I walked past Lauren Pike on the front walk and put my key in my own front door. It turned, thank goodness. Andrew had not changed the locks, only copied a key. I stepped into my front hall, with the wide pine floors and the clock that George wound every Sunday, and I stood a moment breathing in the smell of beeswax and old wood. Behind me, Lauren hovered on the porch with her phone in her hand. “Mrs. Fitch, I think I should call someone,” she said. I said that was an excellent idea, and that she might begin with the Sturbridge police.
I climbed the stairs. The steep narrow flight to the widow walk begins behind a little door in the third floor hall, and I had not opened it since the morning George passed. I held the rail with both hands. There were thirty one steps. I counted them aloud, the way I used to count with my third graders, and at the top I pushed up the hatch with my shoulder and stepped out into the cold October air. Three counties stretched out below me, red and gold, with the Quinebaug River shining in the distance like a thread of silver.
In the center of the little railed platform stood a wooden box, bolted to the floor, about the size of a bread box, weathered gray by the rain. I had never noticed it, because George had always said it held the lightning rod wires. I knelt beside it, in my good wool skirt, and tried the lid. It was not locked. Inside, wrapped in oilcloth and tied with kitchen string, lay a bundle, and on top of the bundle, on a sheet of hardware store stationery, a note in George big square handwriting. Peggy, if you are reading this, it is time to look at the stars.
A pumpkin in a paper bag, a flag on a rooftop, and a woman who climbed thirty one steps to find what her husband left.
I unwrapped the oilcloth with trembling fingers. Inside was a folded flag, made of coarse blue wool, embroidered with thirteen white stars in a circle, faded to the color of old bone. A small card pinned to the corner read, Captain Josiah Fitch, 1777, Sturbridge Company, Massachusetts Militia. Beneath it lay a bundle of letters, written in iron gall ink, and a medal. I could not breathe. My husband family, three hundred years of Fitches, had lived on that town common, and I had never known. “George,” I whispered into the wind. “You rascal.”
I heard footsteps on the stairs behind me, then Andrew voice, high and angry. “Mom! What are you doing up there? It is not safe.” He stood in the hatch, in his good Boston coat, with Lauren Pike behind him and two officers from the Sturbridge police, young Officer Dube, whom I had taught in the third grade. They all stopped when they saw what lay in my lap. Officer Dube, a tall boy of thirty with a mustache, took off his cap. “Mrs. Fitch,” he said softly, “is that what I think it is?”
I told them. I said that it was a Revolutionary War flag, carried by my husband ancestor at Saratoga in 1777, and that George had found it in the attic of the old Sturbridge church in 1991, when they tore out the choir loft, and had hidden it in our roof so that nobody could take it. The historical society, he told me once, would have put it in a glass case and forgotten it. Andrew went pale. He had known the box was there, I realized. Years ago, George had mentioned it, drunk on a little cider, and Andrew had held onto it ever since.
Officer Dube took the power of attorney from Lauren Pike, and he looked at the notary stamp, and he made a call. A hand writing expert at the state police crime lab confirmed within three days that my signature had been copied from my own Christmas card. The notary, a man in Boston who was a friend of Andrew college roommate, was arrested at his office. Andrew himself was charged with forgery, attempted fraud and exploitation of an elderly person. Lauren Pike, who had been fooled, as it turned out, by the same documents I was, apologized and gave her entire file to the police.
In November I donated the flag, the letters and the medal to Old Sturbridge Village, on the condition that it hang in the town meetinghouse for the next two hundred years, with a plaque that read, Found by George Fitch, 1991. A hundred and fifty people came to the dedication. Andrew drove out from Boston and stood at the back of the room, in a plain gray coat, with his hands folded. When the director read my husband name aloud, I saw my son close his eyes. Afterward he came and stood beside me in front of the glass case, and he did not say a word.
The first Saturday of October the next year I drove down Route 20 to the farm stand. Emma Whitcomb was at the table, in a Whitcomb Farm sweatshirt, with a pyramid of small orange pumpkins behind her. “Pie pumpkin, Mrs. Fitch?” she asked with a shy smile. “The small sweet ones are in the back.” I took her hand across the table and held it. “Emma, I would like six,” I said. “And I would like to tell you that a paper bag and a crayon once saved my house.” She flushed to the roots of her hair, and carried the pumpkins to my car.
On Thanksgiving, I made two pies from scratch, the way my mother taught me. Andrew came out on the bus, because he no longer owned a car, and he set the table with the good china. He peeled the apples. He carried the turkey. When the whole family had sat down, twelve of us around the long pine table, I stood at the head and raised a glass of cider. “To George,” I said, “who looked at the stars.” Andrew, beside me, took my hand under the tablecloth. And above us, in the cold dark, on the roof of the old house, the widow walk waited, steady and white, under the stars.
