I set it down slow because there was a steel cash box in the hole, rusted along the seams, and on its lid someone had laid a yellow card in neat teacher handwriting. FOR THE CHILDREN OF PLEASANTS COUNTY WHO NEED BOOTS. NOT FOR GROWN FOLKS. Behind me, Lyle Sparks stopped breathing for a moment and then started again, a good deal faster. I had wondered all morning why a man hovers over a bench job. Now I knew. He had known something was down there, and he had hoped to be alone when it came up. “Move on back, Lyle,” I said, and I did not say it unkindly.
He leaned against the washer with his arms crossed and told me everything. In March he found a postcard in the attic, dated 1931, signed E.V., with four words on it. Look under the bench. The house had belonged to Edna Voss, who taught third grade at the school on Second Street for forty years. “I paid ninety four thousand dollars for this place,” Lyle said. “The roof leaks, the truck note is late, and I got laid off in April. Whatever is in that box, I figured the house came with it.” I did not argue. I just pointed at the card on the lid, and he read it again.
“I am not telling you it is easy,” I said. “I am telling you the lady wrote it down.” We carried the box to the kitchen table, and Lyle called his wife Peggy in from the porch to witness it. The lid came up with a squeal. Inside lay a school ledger, a stack of bills rolled in wax paper, and a handful of silver certificates, the old large kind. Peggy counted the money twice. Fourteen thousand, two hundred sixty dollars in all. Nobody said a word. On the last page of the ledger, Edna had written one line in red ink: Reserve for the hard winters.
Under a mudroom bench in St. Marys lies an old school fund for children boots, and doing right by it helps a whole town.
I took the ledger to Joan Mercer at the historical society, and she studied it for an hour before she spoke. Every December from 1927 to 1931, Edna Voss had bought boots for the poor children of the county, and she had paid for them with dimes and nickels collected from 212 households, and with one other, odd source. A line each year read H.T., four hundred dollars, no questions. “Hollis Teel,” Joan said, grinning. “He ran moonshine up Middle Island Creek during Prohibition. The whole town knew, and Edna never once asked him where it came from.”
I wanted to know if any Teel family was left, so Joan made a call. That afternoon I drove to Sistersville and sat on a porch with Bonnie Teel, eighty one years old, the granddaughter of Hollis. She listened to the whole story with her hands folded. “Granddad never went to church,” she said, “but he told me once that a schoolteacher had shamed him into being good for exactly four hundred dollars a year, and it was the best deal he ever made.” She wrote a check for five hundred dollars right there on her knee. “For boots,” she said. “Tell Edna we kept up.”
Joan pulled a faded newspaper from a drawer. In October 1931, the bank in St. Marys had locked its doors, and half the town lost its savings overnight. Edna never trusted that bank, and she had kept the fund at home, bolted under the bench in her mudroom, where no clerk could close a door on it. She wrote down every boot she bought, 1,140 pairs in five winters. Then the Depression settled in, the donations dried up, and she moved to her sister in 1958 and, I suppose, forgot the bolts. The fund simply sat there for sixty seven years, waiting for a hard winter.
I went back to the Sparks house with the news. Lyle was in the mudroom, sitting on the floor where the bench used to be. A lawyer named Marjorie Ames had already told him what I suspected. Edna had no children, and an unclaimed fund with a written purpose belongs to that purpose. A coin dealer in Parkersburg offered thirty one thousand dollars for the old bills as collectors items. Lyle stared at the number for a long moment. “My dad wore newspaper in his shoes in the winter of 1974,” he said quietly. “I never forgot that.”
The next Tuesday, Lyle carried the cash box into the county school office himself, with Peggy and me behind him. A counselor named Terri Wade took the lid off and put her hand to her mouth. She told us forty one children had gone without proper boots last winter. Lyle did not ask for a reward, and she did not offer one. But word got around St. Marys the way it does, and that Saturday a roofer named Dean Morrow pulled up with a crew of four and fixed the Sparks roof for the cost of the shingles. Nobody asked him to. He said he had been a boot kid too.
I rebuilt the bench that winter, and Lyle paid me in coffee. The hatch stays unbolted now, and the lid has a slot cut in the top, with a small brass plate that reads The Edna Voss Boot Fund. Neighbors drop in coins and sometimes folded bills. That first December the fund bought boots for more than seven hundred children, in every size from toddler to tall boys, and a good number of them went home wearing their new pair. Terri Wade sent me a photograph of the first group lined up in the school hallway, every boot still stiff and shiny. I keep it taped inside my truck, right above the dash, where I can see it on cold mornings.
Lyle still hovers a little, but only to greet whoever comes to drop off a coin. I stopped by on New Years Day to check a hinge and found three kids on that bench, stomping their boots dry. Some folks hide treasure to keep it. Edna Voss hid hers so it would still be there to give away.