The Letter He Kept

I found my brother’s papers beneath the Bible in my valise, where I had put them after his funeral and then left them untouched. The bundle was tied with kitchen string. When I loosened it, a folded letter slid out and stopped against my bandaged hand.

The postmark was from last winter. My brother had kept it with his accounts, though he had never shown it to me. I called for Vincent before I opened it. A letter can say more than its writer meant, and I had learned the hard way what happened when men kept records of my family.

He came to the cabin with his hat in his hand. He had been working at the gate with Mateo, but the dust on his cuffs was already brushed away. I set the letter on the table between us.

“Do you want me to read it?” he asked.

“I want you to stay while I read it. That is different.”

He took the chair across from me. I broke the seal.

The letter was from a man named Josiah Bell, my father’s sister’s son. His hand leaned hard to the right, and the ink had blotted where the paper was folded. He wrote that he had come west with his wife and little girl, and was living near Fort Garland in Colorado Territory. He said he was nineteen years old, and that his mother had died the year before. He asked whether my brother remembered the summer they had caught a snapping turtle in the creek and carried it home in a wash tub.

I remembered no such turtle. I remembered my brother returning from visits with our father’s family speaking less than before. It had seemed a matter between grown people. I had been a child, and I had not pressed him.

The letter ended with Josiah’s hope that we might meet again. There was no mention of witchcraft, bargains, or collectors. A young man had written to his cousin. My brother had put the letter away and left it unanswered.

I read it again, slower. “If he is nineteen, he is younger than I am.”

“And he was alive last winter,” Vincent said. “That challenges the collector’s statement. It doesn’t tell us whether Josiah is alive now, or what the collector means by ‘known.’”

“Or whether a cousin counts as an issue of the same line,” I said. I disliked how readily I heard the collector’s voice in my own questions. “His mother was my father’s sister. That seems plain enough.”

“It is plain to us. We need the family records to make it plain to anyone who would dispute it.”

I searched the bundle while he waited. There were receipts from the store, two account books, and a small packet of letters my brother had kept from our father. I found no reply to Josiah. In the back of the second account book, beside a list of debts, my brother had copied the letter’s date and address. Beneath it he had written: “Boy is nineteen. Do not put his name forward until I know what the instrument permits.”