I chipped it open and shined my light in. The moment I saw what had been sealed into that lock wall all those years, I backed out fast, because there was a boot heel and a bone-colored curve of something, and it took me a full minute of standing in the mud with my heart going to understand I was looking at a hat.
A felt hat, collapsed, on top of a tin trunk about the size of a bread box.
The trunk had been packed by somebody who intended it to last. Wax paper, then oilcloth, then a layer of tar over the seams, and inside it was dry as an attic.
What is in it is a union.
The charter for a local of the canal boatmen and mule drivers, dated 1911, hand-lettered, with forty-one names signed to it. A relief ledger showing what each man paid in and what went out to families during the tie-up of 1913. Two hundred and some dollars in old bills, which was a great deal of money then. And a stack of membership cards nobody ever got back.
The lock tender was a man named Isaiah Crowe, and the story in this township for a hundred years has been that he went into the water on a February night and the canal kept him.
Isaiah Crowe did not go into the water. He went to Toledo.
The company had the sheriff coming for the books. That is what the last page in the ledger says, in a fast, bad hand, and it is the only page written in a hurry.
They will take the names and every man on this list will be blacklisted from Cleveland to Cincinnati and their children will not eat. So the names go in the wall and the money goes with them and I go too. Tell them I drowned. A drowned man is not asked questions and neither is his list.
He walked away from a wife and a lock and let a whole county bury him in its head so that forty-one men could keep working under their own names.
His great-granddaughter is seventy-nine and lives in Sylvania. The family always knew, the way families know things they do not say out loud, and she grew up with a grandmother who mailed money to a woman in this township every Christmas until 1948 and would never explain why.
She came down in April with two of her sons. She stood in the drained channel in her good shoes and put her hand on that stone.
The charter and the ledger went to the county historical society, and eleven of those forty-one surnames are still on mailboxes within four miles of this lock. Three families have come out to see their great-grandfathers’ signatures.
The money we gave to the historical society too. It bought a case and a light.
The cavity is mortared shut again, wrong color and all, because it seemed to me that a man who built himself a grave to save a list ought to be allowed to keep the shape of it.