And I came down off that ladder and went to wake my wife up, because I had to show somebody or I was not going to believe it come morning.
Up in that gap between the ceiling and the floor above, laid on a board somebody had fitted in special, was a small sea chest. No bigger than a bread box, banded in brass gone green. Inside, wrapped in oilcloth, was a leather book, a ring, and a photograph.
The book was a ship log. Neat little entries in fountain pen, dates from the nineteen twenties, a man setting down weather and cargo and the moods of Lake Erie the way a sailor does. He ran the ore boats out of Ashtabula harbor, back when this town moved half the coal and iron on the lakes. The last entry was November of nineteen twenty-nine, and it stopped mid-page, the way a thing stops when it was not meant to end there.
The photograph was a young man in a peacoat with his arm around a young woman on a porch, this porch, our porch, when the paint was new. And the ring was a wedding band, worn thin.
I did the reading later, down at the historical society. His name was Emil, and he went down with his boat in a November gale in nineteen twenty-nine, him and the whole crew, the lake never gave a one of them back. He and his bride had built this house the year before. She was carrying their first when he shipped out that last time. And she lived here another forty-some years, a widow at twenty-three, and she never remarried, and she raised that baby alone under this roof, and somewhere in her grief she climbed up and sealed his log and his ring into the ceiling, right over where they used to eat their suppers, so he would be above them always and she would never have to look at it and never have to let it go.
Fair weather promised. Home to Clara by Sunday. That was the last line he ever wrote, and he never made it home, and I have not been able to get it out of my head since.
Clara passed in nineteen seventy-one. But the baby she raised had children, and those children are scattered around the county still, and I tracked down a granddaughter over in Conneaut. She knew her great-grandfather had drowned on the lake. She never knew a thing about a log or a ring. When I set that thin gold band in her palm, she cried, and she told me her family had never had a single thing of his, not one object his hands had touched, because the lake had kept it all.
The log is going into a glass case at the maritime museum down at the harbor this fall, with Emil name and his ship on the card, so the town remembers one more of the men it lost out there. The ring, the granddaughter is keeping. And Emil, after ninety-some years, finally made it home to shore.