I got to the top of that shaft with the pouch buttoned against my chest and my hands were not steady. Thirty years pulling pumps and I had never once carried anything up out of a well that a man had gone to the trouble of hiding. The owner was standing by his truck when my head cleared the casing, and he could see something was wrong on my face before I said a word.
I told him straight. I told him there was a welded pocket cut into the side of his well casing forty feet down, sealed shut, and I had found something dry inside it. He went pale. He had only owned the place eight months. The people before him had lived there better than twenty years, and they had left in a hurry, he said, sold cheap and never looked back.
We did not open it there in the yard. I have learned a few things in thirty years, and one of them is that some things you do not want your own fingerprints all over. I called the county sheriff from the man owns kitchen and we waited on the porch for a deputy to come out.
When they cut the wax pouch open on the tailgate, careful, with the deputy filming it on his phone, it was papers. Bank books. A stack of old savings passbooks in a woman name, and under them a handwritten will and a letter, and photographs of a woman nobody at that address had ever met.
Turned out the woman had lived in that house long before the last owners. Her family had told the county for years she had run off. She never ran off. The passbooks and that letter were enough that the sheriff office opened a real case, and the state got involved, and the woman own grandchildren were found three states away, people who had grown up believing their grandmother abandoned them.
I do not know every last thing that came of it. That is for the law and for that family. But I know the grandson drove eleven hours to shake my hand in that yard, and he stood there a long time and could not talk.
All he finally said was that they had spent their whole lives thinking she had not loved them enough to stay. And now they knew the truth, and they could grieve her honest, the way she deserved.
I have pulled a lot of things up out of the dark in thirty years. That is the only one I will carry the rest of my life. Some wells you close back up. That one, I was glad I looked.
