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Jay's imagination whirled as he stepped out of the back door onto the acres behind the old home. Piles of steel and rubber tractor tires rose between groves of rusted farm implements to his left. Rusted cars and motorcycles sprouted like ivy upon the grass to his right. A sea of discarded appliances, from washboards perched upon modern clothes dryers to microwave ovens stacked on wooden ice boxes, stretched ahead of him. Jay could see no clear path winding through the Turners' accumulation in any direction. If the Turners stacked their salvaged iron and stainless steel according to any organizational paradigm, Jay failed to recognize it.
Jay smiled. All those piles of aluminum and tin would bring a healthy return on salvage prices alone. And Jay remained confident that treasure rested beneath many of those piles. He knew how aggressively the Turners had bid at the public estate auctions. He knew how carefully the Turners sifted through through the county trash piles. Those heaps scattered about the Turner acreage had still been growing when Jay started mowing those county roadways twenty-seven years ago. In the near twenty years since the last Turner man died and left Jackie alone upon the homestead, since the heaps had ceased to grow, Jay had stared at that acreage of a veritable junk yard as he mowed grass upon his county tractor and imagined what valuables the Turners tried to shroud beneath camper trailers and boat shells.
Jay focused on a single outbuilding and made for its walls. Fishing wire snaked around his ankles. Disks from discarded tractor plows scraped his elbow. He shimmied between flatbed trailers and crawled beneath a burned-out combine. His progress appeared stymied before Jay wrenched upon the emergency, back door on a tire-less school bus and inched through the vehicle's box-laden aisle to exit through the front door before finding new room for his advance.
It was slow progress, but the outbuildings did not disappoint Jay. An empty cow dairy brimmed with neon tractor dealership signs and canvas bags advertising corn seed, collectibles which Jay knew always fetched healthy bids at country auctions. Squeezing through the door of an aluminum post-frame garage, Jay found the inner space brimming with visible gas pumps and unbroken glass petroliana globes. A wooden shed housed vintage posters advertising war bonds. None of the walls he peeked upon were empty. Every building teemed with antiques.
Jay stubbornly worked his way deeper into the property, towards the heart of those fields crowded with debris. It would take him months to create a rough catalog of his investment. It might take years to liquidate all the assets, but Jay was confident that ninety-grand would be returned many times over. He chided himself for fearing any of his money would be lost.
“Kelly's not going to believe it,” Jay smiled. “A picture on my cell phone isn't going to be enough to convince her. I have to bring something back to help her see the light.”
It was the middle of the afternoon by the time Jay worked his way through the piles of rusted relics to find his property's center. A round barn rose in the heart of those acres. Much of its original red paint had peeled and fallen away during many humid and hot summers. Thunderstorms had chipped away most of the roof's shingles. But the outer, circling wall still appeared solid.
Jay circled the barn, pushing his way through jutting plastic pipes, grimacing as thorns and brambles clawed at his face. He grunted against the latch of the barn's stuck, double door. A discarded rod of rebar provided Jay with a sufficient crowbar, and the door's outer hinges popped clear as Jay leveraged against them. Jay cursed when a sheet of corrugated metal propped against the barn's opening provided another obstacle to his progress.
Heaving against the sheet of metal, Jay wedged himself into the barn. Industrial machinery and components crowded against each other. Tractors and cars filled whatever space remained, with boxes of tools, filters and grease guns sitting upon every fender and hood. A thick layer of dust covered everything, rising to choke at Jay's throat as the estate's new owner stepped forward to closer examine his purchase.
“How is anything in this barn still that white?”
A glimmer from the barn's dim center attracted Jay's attention. He crawled through a shelve unit filled with oil cans and breached an inner circle of open space, a small sanctum free of accumulation. A paraffin lantern sat upon the floor. While dust lay deep all around the lantern, not a mote of grime blemished its white lamp. Jay had noticed no prints in the dust as he had made his way into the center of that barn, no indication of the path any soul might have taken to polish that antique. Yet the glass of that lantern's lamp remained pure and clean, bearing no trace nor patina of the years.
Jay knelt in the dust to peer more closely at the lantern. An intricate mosaic of glass colored in subtle shades of pearl and grays depicted the myth of Persephone's winter abduction and spring resurrection. Small, embossed pomegranates adorned the copper ring that joined the lamp to a white, ivory base.
“Something to help see the light.” Jay grinned. “It's just the piece to bring back home to Kelly. Just the thing to show her that there's treasure in the middle of all these piles. It looks ready to burn once I get it a new wick. This place is a goldmine.”
Wind drifted through the barn's open spaces. Dust swirled as a strong breeze whistled through the scattered piles. Something rattled, like windchimes, further ahead in the shadow.
Jay's eyes pulled away from the paraffin lamp and squinted at the darkness.
Someone grinned back upon Jay Logan.
Jay stumbled into a retreat. His frantic movements threw clouds of dust into the air and hampered his search for the path back out of the barn. He went to his knees and crawled between tractors and machinery. He lost his bearing and painfully wedged himself between jutting iron and metal. He was lost and stuck. He could not think clearly. His heart raced as he panicked.
Jay screamed in the shadows and prayed he would not be forgotten like so many pieces of junk surrounding him. He screamed and hoped that Gus would hear. He did not know what else to do. So Jay screamed and refused to look back behind him into the shadow, towards that thing which grinned upon him.
Guarded Keepsakes Page 6