This Old Treasure

Ma always said, that in time of need, dig up the treasure in the basement.

We all knew about it. Ma had five sibs, and Da had ten at one time, though only six of the whole bunch lived to have kids. But we all knew. Da's great-great-great-great grandpa had buried a treasure in the basement of the house, and if we were ever in dire need, dig it up and use it.

Well. You can imagine what happened next!

Throw a rock at some of us cousins, and you'd get double the answers on what it really means to have a "dire need." One's wedding. Another's funeral. Jimmy's three kids having to go to college all at the same time. Clara's down payment on a second house.

Some, of course, were actual emergencies, but really, what is a "dire need"? Jase's surgery after he took out his own gall bladder running his motorbike off the road? Grandma's surgery to fix her broken hip? Mary's down payment on a new house when the old one burned?

Some days I think I'm the only one who hasn't asked for the treasure to get rich. Not really, but it sounds good. As a kid, I would make up fanciful reasons to do it, just because I wanted to know what was buried there. I needed a dog, that was an early one. Later it changed to needing a pony. Oh, a new vacuum cleaner - don't ask, there was a memorable incident at a Christmas get-together. Oh, yeah, bailing me out of jail for running a red light. I didn't even have a car then, much less a license. I tried the same one a year later, changing it to my bicycle to make it more believable.

A few of the idiot cousins became daredevils, coming up with more and more inventive ways to break themselves, just to see if their hospital run would be the one to finally break ground in the cellar. Most only came down with a spectacular case of being dead. The two that lived, we got nice wheelchairs and built ramps up the farm house's steps.

Did great-to-the-fourth grandpa rob a train of its gold? Were there family jewels? I wouldn't mind a tiara dripping in sapphires and diamonds, actually. I dreamed about a cache of Columbian emeralds from a secret voyage. Or a pirate that got away clean when the rest of the crew got caught. Maybe Great-four-Grandma was the captive that melted his murderous heart?

I speculated on how Great-four-Grandpa had gotten so wealthy, but only left a few grand to each of his three "extra" sons and one daughter. Nice, solid nest egg, especially in those days, but no fabulous wealth. The oldest son got the farm and house, natch.

But over time, I really had to wonder: what if, he didn't tell a yarn just to keep the family together? Hard to sell the farm when there's that treasure in the basement, you know? How would you figure that into the selling price? Yeah, every other farm in the county's going for high five figures, but we've got a family story, so a cool three mil please. Or ninety grand, and a backhoe, could you step off the property for a moment and look away before you take over?

Then the pandemic hit. Cousin George brought it to Thanksgiving dinner. All of us caught it, to one degree or another. We took up a whole wing at the hospital, for months. Even with most relatives dead and inheritance and selling the second houses and other stuff no one wanted or needed any more, we were going to take a major hit to the wallet. And heart. Dozens of funerals. The poor funeral home took pity on us and gave us a group rate. Lucky us.

So what better time to dig it up? We gathered at the house - now mine. Just me and my younger sister and five cousins, that was it out of the whole extended family. Hit us hard to see the huge empty table in the dining room, with chairs it would take a few generations to fill full up again.

None of us had ever been to the cellar at all - Great-great Grandpa had put a big lock on it, to keep sneaky-peeks out of trouble. We had to break that, since no one knew where the key was. And we were still weak from being sick. And we didn't know where to dig. It took days, shoveling up the whole thing. Cousin Jerry was the one to come up with the bright idea of renting a metal detector. We found every single lead pipe, and a few copper ones. Even the original clay ones. The water and septic systems they used to serve had been upgraded over the years; these were useless except as recycling.

I seriously wondered if one of my ancestors fed us a tall tale, like the ones I made up when I was a kid. Or if the "dire need" had already happened, and the money was gone to great-great-great Grandpa's furthering education or something. Or a hidden gambling debt, or maybe a secret family or two? We had nothing to go on.

We gave it up in disgust after a few days. Me and my little sis rattled around in the big house and brooded.

I started going through house stuff. Some I kept as part of the estate - that dratted vacuum cleaner which was now a family relic, the paintings and later photographs of seven going on eight generations of our family. The steamer trunks from marry-ins that emigrated later, and some of their clothing. That darned Rococo carved desk with that sharp corner that jutted into the hall, which I think every single dratted kid hit their head on and bled on the carpet underneath when we'd run screaming up and down the hall after too much pie.

