Diggin' in the Dirt

So Uncle Jack was dead. Finally. Here we were, scrimping to make ends meet, and he takes years to drop off his perch. Years of crippling mortgages and groaning credit card bills. Jack was loaded, but he never gave us a dime. Nada, rien, nix. He went to live in that cabin in the woods, to chop wood, write and sketch and walk that dumb dog. Hemingway. I mean seriously, who calls their dog Hemingway?

As Uncle Jack never married, there were only two of us nieces in line to inherit. He could have paid for new homes for us without breaking a sweat, and put his grandchildren through Ivy League schools, but: “One day you’ll understand I was doing you a favour,” he would say, with that knowing smile of his and those piercing blue eyes. Those eyes that always freaked me out, like you were a joke only he understood. And off he sloped into the woods, wearing his thrift store clothes, with his beard and his dog and that Moleskine notebook of his.

Back in the day, Uncle Jack was a real force to be reckoned with. His nickname on Wall Street was Jack the Knife. Then out of the blue he had his great epiphany. Driving his Porsche downtown one day, he hit a pedestrian. Some random woman called Amy Stevens. Single mom in her forties - worked as a maid at the Carlyle. She survived, but couldn’t work anymore. Uncle Jack went to see her in the hospital every day, paid her bills, then set her up in an apartment somewhere in Brooklyn. She had a kid, a boy called George or Fred or something. Uncle Jack took an interest in him too. He took more interest in that maid and her kid than he ever took in us.

But finally now we would come into our own. It was ironic. We’d waited so long, and the day the will was read it was our silver wedding anniversary. Uncle Jack’s attorney, Elliot Friedman, called us to say the will would be read after the funeral at that rundown hick hotel near Uncle Jack’s place. Jack had left instructions to be cremated and for his ashes to be scattered on his favourite spot in the woods, overlooking a ravine. Whatever. Not so much as a gravestone, but what the heck.

We drove up in our S-Class Mercedes that ought to have been upgraded to the new model two years ago, but thanks to Uncle Jack we couldn’t afford it. We nearly drove into a ditch on the parking lot outside the hotel Back of Beyond, or whatever it was called. A young, shabbily dressed man walked up to us, smiling.

“Hey, I’m George,” he said, putting his hand out, you know like we were going to pee ourselves with joy. Hemingway was following him around now. Kid was welcome to the scrawny runt.

You couldn’t even call it a funeral. There was just a handful of us, plus Elliot Friedman. George said he’d see to the scattering of Jack’s ashes himself. Who cared?

So, we all trouped to the Back of Beyond hotel, shack, whatever, and ate a forgettable lunch and sat down to hear the will reading. Elliot sat at the head of an old oak table they used for private functions at the hotel. Couldn’t see how it could get much use in that place. Like what would they have to celebrate?

Elliot looked sad. Maybe he was wearing his funeral face. George sat down near the window, away from the table. I didn’t see he needed to be there at all. Some people have no sense of decency. Elliot opened his briefcase and slowly took out a large brown envelope and a battered Moleskine notebook. Must have been the one Uncle Jack had always had stuffed into his jacket pocket. Slowly and carefully, Elliot unfolded the thick vellum paper of Uncle Jack’s will. He had one of those droning, slightly pompous, faithful retainer kind of voices:

“I, Jack Henry Sylvester, being of…..” - Oh, get on with it!

“Do bequeath…..” - At last!

“…to each of my nieces, Jessica Jane Walters and Ashleigh May Burgeon, the sum of $20,000.” Friedman paused and looked up. Silence.

Jessica spluttered and looked over at me. Her husband Grant looked down into his lap. Was that a smile on his face?

“There must be some mistake!” I said.

“No, no mistake,” said Elliot, with irritating calm. “If I may continue?”

He raised his eyebrows for a moment, looked back down at the will, but did not wait for a reply.

“To my adopted son, George Emerson Stevens Sylvester…”

“You’ve got to be kidding me!” I heard myself shouting. I realised I was standing.

“I must ask you to sit down and calm yourself until I’ve finished,” Elliot said as firmly as he could without raising his voice.

I felt my husband tugging at my sleeve.

“Sit down, honey,” he said quietly. He said everything quietly. That was his trouble. Still, I sat down. I could hear my heart thumping in my rib cage.

“To my adopted son, George Emerson Sylvester,” Elliot continued, “I likewise leave the sum of $20,000.”

I was so dazed, I’m not sure I even heard everything else. Eventually, Friedman stopped reading and folded up the papers, ready to put them back in his briefcase.

I felt as if someone had glued me to my chair. I looked past George’s silhouette, out of the window. Trees as far as the eye could see.

“I don’t understand.” It was my voice, but it sounded far away, like it belonged to someone else.

“What happened to all that money?”

Elliot looked across the table at me, his briefcase still open. A shaft of light fell across the oak table.

