Chapter 2 ended with Kerr's arrival in Maine, greeted at Tom's door by his grim housekeeper, Mrs. Danvers, who was not thrilled the guests were late. As the evening progressed, Kerr and Tom reminisce about the Old Days at Faber but mostly about things that have been bothering Tom since he inherited the cabin in Swanville. There's the Casaubon Society and also the sense Clara, the Artificial Creativity software Tom developed which then escaped into the ether, may still be around, waiting. When Kerr follows Tom upstairs, he has the uncomfortable feeling someone else is in the room.
= = = = = = =
CHAPTER 3
Cameron was already up, foraging through cupboards to the left of the sink, when I ambled, half asleep, into the kitchen.
“I wonder where he keeps anything we could use for breakfast? I'm starving.”
I hadn't thought he'd noticed me, only his instinct making him assume this vague shape was me and not our host.
Without answering, I ambled past him to an old-fashioned pantry next to the refrigerator, opened one of its doors and revealed an array of what I announced were the raw materials for home-made meals.
“How did you know that? Didn't you say you'd never been here before?”
“Data gleaned from being in old-fashioned kitchens before, my dear Watson,” I mumbled, poking around for what might pass as coffee. “Really old kitchens would have a pantry room to store food,” I explained. “This contraption kept the basics closer at hand.”
“I suppose I should just get something to tide me over till Tom gets up or Mrs. Danvers arrives,” he said and scanned the shelves for something a little closer to a finished product.
In the refrigerator, which appeared well-stocked, he noticed plates of left-overs from the dinner she'd cooked for us the night before with other containers all handily labeled in clear, black markers with specific dates. Not sure when she'd be back again – did she come and cook every day? – I suggested not getting ahead of schedule.
“If there's milk in the fridge, there might be cereal behind Door #2, but I don't recall Tom being a milk-drinker.”
Behind the door I'd pointed toward, Cameron discovered only a few boxes of shredded wheat and oatmeal; then, wrinkling his nose, he made the soft, strangulated cry of one resigned to a slow death.
He enjoyed the occasional salad but loathed oatmeal and probably never willingly ate shredded wheat which he dismissed as Old-Folks' Food. He wasn't yet old enough to comprehend the necessities for a high-fiber diet.
“When will she show up?” He peered into the cavernous antique of a refrigerator in case anything else edible would materialize.
“I think she'd said before lunch-time or so,” and pointed to a compartment on the door that revealed a half-dozen eggs.
“Ah, that's a step in the right direction. Well – any bacon, d'you think?”
After the storm's ominous nastiness with its overhanging clouds, winds, and violent downpours, the rain had barely ended when Tom went up to bed; the wind still howled stubbornly after I'd gone upstairs, myself. The morning turned out to be a benediction, one of those nearly cloudless, brilliant sunrises you thought you'd never see again, light pouring in victoriously from every direction through so many windows, augmented by the songs of birds who sounded equally delighted. I used to think birds singing at sunrise signaled they'd survived another night.
Cameron woke up his usual cheerful self, his hair stylishly unkempt, showing an easy smile despite his frustration prowling for food. I, as usual cloaked in my traditional curmudgeonliness, remained numb, achy and irritable. Perhaps Tom, evidently still asleep, would be improved with the new day, but that, in due time, remained to be seen.
New in the '80s, the microwave still had the appearance of an antique in this 1940s kitchen but I succeeded in converting a measuring cup of water into an unpromising cup of instant coffee. The side-yard, refreshingly visible beyond the curtains, I suspected was probably larger once before the woods crept closer to the house.
“Here, if you want oatmeal – or I could make scrambled eggs for us?” Cameron tested the heft of an iron skillet.
“That's okay,” I said, sliding the bowl aside, “you go ahead – I'll wait.”
It's not that Tom was being a poor host: he was ill, recuperating from a stroke, and alone in the house. Though our visit was haphazardly arranged, the invitation long-standing, our arrival wasn't sudden. It felt odd he'd know we were finally coming but hadn't stocked the place with things for his guests. Oh, well...
“We'll go into town and pick up a few things at the store,” I said, sipping at the barely palatable coffee.
“Assuming we can even find the town, much less find our way back.”
Cameron opened another door on the pantry to reveal a weird, cone-shaped contraption, and stared at it with confusion and curiosity.
“It's a flour-sifter, fully intact.” He looked at me with even more confusion.
