The old man in the wheelchair held the rusty box in his lap with both hands, as though it might fly away. His name was Arthur Lindqvist, he told us, and he was ninety five. He had come from a care home in Des Moines with his nurse, and he had come, he said, to keep a promise made in 1949. Megan sat on the courthouse step with the photograph in her hand. Blake stood behind her. I sat down beside my daughter and took the box from the old man, very carefully, and laid it on my knees.
The lid was stuck with rust, and it took a pocketknife to open it. Inside, wrapped in oilcloth, were three things. A baby bracelet of tiny white beads, spelling the name ANNA. A lock of dark hair tied with a thread. And a letter, folded small, in the round handwriting of a girl. It began, My darling baby. I could not read it for a long minute, for the tears. I handed it to Megan, and my daughter read it aloud on the courthouse steps, in a small shaking voice, while the people of Marshalltown walked past with their briefcases.
My mother, Dorothy, whom I had loved with my whole heart for seventy seven years, had been my aunt. The girl in the photograph was her younger sister, Ellen. She was seventeen when I was born, in a small farmhouse outside Marshalltown, in the spring of 1948. The father of the baby was the boy who had come to work the harvest, Arthur, eighteen years old and without a penny. The family would not hear of it. Ellen had a hard father, who ran Arthur off the farm and gave the baby to his older daughter, who had no children of her own.
Ellen did not live to see me grow. She caught polio in the summer of 1952 and died in a hospital in Des Moines, at twenty one. Dorothy never told me. She raised me as her own, in the house with the young tree out front, and she kept the secret for the rest of her life, I think because she was afraid I would love her less. I would not have. I sat on the courthouse steps and told Megan that I would have loved her exactly the same, and I wished with all my heart that I could tell her so.
A tree can keep a secret for seventy six years, and then, when the saw bites into it, tell the whole truth at once.
The story of Arthur came out slowly, with pauses to breathe. He had worked for the farm family as a harvest hand, and he and Ellen had loved each other from May to September. When the baby was born, the father of Ellen sent him away. Before he went, Ellen pressed the box into his hands, with her letter and the bracelet inside, and made him promise to put it where the baby could one day find it. That spring Arthur planted a young tree in the yard of her sister, nailed the box to its trunk, and sealed it with tar. He wrote to Ellen for a year, he said. Her father burned the letters.
He did not learn until 1961 that Ellen had died. By then he was married to a good woman in Des Moines and was a father himself. He thought of coming back. But he had been told that the baby was well and happy in the home of her aunt, and he could not bring himself to break it. Last month a nurse read him an article from the Marshalltown paper about an old woman who fought the city over a tree, and showed him the photograph of the house. He knew it at once. He said, “That is the tree.” He asked to be driven here.
I was speechless. Seventy seven years, and the father of whom I had never been told sat in front of me in a plaid blanket, with a face I knew from the mirror. Megan was weeping. Blake stood with his hands in his pockets, white and stricken. And I looked at Arthur, and he looked at me, and for a long moment neither of us said a word. Then he lifted a trembling hand and said, in a voice like paper, “You have her chin.” I put my hand in his, and I said, “Hello, Papa.”
Blake apologized that same afternoon, in the hallway of the courthouse, to me and to Arthur. He said he had ordered the tree cut because a contractor had promised him a favor, and the contractor wanted the lot for a parking garage. There had never been an arborist report. He resigned from the council that week, before they could vote again, and he confessed everything to the DNR. I did not make it easy for him. But Megan stood beside him through it all, and I could see she still loved him, and that was reason enough for a second chance.
Arthur lived another fourteen months. I drove down to Des Moines every second Sunday with a thermos and a plate of pie, and we sat in the garden of the care home and talked. He told me about Ellen. How she laughed with her whole face. How she could whistle through her fingers. How she once chased a rooster across a field in her Sunday dress. I wrote everything in a spiral notebook. In return, I told him about Dorothy, and about my life, my students, my children. He listened as though I were reading him a book he had waited his whole life to hear.
When he died, in the spring, I was holding his hand. He was buried beside Ellen, in the little cemetery outside Marshalltown, because he had asked to be, and his family from Des Moines came and stood with mine. The foreman who had found the box, a bearded man named Hank, cut a thick round from the heart of the old trunk, planed it smooth, and made it into a bench. We set it under the new tree in my front yard, with a brass plate. For Ellen and Arthur, who planted it, and for the daughter who found it.
I sit on that bench most evenings in summer. The new tree is only a sapling, no taller than a fence post, just as the old one was in the photograph. Megan sits with me sometimes, and the grandchildren hang a tire swing from the low branch, and I like to think that somewhere in the whisper of the leaves, two young people are laughing. I pat the wood beside me. I tell Harold to scoot over.