She allowed me to help her into the truck.
She did not speak during the six-mile drive.
Her hands stayed folded over the pocketbook.
She looked straight through the windshield.
When I turned onto the lane, she made a small sound.
I assumed the ruts had jarred her.
Nate was waiting in the yard.
He had cut the weeds and placed two planks across the worst section of the porch.
He came toward us to help Opal from the truck.
She lifted a hand.
“I can manage steps, Nathan.”
She refused my arm too.
Slowly, with one hand gripping the porch post, she crossed the planks and went through the front door.
Then I noticed something strange.
She did not look around.
Visitors look around.
They stop.
They study doorways.
They ask what room used to be what.
Opal walked straight through the front room.
Turned left.
Then right.
Passed through a doorway where we had not yet hung a door.
Her feet knew where they were going.
She stopped in the middle of the kitchen beneath the bare bulb.
First she looked toward the window where the sink had once been.
Then toward the little room off the kitchen that Nate and I had been calling the back bedroom.
Then she walked to the pantry.
She put one hand flat against the dark varnished door frame.
And started to cry.
No sound.
Her face barely changed.
Tears simply ran down both cheeks.
I had known Opal for eleven years.
I had never seen her cry.
Not even when her husband was buried.
“Opal,” I said softly. “Do you need to sit?”
She ran her thumb along the wood.
Searching.
At about four feet above the floor, her thumb stopped.
“Emily,” she said, “did nobody ever tell you whose house this was?”
“The Millers’.”
She shook her head.
“The Millers bought it at a sale in the fall of 1961. They paid less than it was worth. They were decent people, and I never blamed them.”
She drew a breath.
“Before them, it belonged to Henry Brandt.”
I waited.
“My father.”
Nate had appeared in the doorway.
Opal looked toward the porch.
“He built that porch himself.”
Then she turned toward the small room off the kitchen.
“I was born right there in March of 1937. Neighbor woman served as midwife. Roads were mud up to the axles and the doctor couldn’t get out.”
Nate removed his cap.
“Bring your light, Nathan.”
He stepped closer and aimed his headlamp where Opal’s thumb rested.
Under the old varnish were pencil marks.
A ladder of short horizontal lines.
Each with a date and a name written beside it in square handwriting.
I had scrubbed past them dozens of times.
I thought they were scratches.
Nate read the first visible line.
“Opal. Six years. 1943.”
He raised the light.
“Opal. Nine years.”
Another.
“Opal. Twelve.”
Then he moved downward.
Near the bottom was a separate mark in different handwriting.
A woman’s hand.
“Ronnie,” Nate read. “Four years. 1960.”
Opal touched it.
“I made that one.”
“The next year,” she said, “we were gone.”
She told us the rest while standing in the middle of that kitchen.
Her father had died in 1957.
He left the farm to Opal and her husband, Walt Schafer—Nate’s grandfather.
One hundred sixty acres and the farmhouse.
Walt worked hard and wanted to modernize.
He borrowed against the farm for a new tractor and a hog building.
Then came two bad years.
Disease went through the hogs.
The farm income collapsed.
The bank called the note.
“They sold it on the courthouse steps,” Opal said.
Nate looked at me.
“The same steps?” I asked.
“The same steps.”
She looked through the kitchen window.