I got down on my bad knees and shined a flashlight into the hole, and I had to switch it off and just sit there in the dark a while, because down in that boxed-in hollow, wrapped in a scrap of oilcloth gone stiff, was a little tin, and inside the tin was a wedding ring, a tintype photograph, and a few pages folded soft as cloth.
The photograph was a young woman, done up the old way, the way they did them a hundred years ago and more. Long dress, hair up, a face that must have been kind even before the photographer told her to hold still. And the pages were a letter, the ink gone to rust, written by the man I bought this place from back in sixty-eight, or by his own father before him, I could not rightly tell which anymore.
He wrote about a woman named Ada. His wife. They had homesteaded this ground young, the two of them alone, broke and half-froze those first winters, and they had loved it, and loved each other on it. And Ada had died here, of a fever, in the spring of their fourth year, before they had a single child between them, and he had buried her on the rise behind the house. The same rise where, fifty years later, I would go and bury my own wife without ever once knowing.
He could not take Ada with him when age and hard times finally drove him off this land. And he could not stand to leave her ring and her face out in the open for a stranger to paw through or throw in a fire. So he buried them here, under the pump pad, in the one spot he figured would lie undisturbed, close to her, in the ground she loved, and he trusted it to time.
Whoever finds this, be gentle with it. Her name was Ada and she was the whole of my heart. She lies on the rise behind the house. Say her name sometime, if you would. A person is not gone as long as somebody still says the name.
I am eighty-one years old. I have lived on this land more than fifty years now. I raised my kids on it, and I buried my own wife, my Ruth, up on that same rise, under the pines, because it was the prettiest and most peaceful spot on the whole place. And I never once knew that another man, a hundred years back, had laid his own young wife down in that very ground for that very same reason, and grieved her the same way, and loved this hard beautiful country the same as I always have.
I sat out there in the cold and the dark a long time, an old widower holding the ring of another old widower, the two of us a century apart, tied together by one rise of ground and two women neither of us could keep. In the morning I walked up to the rise with my son, and we laid his Ada down next to my Ruth, the two of them side by side under the pines at last, and I said both their names out loud into the cold clean air. Ada. Ruth. This land has held a great deal of love and a great deal of grief, and it will hold mine too before very long, and somebody someday will turn up whatever is left of me and, I hope, say my name just once, the way I said his Ada. That is about all a person gets, in the end. It is enough. It is plenty.