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

Chapter 13

The first snow came down off the ridge in the middle of November, and the world went white and still overnight, and Ada stood at the kitchen window with her coffee and watched it come.

Nearly a month married, and the house had begun to fit her the way a coat fits after the first season — seams in the right places, the shape of it no longer strange. She knew the exact morning silence of it now: the mill’s timbers settling, the pump’s particular wheeze, the way the floor at the back of the kitchen complained if you walked on it at night. She knew the children’s feet, too — could tell June’s tread from Jesse’s in the dark, the way you learn to read a house by its own time.

In the yard, Silas and Jesse were at war.

Jesse’s method was to throw snow with the wild inaccuracy of a five-year-old, and Silas’s method was to stand there and take it — the patience of a man who has decided that some things in life are worth standing still in the cold for. Each hit was announced at full volume: “Got you!” “That’s three!” “That’s four!” Silas, who had taken a shot to the chest that had gone down his collar, was pretending to be defeated with the dignity of a general accepting terms.

The sweet peas were gone, of course — cut back by the frost, their green surrendered bladeless to the season. But the ground along the south fence was turned and ready, patient under its white cover, and Ada knew that in the spring there would be seeds. Ground remembers.

She heard boots on the porch — solid now, no rocking — and the door, and the rush of cold air, and Jesse’s voice arriving full of margin:

“I got him six times.”

“I saw,” Ada said.

“Did you count?”

“I counted every one,” she said, and the look he gave her was the look of a boy who has discovered a reliable witness to history.

Silas poured himself coffee and came and stood beside her at the window, and they looked out at the yard together — at the snow and the mill and the pines on the ridge — and he did not say anything, and she did not say anything, and the house was warm around them, and outside the snow kept falling, quiet and steady, covering everything over, making the world new.

June came in from the back room and looked at the table. On the table sat the small glass jar — the one that had been on the windowsill of the room off the kitchen on the first night, the one Ada had been careful not to touch, the one she had come to understand belonged to a woman named Etta, who had used it to hold cut sweet peas in a jar on the table. June had found it somewhere in the house that morning — had carried it out with the care of a person transporting a relic — and she had set it on the table without explanation, empty, open, waiting.

“I thought we’d need it in the spring,” June said.

“We will,” Ada said.

June sat down at the table and opened the fable book — to the story about the man who built the tower, which she had heard Jesse ask for many times and had never once admitted to listening to — and she began to read it to herself, her lips moving slightly, her finger tracing the words.

Ada watched her for a moment. Then she turned back to the window. The mill was still. The snow came down. The porch step held firm under every foot that crossed it. And the south fence waited under its white cover — patient as a thing that knows what it is for.

The house held its warmth around all of them. It was not waiting for anyone. Not anymore.

The deep cold came with December, and with it a night when the wind came down off the ridge like a judgment, and Ada woke in the dark to a sound she had not heard in that house before: Jesse, coughing.

She was at the door of his room before she was fully awake, and June was already there, standing in her nightdress with her hands at her sides, looking at her brother with the measuring look trained on its highest subject yet.

“He coughed and coughed,” June said. “He won’t wake up. He won’t say anything.”

And Ada went to the bedside, and put her palm to the boy’s forehead, and the heat coming off him was the heat of a stove that has been stoked past sense. She had felt heat like that before — in a dormitory in Holman County, in the winter of her ninth year, when the fever had come through the little ones’ room like a river going over its banks.

She turned to June. “Build up the kitchen fire,” she said, her voice level, the way work demands it be level. “Then go wake your father.”

June didn’t move.

“June,” Ada said.

And June said — small, flat, the report of a child filing what she knows in advance, so no one can accuse her of hoping: “Her fever went like this. Mother’s. When it turned, she went to sleep and didn’t wake up.”

The house stood very still in the dark. The wind came down off the ridge, and the mill was quiet, and the two of them stood in the doorway of the sickroom with the boy’s breathing running between them, harsh and shallow and loud, and Ada put a hand on June’s shoulder.

“I’ve got this,” Ada said. “I’ve got him. Go wake your father.”

June went.

And Ada stood in the dark with the noise of the boy’s breathing in the room behind her, and for a moment — a long moment, a moment with teeth in it — she was not equal to it. She was a woman from a county home with four dollars and sixty cents’ worth of history. She was thirty-one years old and three months married, and the boy in the bed was burning up, and the winter outside had already taken one woman from this house.

Then she went to work.