Sunday night I’d call my grandmother down in Alabama. If Birchie had been any other small-town ninety-year-old southern lady, the thought of telling her might make me cringe, but she was her singular self. Sure, Birchie lived stiffly, and by rules, but they were rules of her own making. That call seemed more like a reward I’d earn by weathering the storm of telling Rachel and my parents.
When I told Birchie about Digby, I knew that my prim grandmother would be . . . joyful. Joyful that she and I would not be the last of the Birch line after all. Joyful in the same soaring, secret way that I was—and right now? Feeling him move? I was practically giddy with it. I lay in the darkness, reveling in the flutter of this tiny, late, imperfectly got piece of what I’d always wanted.
Now I could hardly wait to call her. She had lived a version of this story: a single son, born when she was past thirty, that she had raised alone. Granted, she’d been a young widow. She’d had a proper husband there for the conception part. Even so, Birchie would understand better than anyone else how, in the wake of my son’s beginning, I felt like my life was beginning, too.
I had no way to know that seven hundred miles south of me, the grandmother I longed to tell was coming to her end.
2
Birchville, Alabama, had its own origin story, so entwined with my grandmother’s that there was no way to tell one without the other. The town itself was founded by Birchie’s grandfather, Ethan, the eldest son of an old Charleston shipping family who had acted as blockade runners in the Civil War. They kept their money safely overseas, surviving the Late Unpleasantness with their fortune intact, if not their reputation. Their newly destitute social circle had small appreciation for southerners who had chosen prudence over patriotism.
By 1874 Ethan, who had been a child during the war, was chafing under the uncomfortable combination of wealth and the Old Guard’s condemnation. He wanted a fresh start, and he was not the only young man in Charleston who felt that way. He left, taking several sons from the old families with him: a Darian, an Alston, and two of the impoverished Mack boys. The Macks had sunk all their money into Confederate government bonds; that family especially was so bitter that it penetrated the bloodline, genes-deep.
Ethan founded Birchville on the bones of a burned-out ’Bama town that had lost its charter in the war. He rebuilt the church first, then perched a big white Victorian house on the hill across the road. When both buildings were finished, he sent back to Charleston for his girl, to marry her in one and move her into the other. My great-grandfather, Ellis Birch, was born in that house, and my grandmother was born inside it, too.
At 9:00 a.m. on any given Sunday, Birchie would be sitting at her formal dining-room table in that very house, watching her town wake up through the big bay window. Behind her, on either side of the doorway to the kitchen, portraits of her grandfather and father flanked her, watching their town as well, stern and benevolent. Ethan looked proud, after the fashion of portraits in his day. Ellis looked even prouder, plus he had those creepy Uncle Sam eyes that seemed to rove around the room. I had never liked eating in the dining room under his painted gaze, but it was the Lord’s day. Birchie would no more eat a Sunday meal in the cozy breakfast nook than she would take up Prancercise. I could imagine her there perfectly, spine ramrod straight, ankles crossed, eating her egg and sipping coffee with Wattie Price, her bosom friend.
I didn’t have to imagine the wretched events that awaited them across the street at Birchville First Baptist on this particular Sunday morning. I would see the whole story unfolding in my head from a hundred different angles, because every church member who was present—and a few who weren’t—would later tell me all the gory details.
As the church bells pealed ten-fifteen, Birchie and Wattie linked arms to careful their way down the wide steps of their front porch. Those two little old ladies, round and soft and short and fragile, looked like a matched set of salt and pepper shakers as they toddled down the hill toward First Baptist, on schedule and as timely as the tides.
Birchville’s population was a little smaller and skewed a little older than when I was growing up, but there was still a family of Darians, plenty of Alstons, and a slew of Macks who lived in the town. My grandmother was the only remaining Birch, though, and all the old-name families were members at First Baptist. As Birchie and Wattie made their stately way up the left side aisle, folks cleared a path, offering smiles and greetings. Birchie took it as her due, pausing only to exchange a speaking glance with Wattie as Martina Mack clomped up the other aisle in her enormous Sunday hat. It blocked the view, perched high and bright red over Martina’s iron-gray witch scraggles, but Martina would neither remove it nor move back. She had to sit in the second row, right side, exactly opposite Birchie’s pew.
Wattie’s knees were bad, so Birchie helped her settle before sitting down herself, and quite a few folks in the congregation looked away. There were folks at the church who could not seem to remember that Miss Wattie did not work for Birchie. Wattie had never worked for us, in fact. That was Wattie’s mother, Vina. She had been the Birches’ housekeeper. When Birchie’s own mother died in childbirth, Vina had rocked Birchie, and taught her songs, and tucked her in for naps in the kitchen playpen. She still had milk from her youngest boy, so Vina fed Birchie with her own body. A year or so later, Wattie came along to join my grandmother, and they had bonded deep as sisters. The two of them had put up jam together every August of their lives in that kitchen: as babies watching, as helpers too little to be truly helpful, as young girls, as married ladies, and eventually as jam masters who regularly took multiple ribbons at the county fair.
Around twelve years ago, I started worrying about Birchie living all alone in that big house full of staircases with her bad balance and worse eyesight. I’d wanted her to move to Virginia, into an assisted-living apartment near my house, but she would have none of it.
Meanwhile Wattie’s husband had passed, and both her sons lived far, Stephen in Chicago, Sam in Houston. They were worried, too. Wattie’s house was on an isolated road outside of town. She drove herself into Birchville almost every day with less and less regard for what lane the car was in. She and Birchie would sit out on the porch in fine weather or in front of the living room’s wide windows when it rained. They would knit and talk and supervise town life. It was a relief for all of us when Wattie failed her driver’s test and came to live with Birchie in the big Victorian. They could walk to the beauty parlor, the library, three restaurants, the yarn shop. The Piggly Wiggly didn’t have a delivery service per se, but for Emily Birch Briggs? The groceries got delivered.
The longer they lived together, the more symbiotic they became. Church had been the last amalgamation. On paper Wattie was still a member at Redemption, the all-black Baptist church near her old house. Birchie kept her membership at First Baptist, too, but for years now they had gone to services together, half the time walking to First Baptist and half the time being driven to Redemption by one of the deacons. This was a First Baptist week, and they bent their heads over their shared church bulletin until the service started.
Birchie took tidy notes in the margins of her Order of Worship, upright and attentive, giving Miss Wattie small, decorous nods when the preacher got it right, frowning slightly when he got it wrong. There were very few nods.