“Your uncle made certain dispositions with his property some years ago,” he said, with that annoyingly patient tone of his.

“Certain dispositions,” I repeated. I hated sounding like a retard. Bradley and Grant gave each other a silent look across the table. They weren’t going to be any help. Jessica was still opposite me, tears on her cheeks.

“Yes,” Elliot answered, sounding almost bored.

“Soon after moving away from New York City, your uncle set up a property trust and tied up most of his fortune in real estate. Most of the income goes to charitable causes, with a modest annual income going to George’s mother Amy, to keep her in her Brooklyn apartment.”

“Well, ain’t that sweet,” muttered Jessica darkly from the other side of the table.

“C’mon, honey, let’s go. There’s nothing more to do here,” said her husband, gently lifting her arm to get her up.

Elliot looked at me, then at her, and sighed. He closed his briefcase and reached for his jacket.

His eye fell on the battered old Moleskine notebook, still lying on the oak table.

“Oh, I almost forgot,” he said, picking it up.

“Would any of you care to have this as a memento?” he asked, his eyebrows raised. “Jessica? Ashleigh?”

I thought I heard Jessica snort. She was on her feet now, already heading for the door.

George, who had so far said nothing, stood up slowly and hesitantly, looking a little embarrassed.

“If no one else wants it…” he started to say.

Jessica turned and left the room, dabbing at her eyes with a tissue. I followed her out the door and we made for the parking lot.

“I can’t believe we waited twelve years for $20,000!” I said, as we got into our car.

“Can we contest it?” I asked, looking over at my husband.

He gave me a look that said it all: what, contest the will and risk losing the little we had in legal fees? We were no match for Manhattan trust funds. Uncle Jack had stitched us up but good.

“Let’s get outta here,” I said, leaning back on the headrest. So off we drove, out of Hicksville, back to our mortgages and our groaning credit cards. Great Silver Wedding anniversary!

Elliot Friedman smiled a rare smile at George as he handed him the battered, stained old Moleskine.

“I’m sure Jack would have wanted you to have it,” he said.

George looked down sadly at the book, running a work-calloused hand over the soft black cover.

“The times I saw him pull this out of his jacket pocket and jot something down, or just sit and sketch something..” he said, thoughtfully.

“You know the history of the Moleskine?” George asked.

There was another rare smile as Elliot nodded.

“Sure,” he said. “Jack told me about the iconic notebooks used by writers and artists in Europe in the 19th and 20th centuries – people like Hemingway.”

“Yeah,” answered George, “and then an Italian company called Modo & Modo resurrected them in the 1990s. It was a huge success.”

Hesitating for a second, George pulled off the built-in stretch band that secured the notebook and opened it. He recognized his Uncle’s handwriting on the front page. Smiling, George flicked through the pages and saw notes, sketches and doodles.

He was about to close the Moleskine and secure it again with the band when he saw something sticking out of the inside fold of the cover. There is a side pocket built into the cover of Moleskines – handy for stowing stray bits of paper when on the move. Slowly, he pulled a small envelope out of it. Handing the Moleskine back to Elliot to free his hands, he carefully opened the envelope and peered inside. It contained two stamps. He lifted them out.

“What are these doing here?” he said.

“Show me,” said Elliot, turning to stand beside George to see what he had in his hand.

“Well, I’ll be….” said Elliot, his voice trailing off.

“What?”

Slowly, imperceptibly, like a rumbling freight train coming toward you from a great distance across a vast expanse of land, George heard something like a low chuckling noise emerging from deep inside the lawyer.

“Son of a gun,” he laughed. Then he looked at George.

“What you have here, son,” he said, “is a Prussian Blue, Silver Jubilee King George V shade error stamp. They’re very rare, and very valuable!”

“How valuable?” asked George.

“Oh, around $20,000 dollars, I’d guess,” said Elliot.

“So…..”

“So, by my reckoning son, you just doubled your inheritance, right there!”

“Well, I’ll be….”

“Exactly!” said Elliot, now chuckling openly.

“But then there’s the other one.”

“Is that valuable too?” asked George, feeling a little giddy.

“Unless I’m very much mistaken, young man, what you’ve got there is what is known as an Inverted Jenny. An even greater rarity. You see how the airplane is upside down?” he said.

“Stamp collectors love rare mistakes.”

“How much do you think it’s worth?” George asked.

“Well, we’d need to get it checked out, but the last one I heard about fetched $1.6 million at auction.”

George laughed and threw his head back. “1.6 million?!!”

George suddenly stopped laughing.

“Just think,” he said. “Ashleigh or Jessica could’ve gone home today with over $1.5 million right in their wallets.”

“Yeah,” said Elliot. “But I’m pretty sure Jack knew neither of them would be interested in some dirty old Moleskine.

“They should’ve known what you and Jack knew. If you want real silver and gold, you’ve gotta do some diggin’ in the dirt.”