Things You Would Know If You Grew Up Around Here

by Nancy Wayson Dinan

  Then, in Detroit, Michigan, in the News Tribune, October 4, 1901, news about a different find: “The buried treasure of the ruins of San Saba, Tex., for which Texans have been seeking for more than a century, has been found and some of it carried away by a small party of Mexicans.” This was the first time—at least that I know of—that Pedro Yorba was named, and we only have a partial story of that one ingot, and what happened, and how those men died under the wall at Fort Bowie. How, under attack, they fled and threw the treasure into a deep well. One hundred feet deep, the single eyewitness said. Nobody would ever find it, and it would remain in the ground for eternity.

  May 22

  7:00 A.M.

  In the morning, Boyd made coffee before Isaac was even awake, using his camp stove and her cast-iron percolator. It was that hour when the rising sun drives the wind before it, and mist rose off the lake, too low for the wind to catch it. The coffee steamed in her flecked porcelain cup; she blew on it and sipped gingerly.

  Still before Isaac woke, she took her sluice pan to the water’s edge and scooped gravel, shucking her shoes and standing in the cool water. She squatted on her heels, though she wouldn’t be able to maintain this position all day, and stroked the gravel with her right palm, then tipped the edge of the pan into the water and began the stratification: swirl, shake, swirl, shake. Before long, Isaac joined her. No need to say a thing—a quick nod and a smile was enough. Shake, swirl, then she lightly washed the top layer of dirt back into the lake.

  She had started earlier so she reached the black sand more quickly. He glanced over at her pan, interested to see what she had, though it was still too early. “Boyd,” he said when she caught the black sand in the dents at the edge of the pan. “Things come to you so easily.”

  It wasn’t true. She just didn’t do the things that didn’t come to her. She was not, for example, much interested in sports or cooking or art. But here with the sluice pan, she was better than him, and she’d pull more out in half the time. Isaac was patient, however, and that’s how he paid his tuition bill. Boyd didn’t mess with the black sand, the sand where the iron rested. But Isaac, by the end of the summer, would spend the evenings with mortar and pestle, grinding this sand, then pulling it out with a magnet, leaving the tiniest gold, the micron gold, behind. Boyd’s interest would, by then, have moved on.

  She fanned the last bit of sand in the pan and saw the tiny nugget, the size of a peppercorn. She palmed it, a quick thrill tightening her throat, and Isaac nodded his approval of her. His nod made her both inordinately pleased and sharply irritable.

  They heard the engine and the gravel popping underneath the tires; Boyd’s mom and Carla were there to pick up the truck. When the car stopped and Lucy Maud got out, she looked pointedly at the stack of crushed beer cans. Boyd reluctantly left the water, dripping as she went.

  “They’re predicting rain,” Lucy Maud said, looking up at the sky as if she were expecting a thunderbolt right then. The sky was a flat blue, the light both muted and sharp. “Boyd, we have the wedding tomorrow.”

  Boyd, crouched over the camp stove, nodded. “I’ll be there in plenty of time.” The hearts of the coals glowed, heating her shins and forearms.

  “No.”

  Boyd looked up.

  “I mean,” Lucy Maud clarified, “I think you should spend the night at home tonight. You should go to the rehearsal dinner.”

  “Yeah, okay.”

  “I watered your garden last night. Your pole beans are coming in nice, running right up those stakes.”

  Boyd was annoyed; she’d been planning on watering the garden later that morning. You didn’t water in the afternoon here; experienced gardeners said you’d burn the plant in the afternoon sun, but Boyd knew for sure that a plant left wet overnight would attract slugs. She felt a sense of property over her garden; somehow her mother watering it diffused Boyd’s efforts, made it less hers. “Thanks,” she said.

  “Some rain will fill that barrel of yours, you think?”

  “Half an inch is supposed to fill the whole drum.”

  Carla, whose barrel it had originally been, shifted, and Boyd wondered if she wanted her barrel back, if she was mad that Boyd had found it and kept it without asking permission. Boyd knew the soap business was not as good as it had been.

