The Mother Book

Chapter 1: The Breathing

Lettie Odom learned to read a woman's labour before she learned to read a book.

At twelve years old, standing in the corner of Nola Sizemore's cabin with her grandmother's hand pressing her shoulder to keep her still, she had watched the woman on the bed and listened. Nola's breaths came in long, shuddering draws that hitched at the top, and Delsie Odom had leaned close to Lettie's ear and whispered, "Hear how she catches? That baby's turned proper. Won't be long now."

It hadn't been long. Twenty minutes later, a boy slid into Delsie's waiting hands, slick and furious and alive.

That was seven years ago. Since then, Lettie had attended more than a hundred births across the ridges and hollows of Laurel Branch, North Carolina, first as her grandmother's shadow, then as her hands, and finally as her voice when Delsie's instructions needed repeating to a family too frightened to hear them the first time.

She knew how to judge progress by the way a woman breathed. Short, panting breaths near the top of the chest meant early labour, and there was time. Deep, groaning pulls from the belly meant the child was close. A sudden silence—a held breath that stretched too long—meant something had changed, and Lettie needed to move.

She knew which roots settled a stomach. Ginger scraped thin and steeped in hot water. Wild yam bark for the cramps that came weeks before a baby was due. Raspberry leaf tea, brewed strong and offered warm, to ready the womb in the final month.

She knew which leaves drew out fever. Boneset, bitter as regret, boiled until the water turned the colour of weak tea. Willow bark stripped from the trees along Coldwater Creek, where the current ran fast enough to keep the bark clean.

She knew how to turn a frightened mother's attention away from pain without ever promising the pain would stop. She had learned this not from any remedy book but from watching Delsie, who could fill a room with her voice the way a lantern filled it with light—steady, warm, impossible to ignore.

"Tell me about your garden," Delsie would say to a woman whose screams had gone raw. "Tell me what you planted this year. Did those pole beans come up?"

And the woman would answer, sometimes through gritted teeth, sometimes through tears, but she would answer, because Delsie asked as though the answer mattered, and in that small turning of attention, the next contraction would arrive and pass without the woman bracing against it like a wall.

Births rarely waited for daylight, good weather, sober husbands, or a doctor's permission.

Lettie had delivered babies in thunderstorms with rain blowing sideways through gaps in cabin walls. She had delivered babies while a husband sat drunk on the porch singing hymns he only half remembered. She had delivered a baby in the back of a wagon because the mother's water broke on the road to church and there was no time to turn around.

She was nineteen years old.

She was the third generation of Odom granny women to serve the scattered families of Laurel Branch and the surrounding ridges, and the first two generations were recorded in a thick leather ledger the family called the Mother Book.

The book sat on the shelf above Delsie's bed, between a tin of camphor salve and a Bible whose spine had cracked from use. It was bound in cowhide that had darkened over the decades from honey-brown to the colour of strong coffee. The pages were heavy, handmade stock, and they smelled of pressed flowers, dried herbs, and the faintest trace of blood that no amount of airing could remove.

Fifty years of births lived in that book.

Names and dates, written in two different hands—Delsie's mother, Parthenia, had begun the record, and Delsie had continued it. The entries were precise. The mother's name. The father's name, if known. The date and hour of delivery. The position of the child. The length of labour. Any complications. Any remedies used. The outcome.

But the Mother Book contained more than medical facts.

A blue thread stitched beside a name meant the child came early.

A pressed violet, its petals flattened to translucence between the pages, marked a mother who died.

A single line drawn beneath the father's name meant Delsie did not believe it.

There were other codes. A small cross in the margin meant the family could not pay and Delsie had not asked. A circle meant the mother was younger than sixteen. A dash after the entry, standing alone like a breath held and never released, meant something had happened that Delsie would not write down but would not forget.

The Mother Book was more than a medical record. It was the private history of Laurel Branch, written by women whose lives never reached courthouse ledgers or newspaper columns. It recorded the truths that families told only in the dark, sacred hour of labour, when a woman's body demanded honesty even if her circumstances did not.

Lettie had grown up knowing the book existed. She had watched Delsie write in it after every birth, the old woman's hand moving across the page with the careful deliberation of someone who understood that what she recorded might be the only proof a life had begun.

But there was one entry Lettie had never been allowed to see.

Her own.

Lettie's mother, May Odom, had died when Lettie was born. That was the story. That was all Delsie would say. May had been twenty-one years old. The labour had been difficult. May had not survived it. Delsie had raised Lettie herself, and the subject was closed.

The only relic Lettie possessed of her mother was a torn piece of paper—a fragment of the page recording her birth, ripped from the Mother Book before Lettie was old enough to remember seeing it whole. She had found it pressed inside her mother's Bible when she was fourteen, a scrap no bigger than her palm, with Delsie's handwriting on one side and a dark stain on the other that might have been ink or might have been blood.

The fragment read:

*Girl, healthy, 6 lbs by hand. Mother—*

The rest was gone.

Lettie had asked Delsie about it exactly once.

Delsie had taken the fragment, looked at it for a long time, and handed it back.

"Some pages tear," she said. "That's all."

It was not all. Lettie knew it was not all. But she had learned, in the way that children of grief learn, that some doors stayed shut not because they were locked but because the person holding them closed would break if they opened.

