The Oak Island Affair

by Jane Bow

  So what in hell had she been trying to prove by jumping into the freezing Canadian sea and then smiling up at him? “Come on in!” Was she trying to give him a hard-on or a heart attack?

  Sanger’s feet struck the pavement in time with his breathing. Sweat dripped off his chin. The breeze along the bayside road carried the scent of lilacs. Above his head chestnut trees shielding some of Chester’s prettiest white clapboard houses were clouds of white orchid-like blossoms. Ahead, past the cenotaph, a little road led out onto the peninsula where her house was.

  When Vanessa’s little pixie bitch friend had pushed past him last night, the red sweatshirt she was wearing had smelled of salt and smoke. From where? The white Olds she had gotten out of belonged to the librarian. Which meant that—Christ where had his brain been? Vanessa, her friend and the librarian they spent so much time with were plotting against him. Sanger’s feet pounded the road.

  So let them scheme. By the end of today he’d own Oak Island. He should go up to the house now, bang on the door. Vanessa would open up, stand there half asleep in her nightie, so surprised, and before she could say anything he’d come right in. Get her into her bedroom, lock the door, take a handful of that nightie and do what he’d planned last night, what they both wanted. Shut her up with a kiss before the pixie bitch disturbed them and this time there would be no “Ed?” No polite backing off.

  Sanger’s breath was coming in short bursts now.

  Her breasts were so round and full. She’d be shocked but she’d love it and the pull of his lips would turn her nipples into little soldiers.

  He’d bend her over the bed, away from him, bum up and maybe he’d be a little rough. Some women liked that. And it might remind her that nobody plays Teach and wins.

  Ahead on his right, past a clump of bushes and an overhanging maple, was her front walk and the “For Sale” sign.

  The door opened. Sanger stopped. Watched the pixie bitch close it quietly. Turned away as she came down the front walk toward a rental Jeep parked in the road. He jogged back the way he had come.

  Christ, was the pixie bitch Vanessa’s guardian angel?

  Your guardian angel more likely, dumb-ass, because think it through. You want to wind up in a Canadian criminal court?

  He turned right at the cenotaph, up toward the bay on the other side of town. Pixie bitch would not drive this way.

  The road back to the highway was uphill. Good. He pushed himself.

  Get a grip, man. The woman has been blinding your mind, clouding your vision from the get-go. He increased his speed. Get the blood flowing up instead of down for Chrissake.

  The deals he had made yesterday had secured his ownership of all of Oak Island — except one lot. Last night one of the treasure hunters had admitted to selling it last month to the librarian, had not told him for fear of skewing the sale, damn him to hell. Still, the librarian’s purchase offer had been accepted but the sale would not close until the day after tomorrow. The treasure hunter would own the lot until it did. So stop being distracted by a siren’s golden hair and silky body. Talk the treasure hunter into closing your deal now, today. Then let the old lady fight it out in court, if she can afford to. In the meantime who would stop him from putting a fence and gate across the whole approach to the causeway, from forbidding any water access? The highway ahead of Sanger levelled out, a short respite before the last push up the driveway.

  Back in his room Sanger blotted his face with a towel. He had a meeting set for Monday morning with the government players in Halifax.

  He would show them signed deeds of purchase. And if they asked to sponsor a federally controlled archaeological program on his land?

  No problem. Deliver it in a nice tight time frame and he would cooperate.

  Ownership of all treasure found by the program to be held by the people of Canada?

  Sure, just give me a guaranteed tax exemption in return. Sanger chuckled. Because by the time the bureaucracy had finished churning out the necessary forms, what two-bit Canadian government archaeologist was going to dig up anything that Sanger wouldn’t already have taken out of the ground?

  As for Vanessa Holdt and her little conspiracy—

  Inspirations, solutions come in flashes. Sanger lifted the telephone, gave his morning orders. Then, humming, he headed first for the shower, then downstairs where a masseuse and his breakfast were waiting.

