I got a grip on it and hauled it up over the edge and unwrapped the sopping thing right there on the platform, and I about came off that ladder, because inside the oilcloth and the sealed tin was not what a man braces for out of the bottom of a stock tank. It was a family. Photographs, a christening gown, a deed, a fistful of old letters, and a little sack of wheat seed gone hard as gravel, all of it sealed up watertight and sunk down in the silt eighty years ago.
The letters told the whole of it. A family homesteaded this ground back in the twenties, broke it, farmed it, had their babies right here on it. And then the thirties came, and the Dust Bowl, the black blizzards that buried the fences and killed the stock and drove folks off the land by the thousands. This family was one of them. They were losing everything, the farm, the future, all of it going to dust in the wind, and they had to load up the truck and join the exodus west to California with a hundred thousand others, and they could not carry much of anything.
So the things they could not bear to lose and could not risk to the dust, the photographs and the family record and the deed to the very land they were being driven off of, they sealed in a tin and sank it down in the stock tank, deep in the water where the dust could never reach it, where it would keep. Meaning to come back for it. They wrote right there that they were coming back.
We will return to this land. Whatever else the dust takes from us, it will not take who we are. We are leaving our hearts here in the water, in trust, until the day we can come home and claim them again. This is Panhandle ground, and we are Panhandle people, and we will be again.
They never made it back. Most of them never did, those Dust Bowl families. California swallowed them up, or the long years did, and the land got sold and resold, and here I am eighty years on, a hired hand fishing their whole hearts up out of a stock tank they sank them in the week they lost it all.
I took it to the ranch owner, and he is a decent man, and between the two of us we set out to find them. And we did. Their great-grandchildren, out in California, three generations of a family that knew only that they came from somewhere in Texas once, a long time back, before the dust, a place nobody living among them had ever laid eyes on. They had lost even the name of the town.
We gave it back to them. The photographs of the great-great-grandparents who broke this ground with their hands. The deed with the land laid out on it. The christening gown their babies were baptized in. A whole family got handed back the roots the Dust Bowl tore them up from, eighty years and a thousand miles later. One of them is driving out this spring to stand on the ground her people homesteaded and lost. She is going to see the windmill, and the tank, where her family sank their hearts and left them in trust for somebody someday to find. I am mighty glad it was me. Some things the dust does not get to keep after all.