  Isaac finally spoke. “Might come up in a bit with Boyd and charge my phone.”

  Lucy Maud brightened. “I’ll make y’all some lunch.”

  Boyd had planned a day sluicing, especially if she was going to miss tomorrow for her granddad’s wedding. “Bring me some back, will you?”

  Lucy Maud said, “You can’t come for lunch?”

  “I’ll be home for the rehearsal dinner. I’d like to hang out down here as long as possible if I’m spending the night at the house.” Boyd’s hair smelled like a campfire, and she was reluctant to wash it.

  Lucy Maud said, “They’re predicting maybe five inches. Y’all might want to pack everything up for the weekend, come back down on Monday. The Memorial Day floods are always the worst. It was a Memorial Day flood that broke the banks of Shoal Creek. Your dad and I were in Austin when that happened, and it was something to see.”

  “I said I was spending the night. This lake’s so empty it’d take an ocean to flood it.” Even the ground on which they were standing, covered as it was in rocks, shells, and gravel, revealed the drought: waves of silt crusted where the water had last stood, cracks in the earth, the space between the cracks concave as a bowl, meant to hold water.

  “That’s when the worst floods happen.”

  Boyd could feel her mother’s concern, see it in the way she shifted from foot to foot. A flood seemed so unlikely at the moment, with the world as dry as it was. “I’ll spend the night at the house tonight,” she repeated.

  Lucy Maud let it go.

  Carla spoke up. “You got a cup of coffee to spare?”

  Boyd poured coffee from the percolator into Isaac’s mug and handed it to Carla, who cupped it with both hands. She was wearing a knit cap she’d made herself, and gloves with no fingertips. It was already seventy-five degrees.

  “I’ll come eat,” Isaac volunteered, grinning at Lucy Maud as if she had really meant to ask him. “I’m not in a hurry to stay down here. I’ve got all summer.”

  Lucy Maud looked at him. “Yeah, I figured you’d be there.” Boyd knew her mother was wary of Isaac whenever he came back, wary of what would happen to Boyd when he left again.

  They stood for a minute, silent, listening to the mockingbirds and the jays and the sound of the water barely lapping the shore. The morning smelled newer than the night had, fresher, and the scent of coffee added to that impression. Isaac got a camp chair for Carla, and she sat, crossing her legs at the knees and swinging her foot, which was clad in a hand-knit sock. With each movement, she shed a scent of patchouli and sandalwood.

  Inside Isaac’s tent, a phone rang. He fetched it and answered, then mouthed to Boyd, My dad. “Uh-huh,” Isaac said, tucking the phone between chin and shoulder and looking out over the lake. “You were listening to the radio?”

  It seemed a normal conversation, but they all eavesdropped. They could hear the sound of Ruben King’s voice but couldn’t make out what he was saying. Isaac nodded as if his father could see him. “How do you know it was him?” Isaac said when his father took a breath, and then: “Dad, you realize this is crazy.” Isaac shook his head at Boyd, dismayed by whatever Ruben was saying, but Isaac was smiling, so it couldn’t be that bad. “Yeah, all right. I’ll be there in an hour.” Isaac hung up.

  They all looked at him.

  “I won’t be going to the rehearsal dinner tonight.”

  “I didn’t think you were anyway,” Boyd said.

  “Free food at Dahlia’s?” Lucy Maud asked. “I thought for sure you would make it.”

  “My dad wants me to come home for the day, help with some stuff in the yard.”

  “Okay.” Lucy Maud didn’t seem that interested, but Boyd coul
d tell Isaac wasn’t telling the truth, or at least not all of the truth. He wasn’t as open to her as other people were, but she could still tell.

  “Can you give me a ride back up to your house?” he asked Carla.

  When she nodded and stood to go, Boyd said, “Isaac, can you help me with something real quick?”

  She grabbed the tarp so she could string it up and walked twenty yards to a copse of pin oak. Isaac reached for it, and she unfurled the blue square, shaking it free in the wind like the parachute she used to play with on the good days in elementary PE. “Help me with this.” She handed him a length of twine and a pocketknife. “What did your dad really want?”

