The Three Boxes On Our Bench

Beth had written at the bottom of her note, my mother does not remember much. But last month I showed her the picture I found in her things, the five of you on the dock, and she touched your face in it, and she said Ruthie. She said your name. Of everything that has gone out of her, your name stayed. I thought you should know that your name stayed.

I have been given a great many gifts in my life. I do not know that I have ever been given one to match being told that my name stayed.

The third box was Walt’s.

Walt was still alive, out in Oregon, with his bad lungs and his oxygen, and he could not fly and he could not make the drive, and so he had done what he could do. He had mailed his box to Danny months ago, before Danny died, and then after Danny died he had mailed a second thing to Janine, to make sure.

Walt was the quiet one. You would think the quiet one would send the least. He sent the most.

Inside the box was a pocketknife. A small bone handled pocketknife, worn smooth. And I knew it. I knew it the second I saw it. It was the knife Walt used to carry at thirteen, the one his dead father had left him, the one he used that last August to carve our five sets of initials into the underside of the bench where the grownups would not see. R. D. L. W. D. Ruthie, Dot, Lorraine, Walt, Danny. He had carried his father’s knife his whole life, across the whole country, through sixty eight years, and he sent it back to the lake.

There was a letter with it, in Walt’s shaky hand, and it was short, because Walt was always short, a man of few words who meant every one.

He wrote: Ruthie. I carved our names under the bench the last summer. Reach under and feel for them, they are still there, I made them deep. I always meant to come back. My lungs had other ideas. I am sending the knife home. It has been away long enough. You were all the best thing that ever happened to a quiet kid whose dad died too soon. Tell the lake I said hello. Walt.

I got down on my knees on the point, sixty eight years old, in my good coat, in the October grass, and I reached under that bench, and I felt along the rough underside of the oak, and I found them. Five sets of initials, cut deep by a boy with his father’s knife fifty five years ago. R. D. L. W. D. I ran my thumb over every one of them the way I used to run my thumb over the 1949, and I said every name out loud, and a pair of mergansers went by low over the water, and the sun came all the way up over the tamaracks, and I understood something I want to try to tell you right.

All five of us kept the promise.