  The dawn’s first glow shot across the silver-black sea and was gone as Brigit pushed the duvet back, swung her legs out of the bed. She could not sleep. “You could have been killed!” she had shouted last night, once Blackbeard was out of the way. “Just what kind of menace have you become, Van, first throwing things, then jumping off ships into the freezing ocean?” Vanessa had always been the careful one. Now she was a derailed train running full tilt, all communication lost. So how could Brigit sit across from her sipping morning coffee as if nothing had happened? Also, she looked at her hand. A thin pink scab had formed across her palm, the skin around it taut, sore. How could she not admit to taking Dancer out and capsizing her? Although Vanessa would find that out soon enough when they met Mlle Durocher today.

  Brigit pulled on a heavy woollen sweater and jeans and tiptoed out to her car. She would use this early hour to sneak onto Oak Island, to sit by the headstone again. Yesterday the energy had been immediate.

  Today she would focus on it, and on erosion, and see what came.

  Mlle Durocher’s boat was padlocked to the jetty. Brigit was standing at the causeway, screwing up her courage to run across, when a man came out of the treasure hunter’s bungalow, walked over to the old museum building and disappeared inside. Damn! What was he doing up this early?

  Brigit took a deep breath. Everything that happens in life has a part to play in the whole, that’s what the maharishi had said. So what was the meaning of this? She looked at the sea, still rippling black on this mainland side of the island. Another hour would pass before the light reached it.

  Erosion, Robert had said, pointing to the Oak Island shoreline at South Cove, beyond the treasure hunter’s bungalow. She was turning away when the answer came, sudden as the glow across the dawn:

  Of course! Erosion of so many things. Brigit moved off into the weeds facing the island, sat down and crossed her legs, closed her eyes.

  The dawn’s first glow shot across the silver-black sea and was gone as Vanessa lay dreaming of her dad leaning over her shoulder, poring over the pages of the diary with her, both of them so happy—

  Something percussive — a bird striking the window? A branch knocking? — snatched away sleep.

  A note from Brigit was leaning against the kettle. “Meet you at the causeway at 1 pm.” Last night she had been so angry. Vanessa pulled her bathrobe closer, made tea, took it in to sit, legs tucked under her on the couch. Alone.

  Again. Alone with a full, spent, lunatic’s moon hanging just above the tree line on the other side of the bay. Was that the real reason she had gone sailing with Sanger? Because when you are alone what is there left to lose?

  Still, she could not help smiling a little at the memory of flying off the yacht’s railing. Free!

  Of what?

  The thrust of Sanger’s kiss, the power of his desire, the strength of the purpose in which he’d lost himself, her fear.

  Face it Vanessa, all men — Ed, Brigit’s Daniel, Charlie — attracted women for the purpose of getting what they needed. I love you, Charlie had told her. And meant it. But what exactly was love, to him? Breasts, a vagina, a sense of humour; men used women to salve their wounds, replenish their energies for the ongoing take-what-you-can battle they called making a living.

  So now here she was again, sitting on one of life’s park benches, pigeons pecking at her feet. Alone.

  Don’t fight the pain, Brigit would say. Don’t try to rationalize or make sense of it. Don’t make a plan. Just breathe: in, out, sitting still, hands in lap.

  Sorrow, grief, fear gathered strength, tightened her jaw.
In … pain building, squeezing the cords in her neck, knotting her stomach. Out … echoing, shaking her bones, rattling her teeth. In …

  Cresting. Out … breaking into white plumes of memory. The Altamira fishermen’s widows, dressed all in black, were statues standing at the end of the beach beside the red, blue, green fishing dories drawn up on the sand, staring out at the careless sea. The wind teased their black wool skirts, plucked at their shawls but still, waiting for the husbands who would never come home, they did not move. If you crept close, you could see in their eyes that they had removed all but their bodies to some other place. In …

  Out … now Vanessa was back in her classroom in Spain, dirty windows gummed shut, uniformed students confined to their seats, working silently in the heat because the nuns would tie you to your chair if you misbehaved. In …

  Out … when her father had brought the family back to Canada Vanessa had gone to a high school where teachers assigned group work, nobody checking to see who was concentrating and who was wandering, exchanging notes, making dates. There had been no strappings, no expulsions. No nothing. Failing, lying, raping, killing, everything here in Canada happened behind closed doors, in boardrooms and bedrooms in the dead of a winter gale while the television blared and shoppers streamed, glassy eyed, through the malls. In—

  Where was the passion, the real, the cruel, the glorious mesh of mind and voice and body?

