That canister was an old steel thermos, the big kind a miner would carry down the shaft, sealed at the lid with wax and wrapped in electrical tape. It was cold as ice from sitting in that water for who knows how long. I set it on the tailgate and called the family over before I opened it.
The Pritchards had bought the land that winter. Forty acres outside Clarksburg, an old farmhouse, a barn half fallen in. The last owner was a widower named Ansel who farmed it until he was ninety.
Mike Pritchard cut the tape and pulled the wax off with his thumbnail. Inside were glass baby food jars, a dozen of them, packed in cotton. Every jar was full of seeds. Beans, mostly, and some tomato and squash. Each lid had masking tape with writing on it. Mama Opal Cornfield Beans, since 1910. Aunt Bess Pink Tomato. Grandpa Wade Cutshort.
Rolled in the middle was a note. Ansel wrote that these seeds had been in his family for over a hundred years, and the well was the coolest, darkest place on the farm. He said whoever got the land should plant them, because his kids had moved to the city and did not want them.
His wife Tammy just stood there with a jar in her hand. A hundred years of one family, and they had been hanging in the dark waiting for somebody to care.
I have been around farms my whole life, and I did not know if seeds that old would still grow. Tammy called the WVU extension office in Clarksburg. A lady there nearly came through the phone. She said families in these hills saved seeds like that for generations, and a lot of the old varieties were lost for good. She said to keep them cool and try a few.
That spring Tammy planted twenty of the cornfield beans in a row by the house. Fourteen came up. The tomatoes took, too.
By August the vines were climbing the old fence Ansel built. The extension lady drove out to see them herself. She said she had not seen that pink tomato since her own grandmother grew it.
Then Tammy did the part that got me. She tracked down one of the granddaughters of Ansel, a young woman in Columbus named Brooke, and mailed her a jar of fresh seeds with a photo of the garden. Brooke called crying. She said she remembered snapping those exact beans on the porch with her great grandpa when she was six, and she had always wondered what happened to them.
Brooke drove down in September. She and Tammy canned beans in that farmhouse kitchen all afternoon. Now Brooke grows them on her apartment balcony, and the Pritchards entered that pink tomato at the county fair. It took a blue ribbon.
They put new casing in the well. Water runs clean now. But Mike still leaves a hook on the side of it, just in case.
Twenty six years I have been working wells. That is the first one that gave something back.