“You a niece or granddaughter?” He zeroes in on me. I can see him searching his mental catalog, trying to decide who I might be.
I’m afraid to lie to the man. No telling whether May even has a granddaughter. Bart might be testing me.
A lie won’t really solve my problem anyway. “I’m not…exactly sure, to tell you the truth. You said your mother lives nearby? I wonder if she might know anything about the”—the secret my grandmother was keeping—“pictures in the house and the painting above the fireplace? My grandmother is one of the women in it.”
Bart gives the cottage a clueless look. “Couldn’t say. Haven’t been inside in years, myself. Mama’s been the one to take care of the place here for a long time. Since before the big house got burned down by lightning in ’82, even.”
“Could we possibly…talk to her? Would it be too much of an imposition?”
He tips back his hat, smiling. “My mercy! Not a bit. She loves it when anybody comes to visit. Just be sure you’ve got time to kill. Mama can talk.” He leans back and looks around the edge of the cabin. “Did y’all walk down here on foot from the old house? There’s an easier route out right through there. Little driveway up to the farm lane. May kept her car parked in the garage by Mama’s place.”
“Oh, I didn’t know.” But that explains a few things, like the overgrown condition of the front entrance and the rough trail that led us here. “We walked in from the old iron gate.”
“Oh slap, you’ll have chiggers by tomorrow. Remind me to give you some of Mama’s chigger soap. She makes it herself.”
I immediately start itching.
“Y’all hop in my li’l box trailer there. I’ll give you a ride over to Mama’s house. Unless you’d just as soon walk?”
I look across the way, and all I see are billions of chiggers waiting to attach themselves to me and make me itch for all eternity.
Jonah is already vibrating in place and tugging his daddy’s pant leg and pointing at the tractor.
“I think we’ll ride,” Trent decides.
Jonah claps and cheers, seconding the motion.
“You come on then, young fella.” Bart opens the screen door, and Jonah reaches for him as if he’s an old friend. He swings Jonah into the air and down the steps, and it’s clear that Bart is experienced at this kind of thing. Obviously he’s a top-notch grandpa.
Jonah is in heaven when we climb into the little two-wheeled wooden trailer, which reminds me of the manure wagon the stable hands use at Drayden Hill. I even suspect this cart may have been employed the same way. Suspicious-looking substances bounce around underneath the pile of twigs. Jonah doesn’t mind a bit. He looks happy as a duck in a puddle as we motor through some underbrush at the edge of the yard and follow what is clearly a well-used trail, perhaps for a four-wheeler or a golf cart.
Our route runs away from the river, taking us to a rural road, where we turn in to the first driveway. The freshly painted blue house looks like the sort of place where an old farmwife would live. Chickens peck in the yard. A spotted milk cow lounges under a shade tree. Laundry flaps lazily on a multistrand clothesline. Sammy bounds ahead, barking and baying to announce our arrival.
Bart’s mother shuffles onto the porch dressed in a colorful muumuu, house shoes, and a bright yellow scarf. A matching silk flower adorns the fluffy gray bun atop her head. When she sees us in the tractor cart, she draws back and shades her eyes. “Who ya got there, Barthol’mew?”
I let her son offer an explanation, since I don’t have one. “They were over at Mrs. Crandall’s place. Said they been to visit her in the nursing home.”
The old woman’s chin disappears into the leathery, cinnamon-colored folds of her neck. “Who you say you is?”
I climb off the wagon before she can decide to have her son take us back where he found us. “Avery.” It’s only two steps onto her porch, and I hurriedly offer my hand to shake hers. “I was asking your son about the pictures and the paintings over at May’s house. My grandmother is in them.”
The old woman glances from me to Trent, who’s waiting at the bottom of the steps while Jonah investigates the tractor with Bart. A boy about Jonah’s size emerges from a nearby barn and runs across the yard to join them. Introductions aren’t needed, but they’re quickly offered. This is little Bart.
The old woman turns her attention to me again. She cranes upward and looks long and hard, as if she’s mapping the contours of my face, comparing them to something. Is it my imagination, or is there a spark of recognition? “Now, who you say you is?”
“Avery,” I repeat more loudly this time.
“Av’ry who?”
“Stafford.” I purposely haven’t offered that information until now. But I don’t want to leave here without answers, and if this is what it takes, this is what it takes.
“You Miss Judy’s daughter?”
My heart starts pumping so hard I can feel my eardrums pulsating. “Granddaughter.”
Time seems to slow down. I lose all consciousness of little-boy chatter, and tractor talk, and big Bart, and chickens clucking, and the cow swatting flies, and the endless song of a mockingbird.
“You wanna know ’bout that place next door. ’Bout why she go there.” It’s not a question but a statement, as if this woman has been waiting for years, knowing that sooner or later someone would come asking.
“Yes, ma’am, I do. I’d ask my grandmother, but to tell you the truth, she’s not doing all that well mentally. She can’t remember things.”
She shakes her head slowly, her tongue making a soft tsk, tsk, tsk. When she focuses on me again, she says, “What the mind don’t ’member, the heart still know. Love, the strongest thang of all. Stronger than all the rest. You wanna know ’bout the sisters.”
“Please,” I whisper. “Yes. Please tell me.”
“It ain’t my secret to tell.” She turns and shuffles toward the house, and for a moment I think I’ve been dismissed, but a quick glance over her shoulder tells me otherwise. I’m being asked to follow her inside.
Told to.
I stop just past the threshold, waiting while she opens the slant top on an oak secretary desk and draws out a dented tin crucifix. From beneath it, she takes three rumpled sheets of paper originally torn off a yellow legal pad. Even though they’ve been wrinkled and then straightened, they don’t look particularly old, and they’re certainly not of the same vintage as the pressed tin piece.
“I only took it fo’ safekeepin’,” the woman says. She hands me the tin piece and the papers separately. “That cross been Queenie’s, long time ago. Miss Judy write the other. It’s her story, but she never write the rest. They decide they all gon’ carry it to they graves, I guess. But I figure somebody might come askin’ one day. Secrets ain’t a healthy thang. Secrets ain’t a healthy thang, no matter how old they is. Sometimes the oldest secrets is the worst of all. You take yo’ grandmother to see Miss May. The heart still know. It still know who it loves.”
I look down at the crucifix, turn it over in my hand, then unfold the yellow sheets. I recognize the handwriting. It’s my grandmother’s. I’ve looked at enough of her daybooks to be certain.
“Sit down, child.” Bart’s mother guides me to a wing chair. I half sit and half collapse. The top of the page reads:
PRELUDE
Baltimore, Maryland
August 3rd, 1939
The date of my grandmother’s birthday and the place she was born.
My story begins on a sweltering August night, in a place I will never set eyes upon. The room takes life only in my imaginings. It is large most days when I conjure it. The walls are white and clean, the bed linens crisp as a fallen leaf. The private suite has the very finest of everything….
I float through time, tumbling back years and decades, moving through space to a hospital room in August 1939, to a tiny life that enters the world and leaves it in the same moment, to blood and grief and an exhausted young mother who sinks into merciful sleep.