His name was Theodore Pruitt, and he was eighty eight years old. He sat at the kitchen table of my grandmother with his gray felt hat on his knee and told me the story in a soft, careful voice, the way you handle a cup you are afraid to chip. In the spring of 1951 he married Lula Belle in the church on the photograph. Three weeks later the Army sent him to Korea. Eight months after that, a telegram arrived saying he was missing. For two years she waited. She wore black to church. Her mother told her to stop.
In 1953 she married my grandfather, Alonzo Odom, a good man and a hard worker who loved her honestly. Then in 1955, Theodore came home. He had been held in a camp, then in a hospital, and nobody had ever sent word to the right address. He stood on the sidewalk across from her porch and watched her hang laundry. She was carrying my mother in her belly. He did not cross the street. He never told her he had seen her. He took the train to Atlanta and worked for the railroad for forty years.
“I came back to Savannah in 2002,” he said, “when I retired and my knees went. I walked down Jones Street one morning and saw her put out a saucer of milk. She looked up at the window and saw me, Beverly. She did not say a word. She just nodded. And the next morning, there was another saucer.” He smiled at the table. “She told me once that a gray cat only comes when nobody is looking. That is how we kept it. Twenty two years of mornings, and we never spoke more than a hundred words.”
A saucer of milk on a back step gave one granddaughter the morning to bring her family back to the truth in Savannah.
I gave my terms the way my grandmother would have. “Mr. Pruitt, you are going to stay for breakfast, and then we are going to the lawyer on Bull Street together. Nobody is going to call you a con artist in this family again.” He said he did not want a penny. I told him it was not up to him, because Lula Belle had written it down, and she had visited that lawyer four times. He looked at the photograph on the table, and his chin trembled, and he nodded.
He told me why it had stayed a secret. Alonzo was a proud man, and he never knew. Lula Belle was afraid of what the church ladies would say, and what it would do to my mother, and afraid most of all that Alonzo would feel second in his own house. “She kept the one thing she could,” Theodore said. “A saucer of milk.” I put my hand over his, and mine was shaking more than his. I had spent forty years believing I knew everything about the woman who raised me. She had been carrying a whole second life on her back.
The back gate banged open. My Uncle Clarence came across the yard with his wife behind him, red in the face. “I knew it!” he shouted. “Some old man in a hat! Beverly, get away from him!” He grabbed Theodore by the lapel of his gray cardigan and pulled him up from the chair. Before he could do worse, our neighbor, a retired Chatham County deputy named Mr. Gaines, who had been watering his ferns, stepped through the door and took Clarence firmly by the wrist. “Sit down, Clarence,” he said. “Or I will show you how a man gets arrested in Georgia.”
The lawyer arrived at ten with the letter in the handwriting of my grandmother, the one he had kept in his safe. It said in plain words who Theodore was, and why she had made the arrangement, and that Clarence was to be given a hundred dollars and a kiss on the cheek if he made trouble. Even Delores laughed, though she tried to hide it behind her hand. My uncle sat in the corner chair for an hour and stared at the floor. At the end he stood, crossed the room, and offered Theodore his hand. “She would have been furious at me,” he said. “She was right about you.”
The money consequences were gentle. Theodore took forty thousand dollars to put a new roof on the little potting shed, because he said he had been sitting under the old one for twenty two years. The house stayed with Clarence and my mother, as the will said. The rest of the three hundred seventy five thousand went into a fund, and I added my own money to it. Mr. Pruitt still comes at 8:40 every morning. Now he knocks on the back door, and I pour the coffee, and we do not need to say much.
In the name of Lula Belle, who passed in August, I started the Lula Belle Odom Fund. It pays for sewing machines, fabric and lessons for women and girls in Chatham, Bryan and Effingham counties. In the first year we put forty one machines into homes and church basements. One woman in Pooler, sixty eight years old, had never been taught to sew. She hemmed her first pair of curtains in an afternoon, called me up to read me the whole story, and cried when she got to the part about the lace.
Last Sunday, a tour group stopped at the gate on Jones Street, and the guide told them the old woman who lived here fed a ghost cat for twenty two years. Theodore was in the garden, hat on, trimming the roses. I leaned over the fence and told the guide the real story. It took five minutes. When I finished, half the group was crying, and the other half was taking photographs of the saucer on the back step. Theodore tipped his gray hat to them, and winked at me, and went on trimming.