by Jane Bow
Or had she known and never told? Outside, beyond the sea-field of whitecaps running for shore, Mahone Bay’s scattering of islands was a smudged line of ragged, darkened green: a perfect, inhospitably wild and nondescript hiding place for gold. Stories about Captain Kidd, John Morgan, Sir Francis Drake, of found sea chests, stray bags of doubloons, had been circulating Mahone Bay taverns for several hundred years. Then there were the 18th century pirates who had lain in wait here for British and French army payroll and tax ships, and American privateers loaded to the gunwales with gold and silver ransomed from towns up and down this coast. Even the name of this bay, Mahone, came from the Turkish word for the low, fast ships pirates favoured. Always there were Oak Island tales of strange sightings, of the two young men who, having spotted fires burning on the little offshore island, had rowed out to investigate. And never returned. But for some reason Gran’s eyes had flashed anger at the mention of the Oak Island treasure.
“Two hundred years men have been turning that poor little island into Swiss cheese, dying even, not to mention pointing guns, taking each other to court, and for what? A few doubloons, bits and pieces of old wood. You stay away from there, Vanessa. The Holdt family is not interested in Oak Island.”
As if a fifteen-year-old recently bereft of the only world she had ever known, of the Altamira sun and beach and harbour and La Montaña lying like an ancient bone behind it, of her best friend Carlita, and Paco and Santi and the others, of a world full of stories about ancient ships and castles and treasures; as if she were not going to talk her brother Adrian, who was two years older, into borrowing two rickety bikes from Gran’s shed, riding down the coast road, hiding the bikes in the weed-choked ditch to jump the chain across the Oak Island causeway, to sneak around the dilapidated museum building and then the waterlogged pits that pocked the denuded east end of the island where treasure hunters had spent millions of dollars and more than two hundred years digging. Until seventeen-year-old Adrian had found a holiday girlfriend, and at the end of the summer their parents had moved the family to Ottawa.
Her father had always dismissed the idea of treasure on Oak Island.
Where, he wanted to know, was any hard evidence?
Vanessa looked at Brother Bartolomeo’s diary nestled among the dictionaries on the table. Maybe right here, Dad.
She had to tell someone — Gran’s old black telephone was still hooked up — but whom?
She dialed Brigit, her closest friend. She had called Brigit’s cell phone in British Columbia three nights ago after she had fled her life in Toronto, had cried into the receiver, but then Brigit’s phone had started to crackle.
“Hang in, Van,” Brigit had shouted. “I’m on the mainland, up in the mountains, but on my way home. I’ll call you when I get there.” A jewellery designer, Brigit left her Vancouver Island studio regularly to augment her income by gathering mountain flora for a research biologist at the University of Victoria.
There was no answer.
Vanessa’s mother was in England on a pilgrimage back to Cambridge University where she and Vanessa’s father had met, and then home to Cornwall. Anyway, though her mother had a thin intensity that could have come out of an El Greco painting, her English tongue had never adapted easily to Spanish. Vanessa meanwhile had lived in the language from birth, chattering in it even with Adrian at home, her body and soul grounded in its sounds, rhythms, contexts. Inevitably a gap had opened.
Now Adrian was traveling in Australia.
She would not call Charlie.
Vanessa made a sandwich, opened a bottle of Gran’s favourite Chablis and flicked on the television, sat back as a ballerina twirled to a piano riff, beautiful; the music was reaching into her tired mind, the camera closing on the dancer’s supple grace, when a word crossed the screen: the name of a menstrual tampon.
“Oh, for God’s sake.” Vanessa jabbed the remote’s “off” button, got up to open the French doors to the deck overlooking the sea.
The storm had blown itself away, leaving a sky studded with stars.
To her left, rags of cloud were flying across the face of a three-quarter moon. Vanessa leaned against the deck’s railing, letting the breeze and the play of the heavens cool her. North American native people believed that when you died your soul went up to join the stars.
Now a single point of light detached itself from the canopy, shot across the blue-black night.
Dad? Gran? Brother Bartolomeo? The girl he had loved?
