I chipped it open and reached inside. The moment my flashlight caught what had been sealed into that footing all those years, I pulled back, because it was a boot.
One boot, standing upright, and my whole body went cold before my brain caught up to what was underneath it.
The boot was full of envelopes.
Somebody had wrapped the whole thing in oilcloth and then in a flour sack, and the mortar had held sixty-some years, and the paper inside was as dry as the day it went in. Forty-one envelopes, addressed in pencil, all to the same person. Miss Ada Renfrow, general delivery, Havre, Montana.
None of them were stamped. Not one had ever been mailed.
The man who went missing near that trestle was named Willem Rasmussen and he was a section hand on that line, and the story in this valley has been that he wandered off drunk in 1958 and the coyotes got him. Everybody told us that story. The fellow who sold us the place told us that story with some relish.
Willem Rasmussen did not wander off. He went to Havre and married Ada Renfrow in March of 1959, and they had four children, and he died in 1994 in a house on Third Avenue with his grandchildren in the next room.
We know that because his granddaughter answered the phone in Great Falls when we finally found her, and she said, oh, you found Grandpa’s mailbox.
She knew about it. The family always knew.
Ada was married to somebody else in 1957. That is the whole of it, and it is a small enough thing now and it was not a small thing then, in that county, and her husband was a man who put her in the hospital twice. Willem worked the section crew and could not write to her at the house, so he built himself a hollow in the pier he was pouring, and he left the letters there, and once a week when the crew came through she walked out from her sister’s place and took what was there and left him one back.
Forty-one of them are the ones neither of them ever came back for, because in the spring of 1959 they did not need a hollow in a bridge anymore.
The last one in the stack, on top, is the only one he wrote after.
Ada — leaving these where they lay. Let somebody dig them out in a hundred years and think a man disappeared here. Better a ghost story than the truth, and better the truth than either of us in that house one more winter. Meet me Thursday. Bring nothing.
He sealed his own disappearance in on purpose. He let this valley bury him so that nobody would come looking for her.
His granddaughter drove out in June with two of her cousins. We had coffee on the tailgate and then walked down to the footing, and she put her hand flat on the stone for a long time and did not say anything.
The letters went home with her, all but one, which the family asked us to keep.
We put the boot back. My husband mortared the chamber shut again with the wrong-colored mortar, on purpose, so that it looks the same as it did.