The torch hissed for four minutes, and then the hatch came up with a groan. The well man, Earl Rudd, went down first with a flashlight and called up that it was safe. My son in law Marcus held my arm, and I climbed down that ladder one slow rung at a time in my church shoes, with my heart going like a washing machine. At the bottom Earl pulled a string, and a bulb came on. I expected a stranger in a picture frame, or a stack of secrets in a shoebox. What I saw was a clean little workshop, twelve feet square, smelling of oil and fresh paint.
And bicycles. Eleven of them hung from hooks in the ceiling, small ones with training wheels and streamers, painted bright red and blue. Two wheelchairs stood folded in the corner with brand new cushions. A row of walkers leaned on the wall like tin soldiers. On the bench sat a half finished tricycle and a coffee can of bolts. I stood there with my hand over my mouth. Marcus said, “Mama Jo, this is not what I figured.” I said, “Neither did I.” Then I saw the green ledger on the shelf, with my name written on the front in the square handwriting of Dale.
Page after page, forty four years of Sundays. “June 1981, Tommy Hargett, red bicycle, age seven.” “October 1994, Mrs. Ola Banks, walker.” “March 2019, the Reyes family, wheelchair for the grandmother.” Two hundred and twelve names in all, and beside every one the same words: “Delivered by Pastor Ellis. No name given.” Taped inside the cover was a letter. Dale wrote that when he was nine, in 1958, a stranger left a used bicycle on the porch of his mother, and she cried over it. He promised the Lord he would pass that kindness on, and never let anyone know whose hands made it.
A widow opens the locked well house of her husband and finds the quiet kindness he gave away for forty four years.
“Jo,” the letter said, “if you are reading this, the lock finally failed me. I was not hiding from you. I was hiding from thank yous. You would have told the whole church out of pure pride, and I love you for it, but then it would be about me. The wires on that pump are real, but the saws are what I kept the grandkids away from. Forgive an old man his secret. Check the pressure for me once in a while.” I read it twice. Earl wiped his eyes with his cap, and Marcus had to sit down on a paint bucket.
That afternoon I called Pastor Ellis Whitaker, eighty one years old, and told him the hatch was open. He was quiet so long I thought the line had dropped. Then he said, “Josephine, I have carried that for forty years, and it was the best weight I ever carried.” He drove out that evening and stood in the workshop and cried like a boy. Earl would not take a cent for the lock he cut. He told me his own daughter rode a blue bicycle in 1996 that nobody ever explained, and now he knew who to thank. He thanked a ledger, since Dale could not hear it.
On Sunday I sat all my children and grandchildren at the long table and told them the truth, from the shed to the stairs to the paint. Nobody spoke for a minute. Then my grandson Wyatt, sixteen, who had been told since age six that the shed would shock him silly, asked, “Grandma, can I learn how to do it?” I looked at his hands. They were Dale hands, wide and patient. I said the tools belonged to the family now, and every person at that table would carry a piece of the work, if they wanted. Eleven hands went up.
On a clipboard by the bench I found a list in the writing of Dale. Five names, with sizes and ages, still waiting. A girl of six named Maribel. A man of seventy who needed a walker for his hip. Dale had not finished with them when he passed in March, and I could not stand the thought of those folks waiting for nothing. Wyatt and I spent three weeks in that workshop, with Marcus holding the flashlight and Pastor Ellis telling stories. We sanded, we painted, we tightened every bolt twice. The tricycle for Maribel came out candy apple red, and I cried when we hung it up to dry.
The Saturday after the last delivery, a man in a good gray suit stopped his car in my yard. He was about fifty, with kind eyes and a deputy badge on his belt. “Mrs. Mercer, my name is Tommy Hargett. In 1981 a red bicycle showed up on our porch, and my mother said it was from heaven. I have wondered about it for forty two years.” I took his hand and walked him down the yard, past the open hatch, down the ladder, and I put the green ledger in his hands, open to the first page.
Tommy read his own name in the writing of Dale and could not stop the tears. Then he laughed, because on the wall hung a photograph of a skinny boy on a red bicycle, cut from the church bulletin of 1981. Dale had kept it all those years. Tommy asked if he could come on Saturdays and help build the next ones, and Pastor Ellis, standing on the ladder, said the Lord does move in tidy ways. By dusk the three of us sat on upturned buckets in the workshop eating cold cornbread, laughing like fools, with two hundred and twelve names looking down from the shelf.
The padlock is gone from that door now, and the hatch stands open all day with a rope rail around it for the grandkids. A sign on the well house reads, in the paint of Wyatt, WORKSHOP OF DALE MERCER, ALL KIDS WELCOME. Every Sunday after church I put on my apron, walk out to that shed, and turn on the bulb. People think I am old and confused. I tell them I am only checking the pressure, exactly as my husband did, and that it has never once been higher.