by Jane Bow
A ray of daylight came in through a hole high in the ceiling. Around it hair-like roots dangled. Vanessa stared. Directly ahead of her, on the other side of the cavern, the sunlight was illuminating three panels of worked gold.
A vision.
A dream.
A chamber in Heaven. In front of the lit panels six metal chests had been stored side by side.
Vanessa closed her eyes, opened them again. Dared finally to cross the room, to run her hands over the golden panels.
She was not dreaming. See the sun, and the people, and the animals?
This was Brother Bart’s temple gold! She moved closer, Brother Bart’s wonder flooding into her now at the perfection of the figures, each one rendered in detail, right down to the bird’s feathers, the salamander’s toes, the kindness in the faces of people no bigger than any of the other animals.
The images — animals, insects, birds, people — were a chronicle of the universe unfolding, of a people’s history. Any people’s history because wasn’t it true that in the end, whatever the race, century, geography, all humans have grown from the same source, love. The beauty of this golden monument to every living being brought tears. Vanessa wiped them away with hands covered in mud.
There had been no need to lock the treasure chests. Their lids creaked as she heaved them open. One held ingots, another plates, goblets, jugs made of gold and silver inlaid with jewels that winked red, green, blue, amber in the first light they had seen in centuries. She lifted out a silver chalice. Was this the one Brother Bart and Mia had drunk from?
Inside a third chest were necklaces, bracelets, rings, headpieces.
Vanessa let them dribble through her fingers, felt their heaviness: a fortune in four hundred-year-old gold. Here was the gold chest plate the chief must have worn. Vanessa picked up a bracelet inlaid with rubies and through the intricacy of the designs worked into the gold felt the love, palpable as her own heartbeat, with which it had been wrought.
Oh Brig’ if you could see this—
Here was a gold ring moulded into the shape of a butterfly, its wings a mosaic of red amber green blue! Had the cook who had pocketed it been one of those hanged? Vanessa laid the ring in the palm of her hand, and felt Mia and Brother Bart. Smiling, she sat down in the puddle of sunshine. Its warmth came into her feet, legs, arms as she slid the ring onto her wedding finger, turned it this way and that. Cried.
The face of the sun at the top of one of the gold sheets looked down at her through the ray of light, immutable. Across from it the moon also watched. She would lie down just for a moment to rest.
“Vanessa?” Charlie’s voice was a whisper, a movement of air, a wish. And look, he was kneeling over her, so wet and filthy. She dared to reach out—
She must be dead. Was that why he was here?
He felt real. She pulled him down into the sunlight.
“I couldn’t find you and I was so scared.” His face was smeared with tears too.
“Ssshhh.” There was no need to cry when you were dead. And his arms around her felt so right. She could feel his breath on her hair and reaching up, she felt his face, his muddy whiskers, his silly grin. She kissed him. Kissed him again because in this death place he felt very much alive. Taking off the butterfly ring, she put it into Charlie’s hand.
He slipped it back onto her ring finger just as Brother Bart had done for Mia and together they watched it pick up the sunlight. Then, in the sacredness of this temple, naked and muddy, Vanessa and Charlie left the world of cold and death and secret codes. Came without thinking or trying or wanting into the place where love lives, where there was no “he should” and “she didn’t,” no “if only,” where there was only the miracle of touching feeling being, of wanting to open body, heart and soul. Riding the waves that dissolve time and space and separateness, receiving the joy of his thrust into the centre of herself, Vanessa touched with Charlie the golden energy that powers the universe.
The old woman was right. The rules of the outside world did not apply down here.
XIX
EDWARD “TEACH” SANGER IS DEAD. The police know I had something to do with it. Because I am Vanessa. The story you have been reading is mine.
I don’t know how long I spent in the Oak Island treasure room before the shaft of sunlight shifted away from the hole in the cavern roof, returning the room to shadow, bringing me the realization that I was alone. A puddle of sea water started to seep in through the tunnel, spreading across the floor as the water came up from below, the way it always does on Oak Island. Silent, cold, terrifying.
By the time I had taken all the ingots out of one of the treasure chests and then heaved the empty chest up onto the top of one of the other ones, the water was knee high. Then all I could do was wait, teetering on the top chest, while the tide sweeping in through the tunnel now, so cold, roiled higher and higher until I could float up to grasp the roots dangling out of the ceiling, hang from them to pull the dirt and stones above out of the way.
I won’t say anything about the hole I finally pulled myself out of, except that it was hidden completely by the underbrush. I tamped down the earth, pushed the stones and brush back into place and was moving away through the bushes when three police officers, accompanied by Brigit and Sanger’s driver, found me.
“Oh thank God, Brigit!” Reaching out to hug her, I noticed the butterfly ring still on my finger. What’s down here stays down here, that’s what la vieja had said. But how could I go back, and wouldn’t it be all right, I asked her silently, to keep this one connection to Brother Bart and Mia? The butterfly, symbol of wisdom, token of love?
