The pond dried enough this August to see the bottom, and there’s a set of steps down there. It’s a farm pond, dug in 1959, an acre and a half. My father put the dam in himself with a borrowed dozer, and I’ve fished it my whole life. Concrete steps. Six of them, going down into what used to be the deep end, and at the bottom of them, a doorway framed in block.
I figured it was a springhouse or an old cellar that got flooded when they filled the pond, and that’s a reasonable thing—plenty of ponds have a homeplace under them. But my father dug that pond out of pasture. There was no homeplace. There was nothing there but grass, and he told that story a hundred times. I walked out on the cracked mud and down those steps with a light, and past the doorway the block room was dry.
Against the far wall was a wooden shelf with three glass jars still sitting on it. They were dusty but intact. Beside them was an old metal lunchbox, and inside was a folded survey map dated 1958. The property lines were different from today, but one detail was circled in pencil: “Do not excavate.” Underneath it was a name I recognized—my grandfather’s. He had died before I was born, and Dad had always said his father had nothing to do with the farm before 1960.
I called my uncle, the only person still alive who remembered the property before the pond. He went silent when I described the room. Then he asked me whether I’d found the shelf. I said yes. He told me to leave everything exactly where it was. Apparently, my grandfather had built that room with two other men before the pond existed. They told the family it was for storing equipment, but one of those men disappeared in 1959, just weeks before the pond was filled. My uncle had never understood why my grandfather refused to talk about it. Then he asked me one last question: “Did you find the second doorway?”
