Nora came to the church social in June of 1889 carrying a plate of food to the older women near the side door, and Harlan Dillard turned to watch her cross the room. He was 28, newly arrived from Ohio, with a little money and enough sense to buy 40 acres east of us on the road toward the mill town. He did not drink, not then, and he went to the Methodist church every Sunday and sat in the third row and sang the hymns. I looked at his face while he watched her, and something moved in me I could not name.
Not alarm, quite. Something quieter. The way a horse will sometimes stop on a familiar road and look toward the brush without appearing to see anything. By August they were keeping company.
He had asked Fletcher’s permission, which was still the form of things then, and Fletcher had talked to me about it. I said I did not know the man well enough and wished we had more time. Fletcher said I would have a chance to know him, and I did. But by the time I knew him well enough, I could not make Nora see what I knew.
I was born in the spring of 1848 in a county in Indiana that was still mostly timber when my father’s people came to it. My father broke sod and raised corn and hogs, and by the time I was old enough to notice such things, we had a frame house with two rooms upstairs and a kitchen that did not double as a sleeping room. My mother was a Methodist and serious about it, a woman who had learned early that feelings, if you let them loose at the wrong moment, could cause more trouble than they were worth. I married Fletcher Cullum in the spring of 1868.
I was 20. He was 24 and had 40 acres of his own, a start his father had given him when the old man’s health turned. Fletcher was not a man who talked much, but he was steady, and steady mattered more to me at 20 than it might have to some. I had grown up watching my father’s temper blow through the house like weather, and I had decided before I was fully grown that I did not want that.
We suited each other. By 1872 we had two children, Raymond, who was 3, and Nora, who had come in January of that year. She was a particular child from the beginning. Not difficult, though she was sometimes.
She had a quality to her that was hard to name, a kind of readiness, slightly ahead of the world, watching for what came next. By the time she was eight or nine, she was the child I talked to. Raymond was a good boy and grew into a good man, but Nora was the one who sat with me while I sewed and asked the kind of questions that made me stop and think before I answered. Whether the family down the road had enough to eat.
Whether I had ever wanted something other than what I had. That last one I did not answer the first time she asked it. I said something about being grateful for what the Lord had provided, which is the kind of answer you give a child when you do not want to give them the real one. By the time she was 16, she could cook a full meal without help and keep the younger ones from killing each other and still find time to read whatever she could get her hands on.
She read things I’d never heard of and told me about them in her plain, exact way, not showing off. Just sharing what she had found the way you might show somebody a good apple. How easy it was to know her then. And how slowly, how quietly, without my fully seeing it happen, that changed.
What I saw in Harlan Dillard was not that he was cruel. I never saw him be cruel to anyone in those months of the courtship. He was polite to me. He thanked me for supper.
He helped Fletcher with the fence repair one Saturday without being asked. What I saw was something else. He had opinions about things, strong ones. And when Nora had a different opinion, even about something small, he did not argue with her, exactly.
He went quiet and waited until she finished, and then he said something that made her position sound not wrong, exactly, but small, uncertain, like she had not thought it through quite right. I watched her face when he did this. I watched her pull back from whatever she had said. She is already learning to take up less room when he is in it, I thought.
I thought about my father, who had not been cruel, either. Who had not beaten us. Who had been a church man and kept us fed and clothed. Who had simply arranged everything so that the room shrank when his opinions entered it.
I talked to Fletcher. He listened the way he listened, fully, but without much comment. He said he had not seen anything that troubled him. I tried to talk to Nora.
She did not get angry. She put her hand on my arm and said, Mother, you don’t know him yet. You’ll see. She said it with so much gentleness and certainty that I almost let myself believe she was right.
They married in November of 1889. It was cold, and the church was heated only by the two stoves at the front and back, and everyone kept their coats on. Nora wore a dress she and I had made together that fall, blue wool, the best fabric I had been able to afford. She was beautiful.
She was happy in a way that looked real and not performed. I stood in that cold church and watched my daughter marry this man, and I prayed I was wrong about him. That winter I made her a set of four dish towels. Plain white cotton, hemmed close and even, with a small blue embroidered border along each edge, a running vine pattern simple enough that I could do it without thinking.
I put them in a paper parcel tied with string and wrote her name on the outside in my best hand. I meant it as a beginning, as a way of saying I am still your mother. I am still here. It came back to me in April of 1890, the string still tied as I had tied it, my handwriting on the outside, her name in my hand, no note inside, no note enclosed.
I put it on the shelf in the back room. I did not unwrap it for a year. The first year of their marriage, I saw Nora regularly. They lived only three miles east, and she came to Sunday services with Harlan, and we spoke before and after.
It was not like before. There was a careful quality to her visits now, a sense that she was managing something. At Easter dinner in 1890 he answered questions she had not asked. She would start to say something and he would finish it or redirect it, not rudely, just with the quiet authority of a man who believes he knows what she means better than she does.
And she let him. She nodded and did not correct him. That summer she came by herself one Wednesday, and we were working in the garden, and I asked her how she was managing. She looked at me in a way I had not seen before, the look of someone deciding how much weight a floor will hold before they step on it.
Then she said she was fine. I asked if she was happy, and she said she was, and said it in a tone that meant she wanted me to hear the answer and not ask the question again. I should have found a different way to ask. The way I asked it was not quite a question.
It was a test. And she was smart enough to know the difference. In the spring of 1891 a boy was born, William, named for Harlan’s father. I went to see her in the first week after the birth.
I held the baby. Nora watched me hold him. There was something between us in that room that I could not reach across, and that she did not try to reach across either. By 1893 or so I understood that what I was dealing with was not a season of difficulty but a condition.