There was no reply and now one of the officers was covering me with blankets, listening to my story about Sanger’s and my boat ride, Sanger’s injury and his pursuit of me into the tunnel on the stem of the cross.
I showed them where it was and the police went down, shone flashlights into the sinkhole.
“You say you and Edward Sanger both fell in?”
“Yes, but he was already badly injured by the boat boom.”
“How did you get out?”
“Um,” I said, grinning a little stupidly, knowing only that this was a truth I would not tell. The rules of the outside world did not apply. “I’m sorry, I can’t say. I think I kind of went out of my mind after Edward sank.”
The detective in charge did not believe me, kept harping about the time lag, where I was found. He took in my nakedness, my hair matted with mud, the look in my eye probably. He would send a diver down the sinkhole, he said. Only Brigit noticed my ring.
A police psychologist came from Halifax. She said our brains are closets full of jumbled ideas. Writing out the whole story might help me to sort them. So that’s what I’ve been doing, sorting the bones of fact, clothing the skeleton of a truth that may be too big, too complex for my little closet to contain.
One thing I find difficult is what happened to Brigit. Venturing down the hole, she had encountered only darkness, had recognized how foolhardy it would have been to proceed alone without a light.
“I was so excited though because now we had the spot. It was just a matter of waiting for you, but by the time I got down to the shore you and Sanger were way out in the bay, so I thought, okay I’ll use the time to go get a flashlight — I’ll string Gorpo some line — but before I got to the causeway you were running back in, so I doubled back. And then I couldn’t find either of you. It was clear you had gone down the hole though. I called and called and I was so scared! That’s why I finally went for help.”
Why did la vieja decide that Brigit was not ready? She is so beautiful, so free of inhibition, so quick to love, to laugh. She’s the one who taught me to see. I look out at the clouds sailing across a blue summer sky. Brigit is right, this universe is a great mix of energies in which the perfect white light that is the core of life guarantees no more than each instant’s creation. Passion lives outside happy/sad, good/bad. A geyser of energy, passion happens to us. And when the passion
is love our choices make our futures. The people both Brigit and Brother Bart loved lost their lives. Brigit is still hurting, hiding in her woods, not ready. We have begun to talk a little about this, about my father’s belief that whether we know it or not we are making a choice, to grow or to die a little, in every moment.
I was lying in the hot tub, watching the full moon riding, cold as a coin, across a cloudless sky, and thinking of Charlie and me making love in the treasure room. How real it had been to me, as achingly lush as any moment I can recollect in my life. A golden moment as powerful as Mia’s people’s treasure panels. Brigit was inside booking her flight home. Distracting myself, I was contemplating the relationship between the words “luna” and “lunatic” when footsteps sounded on the deck stairs.
Seeing me in the tub, Charlie stopped. His hair lifted in the breeze, indescribably beautiful. I could find no words.
If all life is energy, then the tsunami wave of my grief on Mlle Durocher’s death must have reached him in Toronto, fracturing his concentration, demolishing his equilibrium.
He had bought a case of twenty-four beers, had snapped open one after another as he and Pete put the finishing touches on “Tunnel Warrior.”
“You wanna get a bite to eat?” Pete had asked. It was late. Outside their studio Queen Street bar signs were flashing yellow, green, red.
Reggae music was pumping out of a loudspeaker down the block.
Charlie had shaken his head.
“Thanks man. I think I’ll take a walk.”
Kids were bunched on street corners, a few cars still cruising, stopping to let leather-jacketed men and their high-heeled companions scurry across the street as Charlie raised his jacket collar and, hands in his pockets, turned south into the teeth of the night chill. Light from the street lamps pooled yellow on the pavements of side alleys where cars were parked nose to rear below darkened curtains, where a couple sat kissing on the stoop while a group of skaters jeered.
“Hey mister, got a dime?” Eyes appraised his clothing. “Or a C note?”
Heel toe, heel toe. After a while all he heard was the rhythm of his loafers on the pavement, their echo off the concrete walls of the darkened buildings. He should have been afraid. Dark concrete under a sky that is never really black, city life is an endless game of choices. Left?
Right? Straight ahead? Muggers, gangs, accidents, fires, there were no caches of gold, no power packs to give him an extra life.
Heel toe, heel toe. His mind showing a series of snapshots now: of dancing at the Bamboo Club, me flopping into his lap at the end of the song, laughing; of my arm cranking back, releasing Flamenco Dancer.
Heel toe, heel toe. How, he wondered, had he landed in this grey lightless maze? How to reach me from there? How to get up tomorrow?
Ethiopian grocery stores, storefront dentist, lawyer, African aromatherapy centre, palm reader. The upstairs apartments were dark, pastel curtains open to take in the night cool, a radio playing a single mournful horn.
Heel toe, heel toe. Farther and farther from our high rise condo, and now there was no one, not even a car, just Charlie and the concrete and the lights at the crosswalk — yellow, red, green, a little man walking. GO.
