The Deed Book
My name is Elnora Ruthanne Whitsett, and I’m seventy-two years old.
I have cleaned houses since I was fourteen. I have scrubbed floors on my knees in Maury County, Tennessee, for fifty-eight years. I have raised a daughter, buried a husband, buried my mama, and buried more friends than I care to count.
And I have never in my life stood in a courthouse and read my own name in a book that big.
Rosella turned that book around to face me.
She put her finger on a line.
“Read it, honey,” she said. “Read it yourself.”
I put on my reading glasses. My hands were shaking so bad I nearly dropped them.
I looked down.
There it was. In type. In black ink. On thick, cream-colored paper that smelled like old dust and lemon oil.
My whole name.
ELNORA RUTHANNE WHITSETT.
And right under it…
But I’m getting ahead of myself.
My mama always said you can’t understand the end of a story if you don’t know where it started. So let me start where it started.
On a porch.
I grew up on the Lockridge place.
It’s out on the Hampshire Pike, eight miles west of Columbia. Three hundred acres of rolling pasture and woods. A big white farmhouse with green shutters and a wraparound porch, sitting up on a little rise so you can see it from the road. Built in 1889.
And at the end of a gravel lane, down past the barn, past the pond, back where the land dips toward the creek, there’s a little white tenant house.
Four rooms. A tin roof. A porch with a swing hanging on chains. And behind it, a pecan grove. Forty-one trees. Big ones. Older than anybody living.
That’s where I learned to walk.
On that porch. Holding on to the swing chain. My mama said I took my first steps from the swing to the screen door and fell flat on my face and laughed.
My mama was Odessa Whitsett.
She cooked and cleaned for the Lockridges from 1946 until 1989. Forty-three years. She started for old Mr. Amos Lockridge, Mrs. Henrietta’s father-in-law, when she was sixteen years old. Then for Mr. Walter Lockridge and Mrs. Henrietta when they married.
She was paid eleven dollars a week in 1950. And the tenant house to live in. Rent free.
That was the arrangement.
That’s what I was told it was, anyway.
My daddy worked the farm. Plowing. Haying. Cattle. Fixing fence. He died in 1961 when a tractor rolled on him on the north slope. I was eight.
Mr. Walter paid for the funeral. Mama cried, she was so grateful.
Mrs. Henrietta brought a ham.
I left the Lockridge place when I married Clarence Whitsett in 1971. Well, I kept my name. Clarence’s name was Whitsett too. No relation. People thought that was the funniest thing. Two Whitsetts marrying. Mama said it saved on stationery.
We had a little house in Columbia, on East End Street. Clarence drove a truck for the phosphate plant. I cleaned houses in town. Doctors’ wives. Lawyers’ wives. A dentist who wanted his baseboards done with a toothbrush.
We had Alfreda in 1974.
In 1989, Mama got sick. Her heart. She couldn’t work anymore.
Mrs. Henrietta called me.
“Elnora,” she said. “Your mama’s been with this family forty-three years. I won’t have her anywhere but that house. I’ll take care of her doctor bills. But I need somebody to help me out here. Will you come?”
I came.
Mama died in 1992. In the tenant house. In her own bed. With the window open so she could smell the pecans.
I kept coming.
Clarence died in 2004. Lung cancer. Phosphate dust, the doctor said.
I kept coming.
Twenty-six years, all told. Since Mama passed.
Mondays, the kitchen and the bathrooms.
Thursdays, the floors.
Fridays…
Fridays she wouldn’t let me touch a mop until I sat down with her for coffee and a biscuit.
At the kitchen table. The long oak one. Under the window that looks out on the pasture.
She’d have the coffee made. Percolator. Maxwell House. She never would get one of those fancy machines. And biscuits from scratch. Every Friday. Even at ninety-three, when her hands were so stiff she had to roll the dough with the heel of her palm.
“Elnora, the dirt will wait,” she’d say. “I won’t.”
So I’d sit.
And we’d talk.
About everything. The weather. Her boys. My Alfreda. The preacher at First Presbyterian, who she said couldn’t preach his way out of a paper sack. The price of eggs. The president. The Titans.
For twenty-six years.
Every Friday.
She was ninety-four when she passed. Sharp as a tack till the last week. She did the crossword in the Columbia Daily Herald every morning in ink.
Mrs. Lockridge had three boys.
Not one of them lived closer than Nashville.
Carlton was the oldest. Sixty-eight. A retired banker in Brentwood. A quiet man. Gray suit. Gray hair. He called his mama every Sunday afternoon at three o’clock. You could set a clock by it.
Thurston was the middle one. Sixty-five. A real estate developer. He builds subdivisions. Big ones. The kind with names like The Reserve at Copper Creek. He drove a Range Rover. He wore boots that had never seen a cow pasture.
Bertram was the youngest. Sixty-one. He’d been a lot of things. A car dealer. A restaurant owner. A man who sold something on the internet. He’d been married three times. He came around when he needed money.
Thurston and Bertram only came when they wanted something.
Christmas. Easter, sometimes. Her birthday, if they remembered.
They’d sit in her front parlor for an hour. Drinking her coffee. Talking about property values. Looking out the window at the pasture like they were measuring it.
Last Christmas, Thurston came through the kitchen while I was washing the turkey platter.
He leaned on the counter.
“Elnora,” he said. “You know my house in town? On West Seventh?”
“Yes, sir.”
“My cleaning lady quit,” he said. “I need somebody Tuesdays and Saturdays. Mother pays you anyway. What’s the difference?”
I didn’t know what to say.
I was standing there with my hands in the dishwater.
Mother pays you anyway. What’s the difference.
Like I was a lawnmower she was letting him borrow.
Mrs. Lockridge heard him.
She was in the next room. The sitting room. In her chair by the fire. With her afghan over her knees.
She didn’t say a word to him.
But I saw her face through the doorway.
I’d known that face for sixty-some years. Since I was a baby on that porch.
It went very still.
That Friday, over coffee, she asked me a strange question.
We were at the oak table. She’d made biscuits. Buttermilk. With sorghum.
She set her cup down.
“Elnora,” she said. “What’s your middle name? I want to get it right.”
I looked at her.
“Ruthanne,” I said. “Why?”
“Ruthanne,” she said. “R-U-T-H-A-N-N-E. One word?”
“One word.”
“After who?”
“My mama’s mama,” I said. “Ruth Anne Whitsett. Mama ran it together when she named me. She said it sounded prettier.”
Mrs. Lockridge nodded slowly.
She pulled a paper napkin out of the holder on the table.
She took a pen out of her housecoat pocket.
And she wrote it down.
Elnora Ruthanne Whitsett.
She looked at it for a long time.
Then she folded the napkin in half and put it in her pocket.
“No reason, honey,” she said.
She went back to her biscuit.
I didn’t think about it again.
Not until the courthouse.
She passed in her sleep in September. 