The initials beside the red X were D.K., and the date was the ninth of July 1971. Every person in my family knew those two letters, because they belonged to the name we did not say. Daniel Kessler. My brother. He was seventeen when he left our farm in the middle of the night, and the story I had been told for fifty two years was that he went west, got into trouble, and was never heard from again. My father said it at the table, in a flat and final voice, and my mother never said anything. I sat in the study of my Aunt Ruth with the map spread over my knees and the clock ticking in the hall.
I took the map out to the north pasture that afternoon with a garden spade and a thermos of coffee. The farm belonged to a cousin now, who let me walk it. I found the spot easily. Aunt Ruth had marked it by a flat stone under a lone bur oak, in the corner where the fence made a slow turn. I dug for twenty minutes in the autumn sun. When the spade rang on metal, I got down on my hands and knees, and I lifted out a rusty Folgers can, sealed all around with melted candle wax. Inside, wrapped in a handkerchief, was a bundle of papers tied with a shoelace.
There were three things in the can. A draft notice, dated June 1971, addressed to Daniel R. Kessler. A bank book from the First National Bank of Galena, opened in the name of Daniel, with forty eight thousand dollars. And a letter, folded small, in the tiny handwriting of my aunt. Patty, if you are reading this, your brother is alive, and he is not a bad man. He did not want to go to Vietnam, and your father said he would rather see him gone than shamed. I helped him get to Canada. I have written to him every year. His address is on the back. He asks about you. I should have told you sooner.
A county survey map locked in a cabinet gave one niece the weekend to bring her brother home to the hillside town of Galena.
I sat under the bur oak until the sun was low, with the letter in my lap. I thought of the winter of 1971, when I was eleven years old and my brother had taught me to skate on the frozen creek. I turned the letter over. On the back, in pencil, was an address in Winnipeg, Manitoba. A street I had never heard of. The name of a woman, Margaret. I put the letter in my coat, and I walked back to the house with the can in my arms, shaking the whole way.
I called my sister Joan that night, who lives in Dubuque and is sixty eight. She was quiet for a long time after I told her. “Patty, Daddy told me Danny was lost in a car wreck in Oregon,” she said at last. “He told me that when I was fourteen. I cried for a month.” She started to sob. “He lied to both of us. He lied to Mama.” I held the phone, and tears ran down my own face. We agreed that we would go together. We would leave in the morning, in her car, and we would drive the nine hundred miles to Winnipeg without stopping, except for gas and for coffee.
My cousin Roger came by the house on Main Street that night, as we were packing, and tried to talk us out of it. He is sixty four and a deacon at the Methodist church. He said it would only bring pain. He said a man who ran from his country had no right to a family. He picked the draft notice off the kitchen table and crumpled it in his fist. “Burn this,” he said. “Let the past rest.” I took it gently out of his hand, smoothed it flat on the table, and looked him in the eye. “Roger, he is not gone,” I said. “And he never was. He was only waiting for somebody to come.”
The house in Winnipeg was a yellow bungalow on a street of bare maples. A woman in her seventies came to the door, small and sharp eyed, and I knew her at once as Margaret from the letter. She looked at Joan, and at me, and put her hand to her throat. “You are the sisters,” she said, in a trembling voice. Behind her in the hall appeared a tall, stooped old man in a gray cardigan, with white hair and the eyes of my father. He held onto the doorframe. “Patty?” he whispered. “Joanie?” Joan made a sound I had never heard from her, and we were all in the arms of one another on the porch.
The money consequences were small, and the best of all. The forty eight thousand dollars in the bank book had grown with interest to a little more than one hundred and ten thousand, and Daniel would not take a cent. He had been a teacher for forty years in Manitoba, he said, with a pension and a house, and he wanted it to go to his nieces and nephews, and to the children of Ruth. I kept the farm survey. Joan kept the Folgers can. And the three of us decided together that the red X in the north pasture would never be dug up again, but left, with a bench, in memory.
In the name of my Aunt Ruth, who passed last fall and who mailed one letter a year for fifty two years, I started the Red X Fund. It pays for travel, legal help and counseling for families in Jo Daviess, Carroll and Stephenson counties who are reconnecting with relatives lost to war, estrangement or old shame. In the first year, we helped twenty eight families. A man of seventy five, in a corduroy jacket, laid a postcard on the desk and said, “My brother sent this from Sweden in 1972.” I said that we would help him write back.
That Thanksgiving, Daniel crossed the border for the first time in fifty three years. He had received a pardon in the 1970s, he told us, and had never believed it. He came through the door of the Galena house with a pie from a Winnipeg bakery, wearing a bright red scarf, and Joan and I stood in the hall like girls. We sat down together at the long table, the three of us and our children, and we ate until dark. At the end, Daniel stood by the window and looked up the hill to the farm. “It looks the same,” he said. “It looks exactly the same.”