So Lettie kept the fragment inside her own copy of the Bible, and she did not ask again.

On the morning of September the third, 1889, the rhythms of Laurel Branch were the same as they had been for as long as Lettie could remember.

The sun came up over Painter Knob and lit the eastern faces of the ridges in bands of gold and green. Mist lay in the hollows like poured milk. The air smelled of wood smoke, damp earth, and the first faint sweetness of apples beginning to ripen in the orchard behind the Pless house.

Delsie was already awake when Lettie came downstairs. The old woman sat at the kitchen table with a cup of sassafras tea, her white hair braided and pinned, her eyes sharp as a hawk's. She was sixty-eight years old, and her hands—the hands that had caught more than a thousand babies—were still steady.

"Pless boy's got the croup," Delsie said without looking up. "Eula sent word last night."

Eula Pless was the preacher's wife, and she was the closest thing Laurel Branch had to a telegraph office. She organised the quilting circle, remembered every household illness within twenty miles, and could move news across the ridges without appearing to gossip. She accomplished this by framing every piece of information as a prayer request.

"We should pray for the Henley family," she would say at quilting, "because their cow went dry and their oldest boy has been seen in Madden Crossroads with that Vickers girl, and you know her mother."

By the time the quilting circle disbanded, every woman on the ridge knew about the cow, the boy, and the Vickers girl, and Eula had technically only asked for prayer.

"I'll take him some horehound syrup," Lettie said, reaching for her shawl.

"Take the black cohosh too. Eula's been having those headaches again, and she won't ask."

Lettie gathered the remedies from the shelves that lined the back wall of the kitchen—shelves her grandfather had built forty years ago to hold Delsie's growing collection of dried herbs, tinctures, salves, and roots. The shelves were labelled in Delsie's hand, each jar and bundle marked with a name and a date of gathering. Boneset. Goldenseal. Bloodroot. Slippery elm. Black cohosh. Blue cohosh. Pennyroyal, kept on the highest shelf, out of casual reach, because it was powerful and dangerous and not to be used without thought.

The Odom house sat on a piece of land that had been in the family since before the war. It was not large—four rooms downstairs, two up—but it was solid, built of chestnut logs that had darkened with age to the colour of iron. The porch faced east, toward the sunrise and the trail that wound down to Coldwater Creek. Behind the house, the mountain rose steeply through laurel thickets and hemlock groves to the bald summit of Odom Knob, which the family had named not out of vanity but because no one else had bothered to climb it.

Lettie walked down the trail toward the Pless house with her satchel over her shoulder, the same leather satchel Delsie had carried for thirty years. It was scuffed and stained and smelled of herbs and lanolin, and it contained everything a granny woman needed: clean cloth, a sharp knife, twine for tying the cord, a small bottle of whiskey for sterilising, packets of dried herbs, a tin of salve, and a pair of scissors that Delsie sharpened every Sunday evening on a whetstone she kept beside the back door.

The trail crossed Coldwater Creek on a log bridge that Lettie's grandfather had laid when Delsie was a young bride. The creek ran clear and cold over a bed of round stones, and Lettie paused on the bridge to listen to it, the way she always did. Water had a voice if you knew how to hear it. Fast water over stones sounded like laughter. Slow water in deep pools sounded like breathing. And the silence between—the pause where the current gathered before dropping over a ledge—sounded like the moment before a baby cried.

She was thinking about water and breathing and babies when she came around the bend in the trail and saw Junie Blevins sitting on a rock beside the path, crying.

Junie was sixteen, fair-haired, and small-boned in a way that made her look younger than she was. She was Lettie's closest friend, though the three years between them sometimes felt like ten. Junie still believed that promises were kept and that love was enough to build a house on, and Lettie, who had spent her adolescence watching women in labour and listening to the things they said when pain stripped away pretence, knew better.

"Junie." Lettie sat down beside her. "What's wrong?"

Junie wiped her face with the back of her hand and looked at Lettie with eyes that were red and swollen and terrified.

"I'm caught," she whispered.

Lettie understood immediately. In Laurel Branch, "caught" had only one meaning when a girl said it with that particular expression.

"How far along?"

"Three months. Maybe more. I've been sick every morning since July."

"Who?"

Junie looked away. "Will Buckner."

Lettie closed her eyes.

Will Buckner was twenty years old, handsome in a careless way, and the son of Hardin Buckner, who owned half the county's timber rights and had the kind of money that insulated a family from consequences the way a good roof insulated a house from rain.

"Has he said anything?"

"He says he'll marry me." Junie's voice was small but fierce. "He promised, Lettie. He got down on his knees in the meadow behind the church and he promised."

"And his father?"

Junie's silence was answer enough.

Hardin Buckner had promised nothing. Hardin Buckner had built his timber empire by knowing exactly what a promise was worth and never spending more than he had to.

"Does your father know?" Lettie asked.

"No." The word came out sharp, edged with fear. "And he can't. Not yet. Not until Will talks to his daddy. Will says he just needs time."

Lettie looked at her friend—this girl who believed that a boy's knees in the meadow grass meant more than his father's silence—and felt the weight of everything she could not say.

"I'll help you," Lettie said instead. "Whatever happens, I'll help you."

Junie leaned against her shoulder, and Lettie held her, and the creek went on talking to itself below them, and the morning light moved slowly down the ridge.