by Ann Treacy
“It reminds me of a tiny coffin,” Martin said. “My pa taught me how to make coffins watertight.” He turned the box in his hands. “Pa says a carpenter can make just about anything once he masters a cradle and a coffin.” The lid was swollen in place. He turned it on its side and struck it with the only tool available to him, but the spade did nothing to spring it free. He fished for his pocketknife and pried the blade into a seam at the top of the box. It reluctantly squeaked free, reminding him of the sound that stones made when he forced them from their sod moorings.
The box was stuffed with oilskin. Martin tipped the heavy bundle into his hand, then slowly unwrapped the fabric, which had been bound and tied with a leather strip. He looked at Samson.
The boy just shrugged.
The next layer, a piece of muslin, fell limply in pieces to the ground. Left in his hand was a roll of more tightly woven fabric. It had once been white, and it looked lightweight but was deceptively heavy. Martin unrolled it.
Samson looked bewildered. “What is that?”
Martin had already figured that Gypsy women with their loose clothes probably didn’t wear these, so he explained, “It’s a corset.” He unwrapped it completely and held it expanded as a circle in front of his chest.
Samson nodded in understanding.
“Mighty heavy though.” Martin couldn’t imagine a woman wearing something like this, especially in hot weather.
Mother says she kept it with her every day of the long journey.
Martin laid the corset facedown on his lap. He counted twelve casings, each formed by two seams sewn close together. He pulled two rigid stays out of their casings and studied them. Often when Ma and Aunt Ida washed corsets they left the stays standing in a glass on the windowsill. He had played with them as a child. The ones he remembered had been light and slightly bendable. These were as rigid as steel. Yet they were fashioned for comfort, smooth and rounded at the ends.
About the size of flat pencils, these felt heavier than iron. Martin handed one to Sam and brought one up to his face for closer scrutiny. He could barely make out near the tip the familiar shield that had been his great-grandfather’s metalsmith signature in Sweden: crown and sword.
The handcrafted sticks of metal with their tiny crowns and swords like lightning bolts glowed bronze in the afternoon sun.
The boys rested, passing the similar yet unique rods back and forth for inspection.
“I don’t know what I am holding, Sam,” Martin said, still exhausted and awestruck by the discovery, “but what if this means I can pay you now for all your hard work?”
Sam looked as horrified as the day he realized that rock-clearing was not a onetime job. He held up both hands. “I did not work for money, for to be paid. I work for friendship.”
“Not money then. Take one of these.”
Sam shook his head at the offered stay.
“Take it because my great-grandfather made it.” Martin dug in the pocket of his filthy pants, felt again the knife, the half dime, and pulled out the horse. “You once asked me to accept something made by your grandfather.” He held both palms open, a horse in one, a slice of metal in the other.
Sam chose.
Chapter 26
After sharing the discovery with Ma, Aunt Ida, and Lilly, he and Sam returned the treasure to the only place of safekeeping left on the farm, the earth. He told the women about the diary. It soothed his guilt over losing it to the fire and never being able to share it with Pa or with the one it really belonged to—Lilly. He thanked Lilly with an afternoon of endless twirling.
The food and clothing that people brought helped them get through their first night after the fire, and the gypsy wagon was comfortable shelter. The women and Lilly slept in the traveling home; Martin slept outside. The fire could have been much worse. It could have been harvesttime with fields of tall, swaying wheat and field corn on stalks so dry they rustled. The fire could have coursed across the county.
Martin woke up realizing that the real loss from the fire was yet to come. After breakfast he walked out on the land until all he could smell was fresh air.
Sam found him standing on one of their irregular rock piles between fields. They stood a while, inspecting all they’d done together, the silence between them not comfortable this time. They shifted from foot to foot to maintain balance. A hawk with broad wings appeared to be napping in the sky above them. Wildflowers that covered the berms between fields looked like fancy stitchwork connecting quilt squares. Martin glimpsed Sam out of the corner of his eye, and that moment confirmed his suspicions that Sam’s people would pull up stakes, afraid to remain in the vicinity of a fire they might be blamed for. He went back to studying the turned and planted earth. He hoped that when he found his voice, the words wouldn’t be what he’d just been thinking: I owe you everything. “When do you go?”
