I reached down with my arm to the shoulder and got hold of it, and I set my hammer on the ridge real careful — because the thing resting on that little mortar shelf two feet down inside a chimney that never carried smoke was a bundle wrapped in oilcloth, and it was soft, and it was light, and it was letters.
A whole packet of them, tied with a ribbon gone gray with age, and tucked in with them, a photograph of a young woman laughing on a porch, sixty years ago if it was a day.
The man who had owned this house — the one who bought it and lived in it alone and died in it alone — was known around Steubenville as a hermit. A hard old man who kept to himself, no wife, no kids, no company. Everybody had a version of that story. Everybody had him wrong.
Because those letters were love letters, decades of them, and the woman in the photograph had written every one. Her name was Eleanor. And from what I could piece together — I read a few, I admit it, standing right there on that roof, and I am not ashamed of it — she was the great love of his life, and something had kept them apart. She married another man, back when that was the kind of thing a family arranged, and my hermit spent the rest of his years alone rather than settle for less than her.
He built a false chimney on his own roof so that the one thing he could not bear to lose would sit somewhere no thief and no nosy relative and no passing storm would ever reach it — up high, boxed in, safe. He climbed up there, an old man, and lowered the great love of his life down a fake chimney to keep her close and keep her secret.
One of the letters, the one on top, ended with a line of hers I have not been able to forget: “Whatever life makes us do, and whoever we each end up beside, know that I loved you first and truest, and that some part of me is always laughing on that porch, waiting for you. — Ellie.”
I did some asking around town. Eleanor is still living — ninety-one years old, in a care home not twenty miles away, her husband long passed. I drove out and told her what I had found, and I gave her back her own letters, and the photograph of herself laughing on a porch when the world was young.
She held them a long time. Then she told me he had been the love of her life too, and that she had wondered, all these years, whether he had kept her letters or thrown them in a fire. He kept them. He built a chimney to keep them. She cried, and she smiled, and she said, “So he did love me the whole time,” and I said, ma’am, he loved you enough to hide you in the sky.
Twenty-five years on roofs, and I thought I had seen everything a house can hide. I never expected to find a whole secret love story sealed in a chimney, or to carry it back down to the woman it belonged to while she was still here to hold it. This town called him a lonely old hermit. He was the least lonely man I ever heard of. He had Eleanor, up on the roof, the whole time.
