I pried it open on the porch. The second I saw what my grandmother had hidden inside that tub all those years, I had to sit down, because it was steel.
Four pieces of plate about the size of playing cards, with a weld bead run across the middle of each one. A chipping hammer. A pair of goggles with the strap gone hard. And a paper card in a cellophane sleeve.
Weld test coupons. That is what those plate pieces are. You run your bead, they cut it, they bend it, and if it does not open up you pass.
The card is a welder qualification card out of a shipbuilding yard on Lake Michigan, issued in March of 1943 to Alvina Kubek, age nineteen, and it is stamped and countersigned and it lists three positions including overhead, which is the hard one.
My grandmother welded ships for two years and eight months and I never heard one word about it in twenty-nine years of Sunday dinners.
She was let go in November of 1945 along with every other woman on that shift. There was a letter with it, one paragraph, thanking her for her wartime service and reminding her the positions were temporary in nature.
Scratched into the underside of that false floor with a scribe, in letters about a half inch tall, is what she put there before she soldered it shut.
These are mine. I passed overhead on the first try and Emil Pryzbylski took three. They told me to go home and not to bring it up, so I am not bringing it up. But it happened and here it is and I am not throwing it in the lake.
Then she hung that tub on a porch and did laundry in it until 1994.
My mother did not know. My aunt did not know. My grandfather is gone and I would give a good deal to know if he did, and my aunt says probably, because he never let anybody take that tub down off the hook.
The card went to the maritime museum in Manitowoc. Hers is in a case now with her name printed under the glass, and they asked me twice if I was sure.
I kept the coupons. All four are on a shelf in my shop where I can see them from the bench.
I am a welder. That is the part that gets me. I have been welding for nineteen years, structural, and I got into it because I liked it and for no other reason anybody ever told me.
My daughter is fifteen. She has been running beads on scrap since she was thirteen and she was better at seventeen weeks than I was at a year.
She has held the coupon with the overhead bead on it. She asked me why her great-grandmother hid it, and I told her the truth, which is that a woman was told to go home and not bring it up, and she obeyed the first part.
She did not throw it in the lake. She soldered it into the bottom of a wash tub and waited eighty years for somebody in this family to pick up a torch.