The star’s light went out, as if it had never existed, as if it had had no part in the shaping of this universe. Stars were random explosions of gas, nothing more. There was no divine plan, no ascension out of the nameless blameless pain of day-to-day existence. The elements, like the sea breaking against the rocks at the bottom of Gran’s backyard, had no care for the paltry existence of humans.
The deck was equipped with a hot tub. Vanessa turned it on, lit the candles in the glass globes of a wrought-iron floor candelabra, brought her boom box out onto the deck and slipped Paul Simon’s Graceland into the CD tray. The house shielded her from the road. Unless someone pulled right up to the dock at the bottom of the garden, nobody could see her strip off her old York University track suit and underwear, tie up her mess of gold blond hair to lie in the water’s womb-like warmth.
Above her the moon sailed higher, laying a path of silver across the sea.
A chorus of candle flames danced inside their globes.
This fickle light, wavering on every passing breath of air, was the kind by which Brother Bart would have written. Her painstaking delivery of the ancient words into modern English had imprinted his story on her heart:
The chief found a hut for me, and the women laid out fruits and fish and drink. Then the chief returned the soldiers’ muskets as a gesture of trust and they began to relax a little, even Jose.
During the next few days I kept noticing the women, their wrists, ears, necks decorated with jewelled gold. When the sun rose they shook off their skins. Under them their cotton tops were pinned up to leave their breasts exposed. There was one particular young woman who, every time I needed food or a drink, brought it to me and I could not help admiring the grace in her long legs and her breasts so high and firm and virginal. When I thanked her the smile she returned was full of sunlight, warming the very marrow of my monk’s bones. Her name was Mia. One day she packed a basket and led me away, up a path through the woods into a small mountain pasture. I thought she had been detailed to show me something, a sacred shrine perhaps. Small birds twittered amongst the surrounding trees. Yellow, blue, orange butterflies flitted among the stalks of the many coloured wildflowers while high overhead an eagle circled.
She spread a beautifully woven cotton rug and then proceeded to disrobe, her bracelets jingling, as if this were the most natural state, and the sun glowed on the roundness of her buttocks and breasts, the long slope of her back, the tautness of her thighs. She must, Heavenly Father, have been amongst Your most perfect creations.
She did not appear to know that monks must remain celibate, and I know that I am supposed to believe that this was my test: temptation proffered as surely as Satan offered it to Blessed Jesus in the desert.
But as she helped me off with my monk’s robe, so that for the first time in forty-odd years of memory I too could glory in the sun’s warmth, the breeze on my skin, I thought that one could also, with the genuine sincerity of honest contemplation, take the view that it was You leading me, that if she was offering herself to me, I should give thanks for the opportunity to join myself to the perfection of Your creation. For You must know, dear Father, that there was, in the miraculous hours that followed, something much more precious in that mountain meadow than simple carnal gratification. It is a moment I hold sacred.
Mia told me, through hand sketches and sign language, that she was a half-breed, a baby born of a native to this village who had been impregnated by a Spanish prospector. Her mother had died in childbirth.
The tribe had raised Mia, but now it was time for her to begin a life of her own. Because of her racial impurity, none of the tribe’s sons had chosen her. She thought I had a kind face and a mighty heart.
I listened and knew, in spite of a lifetime devoted to You, that here in the arms of this innocence was where a man’s truest communion was to be found. Never, even in church, had I felt this sense of total acceptance, of wholeness. Could there be a greater sweetness? Mia felt it too, and I could not bring myself to believe that such gentle loving, the touch of her fingers light as a butterfly’s wings on my body, and such towering, shuddering, monumental joy could be any kind of sin against You. Hours of prayer, listening for Your voice, have not touched this, Father, in spite of what happened next …
High above the hot tub the three-quarter moon had a face. Her eyes were full of compassion, her nose long and straight, her mouth declining judgment though she had been there four hundred years ago, had witnessed the whole story.
The jangle of Gran’s phone brought Vanessa up out of the water, a tidal wave sloshing over the lip of the tub as, before she knew what she was doing, she was standing naked and dripping on the living room’s hardwood floor.
