The Letter Under the Barn Floor
A Second Hand in Blue Ink
She didn’t open the second letter until that night, in a motel room in Grand Island with a vending machine humming outside the door and her boots drying by the heater. She had called Kayla from the road and told her the truth, or most of it: that she had found some old personal letters under the tack room floor addressed to someone named Lorrie, and she wanted to try to return them to the family. Kayla, who had grown up in a suburb and found the whole farm a little magical, had said of course, how romantic, let us know what happens.
Marisol sat on the edge of the bed with the paper in her lap. Then she unfolded it.
Lorrie. I found this the week he left. I came out to oil the harness and saw the board was loose, and I knew. I had known about your post office for a year. I never said so because I thought it was harmless, a game. Then I read this, and it wasn’t a game anymore.
Your brother wrote to your mother every week from Korea. We got every single letter. I used to walk down to the box at the end of the lane every afternoon, and every afternoon there was something from Gerald, right up until the day there was a telegram instead.
I could not stand at that mailbox again, Lorrie. I could not watch you stand at a post office window every day for two years waiting on a boy in a uniform. I told myself I was protecting you. I wrapped it up and put it back and nailed the board down so you would think he hadn’t left you anything. I watched you go out to that barn every day for a month. I watched you stop going.
I could not burn it, and I could not give it to you. I am putting this with it now because the doctor says I do not have long, and I am a coward still, because I am not handing it to you even now. If you ever find this, I was wrong. I was wrong and I was afraid and I loved you more than I knew how to say. — Dad. March 1990.
“I could not burn it, and I could not give it to you.”
Marisol set the page down very carefully on the bedspread, as though it might break.
She thought about a seventeen-year-old girl walking out to a barn every day for a month, kneeling under a saddle rack, prying at a board that had been nailed shut, and finding it shut. Thinking he hadn’t left anything. Thinking he had gone to war without a word. And her father, standing somewhere in the yard, watching her do it.
And then, twenty-three years later, an old man dying, going back out to that same barn with a hammer and a piece of drugstore stationery, adding his confession to the boy’s, and nailing it all shut again.
Marisol got up and stood at the window for a long time, looking out at the parking lot lights. Her father’s rule echoed in her head. Anything with a name on it belongs to the name. But her father had never had to deliver something like this. Some things, she thought, a person might be better off never knowing. If Lorrie was still alive, she would be an old woman now. She had lived a whole life. Maybe a good one. Did a stranger with a pry bar have any right to walk into it and hand her the worst thing her father had ever done?
She thought about her own father then, and the shop in San Antonio, and the last conversation she’d had with her mother, a year ago, in the parking lot outside the lawyer’s office. Both of them saying things they couldn’t take back. Neither of them calling since. She thought about how many words people carried around folded up in their pockets, and how few of them ever got delivered.
She sat back down on the bed and picked up Danny’s letter again. I’ll come home. I promise you that part.
“Okay,” she said out loud to the empty room. “Okay. I’ll at least find out if you’re still here.”
She did not sleep much. In the morning, before she went back to the barn, she drove into Ashby Creek and parked in front of a narrow brick building on Main Street with a hand-lettered sign in the window. County Historical Society. Open Tuesday and Thursday, 9 to 3. Today was Thursday.
