“Miss Cascade is correct. Reading is essential, for a full and productive life.” Mrs. Sweet peered at Hannah with something like hunger in her eyes. It made Hannah feel uncomfortable, but a tiny thrill of pride swelled through her, too. If nothing else, she had impressed both Mrs. Sweet and Miss Cascade with her counting.
She returned Mrs. Sweet’s gaze directly. “I don’t much care about being illiterate, Mrs. Sweet, especially when there’s so many others—my best friends, Tru and Betsy, plus Ma and my brother Roy—to read aloud to me. Ma says there’s bigger problems in our country than not understanding when the e is silent.” She drew a breath. “And if you must know, I don’t care for poetry, either. Thankfully, it’s our first class, so I don’t have to dread—”
“All right, Hannah.” Miss Cascade lifted and dropped her hands. “I think we’re finished here. Get along home. Your family will be wondering.”
Mrs. Sweet nodded in agreement. Hannah leaped from her seat and nearly knocked over the dunce stool on her way out the door.
“Take heed, Hannah,” warned Miss Cascade. To Mrs. Sweet, she said, “You must understand, her difficulties are greater than you perceive. I can’t see how you might think …”
Hannah was not listening. She did not much care what Mrs. Sweet might think. She ducked outside, floating into the warm welcome of a September afternoon. Free.
3. RUNNING, COUNTING, STACKING
HANNAH DECIDED TO RUN home.
She had to. The counting had given her energy. It was like performing a circus entertainment, like spinning plates or eating fire. Counting was a bolt of hot, bright lightning in her brain. It was a habit and a comfort, yes, but it also opened her mind to a vastness of numbers that overwhelmed her.
No matter how fast Hannah ran, she could always count faster.
She was counting, even now. She had started with the poems and she could not stop.
She counted her steps, the draw and release of her breath. She counted fence posts, birds, Holsteins, rocks strewn along her path.
She counted inside things, too. Rounded up this afternoon to four o’ clock and from there, she counted off the hours until the dawn of her birthday, April fourteenth. Then she counted the hours she had lived since her last taste of chocolate ice cream, the minutes her seventy-nine-year-old self would be on this earth at eight in the morning of the first day of the year 2001 (factoring in the 1,440 minutes per extra day times 20 leap years).
Finally, she took this year, 1934, and divided it by two. Over and over, skipping the decimal point like a checkers piece until it stood at the front of the line.
Granddad McNaughton encouraged her mathematics. Sunday afternoons, they passed gleeful hours inventing games with figures and sums, making up riddles and puzzles to solve. Until recently, Granddad himself was always up and running, too, either to clear branches or chop wood or weed his vegetable garden. Mental tasks must be balanced by the physical, Granddad liked to say. He’d been feeling poorly of late, but he never said no to a walk in the outdoors. And he still loved math.
Hannah’s shoes were thick with dust by the time she turned off Brintons Bridge Road and onto Orchard Way. The same sprint, an equal length of distance, every step. She rounded the Applebee farm and the Roe farm and Indian Rock. Objects whizzed by, and she gathered them mentally, easy as ps and rs and ts.
It was not until she reached her front gate that she stopped and stood, panting, triumphant. She closed her eyes to set the final sums in a row.
Steps: 1,657
Paired breaths: 520
Fence posts: 192
Birds: 29
Holsteins: 44
Rocks: 170 (gray: 111; black: 53; mixed: 6)
Hours left until April 14: 5,041
Hours since last taste of chocolate ice cream: 3,212
Minutes lived on planet Earth at eight o’clock A.M. of 1/1/2001: 41,927,680
1934 divided: 967, 483.5, 241.75, 120.875, 60.4375, 30.1875, 15.09375, 7.546875, 3.7734375, 1.8867188, .9433594
4. LATE
MA WAS TAKING DOWN the bedsheets in the side yard and listening to the kitchen radio tuned to The Betty Crocker Hour. Hannah saw her undergarments flapping on the line. Not again—as if she hadn’t asked Ma a thousand times to please let her dry her delicates in the privacy of her bedroom!
But Ma, always busy and never modest about such things, often forgot.
Hannah dashed across the yard, shouting a flapping, strutting Homer out of her way, then jumped for a pair of waving underpants. She jiggled the line hard. Roy’s spare coveralls and one of Pa’s kerchiefs dropped to the dirt.
