They were tearing the old grade school down in the spring, and they hired me to pull anything worth money out of her before the dozers came, copper mostly. I did twelve years at Union Carbide before my back quit, so pulling wire out of a dead building is easy money and quiet work. I went to that school myself, matter of fact. Sat in those very rooms. That is a strange feeling, prying the guts out of a building that taught you to read.
I was down in the boiler room, the old part, chasing a heavy line along the wall behind the panel, and my bar catches on the stone, and a chunk of it moves. Not stone. A face of stone glued onto a wooden door, made to look like the wall. Somebody had walled off a little cavity down there and dressed it up so you would never know, unless you were dumb enough to be swinging a bar behind the panel like I was.
The little door pulled open on a hinge gone stiff with rust. Inside, up on a shelf cut into the foundation, dry as anything, there was a metal box, schoolhouse-gray. I lifted it down. It was heavier than it looked. I set it on my knees and thumbed the lid up. And I sat down on those cold basement steps holding it.
It was a time capsule. A whole classroom of it. Letters, dozens of them, each in a childs careful pencil, each folded and labeled, to be opened at our twenty-year reunion. Our teacher, Miss Albright, had the class write letters to the grown-ups we would someday be, and she sealed them down in that boiler room for safekeeping. Then she took sick and passed that very summer, and nobody else knew where she put them, and the reunion came and went with the letters walled up in the dark, forgotten for near fifty years.
I went through them with shaking hands. And I found mine. My own name in my own eight-year-old print. I opened a letter I wrote to myself half a century ago and had no memory of writing.
Dear grown-up me. I hope you are a fireman. I hope you married Cindy Voss. I hope you are not scared of things anymore. Do not forget to be nice. Love, you.
I was not a fireman. I did not marry Cindy Voss. But I read that last line, do not forget to be nice, sitting on the steps of the school that was about to be rubble, and I decided the boy had asked me for one thing and I could still give it to him.
I tracked down every classmate I could find, and there are not so many of us left. But I got those letters into the hands of gray-haired men and women all over this county, each one meeting the child they used to be. Some laughed. Most cried. Nobody was untouched.
They knocked the school down a week later. But Miss Albright letters got out first, fifty years late, right before the end. She kept a promise to a room full of kids from beyond the grave. I just carried it up out of the basement.