The moment my flashlight caught what had been sealed away in there, I sat down in eight inches of cold water, because it was a milk can. Forty quart, galvanized, lid wired shut and the seam run around with tar, sitting on a shelf of dressed stone somebody had cut by hand and set with the care of a man building a church.
It took me twenty minutes to get it up the bank and another ten before I could make myself open it.
Inside, wrapped in oilcloth: two ledger books, a bundle of envelopes tied with binder twine, and a coffee tin heavy enough that I knew what was in it before I got the lid off. Silver dollars, half dollars, a roll of gold pieces, and a fold of bank notes from a Barre bank that failed in 1932 and are worth nothing at all except to the people who saved them.
The man’s name was Alton Deschenes. He walked off this farm in the fall of 1938 and the story in the valley for eighty-seven years has been that he took the family’s money and left a wife and two girls to lose the place, which they did, in 1941, at the courthouse steps.
He didn’t take it. He put it in a milk can and sealed it into a weir he built himself and then he went out in the flood that November to pull a heifer off the low ground and the brook took him and did not give him back.
The ledgers are a man’s accounting of a hard eleven years. Every dollar in that can is listed and dated. The last entry is the ninth of November, 1938, and it says: Put by against the note coming due in March. Marie does not know where and I will not tell her until it is enough, because she will spend it on the girls’ shoes and let us lose the farm to keep their feet dry, which is the whole trouble with her and I would not change it.
Marie does not know where. That is the sentence that cost that family everything.
The envelopes were letters he’d written her and not given her. I did not read past the first two.
His younger daughter is alive. Her name is Odile, she is ninety-one, she lives in a care home in St. Johnsbury, and she was four years old the November her father went into the brook.
I drove up there in December with a lawyer’s letter and a box, because I wanted it done properly and because I did not trust myself to explain it.
She knew what the ledgers were before I said a word. She held the coffee tin in her lap and she said, out loud, to nobody in that room: so he didn’t.
Eighty-seven years of being the daughter of a man who ran off. Her mother died in 1971 still believing it.
The money went to Odile and her sister’s grandchildren, all of it, and there was more of it than anybody expected, and I will say plainly that I never once considered doing anything else with it. It was never mine. I just own the field it was under.
We rebuilt the collapsed section in the spring the way he laid it, dressed stone, no mortar where he didn’t use any. There’s a small bronze plate on the abutment now with his name and 1938 on it.
Odile came down in June to see it. She sat in a lawn chair at the top of the pasture for a long while and didn’t say much, and then she asked my wife if she could take a stone home in her purse.