Part 2 — Summer, and the Words That Would Not Stay Put

Summer on the mountain did not arrive as kindness. It arrived as mud, then as a hard light that found every thing the winter had let them leave unfinished. The cabin roof wept pitch. The trail to the spring went soft. Tommy grew an inch, or seemed to, and asked questions with the stamina of a boy who had spent months being told to be quiet and had decided, in the safety of one stove and two adults, to spend the stored silence all at once.

Hannah stayed. She had said summer, and summer had taken her at her word.

In the mornings she taught. Tommy learned his letters the way a colt learns a gate: suspicious, then sudden, then proud of himself in a way that made Jesse look at the wall so the boy would not see what it did to him. Jesse learned more slowly. He could manage a list now, and a short letter if no one watched his mouth shape the sounds. Lowercase b and d still betrayed him. He called them liars. Hannah called them consistent. Tommy called them Uncle Jesse’s enemies and drew them tiny hats.

“That does not help,” Jesse said.

“It helps me,” Tommy said, and went back to the hats.

Hannah did not laugh until Jesse did. She was learning the order of things in a house that was not hers and not quite not hers. Her room had a door and a lock. She used the lock for three nights, then stopped, not because she trusted the mountain but because the sound of the bolt had begun to feel like an answer to a question Jesse had not asked. He never tried the door. He knocked, even when he only meant to say the coffee was on. The knocking undid her more neatly than a hand on her wrist would have.

Bitter Creek did not forget her. It rarely forgot anything it could misunderstand.

They went down in June for flour, salt, and a pair of boots that might survive Tommy’s habit of finding every rock on the trail with the same foot. The mercantile smelled the way it always had, of burlap and oil and the particular dust of a room where people talked over the person sweeping. Abernathy saw her and performed surprise.

“Didn’t expect you back.”

“Supplies,” Hannah said.

“Job’s still open.” He said it lightly, for the two women at the cloth counter. “If mountain life ain’t what you thought.”

“It is exactly what I thought.” She set her list on the counter. “Flour. Salt. Lamp oil. The blue thread, if you still overcharge for it.”

One of the women smiled into her glove. Abernathy’s ears colored. He filled the order and did not call her simple, which was not the same as having retired the word. Hannah heard it anyway, tucked into the pause before he said her name. She paid. She did not thank him for the omission.

Outside, Mrs. Picket stopped them beside the water barrel. She looked at Tommy as if he were a story she had been promised and only half delivered.

“Poor little thing,” she said. “Does he speak of his mother?”

Tommy stepped half behind Jesse’s leg. Hannah felt the old heat rise, the one that used to die in her throat.

“He speaks,” she said. “When someone is speaking to him, and not about him.”

Mrs. Picket blinked. “I only meant—”

“I know what you meant.” Hannah adjusted the package of thread so her hands would have somewhere to be. “His name is Tommy. He is not an exhibit.”

They were halfway to the horses before Jesse said, “You didn’t used to do that.”

“I used to work for him.”

“Not Picket. The saying it.”

“I still don’t enjoy it.”

“Didn’t say you did.” He swung Tommy up. “Said you did it.”

On the ride home Tommy was quiet for a mile, which was long enough to worry them both. Then he said, “She called me poor little thing. I’m not little. I’m six and a half.”

“You’re six and a bit,” Jesse said.

“And I’m not poor. I have boots.”

“You have boots,” Hannah said. “And a slate. And an uncle who lets you draw hats on his letters.”

Tommy considered this inventory and found it sufficient. Jesse did not speak again until the cabin was in sight. When he did, it was to the mare’s ears.

“Town’s going to keep trying that.”

“Yes.”

“With you, too.”

“Yes.”

“You don’t have to go down.”

Hannah looked at the ridge, the way the light broke on it, the small figure of the cabin that had been wrong without her and was now only unfinished. “If I stop going down, they get to keep the last word they had. I didn’t stay for that.”

He nodded. The nod was becoming their longest conversation.

