Tom was there, but not there; nothing was before her but a series of filled pages, a whispering pencil, and Benjy’s careful Palmer Penmanship hand. Cora moved her head around, around, with each o, each l, with each small hill of an m; each tiny dot made her head peck like a chicken: each crossed t made her tongue lick across her upper lip.
‘It’s noon and I’m hungry!’ said Tom almost behind her.
But Cora was a statue now, watching the pencil as one watches a snail leaving an exceptional trail across a flat stone in the early morning.
‘It’s noon!’ cried Tom again.
Cora glanced up, stunned.
‘Why, it seems only a moment ago we wrote to that Philadelphia Coin Collecting Company, ain’t that right, Benjy?’ Cora smiled a smile much too dazzling for a woman fifty-five years old. ‘While you wait for your vittles, Tom, just can’t you build that mailbox? Bigger than Mrs Brabbam’s, please?’
‘I’ll nail up a shoe box.’
‘Tom Gibbs.’ She rose pleasantly. Her smile said, Better run, better work, better do! ‘I want a big, pretty mailbox. All white, for Benjy to paint our name on in black spelling. I won’t have any shoe box for my very first real letter.’
And it was done.
Benjy lettered the finished mailbox: MRS CORA GIBBS, while Tom stood grumbling behind him.
‘What’s it say?’
‘“Mr Tom Gibbs,”’ said Benjy quietly, painting.
Tom blinked at it for a minute, quietly, and then said, ‘I’m still hungry. Someone light the fire.’
There were no stamps. Cora turned white. Tom was made to hitch up the horse and drive to Green Fork to buy some red ones, a green, and ten pink stamps with dignified gentlemen printed on them. But Cora rode along to be certain Tom didn’t hurl these first letters in the creek. When they rode home, the first thing Cora did, face glowing, was poke in the new mailbox.
‘You crazy?’ said Tom.
‘No harm looking.’
That afternoon she visited the mailbox six times. On the seventh, a woodchuck jumped out. Tom stood laughing in the door, pounding his knees. Cora chased him out of the house, still laughing.
Then she stood in the window looking down at her mailbox right across from Mrs Brabbam’s. Ten years ago the Widow Lady had plunked her letter box right under Cora’s nose, almost, when she could as easily have built it up nearer her own cabin.
But it gave Mrs Brabbam an excuse to float like a flower on a river down the hill path, flip the box wide with a great coughing and rustling, from time to time spying up to see if Cora was watching. Cora always was. When caught, she pretended to sprinkle flowers with an empty watering can, or pick mushrooms in the wrong season.
Next morning Cora was up before the sun had warmed the strawberry patch or the wind had stirred the pines.
Benjy was sitting up in his cot when Cora returned from the mailbox. ‘Too early,’ he said. ‘Postman won’t drive by yet.’
‘Drive by?’
‘They come in cars this far out.’
‘Oh.’ Cora sat down.
‘You sick, Aunt Cora?’
‘No, no.’ She blinked. ‘It’s just, I don’t recall in twenty years seeing no mail truck whistle by here. It just came to me. All this time. I never seen no mailman at all.’
‘Maybe he comes when you’re not around.’
‘I’m up with the fog spunks, down with the chickens. I never really gave it a thought, of course, but—’ She turned to look out the window, up at Mrs Brabbam’s house. ‘Benjy, I got a kind of sneaking hunch.’
She stood up and walked straight out of the cabin, down the dust path, Benjy following, across the thin road to Mrs Brabbam’s mailbox. A hush was on the fields and bills. It was so early it made you whisper.
‘Don’t break the law, Aunt Cora!’
‘Shh! Here.’ She opened the box, put her hand in like someone fumbling in a gopher hole. ‘And here, and here.’ She rattled some letters into his cupped hands.
‘Why, these been opened already! You open these, Aunt Cora?’
‘Child, I never touched them.’ Her face was stunned. ‘This is the first time in my life I ever even let my shadow touch this box.’
Benjy turned the letters around and around, cocking his head. ‘Why, Aunt Cora, these letters, they’re ten years old!’
‘What!’ Cora grabbed at them.
‘Aunt Cora, that lady’s been getting the same mail every day for years. And they’re not even addressed to Mrs Brabbam, they’re to some woman named Ortega in Green Fork.’
‘Ortega, the Mexican grocery woman! All these years,’ whispered Cora, staring at the worn mail in her hands. ‘All these years.’
They gazed up at Mrs Brabbam’s sleeping house in the cool quiet morning.
