I set my grinder down real slow because the flashlight showed me a copper cylinder lying in the cavity, about the length of my forearm, turned green at the seams and sealed at both ends with a thick layer of wax. Under the wax was an engraved plate. The cold I had felt went out of me all at once, replaced by something heavier. The plate read: ANTONIO FERRANTE JR. PFC, U.S. ARMY. 1948 to 1969. HE CAME HOME. I knelt there on the broken terrazzo with my knees in the dust and did not move for a long time.
The young couple were named Nate and Claire, and they stood behind me in the doorway, holding hands. They had bought the house in Sistersville on a whim and fell in love with the floor. I told them what the plate said, and Claire made a small sound, as if she had been struck. I did not open the cylinder. It felt like opening a grave. I called a man I knew at the county veterans office, a gentle retired sergeant named Ed Pruitt, and asked him if he could come over, and if he could come in his uniform.
Ed arrived in forty minutes, wearing his old Army dress blues with the creases still sharp. He stood over the cylinder, took off his cap, and said a short prayer. Then, with the three of us watching, he used a pocketknife to open the wax seal. Inside was a folded flag, a Purple Heart, a Bronze Star, a small Bible, and a thick letter written on an onion skin paper in a blocky, careful hand. Ed read the name at the top, and he went very quiet. “Aldo Ferrante,” he said. “The mason. He poured half the floors in this valley.”
Grief that cannot speak will sometimes pour itself into stone, and wait for a gentle stranger to carry it home.
The letter was dated October 1971. Aldo wrote that his oldest boy had been killed in the Ia Drang valley two years earlier, and that when the Army brought the flag to his door, he had not been able to look at it, or to throw it away, or to stand in the same room with it. He had poured the floor of his new house that fall. “I could not bury him in the ground without a body,” he wrote, “so I have buried him in the floor, where my feet will walk over him every day, and where I will know that he is under my care.”
There was more. Aldo wrote that he had been wrong to hide the grief, and that his wife, Rosa, had begged him to put it somewhere she could see. He had refused. “If I am gone and you find this,” he went on, “then I hope the man who finds it is a good one. Please give my boy a proper place. Please tell his sister Gina that I loved him more than I knew how to say. Please tell her I was a poor father to the living, and I am sorry.” Ed folded the letter and held it a moment against his chest.
Gina Ferrante Walsh, it turned out, was seventy eight years old and lived in a small apartment in Wheeling. Ed and I drove there together the next Saturday, with the cylinder wrapped in a quilt on the back seat. She opened the door with a walker. I will never forget her face when Ed told her who we were. She said, “Daddy never spoke of Tony. Mama used to cry in the kitchen. I never understood why he would not even let us hang a photograph.” She took the letter with trembling hands and read it standing in the doorway.
When she finished, she said nothing for a long time. Then she looked up at me, and she laughed, a small bright wet laugh that startled us both. “That old stubborn man,” she said. “He built a floor so my brother could be safe, and then he never told a soul.” She asked to see the flag. Ed unfolded it carefully on her kitchen table and the three of us stood there in silence. The stars were faded to a soft gray blue, and there was a thread of copper dust along the fold. Gina touched it once, with one finger.
We held a ceremony in the spring at the cemetery in Sistersville. Ed arranged it. There were twenty veterans in uniform, and Nate and Claire, and Gina in a wheelchair with a blanket on her lap, and a young soldier from the National Guard who played Taps on a bugle. The flag was presented to her by a white haired man who had served with Tony in the same company. He had driven four hours from Ohio when he heard. He saluted the stone for a full minute, and none of us looked away.
I finished the floor in May. Nate and Claire asked me to leave a section unground, a small square near the doorway where the original stone showed, rough and grey and a little cracked, the way Aldo had left it. In the middle of that square I set a small bronze plate that Gina had paid for. It says, simply: ANTONIO FERRANTE JR. HE CAME HOME. People walking in the front door of that house step over it every day, and many of them stop, and I think Aldo would be glad.
Twenty two years of floors, and I have ground a hundred of them smooth. I have never again felt the cold I felt that afternoon, because I learned what it was. It was not fear. It was the weight of the love of a father that had no place to go and had to be poured into stone. Sometimes now, when I am at home in the evening, I think about the men who built the world I stand on, and what they left under it, and I treat every floor like a quiet kind of church.