Free Silent Thunder by Andrea Pinkney Page B

was an impatient look coming to his eyes. All he said was, “Hand me a new blade, will you?”

13
Summer
    November 10, 1862
    I ’D HAVE GIVEN JUST ABOUT anything, even Walnut, to have my book back. But when Mama put her foot down, she meant it, and there was no use in trying to cross her. Thanks to Rosco’s teaching, I knew me all the alphabet. Plus, I knew six whole words. I came to know every bit of this without my Clarkston Reader.
    I learned letters by finding letter look-alikes, regular things that look just like the letters in my book.
    The slants of morning sunlight coming into the quarters—them light slants looked just like the letter W.
    The wisp of hair that fell on the back of Missy Claire’s neck—that was an S.
    The trunk of the cypress tree, standing tall and proud so’s even the strongest wind or the harshest words couldn’t bend it—for certain, that was the letter L .
    And them sweet, buttery peaks that formed in Mama’s mixing bowl when she was whippin’ tea cake batter—they were a whole mess of M ’s, one coming up in the bowl after the other.
    I’d been stringing letters together, side by side, like the pearls Missy Claire wore round her neck for the Hobbs Hollow Christmas cotillion. I’d been making my own necklace. A necklace of P ’s and D’ s and U ’s and Q ’s. Now, letters were more than curls on paper. Letters meant something.
    I’d learned four words from Rosco: run, man, be , and, the longest and best word, my name, Summer.
    Then, by accident, I learned another word by myself. Two Mondays ago, I was in the parlor where Missy Claire had been spending her days. Missy was working on her embroidery sampler, stretched in its hoop, for what seemed like the longest time. I was sitting cross-legged at Missy’s feet, untangling her embroidery threads, using all the patience I could summon to stay with a tricky knot of the prettiest blue thread I’ve ever seen.
    My eyes were starting to sting from the concentration. I took a long, slow blink, then let my gaze rest on Missy’s sampler. There, plain as the day’s sky, was my name, Summer , stitched in pink across the sampler’s top arc. Further down, under the Summer , was a longer word. I knew all its letters. I made myself curl the sounds of them letters round my tongue. After threetries of sounding the word silently, I blurted it out. Thankfully, my blurt was quiet, like a whisper— “Flower.”
    Missy Claire shifted her eyes in my direction. “You say something, Summer?”
    I blinked and quickly turned my attention back to my knot of thread. “No, ma’am, just a breeze blowin’, I guess,” was my answer.
    Missy Claire gave a blank smile and kept on with her needlepoint.
    Already, I was starting to see what Thea meant about reading being both a blessing and a bugaboo. I was truly thankful that I was starting to see words. Sometimes I thought it was better than seeing the early morning sun crack open the shell of darkness that blanketed the sky each night. But seeing words was also like spending a whole night awake, staring into blackness. The longer I stared, the more I didn’t see—the more words I learned, the more I came to see there were so many I just didn’t know.
    Missy Claire was writing carefully with her embroidery needle, crafting the letters of my name, like it was a fine, delicate thing. But what did my name have to do with flowers?
    Come the next morning, I was a bushel of talk at my lesson. “Ros, Missy Claire’s got my name stitched into her sampler.”
    Rosco was still sleepy. He wasn’t fully listening.“Missy ain’t really makin’ nothing with her needle and thread, Summer. Except for a few lame buds and swirls, her sampler’s been bare for weeks.”
    I slid Walnut from my pocket and smoothed her burlap dress. “Yeah, I saw them rosebuds and swirls