I drew it out into the light and pulled the wrapping back, and it was a christening gown. Tiny and white, yellowed soft with age, the kind of long flowing baby gown they made by hand a hundred years ago, folded careful and wrapped in tissue gone brittle as a moth wing. And tucked in the folds was a note, the ink brown and faded, in a womans old fashioned hand.
I stood there in that half stripped nursery, a paint and paper man from Terre Haute, holding a baby gown that somebody had sealed inside a wall. I called the young couple in, the ones fixing up the room for their first baby, and the wife took the note in her hands and read it out loud, and her voice broke halfway through.
The note was from a mother, written more years back than any of us could rightly say. She wrote that her babies had all worn this gown, every one, and that she was sealing it away in the wall of the nursery so it would keep safe for whoever came after, for the next child born into this house, whenever that might be. She wrote that she hoped the hands that found it would be kind ones, and that a new baby would wear it, and that a little bit of her love would carry down the years to a child she would never meet.
She had built that little door, papered it flat, sealed it up so it would not be disturbed, and left a gift in the dark of the wall for a family not even born yet. Not to hide something shameful. To keep something precious. A grandmother reaching across a whole century to bless a baby who was, right this minute, on the way.
The young wife was standing in the very room, her hand on the curve of her belly, due in the spring. And here in the wall was a christening gown left for exactly this, for exactly her, for the baby coming in a few short months.
A stranger long dead had folded up her love and hidden it in the wall so it could find the next child born under that roof, and the next child was already coming.
They had the gown cleaned by a lady who does old lace. The baby, a girl, was born in April, and they christened her in that hundred year old gown, and half the church cried without rightly knowing why. I got an invitation, on account of I was the one who found it. I have papered a lot of houses in twenty four years. That is the only wall that ever gave something back.