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

Chapter 18

The spring planting took the better part of two days, and it was done the way the family did everything: with opinions.

Beck Hoyle came up from the mill at noon, saw the rows being set along the south fence, and delivered his judgment in his native tongue, which was questions. “Sweet peas by the fence — that’ll draw the bees off the mill timber, won’t it? You planting the pole beans where the light comes earliest, or where the light comes longest? You giving that girl her own row, or is this a committee affair?”

“It’s a committee,” Ada said. “She’s the head of it.”

June, on her knees at the head of the south fence with an apron full of seed and the saved packet from the rusted tin laid out in front of her like a general’s map, said nothing, which was her way of confirming the report.

They planted the sweet peas in the row that had carried them up the year before — the old stems still wired to the fence, gray and dry and faithful — and the morning glories along the east side, where Etta’s seed tin had come up out of the loam, and the pole beans at the south corner, where Jesse had claimed his ground with a stick.

“These grow tall,” he said, one hand on the bean stick, the stick that had come with Ada in the wagon three winters of his life ago.

“To the top of the fence,” Ada said.

“They’ll grow to the top of the world,” Jesse said, which outranked the fence, and which Ada decided to let stand, because a statement like that is a contract with the weather.

The letter from the county seat came on a Tuesday, hand-delivered by the rider, and Ada stood in the yard reading it twice — once for the words, once for the shape of them.

The county undertakes its annual visit to the working households of Crowell County in the first week of August. As the Wade mill has been in the books this past season, we will begin there. — Aldous Tolliver, Clerk of County Records.

“Tolliver’s coming,” she said to Silas at supper.

He looked up from his plate. “The man with the notebook.”

“The man with the notebook.”

“He’ll find the books in better order than the county’s,” Silas said, “if that wife of mine spent the winter writing them.”

She had. The winter’s work had come to a particular use in April, when the quarter’s accounts had gone down to the county seat for the timber tax, and the county clerk’s office had written back twice — once to say the figures did not correspond with the previous quarter’s haul, and once, after Ada’s reply, to say nothing at all, which in county correspondence was the same as an apology.

The mill had a good season that spring. That was Beck’s word for it, delivered at the noon table with the authority of a man who has been paid in questions for thirty years and has learned to spend them: “Mill’s got a good season. May’s timber went out the same week it came in. The quarter’s books closed square to the penny — I never seen the like since — well.” He stopped. “I ain’t seen the like,” he said, “in four years.”

Bram Duggan, whose conversion had been slow but was now complete in the way a man goes all at once from skepticism to partisanship, said, “Fix the books, fix the mill. The sums was wrong and the sawing followed. That’s all I know.”

“The sums was wrong,” Felix Meacham said, which by Felix was a sermon.

Silas said nothing. He had a way of not saying things that was louder than most men’s speaking. He ate at the head of the table with his hands flat beside his plate between bites, listening, and the mill’s good season sat on the table with the biscuits and passed from hand to hand.

Ada put the county letter on the kitchen mantel with the salt box, where it stayed, and the summer came in, green and loud with the water race running full, and the sweet peas climbed.

They climbed the way everything in that house climbed — in a hurry, with opinions. By the first week of June, June had counted them and recounted them and made a ceremony of the recounting: thirty-one plants up the fence, and the fourth one from the south end, the one with ideas above its station, leading the field by a foot.

“There’s more than three now,” she said, standing back from the fence with her hands on her hips, in the exact posture her father used at the head of the saw table.

“There was always going to be more than three,” Ada said.

“I know,” June said. “I was just — I wanted to see it said.”

Ada looked at the girl, at the fence, at the green going up the wire in the long summer light. The word mother had not been spoken between them, not once — it sat in the house the way the fable book sat on the table, present and unremarked and waiting, and every plant coming up the fence was a sentence in it.

“June,” Ada said.

June turned.

“Your mother gave me this family,” Ada said. “She gave me the letters, and the book, and the ground. I want you to know — I never meant to take her place. I meant to keep it warm.”

June looked at her for a long moment with the measuring look. And then the measuring look did what it had been learning to do all year: it collapsed, quietly, under its own weight, and underneath it was the grave, dark gaze of the small girl in the front row at the county home, who had asked for the tower story and had never once been refused.

“She’d have liked you keeping it warm,” June said.

Then she turned back to the fence, and the two of them worked along the row together until the light went long, and the sweet peas stood four feet off the ground at the south end, swaying slightly, like a sentence waiting to be read.