“Can You Read This to Me?” He Asked the Woman the Town Called Simple—And She Read It All
Chapter 21
They came up in rows, the way she had known they would — the ground remembering, the seeds keeping their end of the bargain.
Ada counted them on a Thursday morning, at the edge of the fence, with her hands on her hips the way June stood when she was filing a report. Thirty-one sweet peas, stood to attention along the south line, the fourth one on the south side still running ahead of the rest, ideas above its station, exactly as June had predicted the winter before. June counted them herself that afternoon, twice, and reported the tally in the even tone of a clerk confirming a figure, and then ruined the report by standing at the fence for a long time with her back to the house, doing nothing at all with her face.
The garden came back to life the way a house comes back to life — in stages, each one earning the next. The beans went in along their towers of cut poles, the morning glories against the east wall where the light was good, the wild garlic seeded itself in the corner where the old patch had been. Felix Meacham appeared one morning with a roll of new wire for the fence, set it down by the gate, and went to feed the jays; nobody mentioned the wire, and the fence was mended by supper.
The mill’s books came home true at the quarter.
That was Beck’s word for it, delivered at the noon table with the ceremoniousness of a man pronouncing a verdict: “The books come out right. First time in four years the tallies have squared to the penny. You fixed the mill’s ledgers, Mrs. Wade.”
“I fixed the arithmetic,” Ada said.
“Same thing,” Beck said. “The mill’s been running on a limp since the winter — the figures gone crooked in the same column, page after page, like a foot that turns the same way every time it hurts. Nobody’s corrected a figure in that house of books since Mrs. Wade died.” He looked at her with his questions parked in his throat. “She kept the books. Etta. Told me once that the mill ran on the river and the river ran on arithmetic, and that a column was just a river standing still if you knew how to read it.”
He went back to his plate, and Ada stood at the edge of the yard with the news settling around her like a coat that had been waiting: the repeating error had begun in the winter of the deep snow, with the hand that had written the columns gone half-hearted with grief — the same misstep learned into a walk, the same column added wrong, page after page, four years of Etta’s arithmetic limping on after her.
The quarter’s payment from Millford came back true, and the difference between the crooked column and the straight one was more money than Ada had seen in a month in any previous year of her life. Silas stood at the kitchen door that evening, looked at the totals, and said nothing — but he stood there twice as long as he usually did, and that was the second helping version of a statement.
The letter came at the beginning of summer, in a county seal.
June brought it up from the road, holding it out in front of her with both hands as if it were carrying something. The county’s annual visit, the letter explained in the flat official hand of a clerk: the county agent’s summer tour of mill properties within the district — its books, its payroll, its conditions — and the Wade mill sat on the list, scheduled for the week.
“Week,” Ada said, looking at the page.
“It’s just the tour,” June said. “They came before. It was fine before.”
“Mr. Tolliver came before,” Ada said. “The county didn’t.”
The table went quiet. Jesse, who had been translating the conversation via the private machinery of his supper, looked up with his mouth full and said, “Are they bringing her?”
“The complaint?” June said.
“The Mrs. Holbrook,” Jesse corrected, with the authority of a general amending a subordinate’s report.
“No,” Ada said. “She’s done her part. The road brings what it brings.”
The week of the visit passed in the particular way such weeks pass — the house cleaner than it needed to be, the children buttoned to an unnatural degree, the garden weeded at the edges where the weeding showed. The morning of the appointment came over the ridge clear and still, and Ada stood at the kitchen window with the coffee pot in her hands and watched the road where it curved out of town, and the road brought exactly one rider.
The dust rose, settled, and rose again in the rider’s wake, and Ada set the pot down and went to the door, and came back out of the doorway when she saw the man on the horse raise a hand in greeting — a familiar hand, a lean weathered man with spectacles, his notebook in his saddlebag and his face in its practiced neutrality.
Aldous Tolliver came alone this time.