Because what was down in that dry space was whiskey. Rows of it. Brown glass bottles, corked and sealed in red wax, laid on their sides in straw like eggs in a crate. I counted forty-eight before I quit counting.
I climbed out of that tank and hollered for Bobby and Tina. Bobby came down the ladder, looked, and started laughing so hard he had to hold on to the rung.
We brought up one bottle to look at in the daylight. Hand-lettered on a paper label, still readable, it said Tharp Bros. Wirt County. 1932.
That was the year before Prohibition ended. And now I understood that tank. Somebody had built a cellar and then built a septic tank right on top of it, because no revenue agent on earth was going to climb down into a septic tank on a hunch. I will say it again. Clever.
Tina went to the county historical society in Elizabeth, and the old fella who runs it nearly came out of his chair. The Tharp brothers were famous in Wirt County. Folks said they ran the best whiskey in the whole Little Kanawha valley, and they were never once caught. The story always went that they had a last batch put back when repeal came. People had been digging holes in those hills looking for it for ninety years.
Nobody ever thought to look in the septic tank. Which, I guess, was the whole point.
Bobby and Tina did not know what to do with forty-eight bottles of ninety-four-year-old moonshine. So they asked around, and a whiskey man from Louisville drove up to look at it. He opened one bottle right there at their kitchen table, poured a little in a glass, and held it up to the window.
Then he tasted it, and he did not say anything for a while. He said it was the finest whiskey he had tasted in forty years in the business, and he had no idea how it was even possible.
They kept two bottles and gave four to the historical society for the display case. The rest went to auction that spring.
Here is where I tip my hat to that couple. They did not keep the money. The Elizabeth volunteer fire department had been trying to raise money for a new pumper truck for six years. After that auction, they did not need to raise it anymore.
The new truck has a small painted line on the door, down by the bottom. Tharp Bros. 1932. The chief says that is the best-kept secret in Wirt County, and he tells everybody.
Every year on the anniversary of the day we found it, Bobby and Tina open one of their two bottles and pour three small glasses on their back porch. One for Bobby. One for Tina. And one for the septic man.
Twenty years pumping tanks. That is the first one I ever opened that anybody was glad I did.