because down in that hole under the floor, wrapped in oilcloth and dry as the day it was set there, was a book, and the book was not ours.
It was a family Bible, the big kind, the leather gone soft as cloth, and when my wife got up there and I opened the front cover, we both went quiet. Because the pages inside the cover were a family tree, written and rewritten in a dozen different hands across two hundred years. Births, marriages, deaths, all the way back to the seventeen hundreds, name under name under name, the ink going from brown to black down the generations.
Folded into it were photographs, tintypes and cabinet cards and snapshots, and land papers, and a lock of a babys hair in a paper twist, and a note on top in a shaky recent hand.
This is everything we are. Two hundred years of this family in one book. I am the last one in this house and my mind is going, so I am putting it under the floor where a fire cannot take it and a flood cannot reach it, and trusting that whoever comes next will do right by it.
The woman who lived here before us was the end of her line, no children, and her mind was failing at the end, and she did the only thing she could think of to save the one thing that mattered. She cut a hatch in her own bedroom floor and laid two hundred years of her family down under where she slept, safe from fire and flood, right under her own feet, and trusted a stranger she would never meet to carry it the rest of the way.
That is why you cut a hole in your floor and cover it with carpet. Not to hide a shame. To save a treasure, and to keep it close.
I could have kept that Bible. Old family Bibles like that go for real money. It never crossed my mind, not for one second. That book was two hundred years of somebody, and it was not mine, and a woman losing her memory had trusted whoever found it to find the family too.
So we did. The names in the tree gave us a place to start, and the internet did the rest, and we found them, a whole branch of cousins two states over who thought their family history had died with an old aunt they had lost touch with. They had nothing of their roots. Now they have all of it, two centuries deep.
They drove out to get it in person. When the oldest one held that Bible and found her own grandfathers name written in it as a baby, she cried, and thanked us like we had given her a fortune, which I suppose we had, just not the kind you spend.
We bought a house in Erie for the good bones. What we found under the floor was a woman at the end of everything, trusting the future to be kind. We tried our best to be worth that trust. I think she would be glad.