I trust I’ll be in Heaven when you read this, although God, in His wisdom, may have other things in store for me. Just yesterday afternoon Cor asked me if I had ever thought I’d live this long, and I said, No, not in a million years. What on earth am I doing here? It isn’t necessary for all of your parents to read this, especially not Sandra. (But, Sandra, if you are reading this, please don’t be angry with me. I love you very much. I think you know that.) I just wanted to tell you grandkids, in confidence, that all those school photos of you, of all of you, from all the years, all thirteen years from kindergarten to grade twelve—my goodness there are so many—are in a thick blue photo album in the top drawer of my bedside table. There’s a Bible verse on the cover of the album, one from Psalms: “I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, from whence cometh my help. My help cometh from the LORD, which made Heaven and Earth.”

You remember how Sandra hung those school photos up on thin silver cords in my living room, with little clothespins? She said that it was the fashion to do that, and that this way I’d be able to see the photos all the time, hung out to dry, in plain view. There they’d be as I walked through the living room to the kitchen or to my bedroom or to the porch. I could look at them all day, every day. Sandra also said that, with the photos attached to the cords with clothespins, I wouldn’t pull the paint off the walls if I needed to move them. She has had to repaint many of my walls for that very reason, and it was incredibly difficult to find exactly the right shade of white paint to match what was already there. You have no idea how many shades of white paint there are these days.

Bless her heart, but I just didn’t enjoy seeing all your faces from all the years hanging from a wash line and staring out at me every day. I was afraid I’d begin not to see them, because they were always there. I didn’t want to have fleeting glimpses of your faces as I passed them, back and forth from room to room, and I wasn’t able to stand for long enough to look at them all before I’d get tired and need to sit. And I couldn’t see them clearly from my chair in the living room, as they were hanging rather high up and were tiny because they were school photos. I want to study your faces. I want to concentrate on them, at specific times, in quiet worship, like at a church service, and then have silent conversations with each of you. This is one of my favorite activities. I like, from time to time, to go to my bedroom after supper and take out my photo album and sit up in my bed, with my comfortable pillows and a cup of coffee and perhaps a Cuban Lunch or a Nutty Club on my bedside table, and stare hard at the photos, at each one of you, very slowly turning the pages until I get to the end. I don’t want to do that every day, just once a month or so.

So that is something you need to know: that I took your photos off the wash line and put them in an album in my bedside table, the table with the good lamp on it, which is something you kids will have to hash out, in terms of ownership, in terms of bequeathment. The good lamp.

Another thing: Many years ago, I dug up Roland Sawatsky from his grave and reburied the urn holding his ashes out behind the grain shed on our farm. There’s a small black stone there to mark the spot, but it has no words carved on it. It’s the only black stone. There might still be a feed pail next to it, which I used to sit on. This is a lot to absorb, I think, but I know you are smart kids, and you are kind and you are modern.

I’ll just say that I loved your Grandpa Jake very much. He was a good man and a good farmer and a good Mennonite and he was good to me. Even when they took his leg, he was good to me and helped me and never complained. You are probably wondering who Roland Sawatsky was. Roland was my neighbor on the farm next to ours. When we were kids. And then as teen-agers, too. He was older than me by three years and we never spoke. Very rarely did we speak. He sat at the back of the school bus with the older kids. Now I wish I had known certain things then. For instance, one day he came over to our farm to tell my parents something and he was on his horse. I went outside to look at his horse, and he gave me a carrot to feed it. I asked him what the horse’s name was, and he said it was Trotsky. I wish I had known what the joke was so I could have laughed then. And at other times. Of course, it’s not a terribly funny joke. But I wish I had laughed more at things in life, especially at things presented as jokes.

