Because what I found in that dry compartment was not money, and it was not bones, which I will admit I half expected. It was a steel case the size of a suitcase, wrapped in tar paper and sealed with melted wax, and when I pried the lid with my screwdriver it opened with a sigh of old air. Inside, packed in straw and layered between sheets of blue tissue, were hundreds of glass photographic negatives, each in a paper sleeve, each labeled in fine ink.
The couple who owned the house, Nate and Alicia, had followed me to the edge of the tank and were looking down through the hole with flashlights. I held up a negative to the light and tilted it. It was dark in the way that negatives are, the whites turned black. But I could make out a street, flooded to the windowsills, and a row of men in a rowboat. I called up, “Come look.” It took them a minute to climb down the ladder, and neither of them said a thing.
There was a letter on top, written on lined paper and folded into a cigar box. It was dated June of 1937. “To the Historical Society of Jackson County,” it began, “or to any honest person who finds this. My name is Elias Marsh. I am the photographer of Ravenswood. In January of this year the river took half the town, and I took pictures of all of it. The county commissioners have asked me to hand over my plates, and I will not. I believe they mean to burn them.”
The letter went on. The commissioners, Marsh wrote, had been quietly blamed by the people of the lower town for failing to build the levee they had promised. They did not want a record of the water line, or of what the flood did to the families who had trusted them. Marsh had been fined and threatened. So he had built this compartment in the cistern of his own house, where no one would look, and packed away the whole record in the one dry place he could think of.
The truth, if it is hidden well and by an honest hand, can outwait every man who wished it buried.
Nate made a call that afternoon to the Jackson County Historical Society, a small brick building on Washington Street, run by a seventy year old volunteer named Mrs. Devlin. She did not believe him at first. Then she drove out in her station wagon with a pair of white cotton gloves and a thermos of tea, and she knelt at the lip of the hole and wept. For forty years she had searched for the work of Marsh, whose studio had burned in 1941 and whose photographs had been given up as lost.
The negatives went to a conservator in Charleston, who spent four months cleaning and scanning them. There were 412 plates. Many showed the flood: boats on Main Street, a church with water to the pews, a mule standing on a roof. But there were others as well. Children on a school bench. A wedding. A line of men outside the mill. A black woman in her Sunday hat holding a baby. Marsh had photographed the whole town, as though he knew that somebody someday would want to see who had lived there.
There was a surprise in the box. Wedged under the last sheet of tissue was a short typed list of names, forty seven of them, each with a date and a street. A note at the bottom read: These are the families who lost their homes. The commissioners promised relief. None was paid. Let this stand as a record. When the list was published in the county paper, three descendants called the Historical Society within the week. One woman brought a framed picture she had kept for sixty years without knowing who took it.
The exhibit opened that spring at the library. Nate and Alicia were guests of honor, standing awkwardly at the door in their good clothes. The photographs were printed large and hung in a long room, each with a card that gave the name, the year, and where it was found. At the center of the room, in a glass case, lay the steel box, the letter, and the tar paper wrapping. Visitors lined up around the block. The mayor read the letter of Marsh aloud.
The county commission, now made up of different men and women, passed a resolution formally apologizing for the events of 1937 and establishing a small fund in honor of the forty seven families. It was not much money. But a great granddaughter of one of the families, a retired teacher in her eighties, stood up at the meeting and said it was the first time anyone from the county had spoken the names. Mrs. Devlin held her hand through all of it.
I cleaned the cistern myself in the end, and sealed it, and put in a proper floor. Nate and Alicia asked me to leave the compartment as it was, with a small door to show it. They set a brass plate by the opening. It says: Here Elias Marsh kept the town safe. I looked down into that dry square of dark one last time, with my tools in my hand. In nineteen years of cleaning tanks, I never expected the best thing in one to be a window.
A framed print hangs now in my own front hall. It shows a boy of about ten, grinning, holding up a catfish as long as his arm in front of the old drugstore. The card on the back says Ravenswood, 1936. I have no idea who he was. But I look at him every morning on my way to work, and I think of the man who stood behind the camera, and the long patient dark he waited in, and the day somebody finally lifted the lid.