A Fine Dark Line Read Online Free PDF Page B

it?”
    “Just some letters.”
    “Where did you find it?”
    Callie opened the box.
    “It was buried in the backyard. Me and Nub found it.”
    “Buried? Wow.”
    I sat on the edge of the bed and watched Callie take out the bag, remove the letters, and untie the ribbon.
    “Those are mine,” I said.
    “They belong to whoever wrote them. You just found them, you little goober.”
    “They’re just love letters.”
    Callie read the first letter. When she finished, there were tears in her eyes. “That is so sweet.”
    “I thought it was mushy.”
    “It’s very sweet. And so old-fashioned. Did you see the date?”
    I shook my head.
    “It was written during the war. First year of it.”
    “That’s a long time ago.”
    “I was born during the war. Nineteen forty-two. So it’s not so long ago. It reads like a woman writing to her lover.”
    “You saying a guy kept those letters?”
    “Well, it reads that way. I suppose they could be letters from a guy to a girl. Initials are used. M to J, so I don’t know for sure. Maybe if I read more.”
    “How did it end up buried out there?”
    “I don’t know.”
    Callie pulled out another envelope, removed a letter. “It’s signed M as well. I guess it was a pet thing with them. Just using the initials. Did you notice there are no stamps or addresses on the envelopes?”
    “What does that mean?”
    “To me it means these were probably not mailed, but hand-delivered.”
    Callie began looking through the entire bundle. “Hey, not all of these are letters. Just the top four. The rest of these are torn-out journal pages, written on the back and front. And written crosswise too.”
    “Crosswise.”
    “They are written the way you normally write, front and back, then the pages are turned and written across. See?”
    I took a look. Sure enough. I said, “How can you read something like that?”
    “People used to do this to save paper, especially way back. You get used to reading it, I suppose. Where exactly did you find this?”
    I told her.
    “Let’s go look.”
    I didn’t have anything else to do, so I agreed. Callie put the letters and the journal pages back, pushed the box under the bed.
    She put on shoes and we went outside. Out back I showedher where I had found the box. Nub dug at the hole as if something might still be in it, then quit suddenly, charged into the woods, after who knows what.
    Shortly thereafter, we heard Nub barking.
    I called him, but he didn’t come.
    “It is strange that it would be buried right here,” Callie said, “at the edge of the woods . . . Nub, shut up.”
    “Don’t talk to Nub like that.”
    “He’s giving me a headache.”
    I called him again, but he still didn’t come. “Let’s look,” I said.
    The woods were thick with pine trees and brambles. It was hard to follow Nub, but shortly we found him. He had his front feet against an old oak, his head thrown back, barking at a squirrel. All you could see of the squirrel was its tail blowing in the breeze.
    I grabbed Nub by his collar, pulled him off the tree. His sharp little barks were making my back teeth hurt.
    I said, “Hush, Nub.”
    “My goodness, Stanley, look.”
    I turned, didn’t see anything other than Callie, but as I looked closer, I realized there were some old porch steps half submerged in the earth. Then I saw the outline of a house, a large house.
    Looking closer yet, I saw where lumber had rotted and fallen to the ground and was mostly covered with pine straw and oak leaves.
    Callie glanced up. “My God.”
    I looked. Shredded, rotted lumber hung from limbs like ugly Christmas decorations. There was a window frame with a broken piece of glass still in it, supported by a pine limb. A large piece of the roof frame was up there too. Even ablackened door where a limb had grown through where the doorknob had been.
    Most peculiar was a circular iron staircase that began at the earth between two pines and wound upward to a height of thirty feet,