Tom Lea WPA mural at the Branigan Library

Summer days in my home town of Las Cruces, New Mexico were frequently over 100 degrees. The swamp cooler in our old bungalow wheezed, spat and rattled, but never really cooled. The best place to spend a hot afternoon was a few blocks away at the town library, the Branigan. Built in the Thirties as one of the New Deal’s WPA projects, the library had thick adobe walls that kept the heat at bay. Its peaceful interior was stuccoed white, with gleaming terra-cotta tiles and dark brown vigas (exposed beams). Natural light poured in through deep-set leaded windows.

The Branigan was an oasis in the desert, a down-home temple to the power of the written word. A WPA artist, Tom Lea, painted a stately mural on the upper wall across the entrance, depicting a Catholic priest showing New World natives a large open book, religious in nature, no doubt. Everyone in the mural was strikingly calm, noble and civilized. Even as a kid uninterested in New Mexican history, I suspected the conquest of the New World didn’t go down with the aplomb Tom Lea had envisioned.

Miss Caffey was the queen of the library. A tiny woman in old-fashioned dresses and shoes, she wrapped her gray braids around her head like a tiara of hair. She held court behind a high wood desk. She was always kindly, more so if I stayed in the children section of the library. But I’d learned to read before first grade and was a voracious and indiscriminate sampler of text. I was soon bored with kiddy books and drifted through the adult and reference sections of the Branigan.

During one of my hunts, I found an adult novel that I hoped might be torrid and maybe even sexy. In the name of research, to further my education on sex and romance, I took the book to the front desk to check out. Miss Caffey glanced at the title on the cover, frowned, opened a page at random and read. Then she handed it to me and asked me to read a passage aloud. After I did, she asked if I knew what it meant. I nodded, but felt intimidated by her skeptical gaze. I can’t recall if she let me check out the book. I probably abandoned my quest and slunk back to the children’s section.

I’d check out as many books as allowed. I’d troop home, hurl myself on my bed, and read, read, read. Time slowed down and stretched out. I forgot my troubled family, forgot even who I was as the lives of others, fictional others, laid claim on my imagination.

(PS: The Branigan is now a cultural center and on the National and State Registry of Public Buildings.)