“We are ready.”
“Won’t you stay for the harvest, Sam?”
Silence.
“Cut some wheat, put up hay? Miss all that fun?” You are the best friend I ever had.
“I have to go with them.”
“My whole family wants you to stay. I can almost guarantee my aunt won’t shoot you. And my pa—.” He was going to say My pa needs to meet you and You know Mr. Perry would keep you on. But Martin knew the truth—his time with this uncommon boy was over—and he could have mouthed it with Sam when he simply said, “Grandmother needs me.”
Sam looked at the boulders they were balancing on. “I will return someday to your rock farm.”
“I will always be here.”
That afternoon Martin took one of the stays from its resting place. Riding Finn bareback into town was like sitting on a bouncing tabletop. As he jogged along, Martin made a plan to finish knocking down the buildings and bury some of the debris to remove the scorched smell and memories. This time, though, he’d be doing the work alone.
At Olsson’s Clocks, Watches & Fine Jewelry, Mr. Olsson introduced himself as the manager. The elderly man looked kind but lost his smile when Martin told him his name. Mr. Olsson stared for such a long moment that Martin worried he might be a comrade of Meehan’s. Or maybe he had missed a spot. Every time they touched anything their hands and faces got dirty again.
“Sir?” Martin broke the silence.
Mr. Olsson shook his head slowly from side to side. “Martin Gunnarsson,” he finally repeated. “I’m embarrassed, you see. I’ve meant to come out and meet your family, and now I’ve heard of the fire and, well, I wish I had.”
Martin took the bundle from the pocket of his clean donated pants.
“I must tell you, young man, that seeing you fairly takes away my breath.” He put a hand to his heart as if to pledge allegiance. “I knew your Grandpa Gunnarsson long ago. We were contemporaries. We went to war together. You are his likeness.” He shook his head again. “I knew Jacob growing up, of course, but you are even more Carl’s likeness. Sometimes things skip a generation.”
He held out his hand, formally, although they’d already introduced themselves. “It’s a pleasure to meet you.”
“Thank you, sir. Sometime I’d like to hear more about my grandfather if you don’t mind.”
“I’d like that too, any time at all. How can I help you today?”
Martin unwrapped the long thin bar of metal. “Can you please tell me what kind of metal this is?”
Mr. Olsson studied it, then carried it to the window where he repeated the inspection with a jeweler’s loupe squeezed over one eye. “Where did you get this?”
“It was handed down from my grandmother’s father,” Martin answered carefully. “Is it copper?”
“No.” He studied it like it was a rare gem, like he’d studied Martin only moments before. Treating it like a fragile egg, Mr. Olsson hefted it in one hand to get a sense of its weight.
“Then is it brass?”
“No . . .” Mr. Olsson’s voice trailed off.
Martin felt foolish. Thank God he hadn’t brought
all twelve—no, eleven now. He pressed a palm against the horse in his pocket. He hoped he wouldn’t have to explain that he was asking for an appraisal of corset stays. “Is it valuable at all?”
“Oh, yes,” the man whispered, intent on inspecting the piece. “Very.” He lifted his head, popped the loupe off his eye, and turned to Martin. “This looks to be a very pure bar of gold.”
“But it’s dark, not yellow.”
“This grade of gold is too pure to make jewelry from. It’s softer than jewelry-grade gold. Other metal alloys are added to gold to make it stronger, so it will hold up as a ring or a watchcase, and those other metals change its color too.”
Mr. Olsson carefully wrapped the piece in clean, soft paper and handed it back to Martin. “Where did you say this came from?”
Martin thought about Cora, then about his grandmother wearing the uncomfortable corset on her overseas journey. He smelled the destroyed homestead on himself despite the borrowed clothes and shuddered at how close he’d come to losing this treasure forever.
“From my ancestors. It’s been in the family a long time.”
Author’s Note
Fiction is woven of fact, history, and hard work. Then what if sparks fly and fire the imagination.
