A young couple hired me to tear out the old brick fireplace in their new place here in Terre Haute. It never drew right, smoked up the room every time they lit it, and they wanted it gone and a proper one put in. I have done masonry thirty years. Old fireplace like that, you take it down course by course, salvage what brick you can. I told them a couple days and figured on an easy job.
Working up into the chimney, I got to the damper, and it would not budge, because somebody had bricked it shut. Mortared right over and around it, sealed the flue closed above the damper. That is why the thing never drew. But that is not a thing you do by accident. Somebody deliberately sealed off that flue a long time ago and closed a fireplace this family had been fighting with ever since.
And up in that sealed-off dead space, resting on the closed damper, something was waiting, up in the dark and the soot for years. I broke the old damper loose with my chisel, and a heavy wrapped thing came down out of that dead flue in a shower of soot and landed on the hearth. I pulled back a corner of the wrapping. And I stood right up and called for the couple in the next room, because this was theirs to open, not mine.
Wrapped in oilcloth and old canvas was a family Bible, the big kind, iron-cornered, and a bundle of photographs, and a packet of letters tied in ribbon. Somebody had sealed a family whole history up that chimney, in the safest dry warm place in the house, and bricked it in to keep it through something, a fire, hard times, I could not say. And then never come back for it.
The young wife opened that Bible on her own hearth, and the front pages were the family tree, generation after generation written in fading ink. She went white. Because the names in that Bible were her names. Her maiden name, her people, going back and back.
Her own great-great-grandparents had built this house. She had bought her ancestors home without ever knowing it, drawn to it, she said later, for no reason she could name. The photographs were her blood, faces she had the shape of. The letters were her family courting and marrying and grieving and hoping under this very roof.
Tucked in the back of the Bible was a note, brittle, in the oldest hand of all.
We seal these away for whoever of ours comes home to this house someday. Blood finds its way back. When you read this, you are proof of it. Welcome home.
Blood finds its way back. Written a hundred and some years ago by a woman who never met the great-great-granddaughter who would stand on that hearth and read it, soot on her hands, crying.
They did not tear the fireplace out after that. They had me repair it, open that sealed flue, make it draw right for the first time in a century. It works perfect now. And that young woman lights it every cold night and sits with her family Bible, home in a house that was always, somehow, waiting on her.