His pickup came fast around the drive and he jumped out and came straight at me, and twenty years cutting metal around Shreveport taught me that a running man is usually more scared than dangerous, so I set the grinder down, held my empty hands up, and said easy that the door was only cracked and I had touched nothing inside.
He stopped a few feet off, chest heaving, and then the fight drained right out of him. What had breathed out of that dark container when the door gave was not a thing of horror. It was cold, damp air thick with the smell of old earth and mildew, and under it, row on row of home-canned jars gone bad, lids bulging, some burst.
His name was Cecil. Inside that container, sealed up two years, was his late wife pantry. She had canned every summer of their fifty years together, tomatoes and beans and peaches, and filled that container like a root cellar. When she passed, Cecil could not stand to open it, could not stand to throw it out, so he padlocked the door and let it sit.
He had rushed off for cash and rushed me to hurry not because he was hiding a crime, but because he could not bear to be standing there when the door finally opened on the last work of his wife hands.
The jars had turned in the heat, and that was the sour breath that backed me off. Nothing worse than two years of spoiled preserves in a sealed steel box.
When Cecil saw I understood, when he saw I was not laughing and not backing away, he sat down right on the container step and cried the way old men cry, quiet, with his shoulders shaking.
I did not charge him for the job. I went into town and bought a case of empty mason jars, and I stayed the whole afternoon. Together we carried out the bad ones and I helped him save the few that had held, wiped them clean, set them on his kitchen shelf where he could see them.
Then I helped him clear that container out proper and hose it down, so it stopped being a tomb and started being just a shed again.
Before I left, Cecil pressed one good jar of his wife peaches into my hands and made me promise to eat them and think of her. I did. Fifty years of a womans love, and it was still the sweetest thing I ever tasted.