I cut it open in my garage. The second I saw what had been hidden inside all those years, I understood why the park closed so suddenly, because it was a bank passbook and it was still holding four thousand eight hundred dollars.
Wrapped around it with a rubber band that had gone to powder were the deposit slips. Sixty-two of them, one a week through every summer season from 1961 to 1978, in amounts between eleven and forty dollars.
Under those, in a bundle, were receipts from the Sisters of Mercy children’s convalescent home two towns up the shore.
The ride is a little steel boat on a post. Kids put in a dime and it rocks for ninety seconds. That was the whole business.
What Amedeo Farro did, and I know his name now because his handwriting is all over that box, is take every dime out of that one machine every Sunday night and walk it to the bank in a paper sack, and none of it ever went into the park.
The convalescent home had a bus. Wednesday afternoons in the summer, twenty-some children who could not walk well or could not walk at all, brought down to the beach for two hours.
He built a ramp to that ride himself. There is a drawing of it in the box, on graph paper, with the angle worked out in a man’s careful pencil, and a note that says the seat has to come off so a child can be lifted in from a chair.
Every Wednesday the whole park was free for that bus. Every Wednesday for seventeen years.
The park closed in the fall of 1978 because Amedeo had a stroke on a Tuesday in October and died on the Thursday, and his wife had been dead since 1970 and they had no children, and a place like that does not survive a week without the man who winds it.
Nobody knew about the account. It sat in that box under a boat seat in a shed for forty-seven years.
The letter is one page, written in 1974, folded into the passbook.
If I go quick this is what it is for. The boat money is the Wednesday money and it does not belong to the park and it does not belong to me. Sister Bernadette knows. If she is gone too then give it to whoever has the children now, and do not put my name on anything, because they come down here to be children for two hours and not to be somebody’s charity.
The account was long since escheated to the state, which I did not know was a word until this year. It took a lawyer and eleven months and a great deal of paperwork, and the state does pay it out when you can prove what you can prove.
The convalescent home closed in 1989. The organization that came out of it still runs a summer program for children with disabilities, four towns down, and they still have a bus.
It went to them in March. Four thousand eight hundred dollars, plus what the state added, and they did not put anybody’s name on it because I asked them not to.
The boat is restored. It sits on their lot now. A dime still runs it, and it still rocks for ninety seconds, and the seat comes off.