I opened it anyway. And when I saw what Grandma Ruth had been sitting on top of since before Mama was born, I set the putty knife down and sat straight down on her kitchen floor, because it was schoolbooks.
Not children’s schoolbooks. Adult primers. The gray kind the state used to print, big type, lined pages in the back. Forty-one of them stacked in that stool with a name written on the inside cover of every one.
Women’s names. Married names, most of them, and I knew a good third of them, and two of them are still living out on the Ridge Road.
My grandmother taught grown women in this county to read at her kitchen table from 1958 until 1974.
Sixteen years. One at a time, Tuesday and Thursday afternoons, while the men were in the field and the children were at school. She never took a nickel and never told a living soul, including her own daughters.
She sealed that stool because those forty-one names were in it.
Loose in the bottom, under the books, was a single sheet in her hand, folded in four.
If somebody has got this open, the last of them is likely gone and so am I. Do not go reading these names out at church. Every one of these women sat in my kitchen and cried the first afternoon because she was ashamed, and I told each one that not a soul would ever know, and I meant that to hold after I am dead too.
My sister was still in the doorway. She read it over my shoulder and then went and sat in the car for a while.
I want to say plainly what I did, because people have asked and some have not liked the answer.
I read the forty-one names one time, sitting on that floor. Then I put the books back in the stool and closed the lid.
I did not write them down. I have not repeated one of them, not to my mother, not to my sister, not in this.
I did go see Verna Mott, ninety-six, in the home out at Dawson, because her book was the fourth one down and she is the only one I could still ask. I did not tell her what I found. I asked her about my grandmother.
She told me she came to Ruth’s kitchen in the fall of 1961 at twenty-eight years old, married with three babies, and could not read the label on a bottle of medicine.
Then she picked the newspaper up off her tray table and read me the front page out loud, slow and correct, and she did not stop until she had read the whole thing.
The stool is in my kitchen now. Same corner, by my stove. The books are in it and the lid is shut and my children know they are not to open it.
Ask that woman about the old days and she would hand you a biscuit and change the subject. She had forty-one reasons for that and every one of them had a name on it, and she sat on all of them for fifty years so nobody would ever have to be embarrassed in front of this town.