I knocked the loose brick out and put my flashlight into that walled-off little pocket beside the flue and looked at what was tucked in there, and I climbed down off that roof real slow, because it was a metal box, a good heavy fireproof one, and it was packed with the whole heart of a family.
Photographs, wrapped in oilcloth, generations of them. A family Bible with the births and the deaths written in the front. A christening gown, gone yellow with age. Deeds and papers. A child crayon drawing. A little velvet pouch of a womans jewelry. Everything a family owns that a family cannot ever replace, sealed up in the one part of a wood house that does not burn.
There was a letter with it, and it explained the thing a young couple from someplace else would never once have thought of. The family who built this house lived in fear of the fires. Up here in these woods, the big burns come through, and they have wiped whole towns clean off the map in a single afternoon, the Big Burn and the ones after it, walls of flame a man cannot outrun. And when a wood house goes, it goes to ash and nails in an hour. But the brick chimney stands. The chimney always stands.
If the fire ever takes the house, it will not take this. Everything we are that cannot be bought again is sealed here in the chimney, in the one place the flames cannot reach. The faces of our dead. The record of the family. The proof that we were here. If you are reading this, then either the fire came and the chimney kept its promise, or the long years did, and the old house changed hands. Either way, we were a family once, right here. Be good to the place. It kept us safe.
I sat in my truck a good while before I drove home, thinking about a family so afraid of losing everything to the fire that they built themselves a fireproof heart in the middle of their own house, and trusted the chimney to carry them through whatever came, even the total loss of every other thing. And it did. The house never once burned. But the chimney kept its promise anyway, and held their whole heart safe for a hundred years, until a sweep brush caught on it on an ordinary Tuesday.
The young couple who own the house now helped me track the family down, descendants scattered clear across the country, who had no idea any of it survived, who figured their great-grandparents photographs and the old family Bible were long gone to time. They wept on the phone. That was their whole history, come back to them out of the chimney of a house they never even knew had existed.
They came and got it, the whole heart of their family, the record of who they are and where they came from, kept safe against a fire that never came by people who loved them enough to plan for the very worst. The chimney kept its promise. I just happened to be the fellow who finally opened it up. Best day I ever had on a roof.