The Winter Somebody Fed My Children

Rachel came up perhaps once a month. She would not be taught herself. I offered twice and she said no both times and the second time she told me why, which was that she was forty six years old and there were things she would rather spend the last of her eyes on.

She sat in my kitchen and mended while the girls read. She had opinions about the sermons in that bound volume and most of them were unkind and most of them were right.

I have been asked whether we were friends. I have never been able to answer it cleanly. There was a great deal between us that neither of us ever put into words, and some of it was fondness and some of it was a ledger, and I do not think she ever entirely stopped keeping the ledger, and I do not blame her for it. She had watched settlements before.

But she sat in my kitchen for six years with her feet on my fender, and when my Polly had the fever in 1816 she stayed two nights, and I know what that is even if neither of us ever said the word.

Eighteen Eighteen

In the autumn of 1818 men who had never been on our creek sat down at St. Mary’s in Ohio and signed the White River country away, and the Delaware were given three years to be gone out of it.

Esther was twelve. She could read it. She read it out loud to her mother in my kitchen, and she had to stop twice, and she got through it.

That is the answer to the question about what reading does. It did not save one acre. What it did was let a twelve year old girl tell her own mother what had been decided about her, in her mother’s own house, instead of the two of them finding it out from a man on a horse.

I do not know whether that is worth anything. Rachel thought it was. She said so. She said knowing a day early is not nothing, and she was the one it was happening to, so I have let her have the last word on it for forty years.

They went in the autumn of 1820, down toward the Missouri country.

I saw Rachel the day before. She came up the creek and she did not sit down. She said she had not come to say goodbye, she had come because she wanted to know that Esther’s hand was good enough, and would I look at it.

I looked at it. It was better than mine.

Then she stood in my doorway, and this is the only time in nine years I ever saw her come close to anything, and she said: you said a true thing out loud.

And I said it was too late and it did not stop anything.

And she said: I know. That was not what it was for.

I have turned that over every year since and I am still not certain I have got to the bottom of it.