opposite pew.
“Not properly. My brother Harris was the one who got his reading and numbers while I cut wood to feed us.”
“Is that who you’re taking the baby to?”
Everett silently curses himself for letting the name slip. “Yes,” he says.
Mercifully, she lets the subject drop and reaches out to examine the spine of the book before him: “The History of Seed Crushing in Great Britain,” she says. “I read this when I first bought this old place. Boring as a ten-hour sermon. You have an interest in seed storage?”
“Sure,” he says, eager to change the subject. “You read all these books?”
“Oh, no, no,” she says, glancing around. “There are more books here than anyone could ever hope to get through in a lifetime, which is sad if you really consider it.”
“You’ve read some, though?”
“Sure.”
“How many?”
“A fair number, I suppose.”
“You should be proud of that,” he says, eyeing the crowded shelves.
“Well, I guess I am,” she says, as though she’s surprised herself.
“What kind of books do people like me usually fancy?”
“People like you?”
“Tramps,” he says. “Hermits. Lowlifes.”
“The Count of Monte Cristo is popular with the lowlife set,” she says slyly. “Not sure why that is. Revenge, I suppose. Sometimes when people lose everything, all that’s left are their grudges. Also Dickens. Dostoevsky. Pulp novels. Detective stories. Not much interest in romances, unfortunately.”
His face burns at her mention of this last subject. “And what kind of books does your type fancy?” he manages to get out.
“Who, us farm-bound spinsters?” she says. “We tend toward tales of escape. Adventure. Exotic locales. Egypt. Siam. I’ve read about Paris so much I no longer feel the need to go there.”
“I was in northern France during the War. But I never saw Paris.”
“Many of the folks here were once soldiers. What did you do there?”
“I wasn’t much of an infantryman, so I did carpentry, mostly. Tables for the radios and planks to keep the soldiers up out of the mud. Otherwise, I carried stretchers. I probably carried a thousand men, most of them halfway between living and dying.”
Her lips tighten over her teeth. “That must have been painful,” she says. “To see all those people torn up like that.” And her statement’s naked simplicity unlocks something in Everett’s chest. How easily she’s linked what he witnessed in the War with the disquiet that afflicted him afterwards, like a blade that’d entered him through his eyes and broken off inside his head. Sights that, in the last days of the War, rendered him unable to speak or sleep for more than a few hours at a time, which landed him in a special hospital for soldiers suffering the same condition. It was what prevented him, after he was sent home, from joining Harris on their woodlot like he promised, and kept him drinking and roaming all those years afterward. But Everett can’t express any of this now, so he directs his attention again to the incomprehensible book before him.
Pod starts whimpering beneath the table, opening and closing her tiny hands like a crab, and Temple stoops to take her up. Everett likes how she holds her, bouncing easefully on the balls of her feet.
“You know, I could help you,” Temple says. “With your reading, I mean. Maybe not this one.” She points at The History of Seed Crushing in Great Britain. “But I was a schoolteacher before I bought this place, and teaching people to read was the only part of the job I didn’t mind.”
“Oh, there isn’t much hope for me,” he says.
“I’ve instructed greater fools than thee,” she says in a haughty voice, and carries Pod over to the shelves, right near to where he stuffed the journal. His stomach drops, though thankfully, she selects a different book. “Here,” she says, sitting beside him, and suddenly he’s shamefully aware that his ratty clothes haven’t been washed in weeks.
“Try this,” she says, pointing to the first line, a crescent of soil lodged permanently under the nail of her index finger. “It’s called the Odyssey.”
He has no choice but to try, and while the black type is easier to identify than the unruly handwriting of the journal, the words themselves are convoluted and meaning refuses him. Letters scatter from his eyes like roaches from a lamp. He trips and stumbles with his tongue for a while until he gets too embarrassed and says he’s all worn out, and they walk back together to the house before turning in for the night.
In bed that evening, Everett decides against