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intercepting pine boughs along the way, mixing between the railings until trees and stairs were one.
    I examined the rusted stairway, saw that it was not actually touching the ground. It had been lifted several inches from the earth. I took hold of it and tugged.
    “Don’t,” Callie said. “You’ll pull it down on your head.”
    I climbed up a couple steps. “It’s firm, Callie. I could go all the way to the top.”
    “Well, don’t.”
    “You think a tornado got the house?”
    “I don’t know. This didn’t happen a short time ago, but not a long time ago either. That big oak has been here for no telling how long, but those pines are young. The oak was probably in the side yard, but the pines, they’ve grown up since. Look.”
    Callie bent, picked up a fragment of lumber that had been partially hidden under the pine straw.
    She handed it to me. It was less than a foot of jagged, blackened board. It crumbled in my hand, leaving my fingers black.
    “A fire, Stanley. The house burned down, and pieces of the house were slowly pushed up by the trees as they grew. Isn’t it amazing?”
    “It’s creepy.”
    “It was a big house, Stanley. I bet this is the center of it. The heart of the house.”
    “You mean it was a mansion?”
    “Seems that way. If it was, could be the box wasn’t buried at all. But in the fire it dropped through the burning floorboards and in time got covered. Grass grew up around it, waterwashed dirt over it. Everything shifted. And there it lay until you and Nub found it.”
    Nub had fixed his mind on the squirrel again. It was running along a limb, looking down at Nub, making that peculiar chattering noise they make, slashing with its tail.
    Nub managed to run up the slight slant of the oak’s trunk, and was now perched on a low-hanging limb barking at the squirrel.
    Callie laughed, said, “Get that fool mutt down from there before he falls on his head.”
    I called Nub, but he wouldn’t come. I finally climbed up and got him, swinging by my feet from the limb and handing Nub to Callie. I squirmed back onto the limb and climbed down.
    “You’re such a bad dog,” I said, petting Nub on the head.
    As we went out of the woods, the squirrel chattered loudly, calling for me to return his playmate.

4
    C ALLIE WANTED TO EXAMINE the letters and the journal more closely, but it was almost time for supper, then it would be time to get ready for opening up the drive-in.
    Saturday was our biggest night. It was the night Daddy was the most nervous. He took to wringing his hands and drinking baking soda mixed in water for his stomach.
    If we had a big Saturday, we sometimes had our money for the week. Everything else, Monday through Friday, was just icing on the cake. But Saturday you had families and dates, the masses turned out to worship the gods on the big white screen.
    Since Rosy Mae was off Saturdays, it had become our custom to have TV dinners, or hot dogs, or fried chicken from the concession stand. But this night, perhaps because Mom didn’t want us to forget she could cook when she had to, we had a big dinner of roast ham, bacon-dripped green beans, brown gravy, and mashed potatoes so light and fluffy you could have tossed them skyward and they would have floated like a cloud. It wasas if Mom were trying to compete with Rosy. And as amazing as Mama’s food was, competing against Rosy was like trying to play against a royal flush with a busted flush.
    We finished eating, and were about to go about our business, when we heard the front door open, which we seldom locked (though that would change), and we heard a voice call out, “You Mitchels in there?”
    It was Rosy Mae, calling from the front door. She was leaning in, acting as if she had never been in our house before.
    Mom called out, “Come in, Rosy Mae.”
    Rosy Mae came, stood in the doorway of the kitchen, clutching her paisley purse to her as if she were holding a kitten.
    Her head rag was gone and her woolly hair was twisted