The face in the wedding photograph belonged to Lorraine Hatch, who had been crowned Miss Keith County in 1950, and whose portrait still hung beside the front desk of the Ogallala Public Library with a brass plate beneath it. Our Lorraine, lost to the Platte, 1953. Every schoolchild in town had been told her story. A beautiful girl, a spring flood, a car found on the sandbar, and a search that went on for a week. In the photograph, she wore a lace veil and stood on a courthouse step beside a young soldier with his cap in his hand. I turned it over. In pencil: Walt and Lorraine, June 1951.
I sat down on the floor of the loft, with the pigeons shifting in the rafters, and went through the shoebox one clipping at a time. They were all about the search. Divers, sheriff deputies, a reward posted by her father, the county judge. But under the clippings lay two folded sheets, soft with age. One was a birth record from a small clinic in Sterling, Colorado, dated November 1953. Baby girl, Janet Marie. Mother, Lorraine Hatch Hollis. Father, Walter Hollis. The second was a letter in the neat hand of a woman. Walt, if I do not come through this, I want her to have my name.
Janet Marie was my mother. I read the line three times. The woman who had raised her, my Grandma Opal, who baked kolaches and canned beans, and who had passed when I was twelve, had never been her mother at all. Lorraine had not drowned in the Platte, I realized, with a cold feeling in my chest. She had been hidden. She had married in secret, and her father, the judge, had refused to accept it. When she passed in a clinic bed in Colorado, Walt had brought the baby home, and the town had been told a flood story that spared a proud man his shame.
A footlocker pried open in a barn loft gave one grandson the weekend to bring his mother back to her own family in Ogallala.
I drove to the house of my mother in North Platte that night, with the shoebox on the seat beside me like a sleeping child. Janet is seventy two now, a retired teacher, with white hair and the jaw of her own mother. I sat her down at the kitchen table and read her the letter aloud, one line at a time. She did not interrupt. When I finished, she lifted the wedding photograph with both hands and held it up to the light, and her face came apart. “I always looked like her,” she whispered. “Everybody said I looked like the picture at the library. I thought it was a joke.”
My brother Dale arrived on Sunday morning, still furious about the belt. He is sixty and built like a silo. He had heard the story from Mama, and he stood in my yard shouting that the old man had lied to us for seventy years. “It is a pile of old paper,” he yelled. “Burn it.” Before I could stop him, he seized the shoebox from the porch, dumped it into the burn barrel, and struck a match. The flames caught the clippings at once. I plunged my arm into the barrel, blistering my wrist, and dragged out the birth record and the letter, black along the edges, but whole.
Dale sat down on the porch step and stared at my burned hand. The anger drained out of him slowly. “Curtis, I wanted him to be a bad man,” he said, in a smaller voice. “It was easier.” I wrapped my wrist in a dish towel. “Dale, he was not a bad man,” I said. “He was a boy who lost his wife and had to choose between a lie and a baby. He chose the baby.” My brother nodded, once, and covered his face. Our mother came out of the house and sat between us, and she put an arm around each of her sons.
On Monday, we all went to the library together. Janet stood in front of the portrait for a full ten minutes, a small woman in a blue cardigan, and the librarian came out and stood quietly behind her. Then Janet reached up and touched the brass plate with one finger. “Hello, Mother,” she said. The room went very still. I read the letter aloud to the people who had gathered, and when I finished, the old librarian was weeping into her sleeve. The city council voted the next week to change the plate on the bench by the river, and the portrait too.
The money consequences surprised us. In the records of the county, a lawyer found a trust that the father of Lorraine had written in 1952, leaving one hundred and sixty acres south of town to his daughter or her heirs. It had never been claimed. After a short hearing, a judge awarded the land to Janet and to her children. It was appraised at one million four hundred thousand dollars. My mother kept a small portion and gave the rest to us and to our own children in equal shares. Dale used his to pay off the mortgage on his shop, and he finally told me he was sorry.
In the name of my grandfather Walt, who passed at ninety four and who carried a locked box up a ladder for seventy years, I started the Loft Ladder Fund. It pays for genealogy research, legal help and counseling for families in Keith, Perkins and Lincoln counties who discover hidden relatives after a death. In the first year, we helped thirty one families. A woman of sixty eight, in a denim jacket, brought a suitcase of letters into the office and said, “I did not know I had a sister.” I said that I knew how she felt, and that we would find her.
In June, a new bronze plate was set into the bench by the Platte. Lorraine Hatch Hollis, beloved wife and mother, found. Janet unveiled it with Dale and me on either side. She laid a bouquet of prairie roses on the seat, and a small gold ring beside it, the one from the footlocker. Then she took our arms and walked us back up the path. That night, I climbed the ladder to the loft, and I hung the wedding photograph on a nail in the beam, where the light from the gable window would fall across it every morning.