our house was never locked. Bedford was that kind of town.
After class ended that first day, neither Neal nor I had a mother waiting for us at home like the other children.
“You can stay after and help me if you like,” said Miss Logan. A kind, intuitive teacher, helping us with her generous attention. Standing in as a surrogate mother, as other teachers would, and as I often have for my kids. All our teachers at the Common School were single women. Once married, they had to retire. We were their practice children.
Miss Logan showed us how to pound erasers against the brick wall.
Neal slammed the felt hard. His arms were long and he could reach much higher on the wall. His fingers were long, too. Spider Fingers, the kids would call him in a few years when he’d grown so fast he was lanky and lean.
We raised clouds of white dust, and sneezed and laughed and choked.
“You’re a good reader,” he said to me.
“It’s not hard. My father showed me.”
We finished the erasers and brought them in to Miss Logan. She was sitting on her desk, laughing and talking with one of the teachers from upstairs.
“Thank you, children. See you tomorrow.”
I started home along the alley.
“Can I come with you?” he asked. Always, from that first day, when he asked a question, he looked at me intently. He really wanted to know what I was going to say. He stared so hard his forehead creased a little.
“I guess so,” I said.
“You live here?” he said, when we reached the Jail.
“In the house part.”
“Are you afraid?”
“No,” I said. “My father teaches them to be better.”
“Does he whip them?”
“No!” I said. “We’re Quakers. My father doesn’t believe in that.”
“Mine does. What’s a Quaker?” He fixed me with that intent curious gaze.
“We believe there’s a little piece of God in everyone.”
“How does it get in?”
“It’s just in there, my father says.”
“How does he know?” He was pure curiosity, not doubting or teasing.
“He learned in First Day School, when he was little.” I told him that my father came from Philadelphia, and Quakers started Philadelphia. Quakers started all of Pennsylvania. My mother and her family were Quakers, too, from near here—Dunning’s Creek, where my father and I went to Meeting, and I went to First Day School.
“What meeting?”
“Meeting for worship. You listen, to hear the still small voice inside.”
“What does it say?”
“Anything. Maybe from the Bible.” I took him up our front stairs and through the screen door.
“This is pretty nice, for a jail.”
“It’s the house, silly,” I said.
“Who are they?” Neal asked, looking up at the photographs on the golden oak mantelpiece above our tiled fireplace.
“My mother. My grandparents,” I said. “Me, in the bonnet. My grandmother is the one holding me.”
“You sure have a big family.”
“Not really. My mother is dead. And all the grandparents.”
“So you don’t have anyone. Like me.”
“I have my father.”
“And now you have me.” I got milk from the ice box, and cookies from the ceramic jar shaped like an apple with a stem.
“These are good,” he said. He’d eaten three. My father said two was enough, moderation in all things. But Neal looked so hungry and happy, pressing the crumbs on the table and licking his finger.
“My father made them.”
“Does he cook for them?”
“Yes,” I said. “Same as for us, just more.”
I heard the sound of locking and unlocking. My father was coming through. He had to duck his head, so as not to hit the door sill. Neal looked into the dark corridor, his eyes wide again, trying to see into the cell block.
“You brought a friend home,” my father said. “Looks like it’s been a fine day.”
“Hello, Mr. Miller,” Neal said.
“You may call me John, please,” said my father. He was respectful with everyone, young and old, inmate and free, but he didn’t use titles: first name and last name in formal situation, but no honorifics.
His Philadelphia family included a long line of attorneys who had gone to Swarthmore. But after he graduated from the University of Pennsylvania, he wanted to run a jail—according to Quaker principles. The Way opened for him, as he said. A job opened, actually, and he came west to the foothills of the Alleghenies, to Bedford. He attended Dunning’s Creek Friends Meeting, eight miles out of town, and spotted my mother his first Sunday. Her high school graduation picture and her wedding picture show clouds of dark hair, and large, watchful eyes. She was the only child of a family who had settled the valley and founded the Meeting in 1800, when western Pennsylvania was a wilderness frontier. I spent weekends and summers on my maternal grandparents’ farm, until my grandfather died clearing brush when I was three. My grandmother died that same summer. The farm went to auction, and my father put the proceeds of the sale aside for me. “For Bryn Mawr College,” he told me, from the beginning.
Neal stayed to supper that first night, and often, afterward. His father didn’t seem to care or notice. He learned about setting the table. And my father showed him about cooking. We would talk over dinner. My father loved the pleasure of table talk, had taught me to save up morsels of my day to share. I’ve read about the effect of early maternal loss, and have seen it among some of my kids. But I grew up secure, taking love for granted, as all children should and the fortunate ones do. We had more than enough love to share with Neal.
My father washed the dishes, we dried. We would sit at the kitchen table and do homework after doing the dishes. Later, Neal would walk home down the hill to his house across the river. Even children with watchful parents walked everywhere, alone or with friends, then.
That very first day of school set the pattern for our eight ensuing years at the Common School. We would stay after and help our teacher decorate bulletin boards in the drafty entry hall, marking the season with construction paper leaves which gave way to Pilgrims and then snowflakes, silhouettes of Washington and his cherry tree, Lincoln and his axe. On the way home we would collect walnuts and line them up across the road to enjoy the mess created by passing cars. We lobbed snowballs at each other, and if I managed to hit him first he would drop and howl in mock pain. In spring, we would take off our shoes and socks, hike up our itchy woolen long johns, and go barefoot on tender winter-soft feet.
Kids teased us sometimes about being friends. K-I-S-S-I-N-G! First comes love, then comes marriage, then comes baby in a baby carriage. The teasing seemed to roll off Neal. He would just shake his head, shrug, and smile; at ease with himself, truly comfortable in his own skin. I preferred his company to that of girls. Girls were skittish about visiting a jail, and their mothers wary, too.
When I was ten, my father gave me a two wheeler, and let Neal use his bicycle. Neal had started his growth spurt by then, and his legs were long and easily reached the pedals. It took me longer to get the hang of it, to trust the balance, but with Neal’s encouragement and my father’s steadying hand on the bicycle seat, I finally got it. After that, our narrow valley world had no limits for us. We could bike to the Coffee Pot, a round cinder block building