It was amusing how this old kitchen reminded me of my grandmother's house, yet to Cameron it was an interactive museum.
“People still bake their own cakes?” He, of course, would just order one at the bakery in whatever flavor he desired.
“I doubt Tom ever did. It's unlikely Mrs. Danvers bakes anything here, but I'm sure she would in her own kitchen.”
“D'you think she'd left some slices of cake for us in the fridge?”
Disappointed to find no container marked CAKE, he stood back and sighed again. Ah, to be young and invincible: at his age, my breakfast was often a slice of cold pizza and a soda.
Opening another, smaller door on the pantry, covered by pierced metal grillwork, I thought I might find a covered cake dish – Grandmother's cupboards always reminded me of an advent calendar, only focused on food. Instead, I found numerous jars of pickled onions, cauliflower, and mushrooms which, I imagined, wouldn't be good for Tom's blood pressure. Cameron's nose wrinkled like we'd stumbled on a mad scientist's collection of eyeballs and brains preserved in formaldehyde, fascinating but repelling. He stepped back to avoid whatever I'd find next, perhaps a real body.
“So,” quickly changing the subject, settling on eggs, “what did you guys talk about last night after I went to bed? You were still at it when the wind woke me up around 2:00.”
“Oh, uhm...” What we'd thought about as opposed to what we'd actually said might've been two different things. “This and that...”
The calendar hanging on the refrigerator door showed a garden scene in full bloom with several birds and butterflies suspended mid-air. The month was May (not a far cry from April), the year, 1959; more appropriate than the frigid scene of kids skating on a frozen pond from the January '54 calendar in my room. The one I'd seen in the study by the fireplace last night, with its winter woodland scene from December of 1961, was the year Tom's childhood visits to the cabin had ended so abruptly.
He said his father never explained why they stopped coming up after that, and Tom felt too embarrassed to ask, sure it had something to do with his getting caught skinny-dipping at the pond. If his dad thought being a musician wasn't “manly” enough, what would he make of Tom's swimming naked with another boy?
Years later, his father already ill, Tom overheard him complain to a card-playing buddy how the “little old biddies” in his late-wife's family were so intent on marrying him off to the Widow Cosgrove. “It was the summer after my mother died and I guess Dad thought the visit would cheer me up a bit. We hadn't counted on their plan to keep my dad 'in the family,' and I remember how we'd left rather suddenly. He hadn't explained to me why and I was thinking, 'well, don't ask...'
“As far as I can remember, Mrs. Cosgrove's husband had recently died – she was the youngest daughter of Grandpa Peter Norton and about the same age as Dad, plus she already had two kids.” Tom was keeping track with his eyes closed as his finger moved across an imaginary chart of the Norton Family Tree. “The idea my cousins Ben and Martha could've become my step-brother and -sister was enough to make me gag,” he laughed. “I hated Ben's guts and Martha was the prissiest of the whole bunch.
“Oh, if Dad'd been interested in Melody Quigg – she's the daughter of my Uncle Eddie[n-d] that would've been okay with me.”
(Eddie Quigg? Melody? Why did they sound familiar – had he mentioned them before?)
“As it was, Burt was the only cousin I really got along with but we hardly ever bothered corresponding after that.”
I suspected Tom hung the old calendar there as a reminder of pleasant memories – other than a brief visit for Uncle Max's funeral in the '80s, it was his last time at the cabin – which might explain the kitchen's calendar, but the one in my room was from before Tom would have ever visited here.
“Yeah,” Cameron said, watching me at the fridge, “what is it with the calendars in this place? They're not exactly current. The one in my room is for June, 1951, and this one's 1959.”
“Right...” I looked up at him, somewhat mystified myself. “The one in my room is from 1954, – January, an ice-skating scene – and the one in the study is a winter woodland from December '61.”
Cameron cracked a pair of eggs into a sizzling skillet, a lot of butter and too much salt for my taste. “Well, mine's pleasant enough, a bunch of naked boys at some swimming hole – doesn't make me shiver when I see it.”
“So that's why you chose that room, is it, a touch of porn?”
“Hardly,” he laughed, flipping his middle finger, “it's like some Norman Rockwell painting! A deftly placed branch, a modestly raised thigh...”
“We've stepped into a time capsule from the distant past, between all the furniture and everything. Even the calendars are antiques.”
Cameron smiled and thought it was a nice touch, a break from reality.
