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The Bible in the Mud: Seven Margin Words That Broke a Family · Family Secrets Revealed

• 0:03
  Speaker 1: A retired electrician named Marvin Davis was running fishing lines
• 0:07
  Speaker 1: along Caldwell Creek on a Tuesday morning in November of
• 0:11
  Speaker 1: twenty nineteen when he noticed the old Sharp farmhouse porch
• 0:14
  Speaker 1: had finally caved in. He walked over to look. Buried
• 0:19
  Speaker 1: in the mud and rotting wood was a family bible,
• 0:22
  Speaker 1: its cover swollen tight as a fist. He could not
• 0:25
  Speaker 1: have known what was written inside it. The Sharp family
• 0:28
  Speaker 1: had owned that land in Greer's Mill, Tennessee for three generations.
• 0:34
  Speaker 1: The farmhouse had been abandoned for years, and whatever that
• 0:37
  Speaker 1: bible recorded had been sitting undisturbed in the dark in
• 0:41
  Speaker 1: a community of fewer than four hundred people for the
• 0:44
  Speaker 1: better part of half a century. There are two kinds
• 0:47
  Speaker 1: of family secrets, the kind that everyone suspects and no
• 0:51
  Speaker 1: one names, and the kind so carefully buried that not
• 0:55
  Speaker 1: even the person it concerned ever knew where to look.
• 0:59
  Speaker 1: This is the second kind. By the time that bible
• 1:03
  Speaker 1: reached a kitchen table in Clarkson, forty minutes away, it
• 1:06
  Speaker 1: carried a name that had never appeared in any official
• 1:09
  Speaker 1: family record, A single handwritten note, cramped and slanted in
• 1:12
  Speaker 1: a margin beside a passage in the Gospel of Luke
• 1:16
  Speaker 1: seven words written about a child, a child who had
• 1:19
  Speaker 1: lived in that farmhouse and vanished from it before anyone
• 1:22
  Speaker 1: thought to ask why. What no one expected were the
• 1:25
  Speaker 1: margin notes. Ross Sharp was seventy one years old in
• 1:30
  Speaker 1: the fall of twenty nineteen. He had been born on
• 1:33
  Speaker 1: the fourteenth of April nineteen forty eight in Greer's Mill,
• 1:37
  Speaker 1: the same small Tennessee community where his parents had farmed
• 1:40
  Speaker 1: the same land since nineteen forty seven. He was the
• 1:44
  Speaker 1: kind of man who still drove the same route his
• 1:47
  Speaker 1: father had driven, who still knew which deacon sat in
• 1:50
  Speaker 1: which pew at first Methodist, who still referred to the
• 1:54
  Speaker 1: abandoned farmhouse as the home place, even though no one
• 1:58
  Speaker 1: had lived there in decades. He had a sister named Janet.
• 2:03
  Speaker 1: She was born in nineteen fifty one and died in
• 2:07
  Speaker 1: nineteen fifty four, three years old, from scarlet fever. Ross
• 2:11
  Speaker 1: had no memory of her death. He had been six.
• 2:15
  Speaker 1: What he knew of Janet came from a framed photograph
• 2:17
  Speaker 1: on a shelf and the way his mother, Milly, went
• 2:20
  Speaker 1: quiet every February. Earl Sharp his father had been a
• 2:25
  Speaker 1: careful man, careful with land, careful with money, careful with words.
• 2:31
  Speaker 1: He had built the east wing of the farm house
• 2:33
  Speaker 1: himself in nineteen fifty six, expanding the structure with the
• 2:37
  Speaker 1: patience of someone who measured twice and regretted nothing. He
• 2:41
  Speaker 1: died in nineteen eighty eight without leaving behind explanations for
• 2:45
  Speaker 1: anything that was simply how Earl was. Millie sharp Ney
• 2:49
  Speaker 1: Corbette had been the warmer of the two. She had
• 2:53
  Speaker 1: grown up in the same county as Earle, one of
• 2:56
  Speaker 1: the Corbett girls, close to her older sister, Agnes. Agnes
• 3:01
  Speaker 1: Corbett had never married. She had moved to Cincinnati at
• 3:04
  Speaker 1: some point in the early nineteen fifties and had lived
• 3:07
  Speaker 1: and died there, passing in nineteen eighty one without fanfare.
