The Letter Under the Barn Floor

Fort Leonard Wood on the Fourteenth

The envelope held two sheets of paper, folded together. The outer one was a page of lined notebook paper filled edge to edge in a young man’s pencil handwriting, slanted hard to the right. The pencil had smudged in places, and in one spot near the bottom the paper had puckered, the way paper does when something wet falls on it and dries.

At the top, someone had written a date. September 30, 1967.

Marisol read it slowly, the wind lifting the corners of the page against her fingers.

Lorrie. I got my notice. I report to Fort Leonard Wood on the fourteenth. I came by Sunday to tell you, but your dad was on the porch and I lost my nerve, and I know what he thinks of me anyway, so maybe it’s better I put it here in our post office where you’ll find it.

I’m not asking you to promise me anything. I know how it goes with soldiers. I’m only asking you to write. I won’t send letters to your house, because I know where they’d end up, so I’m going to write to you care of General Delivery at the Ashby Creek post office. All you have to do is go to the window and ask for mail under your name. Mrs. Haldeman will give it to you and she won’t say a word to anybody. I asked her.

If you don’t want to hear from me, don’t go to the window, and I’ll understand by Christmas.

I’ve loved you since the county fair when you beat me at the ring toss and wouldn’t let me forget it. I don’t know how to say it better than that. I’ll come home. I promise you that part. — Danny

Marisol read it twice. Then she set it down on the tailgate and looked out across the stubble field toward the creek, where a line of cottonwoods marked the water.

Our post office. She looked back at the barn, at the open door of the tack room, at the dark rectangle in the floor where the board had been. Two kids, a farmhand and a farmer’s daughter, she guessed, passing notes under the floor of a barn because they couldn’t pass them anywhere else. She thought of the tin full of folded notes. Meet me at the creek after chores. Bring the radio.

She had a strange, heavy feeling in her chest. The letter had never been sealed. It had been wrapped carefully in waxed paper and tied with twine and put back into the hiding place, and the board had been nailed down over it with newer nails. Someone had hidden it on purpose. Not Danny. Danny had left it there to be found.

The second sheet was still folded inside the first. It was different paper entirely, heavier, the kind of plain white stationery that came in a box at the drugstore. It had been folded into quarters, and on the outside, in a different handwriting altogether, a cramped and shaky hand in blue ballpoint, someone had written the same single word.

Lorrie.

“Anything with a name on it belongs to the name.”

Marisol held it for a long moment without opening it. She thought about her father, who had a rule about the things they found in barns. Anything with a name on it, he had told her once, belongs to the name. Not to us. Not to the owner of the barn. To the name.

She was aware that by that rule she had already gone too far. She had read Danny’s letter. But the first letter had been a story she could see, a boy and a girl and a draft notice and a promise. This second one felt like something else. It had been folded too tightly. The handwriting was too careful, as though the person writing it had been holding the pen with great effort.

Behind her, a car door slammed. Kayla Doucette, the new owner, was crossing the yard from the farmhouse with two mugs of coffee and a friendly wave. Marisol quickly folded both pages back together and slid them into the inside pocket of her canvas jacket, next to her chest, without fully knowing why.

“Find anything good?” Kayla called out.

Marisol took the coffee and smiled and said, “Just some old horseshoes.” It was the first lie she had told on a job in fourteen years. She felt the letters against her ribs all afternoon, like a second heartbeat.