What I felt on that ledge was a coffee can, the old kind with the little key on the side, wrapped tight in oilcloth and tied off with baling wire. It was heavy and bone dry.
I did not open it. That is not my place. I climbed down and carried it inside to the couple. Dana and Ray had been living out of boxes for two weeks while they fixed up that old house on the north side of Marietta.
I set the can on the kitchen counter and told them exactly where it came from. Ray laughed and said it was probably a can of old nails. Dana did not laugh. She was staring at the baling wire, the way it was twisted in three tight loops at the top.
“My granddaddy tied everything like that,” she said quietly. “Fence gates, tomato stakes. Three loops. Every single time.”
Then she told me the part I did not know. This was the house her grandparents owned for almost forty years. Her grandfather, Walter, rebuilt that chimney himself in the fall of 1984. After he passed, the family sold the place, and it went through three owners before a sign finally went up in the yard last spring. Dana and Ray put most of their savings into buying it back.
Ray cut the wire with a pair of pliers. Inside was an envelope sealed in a sandwich bag, and under it a small velvet box gone gray with age.
Dana opened the envelope first. It was a letter in pencil, dated Christmas 1984, written to her grandmother.
Ruthie, you always said I never got you a real ring. We married at the courthouse in 1951 with a band from the five and dime, and you wore it thirty three years like it was gold. I have been putting away a little from every paycheck at the mill. This is the ring you should have had. I am hiding it where you will never look, and on our fortieth I am going to light a fire and tell you to check the chimney.
Dana put her hand over her mouth. Walter had a stroke in 1990, she said. He lived eight more years, but he never spoke clearly again. The fortieth came and went. Nobody ever knew there was anything to find.
Ray opened the velvet box. It was a plain gold ring with one small diamond, the kind a mill worker could afford if he saved for years.
Here is the part that got me. Ruth is still living. She is ninety three, in an assisted living place about ten minutes from that house.
Dana called me the next Sunday. She said they drove over that same afternoon, and when her grandmother saw that ring she cried for a solid ten minutes. Then she put it on and said, “Well, he always did run late.”
She shows it to every nurse on the floor now.
And that first fire in the house? Dana and Ray waited and lit it with Ruth sitting right there in front of it, the way Walter planned. I got the invitation. I went.
Nineteen years I have been cleaning chimneys. That is the only one I ever cried over.