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

Chapter 14

The night went the way such nights go: in segments, each one longer than it had any right to be, each one folded into the next by small tasks.

Ada worked the way she had been taught to work — by the hands, not by the fear. Cool cloths from the well, changed on the hour. Vinegar water for the forehead. The tonic she remembered from the dormitory winters in Holman County, though she would not have sworn to it in court. She gave him nothing but the cold cloths and her own steadiness, and she talked to him in a low, even voice the whole time, the way you talk to a horse in a storm, because a voice can be a hand held out even when the hands are busy.

Silas came in behind her at some point. She did not hear him — no one ever heard him — but the lamp shadow shifted, and there he was, standing at the foot of the bed with his hands at his sides and his whole face shut. He looked at his son the way a man looks at a fence he built in a year of his life and has just seen come down.

“Wood,” Ada said, without turning around. “The kitchen box is low. Bring it up. And water from the well — two full pails, so we don’t have to wait between changes.”

He went. She had learned, in a marriage of nearly three months, that giving Silas Wade a task was the kindest way to love him. His hands needed something to be about; otherwise they stood at his sides like two men who had been dismissed from their posts.

June came with the first light, still in her nightdress, and stood in the doorway of the sickroom with the measuring look at full wattage. Ada put her to work folding cloths, and June folded cloths for an hour without asking a single question, which was the girl’s way of asking every question at once.

The doctor came from Morrow Creek — Dr. Landis, a slow man with a quiet voice and hands that had never rushed at anything in fifty years, which was exactly what a house in a crisis needed. He examined Jesse in the lamplight, and he did not say the words that were on the tip of the room’s tongue, and then he said them anyway, in his slow way:

“Fever’s a fire, and fires burn one of two directions. We keep the boy wet and the room quiet, and we wait to see which direction God means.”

He left powder for the water and a lantern to keep burning, and he came back out into the yard and stood talking with Silas in the cold, and Ada watched them from the window — the two of them, voices low, breath white — and she knew, the way you know a story you have been told once and could never forget, what they were talking about out there in the dark.

The second night, she read to him. That was the thing she could give him that the tonic could not reach. She sat on the chair pulled up to the bedside and read the fable book the way she had read it a hundred evenings, in the same voice, with the same rhythm, as if the room were the kitchen and the supper were over and the only thing in the world was the story. The tower. The river. The lamp.

And once, in the deep of the night, when the fever had ridden him up out of the bedclothes and he was clutching her wrist with a grip like a man holding a rope:

“Jesse,” she said, low, in the steady voice. “I’m here. The man built the tower. He found out the stars were far away.”

And the boy, three-quarters gone, answered her: “He built it anyway.”

“Say it again,” she said.

“He built it anyway.”

She held his wrist. “That’s right,” she said. “That’s right. Hold on to that.”

The crisis came at the third hour of the morning, and the house came awake all at once — June running, Silas behind her, the lantern swinging — and the small body on the bed arched and shook, and for a moment the room had the particular silence of a room where time has stopped walking and turned around to look back.

Then the shaking passed. The sweat came. Everywhere at once, the way relief comes — soaking the sheets, the small forehead, the tangle of dark hair — and the heat that had been the room’s tyrant for two days broke, and the boy’s breathing went long and even and easy, the way a river goes after the flood.

Dr. Landis came out of the sickroom at dawn with his coat over his arm and said, “He’ll do. He’ll be angry about the porridge and back to throwing things at his father inside a week. That’s the prognosis.”

June stood in the doorway of the kitchen with the cloths still in her hands, and she did not cry — she had her father’s machinery there — but she handed Ada the cloths, and Ada took them, and that was the girl’s way of letting it out.

Silas stood at the door of the sickroom, looking in at his sleeping son.

Ada came up beside him. “He’s going to be all right,” she said.

“He’s going to be all right,” he repeated, and the words came out of him like a thing he had been carrying over a long road.

And then, in the doorway, in the gray light, with the whole house awake around them and the fever broken and the danger past, he said — flat, without ornament, the way he said everything that cost him:

“I couldn’t sit with her. Etta. The last winter. She was in this house, in this room, burning up, and I couldn’t sit with her. I told myself it was the mill. I told myself work. I stood in the mill the whole time she was dying.”

Ada looked at him. He was looking at the floor now the way some men look at the floor when they’re describing a wound.

“You’re in the room now,” she said.

He stood in the doorway for a long time, with the lamp burning low and the sleeping boy between them. And then he crossed the threshold, and sat down on the edge of the bed, and took his son’s hand, and stayed.

Whatever he had carried over that long road, it was lying down in the room now, and Ada knew — watching him, watching the morning come in through the window glass — that there was a story in this house that she had not been told yet. And that tonight, finally, he was going to tell it to her.