"You got some paper?" asked Benjy.
"Oh, land, I never thought," she wailed, and the room walls darkened. "What'll we do?"
"Just happens I brought some." He fetched a tablet from his little bag. "You want to write a letter somewhere?"
She smiled outrageously. "I want to write a letter to... to..." Her face fell apart. She looked around for someone in the distance. She looked at the mountains in the morning sunshine. She heard the sea rolling off on yellow shores a thousand miles away. The birds were coming north over the valley, on their way to multitudes of cities indifferent to her need at this instant.
"Benjy, why, I never thought until this moment. I don't know anybody in all the world out there. Nobody but my aunt. And if I wrote her it'd make her feel bad, a hundred miles from here, to have to find someone else to read the letter to her. She's got a whale-boned-corset sort of pride. Make her nervous the next ten years, that letter setting in her house on the mantel. No, no letter to her." Cora's eyes moved from the hills and the unseen ocean. "Who then? Where? Someone. I just've got to get me some letters."
"Hold on." Benjy fished a dime magazine from his coat. It had a red cover of an undressed lady screaming away from a green monster. "All sorts of addresses in here."
They leafed the pages together. "What's this?" Cora tapped an ad.
"'HERE'S YOUR Power Plus FREE MUSCLE CHART. Send name, address,'" read Benjy, "'to Dept. M-3 for Free Health Map!'"
"And what about this one?"
"'DETECTIVES MAKE SECRET INVESTIGATIONS, PARTICULARS FREE. WRITE G.D.M. DETECTIVE SCHOOL--'"
"Everything's free. Well, Benjy." She looked at the pencil in his hand. He drew up his chair. She watched him turn the pencil in his fingers, making minor adjustments. She saw him bite his tongue softly. She saw him squint his eyes. She held her breath. She bent forward. She squinted her own eyes and clamped her tongue.
Now, now Benjy raised his pencil, licked it, and set it down to the paper.
There it is, thought Cora.
The first words. They formed themselves slowly on the incredible paper.
Dear Power Plus Muscle Company
Sirs, [he wrote].
The morning blew away on a wind, the morning flowed down the creek, the morning flew off with some ravens, and the sun burned on the cabin roof. Cora didn't turn when she heard a shuffle at the blazing, sun-filled door. Tom was there, but not there; nothing was before her but a series of filled pages, a whispering pencil, and Benjy's Palmer Penmanship hand. Cora moved her head around, around, with each o, each l, with each small hill of an m; each tiny dot made her head peck like a chicken; each crossed t made her tongue lick across her upper lip.
"It's noon and I'm hungry!" said Tom almost behind her.
But Cora was a statue now, watching the pencil as one watches a snail leaving an exceptional trail across a flat stone in the early morning.
"It's noon!" cried Tom again.
Cora glanced up, stunned.
"Why, it seems only a moment ago we wrote to that Philadelphia Coin Collecting Company, ain't that right, Benjy?" Cora smiled a smile much too dazzling for a woman fifty-five years old. "While you wait for your vittles, Tom, just can't you build that mailbox? Bigger than Mrs. Brabbam's, please?"
"I'll nail up a shoe box."
"Tom Gibbs." She rose pleasantly. Her smile said, Better run, better work, better do! "I want a big, pretty mailbox. All white, for Benjy to paint our name on in black spelling. I won't have an shoe box for my very first real letter."
And it was done.
Benjy lettered the finished mailbox: MRS. CORA GIBBS, while Tom stood grumbling behind him.
"What's it say?"
"'MR. TOM GIBBS,'" said Benjy quietly, painting.
Tom blinked at it for a minute, quietly, and then said, "I'm still hungry. Someone light the fire."
There were no stamps. Cora turned white. Tom was made to hitch up the horse and drive to Green Fork to buy some red ones, a green, and ten pink stamps with dignified gentlemen printed on them. But Cora rode along to be certain Tom didn't hurl these first letters in the creek. When they rode home, the first thing Cora did, face glowing, was poke in the new mailbox.