The Old Biker Digging in My Backyard at 2AM Buried Something There in 1971
Public records and an obituary eventually gave us Ruth Henderson Franklin, age eighty-one, living less than ninety miles away. Mack went silent when I found a phone number. “Call her,” I said. “After fifty-five years?” “Especially after fifty-five years.” “What do I say?” “Start with your name.” He made the call at my kitchen table. I tried not to listen but heard enough. “Ruth? This is Arthur McKenna. Mack. Danny’s friend.” Silence. Then Mack covered his face with his hand. I could hear a woman’s voice through the phone, but not the words. Mack said, “Yes, ma’am. I’m still alive.” Another pause. “I found something Danny left for you.” Ruth arrived that afternoon with her daughter and grandson. Mack’s sons arrived shortly afterward. My backyard became the strangest reunion I’ve ever witnessed. Ruth was tiny, white-haired, and walked with a cane. The moment she saw Mack she slapped him across the face. Nobody moved. Then she wrapped both arms around him. “Fifty-five years, you idiot,” she said into his chest. “I know.” “You could’ve called.” “I know.” “Dad died wondering what happened to you.” Mack’s face crumpled. “I know.” She hit his shoulder once more, then hugged him harder. Under the oak tree, Mack gave Ruth the envelope Danny had written to her. She opened it alone. We moved away. Twenty minutes later she called Mack over and handed him the page. Whatever Danny had written made both of them laugh and cry at the same time. I never asked to read it. Some things don’t become public just because they make a good story. The letter to Danny’s father remained unopened because he had died decades earlier. Ruth chose to keep it. Then she saw the toy motorcycle. She gasped. “Oh my God. Blue Thunder.” Mack laughed. “That’s what he called it?” “He was six.” Ruth held that broken plastic motorcycle like it was priceless. The mysterious metal key turned out to belong to a padlock from the boys’ old treehouse. The class ring was Danny’s. The photographs showed Mack and Danny beside two motorcycles under my oak tree in 1971. The tree was barely thicker than my arm. My house stood behind them, recognizable despite a different porch and siding. One photograph had writing on the back: WE LEAVE TOMORROW. DON’T LET THIS BE THE LAST RIDE. Mack stared at those words for a long time. His son Patrick stood beside him. “Dad,” he said, “when was your last ride?” “Proper one?” “Yeah.” “1998.” “Why?” Mack shrugged. “Life.” Patrick shook his head. “No. Fear.” That could have become an argument. Instead Mack nodded. “Probably.” His younger son told me later that their father had sold his motorcycle after a close friend died in another crash. Mack told everyone age had caught up with him, but his sons believed he’d simply accumulated too many memories of people who left on motorcycles and never returned. The following morning Mack repaired my yard. Not personally, because his back was wrecked from the midnight excavation. He hired a landscaping crew, replaced the damaged sod and paid to have an arborist check the oak roots. I told him that was excessive. “I dug a hole in a stranger’s yard at two in the morning,” he said. “I’m trying to climb back toward normal.” Before leaving, he asked if he could take one thing from the box. Ruth had already given him permission. It was the photograph with DON’T LET THIS BE THE LAST RIDE written on the back. He slid it into his vest pocket. “What are you going to do with it?” I asked. “Don’t know yet.” Three months later I found out. Mack returned to my house in October. This time he called first. He wasn’t alone. Patrick rode beside him on a dark blue touring motorcycle, and Mack was on an older silver cruiser his sons had helped him buy. He moved carefully, rode conservatively and complained about his knees the second he dismounted. “You bought another bike?” “Apparently I’m having a late-life crisis.” “At seventy-eight?” “Took me a while to schedule it.” They were riding to Ruth’s house. Mack wanted to ask whether I minded if they stopped beneath the oak first. I brought coffee outside. Mack stood where the hole had been. The new grass had already blended into the yard. “I spent fifty-five years thinking keeping the promise meant opening that box,” he said. “Turns out that was the easy part.” “What’s the hard part?” He tapped the photograph inside his vest. “Not letting it be the last ride.” He and Patrick left twenty minutes later. I watched them disappear down the road. Since then, Mack has become an occasional and improbable visitor in our lives. Not every week. Not some sentimental replacement grandfather. He simply calls when he’s passing through. Ruth comes sometimes too. Last summer they sat beneath the oak arguing about whether Danny had once broken a neighbor’s window with a baseball. Ruth said yes. Mack insisted it was a rock. Fifty-five years had apparently done nothing to improve either one’s willingness to lose an argument. My children know the story now. They call the oak “Danny’s tree,” although I keep reminding them Danny didn’t own it. On the anniversary of the night I found Mack digging, we buried something new beneath it, legally this time, with everyone present and the location carefully marked. Not another secret box intended to stay hidden for half a century. Just a small weatherproof container holding copies of the 1971 photographs, a picture of Mack and Ruth reunited beneath the tree, and a note explaining what happened there. The originals remain with their families. Mack insisted on adding one sentence: IF YOU’RE READING THIS BECAUSE YOU DUG UP SOMEBODY ELSE’S YARD AT 2AM, GO KNOCK ON THE DOOR FIRST. Officer Collins attended and laughed harder than anyone. Mack is eighty now. He rides only short distances and only in good weather. His sons go with him. The battered photograph of him and Danny remains inside his vest. People who hear this story usually focus on the rusted box. They ask what treasure was inside. There wasn’t any, at least not the kind you can sell. A broken toy motorcycle. Letters. A ring. A key to a lock that no longer existed. Two photographs. Objects that would have meant almost nothing at an estate sale. Their value came from the fifty-five years wrapped around them. I sometimes think about how close I came to knowing none of it. If Mack had dug three feet to the left, he might never have found the box. If I had pressed charges, maybe Ruth would still have received her letter eventually, but not beneath the tree where her brother buried it. If Mack had waited another few years, there might not have been anyone left who remembered Danny as a living twenty-three-year-old man instead of a name attached to an old photograph. But I don’t call any of that fate. Mostly I think it was a seventy-eight-year-old man finally running out of excuses. That’s what was really buried beneath my oak tree for fifty-five years. Not the box. A promise he’d been postponing because keeping it meant reopening a part of his life he’d worked very hard to close. The night I caught him, Mack told the police, “Ten more minutes. You can arrest me after.” I thought he was desperate to retrieve something from the ground. Now I know he was desperate to stop being the man who kept saying he’d do it someday. The box came out of the earth before sunrise. The harder thing took longer. Mack had to dig himself out too.