I backed away because I finally let myself understand what I was looking at. That shape in the silt was a strongbox, an old iron one, and no man sinks a strongbox in the deepest part of his own pond by accident. Somebody set it there on purpose, back when the water stood high, and meant for it to stay lost forever.
I did not pry it loose myself. I walked up to the house and called the county sheriff, because whatever this was, it was older than me, and a thing like that deserved to be done the right way. Two deputies came out the next morning with a winch and a tarp, and we drew it up out of the drying mud together.
It was sealed with tar and wrapped in oilcloth that had somehow held. When the deputy worked the lid open, there was no gold in it, nothing like the stories a man tells himself. There were papers. Deeds, a bundle of old savings bonds, and a stack of letters tied with string, every one of them addressed to two children by their first names.
The sheriff traced it in a week. The man who dug that pond, back before my daddy bought the ground, was named Harold. He had a son and a daughter, and one winter he left and never came home, and the whole county decided he had run off and left his family with nothing. His kids grew up believing their father had thrown them away.
But the letters told another story. Harold had put every dollar he had into those bonds and those deeds, all of it set aside for his two children, and he had sunk the box in the pond to keep it safe from a man he owed money to. He wrote that he would come back for it when the trouble passed. He wrote that he loved them more than his own life. And then, that same winter, he took sick and died three counties over, alone, before he could tell a soul where their future was hidden.
I found his children. They were old now, older than me, a brother and sister who had carried sixty years of believing their father did not care. I sat at their kitchen table and set that box in front of them, and I watched two gray-haired people read the letters their father had left.
The daughter put a hand over her mouth and wept, and the brother just kept saying, he did not leave us, he did not leave us. He had never left them at all.
The drought that near ruined my season gave that family back their father. The bonds had long since matured, and it came to real money, but that was the smallest part of it. What the water gave up was the truth, and the truth was that those two had been loved the whole time.