In the spring of 1920, I traveled to Peru, Indiana, to stand in front of a life I had spent forty years trying to find. I was sixty-five years old. The woman who answered the door was forty-one, with gray eyes I had never imagined, and she already knew who I was before I finished saying it. Her mother had told her at fourteen, sitting in the parlor of a farmhouse in Wabash County, that she had been given by a young woman on a train.
She had wondered, she said, whether that woman was still living. I was standing in her kitchen. That was not a reunion. It was something else entirely, and I have spent the eighteen years since then trying to name it.
The beginning of the account was in Westmoreland County, Pennsylvania, in 1878. I was twenty-two, pregnant, and not married. The father, Avery Poth, left when leaving was easier than staying, and by the time my condition could no longer be hidden, he was gone. My family was Presbyterian and farming and not prosperous.
My father was not a cruel man, but he understood property and standing, and he understood what I had done to both. My mother pressed three small copper buttons from her own collar into my hand at the gate when I left in September, and that was the last she gave me. I went to Pittsburgh, found a boarding house, and worked in a laundry, sleeping the child in a drawer lined with flannel because I could not afford a cradle. The woman who ran the house had seen my situation before and expected a specific outcome.
I paid my rent on time. That was what I had to offer. By the winter, I had turned over the arithmetic of a woman without money, without family, without options. There were only honest choices, and none of them let me keep the child.
I wrote to a woman in Columbus who placed children quietly, and I boarded a train on February 14, 1879, with the child four months old and the address in my coat pocket. Ruth Dillard was in the third car, in a window seat, wearing black. She had recently buried her sister and was going home to a house with no one in it but her husband. People say things on trains they would not say at home, and somewhere around the second hour out of Pittsburgh, she told me they had tried for children for twelve years and did not think it would happen now.
I told her what I was going to Columbus to do. She asked about the child’s age. She did not reach for the baby, and I was grateful for that. I asked about her house.
A farm outside Canton in Hardin County, a wood frame house her husband had built, sound walls and a good root cellar. She said her husband was even tempered, without the emphasis of someone trying to convince me. That was how I believed it. I did not decide all at once.
It was not dramatic. But somewhere in that second hour I understood what I was going to do, and that the train was moving and the hour would pass regardless of what I decided inside it. I asked if she wanted to hold the child. She said yes.
The look on her face was the face of someone receiving something they had stopped expecting. She said she would need to speak to her husband. We talked for another hour, and by the end we had said what needed to be said. I gave her the address of the boarding house in Pittsburgh.
She gave me her husband’s name and their township. Before the train reached Columbus, I undid the top button of my collar, the small copper one with the flower, broke the thread, and put it inside the blanket near the child’s feet where it would stay warm. I do not know why I chose that one. It was the one my fingers found.
I got off the train in Columbus. Ruth Dillard did not. I sat on the platform for a long time and watched until I could not see the train anymore. The years immediately after were hard, but I am not sure they were the hardest.
I worked in domestic service in Columbus for seven months, then moved to Youngstown where a cold cousin of my mother’s helped me find decent work. I wrote to the Columbus address, asking if the woman there had any way to contact families in Hardin County. She wrote back that she did not handle placements that way. I wrote to the boarding house in Pittsburgh asking if Ruth Dillard had ever written.
She had not. I wrote twice more over the next year. Nothing. I began looking for the child in 1881.
I met Calvin Tillett that year at a church social. He was thirty, worked in the foundry, and had a square patient face. He asked me to walk with him three weeks in a row before I agreed. He was decent, and I had learned by then that decency was not a small thing.
I told him I had left Pennsylvania after a falling out with my family and did not wish to explain further. He accepted this. We married in the spring of 1882. The search was not sustained or dramatic.
It was a thing I picked up and put down for forty years, interrupted by children and housework and Calvin’s wages going thin in the bad years. I wrote letters to county clerks, to churches, to charitable organizations, always careful in what I said, always telling different stories to different offices. Most produced nothing. In 1888, a Methodist minister in Kenton remembered the Dillard family and believed they had moved to Indiana.
