I lifted the bricks and started clearing the dirt. The moment I uncovered what had been buried under that pump house floor, I backed out into the daylight, because the first thing my shovel found was iron, and it was curved, and it was big.
A school bell. Cast iron, twenty-two inches across the mouth, with the yoke still bolted to it.
Under it, in a tin bread box soldered shut, was the register.
District 47 of Cheyenne County. One room, half a mile north, opened 1889 and burned by order of the county in the fall of 1954 after consolidation, which is what they did with those buildings.
The register is the attendance book. Every child who ever went to that school, by year, by name, with ages, parents, and the section number of the farm they came from.
Sixty-five years. Nine hundred and forty-one names.
The county’s copy burned with the building. Everybody assumed that, and everybody was right, because there was only ever one book and Alton Prill dug a hole in his own pump house and put it under the floor eleven days before the crew came.
He wrote one page and put it in the box with it.
They are burning the school on the fourteenth and the book goes with it because it is county property and nobody in Sidney thinks it is worth a filing cabinet. Nine hundred and some children learned to read in that room. If the county will not keep them I will, and I am not asking anybody. Whoever digs this up, they are not mine to give away. Find somebody who wants their people.
The bell was the school’s. He took that too, and there was a small stink about it in 1954 that a man at the historical society was able to find in the Telegraph.
He was blamed for the bell going missing and did not deny it and did not explain it. He left the county in 1957. The neighbors’ story is that he vanished one winter, and I cannot find a winter, or a death, or a grave.
The register went to the Cheyenne County Historical Association in July. It is scanned and searchable and free, and there have been eleven hundred and some lookups on it since October.
Fourteen families have come out to the farm. One woman drove from Bakersfield to stand in a wheat field and look at a corner where a building used to be, because her mother’s name is in that book for 1931 through 1938 and she had never been able to prove her mother went to school at all.
The bell is on a post in front of the county museum in Sidney. They ring it on the first day of school every August.
The pump house is a pump house again. I relaid that corner myself and I did not do as good a job as he did.
Whoever he was, he lost his name in that county over a piece of iron and a book, and he never once said why, and he left the explanation four bricks down for somebody with a shovel and an afternoon.