“Can You Read This to Me?” He Asked the Woman the Town Called Simple—And She Read It All
Chapter 22
He came alone, and he came differently.
There was no committee about him this time. He handed the reins to Jesse like a man who had done it a hundred times to a hundred boys, and he stood in the yard a moment looking at the garden — at the fence line stopped at attention with its rows — and he said, in the tone of a man confirming a story he has heard twice and liked both times:
“The sweet peas came up.”
“Thirty-one,” June said. She had come out onto the porch with the measuring look at full wattage, but the measuring look was having trouble holding its post.
Tolliver nodded, and went inside, and the afternoon arranged itself the way the previous one had: coffee on the table, the children present and fed, the questions in the even tone of a man doing a job. But the questions were different this time in their direction — not where she had come from, but where the mill was going; not whether the books were kept, but whether the books were true; not about the arrangement, but about the quarter’s tallies, which he had apparently gone out of his way to see.
“The mill’s columns squared for the first time in four years,” he said, at the kitchen table, with the ledger open in front of him. “I heard it in Millford before the summer — a buyer down there said the Wade mill had gone honest on its figures, and he said it the way a man says a thing he hadn’t expected to be true.”
“Mrs. Wade keeps the books now,” Silas said.
“I know,” Tolliver said. And then he did a strange thing: he reached into his saddlebag and brought out a small worn ledger, older than the others by the look of it, the cover gone soft with years, and he set it on the table between them, open to a page far back in it.
Ada looked down at it. The columns were in a hand she had never seen before, but the notation at the bottom of the page was in a hand she could have drawn blind, and her name was in it.
Voss, Ada. Placed out of Holman County Home at sixteen, indentured to service. On the report of Sister Honora, reads better than any girl the home has turned out in twenty years. Reads like a person keeping something warm. — and beneath, in a different pen, a line added later, in a different year: Whatever became of her, the county at least recorded her honestly.
Tolliver looked at her across the table. “I wrote that,” he said. “I was the clerk at Holman County who processed your papers on the day you left. I stood at the gate with you while you waited for the wagon that was coming to take you to the station. You were sixteen years old, you had a Bible under your arm, and you asked me whether the wagon would be on time, because you had a letter in your pocket from a place that had promised you work, and you didn’t want to be late for a door that was opening.”
Ada looked at him. The kitchen was very quiet.
“When Mrs. Holbrook’s complaint crossed my desk with your name on it,” he said, “I looked at that name for a long time. I told myself I was checking the record. The record said I had written you down as a girl who read to the little ones and kept something warm. I came out here to see whether the note was still true — whether the county’s book and the woman were the same person.”
He took the page — the old page, with the two notations — and he tore it out of the ledger along its seam, and he held it out to her across the table.
“The county owes you at least this much, Mrs. Wade,” he said. “A paper that says who you were — and what you turned out to be.”
Ada took it. She held it the way she had held the stick, that first afternoon, with the gravity the object deserved. And because she was who she was, she said, “Thank you, Mr. Tolliver,” and folded it carefully, and placed it in the Bible on the shelf, next to the two letters.
He stayed to supper. He was a good guest — he ate a second helping without being told the language of it, asked Jesse about the pole beans until Jesse’s report consumed the rest of the meal, and stood at the south fence with June in the long evening light, listening to her explain, with impeccable technical precision, the character defects of the fourth sweet pea.
After he had gone, June went out to the garden and cut the first blooms — seven of them, chosen with the care of a diplomat selecting gifts — and she filled the small jar on the windowsill and carried it to the table and set it down with the finality of a gavel.
“I thought we’d need it in the spring,” she said.
“We did,” Ada said.
The jar stood on the table all that summer, and the kitchen smelled of it, and the sweet peas came on along the whole fence, and the mill ran true.
That night, at the kitchen table, in the careful script she had learned from a woman named Sister Honora at a county home in Holman County, Ada wrote a letter. She wrote it the way she had written the one she had carried for three days, once — in the same hand, with the same care — and she told Sister Honora the ending of the tower story: the small girl in the front row had taken the book with her when she left; she had grown up and married a mill man and planted sweet peas along a south fence; her children read the book still; the tower was still going up; and the jar was full.
She sealed it, and she walked it into Morrow Creek, and she gave it to the postmistress with a coin, and it went down the road, south.