The Boy Carl Wrote to for Twenty Years

Twenty bundles

The box was arranged, and the arrangement told me about the man.

Under the first page there were rubber-banded bundles, one for every year, 2005 through 2024. The bands were the narrow tan kind that come on bunches of broccoli, and I could picture him saving them. Each bundle had an index card tucked in front with the year printed on it, and sometimes a note. “2009, dry year, corn failed.” “2013, soccer, broke wrist.” And for 2016, the date and nothing else, only a line drawn under it so hard it had dented the card.

Twenty bundles. I counted them twice, in case my arithmetic had gone the way of my knees. The letters from 2025 lay loose on top, only a handful, the band not yet on them.

I did not start at the beginning. I took one from the middle, 2011, because it was thick, and I unfolded the top letter.

Mateo had written it himself, in English. A neat, upright, slightly formal English, the English of a boy who learned it from a book and a patient teacher and was proud of every word.

Dear Mr. Carl,

Thank you for your letter of May. I am fine. I am thirteen now. We had a big rain and the road to the school was a river for two days, so I did not go, but my cousin carried me on his back across the worst part and then we were both wet and my teacher laughed.

You asked if I like the bicycle. I do not have a bicycle. I think maybe you are thinking of another boy. It is all right. I want to tell you I do not need a bicycle. I have a good pair of boots from my uncle.

Do you still have your dog? What is his name again? I forgot. I am sorry.

Sincerely, your friend, Mateo

I laughed, a short surprised laugh, alone on the closet floor.

This boy was not writing thank-you notes to an angel. He was writing to a man who had gotten his mail crossed, and he corrected him the way you correct a grandfather, kindly, without making a thing of it.

I went back to 2005 then and read them in order. It took most of the afternoon. The light moved across the closet carpet from the window and I moved with it, and I never heard Beth’s text come in.

Is it cold where you live

The first ones were in Spanish, with a typed English translation stapled to the back by someone at the agency. A boy of seven drawing a house with a tin roof and a dog. Thank you for the pencils, I have used one already. In my house we are six. My father works in the fields and in the town. My mother makes tortillas and sells them.

Then, in the third letter, in big uneven printing, like each letter had been labored over, a question.

Is it cold where you live?

He asked it again in the next letter, and the one after. Somewhere around the sixth time I understood that Carl had not answered. He had written about corn prices, and our beagle, Skip, and Swiss Days in July. But for a year and a half he had not answered the one question the boy kept asking.

And then I found the first of the pages my husband never mailed.

A stack of yellow legal pads was at the very bottom of the box, the last one on top. I had taken them for stiffening, cardboard cut to fit. It was the kind the feed store gives away, with the co-op’s name printed along the top in green, and it was covered in pencil, page after page, words crossed out and written over. On one page, a small drawing of a snowflake with six arms and a question mark.