The Treasure My Father Left Behind

by Charles C. Cole

My wife, Becca, and I were busy removing anything not nailed down from my late parents’ homegrown 1970s farm: estate auction house, truck bed full of recovered metal, and rented dumpster for the rest. This included hauling Cushman’s Bakery crates stuffed with moth-eaten mohair coats and National Geographic magazines through an attic trapdoor in a tight closet. When we were done, my lawyer brother would make arrangements to get the place repainted and re-carpeted before listing it for sale.

Dad had been dead just over two years. Mom, his widow, not even a month. My sisters squabbled over vintage china and Mom’s favorite recipe books (with amusing handwritten notes in the margins). The grandsons wanted his pocket knives, his chainsaws and his peavy. My brother, the eldest of five siblings, wanted cash. I, the youngest, only wanted to turn back the clock. My mother had said my brother was the brains and I was the heart.

My folks had lived on forty quiet acres of piney woodland, surrounded by three hundred acres or so of undeveloped exurban Maine forest. Towards the end of my parents’ lives, my wife and I had moved down the street, into the nearest neighborhood, in part to make it easier to take one or the other of them on doctor consultations, or to leave the kids doing homework while we primed the well pump after a power outage, or so I wouldn’t have far to travel after a late night of cribbage with the old man.

The ’rents had a small sparse lawn: never fertilized, splotches of white crocuses would herald spring, followed by a bounty of purple violets, and shy red trillium at the woods’ edge. In the center, there was a rock the size of a dining room table. It had been in the way when Dad had cleared the lot to pour the foundation footer. Dad’s novel solution: “install” the thing in the middle of the front yard like a neolithic millstone.

Eventually, pale jonquils tucked tightly around the edges, a scraggly maple grew up in the shadow of that rock. To the lowest branch, with a final flourish, Dad once hung a cow bell wind chime, a desperate act akin to affixing a bright pink bow to a sad dead car waiting to be retrieved by the National Kidney Foundation.

Death was not a mystery for my family. Cancer got them both, as it had taken both their mothers before them, and my wife’s mother. Dad fought longer, maybe because he had his spouse around for support (or to worry about how she’d survive without him). Mom, alone and tired and still exhausted from the familiar bumpy road with Dad, lasted mere months, from diagnosis to the end of the second weekend after her first radiation treatment.

The big mystery: Where had Dad hidden Mom’s cache of South African gold Krugerrands, worth several thousands of dollars? For many years Mom had received these birthday collectibles from my grandmother as sort of a long-term investment fund. Once someone had stumbled upon them in Dad’s bureau in rolled up wool socks, then they were moved to a hollowed-out book safe in Dad’s personal library, a “financial strategies” title tucked conspicuously in among his Zane Gray westerns and John le Carré spy thrillers.

With nobody but Becca watching, I searched behind light switch plates, over dusty closet headers, under the braided rug in his den (for a floor safe, of course), all around his basement workbench, even in bat houses.

My wife was convinced Dad had given up the stress of hiding the shiny coins and had simply deposited everything at the bank, never telling Mom. But that wasn’t his MO. He’d been a professional Boy Scout for over twenty years! Take something that wasn’t his? And this was Mom’s personal “mad money.” They’d been married nearly sixty years with only one bank account.

Mom had always kept the house as clean as an art museum on opening day of a new exhibit, while Dad had paid all the bills and balanced the checkbook. In fact, except for buying Girl Scout cookies in cash, Mom didn’t deal with money; she didn’t write her first check until after he’d died, didn’t use a credit card (except Sears), didn’t even go to the gas station on her own until Dad was housebound.

I know you’re going to think me mad, after all I have no proof. I think Dad buried the little treasure in a tin can under that damn rock. There was precedent. Years before, while his best friend had been redoing a front walk, he’d uncovered several containers full of silver dollars under the wobbly flagstone steps, presumably tucked away decades before by some previous owner.

Dad was known to be quite good with secrets. He was told by his great-grandfather that local legend Abenaki Chief Polin was buried in the woods. Privately, he said he knew exactly where. But he wouldn’t tell me. I remember asking him about it during his last weeks. “Dad, just the general area, so I can promise no bulldozer digs the old fella up, when some developer turns your woods into a condo association.” At the time, Dad was sleeping on a hospital bed in the living room. He didn’t even open his eyes. Just smiled weakly and shook his head.

When we were done, someone quickly bought the place, for a song as far as I was considered. The new owner, a woman from out of state looking for an investment, caught me at the mailbox one day. “Wanted to warn you,” she said. “We’re going to be doing some selective cutting, half now and half in ten years. Apparently, there’s gold in them thar trees.”

Maybe that was the treasure we’d sought, right in front of our eyes. If so, I never would have noticed until it started sprouting shiny metal branches. The whole time, the treasure was the trees! Took a while for the truth to sink in.