Down in that hollow was a wooden toolbox. Handmade, dovetailed at the corners, oiled so many times the wood had gone almost black. Wrapped in a canvas tarp and set on four bricks to keep it off the dirt.
Inside were tools. Real ones. A hand plane. A set of chisels with the handles worn down to the shape of the fingers that held them. A brass level, a wooden folding rule, a bit brace, a handsaw with a blade still sharp enough to shave with.
Taped to the lid was a note in carpenter pencil. It said, To whoever tears out this deck. I built it in 1994. A good deck lasts thirty years, so if you are reading this, it held up its end. These were my tools. Use them. Do not sell them. Leave the next fella something. Gus Kowalski.
There was also a hundred dollar bill folded under the note. On it he had written, first round is on me.
That man built a deck to last thirty years, and then he left a gift for the man he knew would be standing right where I was standing.
I showed the fella who hired me, a man named Dean. He laughed so hard he had to sit down on the steps.
I made some calls. In a town the size of Kingwood, it did not take long. Gus Kowalski was a finish carpenter who built half the porches and staircases in Preston County between 1960 and 2000. He was known for doing everything by hand, long after everybody else went to power tools. He died in 2012 at eighty four.
His grandson, a kid named Tyler, was nineteen and in the carpentry program at the career center in the next county. Tyler did not have any of the tools of his grandfather. They had been lost when the family sold the house.
They were not lost. They were under a deck on the other side of town.
I called Tyler and asked if he wanted to come see something. He came that afternoon, still covered in sawdust from class.
When he opened that toolbox, he picked up the plane first. He said his grandfather used to let him push it when he was five, with the big hands of the old man wrapped over his.
Then he read the note. He got to the part that said do not sell them, and he laughed and cried at the same time.
I told Tyler the tools were his. He said no. He said the note said to use them and leave the next fella something.
So we made a deal. Tyler worked with me for the rest of that summer on the new deck. He used every one of those old tools. He cut the stair stringers by hand with that old saw, and they came out perfect.
When we finished, Tyler wrote his own note, put it in the toolbox with a new hundred dollar bill, and we set it back in that hollow under the new footing.
We spent the first hundred at the diner on Main Street. Dean bought the second round.
Twenty years I have been building decks. That is the first one I ever built with a message for whoever comes next.