I set my wrench down real slow, because when I got the cap off that sealed canister buried in the yard, it was not the cold thing I was bracing for. It was dry inside, packed careful, and right on top sat a coffee can of silver coins and a bundle of papers tied in string.
No horror. A mans whole quiet fortune, dead-ended off a gas line because a gas line is the one thing a person is trained never to cut into.
Under the coins were savings bonds, a deed, and a letter in an old hand, sealed in wax.
The man who ran that fake gas line to a buried canister had not been hiding anything sinister, he had spent a lifetime distrusting banks and squirreling away everything he had, and he disguised it as the one thing no tradesman would ever touch on a whim, so it would wait safe in the ground until family came for the house.
The letter told it plain. He had lived through hard times that taught him to trust dirt over banks, and he had no one left close by, only a grandson he had lost touch with after a long-ago falling-out. He could not stand the thought of the state taking it all when he passed with no will anyone could find. So he buried it where it would keep, and he wrote down the grandsons name.
He wrote: This is not treasure, it is forty years of not spending. It belongs to my grandson Danny if he can be found. If you are honest enough to have dug this up and read this far, you are honest enough to see it gets to him.
The young couple who hired me did not keep a dime of it, though the law might have let them try. There was a name and a town, and with a little looking we found Danny, a grown man now who had spent years thinking his grandfather died still angry at him.
He came out to the house and we put the canister in his hands. He cried, not over the money, but over the letter, because the last line of it said his grandfather had never stopped hoping he would come home.
Twenty years on gas service and I never saw the like. A capped line running to nothing turned out to be an old mans savings and his last reach toward a grandson he thought he had lost, and I got to be the one who dug it up and handed it back.