The Brother My Father Never Named

Finding Hollis

Lavonne, it turned out, had known exactly where Hollis was for the better part of eleven years.

He had written to her once, out of the blue, care of the address she had never once changed in fifty years of living in that same house, simply to ask if her family was well and if the old church bell had ever gotten fixed. She had answered him. A quiet correspondence had gone on between them since, a handful of letters a year, nothing more, an old friend keeping a door cracked that a proud man could not bring himself to walk all the way through.

“I never told your father,” she said, and for the first time that afternoon her steady voice caught. “He never asked me directly, and I told myself that meant I did not have to volunteer it. I have wondered for eleven years if that was a kindness to him or a failure to both of them. I still do not know which.”

Hollis, she told me, had settled two states over, in a small town not so different from Cauble Mill, where he had raised no children of his own but had, by his own account, found a quiet enough life. He was eighty three now, living alone on a little piece of land with a home health aide who came by three mornings a week, his letters to Lavonne slower to arrive than they used to be, in handwriting that had gotten shakier with each passing year, not unlike my father’s had.

I drove the four hours out there the following Saturday with the cedar box on the seat beside me, the watch and the photograph and every one of those forty unsent letters still tied together in their original twine.