  Return to the breath. Meditating is not thinking. Out.

  Passion, on a Canary Island beach five years ago. On Brother Bartolomeo’s Columbian mountainside four hundred years ago.

  Could there be a greater sweetness? I could not bring myself to believe that such gentle loving, the touch of her fingers light as a butterfly’s wings, such towering, shuddering, monumental joy was wrong.

  Love as passion, was that what she had lost with Altamira, and again with her father’s death, and finally with Charlie? Passion, the spark that ignites life, that pours color into a page of research, immortalizes as memory the moments you share with someone you love. Gold stands for love, Grampa had said. That’s why it was there in all the stories.

  But where was passion here? In the gold that lay buried on Oak Island? Was that why everyone who went there got caught up in the Oak Island hunt, treasure hunters sinking their fortunes into it, losing again and again, sometimes even their lives? Because somewhere inside themselves they knew that the source of life was what they were looking for?

  Greed, Brigit had sensed layers upon layers of it on Oak Island. Was that why the gold had to stay buried?

  Thinking again. Breathe. In …

  Out … waves of thought pushing, tails of thought tugging. She watched them, trying to stay her course, to link heart and mind, to reach the fishermen’s widows’ place, the still centre. But trying was thinking, wanting. Don’t try, Brigit had told her the other day on Oak Island, just breathe. In …

  Out … surrender. Thoughts are electrical impulses, let go of them.

  In … Out …

  I lay very still, listening to my breathing. Pictures came, Mia in the meadow. I felt her body, her love, and how I cried. Then watched again as the pictures rose then faded. A life lived.

  Everything in life is connected, Brigit said. Brother Bart’s diary had been waiting here in Chester and she, Vanessa, had been the right person to find it, to know how to translate it, how to do the research.

  Thinking. I lay very still. In a grave the pirates had dug for him: a Chamber of Reflection, the Freemasons’ symbolic coffin watched over by the skull — the ancient Baphomet, Wisdom — and by two crossed human bones, the dark place in which, immobilized, silenced, they must enter the dark terrain of their own interiors, must search beyond prayers and plans and weapons for the place where “purification came through unity of the individual with the creativity of nature—”

  Thinking. In …

  Out … thoughts dissipating now. Into no place, a light place. In …

  Out … the story of Isis said Mlle D.’s voice, the first love story.

  The book had been lying on the coffee table, forgotten, since yesterday afternoon. Vanessa opened her eyes, abandoned the meditation. She did better with books.

  Isis, Osiris and Seth were all descendants of Egypt’s Atum, “the complete one,” who, rising out of the Nile, was symbolized in the pyramids. Isis loved the virtuous Osiris who was the first king of Egypt. One day Seth, who was jealous of Osiris, had him measured while he slept, and then had a sarcophagus built to fit him. At a feast Seth offered the richly adorned coffin to whomever it would fit. When Osiris lay down in it, Seth had his men nail the coffin shut and sent it off floating down the river. Isis searched all over the earth for her beloved Osiris. When finally she found him in the sarcophagus, she was so happy that a son, Horus, was conceived. Isis then hid Osiris in some marshes while she took Horus to a relative.

  In the meantime Seth, who was out hunting boar, found the chest with Osiris in it and tore his body into fourteen pieces which he threw away. Isis found all the pieces except the phallus which had been swallowed by a fish. Fashioning a wooden penis for Osiris, she fanned her bird’s wings over him, bringing him back to life. Horus grew up to avenge his father, but in battle with Seth one of his eyes was torn out. When finally he triumphed over Seth, Horus found his eye and gave it as protection to Osiris, who became Ruler of Eternity.

