Front Yard

by Norman Draper

  “Of course it will be an amazing find,” said Miss Price, who had waved off the celebratory merlot everyone else was drinking in favor of the Fremonts’ other house beverage, the exquisite Bombay Sapphire gin. “Only you have to find it first. Where do you think it might be?”

  Dr. Lick scratched his head.

  “No idea,” he confessed. “But we can sweep the entire yard.”

  “The entire yard has already been swept,” said George. “A year ago. And by someone who knows what he’s doing. I don’t think Jim missed a single square inch of our property, because, at that point, all our flowers were pretty much gone, wrecked by a hailstorm. We had nothing to lose by letting him tromp around in our flower beds.”

  Dr. Lick twisted around in his chair to take in the full panorama of the backyard gardens, or at least what was left of them.

  “Speaking of which,” said Miss Price. “It appears that your gardens have suffered another mishap of rather gigantic proportions. My goodness gracious! What happened?”

  George and Nan looked at each other.

  “Uh . . . blight,” said Nan haltingly. “A new blight that hasn’t been named yet. It strikes swiftly and devastatingly as you can see. But it is somewhat selective.”

  George nodded.

  “Hmmm,” said Dr. Lick.

  “My condolences,” said Miss Price. “At least I see that your birches and crab apples in your lovely arbor are still flourishing. It appears nothing disturbed that. Though I’ll always remember that old locust that used to be there. I do wish you hadn’t cut that down. That was a stately old beacon, that tree.”

  George shot up suddenly from his seat, startling everyone at the table.

  “What did you just say, Miss Price?”

  “Uh, the old locust tree and how I wish you wouldn’t have cut it down, and what a stately old beacon it was.”

  “Eureka!” shouted George, thrusting his hands skyward.

  “Eureka what, dear?” wondered Nan calmly.

  “Isn’t it obvious to everyone?” George said. “That’s the other tree planted back in the old days on this property. And what did they plant the first tree for, the white oak, Miss Price?”

  Miss Price’s eyes suddenly lit up.

  “As a marker. Of course! As a burial marker!”

  “Right! The two skeletons you found all bound up in the roots. That means the second tree could also be a marker. For something else buried. Say, a treasure perhaps.”

  “Of course!” cried Dr. Lick. “But why wouldn’t your friend have detected it when he did the scan?”

  “Well, the site’s covered with flagstones, and, beneath them, several inches of sand and gravel and concrete. Would that make detection more difficult?”

  “Perhaps,” said Dr. Lick. “Either your friend didn’t hear any signals when he scanned the site, or he assumed he wouldn’t find anything anyway with all that stuff in the way.”

  “Or,” said Nan, “maybe he knew how precious our arbor is to us and didn’t want to disturb it.”

  A quick call to Jim established that he had, indeed, neglected to sweep the arbor. Within minutes, he was trudging up the backyard slope, TreasureTrove XB 255 slung over his shoulder.

  “Nice piece of equipment you got there, fella,” said Dr. Lick. “Find much with it?”

  “Up to this point, no,” said Jim, gazing at the trees ringing the arbor. “Some spare change, a few old trinkets. I’m hoping my luck will change today. But are you guys sure you want to mess up the arbor? That’s a beautiful spot.”

  “Yes, we’re sure,” said Nan. “And we appreciate your sensitivity, we really do. But things have changed and sacrifices must be made. I suppose we should take out the flagstones first, shouldn’t we? I mean, just to be sure.”

  “That might help,” said Jim. “The less there is between your detector and the metal you’re looking for the better!”

  Dr. Lick jumped up from his chair.

  “Well, great! I just happen to have a pick and a couple of shovels in the trunk of my car,” he said. “What say we leave the graduate students behind on this and do a little excavating ourselves?”

  “Hear, hear!” chimed in Miss Price, holding her gin and tonic aloft. “And I shall watch and cheer you on. Uh, Mr. Fremont, my drink is getting a bit low and diluted. Would you be so good as to freshen this up a bit?”

  “Hang on, everybody,” said Nan. “That’s a fair-sized area you’re talking about there. Are you guys ready to dig up a hole the size of a bomb crater? How do we know exactly where it is? When we cut the tree down we had the stump ground up.”

