The letter was postmarked Vancouver, British Columbia, the fourth of March 1974, and it was addressed to Mrs. Rose Gallagher, my grandmother. I knew the name on the envelope as well as I knew my own. Rose Gallagher had lived on Fourth Avenue in Altoona until 1989, in a house with a gold star banner in the front window for her son Thomas, who left for Vietnam in 1968 and was reported lost in the jungle that November. She had set a plate for him every Christmas for twenty one years. And according to the date stamp, Uncle Tommy had written to her six years after the Army said he was gone.
I sat on the edge of the bed of my mother with the bat across my knees, and I read the letter by the light of a lamp. The handwriting was the same I had seen on his old postcards, a quick, slanting scrawl. Dear Mom, I am alive. I am sorry. I could not stay in that place any longer, and I could not come home. I walked away from my unit near Pleiku after we lost our whole squad, and I made my way north, and then across the border in the winter of 1969. I work on a fishing boat now. I think of you every day. Please do not tell Dad. I will understand if you cannot forgive me.
Rolled up inside the same handle, I found a small notebook page with a column of addresses in the hand of my mother. Vancouver, then Prince Rupert, then a town called Nanaimo, each with a year beside it. The last, in 1992, read only, Tommy and Annie, Departure Bay Road. I understood then why the bat had been locked in the closet for fifty years. It was not grief. It was a promise. My mother, who was Peg, the younger sister, had intercepted that letter in 1974, because my grandfather would have thrown it in the stove. And she had kept every address Tommy ever sent, in the handle of the bat.
A hollow baseball bat unlocked from a hall closet gave one nephew the weekend to bring an uncle home to Altoona after fifty years.
I called my sister Carol that evening. She lives in Johnstown and is sixty two. When I read her the first lines of the letter, she did not speak. I heard a chair scrape on the other end of the line, and then a long, shaky breath. “Dennis, he is alive?” she whispered. “Uncle Tommy is alive?” I said I believed he might be. She began to cry, softly, then harder. “Mama told me once that she had a secret she would take to her grave,” she said. “I thought it was about a man. I never dreamed it was about her brother.”
Our cousin Mike came by the house on Fourth Avenue the next morning. He is sixty four, a Navy veteran, with a flat top and a chest like a barrel. Carol had told him, in confidence, and he stood in the front hall with a red face. “He deserted,” Mike said. “Your uncle ran away while good men were fighting. You are going to put that in the stove.” Before I could answer, he snatched the bat from the table and swung it hard against the newel post. The wood cracked but held. He raised it again. I caught his arm from behind, and the bat fell to the floorboards between us, rolling slowly.
I dialed the number I found on Departure Bay Road that same night. A woman answered on the fourth ring, in a gentle Canadian voice. I told her my name, and the line went quiet. Then she said, “Is this the son of Peg?” I could barely breathe. “Yes Madam,” I said. “I think I am looking for my uncle.” She called to someone in the next room, and then a man came on the line, an old, rough, careful voice, with a rasp like gravel on a boat deck. “Dennis,” he said. “It is Tommy. I have been waiting fifty years for somebody to call.”
I flew to Vancouver the following Friday, and took the ferry across to Nanaimo through a morning mist, with the bat in a long cardboard tube beside me. At the terminal stood a white haired man in a wool cap, thin as a rake, leaning on a cane. He had the eyes of my mother. I walked toward him, and he walked toward me, and neither of us could do anything but stop and stare. Then he opened his arms. We held each other on the dock for a long time, with the ferry horn sounding behind us. “You look like Peg,” he said into my shoulder. “You are the whole family.”
The money consequences were small and fitting. My mother had never sold the house on Fourth Avenue, and when it sold that autumn for two hundred and ten thousand dollars, I divided it into three equal parts, for Carol, for me, and for Tommy, the brother she had loved. He refused his share at first. Then Annie took his hand and told him to say yes. He gave all of it, in the name of his sister, to a program on Vancouver Island that helps veterans who came home with wounds nobody could see. He called it the first honest thing he had done in fifty years.
In the name of my mother, Peg, who passed in February and who kept a brother alive in the handle of a bat, I started the Hollow Bat Fund. It pays for travel, legal help and counseling for families in Blair, Cambria and Bedford counties who are reuniting with veterans lost to the war or to silence. In the first year, we helped twenty four families. A woman of seventy, in a Steelers sweatshirt, laid a photograph of a boy in uniform on the desk and said, “They said he was gone.” I told her we would look.
In June, Tommy came home to Altoona for the first time in fifty six years. He stood on the porch of the house on Fourth Avenue, now sold, with Carol on one arm and me on the other, and looked at the front window where the gold star had hung. Cousin Mike drove up in his pickup and got out slowly. He crossed the lawn with his hand outstretched. “Welcome home, Tommy,” he said, and his voice broke. They shook hands in the sun, two old men, and then Mike pulled him into a clumsy embrace. I stood back and let them have it.
