Because the dry space below the false floor held a footlocker. A real one, olive drab, with brass corners and a hasp that had rusted to the color of dried blood, packed into the end of that cistern like a coffin in a vault. I knelt on the wet concrete in my waders, with the pump still ticking behind me, and I put my light on the stenciled lettering on the lid. U.S. ARMY. And under it, a name: MALLORY, E. J.
I climbed out and washed my hands in the yard hose. The couple who had hired me, Sam and Priya, came out to the edge of the hole in their sneakers. Sam is a software engineer who works from home, and Priya teaches second grade, and they had bought the old Haskins place outside Ravenswood because the lot was big and the price was low. I told them what I had found, and Priya, who is practical, said, “Is it safe to open?” I said I had opened a hundred things like it. We lifted it out together with a rope.
The hasp broke on the first tap of my hammer. Inside, wrapped in a gray wool blanket, lay a folded flag, a bundle of letters tied in ribbon, and a small cloth bag. Priya opened the bag. Out into her palm slid two dog tags on a chain, a wedding band, and a folded photograph of a young woman in a headscarf, squinting and laughing. The tags were stamped. Mallory, Eugene J. T42 and a serial number. Sam read it twice. “It is a soldier,” he said. “From the war.”
At the very top of the footlocker, in a glassine sleeve, was a letter in the hand of an old man. I will tell you I have read many letters in my line of work and I do not read them lightly. Sam read this one aloud. “To whoever finds this: I am Walter Haskins. In September of 1944, in the hills above Bologna, I held my friend Gene Mallory while he died. I took his tags and his things, as I was told to do. I meant to bring them to his mother. I could not do it. I was ashamed that I had lived.”
The letter went on. Walter Haskins came home to West Virginia, married, bought a house, and lived for sixty years with a footlocker he could neither give away nor look at. He wrote that the mother of Gene Mallory had written to him twice, asking what had happened, and that he had never answered. He wrote that the army had listed his friend as missing, and that he had let it stand. He wrote, in a hand growing shaky, that he had built a hollow beneath the cistern because it was the only place he could think of where nobody would look and where nothing would rot.
“Missing,” Priya said, very quietly. “His family never knew.” I nodded. In my line of work I have seen how a family can hold a hole in the shape of a person for generations. I looked at the photograph in her hand, the girl in the scarf, squinting, laughing. On the back, in pencil, someone had written: Anna, Christmas 1943. Sam said he would call the Veterans Service office in Jackson County first thing in the morning. And then, without being asked, he stood and walked into the house and returned with three cups of coffee.
It took the county office two days and a woman in Charleston with a very long list of contacts. The army records confirmed that Private Eugene Mallory, of the 91st Infantry Division, was listed as missing in action on the fourteenth of September, 1944. A niece, Carol Mallory Ames, aged seventy six, was found living in Ohio. She had known her uncle only from the picture on the mantel of her grandmother, a boy in uniform, forever twenty. When the caseworker called her and said she had his dog tags, she did not speak for a full minute. Then she said, “I have been waiting my whole life.”
She drove down the following Saturday with her daughter, and we all gathered in the yard of Sam and Priya, around a card table spread with a white cloth. Carol put on a pair of white cotton gloves, which I thought was a beautiful touch, and lifted the tags out of the bag. She turned them over and over. She read the letters of her grandmother, the ones the soldier had saved, and she wept, softly, at a line in which the mother wrote that she had left the porch light on every night. The daughter held her arm. Nobody spoke.
No soldier is truly missing as long as someone is willing to carry his name home.
The tags did one more thing. Because the army now keeps DNA from the families of the missing, the niece was able to give a sample, and the staff of the Defense POW/MIA agency, who read the letter of Walter Haskins, took an interest. They had a note in their files about an unidentified burial near Bologna matching the description. It was not quick. These things never are. But eleven months later, on a bright morning in June, a letter came to Carol, with a seal, and a name, and the words, Positively identified.
They buried him at the national cemetery in Grafton, in a plot beside the grave of his mother, on a morning so clear you could see the hills for twenty miles. An honor guard folded the flag from the footlocker, which had been cleaned by the army and returned to the family. A bugler played taps. I stood at the back in my best jacket, next to Sam and Priya, with my cap against my chest. When the guard saluted, I saw an old man step forward from the crowd, leaning on a cane. He was the grandson of Walter Haskins. He laid a small bunch of wildflowers on the grave.
I did the cistern work myself, after all, filled the compartment with clean gravel and sealed the floor, and Sam and Priya put a garden above it, with a bench. The plaque on the bench reads, Gene Mallory and Walter Haskins, Friends. Carol visits twice a year, and she always brings a thermos of coffee and two cups. I do not ask who the second is for. I have a notion. A man can carry a heavy secret for sixty years. It is a very fine thing when the ground finally gives it up.