I read the old mans last line, chiseled shaky into the bottom of that cornerstone years after all the rest, and I set my chisel down real slow, because it said: I built this house for a family that never came, and I hope with all my heart it finally holds one now.
Twenty-eight years in stone, and I had to sit down on that hearth with the block in my lap.
The top of the cornerstone told the beginning. A name, a date from the 1890s, and a few lines from the man who built the place, saying he had raised the house with his own hands for his wife and the children they were expecting. He had named them, the children he was hoping for. He wrote what he prayed the house would hold for them.
And then, at the bottom, in a shakier hand and a different tool, added by the same man decades later, old now, was the heartbreaking truth: the children never came, the family he built the house for was never born, and he had lived out his long life alone under the roof he had raised for them.
The wife had died young, I gathered, or the children never arrived, or both. However it happened, the man who dreamed a houseful of family had grown old alone in it, and near the end of his life he had done a remarkable thing. He had lifted his own cornerstone, the one he set as a young man full of hope, and added one last line beneath his youthful dreams.
Not a bitter line. A hopeful one. He had blessed the family he would never have, and prayed that someday, long after he was gone, another family would fill the rooms he built for children who were never born.
I called the young couple over, the ones rebuilding his chimney. They were expecting their first child that very spring. And when I read them the old mans words, that he hoped the house would finally hold a family, the wife put her hand on her belly and wept.
His prayer had been answered. It just took a hundred years. The house the lonely old man built for a family that never came was about to hold exactly the family he dreamed of, a young couple and a baby on the way.
They did not seal that cornerstone back into the dark. They asked me to set it where they could see it, and I built it into the new hearth, the old mans name and his dream and his hundred-year-old prayer facing out into the room.
Their baby was born that spring. They rock her by that hearth, beside the words of the man who built the house and hoped, across a century, that a child would someday sleep beneath his roof. She does now. Twenty-eight years in stone, and that is the only cornerstone that ever answered its own prayer. I think the old man knows. I like to believe he finally has his family.