Nuggets

Tragedy struck when Tom was twelve. His mother, chancing a short walk to a neighbor's house, lost her way in that treacherous wintry beauty and soon afterward succumbed to a virulent pneumonia. The burial, a little way from the cabin, was simple and lightly attended. The emotional impact on Tom was crushing. But there was more. He soon began to realize that he would be witnessing not one, but two deaths: the first, his mother's from a fatal illness; the second, his father's from depression and dementia.

Tom had always adored his father and, as he grew up, imitated many of his mannerisms: the way he stood, the speech patterns he used, the way he laughed. More importantly, Tom knew that he had absorbed his father's most deeply held values: responsibility, fairness, truthfulness, loyalty, and honesty. In all these, and in so much more, he was his father's son.

But it was his mother who had made Tom want to be a writer. It was she who read him the great poetry and stories of childhood. It was she who helped him read them back to her. It was her hand that guided his as he struggled to write the words that had so thrilled him when she had read them to him. She began to assign him writing problems: write a story about a father who favored one son over the other; write a story about a woman who chose fame over love; write a story about athletic rivalry between two close friends. He wrote the stories, and she told him they were good, very good. His father, though, always privately Nuggets 13 and tersely told Tom's mother that writing was not something a "real" man did.

Several years after his mother died, Tom fulfilled a promise he had made to her. He sent several of his stories to a number of New York publishers to be considered for publication. His submissions came back rejected. His disappointment was deep, and the irony that his rejection slips were being delivered to him by his father only added to his sense of shame and failure. After a few additional submissions and rejections, Tom simply stopped writing. His youthful notion that he could support himself by selling stories, he now saw, was hopelessly naive. Then, with unexpected suddenness, his father suffered a fatal stroke. Tom was now totally alone. The village, in a gesture of sympathy, offered him his father's job of mail carrier. He accepted. He quickly married and brought his bride to live with him, just as his father had done with his own bride so long ago.

Tom awoke with a start, some troubling thought having broken his sleep. He had had a hard day and was dead tired, but he had to put a meal together. He took his mail pouch off the table and with difficulty stepped over and around the scattered debris that covered the cabin's floor to get to the closet where he hung his mail pouch at the end of the day. He always looked forward to this ritual. Back when he had accepted his father's job, he was given his own new letter pouch, but he asked if he could also keep his father's old one for personal remembrance. He hung the pouch in the main closet and vowed that for as long as he lived, he would, at the end of his daily rounds, hang his own letter bag in that closet next to his father's. This day, he opened the closet door to hang the two bags side by side and stood stock still. His father's letter pouch was on the floor, its strap broken. What he had not realized was that over the years, Murtha had begun using the pouch for storing odds and ends. The strap had been old and worn to begin with and had now finally given way. His reaction was instant. The incident turned into a reminder of his father's death and absence. His eyes teared up. He gently picked up the pouch and brought it to the kitchen table. He tipped its contents onto the table: a couple of books, a sewing box, some knickknacks—all in all quite a bit of weight. With a little 14 Nuggets touch of anger, he remembered how often he had told Murtha not to use the bag for storage.

He shook the bag one last time to make sure it was empty. He looked at the broken strap and told himself that he would fix it in the morning. He was ready to put the bag away when a small piece of white paper caught his attention. It was the corner of an envelope that was sticking out of a kind of hidden pocket on the inside of the bag. He reached into the pocket and removed a letter. It was obviously something he had missed when he was first given the bag, or maybe it was something that was not meant to be found.