I read what Elias asked of me twice, and then I sat there on the footing and read it a third time, because a hundred years is a long way for a voice to carry and still land soft.
He had signed it Elias Ward, mason, 1911. He wrote the way an honest man talks. He said he did not know my name and never would, but he knew my hands, because any hands that lifted this stone would be a masons, and that made us the same across all those years.
Then he told me why he wrote. He said this corner would be the first to move. The ground here held water, he could feel it in the way the earth gave, and he had done what he could, but he wanted the next man to know it was not poor work that let the corner go. It was the land. He asked me to forgive him for what time would do, and he told me exactly how to set it right.
He had built a weep channel behind the stone, a little run for the water to escape, and he told me where to find it and how it would likely be choked with silt by now. Clear it, he wrote, and reset the corner a half inch proud to the north, and she will stand another century.
I went and found that channel exactly where a man had left word of it before my grandfather was born, and it was packed solid, and that packed silt was the whole reason the corner had pulled away.
I cleared it. I reset the corner a half inch proud to the north, the way he said. It sat down true and tight, the gap gone like it had never been. A hundred years dead, and Elias Ward had just walked me through the repair better than any inspector alive.
The last thing he asked was the part that got me. He asked that when I was done, I write my own letter, and seal it in the pocket, and set the stone back over it. For the next mason, he said. So the line does not break.
So I did. I told the old man who hired me the whole of it, and he stood there in his yard with his hand over his mouth. He asked to read the letter, and when he finished he said we had to keep it going.
I wrote my own that evening at the kitchen table. I told whoever lifts this stone next that the man before them cleared the channel and set the corner proud to the north, that the house was still loved in my year, that the trade was still honest work done by real hands. I signed my name and the date, sealed it in wax beside Elias, and laid both letters back in the dark under the corner stone.
Twenty-eight years in stone. That is the finest job I have ever done, and no one will ever see it but the man who comes after me.
