I backed the screws out on the milk house floor. The second I saw what my grandfather had hidden inside that separator all those years, I had to sit down, because it was full of savings bonds.
Series EE, in paper, the old green ones. Eleven bundles, each one held with a rubber band that crumbled when I touched it, and each bundle had a name on a card in his handwriting.
Every grandchild. All eleven of us, including the two who never called him and the one nobody in this family has spoken to since 2009.
They start in 1987, which is the year I was born, and the last one is dated three months before he died. Fifty dollars here, a hundred there, bought at the bank in town on the day the milk check came, for thirty-eight years.
A dairy farmer’s milk check comes twice a month and it is never enough. I know exactly what that money was, because I know what he was not doing with it. He drove a truck with two hundred and eighty thousand miles on it. He wore the same coat my whole life.
Mine came to a little over nine thousand dollars with the interest. The bundles are not equal, and that is because he bought for whoever had a birthday, not because he was keeping score, and I want to say that plainly because my aunt asked about it inside of a day.
Under the bundles was a page in pencil, and he was not a man who wrote things.
Nobody is to know about these until I am gone. If they know, they will ask, and if they ask I will give it to them, and then it will be spent on something and there will be nothing left of me but a stove and some tools. This way each one of you gets a piece of forty years of mornings.
Forty years of mornings. He cranked that separator at four-thirty every day of his life and every day of it he was putting something in the base of it.
I drove eleven bundles around by hand. It took me most of the summer. I would not mail them.
The cousin nobody talks to lives in Kalamazoo and I sat in her driveway for twenty minutes working up to knocking. She did not want to open the envelope in front of me. She called me that night at eleven and she could not talk for the first minute.
She came to the farm at Christmas. First time in seventeen years.
Two of the bundles have to go to the Treasury to be reissued because the paper ones do not cash the way they used to. I am handling that for everybody, which is fine, it is the only useful thing I have ever done for this family.
The separator is back in the milk house. The base is empty and the plate is screwed back on with the same worn-out screws.
I put a bond in it in September, in my daughter’s name. It seems like the sort of thing a man ought to keep going.