I dug down barely a foot before the shovel struck metal, and when I lifted out what that old man had buried under his apple tree, my heart started pounding.
It was a coffee can, the lid rusted tight, wrapped twice in an oilcloth so the damp couldn’t reach it. I knelt right there in the dirt and worked it open. Inside, tucked around a fat roll of bills held with a perished rubber band, were a woman’s gold wedding ring and a second index card in that same careful hand.
The seller was Roy Coleman. He and his wife, Hazel, had married in 1958 and planted that apple tree their first spring in the house, a green twig no taller than a broom. They lived sixty years under it. What they never got, the card explained, was children — and so, Roy wrote, the house had gone sixty years without ever once hearing a child laugh in it.
He’d watched my wife and me at the closing, a young couple counting every dollar, and it had put him in mind of two newlyweds in 1958 doing the very same thing. So he did the only thing a proud old man could think to do. He buried his and Hazel’s savings under the tree where no bank and no stranger could get at it, and he left it for us.
The card finished with the line I’ll never get out of my head. “Hazel and I never got our children, so this house never got to hear any. Fill it up with noise. This is for the first one’s crib and the apple pies after. Don’t you dare send it back — I told you not to argue with a dead man.”
I sat down hard against that tree. Because two weeks earlier my wife had told me she was pregnant, and we hadn’t breathed a word of it to a single soul. Roy couldn’t have known. And yet there it was in his hand, a gift for a baby neither of us had announced, buried a foot down and waiting.
I went looking for Roy to thank him and to argue anyway. I was too late — he’d passed in his sleep a month after he handed us the keys. They buried him beside Hazel, under a different tree, in a cemetery across town. So I did the only thing left to do. We used his money for the crib. Our son was born in October, and the first sound that house heard in sixty years was him hollering his lungs out at three in the morning.
This fall he’ll be old enough to reach the lowest branch of that apple tree. I’ll lift him up to it myself, and I’ll tell him about the gruff old man who loved him before either of us even knew he was coming.