Uncle Vilhelm’s real estate agent was sorry to call so late, but thought he’d seen a light. And since she was there, would she please have the house looking presentable for a showing tomorrow morning?
Politeness, acquiescence. Why? “Before anyone comes to view the place,” Brigit had advised on that first night, before the phone had died:
“Burn something really vile smelling, rubber preferably.”
Gran’s house had been in the family for six generations. Vanessa had been coming here every summer since the age of fifteen. Her father’s and now Gran’s deaths had settled a clammy emptiness into the house, but if it sold Vanessa would lose the only place she had left to call home. Uncle William — Vilhelm, according to Adrian, as in the Kaiser who had worn one of those metal hats with a spike — had put it up for sale the day after Gran’s funeral. There was no choice, he had said. His share of the taxes and upkeep was too costly and the value of a heritage home on Chester’s waterfront meant that Vanessa, her mother and brother could not afford to buy him out.
Vanessa wrapped herself in Gran’s towel robe, made tea, sat back down at the dining room table and picked up her pen.
II
YESTERDAY’S STORM HAD GIVEN THE lilac bush, in full bloom at the bottom of the garden, and the blue spruce beyond the deck a shiny, freshly scrubbed look as they danced on the wind. Whitecaps raced on a sea coloured blue by the morning sky.
Vanessa had found Gran’s ancient rubber bathing cap with knobbles on it stuck to the back of one of her dresser drawers. She pictured herself laying a fire, saw the bathing cap curl into the flames, begin to melt. But any vile smell would go straight up the chimney. She would have to close the damper, but then the smoke would billow out into the room, set off the fire alarm — and now here came her father’s voice:
Are you sure this is the right choice?
Vanessa dropped the bathing cap onto the coffee table, wrapped the diary into its embroidered cloth, packed it and her translation into the metal box and left the house.
Up at the top of the hill beside Chester’s white clapboard library, Mademoiselle Durocher’s ancient white “float mobile” (Adrian’s word) sat in the librarian’s parking space.
“Vanessa, oh my dear!” The old lady came out from behind her desk.
She must be over seventy by now but she looked exactly as she had for the last eighteen years: the collar of her fake silk blouse a size too large, with a filigree silver dragonfly at the neck. Vanessa would have liked to hug her but theirs had never been a touching friendship.
Mlle Durocher took in the smudges under Vanessa’s eyes, the metal box she was carrying. Tipping her head toward the wood-paneled reading room across the hall, she brushed a finger across her lips. A man in his late forties was sitting with his back to them at a table beside the tiled fireplace.
Document scrolls curled on the tabletop as he made notes. His styled salt and pepper hair, pink golf shirt and freshly pressed khaki slacks made the library’s threadbare little collection of reference books look shabby. Mlle Durocher motioned Vanessa toward the kitchen where a sign on the door read, “Employees Only.”
“You sit, chérie, while I make us a nice cup of tea. It is early yet, the library will take care of itself.”
“Who is that man, Mademoiselle?”
“Phttt, an American,” The old librarian was not impressed. “He says he is interested in Oak Island.”
A red and white checked cloth still covered the kitchen’s small table; a spider plant still sunned itself on the window ledge.
“Milk, no sugar. You see how I remember?” The old lady brought two chipped mugs full of tea and sat across from Vanessa. “Now tell me, you are in Chester because your Gran’s house has sold?”
“No, I …” Vanessa looked into her lap. Sympathy would undo her, release the ricocheting pain of losses she had not come here to cry about. “I just need some time to think.”
A new diamond as large as a pebble hung from Mlle Durocher’s ring finger as she pushed Vanessa’s mug across the table. Vanessa reached out to touch it.
“What’s this, Mademoiselle?”
“Oh,” The old lady drew her hand back. “I have a friend. The ring is too big but it was his mother’s.”
“Really!”
“What?” Mlle Durocher’s blue eyes snapped. “You think that because I am old, because I have spent my life dusting library shelves and stamping other people’s books and reading, reading, that enfin I should not get a life?”
