I set my digger down real slow, because under that broken cap sat a gray steel box the size of a bread pan, stamped U.S. ARMY on the lid, sealed all around with a bead of black tar. I lifted it out with both hands and carried it up the long gravel drive to the porch, where the woman who had hired me sat in a rocker with her cane across her knees. Loretta Mercer, seventy nine years old, widow of a man who had carried the mail on rural route four for thirty eight years. “Madam, I think this belongs to you,” I said. She looked at the box, and her face turned the color of paper.
I pried the lid with a flat bar. Inside, stacked on their edges like the files in a drawer, were envelopes, small and square and the soft pastel colors of birthday cards. I counted forty one of them. Every envelope was sealed, stamped and addressed in the same blue ink, and the name on each was the same. Mr. Daniel Walter Mercer. Where the street address should have been, my eye met a single word, repeated forty one times in a careful, shaking hand. Unknown. Loretta pressed her fist against her mouth. “Walter, you old fool,” she said, in a voice that was half a sob and half a laugh. “You buried the birthdays.”
She told me the story the way a person tells something that has hurt for forty years. Her son Daniel had left home the summer he turned eighteen, in 1983, after a shouting match with his father about the army, and a long silence had followed. A postcard from Texas. A phone call that ended in an argument. Then nothing. Walter had never stopped thinking of him. Every February, on the day of the birth of the boy, he had bought a card at the drugstore, written inside, stamped it, and put it nowhere. “I thought he threw them away,” Loretta whispered. “I did not know he saved them for a mailbox.”
A concrete vault sunk beneath a leaning mailbox gave one widow the weekend to bring a lost son back to the end of her driveway in Hurricane.
I made up my mind in the time it takes to tighten a bolt. I told Loretta that I was a brick man and not a detective, but that I had spent twenty years setting posts in this county, and I knew the postmaster, two of the rural carriers and a retired deputy who owed me a favor. Before I poured another yard of concrete, I wanted to find that boy. Loretta wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. “Young man, you were hired to set a mailbox,” she said. “I will not stop you from setting a few more things right.”
The postmaster, a heavyset man named Gene, took one look at the envelopes and went to a back room. He came out with a ledger, and in an hour he had found a forwarding address, three moves old. On Thursday, I stood in the front yard of Loretta with my phone against my ear, speaking to a man in Tucson, Arizona, whose voice had the rasp of a chain smoker and the tremble of a boy. “Mr. Mercer, my name is Ed,” I said. “Your father left you something at the end of the driveway. Your mother would like you to come and get it.”
He took four days. On Monday morning, a dusty white pickup with Arizona plates rolled slowly up the county road and stopped in front of the new pillar I had just finished, a handsome brick column with a copper roof and a small brass door. A thin, gray man in a canvas jacket climbed out. He was fifty nine, built like his father, with the same long jaw. He did not come up the drive. He stood by the new mailbox with his hands in his pockets, and I saw his shoulders begin to shake. I put down my trowel and walked to him. “She is on the porch,” I said. “She has been there since five.”
He asked for the box first. I fetched it from the truck and set it on top of the pillar, and I opened the lid for him. He did not touch the cards at first. He only looked at them, forty one pastel envelopes with his name in the handwriting of his father, and I saw his lips move. Then he took out the first one, from 1984, and slit it with a thumbnail. A cartoon of a bear on the front. Inside, in blue ink, were four words. Happy birthday, son. Home. He sat down in the gravel and bent over the card, and he did not move for a long time, and I stood beside him like a fence post.
When he finally rose, he walked up the drive alone, slowly, the way a man walks into a church after many years. Loretta was standing at the top step, leaning on her cane. Neither spoke. She opened her arms. He went into them like a boy of six, and the cane clattered to the porch boards. I turned my back, picked up my trowel, and busied myself pointing the mortar on a brick that did not need it. There are moments when a working man ought to look at his boots, and I have always known which ones those are. Behind me, I heard a mother say the name of her son.
The money consequences are short to tell. Loretta paid the bill without looking at it, and Daniel tucked an extra hundred dollars under my coffee thermos when he thought I was not watching. I gave it back, and he gave it back again, and we settled it by my accepting a ham sandwich. At his request, I built one more thing. A small steel drawer set into the back of the pillar, lined with cedar and fitted with a lock, where the cards could live in sight of the road. A brass plate on the front reads, in letters I cut myself, DELIVERED.
Daniel stayed through the summer. He fixed the porch steps, painted the barn, and took his mother to church every Sunday. In October, he flew back to Tucson to sell his small house and came home for good by Thanksgiving. The first thing he did was walk to the mailbox at the end of the driveway, open the little brass door, and put in a card he had bought that morning. It was addressed to his mother, and it was not her birthday. The next morning, the carrier on route four put it into her hand. She read it twice, and she pinned it to the kitchen wall.
