by Jane Bow
“She’s a folk tale, a nonsense,” said Vanessa’s father. Now the folk tale was dragging the carcass of a goat into the cavern by one of its legs.
Its neck was broken. The head, nearly torn off, bounced along behind it, leaving a path of something dark in the sand. Vanessa and Paco watched as la vieja stopped, dropped the goat’s foot, sniffed the air.
Then, grunting, she squatted beside Santi’s fire pit. The cloying stink of her reached in through Vanessa’s nose, lodged in her throat. There was a scraping sound: knife against goat hide.
Paco and Vanessa moved further into the tunnel. Maybe it led out of the cavern. They tried to keep their sandals from crunching in the sand, stopped after every step to listen because to see around corners was nothing to la vieja.
The tunnel turned, the blackness grew thick.
“Dame la luz,” said Paco, “Give me the light.”
The walls snaked away ahead of them, smooth and wet as the insides of a worm. The occasional plink echoed: water leaking in through the roof and there was no sense of time down here, no sense of direction, just the crunch of their footsteps and the warmth of their hands joined in the darkness this side of the flashlight beam.
Paco stopped, shone the beam up. The tunnel roof opened into a high ceiling. Twisted, ropy things hung down: roots of the bushes and trees in the world above.
“Madre de Dios.” He let go of Vanessa’s hand, moved forward and then stumbled. The flashlight flew out of his hand, clattered across the stones, and dropped out of sight.
Vanessa inched forward in the darkness. Three feet ahead of where Paco had tripped the floor of the tunnel turned into a water-filled hole.
They watched the flashlight beam drown in rocky depths no living creature had ever disturbed.
A shiver went through Paco. Vanessa received it: a sweet, surprising, body-electric feeling. Turning to him, she found him already close in the darkness, smelling of warmth and salt. His lips brushed across her nose, searching clumsily. Her own lips went to meet him, just for a moment, before confusion crowded in.
At the bottom of the chimney la vieja was feeding by the fire. Paco squeezed Vanessa’s hand: ready?
He stepped into the light.
“Oye, vieja!” The old woman turned toward Paco, her face smeared with goat’s blood, her eyes gleaming. A strange guttural squeal issued from her mouth. Vanessa ran to the rope, began to climb as Paco taunted La vieja from the opening of the sea tunnel.
“Help, Carlita!” she called. “Pull!”
La vieja’s squealing had followed Vanessa up through the rock chimney, into the sunlight, and then down through the years into her dreams: wild, high pitched, insistent.
Vanessa jiggled the teabag in her mug.
Gran’s exercise book was open and waiting on the dining room table.
You could say that Jose saved my life. Handing me my monk’s robe, he told me that if I would repent my giving in to the Devil’s temptation so that my prayers for their safety would have some validity, he would see to it that the men said nothing about my conduct when we arrived in Cartagena. I hid the golden butterfly, symbol in the midst of darkness of life’s great beauty, and also my own ring on a string under my robe. You will call this heresy. So would the soldiers and the priests, but had they got their hands on those rings, they would most certainly have sold them for profit.
What, exactly, was I to repent, Father? Mia in that mountain pasture, the joy we had shared, this came from someplace beyond earthly sin. You must have wanted me to know it. Why?
We are taught that that which happens is Your will, but I don’t accept that any more than I accept that what we are doing to the natives in America is Your will.
An hour later Brigit appeared at the bottom of the stairs, disappeared into the kitchen, came back with coffee.
Vanessa told her about the memory then said, “Brother Bart and the sergeant, Jose, were sent home with the treasure flota the following spring. Brother Bart started this diary in Cuba, where they put in for repairs.”
“Was Havana a safe harbour?”
“The safest in the Caribbean, but in the summer there was swamp fever in Cuba. Dozens of seamen died and finally, after administering the last rites to who knows how many of them, Brother Bart came down with it. He was sent out into the country, and that’s where he started writing to God.”
“Because he thought he was going to die?”
