The words landed the way Ansel had feared they would, and for a moment the old doubt rose in him, the one he had carried since the day Louisa had asked him to stay and teach: that he was a man who measured land, not minds, and that he had taken a place he had no right to take. Then he thought of Tess, reading aloud that morning without stumbling, and of Ben, who could lay a straight line across a field and tell you why it was straight, and the doubt went back down to where it belonged, which was nowhere near the children.
"Then judge the teaching, Mr. Moore," Ansel said, "not the teacher's trade. I have brought evidence. Louisa will bring more."
Moore raised an eyebrow. "Mrs. Bennett?"
"She is on her way," Ansel said, and as he spoke he heard the sound he had been listening for without knowing it: Louisa's wagon on the road from the ranch house, coming fast, because Alma Frost's boy had run the half mile with the news before Moore had finished his first hour in the room. "She keeps the roll, and the journals, and the plans. I keep the lessons. Between us, we keep the school."
Moore closed his ledger and stood. "Then let us see it all," he said. "This afternoon. The whole room, the whole valley, if you like. I will question you firmly, Mr. Grey, and fairly. That is my office, and I will not apologize for it."
"I would not ask you to," Ansel said.
Before the afternoon began, Moore asked to see the copybooks, and Ansel brought them out in a stack, the way a man brings out his accounts when the bank comes calling: each child's book, each page dated, each lesson corrected in Ansel's own hand, with notes in the margins that were not scoldings but directions. Moore turned the pages slowly, and Ansel watched his eyebrows rise, slightly, at Tess's book, where the early pages stumbled and the later pages ran clean, the handwriting growing steadier month by month like a creek finding its channel. He stopped at Ben's book, where the sums gave way to measurements, and the measurements gave way to a small sketch of the school ground, drawn in the margin because the boy could not help drawing what he measured.
"You correct every book yourself?" Moore asked.
"Every one," Ansel said. "There is no one else to do it, and I would not trust it to anyone else if there were. A child's mistake, left uncorrected, becomes a habit, and a habit becomes a wall. I would rather spend my evenings with a pen than build walls around children."
Moore wrote that down, and Ansel could not tell whether it was praise or evidence, and decided it did not matter, because it was true.
Then Moore questioned the children himself, one by one, the way a judge questions witnesses, and Ansel stood by the stove and did not help them, because helping them would have been the worst thing he could do. He asked Carl Jensen's youngest to cipher a sum, and the boy did it, slowly, with his tongue between his teeth, and got it right. He asked a girl from the far farm to spell a word she had learned that winter, and she spelled it, and then, because she was proud, spelled another one he had not asked for. He asked Ben how many rods made a mile, and Ben answered without hesitation, and then, because Ben was Ben, added how many rods ran along the school's creek frontage, and Moore, to Ansel's surprise, laughed, a short, genuine laugh, and wrote that down too.
When Moore turned to Tess, Ansel held his breath, because Tess was the child whose courage had cost the most and whose reading had come the hardest, and he knew that a stranger's question could undo in a minute what a winter had built. But Tess looked up at the inspector with her chin level, and answered him clearly, and when he asked her what she liked best about the school, she said, without a moment's thought, "That Mr. Grey never laughs when I am slow, and Mama never lets me quit," and Ansel had to turn away to the window, because his eyes had filled, and a teacher weeping in front of an inspector would not help anyone, least of all Tess.