Roland was known in town as a very good pianist and very clever. He went to the university in Winnipeg, but still lived at home on the farm. My father told me that his parents hadn’t wanted him to go to university but that they’d reached a compromise, with him staying on the farm and commuting to his classes in the city. His older sister had already left for Bible school in America. She wanted to work for Wycliffe Bible Translators, in Quito, Ecuador, and I think that is what she did with the American fellow she met in Bible school, but I’m not sure. Her name is Ruthie. Once, along the property line between their farm and ours, in those trees there, when I was very young, ten or eleven, she told me that Roland was an idiot. Sometimes he went to concerts that people from the city performed in our high-school auditorium. Just classical music, which was not considered a sin. Roland always sat in the very front row of chairs. People from town made fun of him behind his back—and to his face as well—for being so still and enrapt at these concerts and for always sitting in the front row. One time he himself gave a short concert there. It was very strange. He put up posters around town, and everybody was curious but also worried about it, as in: why was he doing this? I still have one of those posters somewhere. You’ll probably find it. One of you could keep it if you wanted to. Another thing you’d have to agree on amongst yourselves. There’s a funny drawing on it that Roland made of himself at a piano, and the date and time and place of the concert. I was there alone. I mean I’d gone there alone. There were two or three other people. I sat in the front row. I remember Roland’s hands gripping the sides of the piano bench. He had such hands. Strong and steady. What would you call them today? Amazing? Everything is amazing today. He moved the bench around for a long time before he began to play, an inch forward, an inch back, an inch to the side, an inch to the other side. His hands gripped the bench that way until he found just the right place for it. I remember that, just before he started, he moved his hands over his chest, from the top of his chest down and then from the top again, several times, as though he were smoothing his button-down shirt, as though he were keeping his heart in place. But now I think he was probably trying to wipe the sweat off his hands. One other thing I remember from that concert is that he leaned his head all the way back, at times, while he played. I had never seen that before, the head so far back with the throat exposed and his Adam’s apple. I had only ever seen bowed heads. Heads praying or looking at crops or at little children or the floor or what have you. A few times during that concert, he put his head down, too, so far down that he was almost resting his face, his cheek, on the piano keys. And playing at the same time. When he did that, I wanted to see him again with his head back. When his head was back, I saw sweat on his neck. I saw some of it slide down into his collar. His eyes were closed. And he made some sounds, too, that people teased him about and talked about in town for a long time afterward. That Roland Sawatsky, they’d say. And they’d imitate his sounds. After he finished playing, he stood up next to the piano. Nobody clapped, because we don’t clap. I think he saw me there. He smiled. He was out of breath. I didn’t talk to him at the concert. I went home. I put my head back as I walked home to see how that felt. It was dark.

Then, a month later or maybe it was longer, Roland came to the farm again to tell my parents that he was going away to study and wouldn’t be able to help with the harvest that year. He was on his horse. He asked me if I wanted to ride with him, and I said no. He repeated that back to me. He said, No? Or . . . yes? I said no again, and he put his head back and sort of groaned, the way he had when he was playing the piano in the school auditorium, but this time he was just pretending to be devastated, I think. I touched his horse’s face. And then he was gone. I never saw him again. So that was the last time we talked.

My father told me that Roland had received a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford University, in England. A lot of people in town didn’t understand why he would choose to leave. They didn’t like to talk about it. They felt a bit sorry for Roland’s parents. What will he do with ideas? they said. I remember Roland’s father standing out under the yard light, with mosquitoes everywhere, talking with my father and shaking his head, sadly, and my father putting his hand on Roland’s father’s shoulder.

What happened then? Time passed, and I met Jake—well, I’d known him all my life—and we got married and farmed and started our family. Sandra was born nine months to the day from our wedding night. We stayed on the farm, my father’s farm, and my parents moved into town. Then, one day, I was in the yard with the kids and Roland’s father came to talk to Jake. Roland’s father seemed old to me then, but now I realize he wasn’t that old. He and his wife still lived on the farm next to ours, and our fields were side by side. Jake wasn’t at home when Roland’s father came to talk to him, so he talked to me. He told me that Roland was in trouble in England. He didn’t say what the trouble was. He said that he and his wife were going to travel to England to see Roland, and he asked if Jake and I could feed his animals while they were gone. Then, the next week, Roland’s father came to our farm again, and this time Jake was at home and they sat at the kitchen table. They prayed. It was September. But warm. Roland’s parents were not going to go to England after all, Roland’s father said. It would be too painful for Roland’s mother. So instead they were going to get Roland a plane ticket to come home. By then, he had been in England for several years, eight or nine, I think. Later, after Roland’s father left, I asked Jake when Roland was coming home. He thought the next week, but he wasn’t sure. That night, I couldn’t sleep, and the next day I couldn’t concentrate on my housework or even on the children. Del got his foot caught in a trap of some sort that I had forgotten to put back in the bushes. I can’t remember if it was a wolf trap or something else. How old is Del now? Sixty? He still has that terrible scar from my neglect.