Then I settled down to go through all the paperwork I'd collected from their rooms. Most were worthless, but there were a few treasures in their own right: the love letters Da sent Ma when he was stationed overseas. The receipts from Grandpa's honeymoon with Grandma. Birth and death certificates going back generations. Discharge papers, medals from wars I hardly knew about. Over time I scanned and took pictures, and gave copies to each cousin. They decided to do the same with their stuff, and we traded family info. Collected stories, too, since so many people were gone now. The original papers and mementos went in a big fire safe, to protect them for the future. I put that in the basement, on top of a nice new cement slab.

Speaking of fire, that's about when little sis found the original farm deed, and the sketch of the original homestead. And the newspaper article about the fire that burned the original farm house to the ground, and the barn too. We'd been looking in the wrong place the whole time!

So I called the cousins back. Now that we had the blueprints from the courthouse, it didn't take long to figure out they switched places. Both foundations were still good after the fire, but the first barn was bigger than the first house, and they needed that much more space for the whole family. New house was built over old barn, new barn was built over old house. We looked over at the barn. It wasn't in the best of shape, since we'd switched to crops over farm animals years ago. We still had a few critters, especially some milk cows and chickens. Our orchard was even creeping closer and closer to the far wall, as we'd planted more trees to keep it going.

Well, we planned carefully, and we only had to move one of the peach trees to get closest to the spot where the detector was beeping. See, we wanted to keep the barn if we could, Bessie and her friends still needed their stalls and hay. We could remove the boards there and there - you can still see the new paint, when we put them back - and keep the rest intact. Even that peach tree got replanted in the yard over there, since a master gardener from the big city college went utterly bonkers when he realized it was a species that no one even remembered outside a few turn-of-the-century books. He got a decent chunk of our harvest and some cuttings, and we'd all take a percentage of any profit from future sales of the new-old variety.

Grandma woulda been so proud, to know her peach cobbler was as special as we thought.

So. The box was sealed really well with wax when we pulled it out. I used the farm's front end loader to get it there, after using it to move the tree. The wax had cracked in places over time, but the box under it was wrapped in cloth, then lead. We realized the lead was in sheets, covering another smaller steamer trunk that looked like the smaller cousin of one from Grandma's bedroom. It was locked, so we decided to take it apart at the hinges instead.

Oh, we were so excited! So you can imagine the disappointment when we finally realized what was in there. Since I'm telling you this story from the exact spot where we opened the box, instead of my yacht on the Riviera, still sipping on homemade lemonade and not dry martinis, yeah you can almost see the blue streaks that sizzled the air when we stopped cussing.

Stocks to companies that had gone belly-up about as soon as the box was sealed. Aluminum ingots from the Napoleonic era. Currency from countries that don't exist anymore, but just pennies and other small common coins. Do you know what a "jeton" is? Neither did I. They're little counting tokens from overseas, and these weren't worth much either. "Secret" family recipes you can find during any internet search. Steel pins and needles with glass heads that came over on the boat with someone. Neat as curiosities and testament to what they thought was valuable in a bygone era, but worthless by modern standards. I use the darn thing as an ottoman in my bedroom upstairs.

The book we wrote about our family treasure hunt has made us more money than the stuff inside the box is worth. It took us longer to put the barn back together than it did to rip it up and do the digging, because we wanted to make sure it didn't fall in the middle of the night. And people like you come wandering down the lane for a tale and a piece of pie, in season. I don't mind farming now, I've gotten used to the rhythms of the years that Ma and Pa and Grandma and Grandpa seemed to breathe naturally. Little Sis found herself a swell guy, and they're getting married next fall. The cousins still come here for the holidays, with their new sweethearts.

Family treasure, eh? Yeah, sure, we have it. I figured that out later, when the disappointment wore off. Just not the treasure we thought we needed. And somehow, through every generation, we've either found the money to do what was needed, or we made do with what we had. And we will again.

Now, how about a slice of cherry pie with homemade whipped cream? Those cherry trees are special, too, another species you don't see anywhere else. That's why I planted a few more rows of trees, for future pies for my little sis' future kids. That poor arborist is going to cry the next time he comes, since I haven't even shown him our apple trees, beyond the ancient chestnut trees that somehow survived the blight...