‘Oh, that sly woman, making a commotion with her letters, making me feel small. All puffed out she was, swishing along, reading her mail.’
Mrs Brabbam’s front door opened.
‘Put them back, Aunt Cora!’
Cora slammed the mailbox shut with time to spare.
Mrs Brabbam drifted down the path, stopping here or there, quietly, to peer at the opening wild flowers.
‘Morning,’ she said sweetly.
‘Mrs Brabbam, this is my nephew Benjy.’
‘How nice.’ Mrs Brabbam, with a great swivel of her body, a flourish of her flour-white hands, rapped the mailbox as if to shake the letters loose inside, flipped the lid, and extracted the mail, covering her actions with her back. She made motions, and spun about merrily, winking, ‘Wonderful! Why, just look at this letter from dear Uncle George!’
‘Well, ain’t that nice!’ said Cora.
Then the breathless summer days of waiting. The butterflies jumping orange and blue on the air, the flowers nodding about the cabin, and the hard, constant sound of Benjy’s pencil scribbling through the afternoons. Benjy’s mouth was always packed with food, and Tom was always stomping in, to find lunch or supper late, cold, or both, or none at all.
Benjy handled the pencil with a delicious spread of his bony hands, lovingly inscribing each vowel and consonant as Cora hovered about him, making up words, rolling them on her tongue, delighted each time she saw them roll out on the paper. But she wasn’t learning to write. ‘It’s so much fun watching you write, Benjy. Tomorrow I’ll start learning. Now take another letter!’
They worked their way through ads about Asthma, Trusses, and Magic, they joined the Rosicrucians, or at least sent for a free Sealed Book all about the Knowledge that had been damned to oblivion, Secrets from hidden ancient temples and buried sanctuaries.
Then there were free packets of Giant Sunflower seeds, and something about HEARTBURN. They had worked back to page 127 of Quarter Murder Magazine on a bright summer morning when…
‘Listen!’ said Cora.
They listened.
‘A car,’ said Benjy.
And up the blue hills and through the tall fiery green pines and along the dusty road, mile by mile, came the sound of a car riding along and along, until finally, at the bend, it came full thundering, and in an instant Cora was out the door running, and as she ran she heard and saw and felt many things.
First, from the corner of her eye, she saw Mrs Brabbam gliding down the road from the other direction. Mrs Brabbam froze when she saw the bright green car boiling on the grade, and there was the whistle of a silver whistle and the old man in the car leaned out just before Cora arrived and said, ‘Mrs Gibbs?’ ‘Yes!’ she cried. ‘Mail for you, ma’am,’ he said, and held it toward her.
She put out her hand, then drew it back, remembering. ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘please, would you mind, would you put it, please…in my mailbox?’ The old man squinted at her, at the mailbox, back at her, and laughed. ‘Don’t mind,’ he said, and did just that, put the mail in the box.
Mrs Brabbam stood where she was, not moving, eyes wild. ‘Any mail for Mrs Brabbam?’ asked Cora.
‘That’s all.’ And the car dusted away down the road.
Mrs Brabbam stood with her hands clenched together. Then, without looking in her own letter box, turned and rustled swiftly up her path, out of sight.
Cora walked around her mailbox twice, not touching it for a long time. ‘Benjy, I’ve got me some letters!’ She reached in delicately and took them out and turned them over. She put them quietly in his hand. ‘Read them to me. Is my name on the front?’
‘Yes’m.’ He opened the first letter with due carefulness and read it aloud in the summer morning:
‘“Dear Mrs Gibbs…”’
He stopped and let her savor it, her eyes half shut, her mouth moving the words. He repeated it for artistic emphasis and then went on: ‘“We are sending you our free folder, enclosed, from the Intercontinental Mailing Schools concerning full particulars on how you, too, can take our Correspondence Course in Sanitary Engineering—”’
‘Benjy, Benjy, I’m so happy! Start over again!’
‘“Dear Mrs Gibbs,”’ he read.
After that the mailbox was never empty. The world came rushing and crowding in, all the places she had never seen or heard about or been to. Travel folders, spicecake recipes, and even a letter from an elderly gentleman who wished for a lady ‘—fifty years old, gentle disposition, money; object matrimony.’ Benjy wrote back, ‘I am already married, but thank you for your kind and thoughtful consideration. Yours truly, Cora Gibbs.’
And the letters continued to pour across the hills, coin collectors’ catalogues, Dime Novelty books, Magic List Numbers, Arthritis Charts, Flea Killer Samples. The world filled up her letter box, and suddenly she was
