I set my sledge down real slow because the flashlight had lit up a pair of tall metal shelves, stacked to the ceiling with olive drab cans, and a wall painted with a yellow and black symbol that I had not seen since I was a boy. A triangle in a circle. FALLOUT SHELTER. I stood in the broken edge of the slab with a cloud of concrete dust still drifting, and I heard a young couple gasp behind me. The woman said, “Is that what I think it is?” I said, “It is a time machine.” Then I held the flashlight steady and let them look.
The chamber was about ten feet by twelve, with a poured concrete ceiling, a steel ladder in the corner leading up to a hatch that had been sealed over, and a ventilation pipe long since capped. The cans were dated 1961. Crackers, in tins. Water in square drums. A hand crank radio on a shelf. Bunk beds made of pipe and canvas. A card table with a faded checkerboard laid out for a game. On the wall, beside the symbol, a bulletin board with a typed list of rules and, in careful handwriting, a roster of names.
The couple, Ben and Priya, were both about thirty, and they had bought the house in Sutton as a fixer upper, hoping to make a nursery out of the back room. They stood in the dust with their mouths open. “Somebody built this,” Ben said, “in their backyard?” I explained that in the early sixties, thousands of families dug fallout shelters, afraid of the bomb. Some stocked them for years. Most forgot them. But a shelter built under the floor of the house, with a sealed hatch, was a special kind of devotion. These people had meant to stay alive, and they had meant to keep company.
The families who prepared for the end of the world often left behind the clearest evidence that they believed in each other.
On the bulletin board, the roster listed eleven names in neat blue ink. Not one family, but several. The Lindgrens, the Okonkwos, the Valdezes, the Feeneys, four households of Sutton, listed by address, with the number of adults and children in each. Under the names was a schedule of watches, in two hour shifts, and a list of foods that each family had contributed. At the bottom, printed in tall block capitals by what looked like a child, were the words, WE ARE ALL IN THIS TOGETHER. Priya read it twice, and then she turned away, wiping her eyes with her wrist.
On the card table, beside the checkerboard, lay a spiral notebook with a cardboard cover. It was a guest book. Every page was dated. Entries ran from October 1962, the week of the Cuban missile crisis, through the next spring. Children had drawn pictures. Wives had written recipes for canned ham. A man named Lars Lindgren had written, In case of the end, let it be known that we played the best game of checkers in Sutton. We shall go in good company. A boy named Tomas had signed with a drawing of a dog. They had spent six nights down here that October, I read, with a transistor radio and a deck of cards.
Ben turned the pages with great care. The last entry was dated November 2, 1962, in the graceful hand of a woman. The danger has passed. We have climbed the ladder and opened the hatch, and there is snow on the garden. I think we are all different people. We have decided to seal this room and to leave it as it is, so that the children, when they are old, can come back and see that once upon a time we were afraid together, and it made us brave. Tomas insists we leave a message. Dear Future. Be kind. Be careful. Keep the checkers.
“Keep the checkers,” Priya said, and she began to laugh. It was not a joke, but the laugh came up out of her anyway, a laugh of pure delight. She lifted the board in both hands and set it on the table. Every piece stood in its place, waiting for the next move. I was a rough man in a dusty cap, but I felt my eyes sting. I think there is no sight in the world as moving as an unfinished game left behind by people who loved each other. Ben put his hand on the table and said, “We are going to find them.”
It took the couple three weeks and a great many phone calls. The notebook gave them surnames, and the Sutton historical society gave them the rest. Of the eleven names on the roster, six were still living, scattered across the country. Tomas Valdez, the boy who drew the dog, was sixty seven now, a retired pharmacist in Phoenix. When Priya reached him, he was quiet for a long moment. Then he said, “We left a message under the floor? I have been telling my kids about that room for fifty years, and they think I made it up.”
They held a reunion on the first Saturday of June, in the backyard, under a striped tent. Ben and Priya had dug out the old stairwell and fitted a handrail, so that anyone could go down. Sixty people came, children and grandchildren and great grandchildren, some of them in wheelchairs. Tomas stood at the top of the ladder in a pressed shirt, looking down into the shelter, and then he went down alone, one rung at a time. I watched through the hatch as he stood in the lamplight, and touched the wall. He lifted the lid of the guest book, and he picked up a pencil, and he wrote something. I did not see what.
When he climbed back up, he was grinning like a boy. “They kept the checkers,” he said. Then he sat down at the card table in the yard, carried up for the occasion, and an old man from Ohio sat across from him, and they finished the game. It took twenty minutes. The old man won. Everyone applauded. The children ran down the stairs to explore, and the grown ups stood around with paper plates and told stories, and someone started to sing.
The nursery is done now. Ben built it above the old room, with a clear glass panel set into the floor so the baby can look down at the shelter. Priya says it is her favorite part of the house. They keep the hatch open on Sundays, and they leave a new page in the guest book for anyone who visits. I stopped by last week with a bag of nails. I read the new page standing in the lamplight. Under Tomas, in a round child hand, someone had written, Dear Past. We found it. We are being kind. We kept the checkers.