I set my wrench down real slow because what lay in that compartment under the floor was nothing I had ever pulled out of a house in twenty two years of plumbing. It was a metal box, olive green, the kind the army used for ammunition, with a rusted handle and a little brass padlock, and on the lid someone had painted three words in white. For the plumber. The paint was fresh enough to catch the light. Whoever had put it there had wanted it found, and found by somebody like me, and I stood in that bathroom outside Sistersville with my knees going soft.
The young couple, Cody and Maribel Tate, came to the door of the bathroom in their socks. They had bought the house in March from the estate of an old widow named Opal Harmon, who had died at ninety four. Maribel was a nurse and Cody drove a truck for a lumber yard. They had a baby on the way and a mortgage that scared them to death. When I lifted the box out and set it on the tile, Cody asked in a voice like that of a boy, “Is it going to blow up?” I laughed. I said no, sir. It is going to be heavy.
The padlock was no trouble. It came away with a pair of cutters. Inside, on top, lay an envelope, and beneath it row on row of coins wrapped in brown paper rolls, each roll labeled in the hand of an old woman. Silver dollars, the big ones, from the 1920s. Cody lifted one out and turned it in the light, and it shone like a mirror. Maribel gasped. There must have been a thousand of them. And beside the coins was a little cloth bag, tied with string, which I would not touch.
Maribel opened the envelope with her fingernail and read the letter out loud, standing in her socks on the cold tile, in the voice she used for talking to patients. To the plumber who finds this, it began. I hope you are a kind man. I am Opal Harmon. I buried my husband in 1971 and lived alone for fifty years in this house. I lived through the bank failures when I was a girl, and I never trusted a bank again. These are my savings. I put them under the floor because nobody ever moves a toilet on a whim. If you are reading this, either I am dead or the toilet is leaking.
Some people hide a treasure not to keep it from the world, but to leave it for the first honest person who happens to look.
The letter went on. Maribel had to stop twice to wipe her eyes. Opal wrote that she had no children, that her nephew had never visited, and that she wanted her savings to go to good people. She said half should go to the Sistersville volunteer fire company, which had saved her barn in 1983. The other half should go to whoever lived in the house next, because a house is only a home when somebody loves it. And, she added, the plumber who found it should be given the pocket watch in the cloth bag, which had belonged to her husband, who was also a plumber.
I felt my face go hot. I took the cloth bag as though it might shatter. Inside lay a gold pocket watch, old and dented, on a chain, with the initials A. H. on the case, and a note tucked into the lid. For the plumber, because every honest tradesman deserves a clock. I turned the winding stem with a finger that shook. It ticked. It had been wound, and wound again, on a regular schedule, by an old woman who knew that someday a stranger would pick it up.
Cody sat down on the edge of the tub with a thump. He said, “We were behind on the electric bill.” Maribel put an arm around him. They counted the coins that evening at the kitchen table with a calculator and a cup of tea, and a retired coin dealer from the next town, who came over at my suggestion, looked at them one by one with a magnifying glass. By his reckoning, the hoard was worth just under ninety thousand dollars. Maribel stared at the number for a full minute without speaking.
They did exactly what Opal asked. Half went to the fire company, and I was there on the Saturday morning when the chief, a big sunburned man named Tom, came to the porch with his cap in his hands. He cried like a child. The company used the money to buy a new set of rescue tools, and they painted the name of Opal on the side of the truck. Maribel and Cody used their half to pay off the mortgage on the house and to set up an account for their daughter, who was born in August, and whom they named Opal.
As for me, I kept the watch. I did not want to, at first. I tried to give it back. But Maribel folded my fingers around it and said, “She picked you.” I wear it on my belt now, on its chain, and I wind it every morning before work. Customers ask about it. I tell them the story, and they look at the watch and look at me, and many of them go home and check under their own floors. One man in Parkersburg found a jar of buttons.
I fixed the floor properly. I cut the hole back to a clean square and built a small, hinged cover, so that nobody would ever have to saw through again. Then I set the toilet back, on a new wax ring, and I stood in the small bathroom with the afternoon sun on the tile, listening to the watch tick against my hip. A man could have all the tools in the world, I thought, and never be wealthier than when a stranger hands him a clock and says, you did right.