The hidden door in the plaster mountain was no bigger than a picture frame. It swung open on a hinge of brass wire, and inside the hollow of the peak, lit by the little depot lamps we had left burning, we found a space about the size of a bread box. Three things sat in it. A yellow envelope. A square tin box that had once held Prince Albert tobacco. And a small gray cap, a child cap, with a Cubs patch sewn on the front. Paige gave a low cry and covered her mouth. She had gone white to the lips. I put my arm around her shoulders, and for once she let me.
“That was the cap of my father,” she whispered. “He wore it every day he drove. It was missing from the things the police gave us.” Scott took the envelope out and handed it to his wife, and she turned it over, and I saw that her hands were trembling so that she could not break the seal. I took it from her and slid my thumb under the flap. Inside were a dozen typed pages stapled together, stamped across the top with the name of the Burlington Northern railroad, and a handwritten letter on yellow paper in the small, upright script of my husband.
I read the letter of Herb aloud, because Paige asked me to, in a voice that grew steadier as I went. Paige, you do not know me. I am a conductor who retired from the railroad in 2006. In the early morning of October 14, 2004, I was the conductor on the freight that struck the pickup of Dennis Hollis at the Pike Road crossing outside Monmouth. I was riding in the cab with the engineer. We blew the horn. We threw the brakes. The crossing gates did not come down. They had not come down for three weeks, and I had reported it twice. Your father was thirty eight years old.
A good man who keeps a terrible secret may spend his life building a little town, and hiding the only true thing inside the mountain.
Paige slid down onto the bottom step and sat with her hands pressed to her face. I kept reading. The railroad investigated itself, Herb wrote, and found that the driver had failed to stop. They did not mention the gates. They told the family the man had been distracted. The pages in the yellow envelope, he said, were the real maintenance log, which he had photocopied the night after the accident, hiding the pages in his lunch pail, and the report he had written and been told to burn.
“Why did he never say?” Scott asked, in a rough voice. I turned the page. Herb had written the answer plainly. I was fifty three years old and two years from my pension. They told me if I made trouble, I would lose it, and my wife would be left with nothing. I told myself I would wait until I retired. Then I told myself it was too late. I have never forgiven myself. I could not look at your family. In 2005, I found out that your daughter was dating my son. I have built a small town for forty years, and I have put the truth inside it, where my own conscience could not get at it.
There was a pause, and then I laughed, a small startled laugh, because it was such a Herb thing to do. The man could not say a hard word to save his life. But he could build a nine foot layout of Galesburg, with every depot and crossing exact, and lay one tiny plaster mountain in the middle, with a lock. “He knew,” I said. “He knew who she was. He loved my son, and he knew who his wife was. And he could never tell her.” Paige looked up at me through her tears. She said, “Joan, he never told you either.”
No, he never had. I wanted to be furious with him, and I tried. I felt the anger come up, hot and bitter. But in the same moment I remembered the man in the hospital bed, with his hand curled around mine, saying, Joanie, finish Seminary Street. He had not been asking me to finish a street. He had been asking me to finish a story. Paige reached up, and I took her hand, and for the first time since she had moved into my house I felt her fingers close tight around mine. “I am sorry,” she said. “I was so awful about the basement.” I said, “You were grieving. We all were.”
The tin box held more. Wrapped in a clean handkerchief lay the watch of Dennis Hollis, a plain Timex that had stopped at 5:48, the moment of the accident, and a photograph of a young man in a Cubs cap holding a little girl on his shoulders. Herb had walked the crossing the day after and found it in the gravel. He had kept it for twenty years. Paige held the watch against her cheek, and the photograph in her other hand, and wept in a way that sounded like the opening of a long locked room. Scott knelt by her and held her until she was done.
The lawyer who had kept the key for Herb was a gentle old man named Barlow, and he came to the house the next morning with his briefcase. The statute for a lawsuit had passed years before, he said, but the log and the report could still go to the state commission, and to a newspaper. Paige said yes without hesitating. In the spring, the Illinois Commerce Commission opened a hearing, and in June, the railroad paid for a modern signal at the Pike Road crossing and agreed to a public statement. Paige stood at the microphone and read three sentences about her father. She did not cry.
We rebuilt the basement together that summer. Scott laid the new track on Seminary Street. Paige, who had planned a workout studio, hung a single punching bag in the corner and a mat by the furnace, and the rest of the room belongs to the town of 1957. Her little daughter, my granddaughter Lila, stands on a stool and runs the trains with a remote Delbert made her. On the wall above the depot, we hung a framed photograph of two men in caps, Herb and Dennis, side by side, which Barlow found in an old union newsletter. They are both laughing.
Every Sunday afternoon at three, the whole family comes down the stairs, and Paige closes the little door in the mountain and opens it again, like a ritual. Inside now are other things. A school photograph of Lila. A key to the front door of our house. A note in my own hand, which says, Welcome home. The tiny man in the tiny cap waves his lantern beside the depot, and the engine goes around, and around, and round, and I think about the old railroad saying that a train always arrives at the station where it was truly headed.