“Careful, Hannah! Look before you leap.”
Hannah had heard that warning too many times to pay attention to it. She yanked down an undershirt and folded it over her arm. “Ma, I’ve wished a hundred times you would allow me care of my own underclothes.”
“If wishes were horses …” Ma answered. “Hurry now. You’re late to milking.”
“Ladies, you may also use honey or Karo syrup in place of white sugar,” assured the gentleman announcer.
Ha! Karo syrup was a special-occasions treat. In fact, most sweet food was a special-occasions treat. The announcer ought to stick to explaining Bisquick and red cabbage. But The Betty Crocker Hour was Ma’s favorite show, and Hannah knew better than to talk over it.
She hurried into the house and upstairs to her bedroom. Her underwear was dried stiff enough to put away. She took care to fold each article just so before placing it in her clothes cupboard, though Ma wearied of Hannah’s insistence on ruler-straight edges and right angles, on stacking every pair of stockings and underwear neat as saucers.
“Your habits have more hold on you than you do on them,” Ma often chided.
Hannah shut the cupboard and stood at the window an extra moment, feeling the house all around her as she looked out over the view. She stared across the field to the barn’s red roof, half-hidden in a green canopy of maples. Here in her bedroom, across the hall from the room where she’d been born, and staring out over the low hills at a spread of family-owned property—here was safety. She tapped a pattern on the paint-thickened windowpane. She loved her home, with its swept corners and known secrets, its worn, dark furniture, its every scent and view familiar to her.
And now it was September. Soon the leaves would change color, and there would be much to reap for the autumn harvest. In addition to the dairy, the farm had a small oat piece, a potato piece, a garden piece, as well as three acres of orchard. Come winter, sacks of feed would be put away for the livestock, as well as potatoes stacked next to cans of pickled cucumbers, stewed tomatoes, and jar upon jar of Hannah’s favorite preserves, plum and peach, which she and Ma likely would be pitting until late October.
Late! Quickly, Hannah shed her school clothes for milking slacks and a sweater. Then she tied on her white floursack apron, knotting it twice around her middle. The apron was an old one of Ma’s, and though Hannah was taller, she didn’t have quite Ma’s girth yet.
On the way out to the barn, she checked her reflection in the tarnished kitchen mirror. It stopped her. She batted her eyes and gave her best movie-star smile. Then she peered harder at herself. Her face, swamped in a quantity of pale, flyaway hair, looked soft and indistinct. She wished she were a more precise-looking person, with Joan Crawford’s hurt, liquid eyes or with the sly smirk of Claudette Colbert. But the face in the mirror might belong to any girl.
“Hannah!” Her mother’s voice broke Hannah from her thoughts. She turned. Ma stood in the doorway, the laundry basket at her hip, Hannah’s milk buckets held out in her opposite hand. “There’s a sight. Gazing at yourself when you’re needed in the milk house. Where is your sense?”
“I’m going, I’m going.” Hannah collected the buckets and ducked out the door.
Down at the milk house, Roy, Pa, and Ben were finishing up. The cows were back in the barn, fed and content, and Ben was washing down the floor to its center drain. When he saw Hannah, he
nodded acknowledgment and looked away.
The year before, when Ben had come to work for the family, Hannah had decided he was a terrible grouch. Now she knew better: that Ben was a private man, given to long fits of low spirits, pining for his wife and son in Ohio. He almost never spoke of them, but he sent his pay home every month, riding with Pa in the pickup into town and handing the envelope to the postmaster as if it contained a living thing.
Pa said that Ben was lucky to have work when most men didn’t, though lucky was not the word that came to Hannah’s mind. Lonely fit Ben better.
Roy and Pa were huddled in the corner, gingerly lowering the last milk cans into the new electric cooler. They’d only had it for two months, every spare nickel of last year and most of this one sunk into its purchase. But the dairy had been bedeviled by the need for the cooler (Pa’s words), and since the farm almost never earned out in plain cash money, the cooler had been a long time in the waiting. It was here now, and better than any Christmas gift, Hannah reasoned, as this winter she and Roy would not have to pry up ice from the pond to keep the milk chilled overnight.