  He shook his head, holding the end of the burlap twine in his teeth while he unrolled it with one hand and opened his pocketknife with the other. “He’s crazy, you know. They all get crazy if they live out here too long by themselves.” Isaac spoke around the twine, out of the corner of his mouth.

  “How so?” She held the tarp and he slid the twine through the grommet.

  “That gold. You know, we were just talking about it last night, and I hadn’t heard anything about it in years.”

  “He think he found something?”

  “No.” Isaac twisted his mouth in disappointment. “He was listening to the radio. He thinks someone else found the gold from Mexico.” Isaac paused, reaching up and wrapping the other end of the twine around a branch. “He thinks he knows who it is.”

  “What?” She spread the tarp, bringing another corner to another branch.

  “He’s so crazy, Boyd. We all are. Thinking this is The Goonies or something, like there’s an actual treasure out there. There isn’t.”

  “I know.” Boyd looked back to her mother and Carla, both watching them, her mother poking the fire as if she owned it, the same way she’d watered Boyd’s garden. “What’d he say?”

  Isaac leaned his head far back, looking up at the sky. “He said he was listening to the radio, that call-in show out of San Saba, you know?” He had stubble dotted over his jaw, a new development this summer.

  She knew: pecan futures and river depths and what kind of fish were biting where and with what lures, and drought, drought, drought like the end-time.

  “Well, somebody called in and asked, ‘If I found something on my property, does it belong to me?’ And the host said, ‘Now, it depends on what it is.’ And the caller said something about something that would make him rich. The host said, ‘Now, what would that be?’ And the caller hung up.” Isaac brought his head back up, looked down at the twine and the knife in his hands and cut another length.

  “So?”

  “Exactly. Some dude calls in to a radio show and says literally nothing, and my dad is ready to track him down because it sounds like the man down the road.”

  “You’re not helping him in the yard, are you?”

  “Of course not. We’re driving up to see this guy, and then who knows what. ‘Did you find Maximilian’s gold and then call in to a radio show?’ The guy’s going to call the cops.”

  “Unless he really found something.”

  Isaac looked at her, grimacing in disbelief. “If he found something, Boyd, he’s going to shoot us for trespassers.” Isaac jerked the twine tight, taking all of the slack out of the tarp. It was about a foot over Boyd’s head and provided a good fifteen square feet of shade. “I don’t have time for this shit.” When he reached up to cut the last bit of twine free from the roll, he sliced his thumb with the pocketknife. “Goddamnit.” He stuck his thumb in his mouth, then pulled it free, examining. The cut was deep, the blood welling up from its core. He stuck a fingernail in and pried it open, and for a second Boyd could see bulbs of yellow fat. “Well, that’s fucking great.” He looked at her as if it were her fault. “There’s nothing to find and I’m losing a day of panning. You know how much I got to pull out this summer to pay my tuition bill?” He stalked back to the fire, tossed the now-closed pocketknife on his camp chair, and grabbed a T-shirt out of his tent, which he wrapped around his thumb. It was far too big of a bandage, but Boyd could see the scarlet blooming through the white fabric.

  Lucy Maud, who’d been watching the whole thing, though Boyd could tell that she hadn’t heard a bit of it, said, “You’re going to need to go to a doctor, get that sewn up.”

  “If there’s time, maybe.” He took a deep breath, got control of himself. “I’ll probably go as soon as I get out to my dad’s.”

  Carla got the hint and struggled to rise from the camp chair. She set the coffee mug in the dirt beside her. Lucy Maud said to Boyd, “See you after a while.”

  Boyd nodded, squinting into the sun, which was beginning to burn off the haze. Before Isaac got in the bed of the truck to get a ride back to his car, he turned once more toward her. She considered him for a minute, how much he’d changed: legs too long for his body, stomach and chest somehow packed more full of flesh than they’d once been, a restlessness visible in the set of his lips, in the way he ran idle fingers through hair that was just a bit too long, jeans half tucked into Carhartt boots. If she were only just meeting him, if she hadn’t known him all these years, would she still feel this way about him, this compulsion almost?