“Right, but instead he recovered. One day several weeks later he was walking in the garden when a man appeared. He made a hand signal, some sort of secret code. Brother Bart didn’t understand it but he told the man to approach. Vanessa turned back to the exercise book. “Listen.”
He insisted I go with him down the coast, to a hut hidden in the dunes behind an isolated beach. Inside, a man was lying on a straw pallet, his body wasted, stinking of the horrors with which disease signals the approach of death. One of his hands moved slightly as I knelt beside him. I took hold of it. He looked at me, and only then did I recognize Jose.
“My sins are great, Brother.” His voice came on tiny puffs of breath. “I took my prayer book out of my pocket, for myself as much as for him, for how could I ever forgive what he had done to my Mia and her people? How could I forgive You either, for that matter? But listen, Bartito—” He closed his eyes, reached for breath. “I have joined a secret society. It is very old, very dangerous …”
In his last hour, sure that the doors of Hell were gaping below him, Jose began to cry. “Because the Pope is against it.” He looked into my eyes and whispered, “But I thought that you of all people might understand. This society is devoted to God and to the truth that lies beyond the church. Many people, some in very high places, belong to it. And we have heard that the Englishman El Draque is in these waters, so we have been removing the King’s treasure, secretly, from the fort in Habana, Mia’s people’s treasure, Bartito.”
Vanessa looked up.
“This secret society’s plan was to smuggle the riches over to the Isla de Pinos, an island just off the Cuban coast, to hide the chests there until they could arrange for ships that were smaller and faster than the galleons to slip in, pick up the treasure, and take it safely home to the King of Spain.”
“And Brother Bart went along with this?”
Vanessa turned the page.
Jose summoned a few rags of strength. “All I wanted was to serve my King with honour, for Maria and my chicitos to have something by way of reward. So now I am begging you, brother, to forgive my sins and work for our King. To look after my family for me.” A wave of something putrid wafted up out of him. I prayed not to gag. He mustered another breath, spoke quickly before it ran out. “You can trust Jesus here. He is a trader who knows every cove and kink in this coastline. You must go with him to the place where we load the boats, tonight. Go with the treasure to the Isla de Pinos, and make sure—”
Bartolomeo, the man, wanted to spit upon him, to turn away, let him rot in Hell. Heaven had come to me in the form of Mia in the Nueva Granada mountains, Father, miraculously it had come inside the life, the skin, the very heart and soul of a homely, lonely old monk.
“So then, must not this man who had torn my Heaven asunder be Satan? Consigned to Hell? Should I not turn my back …? But Bartolomeo, Jose’s last confessor, clung to his Bible, knowing from a lifetime of training that he had been put into this moment to pray for this man as he died. And may I report that in spite of Jose’s great crime and the bully he had always been, I do find myself glad that I did Your bidding, though I had barely begun the last rites when his breathing stopped. I would have gone on praying then for guidance in what to do next, but now Jose’s man Jesus took it for granted that I would uphold Jose’s dying request.
“They crossed to Cuba’s Isla de Pinos at night and were hauling the crates full of treasure across a deserted beach when two longboats glided in past the point.” Vanessa read on.
We were only half a dozen men. We held our torches high. Th
ose who had them drew their knives, cocked their pistols. But, miraculously, the leader of the boatmen executed the same strange hand signal that the man had made to me back in the garden. So Jesus and the others hailed them, thinking they were with us.
But a few hours later every chest and crate Jose and his group had tried to save had been loaded into a little frigate called L’Amitié which was one of two ships lying just round the end of the point. One flag had an hourglass and a man holding a sword on it, the other the dreaded skull and crossbones.
“Pirates!”
“They were French!”
Out in the hall the doorbell was chiming.
“Who the hell—” The ringing continued.
Fake brown hair, grey suit shiny in the early sunlight, a hand extended.
“Vanessa Holdt? Frank DeCarlo, Coldwake Real Estate. I’ve been trying to reach you.”
Vanessa held her robe together with one hand, gave him the other.
