I lifted the lid, and I had to set my cutters down, because inside that padlocked box was not tools, and not a pistol, and not money. It was a stack of little notebooks, a ring of keys, a folded map of the town cemetery, and a bundle of photographs of gravestones, dozens of them, hundreds, every one clean and tended, with fresh flowers set on it.
It took me the better part of an hour, going through those notebooks, to understand what quiet old Herb across the street had been doing for thirty years. He had been tending the graves of the forgotten. The old part of the cemetery, the paupers section, the corner where they bury the ones with no family and no money and no headstone worth the name, the graves nobody ever visits because there is nobody left to visit them. Herb had taken every one of them on. The notebooks were his records, every name he could dig up for the unmarked ones, when he cleared each plot, when he set out fresh flowers. Row after row of the town forgotten dead, kept clean and honored for thirty years by one lonely widower who never told a living soul.
There was a page at the front, in his hand. Everybody ought to have somebody remember where they are laid. These folks had nobody. So I made myself their somebody. It costs a man nothing to pull a weed and set a flower and say a name out loud so it does not disappear. If you are reading this, then maybe you will take it up. They are good quiet company, the forgotten. They ask so little of you.
And at the very back of the last notebook was a name I half knew. His wife. And under it, two more names. A woman and an infant, from long before Herb ever moved onto our street, with dates only a year apart. Herb had lost a wife and a baby, young, decades ago, in a life not one of us on this street knew the first thing about. And a man who had grieved his own two at graves somewhere far away had spent the rest of his life making sure nobody else lay forgotten in the ground.
Thirty years I waved at that man over the fence and figured he was just a quiet old widower who kept a nice yard. And every week, in the gray early mornings, he was down at the cemetery on his knees among the forgotten, being the somebody they never had.
I took his keys and his notebooks. I could not do anything else. I go down there now, on the mornings I am able, and I pull the weeds and set the flowers and read the names out loud so they do not disappear, the way Herb did, the way he hoped whoever found his box might. He was right about it. They are good quiet company. And Herb is out there among them himself now, and I keep his grave the nicest of all of them, and I say his name out loud every single time, so that the man who remembered everybody does not get forgotten either.