I reached in and lifted out what was there. The second I saw what my grandmother had hidden in that bin all along, I had to sit down, because it was a leather roll, and when I untied it there were instruments inside.
Scissors. Clamps. A brass scale of the kind you hang a basket from. And under the roll, wrapped in waxed paper and dry as a bone, a book with a rubber band around it that broke when I touched it.
Four hundred and eleven births.
Date, time, the mother’s name, the weight off that brass scale, and in the last column the word she used for whether it went all right, which is nearly always the same word and eleven times is not.
My grandmother caught babies in Wilkes County from 1948 until 1979.
She was not a nurse. She learned from the woman who taught her, who learned from the woman before that. The state quit issuing permits to lay midwives in the fifties, and by 1962 what she was doing was against the law outright.
She kept doing it seventeen more years, because the county hospital was forty minutes on a good road and there were roads out there that were not good, and there were families who could not have gone through those doors anyway.
On the front page, in her hand:
This book stays under the flour. If they ever come at me they will want names, and the names in here belong to women who did nothing but have a baby in their own bed. I will take whatever they want to give me. I am not handing them one line of this. If I am gone and you have found it, the women are old by now and it is their business and not mine what happens to it.
My mother is in that book. So is my aunt and two of my cousins, and my mother did not know until I called her from that pantry floor.
I did what she said. I took it to the women.
Of the four hundred and eleven we have found seventy-nine still living, and each got a photocopy of their own line and nothing else.
Fifty-one signed a release. That was their choice, one at a time, and it took two years and a woman at the historical society who did most of the work and would not take gas money.
The archive has fifty-one lines and one page in my grandmother’s handwriting. The other three hundred and sixty are in a bank box and will stay there.
Merleen Absher is eighty-one and lives in North Wilkesboro. Line 288, six pounds four ounces, twenty past three in the morning.
She put her finger on it and said, well, somebody wrote me down.
Her birth was never registered with the state. There are nine like her that we know of, and four have used that book to get a delayed certificate, which takes a lawyer and a year and is worth it.
The bin is in my kitchen. Flour in it, false floor back in, nothing under there.
She scooped out of that thing every morning of my childhood, standing on four hundred and eleven babies, and never said one word about it to anybody in this family.