No Forwarding Address - Part Two

He had been young the night they found the postmaster. Young enough that his own knees gave under him when he saw the man on the floor.

He had been riding out with a lawman, the way a reporter did then, spending the dead hours of a shift beside a stranger with a badge and a slow way of talking, in the hope that something would happen worth the space in the morning paper. For most of the night nothing had. The lawman was not much for talk, and the reporter passed the quiet turning over the empty piece he would have to file, his mind going back to a warm room somewhere and the person in it he meant to get home to.

Then word reached them, carried by a boy sent running. The postmaster had not opened his house in some days, and a neighbor who went to knock had smelled a reason to fetch the law. The lawman turned them around and they went.

The house stood at the end of a road that no lamp reached, back where the trees had come in close over the years and laid their branches along the roof. The smell reached them before the house did. The lawman stopped on the step, put his sleeve across his face, and went in, and the reporter went in after him, because the road behind them was dark and going back down it alone was the worse of the two choices.

Inside, there was no room left in the house to be a house.

The mail had started against the walls and come inward. It stood in stacks pressed down under their own weight until the letters at the bottom had gone the color of the floorboards. It slumped in sacks in the corners. It lay loose across the boards where it had slid from the tops of the piles. The reporter had carried a paper route as a boy and had believed he understood a quantity of mail. This was more than one city should have been able to lose, and it had been coming into these rooms for longer than the rooms should have stood.

He made himself study the postmarks, because reading them kept his eyes off the middle of the room. They were from everywhere. He found the names of ports he knew only from schoolbooks, and scripts he could not read. The inks looked wrong for the dates stamped over them, as though the dates had stopped agreeing with the hands that wrote them. One envelope near his foot had been addressed by a child, the letters large and bitten deep into the paper, and it had never been opened, and it would not be opened now.

The postmaster lay in the middle of the room, in a small clear place the stacks had left, as though they had grown up around him and stopped short of him. He lay on his back, hands folded low on his chest. There was no wound on him that the lawman could find, and nothing in the rooms to say what had stopped him. His face had gone slack and gray, and the jaw had set.

The lawman crouched by him a while. He looked at the mountains of mail the way he might have looked at a snowfall that had closed a road, a nuisance with no name in it and nothing in it to fear. He told the reporter to keep his hands in his pockets and touch nothing, and went back down the road for the others.

The cold came up through the paper the way it would come up, a long time on, through another pile of it beside a creek, and for a moment the reporter could not have said which floor he stood on.

Left alone with it, he did the thing a reporter does. He looked.

He kept his back to the body and worked along the nearest stack the way a man reads the spines on a shelf. Low on a pile near the dead man's head, kept apart from the rest, sat a bundle tied with a ribbon that had once been black and had gone gray under the dust.

He crouched, worked it loose, and lifted it into what little light came through the fouled window.

Most of the hands on the bundle meant nothing to him. Cramped, ordinary, the writing of people no one would ever remember. A few he knew. He had seen the slant of those in books, and once behind glass in a library case, and the names under them did not belong in the same year as one another, and here they were tied in among all the strangers, one behind the next. His hands went still on the ribbon without being told.

He turned the letters over one at a time. Near the bottom he came to one addressed in a hand he knew better than any writer's, because it was the hand he had been writing his whole life. His own name stood on the front, in his own letters, closed the crimped way he closed them and had taught no one. Something went out of his legs. He turned it over for the postmark the way a man presses on a bruise to be sure. The date stamped across it was a day that had not come.

Out on the dark road there were voices now, and men coming back on foot, and his hands moved before his mind was asked. They were not steady. He pushed the bundle inside his coat, flat against his chest, ribbon and all, his own letter in with the rest, and stood up too fast with his hands in his pockets, touching nothing, holding all of it.

The lawman came back through the door with two men behind him, and their lanterns passed over the reporter and over the coat and stopped on neither. None of the three looked at what he carried. He walked out through them into air that had lost its smell, and down a road that was not as dark as it had been coming up.

One letter in the bundle stayed warm against him the whole way home. He kept his hand flat over it through the coat, over his own name, and under the wool his skin had gone cold as the room he had left, and still the letter was warm.

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