• 3:12
  Speaker 1: Milly had outlived her by thirteen years, dying in nineteen
• 3:16
  Speaker 1: ninety four. When Ross cleaned out her belongings, he found
• 3:19
  Speaker 1: a cedar chest at the foot of her bed. Inside
• 3:22
  Speaker 1: that chest, among the linens and old letters, was a
• 3:25
  Speaker 1: single undated note in a handwriting he did not recognize
• 3:28
  Speaker 1: at first. He read it, set it down, read it again.
• 3:33
  Speaker 1: The note said, I know what you did for us,
• 3:35
  Speaker 1: and I will not speak of it. She is well
• 3:39
  Speaker 1: and does not know I pray that is mercy and
• 3:42
  Speaker 1: not cowardice. It was signed with a single initial A.
• 3:46
  Speaker 1: Ross had understood in a general way that ay meant agnes.
• 3:52
  Speaker 1: Beyond that, he had no framework for what the note described.
• 3:56
  Speaker 1: He had filed it in the back of his mind,
• 3:58
  Speaker 1: the way a person files something that herts without yet
• 4:01
  Speaker 1: having a name. He did not throw it away, He
• 4:05
  Speaker 1: did not pursue it. He kept it. He had been
• 4:08
  Speaker 1: keeping it for twenty five years when Marvin Davis found
• 4:11
  Speaker 1: the Bible in the mud. Michell Burke drove up from
• 4:14
  Speaker 1: Nashville the morning after Ross called her. She was twenty six,
• 4:18
  Speaker 1: a paralegal, and she had a portable scanner in her
• 4:21
  Speaker 1: bag before she had eaten breakfast. Ross met her at
• 4:24
  Speaker 1: the door of his house in Clarkson with coffee and
• 4:27
  Speaker 1: the Bible on the kitchen table between them. She did
• 4:30
  Speaker 1: not open it right away. She looked at the cover first.
• 4:33
  Speaker 1: The binding had swollen from the mud, the edges of
• 4:36
  Speaker 1: the pages had gone brown. But when she lifted the
• 4:40
  Speaker 1: front board and turned to the family register, Earl Sharp's
• 4:43
  Speaker 1: handwriting was intact, protected by a layer of waxed cloth
• 4:47
  Speaker 1: some one had pressed between the cover and the first
• 4:49
  Speaker 1: page that single piece of cloth had kept forty years
• 4:53
  Speaker 1: of rain out. The register was what you would expect
• 4:56
  Speaker 1: from a careful man. Earl had recorded berths in the
• 5:00
  Speaker 1: same hand he used for land surveys, precise, upright, no flourishes.
• 5:06
  Speaker 1: Ross Sharp born the fourteenth of April nineteen forty eight,
• 5:10
  Speaker 1: Janet Sharp born nineteen fifty one died nineteen fifty four, Escarlatina.
• 5:18
  Speaker 1: That was the whole of it. No other children, no
• 5:20
  Speaker 1: other names. Michelle turned pages near the back in the
• 5:24
  Speaker 1: Gospel of Luke, chapter fourteen. She found it not in
• 5:29
  Speaker 1: Earl's upright hand, in a different script, entirely small, slanted,
• 5:34
  Speaker 1: pressed hard into the margin, as if the writer needed
• 5:37
  Speaker 1: the physical resistance of something solid. Beneath the pen seven words,
• 5:42
  Speaker 1: and then a line below them. It read Cecilia born
• 5:47
  Speaker 1: July nineteen fifty three, taken to Harmon County. God keep her.
• 5:52
  Speaker 1: Michelle photographed it. Then she photographed it again. The handwriting
• 5:57
  Speaker 1: was not Earl's. Ross looked at it for a long
• 6:00
  Speaker 1: time and said it was not his mother's either. He
• 6:04
  Speaker 1: had seen Milly's handwriting on recipe cards and Christmas envelopes
• 6:08
  Speaker 1: for fifty years. Milly's letters leaned right, these leaned left
• 6:14
  Speaker 1: that detail mattered more than it seemed to. Then. Michelle
• 6:17
  Speaker 1: spent the following week pulling documents. She was methodical, the
• 6:21
  Speaker 1: way paralegals are. She knew which offices held what, and
• 6:25
  Speaker 1: she knew that paper left trails even when people believed
• 6:28
  Speaker 1: they had erased them. The first thing she requested was
• 6:31
  Speaker 1: the property deed for the Sharp farm, originally filed in
• 6:35
  Speaker 1: nineteen forty seven. It came back with an addendum she
• 6:38
  Speaker 1: had not expected. The addendum was dated August nineteen fifty three.
