avoid confusion one stayed Elizabeth, one became Liza, one became Lizzy, and I became Beth. Liza grew up and went down to the mills, Lizzy went to work for a preacher’s wife out in Indiana and I was the only one who stayed here. Elizabeth, who got to keep her name, ran away to Boston which meant running away to be bad.
Reading as she scraped made Vera dizzy—her close vision blurred the letters up, smeared their blackness, giving her the disorienting sense they were an inky black pool and she was about to fall in. She went for her glasses, but they made it worse. The only way to proceed was to clear large sections off at a time, then and only then let herself read. Stripping would give her a goal, a focus— reading would be her break, her reward.
She worked an hour, got the first two strips off, went out to the kitchen to make herself a sandwich, came back and cleared three strips more. The words had waited patiently under the paper all those years, but now that they were exposed to light they seemed actively reaching out to her, demanding to be understood. Sensing this made her hurry and hurry made her clumsy. She scraped too hard—the blade skipped up and cut her finger, so her blood made a film over the writing which wiping only blended in deeper. She thought about using the stripping solution again or even trying the steamer, but worried they would be too harsh, too erasive.
A thunderstorm came up in the afternoon, the hills concentrating the noise and doubling it, until the house shook with each clap. The rain brought the dark on early, forcing her to stop. By then, she had one wall entirely cleared. She was going to put the lights on to read, but then discovered the power had gone off, forcing her to search for the kerosene lamp.
The words must have been written in such a light—if anything, the softness made the ink stand out more vividly, with more force. She set the lamp down on the top step of the ladder, and by moving it closer to the wall or back again she could illumine different paragraphs in a well-defined arc. Seen from a distance, the lines looked like a book, they were so neat and regular, and she realized that this had probably been Beth’s intention, to make it all resemble a book. Lines extended across the wall, stopped at the same right margin, then started up again precisely a half inch below, and so on in the same pattern all the way from the ceiling to the floor—and then over again, only this time one full strip over to the right. Between the regularity and neatness it was amazing how many lines fit in.
They say I was a quiet child except when I had a friend and then I would pour my heart out. But I think there were never many friends. I remember when I was six, Independence Day came and they sent Mounties down from Canada in their red uniforms to march in the parade. I remember skating on the pond in our shoes since we had no skates. I remember dandelion necklaces we pretended were gold. Not much else beside this. They taught us always to sit with our hands folded, whether it was in class or at dinner or saying our prayers, and I knew even then what they really wanted us to do was hold in our thoughts, keep them small and tidy and confined. I could not do this very well. My thoughts made my hands tremble. Someone was always shouting “Don’t fidget!” at me and the more they yelled the more my hands wanted to explode.
It was easier once I learned to read, things grew bigger. Later, Peter Sass teased me about this. “Did you starve in your orphanage?” he asked, with his amused little look that he never allowed to become harder. “Orphans are supposed to starve. Why, just think of Oliver Twist!”
I almost starved I felt like saying. But it had nothing to do with food.
Our books were Sleepy Hollow, Man Without a Country, Message to Garcia, The Queen of Sheba and Ned Buntline. That was for the boys. For girls they had Wide Wide World and Quechee. They were about orphans and how they married rich men and we read them over and over again because they were the only books that told us