“Can You Read This to Me?” He Asked the Woman the Town Called Simple—And She Read It All

Chapter 10

She was awake before first light, the way she had been awake before first light every morning of her life — but this morning she lay still in the narrow bed and let the shape of the hour come to her, the way you let a garment settle before you move in it: she was to be married. To a man with a mill and two children and a grief he had carried four years without once setting it down.

Something had been waiting at the edge of her mind all night, and now, in the gray light, it came forward and stood in front of her.

She got up. She dressed. She went to the kitchen and started the coffee before she lit the lamp, working in the dark the way she had worked for a decade, and then she sat at the table with the fable book — the one thing she had asked permission to keep on the table, the one she read from every night — and she turned to the flyleaf.

She had noticed it the evening Jesse brought it to her. Noticed, and not looked, the way you don’t look at a wound you intend to treat later. But she was going to marry the man whose dead wife had owned this house, and there were things a woman needed to know before she signed her life to a household.

The flyleaf held a name, in a child’s careful hand — a hand that had learned its letters recently enough to be proud of them:

Etta Means. For the stories.

And in the margin of the tower fable, in the same hand, smaller and fainter, a single line she had read a hundred times in the reading without ever letting it stop her:

I asked the big girl and she said the man builds it anyway.

The coffee cup went down slowly.

She sat very still in the gray kitchen, and the years came up around her like water.

Holman County. The long dormitory with the iron beds. The girl who read to the little ones — that was what Sister Honora called her, even when she had been too old for the job, because the little ones slept better with a story running under the door of the dark. There had been a small girl who always sat in the front row, grave-eyed, dark-eyed, younger than the rest by half — a girl who was there for two years and then gone, placed out to farm work upcountry, whose name the dormitory had shortened to a joke she never complained about.

Etta.

Etta Means, who had stood at the big girl’s elbow every night, asking for the tower story — the one about the man who built his tower to the stars — and who had once, on her last night, taken the battered fable book off the shelf where it had lived for years, and had stood holding it with both hands like a thing too heavy for her.

“They’ll give it to you,” the big girl had said. “It’s old. Ask Sister Honora. She’ll give it to you.”

Etta had given her a look — a grave, dark look — and had said nothing, and the next day she was gone to her farm work, and Ada had never thought of her again.

Ada sat in the gray kitchen of the Wade house, at the table with the fable book open in front of her, and she saw it. She saw the whole of it the way you see a landscape from a height you hadn’t known existed: the small girl who carried the tower story out of the county home in her hands; the woman she had become, who married a mill man and planted sweet peas along a south fence and died four years back in a winter that the town had made a curse of.

And the eyes. The grave, dark eyes of the child in the front row — she had seen them on the first day, in the girl in the doorway of this house, the girl who looked at her the way you look at weather you haven’t decided about.

June had her mother’s eyes.

And Ada had known those eyes — known them by heart — a decade and a half before she ever stood on a porch in Morrow Creek.

She did not cry. She sat with it, the way you sit with a thing too large to carry all at once, until the house began to wake — Jesse’s feet on the floorboards, Silas’s boots on the porch — and then she closed the book and put the coffee on and went to meet the day as if she had not just found the seam of her own life.

She told Silas that evening. After the children were asleep, at the kitchen table, with the book between them.

“June’s mother,” she said. “Etta. I knew her.”

He looked up from his hands.

“From Holman County,” she said. “From the home. She was the little one who asked for the tower story. She took this book with her when she left. I never knew where she went.”

The kitchen was very quiet. The stove ticked. Silas looked at the book for a long time without touching it.

“She never told me,” he said at last. “Where she came from, I mean. She said she had a book she’d had since she was small, and she read to the children from it, and when she was angry with me she read it harder.” He was quiet. “She said a big girl at the home read it to her. She said the big girl was the only person she ever told the tower story to, and now she’d told me, and I was to remember it.”

He stopped. The wind came down off the ridge and moved through the pines, and the house held its dark around them.

“The year she died,” he said, “they said in town the mill was cursed. That the river took her — that I should have seen it coming, that any man with a mill knows what the water means in a hard winter.” He looked at the table. “She went out to sit with a sick neighbor’s child, and she took the fever, and the fever took her, and they were right about one thing: I did not see it coming. I was at the mill. They said a curse, and I let them say it, because it was easier than saying what it was — that I was standing in the mill the whole time she was dying, and I did not know.”

Ada listened. When he was done she said, “It was never a curse, Silas. It was grief with the wind in it. And you’ve been standing in that mill ever since.”

He did not answer. He did not need to.

They sat together in the quiet with the open book between them — the small girl’s name on the flyleaf, and the tower standing at the center of everything that had carried them both this far — and the house leaned into the night.