I chipped it open and reached inside. The moment my flashlight caught what had been sealed into that standpipe all those years, I pulled my hand back, because I was touching brass, and brass down in a hole in the ground is not a thing your brain wants to explain to you at first.
It was a bell. A school bell, the yoke-mounted kind off a cupola, about the size of a bushel basket, laid on its side on a bed of straw that had gone to dust.
Wedged in beside it was a lead-soldered tin the size of a bread box.
The town was called Corry Hollow and it does not exist. Coal patch, one company store, ninety-some houses. The mine shut in 1951, the company sold the land, and by 1955 there was nothing left standing but that standpipe because nobody thought it was worth the powder to take down.
The tin had one hundred and forty photographs in it. Families on porches, every one with a name written on the back in the same hand. The school with all thirty-one children out front, squinting. A wedding. Two funerals. A dog somebody clearly thought a great deal of.
And a letter, four pages, dated the ninth of November, 1954.
The man who vanished was Emil Kovach. He was the one who rang that bell for nineteen years, first at the school and then at the mine, and he was the last person living in Corry Hollow — in a house with no power, after everybody else had taken the company’s money and gone.
He didn’t die out here. He put the bell and the pictures in that chamber, mortared it shut himself, walked out to the state road, and got on a bus. The letter says why, and it is not a mystery, it is just a sad thing plainly said:
“I cannot be the man who watches it go and I cannot be the man who forgets it. So I am putting it where it will keep, and I am going where nobody will ask me about it.”
He lived in Youngstown for thirty-four years under his middle name. Worked in a foundry. Died in 1989 at eighty-one. He has two granddaughters, one in Boardman and one in Erie, and neither of them had ever heard of Corry Hollow, and one of them cried on the phone with me for ten minutes over a man she remembered mainly as quiet.
We got the bell out with a chain hoist and a lot of language. It cleaned up better than it had any right to.
It hangs now on a stone plinth at the county historical society, in the yard, where anybody can pull the rope. The photographs are in archival sleeves in a case behind it with every name typed under every face, because Emil wrote all of them down, and he was not writing them for himself.
Eleven families came the day they dedicated it. Somebody’s great-grandmother, ninety-four years old, was carried up the walk in a lawn chair by three grown men, and she is in one of those pictures, six years old, in the second row of a school that is not there anymore.
They let her ring it first. The old-timers had that story wrong for seventy years. Nothing happened to that man out here. He just couldn’t carry a whole town by himself and he found somewhere to set it down.