Miss Adelaide Corwin had read every word of every paper put in front of her for sixty-six years, which is why she could not understand how her own name had ended up on the lightning rod man's contract.
It was the second week of June, 1882, in Liberty Township, Iowa. The corn was knee high. And on every farmhouse roof for nine miles, new lightning rods were going up, shining like needles in the sun.
The lightning rod man had come through the week before. His name was Dexter Fane.
He drove a red wagon with a painted canvas cover and a team of matched grays, and he had a smile like warm butter. He did not try to sell anybody anything. That was what everybody said afterward. He did not try to sell.
He only wanted to put one rod on one house in each township, he said, as an advertisement for his company. He picked the finest houses. The best kept farms. For his trouble, he would take a photograph of the house and the family on the front steps, and the rod would cost no more than fifteen or seventeen dollars, at the very outside.
All the farmer had to do was sign an order, so the company would know where to send the crew.
Thirty-one farmers in Liberty Township signed.
Adelaide had taught school for thirty-eight years, the last twenty-nine of them in Liberty Township. She had retired the spring before last. She lived alone in the little white house across the road from the schoolhouse, with a garden, two cats, and a red pencil she still used for marking the newspaper's spelling.
She had taught nineteen of those thirty-one farmers to read. She had taught their wives. She had taught some of their children.
And when Mr. Fane had come to her gate, he had not asked her about the house at all. He had asked about the schoolhouse.
"I'd like to photograph your school, ma'am, with you on the steps," he had said. "A lady who taught school for thirty-eight years. That's the kind of picture a company is proud of."
She had been more pleased than she cared to admit. She had signed his order on her own porch rail.
She had not gone inside for her spectacles. It had seemed a small thing.
The crews came on Monday.
There were three men to a crew, and they worked fast. They did not put one rod on each house. They put rods on every peak and gable, on the barn, on the corn crib, on the hog house and the outhouse and the windmill. They strung copper cable down every corner. When they were done, they handed the farmer a bill.
Ninety dollars. A hundred and four. A hundred and twelve.
When the farmer said he had been promised seventeen, the foreman showed him the order with his own signature on it, and pointed to a line of small print above the name.
At sixty-five cents per foot, for as much as the work requires.
Then the foreman asked the farmer to sign a promissory note for the balance, due in ninety days. Most men signed. The crew was standing in their yard with tools, and the order did say what it said.
By Wednesday, Gus Marten came to Adelaide's door with his hat in both hands.
Gus had been the slowest reader in her first Liberty class in 1853 and was now the best farmer in the township. He had signed a note for a hundred and twelve dollars. He had never owed any man money in his life.
"I read it, Miss Corwin," he said. "Before I signed. I swear I did. He held it on his clipboard, and I read every word he showed me."
"Every word he showed you," Adelaide said.
Gus looked at her.
She made him coffee and asked him to bring her every order and every note he could gather from the township by Thursday night. The Liberty Grange met Thursday at the schoolhouse. She would read them.
Gus said he would.
As he left, he said one more thing at the gate.
"The foreman says they carry the notes to the bank in Marshalltown on Saturday morning, ma'am. Sell them there for cash. After that, he says, they're the bank's notes, and the bank don't care what Fane promised."
Adelaide sat up late on Wednesday with her spectacles and the lamp and twenty-three orders.
Every one was printed the same way, on a long sheet. The promise of seventeen dollars was written large near the top, in Fane's own hand, in ink. The price per foot was printed in very small type in the middle, in a place that was easy to cover with a thumb, or the clip of a clipboard.
She read them all twice. She made a list of every name, every promise, every bill.
She did not look for her own order among them. She told herself it was because Gus would not have thought to bring it.
On Thursday night the Liberty Grange filled the schoolhouse. Men sat in the children's desks with their knees up. Women stood along the back wall. Somebody had opened the windows, and the June air smelled of cut clover and kerosene.
Dexter Fane came too. He had been invited, he said, to answer any honest question.
He sat in the front row with his hat on his knee, smiling.
Adelaide stood at her old desk with the stack of orders in front of her and her spectacles on.
She read the first order aloud. All of it. The large promise, and then, slowly, the small line in the middle.
"At sixty-five cents per foot, for as much as the work requires."
Somewhere in the back, a desk creaked. She read it from the second order, and the third.
"Every one of these was signed by a man who can read," she said. "I know, because I taught most of them. They read what they were shown. Nobody read them the rest."
Fane stood up.
"Every man here signed his own name, Miss Corwin," he said, gently. "I didn't hold a pistol to anybody. A contract is a contract. You taught them that too, I expect."
Then he reached into his coat and drew out one more paper.
"And since we're reading," he said, "this one has the very first signature in Liberty Township. Shall I read the name aloud, or would you like to?"