I set my pry bar down real slow, because what sat in that compartment was not a thing a man puts in a ceiling by accident. It was a green Prince Albert tobacco tin, wrapped in oilcloth, and under it a short plank of pine about the length of my forearm, and written on the plank in carpenter pencil, nine names in a column. I read them with my light. Arlen Cobb, foreman. Walt Dunbar. Ray Tingler. Hollis Meadows. Four more I did not know. And the last one made the hair stand up along my arms, because I knew it as well as my own. Harlan Pettit. My grandfather.
The couple who had bought the house, Aaron and Beth Lund, were standing on the lawn below with their arms around each other, and their toddler between them wore a yellow raincoat. I climbed down the ladder with the tin in one hand and the plank in the other, and I could not speak for a minute. Beth stepped forward. “Ed, what is it?” she asked. I showed her the last name. “Madam, I did not know my grandfather helped build this place,” I said. “He passed when I was nine. He taught me the very first thing I know about this trade.”
We opened the tin on the picnic table in the shade. Inside was a gold pocket watch with a cracked crystal, a folded union card from 1953, a roll of black and white photographs, and a letter on a sheet of brown paper. The photographs showed nine men in bib overalls and flat caps, standing on a half framed house, grinning like schoolboys. One of them, wiry and long jawed, had my chin. The letter was signed by all nine. Aaron read it aloud while his wife held the baby. “To the man who opens this. We built this house in one hundred and four days. If it still stands, we did our job.”
A box tucked high in a soffit gave one carpenter the weekend to bring nine families back to the farmhouse their grandfathers built in Sutton.
I should say how it felt, because it does not happen to a man twice. I have worked on a thousand houses, and I have torn out the work of a thousand other men, and I have always felt a little like a thief, taking down what someone else put up. This time I felt like a grandson. I told the Lunds that I wanted to find the other eight families. Beth said she had been thinking the same thing. Aaron grinned. “Then we are having a party,” he said. “Everybody who ever touched this house is invited. Even the ones who never knew they were.”
It took me a week with a county phone book and a lot of Sunday afternoons. Arlen Cobb, the foreman, had a granddaughter running a diner in Flatwoods who cried on the telephone when I read her the list. Ray Tingler had a great grandson at the high school who happened to be in my shop class. Hollis Meadows had a daughter, ninety one, in a nursing home in Gassaway, who laughed and said, “Daddy always said that house was held together by spite and nails.” Seven of the nine families said yes. The other two I could not find. I left a place at the table for each of them anyway.
The party was set for Saturday at noon, but a storm rolled in at ten. I was on the ladder, tacking a tarp over the open soffit so that the old boards would stay dry, when the first fat drops hit. The wind kicked up hard, and a sheet of blue plastic ripped out of my hands and sailed across the yard. Aaron and two of the grandsons came running. We chased it down, wrestled it back up, and pinned it with a staple gun in a downpour, all of us soaked, laughing like boys. When I looked down from the ladder, I saw four men in good shirts holding the corners.
By one, the rain had passed. The Lunds had set up long tables under the oak tree, and the families arrived in pickup trucks and station wagons, carrying casseroles, folding chairs, and old photograph albums. Mrs. Meadows, ninety one, came in a wheelchair, in a rose colored dress with a corsage. The granddaughter of the foreman brought a sheet cake with a house drawn on it in blue icing. I laid the plank on the head table, with the nine names facing up, and the tin beside it, and one by one the old families came up to lay a hand on the wood and speak a name.
The money consequences were mostly pie. The Lunds refused to let me bill them for the repair, and I refused to take a dime for the tarp or the afternoon. In the end, they hired me to rebuild the porch the following spring, at a fair price, and I did the work with my own hands and the tools my grandfather left me. Beth made the pocket watch a proper glass, and Aaron mounted the plank over the mantel, behind a plate of clear plastic. When anyone asks what it is, he tells them. And when they ask who the man at the bottom is, he points at me.
I do not tell many people this, but when I closed the soffit that afternoon, I did not close it all the way. I cut a small door, six inches by eight, and hinged it so that it could open without a ladder from the inside of the attic. In the space I put a new tin, a fresh one, and in it a letter from the ten families who had gathered that day, with their names, their addresses and a photograph taken under the oak. Whoever finds it in the next seventy years will know that this house is loved. I signed it Ed Pettit, carpenter, grandson of Harlan.
On the last Sunday in October, the Lunds invited me back for supper. I stood on their porch and looked up at the soffit, at the fresh white boards and the neat little door I had cut. The sun was going down behind the ridge, and the house glowed amber. Their daughter, now three, ran out in her yellow raincoat and tugged my hand. “Mr. Ed, is that where the treasure is?” she asked. I knelt down on the boards. “Yes, sweetheart,” I told her. “And someday you will be the one to find the next one.” She nodded gravely, as if she had always known.
