“Can You Read This to Me?” He Asked the Woman the Town Called Simple—And She Read It All
Chapter 23
The harvest supper came at the end of September, at the long table in the mill yard, when the light had gone gold and the evening had turned cool enough for coats.
It was not a new tradition — Ada had learned that the hands had eaten their noon meal at that table for twenty years, and that the supper was a different thing, a thing of the house, not of the work, and that it had not been held since the winter of the deep snow. Beck had said as much, telling her with his questions that a table that had been quiet for four years deserved a hot plate on it again, and she had cooked as if the whole county were coming, which turned out to be nearly true.
Bram Duggan came with his peace made and his collar scrubbed, and shook her hand with the ceremony of a man signing a truce. Felix Meacham came with another jar of honey — a large one this time — and set it on the table beside the sweet peas and nodded once, which was Felix’s entire eloquence. Mrs. Platt came out from town with a pie the size of a cartwheel and an announcement, delivered at full volume, that the wheelwright’s wife had said the Wade biscuits were being discussed in three counties, which she considered a personal vindication.
The postmistress came. The boy who swept the post office steps came, promoted now to a full broom, and was introduced by Jesse as “the sweep man,” which he accepted with the dignity the title deserved.
And Beck Hoyle stood up at the end of it, with a cup raised, and delivered the longest speech of his life, which was still mostly questions:
“Mrs. Wade fixed the porch step. Mrs. Wade fixed the gardens. Mrs. Wade fixed the ledgers. Now — and here’s the question I’ve been saving since the winter — somebody tell me what’s left to fix, because for the first time in four years I can’t find a thing bent in this house, and a man likes to know when his job’s done.”
Nobody answered, because nobody needed to. The mill sat quiet behind them, the river running, the fence in the last light, and the table full of the town of Morrow Creek, and the answer to Beck’s question was standing at the head of the table with her hand on a nine-year-old’s shoulder and a five-year-old’s arm hooked through hers.
November came, and with it the date that Ada had learned about without being told — because June, on a Saturday, walking the fence line beside her, said, in the even tone of a child filing a report:
“Mother liked this week. She said the whole year turned sweet in it, like the last good bite of an apple.”
Ada looked at her. She did not let her face move. “She was right,” she said. “It is.”
And that afternoon, June took the packet of morning glory seeds from the tin they had saved, and she planted a row of them along the east wall, where the light was good, and she stood back and looked at the bare ground.
“For her,” June said. “She liked blue.”
Ada stood with her. The wind moved through the pines on the ridge. The mill was quiet — Silas had come out and stood at the edge of the yard without saying anything, the way the family observed the date, together, in the particular silence that is the family’s way of keeping a thing safe.
“I’d have liked her,” Ada said.
June looked at her — the measuring look entirely gone, replaced by nothing but the girl herself, standing in the light with the seeds at her feet. “She’d have liked you back,” June said. “She’d have liked you the way the fence likes the light.”
The first snow of the season came down off the ridge a week later, quiet and steady, covering everything over — the mill, the fence, the rows of turned ground along the south side where thirty-one sweet peas had stood at attention and would stand again — and the house held its warmth around them, and the jar on the table held its dried stems, and the winter folded in around Morrow Creek the way winters do, patient as a thing that knows what it is for.
And then, in the deep of the winter, a letter came the other way down the road.