• 6:43
  Speaker 1: It recorded Agnes Corbett relinquishing her interest in a piece
• 6:46
  Speaker 1: of Corbett family property in Harmon County. In exchange, Earl
• 6:51
  Speaker 1: and Milly Sharp had paid Agnes four hundred dollars. The
• 6:55
  Speaker 1: document was a real estate transfer on its face, nothing
• 6:58
  Speaker 1: in its language acknowledged any child, any arrangement, any family
• 7:03
  Speaker 1: connection beyond the stated transaction. Four hundred dollars in nineteen
• 7:08
  Speaker 1: fifty three was not a large sum. It was not
• 7:11
  Speaker 1: a small one either. It was precise that precision was
• 7:16
  Speaker 1: the thing that held the eye. Michele drove to Greer's
• 7:20
  Speaker 1: mill this Saturday after she found the deed. She brought
• 7:23
  Speaker 1: a laptop and the portable scanner. She asked Pastor Ed
• 7:27
  Speaker 1: Coffee at first Methodist, for access to the baptismal records
• 7:30
  Speaker 1: from nineteen fifty two. Coffee was a cooperative man. He
• 7:35
  Speaker 1: pulled the ledger from a cabinet behind the vestry and
• 7:38
  Speaker 1: laid it flat on a reading table under a fluorescent light.
• 7:42
  Speaker 1: The entry for Janet Sharp was there February nineteen fifty two,
• 7:47
  Speaker 1: female parents Earl and Millie Sharp, on the same page.
• 7:52
  Speaker 1: Two lines below Janet's entry, there was a second entry
• 7:55
  Speaker 1: for the same month, female no parents. Listed The notation
• 7:59
  Speaker 1: beside it read private per E s. The initials were
• 8:04
  Speaker 1: Earl Sharps. Michelle would have missed it entirely if the
• 8:07
  Speaker 1: light had not been fluorescent. The entry was partially covered
• 8:11
  Speaker 1: by a water stain, an old brown ring that had
• 8:14
  Speaker 1: crept across the lower third of the page at some
• 8:17
  Speaker 1: point in the ledger's history. She had to hold the
• 8:19
  Speaker 1: page at an angle, tilting it against the overhead light
• 8:23
  Speaker 1: to read the letters beneath the stain. She read them twice.
• 8:27
  Speaker 1: She read them a third time CS female Private per E.
• 8:31
  Speaker 1: S Ross heard this on the phone that evening and
• 8:34
  Speaker 1: said nothing for a long time. Here's what the documents
• 8:39
  Speaker 1: taken together were showing in the winter of nineteen fifty
• 8:43
  Speaker 1: one into fifty two, Agnes Corbett had arrived at her
• 8:47
  Speaker 1: sister Milly's house in Greer's Mill with a newborn daughter
• 8:50
  Speaker 1: she could not yet care for. The child had been
• 8:53
  Speaker 1: baptized at First Methodist in February of nineteen fifty two
• 8:57
  Speaker 1: under initials only by private arrangement at Earl Sharp's instruction.
• 9:03
  Speaker 1: The child had stayed on the farm for approximately a
• 9:07
  Speaker 1: year and a half. In July of nineteen fifty three,
• 9:12
  Speaker 1: Agnes had taken her back. One month later, Agnes had
• 9:16
  Speaker 1: signed away the Corbett property in Harmon County and received
• 9:20
  Speaker 1: four hundred dollars from Earle and Milly Sharp. The left
• 9:25
  Speaker 1: leaning handwriting in the margin of Luke fourteen was Agnes's,
• 9:29
  Speaker 1: not Milly's. Agnes had written that note herself in a
• 9:32
  Speaker 1: Bible she had left behind or returned before she took
• 9:35
  Speaker 1: Cecilia south to Harmon County and closed the chapter. She
• 9:40
  Speaker 1: had not written it for Earl, she had not written
• 9:44
  Speaker 1: it for Milly. The placement of it a gospel passage
• 9:47
  Speaker 1: about a feast about those who come unexpectedly to the table,
• 9:50
  Speaker 1: suggested she had written it for no one in particular,
• 9:54
  Speaker 1: or for God, or for the child herself, on the
• 9:57
  Speaker 1: chance that someone some day would hold this Bible in
• 10:00
  Speaker 1: the right light and find the name. For sixty six years,
• 10:05
  Speaker 1: no one had picture Agnes Corbett standing somewhere in that
• 10:09
  Speaker 1: farmhouse in the summer of nineteen fifty three, the Bible
• 10:13
  Speaker 1: open on a table, writing seven words in the smallest
• 10:17
  Speaker 1: hand she could manage so they would fit in the
• 10:19
  Speaker 1: margin and not be the first thing anyone saw. She
• 10:23
  Speaker 1: did not write a name in the family register. She
• 10:25
  Speaker 1: could not. That was Earle's record, and the family that
• 10:29
  Speaker 1: would survive in that record was Earle's family. She wrote
• 10:32
  Speaker 1: in the margin. Instead, she wrote in the space between
• 10:36
  Speaker 1: the printed words of someone else's scripture, the only space
• 10:40
  Speaker 1: she had been given. The note Millie had kept in
• 10:43
  Speaker 1: her cedar chest for thirteen years. I know what you
• 10:46
  Speaker 1: did for us, and I will not speak of It
• 10:49
  Speaker 1: was not a confession, it was a receipt. Agnes was
• 10:54
  Speaker 1: acknowledging a debt she intended to honor by silence. She
• 10:57
  Speaker 1: had kept that silence until she died in since in
• 11:00
  Speaker 1: nineteen eighty one. She had kept it so completely that
• 11:03
  Speaker 1: Cecilia made nineteen eighty one. She had kept it so
• 11:08
  Speaker 1: completely that Celia, who grew up with Agnes in Harmon County,
• 11:13
  Speaker 1: believed Agnes was her mother in every sense that mattered.
