No Forwarding Address - Part Four

He told the deputy he was all right. It came out steady. The young man bent back to his box, and the year settled around the reporter again. Nineteen sixty-five. The creek was loud again, the redwoods stood black overhead, and the page in his hand was still empty.

The clearing was letting go of its crowd. They had the last of the young people in the cars, and the doors shut on them one at a time, and the cars backed and turned in the narrow drive and went down toward the road, into the gray of a morning coming up under the trees. A deputy carried the coffee can of seed past him. Another went by with a record player held by its wooden corners, the cord dragging in the grass. The man in the gray suit carried his ledger to a sedan and was driven off.

They had taken the painter away while the reporter was inside the other house, an hour gone or a lifetime, lost somewhere on the road between. The man's truck stood empty by the bridge under its wild coat of paint. In the gutted front room the toilet he had been working on stood finished and wet, throwing off a color the woods around it had no answer for.

Somewhere under the engines and the shouting of numbers, a voice went up behind him.

Tell them we were here.

It was not said to him, or not only to him. He turned to find the mouth of it. Four or five faces that might have made it. A dog. The cars already going down under the trees. For the length of a breath he could not have sworn the words had not come out of his own mouth. He had been sent up this road for something worth the space in a paper, and here it was, four words out of the noise, with no way to fasten them to anyone at all.

A deputy told him the clearing was closed and he could clear out. He nodded. He stayed.

He crossed the bridge and went into the cabin, because that was where the quiet had gone.

They had carried the rooms out into the daylight and left the husks of them. Pale squares stood on the walls where things had hung. The floor was tracked with the mud of everyone walked across it. The mail was gone, boxed and driven off. Only the toilet stayed, bright and wet in its corner, and the smell of oil and lacquer, nothing at all like the rot of the postmaster's rooms.

He took the bundle out of his coat, slid the gray ribbon off it, and found the letter with his own name near the bottom, where it always was.

His thumb found the flap.

This time it reached the seam and stopped, and the room was quiet enough and empty enough that he could have done it. He could have torn the paper and read what a man writes to his own ghost. He stood at the seam a long time, in the smell of the paint, in the tracked and emptied room, with the light going down through the redwoods.

He put the ribbon back around the bundle and slid it into his coat.

He took out the notebook and wrote the five words down. The place where a name should go he left blank, the way he had left it blank more times than he could recall, and this time he did not go back to it.

He went out across the bridge. The green had dried on his cuff. The letter lay against his chest under the coat, holding the heat of his own body through the wool, and he went down the mountain toward a town that had not yet heard of him.

Next Part:
https://www.abctales.com/blog/soulfire77/dead-letters-painter