The letter from the court came in July, forwarded through the mercantile and carried up by a freighter who wanted coffee and news in exchange. Crowe’s operation was finished; that much they knew. What they had not known was that the territorial office wanted a further statement. Not from Tommy. From Hannah. A woman in Douglas County had claimed a boy taken from a placement ledger, and the names in Hannah’s copied pages did not match the names the county had produced. Someone had altered the record after the testimony. They wanted the woman who had read the original to say so under oath.

Jesse set the letter on the table as if it might stain.

“You don’t have to.”

“I know.”

“They’ll put you in a room with men who already decided what you are.”

“They do that in the mercantile for free.” She read the page again. The hand was clerical, indifferent, exact. “If the ledger was changed, the boy she wants may be under another name. Almost means closer. You hated that sentence.”

“I still hate it.”

“It remains true.”

Tommy was on the floor with the slate, drawing a horse that had too many legs and, somehow, a hat. He did not look up. “Are you going away?”

“For a few days,” Hannah said. “To say a true thing in a room that would rather I didn’t.”

“Can I come?”

“No.”

“Can Uncle Jesse?”

Jesse answered before she could make it noble. “Yes.”

They left Tommy with the freighter’s sister at the lower ranch, a woman who did not call him an orphan and who had a dog willing to be ordered around by a six-year-old. Tommy permitted the arrangement on the condition that Hannah bring back a story that was not about plants. She promised a story with a wolf in it, and only one, so the hero might have a chance.

The hearing room in the county seat smelled of ink and wet wool. Hannah wore her best dress, which was only her least mended, and held the copied ledger pages in a folder Jesse had made from a piece of oilcloth. The clerk who called her name said it wrong. She corrected him. He did not apologize. A man at the side table — a placement agent’s lawyer, she understood later — smiled the small smile of a person who has been told what to expect.

“Miss Mercer. You worked in a general store.”

“Yes.”

“And you claim you can read a county ledger well enough to dispute a clerk.”

“I do not claim it. I did it.”

A soft sound moved through the room, not quite a laugh. Jesse, against the back wall, did not move. Hannah kept her eyes on the lawyer.

“The town of Bitter Creek,” he said, pleasant, “has described you as simple. A slow girl. Why should this court prefer your memory to an official record?”

There it was. The word, dressed for a better room. Hannah felt it try to fit itself into her mouth and close her up. She thought of the nails, and the stove, and the years of letting the sentence finish without her. She thought of Tommy asking a stranger his mother’s name before he would cross ten feet of snow.

“Because the official record has already been changed,” she said. “And because simple was never a description. It was a convenience. I copied the destination marks in November. Douglas, not Denver. The boy’s second initial was clear. Your new page has smudged it into something a careless man can call uncertain. I am not uncertain.”

“You are emotional.”

“I am precise. Those are not the same.”

She set the oilcloth folder on the table and read the original notation aloud, without stumbling, the way she had read Delilah’s letter on an October afternoon when a man had not asked the preacher. The commissioner listened. The lawyer stopped smiling. When they dismissed her, no one called her simple again in that room. They did not call her correct, either. Correct would take weeks. But a boy’s name went back into a column it had been erased from, and Hannah walked out into a white noon with her hands shaking and Jesse a half step behind, not touching her, close enough that the shake had somewhere to end.

“You were—” he started.

“Don’t say brave.”

“I was going to say loud.”

She looked at him. The scar on his cheek was pale in the sun. “I was not loud.”

“For you,” he said, “you were loud. It suited the room.”

They collected Tommy at dusk. He inspected them for damage, found none he could see, and demanded the wolf. Hannah told it on the ride home, one wolf, a foolish hero, a forest he should have stayed out of. Jesse supplied the wolf’s motives. Tommy supplied the ending, in which the hero apologized and the wolf allowed it, which was not realistic and which neither adult corrected.

July burned the grass on the south slope. Jesse hayed with a neighbor’s borrowed team and came in after dark with chaff in his hair and his hands too stiff for a pencil. Hannah rubbed salve into the cracks without being asked, and the ordinary intimacy of it sat between them like a third chair. They did not speak of the hearing again until Tommy was asleep.

