BOYD CALLED ME THE MORNING of our second scheduled meeting. I thought he was going to cancel, and my heart dropped. But it was just to say that he couldn’t find his mother’s journal.
I arrived at the café first, and from my table, a few minutes later, I saw Boyd struggling up the sidewalk. He was trying to balance a giant file box, a bursting manila envelope, and a picture frame. I rushed over to him. “I’ve got some goodies,” he said, mischievously, knowing he had dramatically undersold the treasure he was about to show me.
We sat down, and I noted the manila folder said in big black Sharpie: “Jane Britton Murder Files. Other Family Papers.” He filled the table with the contents of the file box, which was torn and retaped at the seams; “For Boyd R. Britton From JBB,” it read on the spine––J. Boyd Britton. His parents had compiled this archive of Jane: her Radcliffe commencement program, the picture books she used to draw, all the letters she wrote back home from her digs. Childhood photos. Her funeral book.
I tried multiple ways of asking if it was hard for him to look at this stuff. He deflected by addressing his writing we found in the file. “Some of the things I’d forgotten I’d done.”
I took pictures of everything as he pulled them out of the file, not wanting to lose these artifacts that only minutes before I thought had long since been erased. He looked at me funny. “I’m turning the box over to you,” Boyd said. I didn’t know if I understood him correctly. “There’s no time like the present, and there’s no time at the present to see all this.” He told me to make a copy and give it back to him one day. The only thing he asked was for me to replace the ratty box that the files had lived in for the last fifty years.
I wanted to cry at the generosity of his gesture. Nothing could have meant more in that moment. He even opened the picture frame to give me a picture that Jim Humphries had taken of Jane in Iran so I could make a proper scan.
We walked to the parking lot after lunch, and I thanked him for trusting me with Jane’s story and her letters. “Well, you have impressed people that you’re trustworthy. Mitchell especially. Elisabeth said words to the effect: ‘She’s charming, so I hope she’s trustworthy.’ Well, not quite those words. Her implication was that she enjoyed talking with you. As have I.”
He emptied a large garbage bag that had been sitting in the back of his car and handed it to me to keep the file box safe, a rare hint of sentimentality. I thanked him again. “That’s okay. I’m not exactly busy first of all. And second of all, this means a lot.”