because for one second I was sure I had bought a dead mans crime along with his trailer. You do not build a false bottom into a farm trailer to haul hay. I had it in my head I was about to be calling the sheriff.
What was down in that hollow space was jars. Little glass jars, dozens of them, and cloth pouches, all packed careful in straw so they would not freeze. I lifted one jar into the light and it was full of beans. Speckled beans, a kind I had never seen at any feed store. Every jar and every pouch had a strip of masking tape with a name in pencil. Grandma Hoyles October bean. Cherokee flour corn. Mortgage-lifter, the real one.
Seeds. The whole hidden compartment was seeds.
There was a composition book down in there too, greasy and thumbed soft, and the first page told me what I was holding.
These are the old kinds, near gone from the earth. The big companies quit growing them and folks forgot. Somebody has to keep the seed alive. As long as I have breath and a hiding place, it will be me.
The man who owned this trailer, Elmer, farmed near Sedalia his whole life, and somewhere along the way he appointed himself keeper of the old crops. The varieties that fed this country before everything came from a catalog, saved back one plant at a time and guarded where nobody would ever think to search. He did not vanish running from the law. The bank took his farm, and a broken old man with no land left just drifted off, and I bought his trailer, and I nearly missed the most valuable thing on it, which does not weigh two pounds.
I did not call the sheriff. I called the state extension office, and then a seed-saving outfit two states over. Those folks drove down the same week. When they opened that composition book and read Elmers list, one of the women actually put her hand over her mouth. Some of what Elmer had in those jars, she said, the world had thought was gone. Extinct. Gone for good. And here it was, alive, in a hidden box under a hay trailer near Sedalia.
They tracked Elmer down for me, in a rented room in the next county, and I drove out and told him his seeds were safe, that they were going in a real seed bank and going out to young farmers all over. That old man, who had lost his land and everything on it, sat up straight for the first time in I would guess a couple of years. Not the tractor, he said. Not the house. The seeds are what I grieved. You are telling me the seeds made it.
They made it. This spring, in test plots in four states, Grandma Hoyles October bean is coming up out of the ground again, and Cherokee flour corn, and the real mortgage-lifter, all of it, out of a box a man built to outlast his own hard luck.
I got a good used trailer for cheap. Elmer got to see his lifes work outlive his farm. I would call that a fair sight better than a fair deal.