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She starts walking again. “Come in the house, and I’ll see what I can find.”
I follow her up the steps to the covered porch. The broad, open passage down the middle serves as a sort of wind tunnel, it attracts a breeze even though the air is pretty still in this part of the country. The right side of the house appears to be her sleeping quarters. She leads me into the left side. The front half is a living room with a few pieces of threadbare furniture, a table, an upright piano, and a door leads to a small kitchen.
It’s all weathered wood with dull pine floors, and it all seems to be covered in a film of dust.
“My great grandfather built this house.” Odessa walks over to the mantle and takes down a small wooden box. “My mother lived here with her sister after they passed. Then I was born, and my aunt moved to Vidalia.”
I’m not sure where she’s going with all this, but I don’t interrupt her. I watch as she takes a small, polished wood pipe out of the box and stuffs it with tobacco. The stick she was carrying leans against the hearth, and after spending a few minutes lighting her pipe, she walks to a bookcase in the corner.
“My mamma learned to be a nurse in the war.” I have no idea which war she’s talking about. This woman looks like she could be one hundred ye
ars old, judging by the lines in her face. “When she was young, she cared for the wounded soldiers. When she got older, the hospital didn’t want her because she had no formal training.”
Her voice hasn’t changed in tone, so it’s hard to know if she’s carrying a grudge about this. It’s more like she’s reciting a history lesson.
“I’m sorry.” Just in case.
“No need to apologize. You weren’t even a twinkle in your daddy’s eye when it happened.” She takes a long, narrow book from the shelf and walks over to where I’m standing near the door. “Come out here to the kitchen and take a seat.”
I follow her through the passage to an even smaller room with a metal stove against one wall and a large sink across from it. She puts the book on the table and opens it, and I see it’s a log with rows and columns. Names and dates are down one side, and some of the columns have entries beside them.
“Folks still managed to find her.” Her lips tighten. “I was a teenager when Mamma passed, but I held onto her book. It seemed important somehow, even though most of these people are gone.”
Swallowing the knot from my throat, I look closer at the entries. The listings are a mix of male and female names, but the problems all seem to be about the same topic. My eyes flicker to her face.
She studies the entries with a solemn face, and I realize she’s the keeper of secrets. Dark secrets. Choices forced upon people by hate or made out of fear or desperation.
I think about my grandmother’s desperation, and my chest sinks. “Did she do abortions?”
Odessa shakes her head. “She delivered a lot of babies for people who couldn’t go to the hospital for whatever reason. And she helped women who had tried… other ways. She didn’t ask questions.”
“Would my grandmother have come here to have a baby?”
She shrugs. “It’s possible. How much do you know?”
“I have this letter.” I hand over the letter Miss Jessica gave me.
The old woman takes it carefully, reading the envelope. “Was this Winona Priddy?”
“I think so?” Hell, I don’t know Miss Jessica’s last name.
“I remember Miss Winona. I thought her name was Pretty, and I wondered what it would be like to have everyone call you that. A real confidence booster.” It’s the first time she hasn’t frowned since I arrived.
“You remember her coming here?”
“She came here alone first, then she came again with a woman so beautiful… so afraid.” Her eyes travel around my face, up to my hair, down to my chin. “It was your grandmother.”
“Kimberly Allen.”
Odessa’s eyes travel out the window into the trees behind the house. Sadness washes over her features.
Reaching out, I clutch her arm a little too hard. “What happened to her?”
“I didn’t know that pretty woman’s name. I was just a teenager. Still, I could see how sad she was.”
“And the baby?”
The old woman turns a page in the ledger, sliding her finger down the rows of names. She turns another and does the same, then another. Her brow is furrowed, and her expression grim. The noise of cicadas is loud in the absence of barking dogs, and it intensifies the isolation of this place.
