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

Chapter 15

He told it that night, at the kitchen table, with the lamp between them and the house quiet around them — the whole of it, hitching and plain.

The winter of the deep snow, four years back. The neighbor’s boy up the ridge, six years old, whose mother had died the same month, and whose father was a trapper gone upcountry for weeks at a time. The boy had come down with the fever in the dark of the winter, alone in a cabin with no one to sit with him.

“Etta found out about it at the church,” Silas said. “She came home and told me she was going up there to sit with the child. I said it would take her past dark. She said that was the whole point — somebody had to be there when it got dark. A child shouldn’t have to wait out a fever in the dark by himself. That was the whole of her argument.”

She had gone. She had sat with the boy two days and a night. She had come home in the cold of the third morning and said the boy would do, and by the evening she was the one with the fever.

The roads were closed — the deep snow had shut the county into its own rooms. The doctor came too late and stayed too long, and for two days the house held the fever the way it held the cold, and Etta lay in that room, in that bed, and asked for the book.

“The book,” Silas said. “My mother’s — I gave it to her when June was born. I never knew where she got it, only that she’d had it since she was small and that she read it to the children with the gravity of scripture.” He stopped. “She asked me to read her the tower story. I couldn’t. I couldn’t get the words out. She said to me — she said, ‘Then tell the children the tower’s still going up. Tell them somebody’s building it. That’s the part that matters.'”

That had been the last whole thing she had said. The fever had taken her in the night, and the town had done what towns do: it had made a story of it. The mill was cursed, they said — a man had no business pulling timber out of a hill that had already taken his wife; the river had spite in it, the ridge had a grudge. And Silas had let them say it, because it was easier than the true version, which was that he had stood in the mill — just stood there, between the saw and the light — the whole time his wife was dying in a room four hundred feet away, and he had not once been able to make himself cross the yard.

“The housekeeper left in the March after,” he said. “She was a decent woman, but the house got too quiet for her. She said it to my face — ‘This house is quieter than a grave, Mr. Wade.’ She wasn’t wrong. It was. It was quieter than a grave because I was the one holding it quiet. I put everything into the mill. I told myself it was for the children, for the work, for the memory of her. I told myself I was building something.” He looked at his hands. “A tower to reach the stars. And I found out the stars were farther than I thought.”

The kitchen was very quiet. The stove ticked. Outside, the wind moved through the pines, and the mill stood dark and patient, its water running.

Ada sat with it. She let the whole of it settle — the deep snow, the six-year-old boy, the woman who went out to sit with a stranger’s child in the dark, the room, the book, the tower that was still going up. She thought about the girl in the front row in the dormitory at Holman County, who had asked for the tower story on her last night, and who had carried it out into the world in her hands, and who had married a mill man and planted sweet peas along a south fence and gone out in a blizzard to sit with a child who was not hers.

“It was never a curse, Silas,” Ada said. “It was grief with a man still inside the mill. You’ve been building your own tower for four years — stone by stone, sawed and planed — and you built it anyway. That’s what the story means. It doesn’t mean the stars come closer. It means you don’t stop building.”

He looked at her.

“Etta told you the ending,” Ada said. “The only part that matters. And you told it to her children, every night, by standing in that mill and not falling apart until someone was strong enough to come and take a shift.”

He did not answer. He did not need to answer. The house held its dark around them, and the lamp burned, and the story lay between them on the table like a thing finally put down.

In the morning, the mill ledger was on the kitchen table.

He had left it there without a word — a thick book, worn at the corners, with the columns of the mill’s accounts in a hand gone hasty with years. She picked it up. She had not been asked to pick it up. But the book stood open on the table the way a handsaw stands by a door, and she knew work when it was left for her.

She sat down at the table and pulled the lamp closer, and she opened the mill’s books for the first time — and she found, in the first page of figures, the same mistake three times over: a column added wrong, the same wrong sum carried into the tally, the tally into the quarter.

She looked at it a long time. Then she picked up the pen.

Outside, the mill had begun its morning — the long groan of the water race, the first bite of the saw — and inside the house, a woman from a county home with four dollars and sixty cents’ worth of history sat over a stranger’s ledgers and did the only thing she had ever been able to do with certainty.

She corrected the arithmetic.