I set my shovel down real slow at the edge of the window well in Sistersville, because the thing I had struck was not a drain, and the light was going gold across the Ohio River. I am Lonnie Baxter, fifty seven years old, and for twenty years I have dug window wells for the old houses of the river towns. The couple who owned the house, Abby and Tom Rheinhart, had gone inside for supper. The sealed vault I had uncovered was black iron, the size of a steamer trunk, pressed so tight against the foundation that its back wall was the wall of their bedroom.
I knocked on the kitchen door with the shovel handle. Tom came out wiping his hands on a dishtowel, and Abby came behind him, with a spoon, and the two of them knelt in the dirt at the edge of the hole and looked down, the way people look at a sleeping animal. The house was a tall brick Victorian built in 1909 by an oil man named Josiah Tuttle, in the boom years, when Sistersville had more millionaires per street than any town in America. No one had ever mentioned a vault.
We opened it that evening, with a pry bar and a borrowed hacksaw and a good deal of patience. The door swung with a groan. Inside lay a stack of leather ledgers, a Bible with a cracked spine, a canvas sack of silver dollars, and on top of them an envelope of heavy cream paper sealed with a red wax seal that had never been broken. Abby read the name on the front, “To the holder of this house.” She looked at her husband, and her hand shook.
An iron vault dug up beside a window well gave one digger the evening to bring a hidden inheritance back to the family in Sistersville.
I gave my terms standing in the dusk with my hat in my hands. “Mr. and Mrs. Rheinhart, I would like you to call a lawyer tonight, before you read another word. I would like a witness at the table, and a camera on the vault. I dig holes. I do not read letters meant for other people. But I will stay until your lawyer comes, and I will keep my crew out of the yard, because a thing like this attracts people. And I would like you to know that whatever is in that envelope, you were the ones who bought the house.”
The lawyer, Mr. Hendricks, arrived at nine and read the letter aloud at the dining room table. Josiah Tuttle had written it in 1909, in a fine slanting hand, on the day he finished the house. He confessed that he had cheated a farmer named Orrin Pike out of the mineral rights beneath eighty acres, and that he had never slept well since. He had put the deeds in the vault, in the name of the holder of the house, to be held for the family who lived there, on one condition, that they pay a share to the descendants of Orrin Pike. “I cannot undo it,” he wrote. “I can only hide the means, and pray that a better man finds it.”
The next morning at ten, a black sedan pulled up. Out stepped a polished attorney named Vance Roark and a woman in a gray suit, Donna Fitch, a great niece of the last owner, whose mother had been born a Pike. Roark swept into the dining room and demanded the deeds, claiming the contents belonged to the estate. When Mr. Hendricks refused, Roark snatched the deeds from the table and ran for the front door. He crossed the porch in three strides. My crew of four, who had come at eight to finish the well, were standing in the yard, leaning on shovels, and they closed ranks across the walk as if they had rehearsed it.
Roark stopped, looking at four men with shovels, and let the deeds fall to the porch boards. Mr. Hendricks stooped and picked them up. Donna Fitch stood at the foot of the steps with her hands clasped in front of her gray suit. “I am sorry,” she said. “My lawyer pushed me. I did not know about Orrin Pike.” Abby came down the steps and took her hand. “Donna,” she said, “you are a Pike, are you not?” She nodded. Abby smiled. “Then this concerns you more than anyone. Come in and have some coffee.”
The money consequences were simple and generous. The mineral rights beneath the eighty acres, leased now to a gas company, paid thirty eight thousand dollars a year in royalties. Abby and Tom, after a week of talking, signed an agreement dividing the royalties in half with the descendants of Orrin Pike, more than a century late. Donna Fitch and her cousins received their first check in March. The silver dollars, four hundred in all, were sold to a collector, and the proceeds paid for the repair of the roof.
In the name of the farmer Orrin Pike, Abby and Tom started the Orrin Pike Fund, and I sit on its board. It pays for scholarships and trade school tuition for the children of oil and gas workers, in Tyler, Wetzel and Pleasants counties. In the first year we sent twelve young people to school and repaired nine homes of retired roughnecks. One was a widow in Middlebourne whose well house had collapsed in the spring. The crew arrived on a Saturday with a backhoe and left her a new one before dark.
In October, the Rheinharts held a supper in the dining room of the old house for the descendants of Orrin Pike, thirty two of them, at the long table beneath the chandelier. I was invited, in a clean shirt, and sat at the end beside Donna Fitch. The iron vault stood open in the corner with a vase of marigolds inside it. Abby raised her glass to a farmer none of us had met. I looked at the window, where the river was turning purple, and the light went gold, just as it had that afternoon.