“Sorry about the early call,” he said, “But yesterday’s buyers would like to view the house again. First thing this morning, before they catch their plane.” His smile was as fake as his hair color: “Can you have the place looking good in, say an hour?”
“An hour?” said Brigit after the door closed. “How ’bout right now.”
She took a mouthful of coffee, looked sorrowfully into the mug and then overturned it. The steaming coffee splashed onto the hardwood floor.
Vanessa started, then, as the milky brown puddle slid along a urethaned crack between the floorboards she felt a tickle of laughter—
Censure came right on its heels. Get a cloth, clean it up before it spreads further—
“Why don’t we sail over to Oak Island?” Brigit was looking out at the morning. The sun, just clear of the eastern horizon, was marbling the rippling sea with peach-pink and silver. “You said that the treasure hunters were old.” She looked at her watch. “If we leave right away we can be back before they finish breakfast.”
Vanessa was still watching the coffee puddle. She shook her head.
“The island’s not open—”
“And we’re not tourists. And who will ever know?”
Vanessa looked at the early squalls chasing each other across the bay.
“Come on, Van. What if the ‘the treasure in America’ was Brother Bart’s? You have the diary and who’s done more Oak Island research?
And I have ways of perceiving. Together, how can we fail?”
The brisk northeasterly would carry them quickly. And it was Friday, so the Joudrey’s Cove treasure hunter who spent his weekends on the island would not be there yet.
Treasure in America. Half her lifetime later, Vanessa glimpsed again, through the memory, the delicious dance of fear with freedom.
VI
SKIMMING ACROSS THE WAVES IN DANCER, feeling the wind tugging at the mainsail sheet, the sea pulling the tiller, herself a tiny human link between the powers of Earth’s great elements, thrilled Vanessa every summer. She had been nine the first time her father had let her take command of the little eighteen-footer they had sailed in the same Altamira waters through which the great treasure galleons had moved on their way down the coast to Cadiz. “Coming about!” She remembered her glee as her mother, father and older brother jumped to the tasks of unclamping the jib sheet, shifting sides, ducking out of the way of the mainsail’s boom.
“Van, look!” Now Brigit was sitting opposite her, one hand holding onto Dancer’s jib stay, a multi-coloured cotton sunhat pulled down low against the sun. She was gazing behind Vanessa at the eastern horizon.
Vanessa took a quick look over her shoulder. A wooden sailing ship, the sails on its two yardarms furled, looked as if it had been painted on the white early morning sky.
“That’s one of those ‘tall ships’, Brig’. They sail up from Boston.” Vanessa’s grin was a little wicked. “Who did you think it was, Brother Bart?” She laughed. Brigit still insisted that all life was nothing more than clusters of energy. It was the human’s eyes/brains/senses that turned these concentrations into visions, sounds. Fairies, angels, daemons, the old man, the white light, the dog that people had seen on Oak Island, Vanessa’s own la vieja, they were all energies living here with us. It was a matter of tuning into the way to perceive them.
“Don’t mock what you don’t know how to see, Van,” she said now.
Vanessa had anchored her ponytail with an old Blue Jays baseball cap she had once given her father. She adjusted the peak to take another look.
“I’ll give you this much: that is exactly what Brother Bart’s pirates’ ship would have looked like.”
“And in the hold—”
Face to the wind, using the outline of a tree that was taller than the rest on the far side of the bay as her landmark, Vanessa recited from memory:
I was ordered to pry open the chests, the idea being, I suppose, that only those who had already seen the treasure should cast eyes upon it. And so it was that in the torch-lit hold of L’Amitié, I beheld again the beauty of my marriage chalice, the patterns worked into the silver, the green, red, blue of emeralds, rubies, sapphires glittering in the light—
“Oh Van, imagine if we could find that!”
—Tears poured down my cheeks. The captain put the chalice back in the chest.
“Fear not, brother.” He put a hand on my shoulder. “Your beautiful treasure is in the safest hands now.”
