No. 56

Chas. in 1895 (R.P.O. Clerk)

Stewart King c/o

John C. Davant, Attorney

501 Cleveland St.

Clearwater Florida

Saturday, December 2, 1939

Dear Stewart —

I just unpacked the last box for the move into my new home. Thank you again for this lovely house. Just as we planned: My dreams are true.

Just now I was at the train station, but my party did not show. Someone else did. though: Charles Brother, your uncle. Of course, only in the way a ghost can in fact show up but I felt him with me, and took his spirit home with me, to drink courage with me, for this telling.

This last box may be more valuable to you as a box than its contents. But I will eventually ship it to you to hold this telling, as it held his story. It may very well be the last remaining hat boxes from King & Company. I saved this until now, where we are now—the waiting for the birth of Jesus—but, well, it spoke to me that tonight it is over for us, as families do break, and what peace comes for this closing of a decade is up to both of us.

The letters in this hat box do not belong to me but to your kin and you, most of all. You know more than the others. I will—after some minor dressing—ship this box to your attorney but only in the spirit of peace. The older boys won’t understand.

The letters were written by your Uncle Charles—the Civil War Marine and the railway postal clerk. The one proud of the horses in Kanona. The one who drowned.

He wrote these letters to your mother in the 1880s, when he was at his farm in Cedar Falls. I didn’t know him then. Met him later—1895—when he was on his postal route but living at boarding houses between Sioux City or Des Moines.

When he took me out of my pain, it was that year of electric lights! That's when I helped your parents set up their new mansion. When the house was emptied, those first days, I would run from room to room and turn on and off the lights and scream a little.

I found this stack of old letters from Charles to your mum a few days after I was hired. Because I did not know him well, but apparently loved him, or, at least, as the priest say, "willed the good of him," for how he had improved things for me, well, I wanted to read the letters and I sort of, well, kept them all this time, and not temporarily.

A probationary situation, a temporary sprint. That's what my boarding there was supposed to be. I was a stray animal or a lost letter. Charles caught me. Escorted me into your mother's drawing room. Told her to hire me. Your mother agreed. Said that I was the right dose of medicine, better than one of those bitter pills made by the reclusive genius E. C. Dewitt—you remember meeting him? You there when they came through Clinton and stopped in for a visit in that same drawing room. Your brothers said they were, “Dimwitts” and that’s what we called them thereafter, behind a cupboard door, and under our breath.

— Miss Minnie

2025 Copyright Christine Friesel