  “The bond between Isis and Osiris is the creative force of life,” Vanessa read, “for together they represent the universal soul. He is the flooding of the Nile, she is the earth the Nile covers, the Green Goddess.” Horus, their son, was worshipped by the Egyptians for thousands of years.

  Vanessa’s thoughts tumbled one into the next.

  The forces at work in nature and in human love were exactly the same. The active, thrusting male energy in all humans was virtuous but also prey to the desire for gain, for the golden sarcophagus. It could not, then, see beyond the confines of what resulted. The fertile female energy, meanwhile, would go to the end of life itself in order to find and receive the love for which it yearned. And the ancient Egyptians had figured all this out five thousand years ago!

  Love: the creative force of life, the feeling you got when a butterfly danced across the afternoon light, when a tiny violet caught the light in the woods, when a Beethoven sonata reached into you. When you looked the right man in the eye, love rearranged the shape of your universe.

  Interesting about the loss of Osiris’ phallus. Did the Egyptians equate machismo, greed, vulnerability to destruction with the male genitalia? And yet without the mighty phallus there could be no physical connection, no “flooding,” no new life.

  A photograph of Osiris showed two large painted eyes above him: the eyes of Horus, who was the product of perfect love. The eye on the American dollar bill. Above a pyramid.

  Vanessa clasped the book close to her in excitement, remembered the smile with which Mlle Durocher had given it to her.

  And Seth? He represented the opposing principle to Osiris, blind force, unregulated, unpredictable, ungovernable, everything that was destructive, that diminished life or took it away, ripped out what was, storms, lightning, and in people—

  Hitler, Saddam Hussein. Her own arm-flinging Flamenco dancer.

  “Seth has to be mastered, continually brought into the rule of the good.”

  Vanessa jumped up.

  I get it, Grampa! Gold stands for love, the force of growth, golden wheat growing by the Nile, golden love. Now if she could match the Oak Island clues to the thinking of the people who had laid them. Vanessa looked at her watch. The Halifax library would open in an hour. She would have plenty of time to drive there and back before one o’clock.

  XV

  THE LIBRARY WAS NEARLY EMPTY this early in the morning. Vanessa settled at a computer terminal at the end of the open stacks, under the window. Bringing up the Google search engine, she heard her father’s voice, the way she always did in research libraries and archives.

 
; The more specific you can be at the outset of your research, the deeper you can penetrate your subject. Vanessa typed in “Isis+Osiris +Horus” and clicked on Go.

  “Here’s to you, Dad.”

  Horus’ eye, given as protection to Osiris, was called the Eye of Eternity and although Alexander the Great had conquered the Egyptians in 332 BC, the story of Isis’ love had lived on, hidden in the Greeks’ secret Eleusinian Mysteries and later in King Solomon’s songs. Born of perfect love, the seeing eye appears in cultures around the world, as the eye of the Hindus’ Vishnu, and the eye of the Christians’ Holy Spirit. This was the seeing eye Sanger’s Freemasons, whose roots went back to the Knights Templar, had put on the American dollar bill, above a triangle-shaped pyramid, but what was the connection to Oak Island?

  Vanessa recalled the ancient knight carved into the cliff down the coast, and the ancient foundation that had been discovered at New Ross, up the Gold River which emptied into Chester Basin, where she had taken her swim, and where Brother Bart’s pirates had camped. She typed “Scottish Knights Templar+PopeClementV” into the computer.

  “This one’s for you, Grampa.”

  The Templar cross appeared on the screen. “The Scottish Knights Templar continued to exist after Pope Clement V’s purge, led by their Grand Master William St. Clair—”

  St. Clair. A different spelling, but the same name as Brother Bart’s captain! Vanessa hot-linked into a history of the St. Clairs.

  William the Blond of the Norman St. Clere family had been the first—

  There, the French connection, with the same St. Clere spelling as the name of Brother Bart’s pirate captain.