The Cave That Held My Grandfather’s Faith

The pastor’s wife read the letter over my shoulder, and neither of us said much while I read it through twice more, because there was not much that needed saying on top of what my grandfather had already put down. He wrote that he had watched trouble come for every generation of Ficketts in one form or another, sickness, debt, bad decisions made young and paid for for years afterward, and that he had learned a man in trouble does not need a lecture, he needs a place to stand. So back when the bank had come sniffing around the main farm during a lean year, he had quietly carved off a half acre at the back corner of the property, the corner up against the tree line nobody wanted anyway, and recorded the deed in his own name alone, separate from the house, telling no one, not even my mother. He had hidden it here, in the hollow that had held his own family’s faith through the hardest years he had ever seen, because he believed that whichever one of his grandchildren eventually needed a fresh start more than they needed anything else, faith would walk them up this hillside same as it had walked his own family up here two generations before. The silver dollars were for the first month’s groceries. The rest, he wrote, I was meant to work out with my own two hands and whatever community still had room for me.

The document with the county seal was the deed itself, filed and legal, untouched by anything my mother had needed to sell to cover my debts, because it had never belonged to the house in the first place.

“He knew,” I said, mostly to myself. “He knew I might come home to nothing, and he made sure nothing wasn’t the whole story.”