“Jonah Beal.” He walked toward me, not fast but steady. He moved like a man whose body hurt but who had learned to ignore it. “I live down the hollow about a mile. I’ve been watching your smoke.”
“Watching my smoke?”
“Watching you tear down that porch and haul the boards over here.”
He stopped at the edge of the footings and looked down at them. “Silas’s footings. He laid them in 1892. I helped him with the lintel.” He pointed at a flat stone set across the top of the cave mouth. I had not noticed it before, but now I could see it was shaped, deliberate, a frame for a door that had never been hung.
“You knew my grandfather.”
“Played checkers with him on Sundays when he’d come down from this hollow, which wasn’t often.”
Jonah Beal looked at me with his 1 good eye. “He talked about you. The granddaughter he’d never met, the one Ruth had before she died.”
My throat closed up. I did not know what to say.
“He sent for you, you know. Sent a letter to that relief house after Ruth passed. Asked them to put you on a train.” Jonah shook his head slowly. “I guess the letter never got there.”
I thought of Mrs. Vale, her steel-gray bun and her expression of permanent mild disgust. I thought of her saying, “A box of wind and a house built against a grave.”
“It got there,” I said. “It just never got to me.”
