The Town That Remembered Walt Kessler

We have since found six of those nine families, through the historical society and through some patient letter writing of our own, and Emily, who is sharper with a computer than any of us old women ever will be, found a seventh in an online obituary comment section late one night and woke me up at eleven thirty to tell me.

The first family we reached was in Clark County, a grandniece named Patty, sixty one years old, who had grown up hearing her grandmother talk about a letter that came every single year like clockwork, signed only with the letter W, that nobody in three generations had ever managed to trace.

“My grandmother used to say that letter was the only thing that got her through some Februarys,” Patty told me on the phone, her voice breaking partway through. “She died still not knowing who sent it. She used to say she hoped whoever it was knew she read every single one standing at her own kitchen window, every year, and that it mattered more than he probably ever imagined it could.”

I told her his name. I told her he had lived two counties over his whole life, a quiet man behind a hardware store counter, and that he had never once asked for anything back.

“Seventy three years,” Patty said, crying now, open and unashamed. “Seventy three years, and we never even got to say thank you to his face.”

“You can still say it,” I told her. “Just not to his face. To his grave, if you ever want to drive out this way. Millbrook will show you where he’s resting, and we would be glad for you to come.”

She said she would.

The auxiliary voted, unanimously, to keep Walt’s list going. We will not sign our names either, because that was never the point of it. It was never about being thanked. It was about nine mothers, long gone now, and after them nine sisters and brothers, and after them nieces and nephews who never knew their uncle’s name was kept alive every single year by a quiet man at a hardware store counter who never once mentioned it to a living soul.

We buried Walt Kessler on a cold clear Saturday in October with an Army honor guard, three rifle volleys, a boy playing Taps who had never met him, and a chapel that filled past every chair Les owned and then some, seventy strangers standing for a man who spent seventy three years quietly making sure nobody else was ever forgotten.

He is not going to be forgotten either. Not as long as the auxiliary has a hand to hold a pen.