“The lawyer knew what to call me before I walked in,” she said.

“Abernathy talks.”

“The whole town talks. I have been their story for longer than I have been my own.” She capped the salve. “If I stay past summer, I do not become someone else to them. I become a woman who forgot her place and moved up a mountain with a man they don’t trust and a boy they call an orphan.”

“Is that what’s worrying you? Their sentence?”

“Part of it.” She met his eyes. “The other part is that I am happy here, and happiness has been a trick before. It arrives, and then a room explains why I was foolish to trust it.”

Jesse was quiet. The fire had gone down to a red seam. “I can’t fix the town,” he said. “I can keep the cabin from lying to you. Door locks. Pay on the table. No one answering for you. If happiness is a trick, it’ll have to work harder than that in this house.”

“You once said you were not asking me to marry you.”

“I’m still not.” He almost smiled, then let it go. “Not while you’re counting the exits. A marriage ain’t an exit. I want the summer you agreed to. I want you to choose the next thing when the hay is in and the hearing is behind you and nobody’s hungry. If you choose the road, I’ll hate it and I’ll get you down it safe. If you choose the cabin, I won’t call it a favor.”

Hannah looked at her hands, salve shining in the lines of them. They were not clumsy. They had never been clumsy. They had been given the wrong tools, and then blamed for the breakage.

“Ask me in September,” she said.

“All right.”

“And Jesse.”

“Yes.”

“If you ask, ask with Tommy in the room. He has spent enough of his life on the other side of doors.”

He nodded. The nod meant he had heard the whole of it.

August brought a visitor they did not expect. Mrs. Kettler, the boarding-house widow, came up the trail in a hired cart and sat in the yard as if unsure she had the right to the shade. She had a parcel of Delilah’s things — a comb, a hymnbook, a child’s shirt Tommy had outgrown before he ever wore it in this house — and an apology she did not quite know how to hold.

“I should have hidden him,” she said. “I told myself the papers were the law.”

Tommy took the shirt and did not know what to do with it. Jesse took the hymnbook and could not read the inscription. Hannah read it. For Dell, who sang anyway. Tommy cried once, short, furious, and then asked if the hymnbook could live on the shelf with the plants. Jesse said yes. Mrs. Kettler left before supper. At the gate she told Hannah, quietly, “They said you were simple. They are not serious people.”

Hannah did not know what to do with the gift of that, so she said, “The road is drier if you take the left fork,” and watched the cart until it was only dust.

That night Tommy put the shirt under his pillow and the hymnbook on the shelf, and the cabin held both. Hannah lay awake and listened to the two breathings beyond her wall, one small, one long, and understood that September was already coming up the trail whether she invited it or not. She was not ready to be a wife. She was no longer able to pretend she was only the reader. The words had gotten out of the book. They were in the hearing room, and in Mrs. Picket’s silence, and in a boy’s mouth when he corrected a stranger. They would not go back to being safe.

She got up, barefoot, and opened her door. Jesse was at the table with the slate, practicing a sentence by lamplight, lips moving, stubborn as weather. He looked up, caught, and did not hide the slate.

“Couldn’t sleep,” he said.

“Neither could I.”

She sat across from him. The sentence on the slate was short, the letters uneven, one of them backward.

Hannah stays if she wants.

He saw her see it. His ears went red under the scar. “It’s practice.”

“It is a complete sentence,” she said. “Which is an improvement.”

“Don’t grade it.”

“I live here. Grading is part of the agreement.” She touched the backward letter, not correcting it yet. “September,” she said. “You can ask. I don’t know what I’ll say. But I am not packing the valise tonight.”

Outside, the mountain made its small summer sounds, insects and a far creek and the tick of a roof cooling. Jesse set the chalk down. He did not reach for her hand. He turned the slate so the sentence faced them both, liars and all, and left it there between them like a place set for a person who had not yet decided to sit, and might.