  “That’s easy,” said Miss Price. “Remember me talking about that clothesline we had, and how it was ninety feet from one tree to the other? Measure a little bit less to account for the loops around each of the hooks. Measure it from where the edge of that white oak once stood, angle it halfway—forty-five degrees—between due west and due south, and, presto, you’ve got where the old locust was. It’s two hundred twenty-five points on the compass, if anyone has one handy.”

  “How on earth do you know that?” Nan wondered.

  “Math class,” Miss Price replied. “One of our exercises was figuring out angles at home. Mine was determining the angle of the clothesline from one of the cardinal points of the compass. For some reason, that stuck with me. Lord knows nothing else about math did.”

  “I remember that locust being pretty much right in the middle of where we put the arbor,” George said.

  “Well, okay, let’s get moving,” said Nan. “What’s everyone waiting for?”

  An hour and a half later, all the flagstones had been dug out of the center of the arbor, the concrete broken up, and the sand and gravel removed. George and Dr. Lick, stripped down to the waist and covered with sweat and panting, threw down their shovels. George signaled to Jim, who was sitting on the patio, nursing his second gin and tonic, and apparently in no hurry to go anywhere.

  “Get over here, metal detector man!” he shouted. “It’s time to earn your pay.” Jim got up slowly, clumsily gathered together his gear, and ambled over to the shallow depression that was once the heart of the arbor. It was a sobering sight, and Jim could feel the tears welling up.

  “This was such a placid, restful place,” he moaned. “I hate to see it torn up like this.”

  “We promise to put it all back when we’re finished,” said George. “Now, quit your whining and let’s get detecting.”

  Jim moved the metal detector’s search coil over the spot, feathering it one way and then the other. It was only a matter of seconds before it started beeping to beat the band.

  “Hot! It is hot!”

  Miss Price downed a long slug of gin and tonic she had directed George to make especially strong for her.

  “Sheesh!” said Jim. “There’s definitely something down there. And it’s something of substance. And it’s not all that deep. A couple feet more maybe.”

  “Okay, everyone stand back,” said Dr. Lick, who arced the big pick back and brought it down unsteadily with a thud, sinking it six inches into the ground.

  “Uh, what about gas lines, power lines, et cetera?” said George. “Seeing as how we had a rather nasty experience with a gas line next door a little while ago.”

  “For this part of the yard, you’re good,” said Dr. Lick. “I took the liberty of checking. That means we’ve just got some roots to worry about, but I can rip right through them with this bad boy.”

  Caught up in Dr. Lick’s enthusiasm, George grabbed a shovel and began to dig, his field of action being somewhat impaired by Dr. Lick’s imitation of a drunk day laborer.

  Dr. Lick could barely contain himself. He pushed muscles he never knew existed to the limit, his lungs ready to burst, his body drenched in glistening sweat. It was to be the find of a lifetime. Why would anyone faced with such a discovery want to hold back? The way Miss Price had described it, what they’d find was proof that Europeans had traveled through the middle of the continent
and even settled there more than three hundred years before Columbus. That in and of itself would be immensely gratifying. What’s more, it corroborated the theories he had held all along, but which the archaeological community had dismissed as Eurocentric pseudo-history. This was to be his sweet redemption! And it would catapult him to the highest ranks of his discipline.

  The tale Miss Price had woven to Dr. Lick was of a great chest fashioned almost a millennium ago that contained a historic secret with vast implications. Inside, she said, were inscriptions in Latin and Welsh etched into soft stone and leather that had identified the Fremont property as the home of the followers of Madoc, a Welsh prince banished from his home for some unknown crime or political misstep. Madoc and his followers had set sail west for Cathay and the Spice Islands and wound up in a new continent whose existence he would never be able to make manifest. The chest would contain written proof that Madoc’s village of Welsh expatriates lay right under them.

  Once these buried writings were translated, they would prove to be a historical record of a race that, after two hundred years of roaming the continent, warring and cooperating with Indians, and seeking to carve out its special niche in the wilderness, was beginning to lose its identify. They would speak of a tribe of Welsh that had already been decimated by wars with surrounding tribes and were seeking alliances with other, friendlier ones.

