The Letter Under the Barn Floor

What Gets Saved

The Sauer barn came down over the next three weeks, one board at a time, the way it had been put together in 1911. Marisol pulled the siding first, then the loft floor, then the rafters, then the great oak beams, which took a hired crane and two men from Grand Island to lower onto her trailer. She found other things along the way. A child’s marble in a crack in the loft floor. A rusted pocketknife. And, wedged high on top of a beam above the old hay mow, a gold pocket watch, its crystal cracked, its hands stopped forever at twenty past four.

She drove it to Riverside Commons that same afternoon. Lorraine held it for a long time and said only, “He looked everywhere for this,” and put it on the shelf beside her father’s photograph.

The shoebox from Oregon arrived the following week, wrapped in brown paper and packing tape, insured for more than the postage was worth. Lorraine called Marisol the day it came. She had not opened it yet. She wanted, she said, for someone to be there when she did, and she couldn’t think of anyone else who would understand.

So Marisol drove to Grand Island again after work and sat on the couch while Lorraine cut the tape with a pair of kitchen scissors. Inside were eleven envelopes, yellowed and soft as cloth, each one addressed in that hard rightward slant to Miss Lorraine Sauer, General Delivery, Ashby Creek, Nebraska. Each one stamped across the front in faded purple ink: Unclaimed. Return to Sender.

Lorraine did not open them that night. She sorted them by postmark, oldest to newest, and laid them in a row along the coffee table, and looked at them for a long time.

“I’m going to read one a week,” she said finally. “The way I would have gotten them. I think I’d like to do it that way. Slowly.” She touched the first envelope with one finger. “I waited fifty-nine years. I can wait eleven weeks.”

The tack room floor Marisol saved for last. She pulled every board by hand, marking each one in carpenter’s pencil so she would know where it had come from. She took them back to her shop in Lincoln and let them rest a month in the dry heat, and then, over a long weekend in December, she built a bench. It was simple and sturdy, the kind of bench her father had taught her to build when she was twelve years old. Four legs. Two stretchers. A seat made of six old pine boards planed just enough to take off the grime and show the grain.

The third board from the wall, the one with the newer nail holes angled in a hurry, she set right in the middle of the seat. She left the nail holes as they were.

She delivered it to Riverside Commons the week before Christmas. Lorraine had it placed in front of her window, facing the river. She sat on it and ran her palm across the boards, and Marisol watched her fingers find the nail holes in the center board and stop there.

“Thank you,” Lorraine said. That was all. It was enough.