  Isaac, as if reading her mind this time, came and planted that one last kiss on her forehead, more brotherly than anything else. Then he hitched up one of those too-long legs, climbed into the back of the pickup truck, and they were gone, dust hanging in the space where they had been.

  Boyd slung the rest of Carla’s coffee out over the gravel and sat down to drink the little she had left. But it was cold, and the coals had already died out. The morning was gone.

  Things You Would Know If You Grew Up Around Here

  There Are Things Buried in the Lake

  There are no natural lakes in Texas. None. Well, there’s one, Caddo Lake, way out in East Texas, but that lake’s naturalness is disputed, or maybe it’s more of a bayou. By and large, lakes are a glacial phenomenon, and Texas has never been known for her glaciers.

  In Texas, lakes are dammed river valleys. People used to live in those river valleys. This means that when you swim in a lake in Texas, you’re swimming over the remnants of someone’s life. Houses. Churches. Schools. Windmills. Wood doesn’t deteriorate quickly in water, so these things will stand for ages. When dams were built by the Tennessee Valley Authority, the government moved cemeteries, but not here in Texas. But does it matter that these cemeteries weren’t moved? This ground is full of the people who came before. Just last year, when Cottonwood Shores was building a public boat ramp, they uncovered a grave more than two thousand years old.

  I guess what I’m trying to say is we were never the first.

  11:00 A.M.

  After Carla drove Isaac back to her house to get his car, she wasn’t ready to leave Lucy Maud’s house. Carla thrived on solitude, but now, something was different. She’d spent so much time alone that company had started to be a novelty again. And something about Lucy Maud entertained Carla and made her feel at home all at the same time.

  Lucy Maud was estranged from her husband, and Carla knew that Kevin was having an affair. The other woman was younger, one of his students at the university, but that was all Carla knew. It wasn’t one of Lucy Maud’s favorite subjects.

  What was one of Lucy Maud’s favorite subjects was her father’s wedding, and how he was letting her plan it. Lucy Maud’s father, Homer, was getting married to his longtime girlfriend, Sylvia, and Lucy Maud was thinking she’d be good at being a wedding planner, and her father’s wedding was as good a time as any to get some practice. The rehearsal dinner was that evening, and Lucy Maud was a bundle of nerves.

  “They didn’t even want a rehearsal dinner,” she told Carla as Lucy Maud swept the kitchen. “Can you imagine? They didn’t even want to rehearse. They wanted to go to the courthouse and get it over with, but after all that they’ve been through? They’ve known each other for nearly fifty years. I got them a minister, and they’re having a real weddi
ng.” Lucy Maud knelt to hold the dustpan and swept the pile in. “And when you have a real wedding, you have to rehearse. What if something were to go wrong?”

  Carla nodded, sitting on one of the barstools at the marble countertop, feet dangling, just listening to the sound of Lucy Maud’s voice. It was heavenly, the kind of thing that you didn’t have to pay too much attention to, a sort of unimportant background noise, but you couldn’t help it anyway. “Right?” Carla said, because she sensed a lull in the monologue and wanted to hear more.

  “I mean, not that it’s a catastrophe if somebody says something at the wrong time, and there are only going to be about thirty people there, but think about it on my end. Who would recommend me as a wedding planner if my only prior experience is one where somebody messed up?”

  This was an excellent point, Carla thought, then she realized that in another life, her Austin life, Carla would have rolled her eyes at the unimportant concerns of a woman such as Lucy Maud. But here—here, something was different. Out here, Carla understood people better somehow, had more pity or something.

  “I need to go to the grocery store.” Lucy Maud put the broom away and took off her apron. “Want to go?”

  They got in Lucy Maud’s car and headed down River Road, back out to the main highway, on their way into Marble Falls. Despite the drought, the wildflowers were high on the roadsides, bluebonnets giving way to the verbena and purple nightshade of late spring. The light was strange, Carla noticed, and then Lucy Maud pulled over to the side of the road.

  “Look at that,” she said, resting one hand on Carla’s headrest and twisting her body so she could see out the back. “I could see it in the rearview, but, man.”