I set my pry bar down real slow, because the dry compartment sealed inside that piling, out over the deep water, held a cylinder of oilcloth, and inside the oilcloth were medals.
A Purple Heart. A Bronze Star. And a bundle of letters tied with string, and a photograph of a young man in uniform standing in a rice paddy with two other boys, grinning the way boys do before they know anything.
The man who built this dock came home from Vietnam in 1970 and never said a word about it, the way a lot of them never did. He could not keep his medals in the house, because every time he saw them he was back there. But he could not throw them in the lake either, because of the two boys in the photograph who never came home at all. So he sealed them inside a dock piling, out over deep water, where they were safe and where he would never have to look at them.
He could not carry the weight of them in his house, and he could not set it down. So he put it where the lake could hold it for him.
The couple who hired me did the right thing. The letters had names, and we traced them to the mans daughter, two counties over, who knew her father served and knew he would never speak of it and had wondered her whole life what he did over there.
She came to the lake house. We put the medals and the letters and the photograph in her hands at the end of the dock, over the water where her father had hidden them. She read one letter, the one where he wrote home about the two boys in the picture, and then she held the Purple Heart to her chest and cried for a father she was only now beginning to understand.
She had the medals framed, the right way, in the light, with the photograph of the three boys beside them. She said her father could not do it, so she would do it for him.
I rebuilt the dock solid and new. But I left that one piling hollow, with a clean cap that lifts off, because some weights a man carries deserve a place to rest, even after he is gone.