His father is shaking, breath sawn into pieces, eyes burning a hole through the floorboards. “Promise me,” Samuel Keaton whispers, dragging the words over broken air. “No one touches this floor for fifty-five years. Not one day earlier.” Richard, his son, tries to make sense of it—the floor? why the floor?—but the look in Samuel’s eyes kills every question. He nods. He swears. Hours later, Samuel dies with his eyes open, still staring at the wood.
Bozeman, Montana, 1967. Samuel Keaton—Vietnam vet, carpenter by trade—goes into the ground without ever telling anyone what followed him home from the war. Whatever it is, he buries it under his bedroom floor and chains his son to the secret with a dying breath.
At the funeral, the neighbors whisper what small towns always whisper when men return from war with quiet in their bones: He came back different. Hardly said a word. None of them knows about the floor. Only Richard carries that.
He goes back to the farmhouse, shuts the bedroom door, and locks it—the first nail in the coffin of silence. He marries Evelyn. She wants athe sound in his head is his father’s voice: Never touch the floor. He doesn’t yell. He just pulls Thomas out, grabs a hammer, and drives nails into wood until the…..Read Full Story Here…………………
