I got the panel off and the little roll into my hand and I stood there in that empty front room with the new windows leaning against the wall, not moving.
Twenty years setting windows and I know a sill from a hiding place. A sill is a solid piece of stock. You do not bore one hollow and cut a little door in the bottom held with trim screws unless you want a thing kept where a person can look at it every day and never know.
The young family who hired me were out getting lunch. When they came back I was still standing there, and I showed them what I had found and where. The wife got quiet. They had bought the house from an estate, they said. An old man had lived there alone for near forty years and passed in the back bedroom, no wife, no kids that ever visited.
I did not feel right just handing them a stranger dead mans secrets, so we called the county records office and the funeral home that had handled him, to find out did he have any people at all.
What was in the oiled paper was not money. It was letters, a whole tight roll of them, soft with handling. Letters a young man had written home from a war a long time ago and never mailed. And with them, folded flat, was a citation on Army paper, a Silver Star, in that same young mans name.
The old man in the back bedroom had been that young soldier. He had come home and said not one word about any of it for the rest of his life. The town knew him as a quiet man who kept to himself and fixed small engines. Nobody knew he had letters he could not send or a medal he could not look at.
The records office found him a niece, the daughter of a brother long dead. She was in her seventies herself, three hours off, and she remembered her uncle as the man who never talked. When she read those letters she learned who he had been at nineteen, before the quiet set in, and she learned that the quiet had a name and a weight to it.
She kept the letters. The medal she had put in a case, and she told me on the phone that she was going to hang it where the light hit it, because he had spent his whole life keeping it in the dark and she thought forty years of dark was enough.
I set windows so folks can see out. I did not think I would spend a morning giving an old soldier back to the one person left who wanted him. But she told me before she hung up that she could finally picture his face young, and that was worth more to her than anything.
Some sills are just sills. That one was a man keeping faith with himself the only way he knew. I was glad to be the one who opened it.
