The Writing on the Wall A Novel - By W. D. Wetherell Page 0,16

Wheeler Wilcox, Sara Teasdale and Robert Service, though the librarian did not want me to read him since there was swearing in his poems. “Were you ever out in the Great Alone?” one of his best ones began and I kept saying that to myself over and over during the long walk back to the farm.

They had better than that. Helen Hunt Jackson’s Ramona I read again and again. Elizabeth Barrett Browning I read because we shared first names, then because I loved her books more than anyone’s. Aurora Leigh was about a girl growing up in Florence and marrying her cousin Romney who does not want her to be a poet since women do not have the brains and courage needed to write poetry. She leaves him and moves to London where I liked the story best, Aurora living by herself writing poetry.

No one had checked this out in years. None of the books I read had been checked out in years. It was as if books were deliberately left in the library to rot while everyone went off to the moving pictures and it was only me in the world who still cared for them. Sometimes when I took them off the shelves I imagined them sighing in happiness and relief, finding someone whose fingers and eyes would make them live.

On those journeys back home I became adept at reading while I walked and sometimes had a hundred pages finished by the time I turned up the Hodgsons’ road. My arms would ache from holding the book out straight and I would probably have tripped two or three times and scratched my face on overhanging limbs, but I would have enough read that I could put the book down and help Mrs. H. get supper without being desperate to know what happened next.

Five months after our conversation about leaving school we had our second talk. I had not forgotten about the choices lined out for me, but I was no closer to deciding which was best than I had been the first time.

Her expression was graver this time. She started off with the biggest news first.

“Mr. H. and I are giving up the farm. His heart just won’t take it, all the work there is, and my lumbago doesn’t like winter better than it ever has. My brother lives in Ohio and that’s where we’ll be moving. George Steen is giving us something for the land, enough for rail fare anyway. That leaves you Beth to think about.”

“I’ll be fine,” I said quickly, though the words were even more hollow than they sounded.

“Alan Steen you must surely know. Wasn’t he just ahead of you in school? I saw him yesterday when I went to town and he’s usually so bashful and quiet, but he surprised me since we had a nice long talk.”

Mrs. Hodsgon said he asked about me but I gave this no credence. I never saw him speak to a girl in school let alone me. He played baseball but stood at the bottom of the class and never opened a book without wincing. He was gentle with the smaller pupils, he never let anyone bully them, and other than that I knew very little about him.

He is six feet tall, with boyish features, and his friends tease him cruelly about his ears. He slumps too much, being so tall, but when he finally looks at you his eyes are friendly and sympathetic. And his hair is oatmeal colored, with lots of brown sugar mixed in. He is strong, he has always been strong if you talk just about muscles. Once at school the shed caved in from the snow and he went outside and lifted the beam on his shoulders until the men could come brace it back up.

He started visiting the farm now, pretending it was to talk to Mr. Hodsgon. I remember being astonished that he could talk so easily. Most of it was about his parents who he worshipped. He was temporarily angry with his father because he wanted to go join the Canadians and fight against the Kaiser and his father said no, but I never heard him say anything else against him.

Mr. Hodgson did not think very highly of George Steen. He was said to be the richest man in town, but what did that mean up here? “He’s got his head an inch further out of the mud than the rest of us,” Mr. H. said. “An inch—and he