Denny went still, and then he called me up alongside him, real quiet, because tucked up under that eave, wrapped in oilcloth and packed around with the old insulation, was a wooden crate full of photographs. Hundreds of them. Maybe thousands.
Not family snapshots. These were careful, made by somebody who knew exactly what he was doing with a camera. And every single one was somebody from town. Kids at the county fair. The Little League. Church suppers. The high-school graduations, year after year, going back to the nineteen fifties. Old men playing checkers outside the feed store. The whole long life of Presque Isle, one small town at the top of Maine, quietly photographed for fifty years by a man everybody took for a lonesome old potato bachelor with no people and nothing much to say.
His name was Alton, we knew that much, the fella we bought the house off after he died with no kin. What we did not know, what nobody knew, was that Alton had been the eye of this town for half a century. He went to everything. He stood off at the edge with his camera and he caught us all, being born and growing up and going gray, and then he carried it home to this empty house and packed it away up under the roof where the cold would keep it, and he never showed one soul.
We took the crate down to the historical society, and word got around the way it does up here, and folks started coming. And that is when it turned into something I will carry the rest of my life. Because among all those thousands of faces were people this town had lost. The Poirier boy who went to Afghanistan and did not come home, at twelve years old with a fair-day corndog. Grandmothers of half the room, back when they were young brides. A little girl who drowned in the sixties, laughing on a swing, the only good photo of her that exists anywhere on this earth, and her mother, near ninety now, held it and shook.
I have not had a picture of my Ruthie in sixty years. I had started to forget her face. And here she is. That is what that old woman said, and there was not a dry eye in the building.
Alton never married, never had a child, never, so far as a soul can tell, heard one word of thanks in his whole quiet life. He must have figured he was nobody, just the man at the edge of things with the camera. And the entire time he was the keeper of every face this town ever had. He gave people back their dead. He gave a mother back her drowned girl.
The historical society is putting the whole collection up, and anybody can come find their people in it, free, any day. We hung one photo in our own front hall, the house that used to be his: Alton himself, for once, caught by accident in a mirror behind a wedding party, camera up to his eye, half a smile on him. The only picture of the man that seems to exist. It felt wrong to leave out the one who kept everybody else in.