  “Think of it!” the excited and quaking Miss Price had said. “Europeans here in the upper Midwest, colonizing and flourishing, at least for a while, centuries before Columbus! It’s bigger than Jamestown or St. Augustine! It’s bigger than the Plymouth Bay Colony! It’s bigger than Roanoke Island! My gracious, it’s bigger than all those rolled into one! It boggles the mind! Just think, as many as one hundred Welsh lived here, all of them born in the New World. When this village gave out, there were people living here whose families had been in this country for six, seven generations. The chest we’re searching for is the record they left of this village before they scattered to whatever fate awaited them. It will probably wind up in the Smithsonian, and they will pay well. They will pay well. And they will want any of the artifacts within for display purposes. Goodness, you’ll be set up for life!”

  There was something else. What would likely interest him and the Fremonts more than her, she said, was that the remnants of Madoc’s fortune in gold and gemstones might well lay within.

  And she had the two artifacts to prove it: rune stones inscribed with Celtic characters excavated from the site of the current house when the old one was torn down and a foundation dug for the existing one. No one had been able to precisely date them, but where else could they have come from? And Miss Price had done so much study, and had such conviction! Was there some doubt? Of course, there’s always doubt. But those who become prisoners to doubt never move forward to accomplish anything.

  Besides, and Dr. Lick would tell this to no one, the night before he had had a dream like no other. An ancient bard had come to him in his sleep with a crudely feathered arrow protruding from his chest. He held a half-finished tin of Chicken of the Sea tuna fish in one hand and an old Duncan Imperial yo-yo in the other. What could they possibly symbolize? Dr. Lick dismissed the can of tuna fish and yo-yo as items of no consequence that often cluttered up dreams. But the bard! And the arrow! Only a blind man—or one who didn’t put much faith in dreams as portents—could fail to understand the significance. A clash of cultures from one hell of a long time ago.

  “Dig!” he yelled. “Dig!” By now, Mary and Shirelle had come around from the front to see what all the fuss was about.

  “Oh, my God!” cried Shirelle. “That beautiful arbor! Those beautiful flagstones!”

  “Need our help?” asked Mary. “C’mon, Shirelle; this is a treasure hunt, and my tuition and room and board could be buried down there.”

  Twenty minutes later, Shirelle and Mary were sitting on the grass exhausted, urging on George and Dr. Lick, who had markedly slackened their efforts. An hour and a half and two shift changes later, George felt the tip of the pick hit something and vibrate through the handle so violently that he dropped it.

  “Bingo!” he shouted. “Got something!”

  “Sure hope it’s not another gas line!” yelled Nan from the patio.

  He and Dr. Lick, who had been slacking off big-time over the past half hour, began to dig with a fresh enthusiasm, concentrating now on probing to the edges of the object they were unearthing. That object seemed to be about a foot wide and deep, and two feet long. George swung as lustily as his flagging strength enabled. He finally managed to get the tip of the pick under the object and start prying it loose.

  Fifteen minutes later, they had it yanked out of the hole and set on the ground. It was a wood-and-metal chest of some sort, its hinges and clasp rusted almost beyond recognition, and with the outlines of a pattern etched deeply into the top, but now caked with mud.

  Miss Price let out a cheer and raised her gin and tonic in salute.

  “Iechyd da!”

  “Pardon?” said Nan.

  “Iechyd da,” said Miss Price. “It’s Welsh. It means to your very good health.”

  “Likewise, I’m sure,” Nan said, raising her own glass. “Way to go, guys. Can you drag it over here?”

  “I can’t say for sure,” said Jim, who had run over to the site to help George and Dr. Lick extract the chest. “But that looks to me to be rather old.”

  “If Miss Price is right, then it is very old,” Dr. Lick said. “Many hundreds of years old.”

  “A treasure?” wondered Jim.

  “Of sorts,” said Dr. Lick, smiling through a mask of perspiration. “We’ll soon see.”