“I gathered, from the aroma wafting upstairs, if my house were on fire it wouldn't smell like good old-fashioned fried eggs!” Warmly dressed for a wintry morning, sunshine aside, Tom shuffled into the kitchen, surprised to find Cameron at the stove rather than ransacking the refrigerator, as if he expected me to do the cooking. With an awkward smile, he could tell we were first-time visitors to Maine, too lightly dressed for a deceptively chilly morning. It was, after all, spring now and wasn't it supposed to be warm?
“Did you want some eggs, Tom?” Cameron asked, holding up the spatula. “You could have these – or I could scramble some.”
“Ah, thanks, but right now I just need some water – and some coffee.”
He'd already had his limit of eggs this week, presumably watching his cholesterol. As a result, today he'd settle for oatmeal.
“I suppose I don't have to tell you, young man, not to grow old because I'm sure this antiquated curmudgeon, here, has been telling you that for – well, some time now, am I right?” Tom forgot I'd known Cameron only five years – but yes, how often have I warned him about aging? We both smirked.
Tom reached for a small, ornate silver tray with a dozen prescription bottles and doled six pills into a shot glass.
“So, what was this 'nice touch,' this 'break from reality' you're talking about?”
“Oh, Cameron and I were talking about the calendars hanging in each room, different months, each one dating from the '50s.”
“The one in the study's 1961, to be precise, and the parlor's 1960.”
As Tom downed his pills, followed with a chaser of water – “Cheers, everyone!” – Cameron took a closer look at the refrigerator.
“Today is Sunday the 17th, isn't it? And here, it's Sunday the 17th – same day and date, different month and year.”
“I hadn't noticed the dates on the other calendars,” I said, “brilliant observation!”
“And what, dear Watson, are you able to deduce from that?” Tom asked.
“That it's probably not a random coincidence?” Cameron slid his eggs out onto a plate. “I'd have to confirm some others...”
I reported from the dining room it was Sunday the 17th there as well as the study and in the parlor.
Tom opened a packet of instant oatmeal and, measuring in some water, placed the old dark-blue, rustic-looking bowl in the microwave. “Mrs. Danvers does not approve of instant oatmeal. Frankly, neither do I, but... Ah,” he interrupted himself, “you're waiting for an explanation about the calendars, yes? Terry, you don't want some oatmeal – or eggs?”
When I said I'd probably scramble a couple eggs and get some toast, he quietly agreed that sounded much more palatable. “If you like, I'll ask Mrs. Danvers to get some bacon or sausages?”
I shook my head and said “Not for me, but thanks anyway,” as Cameron nodded with an enthusiastic smile, “Yes, please!” His toast was ready just as he'd finished the last of his eggs. By the time the microwave beeped with Tom's oatmeal, I had chopped up some fresh peppers and mushrooms for an omelet.
Holding the steaming bowl aloft between his fingers, he offered it to the assembled with a whispered introibo ad altare Dei.
Cameron laughed. “Ambrosia?”
“More like Buck Mulligan's shaving cream,” I said.
“Very good!”
Tom confessed to being neither stately nor plump, “but I did once own a yellow dressing gown when I was young.”
The bowl, he pointed out, was the last survivor of a set of six. “Mrs. Danvers' grandmother apparently broke the first one sometime back in the 1920s and they were considered old even then.”
Survivor or not and regardless of its age – the guess was it came with the original furnishings before the Civil War – Tom thought it no doubt felt better still being useful in the world. “Rather than, like so many of us old people, being hidden away in some dark cupboard for fear of being broken.”
“How very anthropomorphic of you.” I saluted him with my personality-free coffee mug, mass-produced, recent and cheap, guaranteed to be short-lived.
“I imagine anything, regardless of its inanimateness, would prefer being useful – wouldn't you?”
We could hear the birds singing outside – I recognized robins and wrens, in the distance a cardinal with its “spring song.” I was looking forward to a walk and seeing the rest of it.
“But we're still waiting for your undoubtedly illuminating explanation about these calendars, you know.” I whisked my eggs into the skillet.
Instead, Tom asked me if I remembered the first time I'd cooked when he came over to my place for dinner. “We'd met during orientation and here we only lived about a block apart.”
“I had planned an old bachelor's staple,” I told Cameron, “macaroni and cheese, but the store was all out of cheddar.”
“The closest thing they had was Port Wine cheese” – Tom made a face – “which unfortunately turned everything a very bright pink!”
“Come on, it tasted fine, Tom, admit it.”
