I hauled myself back up top for my phone, and I will admit my hands were shaking, because down in that old sealed space my mind had already buried a body. But when I got the flashlight steady and really looked, what a person had put down there and sealed away a long time ago was not anybody. It was crates. Rows of them.
Bottles. Dozens of wooden crates of old glass bottles, and stacked in the corner, the copper coils and kettle of a still, and a strongbox that turned out to hold a ledger and a fat roll of old bills gone soft and worthless with age.
My quiet little farm, it turned out, had been sitting on top of a speakeasy operation for a hundred years.
Back in Prohibition, somebody who owned this land before anybody now living was born had dug out that hollow, lined it, and run a still down there in the dark, making liquor when liquor was against the law, and hiding the whole operation under a lawn where no revenue man would ever think to look. And when Prohibition ended, or when the law got close, or when whoever ran it simply moved on or died, they sealed it up and walked away and let the grass grow over it, and a century later a sinkhole opened it back up to the sky.
The geologist fella climbed down beside me and looked at the still and the crates and started to laugh, and said in thirty years of sinkholes he had never once broken into somebody grandpa illegal saloon.
The county historical society lost their minds over it, in the best way. It turns out this whole area has old stories about bootlegging back in the day, whispers and legends, and here under my lawn was the real thing, preserved perfect, the ledger and all. Names in that ledger matched up with old families still around here, respectable folks whose great-grandparents, it turned out, were running moonshine under the pasture.
We got it all up out of the ground, careful, and most of it is going to the local museum now, the still and the crates and the whole story of it. Half the county has come by to see the hole in my yard where a hundred years of local history came up out of the dark.
I called the county worried my house was going to fall into a pit. What I got instead was a piece of my own land history I never dreamed was there, a whole secret chapter that rode under my feet and my kids playing and everything else, sealed in the dark since before my grandparents were born. The sinkhole is filled in now and the yard is safe. But there is a plaque going up at the museum, and it has my little farm on it, and the strange, wonderful truth of what was hiding underneath it all along.