…because what I found inside was not what you expect to find in a hole. It was a steel strongbox, about the size of a small cooler, dark green with age, with a brass hasp rusted nearly shut. It sat on a bed of dry sand in the vault, wrapped in a thick yellowed canvas, with a stoneware crock beside it. I lowered myself down beside it, the sun on the back of my neck, and drew the canvas off. The paint was flaking in long curls. On the lid, someone had lettered in white, with a careful hand: AMOS WHITE. 1933. FOR WHOEVER DIGS. I sat back on my heels and the whole yard seemed to go quiet.
The young couple came and stood at the rim of the hole. Jake and Nina Barlow were barely twenty seven, a nurse and a lineman, and they had bought the old farmhouse outside Sistersville for a song, because nobody else wanted it. Nina put her hand to her mouth. “Is it a body?” she whispered, which is what people always ask. I laughed. “It is a box,” I said. “Somebody went to a lot of trouble to hide it.” We hauled it up together with a rope and a come along, three people grunting in the August heat, and set it on the grass beside the half dug foundation of the fountain.
The hasp snapped with a single hard blow from my shovel. The lid screeched. Inside lay rows of small canvas bags, each tied at the neck with twine, stacked like loaves, and on top, a single folded letter in an envelope. Jake lifted one of the bags and it clinked, heavy as a brick. He untied it and tipped it into the palm of Nina. Twenty gold coins slid out, bright as butter, stamped with an eagle, 1927 and 1928 and 1932. Nina stared at them. “Jake,” she breathed. “Those are double eagles. They are twenty dollar gold pieces. There must be fifty bags in here.”
A hard flat slab buried under the middle of a lawn turned out to be a vault of gold set aside for the young ones of a valley.
I took the letter out with my cleanest fingers, as if it might dissolve, and Nina read it aloud in her careful nurse voice. To whoever digs. If you are reading this, you are standing on the farm of Amos White, who lost his savings when the Sistersville bank failed in March of 1933. I swore I would never trust a bank again. I buried what I saved here in a vault of my own building. I have no children. I have decided that this should go to whoever has the sense to dig it up. Spend some of it on your own roof. Spend the rest on the young ones of this valley. They will need it more than you do.
There was a postscript, in a shakier hand. If you are a tax man, go away. I read it twice, and we all started laughing, a loud helpless laugh that echoed off the barn. Then Nina stopped, and wiped her eyes. “Do you know what this is worth?” she asked. I did some quick arithmetic on my knee. Roughly a thousand coins, give or take. At the going price of gold, we were talking about something north of three million dollars. Jake sat down heavily on the lip of the hole. “We are not rich people,” he said. “We have a leaking roof and a truck with two hundred thousand miles on it.”
We called a lawyer in Parkersburg that afternoon, a gray haired woman named Ms. Hollis, who told us how the state treats found treasure. Because the Barlows owned the land, the find was theirs, less certain taxes. Nina made a decision before the lawyer finished her sentence. “We will do what he asked,” she said. “We will fix the roof. And we will give the rest to the kids of this valley.” Jake nodded as if she had read his mind. They set up a trust the following week, the Amos White Fund, to pay for college tuition for children in Tyler County whose families could not.
The fountain went in that fall, as promised, but not in their yard. Nina asked me to put it somewhere better. We chose the square in front of the old library in downtown Sistersville, a stone fountain with three tiers and a basin wide enough for pigeons to bathe in. I set every stone myself.
On the base, the stonecutter chiseled a line that Nina picked: FOR THE YOUNG ONES OF THIS VALLEY. And below it, smaller: AMOS WHITE, 1933. Half the town came to the dedication. A little girl in a yellow raincoat asked her mother who Amos White was. Her mother said, “He was a man who dug a hole and turned it into a gift.”
In the spring, the first scholarships were awarded. Nine students, from nine different high schools, stood up in the library basement to receive them. One of them was a skinny boy named Caleb, who told the audience, in a shaky voice, that he would be the first person in his family to go to college. His mother wept in the front row. Nina, beside me, took my arm and squeezed. I watched that boy shake the hand of a man in a suit and I thought of Amos White in 1933, with his shovel, burying his savings under a lawn he would never see again.
I still pass that fountain every week. In the summer, children splash in its basin and the water throws rainbows on the library wall. Last month, an old man was sitting on the edge, feeding crumbs to the pigeons. I stopped to say hello. He pointed to the carved words on the base, and said, with a slow smile, “Somebody once told me that the best things in life are buried.” I thought about it. “Not buried,” I said. “Planted.” He nodded, and I picked up my shovel, and I went back to work.