If a man wrote a form letter to Cora about the Mysteries of Ancient Maya Revealed, he was likely as not to receive three letters from Cora in the next week, budding out their formal meeting into a warm friendship. After one particularly hard day of writing, Benjy was forced to soak his hand in Epsom salts.
By the end of the third week Mrs Brabbam no longer came down to her mailbox. She didn’t even come out the front door of her cabin to get the air, for Cora was always down at the road, leaning out, smiling for the mailman.
All too quickly the summer was at an end, or, at least, that part of the summer that counted most, anyway: Benjy’s visit. There was his red bandanna handkerchief on the cabin table, sandwiches folded fresh and oniony in it, tied with a mint sprig to keep it clean to the smell; there on the floor, freshly polished, were his shoes to get into, and there on the chair, with his pencil which had once been long and yellow but was now stubby and chewed, sat Benjy. Cora took hold of his chin and tilted his head, as if she were testing a summer squash of an unfamiliar variety.
‘Benjy, I owe you an apology. I don’t think I looked at your face once in all this time. Seems I know every wart on your hand, every hangnail, every bump and every crinkle, but I might pass your face in a crowd and miss you.’
‘It’s no face to look at,’ said Benjy shyly.
‘But I’d know that hand in a million hands,’ Cora said. ‘Let anyone shake my hand in a dark room, a thousand people, and out of all those I’d say, “Well, this one’s Benjy.”’ She smiled quietly and walked away to the open door. ‘I been thinking.’ She looked up at a distant cabin. ‘Ain’t seen Mrs Brabbam in weeks.
Stays in all the time now. I’ve got a guilty feeling. I’ve done a prideful thing, a thing more sinful than she ever done me. I took the bottom out of her life. It was a mean and spiteful thing and I’m ashamed.’ She gazed up the hill toward that silent, locked place. ‘Benjy, would you do me one last favor?’
‘Yes’m.’
‘Write a letter for Mrs Brabbam.’
‘Ma’am?’
‘Yes, write one of those companies for a free chart, a sample, something, and sign Mrs Brabbam’s name.’
‘All right,’ said Benjy.
‘That way, in a week or a month the postman’ll come by and whistle, and I’ll tell him to go up to her door, special, and deliver it. And I’ll be sure and be out in my front yard where I can see and Mrs Brabbam can see I see. And I’ll wave my letters to her and she’ll wave her letters to me, and everybody’ll smile.’
‘Yes’m,’ said Benjy.
He wrote three letters, licked the envelopes carefully, stuck them in his pocket. ‘I’ll mail them when I get to St Louis.’
‘It’s been a fine summer,’ she said.
‘It sure has.’
‘But, Benjy, I didn’t learn to write, did I? I was after the letters and made you write late nights, and we were so busy sending labels and getting samples, land, it seemed there wasn’t time to learn. And that means…’
He knew what it meant. He shook her hand. They stood in the cabin door. ‘Thanks,’ she said, ‘for everything.’
Then he was running off. He ran as far as the meadow fence, leaped it easily, and the last she saw of him he was still running, waving the special letters, off into the great world over the hills.
The letters kept coming for some six months after Benjy went away. There would be the postman’s little green car and the sharp ice-rimed shout of good morning, or the whistle, as he clapped two or three pink or blue envelopes into that fine mailbox.
And there was that special day when Mrs Brabbam received her first real letter.
After that the letters were spaced a week apart, then a month, and finally the postman didn’t say hello at all, there was no sound of a car coming up that lonely mountain road. First a spider moved into the mailbox, then a sparrow.
And Cora, while the letters still lasted, would clutch them in her bewildered hands, staring at them quietly until the pressure of her face muscles squeezed clear round shiny drops of water from her eyes. She’d hold up one blue envelope. ‘Who’s this from?’
‘Don’t know,’ said Tom.
‘What’s it say?’ she wailed.
‘Don’t know,’ said Tom.
‘What’s going on in that world out there, oh, I’ll never know, I’ll never know now,’ she said. ‘And this letter, and this one, and this!’ She tumbled the stacks and stacks of letters that had come since Benjy ran off.
‘All the world and all the people and all the happenings, and me not knowing. All that world and people waiting to hear from us, and us not writing, and them not ever writing back!’
And at last the day came when the wind blew the mailbox over. In the mornings again, Cora would stand at the open door of her cabin, brushing her gray hair with a slow brush, not speaking, looking at the hills.
And in all the years that followed she never passed the fallen mailbox without stooping aimlessly to fumble inside and take her hand out with nothing in it before she wandered on again into the fields.
The end
