I dug around the chain by hand until I finally reached the end. Attached to it was a small steel box, completely black with age and packed so tightly with dirt that I couldn’t open it at first. There was no lock, no label, nothing to tell me why someone had gone to the trouble of chaining it to a tree before the tree grew around it.
Inside were three photographs wrapped in what looked like oilskin and a folded piece of paper. The photographs were all from the same property, but the house looked different. The first one was dated 1956. The second was from 1958. The third had no date, but someone had written my father’s name on the back.
I knew immediately that the handwriting wasn’t my father’s. I called my older brother and asked if he’d ever heard Dad mention someone burying something on the property in the 1950s. He laughed at first, then stopped when I told him what I’d found. He said our father had always refused to let anyone cut down that particular maple, even when it became diseased.
Then I unfolded the paper. It was only one sentence, written in pencil: “If they ever take the tree down, make sure the boy who finds this knows why his father was never allowed to tell him what happened here…”