• 11:17
  Speaker 1: Agnes had raised her. Agnes had left her a small inheritance.
• 11:23
  Speaker 1: The probate record from Ohio described Cecilia as my ward
• 11:27
  Speaker 1: raised as my own, not my daughter, not my child.
• 11:32
  Speaker 1: The language had been careful. Agnes had been careful her
• 11:35
  Speaker 1: entire life. But there was a fact Agnes had not destroyed,
• 11:39
  Speaker 1: had perhaps not wanted to destroy her own papers. Some
• 11:43
  Speaker 1: time after Agnes died in nineteen eighty one, Cecilia had
• 11:47
  Speaker 1: gone through those papers. She had found documents that told
• 11:50
  Speaker 1: her she had spent her first year with a family
• 11:53
  Speaker 1: named Sharp in a community called Greer's Mill in Tennessee.
• 11:57
  Speaker 1: She had known that for decades before raw Sharp ever
• 12:00
  Speaker 1: opened a Bible on a Friday afternoon and found her
• 12:02
  Speaker 1: name in the margin. She had known the name Sharp,
• 12:06
  Speaker 1: she had not known how to find them. Ross and
• 12:08
  Speaker 1: Michelle drove to Cookville on a Saturday in late November
• 12:11
  Speaker 1: of twenty nineteen. The drive took just under an hour.
• 12:16
  Speaker 1: They had called ahead. They had not explained everything on
• 12:19
  Speaker 1: the phone. Cecilia Warren met them at her door. She
• 12:23
  Speaker 1: was sixty six years old. She had two marriages behind her,
• 12:27
  Speaker 1: a small house near Cookville, and decades of quiet. Knowing
• 12:31
  Speaker 1: she had known the name Sharp, known the outline of
• 12:34
  Speaker 1: her first year, and been unable to close the distance.
• 12:38
  Speaker 1: They sat in her kitchen for three hours. Michelle had
• 12:41
  Speaker 1: brought the scanned photographs of the Bible. She laid a
• 12:44
  Speaker 1: printed image on the table, the margin of Luke Chapter fourteen,
• 12:48
  Speaker 1: the seven words in Agnes Corbett's small, slanted hand Cecilia b.
