“Can You Read This to Me?” He Asked the Woman the Town Called Simple—And She Read It All
Chapter 16
The reading that had never once paid her a wage in fifteen years spent the winter earning its keep.
She learned the mill by its numbers — the timber tallies, the buyer’s returns from Millford, the price of shakes and clapboard, the long columns of Beck’s boards and Bram’s and Felix’s, the store accounts, the freight. It was not that the mill was in ruin; it was that the hand writing the figures had been writing them with half a mind for four winters, and the columns had quietly gone crooked the way a fence goes crooked when the posts are set in grief. There were errors of haste, errors of fatigue, and one repeating error — the same column added wrong, page after page, like a misstep learned into a walk.
By the end of January, Ada knew the mill the way she knew the kitchen — by its seams. She knew what a quarter’s timber should come to within a few dollars. She knew which of the hands worked steady and which hurried, and the difference written as arithmetic between them.
June found her at the table one evening, the way she had once found her in the garden, and stood at the edge of the lamplight with her slate under her arm.
“Teach me,” she said.
It was not a request. Ada slid the lamp over and gave her the column — small figures, an adding of the day’s boards — and June worked through it with the ferocity she brought to everything, the measuring look bent all the way down to the pencil point. She made one error, found it herself, and fixed it without being told, and when she handed the slate back her face had the particular stillness of a person who had just discovered what her hands could do.
Jesse’s lesson was in the dirt. Ada took him out onto the south slope on the soft days and wrote his name in the turned earth with the end of a stick — J-E-S-S-E — and he traced the letters with his finger the way he had once traced the woodcut illustrations of the fable book, learning the shapes of them the only way a five-year-old can, which is with his whole body.
“Now yours,” he said, and handed her the stick.
She wrote ADA in the earth, and he stood over it for a long time, looking at the two rows of letters standing side by side in the turned ground.
“They’ll grow, won’t they?” he said.
“They’ll grow,” she said.
In February, June read aloud to the family for the first time.
It was the fable about the river — the one that changed its course and built itself a new bed through the valley — and she read it slowly, one finger under the line, her lips moving through the hard words like a traveler stepping carefully across stones. She made mistakes. She corrected every one of them herself before anyone could. And when she finished, Silas, who had not moved through the whole of it — who had sat with his hands flat on the table in the particular stillness of a man listening with everything he had, and who could not have said why his throat was tight — said, “Read it again,” and she read it again, and neither of them ever mentioned it afterward, which was the family way of keeping a thing safe.
In March, a basket appeared on the porch step. Preserves — pear and apple and something gold that turned out to be quince — set on the board in the morning with no note attached and no explanation, the way fairies leave things in other stories.
“Mrs. Platt’s jar,” June said, at the kitchen table, holding up the first one to the light. “She signed it by not signing it.”
The seed catalog came with the thaw, brought out from town by Felix Meacham, who handed it over with two words (“For the fence,”) and went back to the jays. Ada and June went through it page by page at the kitchen table over the course of three evenings, and the orders were written in Ada’s careful script: sweet peas, morning glories, pole beans, a packet of the seed saved from the tin rusted under the loam.
“What grows tall?” Jesse asked, from his perch on the edge of the table.
“These,” Ada said, and showed him the beans. “They climb. They put out green towers.”
“Like the man,” Jesse said.
“Like the man,” she said.
The last snow of the season fell on a Wednesday and was gone by Saturday, and the ground along the south fence let out its long winter breath — soft, dark, turned and ready, exactly as it had been promised. Ada stood at the edge of it with the seed packet weighing patient in her pocket, and she considered the arithmetic of it: three sweet peas had come up in the autumn, three out of a dead summer’s saving, and the whole town had seen the three of them and drawn its conclusion.
The seed packet was heavy with more than that.
It’s the whole story that’s planted now, she thought. It’s the whole fence.
She went inside to start supper, and the ground waited for her, patient as a thing that knows what it is for.