I clean and service wells. A young couple bought an old homestead up here outside Bemidji, and the water from their well had started coming up with a strange taste and a cloudiness to it, so they called me out to have a look. Common enough. Old well sitting unused a while, could be a dozen things. First thing I do is drop a camera down, a little waterproof one on a cable, to see the condition of the casing and what is down at the bottom. You would be amazed what ends up in an old well. Frogs, a fallen bucket, roots.
So I am lowering the camera down into the dark, watching the little screen, the water getting clearer as I go deeper, and then the light finds the bottom. And I stopped. Just stopped, my thumb frozen on the reel.
I told myself my eyes were playing tricks. So I raised the camera and lowered it back down slow, to be sure. And it was not my eyes. It was down there, plain as anything, resting on the bottom of that well. I reeled the camera back up and told that young couple not to drink another drop of that water, and not to call anybody but the police.
What was down there was a safe. A small floor safe, the kind a shop or a home keeps bolted down, its door sprung, sitting in the muck at the bottom of a forty-foot well. The rust off it was what had fouled their water. And a safe does not climb down a well by itself.
The police pulled it, and it broke open a case older than the young couple standing in that yard. Thirty years back, the little bank branch in the next town over had been robbed, and a floor safe hauled clean out of the manager office and never found. The money never turned up. And the man who worked there, the assistant manager, had lived under a cloud of suspicion the rest of his life, because folks whispered that an inside man had to have helped, and he was the inside man they landed on. He died still wearing that whisper.
The safe told the truth thirty years late. The real thief, long since passed himself, had dumped it down the well of a homestead he once rented, and it laid down there in the dark keeping an innocent man guilty in the eyes of a whole county.
The old assistant manager had a daughter, grown now, who had spent her whole life defending her fathers name. The police called her to the station the day they cracked that case.
My daddy went to his grave with people thinking he was a thief. And a man came to fix a well and gave him back his good name. Do you know what that is worth to me? There is no number.
The couple got their well cleaned out and their water ran sweet again. And an honest man, thirty years gone, finally got the one thing that was stolen worse than money. His name came home clean.
You never know what an old well is holding. Sometimes it is the truth, just waiting on a light to reach it.