• 12:55
  Speaker 1: July nineteen fifty three, taken to Harmon County, god Cas
• 13:00
  Speaker 1: keep her. Cecilia had never seen it before. Agnes had
• 13:03
  Speaker 1: written her daughter's name into someone else's Bible and trusted
• 13:07
  Speaker 1: that it would survive. She had not told Cecilia it
• 13:09
  Speaker 1: was there. She had not told Cecilia she had written
• 13:13
  Speaker 1: anything at all. That piece of knowledge had traveled sixty
• 13:16
  Speaker 1: six years through a flooded porch, through river mud, through
• 13:20
  Speaker 1: the hands of a retired electrician on a fishing morning
• 13:23
  Speaker 1: before it reached the only person Agnes had written it
• 13:26
  Speaker 1: for the rest of What was on the table confirmed
• 13:29
  Speaker 1: what each of them had already suspected. Peace by piece
• 13:33
  Speaker 1: the addendum to the nineteen forty seven property deed signed
• 13:37
  Speaker 1: by Agnes in August of nineteen fifty three, transferring the
• 13:40
  Speaker 1: Corbett land in Harmon County to Earle and Milly Sharp
• 13:44
  Speaker 1: in exchange for four hundred dollars. The Ohio Probate Record
• 13:48
  Speaker 1: naming Cecilia as Agnes's ward raised as her own. The
• 13:53
  Speaker 1: baptismal entry in First Methodist's Ledger nine Female February nineteen
• 13:59
  Speaker 1: fifty two, Private per e s saying visible only when
• 14:03
  Speaker 1: the page was tilted under light, sitting just below a
• 14:07
  Speaker 1: water stain, as if it had been waiting for some
• 14:09
  Speaker 1: one patient enough to look. There was no crime in
• 14:12
  Speaker 1: this record. There was no court that had been deceived
• 14:15
  Speaker 1: in any documented way. There was a young woman in
• 14:18
  Speaker 1: the early nineteen fifties who had a child she was
• 14:22
  Speaker 1: not positioned to keep, who gave that child to her sister,
• 14:26
  Speaker 1: who eventually came back for her, who spent the rest
• 14:29
  Speaker 1: of her life making sure the child never felt the
• 14:31
  Speaker 1: weight of that first year. There was a family in
• 14:35
  Speaker 1: Tennessee who built a wall over a window and kept
• 14:38
  Speaker 1: a letter in a cedar chest and said nothing to
• 14:41
  Speaker 1: the sun. Who slept down the hall. None of this
• 14:43
  Speaker 1: had a villain. It had costs the four hundred dollars
• 14:47
  Speaker 1: changed hands formerly as a land transaction. No document acknowledged
• 14:52
  Speaker 1: it as anything else. The baptismal entry existed in a ledger,
• 14:56
  Speaker 1: but was never transcribed into the official register. Janet Sharp,
• 15:01
  Speaker 1: who had died of scarlet fever in nineteen fifty four,
• 15:05
  Speaker 1: remained the only daughter in Earle's family record. Cecilia's name
• 15:08
  Speaker 1: never appeared there. Earle had kept a private record of
• 15:12
  Speaker 1: a child he had helped shelter and then helped return.
• 15:15
  Speaker 1: He had kept it private enough that his own son,
• 15:18
  Speaker 1: at seventy one years old, found it only because a
• 15:21
  Speaker 1: porch collapsed in the rain. Ross had not decided what
• 15:25
  Speaker 1: to do with the Bible. It sat on the kitchen
• 15:27
  Speaker 1: table of his house in Clarkson. As of November two
• 15:31
  Speaker 1: thousand nineteen, he had lived seventy one years without knowing
• 15:35
  Speaker 1: a girl named Cecilia had been in that farm house.
• 15:38
  Speaker 1: During his fourth year of life, without knowing, his mother
• 15:42
  Speaker 1: had been handed a letter she had hidden for thirteen
• 15:44
  Speaker 1: years before his father died, and for the years after
• 15:48
  Speaker 1: until she herself died. He had found the letter in
• 15:50
  Speaker 1: the cedar chest in nineteen ninety four. He had not
• 15:54
  Speaker 1: known what Agnes Corbett meant by what you did for us.
• 15:59
  Speaker 1: Now he did. He and Cecilia were not, as far
• 16:02
  Speaker 1: as the documents confirmed, related by blood. Agnes was Milly's sister,
• 16:06
  Speaker 1: which made Agnes and Cecilia family adjacent to Ross by
• 16:10
  Speaker 1: marriage and adoption and the long web of a small
• 16:14
  Speaker 1: Tennessee community. But the certificate of birth listed Cecilia's father
• 16:18
  Speaker 1: as unknown, and no document connected Earle Sharp to Cecilia's parentage.
• 16:23
  Speaker 1: That loop did not close because the record did not
• 16:26
  Speaker 1: close it, and the record is what remains. What remained
• 16:30
  Speaker 1: with more certainty was this. Milly Sharp had kept a
• 16:33
  Speaker 1: secret for forty five years because Agnes Corbett had asked
• 16:37
  Speaker 1: her to. Agnes had asked her with a single sentence,
• 16:39
  Speaker 1: in an undated letter written in the register of a
• 16:42
  Speaker 1: debt that Agnes considered permanent, I will not speak of it.
