My hands curl up now when the weather turns damp, and I use a walker with tennis balls jammed onto the back legs so it doesn’t screech against the linoleum. Cedar Hill Manor serves chicken and noodles every Sunday at noon, and by one o’clock the entire east hallway smells like boiled poultry, industrial bleach, and stale copies of Reader’s Digest. I am seventy-six years old, and I am not helpless. I want that said first. I know when a smile is too careful and when a person sits beside your bed for reasons that are not listed on any volunteer schedule.
Nora Whitcomb came into my room every Sunday after lunch for five solid months before I ever figured out who she was.
She always knocked twice on the wooden frame of my open door, waited three beats, and said, “Mrs. Barlow, may I read today?”
She had a low, steady voice that didn’t grate on my nerves like the radio or the television in the dayroom. That is the part that makes me feel foolish now. I should have asked more questions on day one, but when you live in a place where the days stretch out like dried salt beef, you take a little company wherever you can find it. She was around fifty-two, with brown hair cut blunt at her jaw and hands that never stopped smoothing the blue knit blanket over her knees while she sat in the straight-backed chair. She read the Psalms mostly. Sometimes she read a chapter from Luke or the local church bulletin if my cataracts were acting up and the small print blurred into gray fuzz.
I told her about my late husband Ray. I told her about the way the soil behind the sunroom was too sandy for proper tomatoes. I told her how Cedar Hill boiled the green beans until they gave up every bit of green and turned the color of a wet sidewalk.
She laughed at that. A real laugh, too, not the polite kind the nurses use when you complain about the gelatin.
For five months, I thought she was just another church lady with an empty Sunday afternoon and a heart full of pity for the old folks.
Then came the first Sunday in June.
It was hot enough that the cicadas were screaming in the oak trees outside the window, and the air conditioning in the room was clanking like a loose tin can. Nora walked in wearing a floral cardigan over a white blouse, and clipped crooked to her left lapel was a plastic name tag she must have forgotten to take off after her morning shift in the office.
NORA WHITCOMB.
I stared at those black letters for three long seconds. My thumb froze right on the edge of the paperback Bible she had just laid across my lap.
I looked up from the plastic tag and said, “Whitcomb from Carter County?”
Her thumb stopped smoothing the page. She didn’t look up at me, and her chin dropped just enough that her bangs fell forward.
“My father was Earl,” she said.
My mouth tasted like old pennies and cold iron.
There are names you can pack away in the dark corners of your mind for fifty years, thinking they’ve rotted down to nothing, and then one Tuesday or Sunday they are right back there waiting on you like an unpaid electric bill. Earl Whitcomb was twenty-eight years old in 1974. I was twenty-six, working afternoons down at Miller’s Feed Store, weighing out seed corn in brown paper bags and ringing up calf medicine for men who didn’t much like being rung up by a girl in a feed-stained apron.
Earl used to come in with his cap pulled low over his eyes and his heavy gold wedding ring tucked deep into his coin pocket when he was out chasing things he shouldn’t have been.
I testified against Earl because I saw him drag Lottie Mae Jenkins behind the bulk fertilizer storage shed by her left arm until her feet left the dirt. I testified because Lottie Mae had two black eyes that purpled down into her collarbones and three babies under six sitting in the back of a rusted station wagon. I testified because the town sheriff came by the feed store three times asking questions, and everyone else in Carter County suddenly went blind and dumb whenever Earl’s name came up.
And yes, it cost him.
Not enough, if you ask me. But it cost him three years in the state facility up near Waupun, and it cost him his standing at the Masonic lodge, and it cost him every friend who figured he finally went too far.
Nora closed the leather Bible with a soft, dull slap.
She looked straight at me then, her eyes the exact watery gray of her father’s, and said, “He told me you ruined him.”
I gripped the edge of my blanket until my knuckles turned the color of lard because my fingers had started that twitching business again.
I asked her, “Is that why you came here every week? To read scripture at me until I paid for what I did?”
She folded her hands over the closed book. Her fingernails were bitten down short. She told me she had signed up to volunteer at Cedar Hill because her church group was short on drivers and readers, and she figured old people needed the comfort. Then she walked down the east hall on her very first Sunday, looked at the laminated name cards on the doors, and saw my name typed out in big black letters. Margaret Barlow. Same county. Same woman from her father’s endless, bitter kitchen table stories.
The way she said stories told me Earl had not told them like a man who knew he was wrong. He told them like a martyr who had been wronged by a busybody shopgirl.
I waited for her to yell. I waited for her to spit out some ugly accusation or knock my water pitcher onto the linoleum because children will carry a parent’s grudges long after the parent is in the ground and forgotten.
Instead, Nora reached slowly into the deep pocket of her cardigan.
She didn’t get to pull anything out because Tammy Flores, the afternoon nurse, pushed my door wide open with her hip while carrying a small paper cup full of yellow and blue pills. Nora snatched her hand back out of her pocket so fast she nearly tipped over her chair.
Tammy said visiting hours were ending early on our side of the building because a stomach bug had broken out in the west wing. Nora stood up so quickly her knee caught the edge of the little table, knocking her Bible onto the floor with a heavy thud.
As the book hit the wax, a single faded photograph slipped out from between the pages and drifted face-up near my tennis-ball walker.
I looked down and saw a young woman sitting on weathered porch steps, holding a crying baby in a flannel blanket, with one side of her face swollen purple and yellow from temple to jaw.
Nora dropped to her knees with a sharp groan, snatched the photograph off the floor before I could reach for it, and shoved it back into her purse.
She didn’t say goodbye. She just walked out of the room so fast her cardigan tails flew out behind her.
At 4:17 that afternoon, Tammy came back into my room alone. She set a sealed manila envelope beside my plastic water cup without saying a word.
Before I could ask what it was, the telephone at the nurses’ station started ringing with that sharp, brassy double-ring that always meant something was broken. Tammy turned the color of skim milk before she even reached my doorway, her eyes wide behind her wire-rimmed glasses.
She stopped by my bed and said, “Mrs. Barlow, Nora Whitcomb’s daughter is on the line, and she says you need to open that letter before her mother comes back.”
I picked up the manila envelope with fingers that felt thick and clumsy like sausages. My name was written across the front in neat, careful blue ink that didn’t look anything like Earl’s heavy block letters. I tore the paper flap open, pulled out three folded sheets of lined notebook paper covered in fading handwriting, and unfolded the top sheet.
It wasn’t Earl’s handwriting at all. It was Lottie Mae’s.
The letter started right in the middle of a sentence dated November 1974, written while Earl was sitting in the county jail waiting for the circuit judge to hand down the sentence I had made possible. Lottie Mae wrote that she had found the papers hidden under the floorboards in the pantry after the sheriff took him away, along with a spare set of house keys and three hundred dollars in cash he had set aside to skip town for Tennessee. She wrote that without my name on the police report, the sheriff wouldn’t have looked twice at a bruised woman behind a feed store, and she would have packed those three kids into that station wagon and gone wherever Earl told her to go next.
And then down at the bottom of the third page, written in a different, newer hand that belonged to Nora herself, were three short sentences.
My mother kept this letter in her Bible until the day she died in hospice last winter. She told me to find you when I was ready. Thank you for telling the truth when nobody else in Carter County had the stomach for it.
