The Letters That Came Home

His letter to me was four pages. I read it over three days because I had to.

He wrote that the spring he graduated, things at his house had gotten past what a boy could carry, and that he had made up his mind, all the way up, that he was not going to see the summer out.

He wrote that he had a night picked and a way picked, and that he had told nobody, because the whole point was that nobody would miss the chance to talk him out of it.

And he wrote that my letter came on the Saturday after graduation, into that quiet house, the way I had always timed them to come.

He had carried it out to the porch to read alone. One page, my blue-black ink, the green pen. He did not remember the whole thing, he said. He remembered one line.

I had written: “Carl, the world is not done with you, and I expect to read your name someday in a good place, so do not go anywhere.”

He wrote that he sat on that porch and read “do not go anywhere” and understood that somebody, one grown person in the whole world, was expecting him to still be here, and that he could not make a liar out of the only person who had bothered.

He put the night off. Just that night, he said, on account of the letter. And the next day was a hair easier, and the one after that, and he got through the summer one borrowed day at a time, and the letter rode folded in his wallet through all of it.

He is fifty-three now. He wrote that the letter is still in his wallet, the creases worn through to holes, laminated finally so it would last.

He is a high school teacher out west. Has been for twenty-six years. He teaches the back-row boys, the quiet ones, the ones you have to work not to forget.

And every June, he wrote, he sends a letter to his own graduating seniors. One page, front only. Something true. He had no idea, until the word reached him through some chain of old classmates, that the woman who started him doing it had stopped being able to see.

“I have mailed about nine hundred of my own by now, Mrs. Marsh,” he wrote at the end. “I kept count, because you kept count. We are almost even. I will catch you.”