I worked it out and carried it to the kitchen light and unwrapped the oilcloth, and I had to sit down on the floor, because it was a ledger. A big cloth-bound book, swelled and soft with age, and every page of it was full of names and dates in a fine old hand.
It was a birth record. Baby after baby, going back to the nineteen thirties. Date, weight, the mother by name, the father where there was one, and a little note beside each. Easy birth. Long night, mother and child both fine. Breech, but the Lord was good. Hundreds of them. Thousands, maybe, across sixty years. The old woman I bought that icebox from, the one out on the lake with no children of her own, the one whose Jadeite dishes the whole town had picked through, had been the midwife. She had caught nearly every baby born on this end of the peninsula for two generations, and kept the record of every single one, and hid it in the coldest, safest, most secret spot she had.
I turned the pages a long time. And then I got to nineteen sixty-one, and I found my own name. My own birth, in her hand. Six pounds, four ounces. A hard cold February night. Mother tired but strong, baby loud. She caught me. The woman I had stood over feeling like a vulture, picking through her dishes for forty dollars, had been the very first pair of hands that ever held me, and I never even knew her name.
These are all my children, every one. I never had my own, so the Lord gave me everybody. Whoever finds this, these are your people. Give them back their beginnings. She had written that on the first page, and I had missed it in the shock of all the rest.
I sat on that kitchen floor and wept, for her and for me and for a whole town full of people who did not know their own first moment was written down in a dead woman fine hand out on the lake.
So I did what she asked. I took that ledger to the county historical society and the little museum in town, and we let it be known, quiet, that the old midwife book had turned up. And people have been coming ever since. Grown men and women, old themselves now, finding the line where they came into the world. Finding their mothers as young frightened girls having their first. Finding babies that were their own big brothers and sisters, gone before they were born, that nobody had ever spoken of. A whole community handed back the record of where it started.
I restored that icebox and it is a beauty, quartersawn oak, and I could sell it tomorrow for real money. But I am not going to. It sits in my front room with a little card on it that tells whose it was and what she did. That woman brought half this town into the light with her own two hands, and asked for nothing, and got forgotten the second she was gone. Not anymore. She caught me on a cold night in sixty-one. The least I can do is make sure this town remembers her name. It was Miss Eleanor. Say it sometime.