Vanessa sipped her tea. “What’s his name? Does he come to the library? Can I meet him?”
Mlle Durocher fingered her dragonfly, flicked her eyes over Vanessa’s face looking for mockery. She found none.
“He is Robert. He lives in Halifax and yes, you will meet him. Now, would you like to tell me what is in your box?”
Vanessa found a smile. How snug, safe, cozy was this sunny kitchen, how fine to be sitting here again.
After the Oak Island bicycle trip that first summer, Mademoiselle Durocher had steered Vanessa toward a shelf full of books about Nova Scotia’s history, pirates, treasure. Vanessa had begun to take refuge there as it turned out the librarian was an expert on Oak Island’s two hundred-year old, multi-million dollar treasure hunt.
“Gran and my Dad say the whole treasure hunt is a hoax,” Vanessa had told her.
“Do they?” The old lady’s faded blue eyes had sparked behind her glasses. “And do they also explain why pirates ships were sneaking about, hiding throughout Mahone Bay’s three hundred islands during those years? And what the wooden cribwork for an ancient cofferdam under the sea in Smith’s Cove was for? And what about the stones with a G cut into them, the antique iron scissors, dagger, boatswain’s whistle, the copper coin, the brass buckle? Are they aware that some of these finds have been radio-carbon dated at sometime between 1490 and 1660?”
“Dad says everything they’ve found could have been left by early settlers or explorers.”
“Ah, that Carl Holdt has been away too long. He needs to read the records.” Mlle Durocher’s hand swept toward the books. “There is no question that the young colonist Daniel McGinnis decided to explore the little island at the back of the bay one spring day in 1795. He could easily row the two hundred yards from the mainland. What he found — the depression in the ground at the base of an oak tree on the east end of the island, cut stumps and new, young oak trees growing between them — is a matter of record, as are the layer of flagstones he and his friends dug up two feet under the depression, then the flooring of oak logs ten feet under that, more dirt then a second oak floor at twenty feet.” Mlle Durocher smiled. “But then the work got too hard.
“They filled in the shaft, covered it with brush, and eight years passed before anyone came back.”
“Eight years!”
The old lady’s shoulders lifted.
“Think. Who was here then? Natives and immigrants: British, Scottish, Irish, Dutch, French, Germans who would rather swear allegiance to the British Crown than live in revolutionary America. These people were much too busy fishing and clearing the land to take any interest in digging for treasure.”
Word of McGinnis’ find had kept circulating however, until in 1803 a Nova Scotia colonel, a surveyor, a town clerk and Justice of the Peace, a sheriff and some businessmen started the first Oak Island treasure hunting company. At thirty feet they found a third log platform, covered with charcoal. The logs at forty feet were covered with blue clay. At fifty feet smooth beach stones covered in strange symbols lay across the logs. At sixty feet they found manila grass and coconut fibre. At ninety feet a large flat stone was cut with strange symbols — circles, squares, dots. Decoders said the message read “two million pounds are buried here,” but when the treasure hunters dislodged the stone the sea oozed up from underneath. By the next morning the shaft was under sixty feet of water.
“Their money soon ran out, and another forty years went by,” said Mlle Durocher.
The next consortium sank a hand-turned drill down through the water to one hundred and five feet. It bored through five inches of spruce then, a foot below that, four inches of oak, then twenty inches of metal in small pieces, then eight more inches of oak, twenty more inches of metal, four more inches of oak, then hard clay. Three tiny gold chain links that came up with the drill convinced them they had found treasure chests cleverly buried below the water level. The shaft’s originator had hidden shallow intake shafts lined with coconut fibre under the beach stones at Smith’s Cove then angled a five-hundred-foot tunnel down to meet the vertical shaft one hundred and ten feet below the surface.
Directional markers such as stones laid in the shape of a triangle with a plumb line running through it were later found.
The treasure hunters dammed the Smith’s Cove tunnel and dug shafts all around the original one, trying to pump out the seawater, but then the whole bottom of the treasure shaft caved in.