I set my sledge down real slow because the thing inside the hollow of the footing was no bigger than a lunch box and no heavier than a bag of flour, and every old instinct in my body told me that it was not a body or a bomb. It was a small gray steel strongbox, welded shut, with a name stamped on the lid in raised letters. HOLLIS & SON. I knelt in the gravel at the end of the driveway in Hurricane, with the sun going down behind the hills, and the couple who owned the house stood on the grass behind me, holding each other like children at a funeral.
They were an older couple, in their sixties, named Gene and Marlene Pratt, retired from the school system in Charleston. They had bought the house for its old fashioned porch and its apple trees. The lamppost at the end of the drive had been leaning since the first week, and when Gene called me to replace it, I thought it would take an afternoon. Now Marlene said, “Is it going to explode?” I laughed and said no, Marlene, a thing that heavy that still rattles is not an explosive. She took a deep breath and nodded. Gene knelt beside me and said, “Open it.”
The strongbox had a weld seam on the lid, which I cut with a small grinder. The metal screamed. When I lifted the lid, the smell of old paper and machine oil rose out of it. Inside lay a stack of letters, tied with string. A small gold ring in a cloth pouch. A brass key. A black and white photograph of a young woman in a nurse uniform, smiling shyly at the camera. And folded across the top, a deed, with the county seal, made out in the name of a woman I had never heard of. Gene took the photograph in two fingers and tilted it toward the light.
The most careful way to hide a love letter is inside a thing that everyone drives past and no one ever digs.
On the back, in blue ink, was written, Ruth Ann, 1943. The letters were from a man named Walt, a sergeant in the Army Air Force, to the nurse in the photograph, from a base in England. They were gentle, funny, sometimes terrible. He wrote of a cold barracks, a stray cat, a friend lost over the Channel. He wrote about the day he would come home and marry her. The last letter, dated March of 1945, was from a chaplain. It said, with the stiff kindness of a form, that Sergeant Walter Hollis had been killed in action. I put it down gently on my knee and looked at the sky.
We read them all that evening, at the kitchen table of the Pratts, by lamplight, with pie that Marlene had baked. The ring in the pouch had a tiny engraving inside. Ruth Ann and Walt. Forever. The deed was for the house itself, dated 1946, bought by a woman named Ruth Ann Hollis, widow. She had lived in this house for fifty one years. She had never remarried. She had raised, as best we could tell from the town directory, a nephew and a niece, and had worked as a nurse at the Hurricane clinic until she was seventy. The strongbox, we guessed, was the only grave she had ever been given for her husband.
“Why in the footing?” Marlene asked. “Why not in a drawer?” I suggested that when her husband died, she might have wanted a place that was permanent. Not a place she could open on a sad night and not a place she could lose. A place at the end of the road, where everyone who came and went would pass. I told them about a man I knew in Beckley who had poured the ashes of his wife into the base of his mailbox. People do strange, tender things with sorrow. They put it where they can pass it every day without looking.
The Pratts located the family within a month. A cousin in the courthouse found the nephew, a retired electrician named Dean Hollis Maddox, eighty one, living in Huntington, a widower with bad lungs and a beautiful singing voice. He had inherited the house from his aunt Ruth Ann in 1997 and sold it two years later, never knowing about the footing. When Gene called him, there was a stunned silence. Then Dean said quietly, “She used to stand at the end of that driveway every evening at dusk. I thought she was looking for the mailman.”
We held the ceremony on a Saturday in October, at the end of the driveway, under the new lamppost. It was an old fashioned post, cast iron, black and fluted, that Gene had found at an estate sale in Charleston, and I had set it myself on a proper footing, six inches shallower than the old one. A small group of neighbors came, and a minister from the Methodist church, and Dean in a gray suit with a cane. Gene read the letter of the chaplain aloud, and Marlene read the last letter of Walt, the one written the week before he died. Then Dean placed the ring in his palm.
He stood there a moment, looking down at it, with the light fading behind the hills. “She never took it off,” he said. “Not once, until the day she died. I never knew where it went.” He closed his hand and then, very gently, he opened it again. “Walt would want it with her,” he said. We drove the next morning to the little cemetery on the hill, where Ruth Ann lay beside a plain stone, and Dean buried the ring and the photograph in the earth at the foot of it, with the letters in the strongbox beside her, resting at last in the same ground.
The lamppost still stands at the end of that drive, and I drive by it sometimes just to look. Gene told me that every evening at dusk, he and Marlene walk down to it hand in hand, and they say good night to Ruth Ann, whether she hears or not. Dean comes on Sundays. He sits on a folding chair by the post, with his cane across his knees, and he sings an old hymn in his beautiful, cracked tenor. The neighbors have started to come, too. They stand a little way off, and nobody says a word.