I set my bar down real slow, because what lay inside that chamber was not what the cold on my neck had promised. There were no bones, no money bags, no guns. There was a row of small gray cloth sacks, drawn shut with twine, thirty one of them, packed side by side on a shelf of plank like eggs in a carton. Each sack had a paper tag pinned to it. I picked up the nearest one, and the tag crackled in my fingers. It said, in ink gone brown with age, Earl Whitt, week of March 4, 1983. Forty one dollars and sixty cents. A little coin chimed inside.
I went and got Dale Burkett, the fella who had hired me, from the office where he was eating a ham sandwich over a stack of old invoices. He is a big, easy, sunburned man of sixty, who made his money in propane and bought the shuttered mill outside Spencer for taxes owed. He came out wiping his hands and bent down at the edge of the pit with his flashlight. He did not say anything for some time. Then he reached in with two fingers, as gently as if it were a bird, and turned over a second tag, then a third. “Those are payrolls,” he said quietly.
It took us the rest of that afternoon to piece it together. We found a ledger at the bottom of the compartment, wrapped in oilcloth, in the careful hand of the old owner, a man named Harlan Pruitt. The bank had called his note in the winter of 1983, he wrote. They were going to padlock the mill on Friday and seize every dollar. He had thirty one people on his floor, men with mortgages and children. He had worked all Thursday night to hide their last week of wages in the one spot no bank examiner would think to look, under the scale, where every truck in the county drove across.
A walled chamber under a truck scale held thirty one small sacks and a promise a mill owner never lived to keep.
“I mean to pay them as soon as I am clear of the lawyers,” Harlan had written, on the last page, in a hand that wavered. “I pray God I am granted the time. If I am not, whoever finds this, please do what I could not.” There was nothing after that. I looked at Dale. Dale was standing perfectly still with the flashlight hanging at his side, and the beam lay on the dirt floor of the pit. I asked him what happened to Harlan. “Heart attack,” he said, in a rough voice. “That same Sunday. They found him at his kitchen table, with his coat still on.”
I will tell you honestly that I expected Dale to put the sacks in a box and take them to a lawyer. Or, maybe, to put them in his own pocket, which would have been within his rights. He stood in that pit for a long time, rubbing the back of his neck. Then he straightened up, and said, with a look I will not forget, “Son, I do not need forty one dollars and sixty cents. But somebody out there has been waiting forty years for it, and does not know.” He pulled out his phone. “Can you stay on a few more days? I will pay you double.”
We spent three weeks on it. Dale hired a young genealogist from Charleston who was thrilled by the whole business, and the two of them pored over the old payroll book and the church records and the funeral home registers. I went along as the driver. Of the thirty one men and women on that list, nineteen were gone. Twelve still lived within a hundred miles. For every one, Dale cut a check, not for forty one dollars but with forty years of interest, and a typed letter explaining the sack. He signed each one himself with a ballpoint pen.
I drove him to deliver the first of them, to a widow named Opal Frazier in a trailer at the edge of Walton. She was eighty nine, small as a child, with a cane and a pair of bright black eyes. She read the letter at the table, holding it a long way from her face. Then she looked at Dale and said, “Harlan Pruitt was the only boss I ever had who knew my children by name.” She laughed, and wiped her eyes with the back of her wrist. “I was so angry at him all those years. Thinking he took off with our money. And all this time, he was hiding it for us.”
There were stories like that every day for three weeks. A retired welder who wept on his porch. A woman in a Dairy Queen uniform who said she would put it toward her daughter tuition. A man in a nursing home who could no longer speak, but who took the paper and held it, and rubbed his thumb over the name of the old mill, and nodded, over and over, with his eyes closed. By the end, we had paid twenty two people or their families. The remaining checks went to the churches the others had attended, in their names. Dale insisted on that.
He kept the mill. He told me, standing in the empty feed room one evening in October, that he had been planning to tear it down for scrap. “Now I think I will leave it,” he said. “Maybe make it a place to meet.” In the spring he reopened it as a small community hall, with a coffee pot and a long table, and, mounted by the front door, the old scale beam from the pit, polished and oiled, with a brass plate beneath it that read Pruitt Feed and Grain, 1946. Every worker on the list, living and dead, has a line on that plate.
I was there for the opening, in a clean shirt. Opal Frazier cut the ribbon with her cane. A hundred people crowded the old feed room, and somebody had brought a banjo. In the middle of all that noise, I slipped out the back and stood by the scale pit, now covered with a clean steel grate. I took a handful of the old gray twine out of my pocket, which I had kept without knowing why. I looked down into the dark. Then I said, out loud, to nobody, “Mr. Pruitt, they got it.” It seemed the right thing to say.
