I Dug Up My Mother's Fig Tree Because She Swore There Was Gold Under It

She Asked About the Tree Every Sunday

My mother has lived in the same house in Kensington, Johannesburg, since 1971. My father planted a fig tree in the back corner of the garden the year they moved in, and for fifty years it has dropped purple fruit onto the lawn every February, attracting every mousebird and every wasp in the suburb.

About two years ago, my mother started forgetting things. Small things first. Her reading glasses, the name of the man at the chemist, whether she had already fed the dog. Then bigger things. She once asked me, quite politely, whether my father would be home for supper, though he died in 2009.

But there was one thing she never forgot. Every single Sunday, when I visited, at some point in the afternoon she would look out the kitchen window towards the back of the garden and say, "Don't let anybody cut that tree. Your father's coins are under it."

Nobody Believed Her, Including Me

My sister in Durban thought it was the illness talking. My wife thought it was a story my father had told her once as a joke that had lodged itself in her mind. I thought, honestly, that it did not matter either way. If it comforted her to believe there was treasure in the garden, I was not going to argue with her about it.

The doctor at the memory clinic said that people with her condition often hold onto older memories much more firmly than recent ones. "If she is going to remember something accurately," he said, "it is likely to be something from forty years ago, not last Tuesday." I nodded and filed it away and did not think about the fig tree.

The Money Problem

Last year it became clear that my mother could not stay alone in the house anymore. She had left the stove on twice. She had gone for a walk and been found by a kind neighbour at the corner of Queen Street, not sure which way was home. My sister and I spent weeks visiting frail care homes on the East Rand and in the northern suburbs, sitting in reception areas that smelled of floor polish and boiled vegetables, trying to imagine our mother there.

The one we both liked best, with a garden and a nurse who called every resident by name, needed a deposit that neither of us could easily put together. My sister had just paid her son's university fees. I had just been retrenched from a logistics company after twenty-two years and was living on my package and some freelance bookkeeping.

We sat in my car after the visit and did sums on the back of the brochure. The sums did not work. The house would have to be sold eventually, but not quickly, and not before she moved.

The Sunday I Got the Spade Out

The next Sunday, my mother looked out the window and said it again. "Your father's coins are under that tree."

And something in me, maybe tiredness, maybe desperation, said, "Where under the tree, Ma?"

She did not hesitate. She said, "On the side by the wall. Where the tap is. He put it in a jar."

I went out to the garage, found my father's old spade with his initials burned into the handle, and started digging beside the wall where the garden tap is. My wife came out after ten minutes to ask what I was doing. My mother watched from the kitchen window with an expression I had not seen on her face in a long time. She looked alert.

The ground under a fifty-year-old fig tree is mostly roots. I dug for an hour and a half. I was sweating through my shirt and starting to feel foolish when the spade hit something that was not root and was not stone. It made a dull clink.

It was a glass Consol jar, the kind my mother used to make apricot jam in, with a rusted lid. Inside, wrapped in a yellowed piece of a 1983 Star newspaper, were six gold coins.

Sitting on the Lawn With Six Springboks

I sat down on the lawn with the jar in my lap and could not speak. My wife came and sat next to me. My mother came out of the kitchen, slowly, holding the door frame, and walked across the grass to us.

She looked at the coins and said, "There. I told you." Then she said my father had bought one each year from 1978 until 1983, when he got the bonus from the mine, and that they had buried them because he did not trust banks after something that happened to his brother. She told the whole story clearly, with dates. It was the longest coherent conversation I had had with her in a year.

Then she asked if I would like a cup of tea, and went inside, and by the time I came in she had forgotten the coins entirely and was asking where the dog was.

Not Knowing Anything About Gold

I knew nothing about Krugerrands except that they existed and that my uncle used to talk about them at Christmas. I did not know what six were worth. I did not know whether the ones that had been in the ground for forty years were damaged. I did not know who you even take such things to without being taken advantage of.

That night I sat up with my laptop and searched Where to Sell Krugerrands, feeling slightly like a man in a heist film. I read for hours. I learned that the price moves with the gold price every day, that condition matters to some buyers and not others, and that you should never accept the first number anyone gives you without understanding how they got there.

My sister phoned the next morning, having heard from my wife, and the first thing she said was, "Don't sell them to someone at a flea market." I had not been planning to, but I appreciated the warning.

Asking Around Before Deciding

Over the next two weeks I did what my father would have done, which was ask everyone I knew and trust no one immediately. A friend from my old job had sold a coin when his daughter got married and told me what he had learned. A neighbour of my mother's, a retired accountant, sat with me at her kitchen table and explained the difference between the gold value and anything extra a buyer might pay.

I searched again, more specifically this time, for Where to Sell Krugerrands Near Me, because I did not want to drive six gold coins across the province in my old Corolla. I phoned three places in Johannesburg, asked the same questions at each, and wrote down the answers in the notebook I use for my bookkeeping clients.

What I was really trying to find out was not the Best Place to Sell Krugerrands in some grand sense. It was simply somewhere that would explain the price to me in plain words, weigh them in front of me, and not make me feel like a fool for not knowing. In the end I chose the one where the person on the phone was patient with my questions and did not try to hurry me.

What the Coins Became

I sold five of them. I kept one, the 1978, the first one my father bought.

The money from the five covered most of the frail care deposit. My sister and I made up the rest between us. My mother moved in on a Tuesday in May. The nurse who calls everyone by name met her at the door and said, "Welcome, Mrs Naidoo," and my mother said, "Thank you, my dear," as if she were arriving at a hotel.

She does not remember the coins now. When I visit, she sometimes asks about the fig tree, and I tell her it is still there, which is true. The new owners of the house have promised not to cut it down. I made it a condition of the sale, which the estate agent said was the strangest clause she had ever written.

The 1978 coin sits in a small box in my desk drawer. Sometimes I take it out and think about my father, in 1983, digging that hole at night by the garden tap, and my mother holding the torch. Forty years later, when almost everything else had gone, she still knew exactly where he had put it.