I set my cutters down real slow, because the box that I had opened behind the dead tube was not full of the dark thing I had been bracing for. It was full of paper. Stacks of it, stiff and flat and tied with string, packed to the lid in a space no larger than a bread box. The top sheet was a printed form, with a bank heading and a space for a farm name, and across it, in blue pencil, one phrase, written diagonally. Paid in full. I turned over the next, and the next. There were hundreds. They were all promissory notes, and not one of them had a single payment recorded.
The fella who had hired me, Harold Mays, came down the old marble stairs from the mezzanine. He was a surveyor, sixty six, with a scar across one eyebrow and a gentleness I had liked at once. He had bought the shuttered bank in St. Marys at auction with an idea of turning the vault into a wine cellar. He took the top note from my hand and read it under the work light. “Farm of Elmer Tackett,” he said. “Four hundred and twelve dollars. 1934.” He picked up another. “Farm of Joseph Hupp. Six hundred. 1936.” He looked at me, baffled. “Every one of these says paid. But where did the money come from?”
We found the answer in the lowest stack, wrapped in a bank towel. It was a thin black ledger and a letter on cream stationery. The letter was addressed, To whoever finds this, and signed by Josiah T. Mercer, president of the Farmers Exchange Bank. It was dated November 1937. Harold read it out loud in the echoing lobby, and I stood beside him with my cutters in my hand. Josiah wrote that the Depression had come down on the valley like a hand. Every farmer in the county was behind on his note. The directors in Wheeling wanted the farms seized and sold. He could not do it.
A dead pneumatic tube ended in a sealed box where a banker hid the debts he secretly paid for two hundred families.
“I took the notes into my own name,” Mercer wrote. “I paid them off a little at a time out of my own pocket, the inheritance of my wife, and the sale of my house. The farmers do not know, and I would ask whoever reads this to let them go on not knowing, if they are gone. But if they are not gone, and any of them are poor, tell them that a banker once believed in them.” Harold lowered the page. The only sound in that echoing room was a pigeon walking along a rafter. “Good Lord,” he said, very softly. “He mortgaged his own house to keep the whole county on its land.”
The ledger listed the names. Two hundred and twelve families, with the date each note was paid, in the fine round hand of Mercer. Under the final entry, in a shakier script, was one more line. Banker and wife now live in rented rooms over the feed store. We are content. I looked at Harold. He took off his cap and held it in both hands. “I have lived in this county sixty six years,” he said. “I never once heard the name Mercer spoken, except as the name of a street.” He folded the letter carefully and tucked it inside his shirt. “I am going to find those families.”
It was not hard, as it turned out. St. Marys is a town that keeps its dead in good order. Harold spent a month at the courthouse and the church archives, with a retired teacher who volunteered, and between them they traced a hundred and thirty descendants, scattered from Pittsburgh to Houston. He wrote each of them the same short letter. It said only that a document had been discovered in the old bank, that it concerned their family, and that he would like to share it. He invited them all to the bank on the first Saturday in October. He did not tell them why.
I was there, because Harold asked me to come. The lobby had been swept and polished, and the old teller windows had been lit with lamps. Folding chairs filled the marble floor, and more than a hundred and fifty people came, from toddlers to a ninety four year old man in a wheelchair, in pressed shirts and church dresses. When they were seated, Harold stood under the clock and read the letter of Josiah Mercer aloud, in his slow, rough voice. Nobody coughed. Nobody moved. When he came to the line, a banker once believed in them, a woman in the third row began to cry.
After that, he handed out the notes. Each family got its own, in a clean folder, with Paid in full across it in the old blue pencil. I watched a grown man in a Steelers jacket hold the farm paper of his great grandfather against his chest with both hands. I watched a girl of about fourteen read hers, then run to her mother and show her. A very old woman, the one in the wheelchair, held hers close to her face and said, “My daddy told us a banker saved the farm. We always thought it was a story.” She touched the bank pencil with a fingertip. “Imagine. It was a man.”
Harold never did turn the vault into a wine cellar. He opened the old bank as a small museum and a meeting hall, and above the main teller window, where the clock used to hang, he put up a plain bronze plaque. Josiah T. Mercer, Banker, 1937. He paid what he could not collect. Every year on the first Saturday of October, the families come back and bring a covered dish. In the middle of the room stands the old pneumatic tube, polished, with its brass carrier sitting in the cradle, and the children take turns dropping a note into it and watching it whoosh away into the wall.
On the night of the first dinner, I stayed late to help Harold stack chairs. When the last of the guests had gone, he stood a moment at the end of the dead tube, the one I had cut loose, now mounted in a glass case beside the door. He put his hand flat on the glass. “Funny thing,” he said. “I have spent my whole life surveying land. Never once did I think that the most valuable thing in this county was a mortgage that somebody decided not to collect.” Then he switched off the lamp, and the two of us walked out into the October dark.