Parts of this story were inspired by true events. My great-aunt, Annie Koehnen, whose parents were Dutch and German, died in Minnesota of diphtheria in 1893. She was eight years old. I grew up in St. Paul with this photograph hanging in our living room. The pencil sketch in the center of the photograph is of Annie, who died before the youngest child, my grandmother, was born. Grandma Minnie sits in the front, wearing a white dress. I grew up thankful for immunizations that protected me from serious contagious disease. But I was curious about those past diseases, too, and often look for epidemic deaths in pioneer graveyards where the single word cholera or diphtheria may appear on headstones. Sometimes entire families are recorded as dying in a single week or even one day. It made me wonder: What if you were the only child left? What if you were a helpless baby?
The family of Leonard and Elizabeth Koehnen.
Grandma Minnie was born in 1896 and lived 101 years. She told many stories about the Gypsies who came through their farm community in Minnesota. Throughout her life she spoke of her fear of them, and like Aunt Ida in this story, Grandma believed they would steal children, food, clothing, and equipment. But what if you actually got to know one of those Gypsy kids?
Life expectancy for Americans in 1903 was forty-nine years. Children still commonly died from diphtheria, typhoid, cholera, and measles, which decreased the average life expectancy because many people did not live to adulthood. There were no antibiotics yet to fight scarlet fever or infection. Any wound was treated seriously, as it could lead to blood poisoning. Twenty years after Martin’s story, President Calvin Coolidge’s sixteen-year-old son died from an infected blister on his toe.
My grandma married a Swedish man, Carl Palmer. Grandpa’s brother Martin was fourteen in 1903, like Martin Gunnarsson. My Swedish ancestors did not come to America with a treasure that I know of, although early immigrants commonly brought ironworks such as nails, hinges, and ax heads.
In my living room hangs a rustic oil painting of the Palmer homestead near Bernadotte, Minnesota, dated 1903. Large trees in this painting remind me of the elms on the boulevards in St. Paul where I grew up. As a child I played at the base of those trees, pretending each space between the large roots was a room.
In history, I like the decade from 1900 to 1910. I think of it as a quiet time. Much is written about the years between 1910 and 1920 because of the First World War, and the Roaring Twenties after that, then the Depression of the thirties. During that first decade of the twentieth century, President Theodore Roosevelt governed a country of eighty million people, compared to 319 million citizens today. Farmers (and Gypsies, too) still mostly used horses, although there were some automobiles—about eight thousand throughout the country. While Henry Ford was busy organizing the Ford Motor Company, prosperous farmers might have owned a light team of horses for pulling a wagon or buggy and a heavy team for plowing and logging. Some farmers could also afford to keep saddle horses.
Baseball was big in Martin’s day. The first World Series (a best-of-nine series) was played in 1903, with the Boston Americans winning five games to three over the Pittsburgh Pirates. In this book, Martin helped Samson read English from an actual newspaper report about baseball that spring. That same year Orville and Wilbur Wright made aviation history with their first flight at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina.
Few social or government programs were available at that time to help families in need. If parents could not feed their children, the children were often sent, as Mr. Meehan was as a child, to “work out,” usually on a farm where they labored in exchange for food. My father, Robert O’Brien, was sent to work out as a youth on his uncle’s horse ranch near Hardin, Montana. He remembered that the Gypsy caravans in eastern Montana during the 1920s still used horses, but trucks were becoming popular. Dad was often asked to turn out restless horses in the morning—ride them fast down the road and back. He entered their stalls holding a stick across his chest, just wider than his body, as the horses sometimes tried to crush him against the wall. I borrowed this detail for Martin in the story.
It is likely that Martin’s grandfather volunteered to serve in the Civil War. Minnesota was the first among the states in which no battles were fought to offer troops to President Lincoln. Twenty-four thousand Minnesotans served, half the eligible population of the state. “Minnesota, as a fledgling state, contributed disproportionately to the war through the commitments of its citizens and the valor of its soldiers,” states the Minnesota Historical Society’s website, where you can read more about the contributions of the thirty-second state.