“Yes, but it was pink!”
After a good laugh was shared by all, Cameron and I continued staring at Tom until he finally began how, when he moved in, he'd brought only one current calendar with him from Pennsylvania, one he'd kept on his wall of his study to mark doctor's appointments or birthdays, or when the bills were due.
He found this box of old, practically unused calendars in an upstairs closet, enough to put one in each room. If opened to a particular month, it could have the same weekdays and dates.
“I figured I'd remember which month or year it was: the important thing was to remind me of the day and date, like a 'design statement,' not that anybody's been here to notice it.”
“So,” Cameron realized, “instead of 'I'm staying in the room-on-the-left-at-the-top-of-the-stairs' or 'the blue room,' I'm in the '1951 Room'?”
“Very good!”
Tom took his oatmeal over and sat down at the kitchen table, a small square-cut block of wide planks on thick square-cut legs, nothing fancy, functional but showing its pioneer origins and considerable age. There was room for only two equally rustic chairs, also square-cut with little concern for comfort, without getting in the way.
“It's not the original table I remember from my visits; somebody sold that one off and replaced it with this one. Not sure where it came from – Mrs. Danvers tells me it's quite old.”
He excused himself for sounding like a museum docent, but he'd learned so much about things he'd taken for granted before. “After all,” he nodded, “you're the first visitors to Tom Purdue's Lost Museum.” She'd filled him in on so many details, especially the family history, he thought he should be writing it all down.
“Curiously, she knows nothing about the Standing Stones, whatever history there may be, or won't talk about them if she does. A local historian at the Swanville Library hardly knew anything about them, either. I remember some legends Uncle Max used to tell us, but those were mostly ghost stories meant to scare us kids.”
They were best seen at sunset, the stones, facing west, but that also meant walking home through the woods after dark. “The place was scary enough without having to deal with all that nonsense.”
The path might be overgrown – he hadn't been down there since moving in – since no one bothered to keep it under control after Burt stopped coming here, even for summers, over a decade ago. And he had no idea how the clearing where the stones were has fared once the woods started taking over again.
“I'm worried about anybody vandalizing them, of course, but these days, if it became a popular 'local legend,' you never know. Kids from miles around would flock there to drink beer and smoke pot.
“And that's all I'd need, have some twit, drunk, high and horny, fall off the cliff edge and I'd be sued for negligence even though the property's clearly posted 'No Trespassing' and 'No Hunting'.” And with the swimming hole not far from there, he added, the place could easily become a perfectly isolated hippy hang-out.
“But you'll see. It'll be beautiful in the morning, the sun shining out over the valley; the hillside's still in shadows. Of course, it's been many years – I'd only ever seen it in summertime. You look west from there – the hill's behind you, and,” he added, pointing as he spoke, “the lake's to your south.”
“You can't see the sunrise from the Stones?” Cameron leaned over Tom's shoulder to look out the window. “Isn't that odd? Aren't stone circles supposed to line up with sunrise on the winter solstice?”
There was nothing to see beyond the edge of the woods with its encroaching underbrush of bushes, saplings, and spring-blooming weeds. The larger trees weren't far beyond with no sky visible from the back. I looked out the other window toward the front of the yard and saw a deer quietly nibbling on some violets.
“I'd thought that, too, since some of the aunts and uncles back then used to talk about 'our own little Stonehenge,' but the library's historian – what was her name? Mrs. Salisbury, maybe?[n-d]hadn't mentioned it.”
If it wasn't meant to be some kind of celestial calendar, why did somebody go to the trouble of building it?
“Perhaps it's more recent than that and built with another purpose in mind. I don't know, witchcraft? Some 18th Century coven?”
“Great,” Tom laughed, “as if worrying about gangs of horny teenagers wasn't enough!”
With no direct path to either the Stones or the pond without passing the cabin and with no access from public land, you'd think keeping everything safe and private wouldn't present a serious problem. But if the deer could create a network of paths through the woods, chances are generations of determined teenagers could, too. And like many of the woods throughout New England, there were always little swamps or places where the ground gave way one had to watch out for: “Don't ever walk far off the path!”
Three paths branched off the one we could see from the kitchen windows, disappearing into the undergrowth that came within twenty feet of the back porch and left little space for a decent yard. With the cabin built on a ledge, the crest of the hill rose sharply, protection from north winds and blowing snow.