  There were no handles on the ends of the chest, so George and Jim picked it up from the bottom and lugged it over toward the table, over which Nan had now spread two layers of drop cloths.

  “Maybe it’s too heavy for the table,” she said. “How about setting it right on the cement?”

  “No problem for the table,” George said. “It’s not nearly as heavy as I thought it’d be. In fact, it seems kind of light to be holding such a heavy load.”

  Miss Price stared at the chest for a moment, then ran her trembling hand over it.

  “This is very nice work. It was made in Wales, of course. There is no lock on the clasp, as you see. It’s very rusted, though. Perhaps a screwdriver and hammer and some oil could loosen it.”

  Once the rust was flaked off with the screwdriver and a few taps of the hammer, and some oil was sprayed on it, the clasp proved easy to pry open.

  “Now, to open this chest,” said Miss Price. “And, goodness me, I find that, after all these years, I lack the nerve.”

  “You should be the one who opens it,” George said.

  “Yes,” said Nan. “You must do the honor. It wouldn’t be right for any of the rest of us to do it.”

  “Then get me another good, stiff drink to steady my hands.” Miss Price knocked down most of her gin and tonic in one minute as George and Nan watched her in admiration, and Jim, the euphoria of the find proving only fleeting, wondered whether Alicia had already sold his baseball card collection.

  “Okay,” Miss Price said. “Here goes.”

  “Stop!” said Nan, raising her hand suddenly, palm outward. “Just a moment. Listen.”

  “Stop?” said Miss Price. “Listen to what? I just hear birds.”

  “Precisely,” said George. “Listen to the birds.” Ten seconds later, an urgent, shrill trilling shattered the stillness, modulating higher, then lower, in a crazy series of pitches and dynamics. It stopped, then started all over again.

  “There it is.” George pointed to one of the fence posts, on which perched a squat, fidgety, long-beaked brown bird. It warbled again, then lifted off and disappeared into the small hole in the birdhouse under the eaves.

  “Everything’s all right now, no matter what happens,” said Nan, beaming. “Our house wrens are back.”

  After a short pause during which ev
eryone listened, or pretended to listen, to the song of the house wren, Miss Price raised her glass.

  “Back to the business at hand,” she said in a hoarse, croaking whisper. “This is what those whose only concerns are of a pecuniary nature would call the lost treasure of Livia.” As they all sat or stood there gathered around the object, visions of debts paid, glory gained, an expensive college education, a startup landscaping business, and lots of new pairs of shoes danced in their heads. Yet Miss Price seemed strangely reluctant.

  “Before I open this,” she finally said, after having drained her gin and tonic with one last, noisy glug, “I must tell Dr. Lick I’m sorry. As the Lord God Almighty and my dear ancestors are my witnesses, I am truly sorry.” Dr. Lick almost choked on the merlot sloshing around in his mouth.

  “Sorry for what?” he gurgled.

  “I’m going to tell you I have deceived you, just as I have deceived everyone here today. But please look and listen before you vent your ire on an obsessed woman who’s been on the quest of a lifetime for so many long years.”

  “Open it!” cried Nan and George.

  “Open it!” cried the others.

  The hinges creaked and squealed as Miss Price with some effort pushed open the top of the chest. Inside and taking up most of the space was what looked like a large and deep covered stoneware baking dish. The top was held on tight by tied and knotted leather straps, which George cut through with the loppers from the toolshed. Miss Price bent over, raised the baking dish out of the chest with more effort than appeared to be necessary, and placed it on the table. Standing up straight, she sucked in a deep breath, then noisily exhaled. She then removed the top, peered inside, and began rummaging among the contents. Everyone crowded around her.

  “Please,” she said, stretching her arms out. “Give me some space.” After doing some more poking around she stopped and smiled a beatific smile the likes of which no one there had ever seen light up her face.

  “It’s all here!” she cried. “It’s all here! Now I have proof!” She collapsed back into her chair, suddenly exhausted and fragile. “I must tell you the real truth of what is gathered here in this chest. This will be the complete, unvarnished truth, with no equivocation, no embellishment, and no little half-lies. So help me, God!”