And I set that crowbar down, because down in there, packed careful under the floor of that empty Flint bedroom, was a whole world nobody was ever meant to see.
Not money. Not the thing your mind goes to with a hidden hole in a floor. Carvings. Little wooden figures, dozens of them, wrapped two and three to a rag and laid in rows like eggs in a carton. I lifted one out and it about stopped my heart. It was a bird, a redwing blackbird, and every feather was cut so fine you would swear it might lift off my palm. The next was an old man asleep in a chair with a dog curled at his feet. The next, two kids on a porch step. Whoever made these was not whittling to pass a slow evening. This was a real gift, the kind most folks never get and most that have it never use.
Down at the bottom was a cigar box of notebooks, the cheap spiral kind, filled front to back in pencil. They belonged to a man named Leonard, and they were part diary and part plans for the next carving. He wrote that he had worked the same line I did, forty years, and that his hands only ever felt right when they were wrapped around a knife and a block of basswood. He wrote that his wife thought it a silly waste and his boy laughed at it, so he quit showing anybody, and just kept on alone, at night, and hid the work away where the meanness could not reach it.
A man ought to have one thing in this world that is only his, that nobody else gets to make small. He wrote that on the very last page.
Leonard lost the house to the taxes and passed in a county home two years back, near as I could piece it together. But he had a granddaughter, and it took me a while but I tracked her down, over in Burton, a young woman with kids of her own who barely remembered the old man. When I set that box of birds and figures in front of her, she did not know what to say. She had no notion her grandpa could do anything the like of it. She thought he was just a mean quiet old man who worked at the plant.
There is a fellow I know who runs the little folk-art gallery downtown, part of the whole business of trying to bring this town back around. He took one look at Leonard carvings and went quiet the way people do around the real thing. They are going to show them this fall, the entire collection, with Leonard name up on the wall and a couple pages of his notebooks under glass. The granddaughter is bringing her kids to the opening.
I bought that house sight unseen off a tax auction, figuring on an ordinary job and a small profit at the end of it. Instead I spent forty years standing next to a man and never once knew him, and then I pried up a bedroom floor and finally got to introduce him to the world he hid from his whole life. That is worth more than any flip I ever turned.