I lifted it out of that lined box and set it up on the grass, and I put my shovel against the dirt wall real slow, because a man does not wrap a thing in three layers of heavy plastic and bury it by his septic unless he needs it to outlast him.
Twenty years digging tanks and I know the ground around a septic is the one patch on any property a person will never turn over for curiositys sake. Nobody digs there for fun. Somebody had counted on exactly that, poured a little lid, and set a box in the earth beside the tank where it would sit untouched maybe forever.
The family who hired me came out back when I called up the yard. I told them I had found something buried that was not any part of their system, and that I did not want to be the one peeling the plastic off alone. So the husband got out his knife and we opened it there in the daylight, both of us watching.
Inside was a coffee can of gold coins, a bank envelope thick with old bills, and a letter. The letter was from a man who had owned that house years back, a retired welder. He wrote that his health was going, that he did not trust the man his daughter had married, and that he was hiding his savings where that son-in-law would never think to look. He wrote that if his wife outlived him she was to have every cent, and that if anybody found this and she was still living, please, for the love of God, get it to her.
We took the letter and the box straight to the county. It did not take them long. The welder had passed six years back. The story at the time was that he died with nothing, and his widow had been living small ever since, on a little check, in a senior apartment across the county, going without.
She was alive. Eighty-four. When they brought her the letter and told her what her husband had done, she read his hand and she wept, not for the money, she kept saying, but because he had been thinking of her right to the end, hiding it away so she would be all right, and she never knew.
The money was hers, clean and clear, his letter saw to that. Her granddaughter told me it changed everything, that her grandmother could stop counting dollars at the grocery for the first time in years. But that was not what the old woman kept talking about.
What she kept saying was that for six years she had thought he left her alone and worried. And now she knew he had spent his last strength making sure she was cared for, and she could love him again the way she had before the worry set in.
I dig up tanks for a living. It is filthy work and most men will not do it. But I pulled a welders love for his wife up out of the dirt that day, six years after he put it there, and I have never once minded the smell since.