She spoke to me as a woman speaks to another woman she knows slightly and wishes no ill. Correct. Warm enough to pass for warmth if you did not know what warmth had been. That winter I wrote her a letter, carefully, reading it over several times to take out anything that could sound like an accusation.
I said I missed her. I said I thought about her every day. I said I only wanted to be her mother in whatever way she would allow. She did not answer.
Harlan answered, a brief polite note saying Nora was well and the family was getting on fine. Fletcher said she may have asked him to. He said she may not have known about it. That was the first time I said out loud what I had been afraid to say: I was not sure whether my daughter was being kept from me or was keeping herself from me.
The second letter I wrote in the spring of 1894, I asked if I could come for a visit, an afternoon. She answered this one herself. She said it was not a good time just now, that they were busy with the planting, that perhaps later in the summer. She did not write again.
By 1895 I had mostly stopped writing. Each time I reached and was refused, it took something out of me that did not fully come back. There is only so many times you can hold your hand out to someone who does not take it before you begin to wonder if the holding out is its own kind of harm. I heard about her from others.
This county was not large, and people talked, not cruelly, not most of them, but they talked. There was a second child, a girl, born in 1896, named Clara. I have never held her. By the time she was born, the estrangement was settled enough that I did not think I would be welcome if I went to the house, and I did not want to be turned away.
I told myself I was respecting her wishes. I was also protecting myself, and I knew it. I have a grandson named William, whom I have seen perhaps a dozen times in 30 years, mostly at church from a distance, and a granddaughter named Clara, whom I could walk past on the road and not be certain I would know her face. Fletcher died in 1904, after being sick the better part of two years with something that started in his lungs and finished him slowly.
Nora did not come to the funeral. I do not say that to condemn her. I do not know what she was told or whether she was permitted to come or whether she chose not to. I only know that I stood at the graveside in the November cold with my boys on either side of me and looked out at the faces gathered there, and her face was not among them.
In 1905 I heard that Harlan had gone hard in his later years, that his temper had shortened, that he kept Nora and the children close, that William had gone off somewhere, Ohio maybe, and there had been words about it. I wrote again in the fall of 1906. I said I was alone now and getting older, that I was not trying to ask for anything she did not want to give, but that she was my daughter and I would not pretend otherwise. She did not answer.
Nobody answered. In 1912 or thereabouts, I sat behind Nora at the Christmas service. She was seated two pews ahead of me on the aisle, and Harlan beside her, and a young woman who must have been Clara on her other side. I looked at the back of Nora’s head for the length of the service.
Her hair had gone gray at the temples. At the end, in the pressing toward the door, I came within a few feet of her. She looked at me. I looked at her.
Perhaps two or three seconds. She said, Merry Christmas, Mother, in a voice I could not read. Not warm. Not cold.
Just her voice. I said, Merry Christmas, Nora. And then Harlan was at her side and his hand was at her elbow, and they moved toward the door, and she did not look back. Two or three seconds after 17 years and no answers.
Harlan Dillard died in 1919, in the spring, when the weather was just turning. He was 58 years old. He had been sick the last couple of years, something with his heart. After he died, I thought Nora might write.
I thought she might come by. She did not. I thought about writing to her, about driving to the house, walking up to that door I had never once been properly welcomed through, and knocking. I did not do it.
I cannot say entirely why. Part of it was that I had been refused enough times that I did not know how to pick up the motion of reaching again without grief I was not sure I could manage. Part of it was the thought that if she had not come to me now, with him gone, maybe she was not going to come. Maybe the estrangement had become its own thing by then, too old to be only about him anymore.
I was tired and old and I did not have the strength left for another refusal. I was a coward in 1919 and I know it. I heard later, maybe 1921 or 1922, that she was still at the farm, that William had come back from wherever he had been and was working the land with her. That she was seen in town sometimes now.
That she looked all right. That she was quieter than she used to be. All of this came through other people. It always did.
I am 77 years old and she is 55, and we live three miles apart, and I could not tell you what color her kitchen curtains are. The question, as plain as I can put it, is this. My daughter married a man who over the course of 30 years made her life smaller than it should have been. But she chose him.
She chose him when I told her what I saw. She chose him again every time she refused my letters. She chose him in the way that matters all the way until he died. And what I have never been able to decide is how much of that choosing was hers.
A man who is making a room smaller is also making it harder to see the size of the room you used to be in. He does not have to say you cannot leave. He only has to make the daily cost of disagreement high enough and the habit of smallness deep enough. But I was not inside her house.
She may have had more knowledge of her own situation than I am giving her credit for and made a different calculation than I would have made. Women in that situation often decide that what they have is better than what leaving would cost them. That is a choice. And there is the third possibility, which I have not let myself spend too much time on but which is there: that she was not as miserable as I imagined, that I was so certain of what I had seen that I built a story around it, and she was living a different story.
I never stopped loving her. I am not sure she knows that. I reached and was refused, and I reached again and was refused again, and eventually I stopped reaching. I never stopped being her mother.
I am still her mother. She is 55 years old and I am 77, and I am still her mother, and I do not know what to do with that except say it out loud to no one in particular in this room on this Tuesday morning, with the light coming through the east window and the parcel still on its shelf behind me. The towels are on the shelf, blue embroidery folded in a paper parcel worn soft at the edges. I made them in the fall of 1889 with good intention, and she sent them back in the spring of 1890 without a word.
I have kept them since then for reasons I have mostly stopped questioning. They are mine now in a way they were not when I made them. I am 77 years old. I am her mother.
I was always her mother. I never got to show her that, not in the years when it might have counted for something. I do not know if I will get to show her now. I do not know if I am going to try again.
I think I might.