“The Stones are a little further up the side of the hill – not far. If you look down into the valley, you might not be able to see the pond from there any more. It'll depend how full the leaves are this early or how tall the trees have grown over the past fifty-some years.”
He warned us not to expect too much. “When I was a kid, I'm sure those stones were huge, but now, I'm wondering just how big they might be, given the tricks memory plays.”
For that matter, he wondered if the pond hadn't dried up and disappeared by now or become just a leaf-clogged mud-hole. It was only a small spring-fed pond, he recalled, bone-chilling cold until late-July. An old farmer's dam across the one end will have to be checked; it might've failed decades ago with no maintenance.
“Even if the pond's completely accessible, it's going to be far too cold for any swimming at this time of year!” Completely surrounded by trees, it barely got some overhead sun during the summer.
Tom assured us, if everything checks out and what needs to be fixed can be, we were both welcome to come back in the late-summer for “a proper, pond-worthy vacation.”
“Yes, please!” Cameron nodded.
But now, we needed to get ready if we're going for a walk. Tom was eager to show us the Stones.
“Cameron, why don't you use the bathroom first?” Tom put his old blue bowl in the sink and began washing it. “Just don't hog all the hot water. Leave some for the old guys.”
Even his robe couldn't hide Tom's thinness from view, hunched over the sink. Slippers and baggy fleece pajamas didn't help, either.
From beyond the edge of the side yard, Tom wondered if he hadn't heard the voices of children in the distance. “Probably some more ghosts, I imagine, cosmic echoes of the distant past.”
Seeing Tom in the sunlight of a bright new day, now that he'd gotten some rest, hadn't quite erased the sadness of my initial impressions from our conversation in the dark of the night. I can't say it did, maybe only confirmed it, as he still looked old and tired, perhaps justifiably so, after all.
Given last summer's heart attack, then being abducted by evil music extremists while becoming the prime suspect in no less than three murders before – almost as soon as he'd been rescued – suffering a stroke, Tom Purdue certainly earned the right to look like an old man who'd endured an awful lot and experienced too much. His mind was probably in the midst of distant recollections, picking up forgotten reverberations left over from those childhood visits when he had neither care nor idea about whatever the future had in store.
“What is left to look forward to when there's no 'forward' left,” he'd wondered last night, “no future to move toward? Perhaps hoping I'll feel better tomorrow is enough of a goal, these days.” There was no purpose to his life now, nothing worth doing, except tick the days off the calendar, one by one. “Isn't it just all downhill from here, after taking us so long to reach the peak, if we ever did? Now, just a slow fade to forgetfulness and death – for Sisyphus, one last time.”
Anyone who'd heard those remarks would have thought them pessimistic, maybe downright depressing, but they made perfect sense to my ear, a realistic assessment of our earlier conversations triggered by passing on a legacy. Had it seemed like wisdom to us then, the acceptance of the inevitable? But now it only made me feel older.
“O excellent, I love long life – better than figs!” I'd pulled up a chair, my legs stretched out toward the fire, a far more soothing view than facing the dark emptiness beyond his windows.
“Sit, Charmian,” he said, smiling broadly, “for a Roman thought hath struck me.”
“To sleep out this great gap of time?”
“Ah, salad days, when I was green in judgment: cold in blood, to say as I said then! What think you?”
“Methinks the lady doth protest too much. Oh, sorry,” breaking character, “wrong play...”
Tom sat back and laughed. “No points for you, then – it's also misquoted...”
“What, no bonus point for the modulation? Zounds!”
Invariably, as Dueling Shakespeare Quotes deteriorated, we quickly started making up our own.
“Then dare you be so gauche, forsooth, to sit upon my left side?”
“Adroit as e'er for one who's ever right!”
It must have been thirty years ago we'd last “sparred with the bard,” sitting in some Broadway restaurant before a concert, his piano trio ending the program, some songs of mine starting it off. Or was it the night before, after a final rehearsal at some nearby studio around the corner from Carnegie's recital hall? At the time, we thought the whole world was finally ready for us, except no critics came and very few friends.
“So long ago, Terry – what happened to the 'Hopeful We' from back then?”