That was seven years of searching for that single thread. I wrote to county clerks across northern Indiana, then southern, then the middle counties. Nothing. By 1904, the belief had thinned.
I had three children by then, Robbie, Vera, and Harold. I raised the children I kept and I kept looking for the child I gave away. These were not contradictions. They were just the shape my life had.
In 1908, I wrote to a woman in Indianapolis who ran a private inquiry service. She found an Elias Dillard, deceased 1902 in Wabash County, Indiana, his wife Ruth, and one daughter listed in county records as Cora. I had not known the name. Cora married in 1902 at twenty-three, which aligned with 1878 or 1879, to a school teacher named Thomas Finchley.
By 1910 she was living in Peru, Indiana, with two children, a boy and a girl. I had grandchildren I had never seen. I did not write to her then. I kept the address in the back of my writing desk and I looked at it sometimes, and I was old enough to know that the impulse to confess is not always the same as the right to do so.
I kept the paper and I kept not writing, and the years passed, and Calvin died, and I was sixty-five and alone, and I understood I was running out of reasons to wait. I went to Peru in April of 1920. The house was a frame house painted white, with a vegetable garden coming up on one side and children’s things in the yard. I knocked.
She opened the door in a kitchen apron. I told her who I was, that I had known her mother in 1879 and had something to tell her that I had been meaning to tell her for a long time. She did not look surprised. That was the first thing I understood about what I was going to find.
She invited me in and put the kettle on. When I had finished, she said, “My mother told me. ” Not everything, but the essential part, that a young woman on a train could not keep her child and had given the child to her. Ruth Dillard had told her plainly when she was fourteen, and had told her the young woman’s name was Agnes, and that she was from Pennsylvania.
She had thought about this her whole life. She had wondered sometimes whether Agnes was still living. I had spent forty years imagining what I would find, and I had imagined many things. I had not imagined a woman who already knew the story, and who had been carrying it from the other end.
I asked about the button. She said her mother had kept a small button in a tin on the mantel for years. She had thought it was a button from her mother’s own coat. When Ruth Dillard died in 1914, the tin was not found in the cleared house.
But it had been kept for thirty-five years on the mantel of the Wabash farmhouse. She knew what it was. She must have. She had watched me pull it free on the train.
I stayed two hours. We talked about her children, about her husband Thomas who taught mathematics, about the Wabash farm, about Ruth Dillard, who she described as a woman of few words and consistent warmth, a woman who had been a good mother to her. I did not begrudge Ruth Dillard that. She had been a good mother to my daughter, and I had not treated that as a small thing, even in the years when I did not know what I would find.
What I did not know how to account for was the specific feeling of sitting at that kitchen table and hearing about a life already fully formed. It was not a tragedy. It was not a reunion. It was a life entirely itself, shaped by a train I had stepped off in 1879, and by Ruth Dillard and Elias Dillard and Thomas Finchley, shaped by all of these things without me.
Near the end she said, “I’ve always thought my mother was brave for what she did on the train. ” She said she had thought about me, too. “Less often,” she said. “But sometimes.
” She said I was welcome to write if I chose. We shook hands at the door. I walked back to the station in the April sun and sat on the platform and waited for the train east. I have not written to her.
It has been eighteen years. I have thought about the letter many times, and I have not decided whether I will send it before I die. What I know is that she knew about the train, that Ruth Dillard was good to her, that the button was kept for thirty-five years, and that the giving had not broken her. She had been received and raised and told the truth at fourteen, and had made a life.
The amount of space I occupied in that life was small, and that was what was right. I gave a child away in 1879 because the choices available to a woman in my situation were not plentiful. I do not say this to excuse it. The constraint was real, and the choice was mine, and both are true at the same time, and the holding of both has been the work of sixty years.
What I found in 1920 was that the searching had not been for reunion or resolution. It had been to know that the giving had not broken her. It had not.
And I walked back to the train station in the April sun, and I have been living inside what I found ever since.