Wind, waves, the past, the present stitched together a moment for which there were no words.
When the Mahone Bay coastline opened into Chester Basin on their starboard side, Vanessa pointed at a line of trees.
“You can’t see the way the shoreline works from here, but Brother Bart speaks of a bluff, and the only bluff around here is in Chester Basin.”
A flashing channel marker mounted on a rocky outcropping came up on their port side:
“That’s Warren’s Ledge,” said Vanessa. “Some people think the treasure was buried there, underwater on a shoal that disappears at high tide, that the Oak Island treasure shaft is nothing more than a decoy.”
And now here, to starboard, was Oak Island. Its pebble beach, strewn with tangled seaweed, driftwood and boulders, widened at Joudrey’s Cove where the windows of the treasure hunter’s bungalow reflected the newly risen sun. Nobody would see them land here. Both treasure hunters were elderly now. The one who lived beside the causeway on the other side of the island would not be out walking this early, and there was no aluminum boat on the Joudrey’s Cove beach. The owner of the bungalow was not there.
The bungalow receded, a jumble of Jack pines separating it from the chaos at the island’s denuded eastern end where, at the top of the little rise above Smith’s Cove, a white metal shed protected the shaft called Borehole 10X. A backhoe sitting in the midst of a mess of rusted metal cylinders, an antiquated drill rig, holes full of stagnant green water, looked like a giant mechanical insect. The Smith’s Cove beach, where treasure hunters long ago had discovered an ingeniously engineered tunnel to the treasure shaft, was a tumble of bulldozed rocks.
“Coming about!” Vanessa cruised back, sailing parallel to the Oak Island shore. There was no sign of life, but Vanessa was wary. “I don’t know about this, Brig’.”
Oak Island treasure hunters had sunk their lives and every penny they could raise into the little island. They had pointed shotguns, taken each other to court. The right choice was to sail away.
Right Choices. Suddenly Vanessa was seventeen, landing on this same beach with a member of a Lunenburg motorcycle club, just the two of them with a six-pack of beer and a couple of joints. So romantic, she had thought — what better place to explore the treasures that came from being touched, to finally shed her childhood, to end the summer by sealing a pact — until the last minute when, lying naked, beach pebbles digging into her back, his breath had come too heavily so that it no longer felt romantic or even fun. When he stopped to put on a condom, she had slithered out from under him. And had ne
ver seen the boy again. She had left him telephone messages, had made up excuses for him, waited back in Ottawa for a reply to her emails.
The glow of Christmas — skating on the Rideau Canal, learning to ski in the Gatineau Hills — had given way to March storms, Saturdays at the mall, canned television laughter and Vanessa had begun to wonder, what was the purpose of living? Not that she planned to jump off the Parliament buildings. They were too high, the wait too long before you crunched into the pavement in front of some poor politician on his way to lunch. Not that she was ever suicidal. There was, however, a park on the way to school where even in March the Rideau River tumbled over tables of limestone. One Monday morning she turned in. Spent the morning on a bench, not thinking. Not doing anything at all. The next day she brought bread crumbs for a family of Canada geese that had not flown south. At the end of the week the principal telephoned her parents. Her father called her into his study.
“Listen to me, Vanessa. Confusion, displacement, disappointment, we all go through these things. But if you want any kind of future, you have to face reality, have a plan, make the right choices. If you don’t, life will make your choices for you.”
She had tried not to listen but the words, echoing through the emptiness that was her life, blowing closed one door, had opened another.
Her choice would be to find a way to return to Spain.
“Think of it, Van: emeralds, rubies, sapphires!” The wind had touched Brigit’s cheeks with pink. “Come on, land!”
“I’m just not sure what we’re going to achieve, and what if—?”
Brigit turned toward the Oak Island shoreline, cupped her hands around her mouth.
“Hello! Anybody home?”
“Sssh!”
“Why?” Brigit laughed. “We’re allowed to be in the ocean.” She shouted again. “If we’re disturbing anyone, please tell us and we’ll go away!”
