And what was underneath them was not a thing I expected to find in a shut-up house at the end of the street.
Under the musty quilts, wrapped in oilcloth, was a bundle of papers and a few small things, and it took me a while to understand what I was holding. Papers in a language I could not read, stamped and folded and refolded a hundred times. A photograph of a young man in a uniform that was not any American uniform I knew. And a second photograph, a whole family, a mother and a father and four children on the steps of a house in a town with a name I could not sound out.
Old Doyle, we called him, thirty years at the end of our street here in Ocala, blinds shut, yard grown over, ten words out of the man in all that time. I had him figured for a sour old hermit who did not care for people. I was holding proof I had never known him at all.
It took me weeks and a professor at the community college to piece it together. The papers were from a displaced persons camp in Europe, after the war. Doyle was not the name he was born with. He had come across as a boy of fourteen, the only one of that family on the steps to live through it. The uniform in the photo was his older brothers. The rest of them, the mother and father and the little ones, he had lost in a way the professor read aloud to me and then went quiet.
Tucked in the oilcloth was one line in English, in a old mans careful, foreign hand, on a scrap of paper.
I kept the blinds shut because behind them I could still see their faces. I did not want to lose the faces to the light.
A whole street called him strange. He was not strange. He was the last man standing of a family that got erased, carrying every one of them behind those shut blinds so their faces would not fade, for thirty years, alone, at the end of my street, while I waved and thought him unfriendly.
I did not sell that cedar chest or anything in it. The professor helped me find a museum that keeps records of families like Doyles, so the names on those steps would be written somewhere permanent, would be more than a photograph in a dead mans chest. And there was a niece, it turned out, a grandchild of that brother in the uniform, alive in Chicago, who never knew the boy who got out had lived a whole long life in Florida.
She has the photographs now. She has the faces. Doyle kept them safe in the dark for thirty years so that someday somebody could carry them back into the light, and I just happened to be the one who bought the chest. I think about him every time I pass that house. I do not think strange anymore. I think brave. I think alone. I think I should have knocked.