• 16:47
  Speaker 1: Milly had honored that. She had honored it past Agnes's
• 16:50
  Speaker 1: death in nineteen eighty one, pasted Earl's death in nineteen
• 16:53
  Speaker 1: eighty eight, past her own. She had taken it with
• 16:56
  Speaker 1: her in nineteen ninety for and left only the letter
• 17:01
  Speaker 1: which said everything without explaining anything. Cecilia had agreed that
• 17:05
  Speaker 1: when Ross no longer needed the Bible, she would like
• 17:08
  Speaker 1: to have it. Ross had said that seemed right. There
• 17:12
  Speaker 1: is something in this story that resists the usual shape
• 17:15
  Speaker 1: of resolution. The three people who knew the most, Earl
• 17:20
  Speaker 1: Milly Agnes had all been dead for decades before the
• 17:24
  Speaker 1: porch collapsed. The decisions they made in the early nineteen
• 17:28
  Speaker 1: fifties were made inside a world with fewer options and
• 17:31
  Speaker 1: different silences. Agnes was an unmarried woman in a rural
• 17:36
  Speaker 1: Tennessee county in nineteen fifty one. The choices available to
• 17:40
  Speaker 1: her were not the choices available now. She made the
• 17:43
  Speaker 1: ones she made, came back for her daughter, and raised
• 17:46
  Speaker 1: that daughter as her own. The only evidence she left
• 17:50
  Speaker 1: of what the first year had cost was seven words
• 17:53
  Speaker 1: in a margin and a letter she trusted her sister
• 17:57
  Speaker 1: to burn, and her sister never did. Milli sh Sharp
• 18:00
  Speaker 1: did not burn it either. That is the detail that stays.
• 18:03
  Speaker 1: Two women across more than four decades held a letter
• 18:07
  Speaker 1: that could have explained everything, and chose not to destroy it.
• 18:11
  Speaker 1: Agnes wrote a name in a margin she could have
• 18:13
  Speaker 1: left blank. The Bible sat in a farm house through
• 18:16
  Speaker 1: Tennessee winters and the death of Earl Sharp, and the
• 18:19
  Speaker 1: silence of three generations, And when the porch finally gave way,
• 18:24
  Speaker 1: it landed in river mud and survived. What Cecilia Warren
• 18:28
  Speaker 1: knew when she drove home from Cookville that November was
• 18:32
  Speaker 1: something she had carried in partial form for years. She
• 18:35
  Speaker 1: knew her first year. Now she had a photograph of
• 18:39
  Speaker 1: Agnes's handwriting the margin of Luke chapter fourteen. She knew
• 18:43
  Speaker 1: that her mother, the woman who raised her, the woman
• 18:46
  Speaker 1: who had kept her, had written her name into another
• 18:48
  Speaker 1: family's bible before she came back to claim her that act.
• 18:53
  Speaker 1: Whatever Agnes intended by it was not the gesture of
• 18:57
  Speaker 1: someone who expected to disappear. It was the gesture of
• 19:00
  Speaker 1: someone who expected to return and wanted to leave a mark.
• 19:04
  Speaker 1: In the meantime, Agnes had left the mark. It had
• 19:07
  Speaker 1: taken sixty six years to arrive. Ross Sharp, at seventy one,
• 19:12
  Speaker 1: is the last living member of the generation that knew
• 19:14
  Speaker 1: any of this first hand. He did not know it firsthand.
• 19:18
  Speaker 1: He was four years old when Cecilia left Grier's mill,
• 19:21
  Speaker 1: and he has no memory of her in the house.
• 19:24
  Speaker 1: What he has is a Bible with his father's handwriting
• 19:27
  Speaker 1: the register and his aunt's handwriting in the margin. And
• 19:30
  Speaker 1: a kitchen table in Clarkson, Tennessee, where a document sits
• 19:34
  Speaker 1: that no one expected the rain to return. He has
• 19:37
  Speaker 1: not decided what to do with it. Yet that seems
• 19:41
  Speaker 1: in its own way honest. Some things do not resolve
• 19:45
  Speaker 1: so much as they arrive. Cecilia's first year arrived sixty
• 19:49
  Speaker 1: six years late, carried out of the mud by a
• 19:52
  Speaker 1: man who was only there because he fishes on Tuesdays.
• 19:55
  Speaker 1: The seven words Agnes wrote in the margin were not
• 19:58
  Speaker 1: a confession, an apology, and not a farewell. They were
• 20:02
  Speaker 1: a record. Agnes was a woman who knew that records
• 20:07
  Speaker 1: survive when everything else goes quiet. She was right, it did.
• 20:13
  Speaker 1: This show is made by Obamedia