The roots of trust(risk)

In the center of town, there’s this old oak tree with a wooden box nailed to it. The box has a latch and a keyhole, and for as long as anyone can remember, townsfolk have come by and, whenever they had some spare nickels, dimes or dollars, they’d feed the oak.

No one ever knew what happened to the box. It started to get a bit of a legendary status at my school. People put money into it, but no one ever saw the thing get full. We kids called it magic. If grownups said anything at all about the box, they called it 'just one of those things', and that was that.

I never knew much about the box until a lady down the street, a widow, lost her house to a fire spurred by a candle burning without a watchful eye. The insurance man came around and talked to the fire chief and that was the end of that: The widow didn’t get a dime because the cause was ‘negligence’ and so you pay a couple of hundred thousand dollars for the sin of burning a candle while you’re in the bath tub.

When it happened, more people would make their way over to the tree every day. And then they all stopped, and then the widow was inside the grocery store buying a ham and some toothpaste instead of hanging around outside it crying with her hands out.

I asked my dad about the whole deal, and he told me he may as well tell me something because I was old enough. For telling, he didn't do a lot of talking. He takes me over to a desk and he pulls out this black key, old and narrow, and he tells me there’s something I ought to know about this town and that tree.

We go to the hardware store and dad asks for the owner, and the owner comes down and looks at the key, looks at me, and looks at my dad. Smiling, not saying a word, he retreats to the back room and about a half hour later, there’s a twin key. My dad turned it to me and handed it over like it was his genes.

We went to the oak tree that night, and he had me unlock it. Inside the old box was a black hole about four feet deep.

“It’s usually too packed to be dark,” my dad said. “Usually it’s filled with silver and copper and paper shining back the moonlight.”

I got it all then.

“We’re not the only ones with a key, are we?” I asked.

We weren’t. Dad said that his dad handed it down to him. Grandpa got a key from his boss at the shoe store when he returned a box of cash that got lost on the way to the bank. No one knows who’s got the keys, Dad said. We all get one, and we’re allowed one copy, but no one knows where they came from and no one knows where the money goes. People just throw some money in there and it stays that way until it doesn’t, and when it doesn’t you either got scammed or you served a higher good. You don’t know better either way, so you may as well just trust it.

I shut the latch and locked it closed and then slid all I had, $5.23 in change, through the narrow slot. Maybe I’ll get it back some day. Maybe you will. Maybe some kids will find a key and rob the town blind. Or maybe it’ll show up in between bites of the old widow’s leftover ham. You never know. So you might as well choose to believe.

(The above, if it isn’t clear, is a work of fiction illustrating a computer-free version of my capstone project).