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

Chapter 19

Aldous Tolliver came to the mill on the first Tuesday of August, riding out from the county seat exactly as the letter had promised, with his spectacles and his notebook and his practiced neutrality. He was met in the yard by June, who escorted him to the porch with the formality of a town crier, and by Jesse, who asked him twice whether he wanted to see the pole beans, and by a house that had been cleaned for him in the particular way this house cleaned itself, which is to say: thoroughly, and with commentary.

He sat at the kitchen table with the mill’s books for the better part of the morning. He did not read them the way a man reads when he is checking for errors. He read them the way a man reads when he is interested, turning pages back, going forward, comparing columns — and twice he took out a smaller notebook of his own and wrote in it.

“Mrs. Wade,” he said at last, closing the ledger and taking off his spectacles, “these are the best-kept mill accounts I have examined in this county in twenty years. I would like to say that to the county seat formally. I would like to say it to the town of Morrow Creek if they would hold still long enough.”

“Thank you,” Ada said.

He put his spectacles back on. “Now,” he said, “there’s a second matter.”

He opened the small notebook — the same one she had seen him write in at the county visit, the autumn before — and he laid it on the table between them, open to a page near the front. The page was old. The ink was a different ink — browner, older — and the hand was a younger man’s hand, less careful, more hurried.

She read it. It was a notation, dated sixteen years back:

Voss, Ada. Age 16. Placement: service, out of county. Note: best reader at Holman in my tenure — reads to the little ones, who sleep better for it. Sister Honora speaks highly. Watch for her.

She looked up. “You were the clerk at Holman County.”

“I was the clerk at Holman,” Tolliver said. “Sixteen years ago, I was a young man with a notebook and an opinion of my own competence that time has since corrected. I wrote that note about a girl I saw one afternoon — reading to the little ones in the dormitory, by the light of the window, with half the county’s paperwork in front of me and no idea that she mattered.” He looked at her. “When your name came up on Mrs. Holbrook’s complaint last autumn, I went back and found that page. I drove out here to see whether the note was wrong, or the complaint was.”

“And?” Ada said.

“The note was right,” Tolliver said. “The complaint was a complaint.” He closed the notebook. “I brought you the page. It seemed to me it belonged to you more than it belonged to the county.”

He slid the leaf out of the notebook, folded carefully along an old crease, and set it on the table in front of her.

She looked at it for a long time without touching it. Sixteen years. She had carried Sister Honora’s letter for sixteen years without ever once showing it to a soul; she had been, in the county’s eyes, a woman with no references anyone could verify; and all the while, in a notebook in a county office forty miles away, under the working notes of timber taxes and fence disputes, a young clerk had written her down as a girl who read to the little ones.

“The county’s visit,” she said, “is in August. You came in August. How long did you wait to give me this?”

“Fourteen months,” Tolliver said, plainly. “I wanted to see it hold. A page like that doesn’t want to be delivered to a rumor. It wants to be delivered to a fact.”

He left with his notebook and his spectacles, declining dinner in the tone of a man who has declined many dinners and bearing a jar of Mrs. Platt’s quince preserves, which Ada pressed on him with an insistence the county seat had never once survived.

That evening, after the children were in bed, Ada set the folded page on the kitchen table next to the fable book and the empty jar, and she looked at the three of them — the old notation, the small book, the waiting glass — and she went and found the letters in the Bible.

Sister Honora’s letter, sixteen years old, folded along its own creases. And her own letter, the one to Edmund Holbrook, returned unopened — a letter that had never arrived anywhere, and had carried her anyway.

She sat down at the table in the lamplight, and she took out a fresh sheet of paper, and she dipped the pen.

*Dear Sister Honora — *

The pen stopped. She looked at the words for a long moment, and then she wrote the rest of the letter slowly, carefully, in the same hand the sister had taught her — the letterforms she had pressed into Ada’s memory from the age of seven: that she had found the little one from the front row, the girl who had asked for the tower story; that she was a woman grown, with children of her own now, and a book with a broken spine, and a fence full of sweet peas; that the girl had gone out into the world and built a tower of her own, and that it had stood; and that the tower story was being read aloud again, in this house, every night, to children who would build theirs too.

I am married now. My husband is a good man. The house is not quiet.

She folded the letter, and she put the folded page from the county notebook inside it — no, that page was hers, she kept that. She pressed one small dried flower from the fence into the fold, and she sealed it, and she stood looking at it on the table.

The jar sat on the table beside the book. June had filled it that afternoon without being asked — not with flowers yet, too early, but with water, ready for them.

Ada picked up the sealed letter and looked at it a long time — a letter that would actually arrive somewhere, for the first time in sixteen years.

Tomorrow she would walk it to the post office herself.