I told him the auger had broken, and I drove out to the road, because twenty years of setting posts teaches you what comes up out of the ground, and fabric wrapped around something two feet down at a man who would not stop rushing me was not a thing I was going to keep digging into alone. I called the police from my truck.
They came out quiet, and the man who had hovered over me all morning got very nervous when they did. But what they found, once they carefully worked that bundle up out of the earth, was not the dark thing the whole morning had made me fear.
It was an old mans entire fortune, wrapped in oilcloth and buried along his own fence line, and the reason he did not want a stranger to see was shame, not murder.
The man who hired me was not young himself, and his mind, the police came to understand, had been slipping for a while. He had stopped trusting banks. He had grown fearful and secretive the way that sometimes happens, and over months he had dug up his savings, everything he had, and buried it in bundles along the far edge of his property where he was sure no thief would ever look.
Then he decided to sell the house and move, and in a panic he realized a fence crew digging along that back line would turn up his hidden money in front of God and everyone. So he rushed me, and hovered, and could not leave my side, because he was terrified a stranger would see how far his fear had taken him.
There was no crime under that fence. There was only a frightened old man and the wreckage of what loneliness and a slipping mind can do to a person.
The police did the kind thing. They did not just hand him a bag of muddy cash and drive off. They called his daughter, who lived a state away and had no idea her father had stopped banking, had no idea he had been burying money in the yard, had no idea how much he had been struggling alone.
She came. She wept when she understood what her father had been doing, and how close he had come to losing everything to the weather or a stranger with a shovel. She got him help, got his money safe, and moved him closer to her so he would not be so alone anymore.
He calmed, once she was near. A person often does.
The daughter tracked me down to thank me. She said if I had just kept digging, or looked the other way, her father might have lost every dime, and worse, no one would have known how much he needed someone. Instead a fence job brought his daughter home.
Twenty years I have set posts and expected nothing worse than clay and roots. That once I found a mans buried fear, and calling it in gave him back his daughter.