“Hannah, where’ve you been to?” asked Pa. “We could have used your touch roundabout a half hour ago. Dosey was acting persnickety.”
“I was held back after school. They had a special lady come in from some charity in Philadelphia. I suppose Miss Cascade thought she’d have the right answer to my reading problem.”
“And did she?” Pa took off his cap and wiped his forehead with it. He looked upset. School and reading had been a struggle for him, as well. “Think she might tighten some screws in your noggin?”
“They’ll tighten themselves, Pa,” Hannah assured him. She refrained from saying more. Pa would not want to hear about the other part of the visit, about her counting letters and the surprise that washed over Mrs. Sweet’s and Miss Cascade’s faces. No, that was a show-off story; a tale for Granddad’s ears alone.
“C’mon, cover these, lollygagger!” called Roy. He disliked it when he had to pull Hannah’s share.
She got to work. All that was left to do was to fasten the straining cloths over the two remaining milk cans and to secure the fabric in place with wooden clothespins, a final step before the cans were stored in the cooler until tomorrow morning’s delivery.
She was good at fastening. The cloth spread evenly, no puckering, smooth as a painter’s canvas.
“Radio ought to wipe out most recreational reading altogether,” said Pa after a few moments, speaking to Hannah in a burst as if he’d been stewing on it. “Folks hear faster than they can read, and it’s no strain to the eyes neither.”
Hannah nodded. She liked that idea.
5. EVENING SURPRISE
HEPP’S LETTER, UNOPENED IN the middle of the table, would be more sumptuous than dessert. Ma planned to read it out loud after dinner. Roy, who could mow through a plate of food in two minutes, kicked Hannah under the table to hurry her. She paid no mind and ate her usual way—clockwise, after arranging the food around her plate from least to greatest. Biscuit, rice, bacon lardons, sliced tomato.
Pa stirred all the food on his plate into a puddle and sank a pool of gravy in the middle, as did Ben, but a look from Ma made Roy decide against it. Ma didn’t hold Hannah and Roy to much proper behavior, but she’d been a doctor’s daughter before she became a farmer, and she kept an entire set of rules like a chest of antique silver tucked in a corner of her head.
As he did every night directly after supper, Ben stood and nodded his good-night, taking leave to smoke his pipe under the stars. Once Hannah had cleared the table and soaked the dishes, Ma reached for the letter.
“Shall we?”
“Yes!” chorused Hannah and Roy, while Pa stayed silent but took out his pipe.
Ma tickled her finger beneath the envelope flap, unable to wait another minute. It had been two years since Hepp left home, and everyone missed him sorely. Hepp was a full-grown twenty years old now and still footloose, “crisscrossing the states like a common tramp,” in Pa’s words.
Hepp’s had not been a peaceful departure, either. Hannah could still recall the shouting in the living room, Hepp insisting that he’d never been a farmer and never would be one, and so he might as well take a look at the world and find the right spot to plant roots. Hepp was no good with the dairy, and he had as much feel for the land as the man in the moon. No, her oldest brother preferred wandering to any other activity, and he had spent most waking hours with his head lost in a book of travel or adventure.
But it was not until he’d left home that Hannah fully understood. Hepp out in the world also meant her world without Hepp. It grieved her. She kept one of his impossibly long socks in her dresser, along with the thick pamphlet Hepp had sent her from last year’s World’s Fair in Chicago. Only nothing was as nice as the sound of his voice, blending through Ma’s as she read out loud.
Dear Family,
Except for the red chili peppers growing plentiful as crab apples, Santa Fe was a dead bust. Two weeks of picking and then no work, and now I’m twiddling my thumbs in Macon. We’d had word there was hiring out for cotton crops, seems we were wrong and there’s a hundred men for every job—the usual story.
I got here by rail with my usual boys—Fat Mike and Billy, and it took us three days. We traded turns sleeping to keep an eye skinned against the law. Okie Slims and Texas Slims are quick to shoot you off a train—only to scare, Ma, not to harm. You’d laugh to see me, I swapped most of what was in my bindle for food during a stopover in Austin, so I use one map spread over me for a blanket and the other folded up for a pillow. We’re hungry some, and disappointed, but Mike’s got a hunch to head for Alabama. We hear there’s pine mills might need men for sawing—
Ma broke off, startled at the noise. Pa stopped knocking his pipe against the wall.
