Tony Regan's Locks

Part One  Part Two  Part Three

After Bill Regan died, Tony Regan kept on living in that old house, all by himself, and he never married.  They said all of the first batch of Regans, the children of William B. and Julia, were a little peculiar, on account of Bill and Julia being cousins.  Tony Regan was the most peculiar of the lot.  He hummed, tunelessly and loud, as he walked around the perimeter of his property, compulsively weeding his fences.  Tony hummed so loud that the black folks who lived across the street were straight scared of him, wondering what on earth was wrong with a man who would make so much noise.  Though he was a friendly man who would talk to anybody for an hour, he lived a little bit like a hermit - tucked away inside his father's old house, not so good about bathing or cleaning, rarely venturing off his own property.  Chief among his peculiarities was Uncle Tony's obsession with locks.  He put locks on everything - on all the doors to his house, on the door to his smokehouse, on the gates on all his fences - and he would never just lock them once.  After he locked a gate or a door, he would walk about twenty feet, then turn around and just look at that lock.  And then he'd go back, and unlock it and lock it again, and then he'd stand there and pat that lock - just like you'd pat a pet.  And if you asked, he'd say he was making sure he was safe, and nobody would come and steal him and Granddaddy Regan's money again.  That money was safe for sure now.

But if there was any of that money left, nobody ever saw it.  Tony sure never spent it on anything, wearing his clothes out until they were rags.  Most folks though Tony had gone out of his mind, and was guarding money that was lost forever years ago.  If there were a few whispers that Old Man Regan had a second stash of cash - one he never told a soul about for fear it would be stolen, too - and that Tony wasn't quite as crazy as he looked, and was guarding that last little scrap of the Regans' "dead money" - well, most people just dismissed that as the nonsense it was.  That money was as gone as Old Man Bill.

What about the rest of the family? In the last years of his life, Bill Regan finally let his children own the 180 acres they had each been farming for him.   Most of the fourteen Regans kept living on their land, borrowing money to plant it with crops and hoping to earn enough at harvest to pay back their debts, and maybe keep a few hundred dollars on a good year.  A couple of children moved into town and made a slightly better living buying and selling cattle... with weighted scales, to earn a little extra bit of profit.  They were prosperous some years, not-so-prosperous other years.  They were landowners but never plantation-owners, often poor but rarely impoverished, occasionally well-off but not rich like their father was.  Those children's children, Bill's grandchildren, bought up enough farmland for 20th-century farming businesses, or went to school, or joined the military, or found themselves city jobs.  Today most of them have children, and grandchildren, and great-grandchildren.

One of those children lives today in his great-grandfather's house, old William B.'s, the one Tony guarded for so many years.  Old Tony never had any children, and passed his property to a nephew, and it kept being passed down son to son.  The old house looks a little different now, surrounded by modern detritus, but if you squint real close you can see the ancient wood barely holding up the porch roof.  The Regan there today is a bit of a recluse, and heavy on the drink, so he doesn't get many visitors.  The angry german shepherds in his yard are as good as any lock at keeping strangers and would-be cattle buyers off the property.

The Regan fortune's gone, of course, that's for sure.  But if it wasn't gone... If any cash was still around, it'd be locked up inside that junked old house, inaccessible to the world, rotting away in a secret compartment somewhere.  It wouldn't be doing anybody any good.  And since everyone knows the money must be gone, no jealous neighbors would ever think of whispering to thieves in the night.

No, the money isn't there.  But if it were, it would be utterly useless, and forever safe.  Just how Bill Regan, my great-great-grandfather, would have liked.