And I sank down to my knees among the rubble, because in that hollow my grandfather had sealed a tin box, and wrapped inside it, dry and perfect after seventy years, was a piece of him I never thought I would hold.
His mason trowel lay on top, the wooden handle worn to the shape of his hand. Under it, wrapped in oilcloth, was a letter, and the deed to this land, and a small cloth sack heavy with old silver coins.
I read the letter right there on the ground with the wind still blowing. He had written it as a young man, the year he finished the wall, and addressed it to whoever, someday, would be keeping the family place. To me, though he never knew my name.
He wrote that he had built the hollow on purpose, to leave something for the family down the years, in case a hard time ever came. The silver was his savings, set aside so that no one who kept this land would ever lose it for want of a little money. The deed was there, he wrote, so that whoever found it would know the ground was bought free and clear, paid for with his own two hands, and belonged to his blood forever, no debt, no lien, no one to answer to.
And he wrote something else, at the end, that undid me. He wrote that he knew he would be long gone by the time these stones came down, but that a man puts his love into the things he builds, and if his wall had stood long enough to fall at last, then it had done its job, and sheltered his people the way he meant it to. He hoped whoever read this had learned to walk that wall as a child, the way he pictured his grandchildren doing.
I had. I learned to walk along the top of that wall when I was small. My own kids climbed it. He had pictured us, seventy years before we were born, and built us a message and a gift and set it in stone to wait.
The silver, it turned out, was worth a good deal now, but that was the least of it. I took his trowel, and I used his own tool to lay the stone back up, section by section, the way he would have wanted, tight and true. My grandfather taught me how to build a wall from beyond the grave, with his hand still worn into the wood.
Seventy years he waited in the stone to tell his family he loved them. The windstorm that broke my heart had opened a door straight back to him. I rebuilt the wall stronger than before, and I set that letter where my own grandchildren will find it someday, so the line he started keeps going, one hand laying stone for the next.