The Chapter My Son Read on Christmas Eve

The ruler

The next morning, after the milking, I went to the junk drawer by the phone.

Every kitchen has one. Ours had batteries, rubber bands, a tire gauge, seed-corn caps, and the wooden ruler I had used in school, the thick kind with a brass strip down one edge. It had my name scratched on the back in ballpoint. I was eleven when I did that.

I took it out to the barn.

Eli was on the bales with the book already in his lap. It was Thursday, with half an hour before the bus, and the sun had come up clean and bright over the dew on the yard. The cows were out in the lot behind the fence, steaming a little, chewing. The silo stood up red behind them like it was standing guard.

“We are going to read,” I said.

“I don’t want to.”

“I know. One line.” He looked at me. “One?”

“One line. That’s all today. You and me. Nobody is going to wait on you out here but the cows, and they have nowhere to be.”

He almost smiled. The book was Charlotte’s Web. He picked it. His specialist had told us that a book a child already loves, even loves from hearing it, is a better teacher than any worksheet. I had read it to him two winters before. He remembered the spider by heart.

I laid the ruler under the first line, flat against the page, the brass strip along the top of the words.

It is a small trick. The ruler covers the line underneath so the words do not swim into each other. Mrs. Baker had shown him a plastic version of it in second grade. He had stopped using it because the other kids noticed. I thought, out here, nobody would notice.

Eli took the ruler in his left hand and held the book flat with his right. His finger shook.

“Where’s Papa going with that ax,” he read. Seven words. It took him almost four minutes. When he finished the line he looked up at me, and I saw his eyes were wet, but he was not crying. He was angry. That was the best thing I had seen on his face in weeks.

“Again tomorrow?” he asked.

“Again tomorrow.”