The last line the father wrote was this: leave the horse where it fell, and let your own child be as happy in this room as mine was.
I sat back on my heels holding that little worn horse and read it twice, then climbed down off the ladder and went and found the young couple, because a thing like that is not mine to decide alone.
They were opening that wall to widen a doorway into what would be their little girls room. She is two. And here was a note from a father, sealed up years ago, asking whoever opened this wall to let a child be happy here.
The wife cried when she read it. The husband stood there holding the horse in his big hand like it might break.
We could have just done what the note asked, sealed it back and gone on. But the note was signed, a name and a year in that same careful hand, and the wife is the kind of person who cannot let a thing like that lie. She got it in her head to find out who had written it.
It did not take long. The name in the wall matched a family that had built the house, and the little boy who lost the horse was a man now, in his sixties, living one county over.
His father had passed years back, and the son never knew the old man had opened that wall, found the horse he had cried over as a boy, and sealed it up again with a message for a stranger, rather than keep it for himself.
They invited him out. He came on a Saturday, an old man now, and I was there when the young couple put that little horse back in his hands. He turned it over, found the worn place his own small thumb had rubbed smooth sixty years gone, and he wept the way a man weeps when his father reaches him across all that time.
He read his fathers note standing right where the wall had been. Then he asked for a pencil, and he added a line of his own beneath it.
We sealed the horse back into the wall together, the old man and the young couple and me, the fathers note and the sons answer folded under it, right where it fell all those years ago. In a few weeks that will be a little girls room, and she will grow up on the other side of a wall that holds a boys happiness, a fathers love, and a promise kept twice.
Forty years on the tools, and that is the finest thing I ever sealed up where no one will ever see it.
