I pried the boards up one at a time and leaned out over it with my flashlight, and my hand just let go of the board, because down in there, on a little dry stone ledge maybe six feet down where the old well had long since gone dry, there was a small wooden cross, and a jar of long-dead flowers, and a child pair of shoes.
Little shoes. Old ones, the leather cracked with age, set careful side by side on that ledge, and above them the cross, hand-carved, with a name and two dates cut into it. The dates were only seven years apart. And all around it, jar after jar of flowers going back decades, the newest gone dry just lately, the oldest crumbled to dust, like somebody had been lowering fresh flowers down that well every single year for a very long time.
I went and asked Cecil, the old neighbor, and he told me the whole of it, quiet, sitting there on his porch. Sixty years back, before I was ever born, a little boy from down the road wandered into my grandpa yard while grandpa was off at work, and he got the cover off that old well, and he fell in, and by the time anybody found him it was too late. My grandpa was a young man then. He had left that well uncovered that one morning, meaning to fix the bad latch when he got home that evening. He blamed himself for it every day he lived after.
He boarded that well up with his own two hands the week they buried that child, and he never let a living soul near it again, and he never once said the boy name out loud in sixty years. But every year, on the day it happened, my gentle grandpa, the school-bus driver who ushered at church and would not cuss in front of a lady, went out to that boarded-up corner all alone, pried up a board, and lowered a fresh jar of flowers down to a little pair of shoes and a cross he had carved himself, and grieved a child that was not even his, a child he could not save, for sixty years, in secret, where not a soul would ever see him do it.
I could not give him back to his mama. All I could do was not forget him. Somebody ought to remember a child. So I did, every year, for as long as I lasted. That was written on a scrap of paper, sealed up in a little bottle, set there beside the cross.
I sat in that overgrown yard and cried for a grandfather I thought I had known all the way through and never really knew at all. That gentleness everybody loved so in him, the softness, the way he never had a hard word for a living soul, all of it had grown up out of one terrible morning and one small pair of shoes at the bottom of a well.
We are not selling that place now. We talked it over, all of us, and we just cannot. Instead we tracked down the boy family, still around Elizabethton, older folks now, a brother and a niece who never knew that the man across the road had mourned their boy for sixty years. We are putting up a real stone, out in the sun, with the child name on it, and my grandpa name right there beside it, the two of them together at last, the boy and the man who never once stopped remembering him. Some griefs are too heavy to carry out loud. My grandpa carried this one in the dark for sixty years so that a little boy would not be forgotten. He will not be. Neither of them will.