The Winter Somebody Fed My Children

What Rachel Asked Me For

Captain Doak kept the store and the mill and the commission. He was still the most important man on that water when he died in 1824. Silas left the Territory before harvest and I never heard where he went and never asked.

Nothing happened to either of them. I want that in here, because I have heard this story told back to me with an ending where the captain is ruined, and he was not ruined, he was inconvenienced for about a year.

In June, Rachel Hill came up the creek in daylight and knocked on my door for the first time.

She had her daughter with her. Esther was six.

And she asked me for the thing she had told me in March I would have.

She asked me to teach the girl to read and write English.

I said yes before she finished asking, and then I said that I was not much of a scholar, and she said she knew that, she had asked about me, and that I was the only person on the creek who would do it and not want anything, which was true and was also arithmetic she had done a long time before that day.

I asked her why reading.

She said: because everything that has ever been taken from us was taken on paper, by men we never saw, in a room we were not in. She said her father had made his mark on a paper in 1795 that he could not read a word of.

She said she wanted somebody in her family who could read the paper before it was signed.

Esther came up the creek two mornings a week for six years. She was quicker than my Betsy and both of them knew it and it made them friends instead of enemies, which I have never entirely understood but was grateful for. By the second winter they were reading to each other out of the only three books in my house, which were the Bible, a speller, and a bound volume of somebody’s sermons that Josiah had bought for the binding.

Rachel was right about what reading was for and she was wrong about what it would do. I need to put both of those down.