“Can You Read This to Me?” He Asked the Woman the Town Called Simple—And She Read It All

Chapter 7

Not officially, Fenwick said. Just a conversation.

That was the way of such things in a county small enough that the clerk knew every road and every debt: the machinery of government arrived on horseback, apologizing for itself. Fenwick sat on the porch with Silas for the better part of an hour, and Ada stayed in the house and did not go to the window, and heard the voices move through the wall like a current under ice.

When the rider left, Silas came inside and stood in the kitchen doorway and looked at her. She turned from the stove.

“It’s Holbrook’s wife,” he said. “She’s made a complaint about the situation out here. About the arrangement. About the children.”

“I know there’s been talk,” Ada said.

“It’s not talk anymore. Fenwick has to look into it. He’ll come back in a week with someone from the county seat. They’ll ask questions. They’ll see the house, see the children—”

“And me,” Ada said.

“And you,” he said.

The kitchen was quiet. The stove ticked. Outside, the mill had stopped, and in the hush of it she could hear the river running along its stone, patient with the news.

“If it would be easier for you,” Ada said — and her voice came out clean, which surprised her, because something in her ribs was not clean at all — “if it would settle the matter, I can find other work. I don’t want to bring trouble down on the children. That was never—”

She stopped. She had not meant to say that last part, and the room had taken it like a stone in deep water.

Silas was quiet for long enough that she thought he was going to agree with her, and she kept her face where it needed to be, and waited.

“That’s not what I want,” he said.

He said it plainly, the way he said most things, and he was looking at her directly when he said it. She had noticed that he did not look at her directly very often — he looked at roads, at hands, at the middle distance — and that when he did, it cost him something.

He picked up his hat and put it on.

“I’ll be at the mill,” he said.

She turned back to the stove. Something moved through her that she set aside, because supper needed finishing, and Jesse would be in soon, and June was in the garden, and there was work to do, and she had learned a long time ago that the feeling could wait if the work could not.

That night, after the children were asleep, June came out of her room and found Ada in the kitchen, mending a seam by lamplight. The girl did not sit down. She stood in the doorway exactly the way her father stood in doorways, and she said:

“Are you going away?”

“No,” Ada said. “Nobody’s sending me away.”

“Mrs. Holbrook has a mouth like a cistern,” June said, in a tone that could have belonged to any adult in town, “and a head full of opinions like a swarm. Father says it runs off him.”

“Your father,” Ada said carefully, “does not tell me most things.”

“He told you to stay.”

The needle stopped. Ada looked at the girl across the lamplight. The measuring look was gone from June’s face, or rather — it had been replaced by something it had only ever been guarding.

“I’m not going anywhere,” Ada said.

June nodded once, the way her father nodded, and went back to bed.

The week that followed was the longest week Ada had lived in years. It was not the waiting that ground on her — she had waited before, in worse seasons, and waiting was a skill like any other. It was the smallness imposed on the ordinary. The way her own hands, kneading dough, felt borrowed. The way the house’s quiet felt like a held breath.

She did not tell Silas that she opened the Bible every night now.

She did not tell him what was hidden in it.

Because there was a letter in the Bible — had been for fifteen years — a single folded sheet in a hand she could have drawn blind: Sister Honora’s. To whom it may concern at the county offices: Ada Voss leaves us ready to work and read. She keeps her own counsel and she reads as well as any woman twice her age. I commend her to any household that will take her.

The postmistress at the county seat had read it once, all those years ago, and sealed it, and Ada had carried it out of Holman County and never once shown it to anyone.

A letter nobody has seen, she had learned, is the same as no letter at all. Mrs. Holbrook had said it right enough for her own purposes: Ada had arrived with a letter and an expectation and no references anyone could verify. It was true. Her reference had lived in her Bible for fifteen years, untouched, because the handwriting in it — the same careful hand that had taught her the letterforms in the first place — said more about what Ada had been than what she had become, and she had spent fifteen years building the second thing on her own.

Now the need for it was coming down the road on a horse, and she sat with it night after night, the two of them, the letter and the woman, and could not decide whether to produce it.

She did not produce it. She fed the house. She read to Jesse. She stood at the window with the dishrag. The week ran out like water through a mill race, and Wednesday came, and the dust came with it — a wagon this time, with two men in it, and a third shape in gray beside the driver that Ada recognized from the post office, standing in the bed of the wagon before it had even stopped, a voice already carrying across the yard:

“—the nature of the arrangement and the questions it raises, and what is being done about the welfare of those children—”

Ada dried her hands. She went to the door.

Three figures were coming down off the wagon like a verdict assembling itself, and behind them the yard was quiet, and the mill was quiet, and even the jays were quiet.