Read Beware of Cat for Free Online

“Try here,” or “Please forward to . . .”
    Each one was scratched out.
    We followed the trail of addresses around northern California. Then, in the lower right-hand corner, were the words, “Moved to Oregon in 1983.” An arrow pointed to the flip side of the envelope. On the back we found an address for a church in Portland. More hand-written addresses, more postmarks: 1984, 1985. The trail led to Seattle, and by 1987 the letter had meandered up to Missoula, Montana.
    In the late 1980s, the letter stopped twice in Bismarck, North Dakota. Then it was off to Minot. At that point, in smudged black ink, the words FORWARDING ORDER EXPIRED were stamped across the address. A heavy black finger of ink pointed out that the letter should be returned to the sender. Of course, there was no return address, and once again, in the spirit of getting the mail delivered, a letter carrier in Minot, North Dakota, had written in the address of a small house on my route in South Minneapolis.
    I stared at the address. There was no mistake; the numerals were printed clearly. Even the zip code was correct. I shook my head in bewilderment. While the accountables clerk explained to the other carriers what we were looking at, I turned the envelope over and looked at the name again. Attempting to sound out the letters, I decided it had the ring of a feminine name. The printing, old and faded as it was, looked masculine.
    A love letter?
    The only address not crossed out was the one on my route. We speculated about where the letter had lain for months or years between attempted deliveries. The clerk asked, “Does that name look familiar?”
    I pictured the house on my route. Even though I had been on this assignment only a short time, I knew many of the names of the residents. A young couple lived in that particular house, a young couple with an infant child and a common,
everyday name like Thompson, or Johnson—nothing even close to the exotic name on the envelope.
    I shook my head, but the significance of what I held in my hands began to dawn on me. For fourteen years, letter carriers had found ways to push this letter toward a destination. Machines process undeliverable mail, but if the computer doesn’t have a forwarding address on file, the letter is returned to the carrier to begin the journey back to the sender. Unlike computerized machines, however, letter carriers wouldn’t let this one die. They talked to neighbors and rummaged through old records to keep it alive.
    In handwriting sometimes clear and purposeful, other times scrawled in pencil or bright red ink, they had passed it along. One address was circled several times in dark blue ink to make it stand out from the others, as if the carrier had been sure this would be the final destination. Ultimately, that one was crossed out too, and now it sat in my hands.
    “I’ve never seen this name before,” I said to the clerk. “And
I know who lives at this address.”
    The clerk asked carriers on routes near mine to see if they recognized the name. Perhaps a number in the address had been accidentally transposed. Again, I looked at the original postmark. The stamps had been canceled in Saigon. Hadn’t Saigon fallen in 1975? Wasn’t that Ho Chi Minh City now? I was on my first route, and I suddenly felt a responsibility of historic proportions on my shoulders. Reality rested in my fingertips.
    “It’s Saturday,” the clerk stated flatly, handing me the clipboard to sign for the letter. “Someone will probably be home. If they’ve never heard of this person, bring it back and we’ll kill it.”
    His words stunned me. To “kill it” simply meant we would endorse it as attempted delivery. Under normal circumstances it would then be returned to the sender. In this case, however, it would go to the dead letter office. We would, literally, kill it.
    My mind was in a fog as I cased mail for the rest of the route. The significance of 1975 in Saigon was not lost on me. I remembered