Because the space behind the wall was lined, floor to ceiling, with shelves, and on the shelves were jars. Hundreds of them. Every one labeled in the same tidy hand, and every one sealed, and every one still full.
Now, I know what a root cellar looks like, and this wasnt that. A root cellar is a room. This was a secret. Somebody had built a pantry behind a sauna where the dry heat would keep the damp off it, and then paneled over the door so you would never know it was there unless you tore the cedar out.
I didnt touch a jar. I shined my light along the shelves and read the labels, and that is when the cold feeling went out of me and something else came in.
They were dated. The oldest was from 1979. Peaches, apple butter, green beans, pickled beets, venison, soup stock. Twenty-two years of putting food by, and then it stopped, all at once, in 2001.
At the end of the last shelf, at eye level where you couldnt miss it, was a cigar box. Inside was a ledger and a letter.
I called the couple down before I read either one. It was their house. The husband opened the letter and read it out loud, and his wife held onto his arm.
The man who built the house had come over from Finland after the war. He built the sauna first, before the house was even finished, because that was how it was done where he came from. And he built the pantry behind it because he had been a boy during a winter when there was nothing, and he had promised himself that no house he lived in would ever be empty.
His wife did the canning. Every summer for twenty-two years. The ledger listed every batch. And then she passed in the fall of 2001, and he wrote the letter and sealed the wall, because he could not bear to open it and see her handwriting on every jar, and he could not bear to throw any of it away.
The letter ended by saying that whoever found it should know that nothing in the room was for him. It had all been put up for the family that would live in the house after, because that was what a pantry was for, and he was sorry it had taken him so long to let go of it.
The wife asked me if any of it was still good. I told her the truth, which is that I am a carpenter and not a food inspector, and that twenty-year-old peaches are a question for somebody else.
But I also told her that what the old man had left was not really the food.
He had sealed up twenty-two summers of his wifes work behind a wall, and then he had left a letter telling the next family it was theirs.
They called the county extension office. A woman came out and went through the shelves with gloves on and a notebook. Most of it had to go, as you would expect. But some of it, the honey and a few of the hard sealed things, she said were fine, and the jars themselves were worth keeping, and the ledger was something a historical society would want to see.
I rebuilt the sauna. New benches, new cedar, the works. But I built the back wall with a door in it this time, a proper one, and I put a shelf just inside at eye level.
The wife put the cigar box there. Next to it she put the first jar she ever canned herself, that August. Peaches. She wrote the date on the lid in the same spot the old woman always had.
She said the room should never be empty again. I told her I thought the man who built it would agree.