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

Chapter 8

The county man was named Tolliver — Mr. Aldous Tolliver of the county seat — and Ada understood him within five minutes of his stepping onto the porch.

He was a lean, weathered man of about fifty, with spectacles and a small notebook that he consulted the way other men consult a pocket watch: frequently, and without needing to. He wrote things in it as he walked. He asked a question of the yard, then of the door, then of the pump, with a practiced neutrality that Ada recognized at once as the product of long use — the face a man wears when he has seen a hundred of these situations and learned not to decide too quickly, because he has been embarrassed too many times on both sides.

Mrs. Holbrook did not have that problem. She was off the wagon and through the yard with her speech already running — about the nature of the arrangement, about what a woman of good standing in the community had a duty to observe, about the children and the example and the unverifiable stranger under a good man’s roof. She was still delivering it with her foot on the porch step.

Silas came from the mill. He walked across the yard with his hands at his sides, and when he reached the porch he said, “Come inside,” and went in, and the county man followed, and Fenwick followed him, and Mrs. Holbrook, who had been spared the inconvenience of being invited, followed them anyway.

Ada put coffee on the table. It was a thing to do with her hands while the room arranged itself; she had learned long ago that a woman with a coffeepot has a place in any gathering, and that place is not nothing.

Mrs. Holbrook looked at the kitchen.

Ada understood what she was looking for. She had expected disorder. She had expected the evidence of her own story — the grime, the neglect, the wild children and the unkempt house that justified the complaint she had carried to the county clerk like a torch. Instead there was a clean kitchen with a hot stove and coffee on the table and two children who had been fed and were now present and buttoned, one of them in the corner doing the arithmetic Ada had set her, and neither of them wild in any visible direction.

Mrs. Holbrook’s mouth came open, and then came closed, and she arranged herself at the table like a woman settling into a seat she had been told was a trap.

Aldous Tolliver did not sit. He stood at the window and looked out at the yard — at the woodpile, at the garden fence, at the distance to the mill — and wrote in his book, and then he turned to Ada, and the questions came.

They came in the even tone of a man doing a job. Where she was from. How long she had been at the mill. What her duties were. Whether the children were fed and schooled and washed. Whether she had references.

She answered them the same way: plainly, without elaboration, her hands folded on the table. She did not look at Mrs. Holbrook. She did not reach for the Bible. She had decided, somewhere between the coffee and the first question, that she would not produce the letter — because she was not the girl the letter described anymore, and because she had stopped being a person who needed an argument in her favor, and because some things are proved by being, and let the county man make of it what he would.

He made notes. He made a great many notes. Then the kitchen door came open, and Jesse came in from the yard with mud on his boots and a question on his face, and he climbed up onto the chair next to Ada without being asked, fitting himself against her the way he had fitted himself the first night, and he looked at the three visitors.

“Are these people staying for dinner?” he asked.

“I don’t think so,” Ada said.

Jesse looked at the county man. He considered him with the terrible gravity of a five-year-old, and then he said:

“She reads to me every night. She reads everything. She reads me about the man who built the tower.”

Aldous Tolliver looked at the boy. “Is that right?”

“He built it anyway,” Jesse said. “Even after he found out the stars were too far. She says that’s the right thing to do.”

The room was quiet for a moment. Even the county man’s pencil was quiet.

Then the back door banged, and June came in from the garden with dirt on her hands, and she looked at the room full of people with the measuring look at full wattage, and then she looked past all of them at Ada, and she said — plainly, the way children say true things without armor:

“The sweet peas are coming up along the south fence. There’s three of them.”

Ada looked at her.

“Three,” June said. “I checked this morning. I didn’t tell you yet.”

Mrs. Holbrook said something — it began with “well, I never” and did not get as far as a landing — but the room had shifted, and what she said did not land the way she had intended it to, because the county man had already begun to close his book.

“I don’t find anything here,” Aldous Tolliver said, “that the county needs to look any further into.”

He said it to Fenwick. He did not say it to Mrs. Holbrook.

He said his thanks to Ada, plainly, and he said something to Silas about the mill — and then they left, and Mrs. Holbrook left last, and on her way out she said something about the nature of propriety and the example being set and the good opinion of a town, and Silas held the door open for her and said nothing, and she went.

The yard was quiet. The mill was quiet. A jay called once from the pines on the ridge, and then it was quiet too.

Silas turned from the door and looked at Ada across the kitchen. She looked back at him. There was a coffee cup still on the table between them, and the stove ticking in the quiet, and the whole shape of the afternoon settling like dust after a hard walk.

“I have something to say to you,” he said.

“All right,” she said.

“I’d like to say it later,” he said. “Tonight, when the children are in bed.”

“All right,” she said.

He nodded and put his hat on and went out to the mill, and she stood in the kitchen for a long moment with the stove ticking and the coffee cooling and the jays deciding the coast was clear. Then she started on dinner, because there was work to do, and the feeling could wait — but only just.