“Can You Read This to Me?” He Asked the Woman the Town Called Simple—And She Read It All
Chapter 26
The spring came green again, and with it the flyleaf conversation that Ada had been waiting for the right season to hold.
It came of its own accord, the way such things do. A Sunday in May, the light long and gold, June sitting on the porch step with the fable book open on her knees — reading it, her finger moving under the line, the way she had read the river fable the winter before — and Ada came out and sat down on the step beside her, and June looked up, and the measuring look was gone, and there was just the girl, and the book, and the evening.
“Jesse wants the tower story at bedtime,” June said. “Every night. He says it’s the right thing to do, building it anyway.” Her finger rested on the flyleaf. “There’s a name in here. Etta Means. It’s in a child’s handwriting.”
Ada looked at the flyleaf, at the small careful letters, at the line beneath them in the margin that she had read a hundred times without reading it.
“That was your mother’s name,” Ada said. “Before she married your father. She wrote it there herself, when she was a girl.”
June was very still. “How do you know?”
And Ada told her.
She told her about the county home in Holman County, and the dormitory with the iron beds, and the girl who read to the little ones — she told her that part plain, because children deserve plain: that the big girl had read every night, and that a small girl with grave dark eyes had always sat in the front row, and had always asked for the same story, the one about the man who built the tower to reach the stars.
“She asked for it on the night she left,” Ada said. “She had the book in her hands, and she asked me if they would give it to her, and I told her to ask Sister Honora, because the sister gave things that people needed, and she took it with her down the mountain, and I never knew where she went.”
June looked at the flyleaf. Then she looked at Ada.
“You knew her,” June said. “Before. When she was a girl like me.”
“I knew her,” Ada said. “I knew her as the little one in the front row. I didn’t know I’d spent a lifetime coming back to her — to her fence, to her book, to her children. That’s the strangest part of the story, June. The tower was hers, and it was mine, and we both carried it all those years without knowing the other one was carrying it too.”
June was quiet for a long time. The light went gold and then went deeper, and the mill went quiet for the day, and the boy’s voice came from inside the house asking for supper to hurry up, and neither of them moved.
Then June said, in a voice that had to work at it: “She gave it to me, too. The story. She used to read it to us in this kitchen, on this step — the man who built the tower anyway. And I never told anybody.”
“The tower’s got three hands on it now,” Ada said.
June closed the book carefully, the way a person closes a thing they mean to keep, and she looked out at the fence — at the rows, at the light — and she said, in the even tone of a child filing a final report: “I’m going to read it to Jesse tonight. The whole story. Every word, from the beginning. He should hear it from me at least once.”
She did. That evening, June read the tower fable aloud at the kitchen table, her finger under the line, her voice going steady and falling true on the hard words, and Jesse sat with his elbows on the table and his whole face open, and Silas sat with his hands flat on the table in the particular stillness of a man listening with everything he had, and Ada stood at the window with the jar in her hand and did not move.
“He found out the stars were farther than he thought,” June read, “and he built the tower anyway.”
“Because that’s the right thing to do,” Jesse said, to the table, to the room, to whoever was keeping score.
“That’s right,” June said.
And the lamp burned, and the mill was quiet, and the sweet peas along the south fence grew another inch in the dark, and the house held its warmth around the four of them, the way houses do when they are done waiting.