The next week, on Wednesday evening after supper, Roland’s father came to the house again. Our Roland has died, he said. Like that. Our Roland has died in England. Jake asked Roland’s father how Roland had died, but his father didn’t know. He stood and shook his head. He said that he and Roland’s mother didn’t want to know how Roland had died. It was 1969. In town, people said that Roland must have got caught up in drug-taking and whatnot and kept bad company. But that was just talk. His ashes would be sent back from England and his parents would bury them in an urn on their farm. Our church doesn’t believe in cremation, but the officials in England told Roland’s father that shipping ashes would be a “fraction of the cost” (I remember that expression because Roland’s father said it in English, although he only ever spoke Plautdietsch) of shipping a body, and Roland’s parents had very little money. Jake said that burning Roland would also prevent anyone from doing an autopsy on him and getting to the reason that he died, which was for the best, because nobody wanted to know why. Especially not his mother.

Roland couldn’t be buried in the church graveyard because he had long ago stopped being a member of the church. Jake asked Roland’s father if there would be a service, and Roland’s father said there wouldn’t be one. Jake asked if we could watch Roland be put into the ground and pay our respects, then. Roland’s father said yes, we could do that. Which was how I came to know where on their land Roland was buried.

So that’s how it was then for a long time. On my daily walks I’d pass Roland’s grave and whisper, Yes, I meant to say yes. I couldn’t just say this to myself, in my head; I had to make a sound saying it. I mean I had to say it, not just think it. If there were days when I was unable to walk past his grave, I’d say it twice or three times or whatever the number of days that I’d missed was. For instance, when the twins were born, I was hospitalized for ten days and then had to say it ten times. Eventually, people stopped talking about Roland and his mysterious death. The world was bad, they said. And Roland had found that out.

Then, years and years later, Roland’s parents both died, within months of each other. They were old. Jake was gone by then, too. He was happy to die. He was in such pain. Our kids had all grown up and left home. Even Del, with his mangled foot, had managed to leave. Roland’s older sister, Ruthie, was living in Santa Barbara, California. She had met that American fellow at Bible school in Omaha, Nebraska, and they had married and moved to California after their mission work in Quito, Ecuador. When Roland’s parents died, Ruthie flew home to take care of all the arrangements. They were allowed to be buried in the church cemetery because they were members. Ruthie came to the house and told me that she was selling her parents’ farm and had hired a team to take Roland out of his grave and move him to Santa Barbara, California, to be with her and her kids and grandkids there. Her granddaughter Madison had had the idea that Roland should be with them and not alone in a frozen field somewhere in Canada. Ruthie said that her grandchildren hadn’t known that Roland had existed until a cousin had told them about him, at a funeral in Wheaton, Illinois. She shook her head. She didn’t talk about Roland. She was angry that her cousin had blurted. I was struck by that word, how she said it. Blurted. We had coffee and buns and cheese. Madison was studying conflict resolution. When Ruthie told me that, I laughed, because I had never heard of such a thing. But Ruthie said that it was a serious field of study. She told me that these fellows would be coming for Roland in two days.

I started digging that evening. I had a small flashlight. I was already in my sixties. I managed to dig quite far down that first night. I put a small baby blanket over the hole. I held it down with rocks on all four corners, and then I covered the blanket with twigs and grass and stalks of wheat. The next night I went back and managed to dig all the way to Roland’s urn and I took him. I filled in the hole with the dirt I’d dug up, and covered it again with twigs. That day, in the afternoon, the team arrived to move Roland, but of course they couldn’t find him anywhere. They tried different places. Roland’s sister came and said that that was very strange. She had been certain of the grave’s location. The team worked all day and evening trying to find Roland. Eventually they left, and Ruthie went back to Santa Barbara, California, empty-handed. I buried Roland out behind the grain shed, as I mentioned. You will find the stone, I hope, and the pail I sat on. And then you’ll know where Roland is.

If you’re reading this, it means that I’m gone, too. The land is yours now, and I am wondering if you would let Roland’s sister know where he is, so that she can bring him home and he can be together, finally, with his family, what’s left of it, in California. Imagine Roland resting beneath palm trees! A warm sun all year. But, if you can’t do that or if you don’t want to do that, because I know you’re all so busy, or if you don’t know where his sister is or how to get ahold of her or if she’s even alive, then you could, perhaps, leave Roland where he is, and just remember—as in, hold it in your hearts, or even whisper it, if that doesn’t feel too silly—that when I said no, I should, in fact, have said yes. You could say it out loud, lifting your eyes to Heaven, like a prayer: Dear God, please forgive Grandma. She meant to say yes. ♦