I set my wrench down real slow because the hatch opened on a narrow set of wooden steps, and at the bottom of them, in the beam of my flashlight, I could see the corner of a green steel trunk. Not a body, not a cache of cash, not any of the grim things a man in my trade imagines at three in the afternoon with a cast iron tub on its side. Just a trunk, dusty and dented, sitting on a dirt floor in a space about the size of a closet. I called up the stairs for the young couple, and they came running in their socks, holding hands.
Their names were Dana and Eli, both about thirty, newly married, and so excited about the old house in St. Marys that they had been sleeping on an air mattress in the dining room for a week. They crowded the doorway of the bathroom and looked down the hatch with wide eyes. Dana whispered, “It is a root cellar.” I said I thought it was something more. Eli went down first, carefully, with his phone light. The air smelled of cold stone and old paper. He put his hand on the trunk, and the lid opened without a sound, because it was not locked.
People hide the things they love most under the heaviest objects they own, hoping that no one strong enough to find them will be unkind enough to take them.
Inside lay a quilted blanket, folded, and under it a row of objects arranged with great care. A cavalry saber in a leather scabbard. A bundle of letters tied with a faded ribbon. A pair of tiny knitted baby shoes. A silver christening cup. A folded flag, and a bronze medal on a blue ribbon, in a velvet case that said Purple Heart. And on top of everything, in a yellow envelope, a typed letter dated 1944. Eli read the first line aloud. It was from the War Department, and it began with the words every family dreaded.
The letter informed Mrs. Alma Whitcomb that her son, Private First Class Raymond Whitcomb, was reported missing in action in the Hurtgen Forest. There was a second letter, dated nine months later, confirming the worst. And a third, from 1946, from a soldier who had served beside him, who wrote in pencil that Raymond had pulled two men out of a burning jeep and had never been afraid. I stood in that cellar with my cap in my hands and felt something tighten in my throat. The woman who had lived in this house had lost her boy, and she had put his life under the tub.
Dana was crying openly by then. “Why would she hide it?” she asked. “Why not keep it on a mantel?” I thought about that on the drive home. I think a mother cannot always bear to look at the loss every day. But she cannot bear to throw it away either. So she finds a place that is both close and out of sight, and she sits in the bath above it, with warm water on her shoulders, knowing her son is under her feet. It is a very old kind of love. It is the kind that does not need to be seen.
The young couple did not want to keep what was not theirs. The next morning, Dana went down to the county records office and looked up the Whitcomb name. A clerk named Mrs. Pruitt helped her trace the family through deeds and obituaries. Alma had died in 1981. Her only other child, a daughter named Ruth, had moved to Savannah and had passed in 2009. But Ruth had left behind a son. His name was Walter, and he was seventy, and he lived on a quiet cul de sac in Brunswick, forty minutes away, where he made violins.
I drove them there myself on Saturday, in the truck, with the trunk wrapped in a quilt in the bed. We stood on his porch, the three of us, and Dana rang the bell. A white haired man in a canvas apron opened the door, looking confused. When she told him why we had come, he went very still. “My grandmother used to say,” he said slowly, “that Raymond was home, and that he was safe. I thought she was talking about heaven.” We carried the trunk into his workshop. He opened it with his thumbs on the latches, and he sank onto a stool.
He picked up the baby shoes first. He turned them over and over in his fingers, and then he laughed, a wet, broken laugh. “These were mine,” he said. “She kept them all that time.” Next to them lay a snapshot, tucked into a fold of the blanket, of a smiling young man in uniform holding a baby in a white gown. Raymond had held him, once, a week before he shipped out. Walter held the photograph to his chest. “I never knew him,” he whispered. “I never knew he knew me.”
We stayed for two hours. He made us tea, and he showed us the violins hanging in rows on the wall like sleeping birds. He insisted we take something home, and he refused to hear no. Dana and Eli left that evening with a hand made fiddle for the new house, a small honey colored thing with a scroll of curly maple. They hung it over the fireplace. Walter has written to them every month since, and in the spring he drove up to see the bathroom, and he stood in it for a long time, in silence.
The tub is back in place now, but they left the hatch uncovered, with a small round rug and a brass handle. Dana says it reminds her that every old house has a heart. Eli built a shelf in the cellar and put a candle there, and on Memorial Day they light it. As for me, I got a card from Walter at Christmas, with a photo of the saber over his own mantel. On the back he wrote, Thank you for stopping. I have thought about that a lot. A tradesman who stops is rare. The wrench is worth keeping steady.