In the surgeon's wagon

"Just with practice. In school they have to do it every day, and soon it comes just natural, like firing a rifle or cleaning it. There's lots of little steps to firing your rifle - biting the cartridge and loading it and all, right? - but you probably don't notice them or have to stop and remember them all. Or maybe it's like learning to talk. That young Irish lad in the 95th - Mícheál - he has to think of almost every word before he can say anything. But you and me don't have to. We can talk on and on without thinking at all!" She thought about the different sounds of E. "I guess it is confusing when the letters have different duties like that. Eee and ehh... Oh! I know! It's like sheep and shepherd. Sheep has the eee sound and shepherd has the ehh sound, but they still both have the letter E in them."

"I wonder how he is, the Irish lad," Cotton said. "Can't have been a nice mornin' for him, neither. Not the sort of thing anyone his age should have to see, after all."

He looked at the slate. "The officer one looks strange, all straight lines, with the soldier-one all curly. Ee for eel and egg. Does that make the last one in my name the luh? Otherwise it don't finish right."

"Yes, that's an Ell. See, there's one in rifle too? L for lobster, and lake, and leg, and lass..."

"And lark. Ell for lass, I can remember that. So, G-ay-brih-ell, Gabriel." He grinned at her, pleased. "How do you write the letters, though? You do it so quick I can't make head nor tail of it."

"There's all the letters there. All the small ones anyway. Here, I'll write it in big ones too. All the officers getting together for supper." She erased the slate and wrote his name in capital letters. "Sometimes people write everything in the big letters to make it look more important. Like a handbill or a proclamation, or big labels on boxes. There."

He ran his finger underneath, trying to commit it to memory. He grinned at Maggie, proud of himself for being able to read his name.

"Captain Vickery don't call me Gabriel, though," he said, still with a proud smile. "He calls me Cotton, which is my other name, my surname. And so do most the Rifles call me Cotton. Can you learn me to write that, as well?"

"Of course! Cotton's easy to spell. But wait, time to test you!" She erased the slate and wrote something new. "Can you read these words?" She looked at his face and smiled. "Here, I'll write your name on the top of the paper again so you can still look at it."

He looked at the slate. "The first one's like 'egg' with an ell in front... leg? Then r-ih-buh... rib. Then buh-eh-luh-luh... bell."

He frowned at the last one. "That's got ay, in and jee. And both of those do two jobs. So it could be r-a-guh, rag. Or r-ay-juh, rage. How do you know which?"

"Well done! You are too clever. Gabe, you're reading!" She leaned over and planted a kiss on his cheek. "And I hadn't even thought of rage. That there says rag, but if you added the helper e, the baggage train e, then it would say rage. Like this," she said, squeezing an e onto the end of the word. "I think maybe the Jee can't say juh unless there's a helper e. Or no, that's not true... Sometimes it can be a helper i. Or maybe... hmm. I don't know. It's just the way it is. So that's rag." She smiled, delighted with her student's quick progress and all her worries forgotten. "Are you ready to learn Cotton now?"

He looked at her, his eyes shining, and the pain of his back forgotten.

"You just look at the words and know what the letters sound like, and that's reading?" He wanted to swing Maggie round for joy. "I never knew it was like that. Only folks I ever knew who could read, apart from Squire and Parson, was Mister Fletcher who we worked for, and Mister Langley, the miller."

He was grinning, and didn't care if it made seem like a fool. He was learning to read. Him, Gabriel Cotton.

"That's all there is to it!" she answered with a smiling nod. "And you're doing it. You read that whole slate full of words. Oh Gabe, next time you write a letter to your famliy, you'll be able to do it all yourself! Or if they send you a letter, you'll be able to read it." She giggled suddenly and said, "Mister Vickery will have to watch out what papers he leaves lying about from now on. Especially if they're saying secret things like "Gabriel rang a bell. Maggie bagged an eel."

"I wouldn't read anythin' of Mister Vick'ry's. Wouldn't be right, that. Though he might want me to start keepin' his own accounts for him, if I ever get good enough to do it."

He couldn't seem to stop smiling. "I want to learn your name, and 'Rifleman Cotton' and... and then the rest of the letters. You wrote your name earlier, when I said it had two A's with tails on them. And it had a different letter leading it."

She laughed at his eagerness. "All right, all right. And they weren't little As with tails on them. You know what they were. Same as starts your name, only they're soldiers instead of an officer." She wrote Maggie across the top of his paper, next to his own Gabriel.

"I know. But I didn't know that then."

He looked at what she'd written.

"That's ay, but it sounds 'a' in your name. And two soldier jees that sound 'guh'. And 'eye' 'ee' that sound 'ee'." He looked up. "That's silly, two letters where one will do."

Looking back down, he continued. "But your name's Maggie. Mmmmaggie, so that must be a 'mmm' sort of sound. Looks like two arches." He frowned a little. "What's its name?"

"That's M, and it makes the mmm sound. Clever you, you don't even need a teacher anymore! And yes, that's the helper e at the end, the baggage train e. I don't know why it's there, but... it just is. And two Gs to make sure they'll say guh, because if one was alone it might be tempted to say juh.

"So M in Maggie, that's what's on my locket, remember? And what's the other letter on it?"

"It's for your last name, Evans. Which is the same as egg, so it's an ee. Only it's an officer ee, all pointy arms."

He shifted a little and pulled it out of his shirt. "It's still safe, Maggie. And I'll always keep it there, 'less you want it back, ever. And I can do our names 'cause I know what they sound like. It's written-down things I ain't so sure of. And can you learn me 'Cotton'? Please."

"Of course! And you'll find that when you start reading sentences, the written-down things make sense. Like, if you come to a word you don't know, it's like if an officer is calling out orders, and you know what's supposed to come next, so if there's a word you don't hear, you can usually guess what it is anyway.

All right, here's Cotton," she said, writing it on the slate and turning it to show him.

"Um. They's all new letters," he said, looking at them and frowning in concentration.

(OOC - and he can frown for a bit longer; I need buh-e-duh, bed. )

"That's all right. There's only a few... four different ones to learn, but some repeat. See, Oh, Tea, Tea, Oh, Enn. The first one is C for cuh. C can say sss or cuh, so it's cut, cake, clap, cup... And it kind of looks like a sideways cup. Or cave - it could be a cave...? Maybe not. And the small See looks exactly the same, just smaller. Let's see, what else... Vickery has a C in it... Viccckery? And Jacklin. Cavender. Column. Cow. And for the sss sound, there's... ice. Face. Um... but usually it's a different letter, the Ess, that makes that sound," she finished, pointing at it.



"Here's a cup with a handle that looks like a C. And that says cup right there," she explained.

[gud nit, der wun! cliep wel!]

"'See' for kuh? That's silly." He looked at the new letter and word. "Soldier See and Officer See have the same shape," he said. "Makes that one easier to learn. So, See sounds like kuh, but not in the middle of a word?"

"Well, it's not the middle of a word that makes a difference, because Vickery still has a C in the middle. I think it's... I think it depends on what kind of helper letter is there, like an I or an E."

"Oh. So, 'See' for kuh. Then what's the round one?"

"That's an O. And it says Oh or Ah, like in your name, Cot-un. So it's O for orange - and it's round like an orange - O for olive, ocean, on, off, old, over..." She pointed at the pair of O's on his sheet of paper. "And there it is. The big one and little one look just the same. And it's the shape your mouth makes when you say it. Ohhh."

"Oh for orange. An' that's another one where the officer's the same but bigger. Kuh, o, then tuh?"

He looked up at her. "You'm good at this. Have you done it before?"

She laughed. "No. Have you?"