Hannah recognized the sound of that automobile. Mrs. Sweet! What was she doing here? Whether to discuss Hannah’s poor reading or show-off counting, this unexpected visit would not likely please either Ma or Pa. Apprehension bunched in Hannah’s chest as Roy leaped down the hall to throw open the door. There was a dog’s belief in Roy that his brother might be coming home any day now.
Ma and Pa both scraped back their chairs and stood as Mrs. Sweet entered the kitchen in a bustle, introducing herself and pumping hands mightily all around.
“I’ll sit, but I can’t stay long!” she began when Pa indicated the vacant chair. “I have come to offer Hannah a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, made possible by Wexler’s generous auspices!”
“Wexler? I never heard of any Mister Wexler,” said Pa, reseating himself when Mrs. Sweet settled into her chair. “He’s not from these parts, anyhow.”
“Because Wexler is a place, Pa, not a body,” said Ma, moving to the kettle to prepare Mrs. Sweet a mug of hot tea.
“No, it’s a thing,” said Roy. “It’s money, I bet.”
For once, Hannah stayed as mute as if she’d been set on the dunce stool.
“It’s a person, place, and thing!” Mrs. Sweet harrumphed. “It’s a charitable trust, and I am its executive director, appointed by Philadelphia’s own Mayor Moore. Part of our good work is to award scholarships to children who otherwise might not be receiving the usual advantages. So that he—or she—can prepare for a university education.” She nodded thanks as she accepted the mug. “I did not travel out to these parts looking for a diamond in the rough, but it seems Hannah has a gift for numbers.”
A gift for numbers. Hannah liked that, even if praise came from such a bossy-boots as Mrs. Sweet. And a scholarship! Well, wouldn’t Granddad McNaughton be pleased to hear that!
Though one glance at her parents showed that they were not. “Oh, Hannah’s got a knack,” agreed Pa warily. “She does all the family invoicing. Puts the bills in the bottles at the end of the month. She’s kept track of every cent for years. Course, farms don’t get paid out always in money, so precision’s not the upmost.”
“Rest assured, Hannah woul
d be taught more than invoicing!” retorted Mrs. Sweet. “She would be taught advanced concepts, algebra, geometry, proofs, theorems—”
“Madam, I ought to tell you now, it’s a mighty far-fetched conversation we’re having here,” interrupted Ma. “It’s not as if we have the money to send Hannah to a fancy university once you’ve taken all the effort to prepare her! And, it’s not as if Hannah could qualify to study other subjects, what with all her reading troubles.”
Pa nodded. He picked up Hepp’s letter and began to fold it into small and smaller squares. Hannah knew that if Pa started to fold, things were knotting up inside his mind. “My wife speaks for us both,” he said. “It’s Hannah’s reading where we’d like to see improvements. And truth be told,” Pa added, “I don’t myself see much point to girls learning fancy math.”
“At Ottley Friends, in Philadelphia, Hannah will be reading quicker than you can say boo,” said Mrs. Sweet. “As for girls and math, why, Mr. Bennett, we have lived to see Marie Curie twice win the Nobel Prize, once for Physics and once for Chemistry. Lord rest her soul.”
Pa shook his head. “Cities are no use to children. Young ones are wild cockalorum and grown best out of doors.” He set down Hepp’s letter. His fidgeting fingers found and drew a long match from his breast pocket to strike against the table leg, and he turned his head from Mrs. Sweet to relight his pipe with slow, labored puffs.
“When did Miss Curie pass on?” asked Roy.
“This summer,” answered Hannah. “And she was a doctor, not a miss, and it’s pronounced cure-eee, not curry, dummy.”
“Who’s a dummy? It’s not like you could’ve read it in the newspaper!” Roy scoffed.
“Children,” Ma scolded.
Mrs. Sweet turned to Hannah. “This is a wonderful chance, dear. Toward the end of December, state qualification exams are given to determine scholarship candidates. While Hannah prepares for them, she could lodge for the semester with me—or another sponsor family, if she prefers.” Her voice began to frog into speechmaking tones as she addressed the room in general. “As a patron of Mayor Moore’s education reform movement, I am an advocate of progress and learning experiments.”
Hannah, Divided Page 2