He'd mentioned before about that letter, how he'd inherited the cabin through distant cousins on his mother's side of the family. If it was a total surprise to him, it came at a good time as he recuperated from the stroke, still living in his aunt's house after all that business a couple months earlier. Even when we were in school, Tom had been proud his mother had originally come from “good New England stock,” which sounded like his genealogy was nothing more than a cattle farmer's breeding program. The cabin had been built some years before the Civil War but he'd only mentioned childhood cousins he'd known like Cousin Burt, except maybe once in passing the family matriarch, called only “Cousin Emaline.” The name meant nothing to me then, but now there's a vague stirring: I mean, how many Emalines could there be?
The children he heard playing in the yard were no doubt echoes from those distant childhood visits of sixty years ago, running through the woods with Burt, the one closest to him in age. It hadn't been every summer, and never more than a week or two's vacation, because there wasn't room enough for everyone. Tom's mother was only Uncle Max's second cousin, dismissed as a distant relation, but her mother – Tom's maternal grandmother[n-d] had been a favorite of “Old Cousin Emaline” which, among her descendents, counted for something.
But after his mother died when Tom was ten, his father couldn't stand being around them that last summer, going up for a pre-arranged holiday to get away from recent memories and sudden loss. He'd viewed their concerns as meddling; maybe he'd found this family of lumber barons a little too uppity for his taste.
So, after that summer, they never went back. Tom kept in “scarce touch” with Burt only occasionally, making one more trip when Burt, to his surprise after Uncle Max's funeral, found himself the heir. After that, the cabin stood empty during the winters, only infrequent visitors except for a month at the height of summer.
Despite the inconvenience, Burt hung on to the place, never thinking of selling. Ironically, through some strange fate, all those other cousins were gone now, and the house and its memories belonged to Tom.
Those calendars Tom had hung in every room of the cabin, years we ourselves would have few memories of, were like portals into Tom's own past as it intersected with the cabin's larger history. If he'd been here as a baby before he could remember, the last of these calendars was his last summer here. Another groan escaped from the woodwork and I wondered if generations weren't the equivalent of “dog years” in a house's life, seven generations sheltered under these beams, like Tom's decades now showing their age.
In memory's instant replay, I saw him again, no longer the young man I'd remembered, struggle up from his recliner and I'd resisted that temptation to help, knowing he needed to fend for himself. Once-long blond hair was now close-cropped and white; the twinkle in the blue eyes, sadly at times the smile, had faded.
“It's one thing in the house,” he'd begun, the worry of every old person living alone, what'd happen if he should fall, “since Mrs. Danvers comes every other weekday and on alternate Saturday mornings.” Once he finally stood up and checked his balance, he straightened his back. Acclimated by a few tottery steps forward, he accepted the fact if anything happened to him, she'd find him “soon enough. It's still difficult to walk on uneven ground. So if I fell somewhere outside in the woods? Well, who knows when...”
This-Morning Tom interrupted Last-Night Tom as we walked into the dining room. “So many things I need to say – preferably alone.” An old cardboard box sat on an arm chair opposite the dining table.
“I didn't bring Cameron along to be my driver. Anything you want to say can be said in front of him.”
There'd been plenty of time last night if he needed to talk “alone,” but I suspect he wasn't really ready yet.
“He's a good kid.” Tom nodded his approval. “You're very lucky, you know.”
For the moment, I let that hang as a rhetorical question, whatever he was implying or what I'm used to inferring. If he was referencing Cameron's relationship to me, now was not the time. I also didn't want to remind him, if that wasn't it, of Susan, the death of their daughter, or the divorce.
Usually, Tom was not an emotional guy and whenever things started turning sentimental between us, he would become even more awkward. I knew, after last night, the last thing he wanted was a hug.
“Tom, whenever you're ready – I'm here. And Cameron's here, too. We can both help you,” trying not to sound too sappy.
“Something else I found while going through the closets upstairs,” Tom said, side-stepping the obvious, “is this box. The place had been thoroughly cleaned and orderly when I moved in, so this was unexpected.”
He picked it up very carefully. The cardboard box I thought was old held a dusty, even older-looking wooden box inside, its clasp once tied with a piece of faded ribbon once probably red.
“I had to cut it, unfortunately, since it was already too brittle to untie the bow. It would easily have disintegrated.”
He placed it on the table and sat in the chair he'd used at dinner last night, carefully raising the lid to reveal a pile of hand-written music inside, a folded letter on top.
“I wasn't sure what it was,” he said, half-whispering, “but where could hand-written music manuscripts have come from, in this family?” He unfolded the letter, dated October 10th, 1908, signed by Emaline Norton Hyde.
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©2022 by Dick Strawser for Thoughts on a Train
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