Down in that space sat a green metal tackle box, the kind every man in Ohio had in his garage in 1983. It was wrapped in a bread bag and set on a bed of old newspaper so the damp would not get to it. Somebody had lined that little hole with care, and that was what bothered me. You do not put care into hiding junk.
I called the family in from the kitchen before I touched it. Greg and Lisa had bought the house from an estate sale that spring. They knew nothing about the people before them except that the last owner was an old man named Harold who lived there alone for thirty years.
Greg flipped the latch. Inside were U.S. Savings Bonds, stacked and rubber banded, maybe forty of them. Every one was a fifty dollar bond. Every one was dated between 1982 and 1985. And every one had the same name typed across it as the owner. Daniel R. Mercer.
On top was an index card in shaky blue ink. It said the bonds were for Danny, for college, and that Harold was keeping them where nobody could cash them for a bottle.
Lisa looked at me and asked who Danny was. I did not have an answer. But I knew who would. In a town like Cambridge, the church knows everybody.
Lisa made two phone calls. By supper we had it. Harold had a daughter who fell in with a bad crowd in the eighties, and her little boy Danny spent most of his summers at this house. After a hard falling out, the daughter moved away and took Danny with her. Harold never saw him again. He kept buying those bonds anyway, every month, for four years, until the money ran out.
That old man had been saving for a grandson he would never see again.
Danny was forty seven now. He worked as a custodian at a middle school over in Zanesville, about thirty minutes up the road. He had no idea any of it existed. He thought his grandfather forgot about him.
Greg and Lisa drove the box to him that weekend, and they asked me to come since I was the one who found it. Danny sat on his front steps and went through that stack one bond at a time. He read the card three times. Then he just held it against his chest and did not say anything for a long while.
Those bonds stopped earning interest years ago, but they were still good. With the interest they piled up, it came to a real amount of money. Not a fortune. Enough.
His daughter had just been accepted into nursing school at Ohio University, and he had been worried sick about how to pay for it. He looked up at the three of us and said his granddad finally got somebody to college after all.
She starts classes in the fall. Danny sent me a picture of her in her scrubs, and taped to the corner of the frame was that index card in shaky blue ink.
Twenty years I have been laying floors. That is the first one I ever wanted to keep a piece of.