Many nations of the world have nomadic people known by various names as Gypsies, rovers, walking people, and travelers. Gypsies came to America in the second half of the nineteenth century, when many Europeans immigrated. Aunt Ida incorrectly calls them “heathen Egyptians” because the name Gypsy comes from a mistaken belief that their ancestors were from Egypt. In fact, Gypsies came from northwestern India. They call themselves Roma, and the many dialects of the Romany language contain words clearly derived from Indian Sanskrit.
The Roma follow extremely strict guidelines about cleanliness. Ruby would indeed have been shocked to see Martin—a gadjo (non-Gypsy)—in their wagon, as his presence would require them to conduct a rigorous cleaning. The Roma are self-governing, and one of the most dreaded punishments a vitsa (clan) member can receive is loss of commensality—no longer being accepted at table. The Roma love to feast together, and it would have been bad manners for Martin to decline Samson’s grandmother’s invitation to stay for dinner. I did take some literary license with the story; for example, in Roma society men and women stay separate at social functions, and Martin would not likely have been dancing with Ruby.
Traditionally the Roma worked as metalsmiths, musicians (their music has influenced great composers, including Haydn, Beethoven, Brahms, and Dvořák), horse dealers, and fortune-tellers. Municipal ordinances against fortune-telling severely curtailed their incomes.
In Martin’s time, newspaper reports of Gypsies were usually published to warn people of their presence in an area. They were thought to overcharge and swindle gadje. Farm journals from many agricultural areas throughout the country include passages about Gypsies stealing medicine, small animals, implements, and, as Aunt Ida warns, “the clothes off the line.” They probably did not have the habit of knocking on a door, and their culture allowed for different methods of distributing wealth. They were consistently feared and often sent packing. Yet it was widely understood that they did not steal from households that provided for them, and many settlers’ journals list donations to Gypsies of woven cloth, chickens, and bread. Their wandering lifestyle has historically made census statistics contradictory and unreliable. In many areas of the world, Gypsies
have been persecuted. During the Holocaust of the 1930s and 1940s, many Roma in Europe were killed, but counts of how many vary by as much as half a million, due to the undocumented nature of their lifestyle.
The Roma traveled freely throughout the United States and Canada during the late 1800s and the first half of the twentieth century. These accounts from the Red Wing Daily Republican describe the visits of Gypsies to this area:
A number of gypsies who have been in camp near this place for the past few days, canvassed the city yesterday, begging money and making themselves a nuisance generally. Some of the merchants say that it required close watching to keep them from carrying away articles in their spacious pockets or bundles which they carried with them. A trained bear and monkey, and the singing of antiquated songs by young girls, were some of the methods used to attract attention and draw pennies from the pockets of our citizens. (August 15, 1895)
The gypsies who came to town yesterday were the toughest and dirtiest set of people that ever visited this vicinity. The girls that were supposed to be telling fortunes were “fakes.” (October 21, 1898)
About a week ago a gang of gypsies visited this city. The women told “fortunes” and took many a dollar from our business men. They also visited Pine City, Minnesota, and worked their schemes there. A special to a St. Paul paper says: “There was considerable excitement in this village yesterday over the presence of a gang of bold, bad gypsy women, who pretended to tell fortunes and do tricks requiring coins, which they immediately proceeded to appropriate. Six of them were rounded up last evening and spent the night in the cooler.” (October 27, 1898)
Red Wing is the county seat of Goodhue County, and I chose Goodhue County as the setting for The Search for the Homestead Treasure because of its unique blend of beautiful farmland, forests, and steep river bluffs that are home to rattlesnakes. Of the seventeen varieties of snakes found in Minnesota, only two are poisonous, the timber rattlesnake and the eastern massasauga. The timber rattlesnake is found in Goodhue County—and in much greater numbers in Martin’s time than today. In the late 1800s and early 1900s, rattlesnake kills were listed in the county newspapers, including the length of the snake in feet and inches and the number of its rattles. Bounties were offered for killing these snakes until 1989, and five thousand bounties were paid in 1970 alone. By 1984 the timber rattlesnake was designated a species of concern and in 1996 was reclassified as threatened. Today this species is considered secretive but not aggressive; a few bites are reported annually in Minnesota, but there have been no reported deaths from this snake in the last hundred years.