I chipped it open and reached inside. The moment my flashlight caught what had been sealed into that aqueduct all those years, I backed away, because it was a lead cylinder about the length of my forearm, and it had a name soldered onto the cap.
Silas Boone. 1949.
Silas Boone is the man the old-timers meant. I had heard three versions of it in the two years we owned the place, and every one of them was wrong.
It was soldered shut. I took it to the county historical society rather than open it in my kitchen, which I am glad of, because four people were standing there when it came apart.
Inside was a roll of oilcloth. On it, in India ink, forty-one names.
The men who built that aqueduct in 1888. Full names, ages, where each one was from, and beside eleven of them a small cross for the ones who died on it, three in the same week in August.
The bronze plaque at the north end of that line, which is still there, gives the name of the engineering firm and the name of one engineer from Philadelphia. That is all it has ever said.
Silas Boone was fourteen years old in 1888 and carried water for that crew. He was the last of them living. In 1949 he was seventy-five, and he mixed a batch of mortar that did not match, and he climbed up on that arch alone and sealed the crew into the wall they built.
Rolled inside the oilcloth, on a separate square:
These are the men that laid this stone. I am putting them in it because the county would not put them on it. They are up out of the water and out of the weather and they will keep. Whoever finds them, they have waited long enough, and they are owed better than a wall.
He did not go missing. He went to Baltimore in the fall of 1949 to live with his daughter and died there in 1953, and the county quit knowing where he was and made a story out of it.
The historical society has spent two years on those names. Thirty-four are matched to census records. Nineteen have living descendants, and eleven of those families are in the same counties they were in a hundred and thirty-seven years ago and had no idea their people built the thing they drive past.
There is a granite marker at the north end now, twelve feet from the bronze one. All forty-one names, in the order Silas wrote them, which was not alphabetical and which nobody has figured out. The crosses are on it too.
Silas Boone’s name is on the bottom, last, which is where he put himself.
My wife and I paid for about a third of it. The rest came from the families.
The cylinder went back into the arch in September, names copied, original inside. Same chamber, better mortar, mixed by a mason from Roanoke who is descended from the seventh name on that list.
Some men build a thing and get left off it. Every so often one of them lives long enough, and is stubborn enough, to hide the truth inside the stone and trust that somebody eventually repairs a wall.