Chapter 12 of 15Her Mother's Name

Friday's board vote would decide whether Marianne Abbott kept her job, and Thursday was the last full day she had to earn it. Reverend Ben Wilkins stood in the vestry doorway of Harmony Creek Community Church with a ring of keys and the look of a man who had already been asked twice to change his mind.

"Rules first," he said. "One volume at a time, and nothing leaves this room."

"Understood," Marianne said.

"White gloves. I'll bring them."

Jamal Washington leaned his cane against the table. "Reverend, I taught Sunday school in this building. I know how to treat a book."

"Then you know why I'm nervous." Wilkins unlocked the cabinet and stepped back toward the hall. "I'll be in my study. If Owen Pritchard asks, I was never here."

The first volume came out with its spine mended in linen tape, and Marianne laid it flat on the table, and the paper was cold to her fingertips even through the gloves. Jamal turned pages with one gloved finger while she read over his shoulder, and the only sounds were the radiator knocking and the slow rustle of old handwriting.

"Start with the baptismals," he said. "Land comes later. A family shows up in the church book first."

"Coleman." She stopped on the opening page. "Right here."

"Read it out."

"Received into the congregation, the Coleman household." She turned the page. "Frye."

"Keep going."

By the third volume the light through the high window had moved from gray to something like gold, Marianne's neck ached, and her fingertips were cold even through the cotton gloves Wilkins had handed her. She had written fourteen surnames on her legal pad and struck through two of them.

Jamal noticed the crossings. "You gave up on the Bledsoes?"

"I didn't give up. I checked again." She tapped the page. "Your list has a Bledsoe. So does the index in the back of this volume. But the entry itself says Blakeslee, and the family came out of Rockbridge."

"Index error."

"Somebody typed the index up wrong years ago, and every researcher since has copied the mistake forward without ever walking back to the page itself." She drew a line through the name. "So that's one theory gone. There was a Westwood in here too, an infant baptized, and I chased it around for most of an hour before I found the father's occupation. Drover. Out of Augusta County. Not our Westwood."

"So Thaddeus didn't have people here first."

"No. He walked into a settlement that was already running." Marianne said it quietly, and then neither of them said anything for a while, because there is a difference between a story a man carries in his memory and the same story written down by a clerk.

At noon Wilkins came back with a tray: ham biscuits wrapped in a dish towel, a thermos of coffee he'd picked up at the Sheetz out on the bypass, and a foil bowl of Brunswick stew from the church freezer that he set on the corner of the table next to her pad.

"Somebody's funeral," he said. "It keeps turning up. Did you find anything?"

"We found the community," Jamal said. "We haven't found the marriage yet."

Wilkins glanced at the open volume. "There are more in the cabinet. The last one's in the worst shape."

"Then we'll be careful with it," Marianne said.

Her phone buzzed against the table leg. Sofia Navarro, and Marianne took it standing at the window with her voice kept low.

"Tell me you have something," Sofia said.

"I have names. Names in a church record that shouldn't be there if the official history is right."

"That is not what the board asked for."

"I know what the board asked for."

"Okay, so the agenda went out last night, and Owen added a line about the deed's provenance." Sofia didn't say anything for a second. "Have paper in my hands by tomorrow morning, Marianne. I can't defend a photocopy of a photocopy."

"I'll have it."

The last volume had given up its binding years ago. The pages lay in the folder loose and out of order, so Marianne sorted them by the dates penciled in the upper corners while Jamal read the surnames aloud and she checked each one against the list on her pad.

"Coleman, then Frye, then Blakeslee, forgive me, then Hawkins and the Turners, one after another down the column."

"Nothing new."

"Wait." Marianne had stopped on a page foxed brown along one edge, and she went back to the top of the entry and started over. "Wait."

"Wait what?"

"Marriage. 1871." She put her finger under the line and did not take it away.

Jamal set his hat on the table. "Read the rest of it."

"Thaddeus Westwood, of this county, to Sarah Sparrow, of this county. Witnesses, names I don't know." Her finger moved down the page. "And here. Bride's mother."

"Say it."

"Eliza Sparrow, Herbalist."

Jamal sat down slowly and took his hat off the table again and held it in both hands. "Say it once more."

"Eliza Sparrow, Herbalist."

"That's her name in a church book. In a column somebody else filled in." He looked up at the ceiling, then at her. "My grandmother told me that story when I was a boy, and I have never once been able to hand anybody a piece of paper."

Marianne looked at the page again, at the ink pressed into the paper so hard it had dented the reverse side, at the clerk's cramped letters, at the small unremarkable column where a stranger had written down the bride's mother and not the bride's father.

"The mother is named," she said. "Not the father."

"Because the mother was the one who mattered."

Marianne propped the loose sheet against the edge of the table and photographed it three ways, one close, one whole, and one with her own pad and the church's date line showing in the corner, so that nobody could later claim the picture had come from somewhere else. Then she found Wilkins in his study, standing over a stack of bulletins.

He looked at the photograph, then at the original, then back at the photograph, and he read the line under his breath and did not say anything at all for a while.

"You understand what this does," he said finally.

"I do."

"Owen sits on the finance committee. He wrote the check for the roof."

"I know. I'm not asking you to say a word tomorrow. I'm asking you to remember that you saw it."

Wilkins handed the phone back. "I'll remember."

Outside, the afternoon had gone flat and gray, and frost still held in the shadow along the north wall where the sun never reached it. Jamal pulled his hat down and leaned on the cane.

"One page," he said. "Out of a century of paper. You think a page will hold up against a man like Owen Pritchard?"

Marianne looked at the picture on her phone one more time: a bride's first name, a bride's family name, and under it, in a clerk's small hand, a mother called an herbalist. She put the phone in her coat pocket and closed her fingers around it.

"Tomorrow it buys us the right to ask for more," she said. "Friday, that's all we need."