“Can You Read This to Me?” He Asked the Woman the Town Called Simple—And She Read It All
Chapter 28
The deep winter came down, and the world went white and still, and one evening in the middle of it, with the snow falling into the yard and the mill quiet in its white coat, the family gathered for the last scene of the story.
It had the shape of a hundred evenings — the kitchen warm, the lamp burning, the stew going low in the pot, Jesse coming in from the yard with snow on his boots and a report of snowball casualties to file — but there is a difference between an evening and a last scene, and the evening knew it, and the house knew it, and nobody said so, which was the family way of keeping a thing safe.
“I got him eleven times,” Jesse said, to the room at large.
“I counted every one,” Ada said.
“Did you count the snow I got?” Silas asked, from the window, with his coffee in his hands.
“Six,” Jesse said, with the precision of a general. “You only got me six. I got you eleven.”
“I was counting too,” Ada said. “The record stands. Eleven.”
Jesse sat down at the table with the dignity of a man entering his name in the ledger, and June came in from the back room and set the jar on the table — the jar, empty and clean, waiting for the spring the way the windowsill had waited that first night, when a stranger had been careful not to touch it — and then June sat down at the table, and she opened the fable book, and she read.
She read the tower story. She read it out loud, the whole of it, from the beginning — the man who saw the stars and wanted them, the stones he hauled, the years it took, the top of the tower where the stars stood farther away than he had ever imagined they could be. She read it in her steady voice, her finger under the line, her lips finding the hard words and getting them true, and beside her Jesse sat with his chin on his hands and his whole face open, and Silas stood at the window and did not move — the particular stillness of a man listening with everything he had.
“And the man looked at the stars,” June read, “and he saw how far they were, and he saw all the stone he had carried, and he understood the thing he had known all along: that no tower reaches the stars. And he built the tower anyway.”
“Because it’s the right thing to do,” Jesse said — quiet now, not for an audience, for a room.
“That’s right,” June said.
And Ada, at the stove, with the jar on the table and the snow falling outside and the house warm around the four of them, looked out the kitchen window at the yard — at the snow covering the mill, covering the south fence, covering the ground that remembered — and she thought about the bench at the far end of the road in Morrow Creek, and the letter folded twice in her bag, and the four dollars and sixty cents, and the county home in Holman County with its iron beds and its careful teacher, and the long road down from the mountain, and everything the road had brought her to.
Silas came and stood beside her at the window, and they looked out at the snow together, and he did not say anything, and she did not say anything, and the coffee was hot in his hands and the house was warm around them, and outside the snow kept falling, quiet and steady, covering everything over, making the world new.
And that was the story of Ada Voss and the mill at Morrow Creek: a woman who arrived along the mountain road with a letter and four dollars and sixty cents and a gift for reading nearly anything, and who discovered at the end of the road that if you wait long enough, the right person will ask you to read the words out loud — and will pull up a chair, and sit down beside you, and stay for the ending.
The mill was still. The snow came down. The porch step held firm under every foot that crossed it, and the south fence waited under its white cover — patient as a thing that knows what it is for.
And the house held its warmth around all of them.
Not waiting for anyone.
Not anymore.
THE END