I set my chisel down real slow, because the dry chamber built into the back of that old brick oven, sealed off behind the firebox where a fire had roared for years, was not a tomb and it was not a thieves den. It was a tin trunk, and when we opened it, it held the lost heart of a whole church.
Inside were ledgers, and envelopes of cash gone brittle, and bearer bonds, and a leather book with a cross stamped on the cover, and a letter from a man named Deacon Samuel Pratt.
What was walled behind that firebox was not a secret to be ashamed of, it was a congregations missing building fund, hidden by a faithful man and lost when he died too suddenly to tell a soul.
Deacon Pratt had been the treasurer of a small country church outside Ravenswood in the 1960s. The church was raising money to build a new sanctuary and a hall for the children, and there had been a string of break-ins in the county, and the deacon did not trust leaving the fund in a building with a flimsy lock. So he took it home and built it into the back of his own bread oven, behind the firebox, where he baked over it every week and no burglar would ever dream to look.
Then Deacon Pratt had a heart attack in his garden, and he died with the secret still in him. The church thought the money was stolen. Some people blamed each other. The new sanctuary was never built. The congregation dwindled and finally the doors closed, and the deacon was quietly remembered by some as the man who must have run off with the building fund.
He had not. His letter, tucked in the leather book, listed every dollar, every donor, every penny a widow had given, and it said plainly that this money belonged to the Lord and to the children and to no one else, and that if it was ever found it was to go back to the church, or if the church was gone, to the children of that community.
I have laid brick for twenty-three years. When the back of that firebox sat a foot forward of where the dome said it should, every instinct said the last man walled up something evil. Instead he walled up the honesty that his whole town had doubted for sixty years.
A man who finds a church fund in an oven does not get to spend it or keep it. I called the couple who hired me, and we found that the little church was indeed long closed, so we did what the deacon asked. We took the leather book with its list of donors to the county, and to a lawyer, and we traced the congregation forward.
Many of the donors were gone, but their church had become part of a larger one in the next town, one that ran a program for kids who need a hot meal and a safe place after school. The old building fund, counted up and valued fairly at todays worth, went there, to a hall with the childrens names on it, which is exactly what Deacon Pratt was raising it for in the first place.
And the county did one more thing. In the little churchs records, now kept by the larger congregation, somebody corrected the old quiet lie. Deacon Samuel Pratt did not steal the building fund. He guarded it with his life and died before he could hand it back, and sixty years later it built the hall he dreamed of.
The couple who hired me to rebuild their oven could have claimed it all. They did not. The wife said a man protected his churchs money with his own bread oven, and we are not going to be the ones who finally take it. People surprise you, in the good direction, more than the stories let on.
You hide a space behind an ovens firebox because who reaches into an oven and measures it, and the eye takes brick for brick. Deacon Pratt was clever, and clever is what put the chill through me. But the chill was a faithful mans honesty, sealed behind the fire, waiting six decades to clear his own name and feed the children he never got to build for. I laid the new oven solid, all the way through, and I baked the first loaf in it myself, and I left it on the doorstep of that after-school hall.