The Boy Carl Wrote to for Twenty Years

A year after I buried Carl, I finally cleared out his closet.

People hear “cleared out his closet” and picture a woman weeping into a flannel shirt. It was the middle of October. The soybeans were coming off in the fields behind our house in Berne, and I did the closet because my daughter Beth was driving over from Indianapolis on Saturday and I had told her it would be finished. I had told her that in March.

So I put the radio on low and started at the left end of the rod.

Carl was a man who kept things. Eleven winter coats, and I could have told you the story of nine of them. I folded each one over my arm and carried it to the bed, and I did not cry, and I was a little proud of myself for it.

Behind the coats, on the floor, under the hanging bag with his good suit in it, there was a boot box. A Red Wing box, the orange kind, gone soft at the corners from years of being nudged a few inches at a time.

I knew that box. For forty-six years it had been where Carl kept his tax receipts, and I had never once lifted the lid. He did the taxes and I did everything else.

I sat down on the closet floor to open it. My knees cracked like kindling on the way down.

There were no receipts.

On top, lying flat, was a letter on pale blue paper from a relief agency, the kind that sends mailers every Christmas. A small school photograph was stapled to the corner. A boy of seven or so in a white shirt two sizes too big, the collar standing out around his neck like a paper cup. A cowlick in front. A serious mouth, the kind a child makes when he has been told that this picture is important. Behind him was a cinder block wall painted pale green and the edge of a blackboard.

The letter was dated June of 2005. It said, in the careful way those letters have, that Mr. Carl Stoltz had been matched with a child named Mateo, age seven, from a farming family in the highlands of Guatemala, outside Huehuetenango. It said he liked soccer. It said he was in the second grade and was learning to read.

Under the photograph, in Carl’s pencil, in the squared-off capitals he used for labeling jars of screws, he had written one word.

Ours.

I looked up at the empty rod where the coats had been, and I said out loud, “Carl Stoltz, what did you do?”

Nobody answered. The radio was playing a polka station out of Fort Wayne. I turned it off.