Where? He stopped. Why go anywhere? He would sit down, here against the wall. He was too tired to try any more paths, to reach the next level, then the next, and the next. Better maybe to stop, to rest.
“Hey bud.” A prod in the side. Shiny black boots, blue pant legs, a cop car at the curb. Another prod, painful — “Okay, okay.” Charlie struggled to his feet.
“You want to spend the night downtown?”
“No, officer.” Charlie pushed away from the wall. “Sorry I … guess I fell asleep.”
The policeman must have seen that this was not a junkie or a drunk.
“You want a ride? I can take you as far as the subway.”
“Ah …” A taxi turned into the empty street, its overhead light on.
Charlie watched it approach. Suddenly it was as if he was above the empty street, looking down on the traffic light painting the tarmac yellow, red, green, and looking down on the parked police car, the baffled cop and the crazy man huddled on the pavement one minute, then leaping up to flag down the taxi the next. To fly, straight as an arrow, out of the twisted canyons of his mind.
“Where to?” The driver’s accent was African.
“The airport.”
Most of Chester came to Mlle Durocher’s funeral. Then Brigit, Charlie and I took her ashes to Oak Island. The old librarian had no family, so the will named me her beneficiary.
I found the hole above the treasure room, behind the underbrush, where I had climbed out. Brigit knelt, her eyes closed, but nothing came.
“Never mind,” I told her. “Next time we’ll bring a rope. Wait’ll you see those awesome gold panels and all that jewellery!”
“And who knows what else is down there? How many other tunnels there might there be? If the Templar Henry Sinclair used Oak Island and the pirate St. Clere knew about him, who else did?”
“Francis Bacon?”
There might be a next time because the Oak Island lot, along with everything else Mlle Durocher owned, belongs to me now.
But no. How easy it is to be carried away. Treasure, even the word births greed. I looked down at Mia’s ring and knew that what’s down there must stay down there, for now.
We poured some of Mlle Durocher’s ashes into the hole. The rest we scattered on the beach beside the lot she had bought, and as the tiny grey particles whirled up into the wind, I swear I heard her laugh.
In the evening Charlie poured scotches out on the deck. I lit the candles. He raised his glass.
“To Mlle Durocher, a little old lady who was a Colossus among humans.”
At night I still dream of her, hold her soft bird-boned hand and wake up weeping, thinking that ideas about choices and fortunes and growing and dying are nothing more than the mind’s way of trying to tidy away the fact that Mlle Durocher died because Sanger wanted the lot she owned. He did not kill her outright, but isn’t that always the way with ambition, with evil? She had sensed danger in the man, had known that Sanger was Seth, the force of wild, destructive ambition, ungovernable.
And still she had challenged him, had stood up for love.
A new thought arrives. The detective is right, I am the reason Edward Sanger is dead. I took him out into the wind. But maybe it was the same energy that has rained on Oak Island treasure hunters again and again, flooding their digs, sending giant waves to smash their dams, that gusted behind Dancer’s boom that afternoon.
The evening air on Gran’s deck is growing chillier. A few wisps of cloud sail lazily across the sky, the new moon a sliver above the horizon. Brigit has left and Mlle Durocher and Edward “Teach” Sanger are dead. Brother Bart’s testament has been housed finally under glass in the Halifax museum.
Charlie sits down beside me in the candlelight. Pete can launch “Tunnel Warrior,” he says, and eat and drink at the galas, do the interviews, take the orders. Charlie will not leave until I am ready.
The police say I am free to go. The diver found that the silt at the bottom of the sinkhole, once disturbed, was too thick to see much, but they did find Edward Sanger’s body. After my testimony at the inquest the police pathologist said that blood vessels behind the shattered bone in Edward Sanger’s temple would have been leaking since the moment he was hit. And murder is not usually committed with the boom of a sixteen-foot sailboat.
Yesterday morning a publisher called. He had read both my magazine article “Treasure Island North” and the newspaper stories about Edward Sanger’s death. Would I write a book about what had happened to me on Oak Island? It could establish me both as an expert in Spanish treasures and as a writer.
Last night we stayed up late talking, planning. Charlie will go on designing computer games. It is what he loves. I will turn my story and the translation of Brother Bart’s diary into a book. We will sell the condomin
ium overlooking Lake Ontario. Ours must be a wilder, freer landscape, closer to the ground, where the sun shines and the moon comes and goes, and that which dances in their lights has been born out of the silent centre, time the servant, not the master.
Still, I find myself wondering how, in the concrete maze of city life, where sun and moon shine mostly through windows, Charlie and I will manage not to lose our gold again. In Brother Bart’s and Mia’s era the taking and killing were visible, gruesome and gory. Charlie and I had allowed these same energies to thrive unseen, to take over.
My robe must have fallen open. Charlie’s hand on my stomach feels so gentle. I reach for him, crying a little now, not only out of sadness, but because with his touch I know that there never was anything wrong with who we can be together.
“I’m thinking, with your publishing contract and my “Tunnel Warrior” prospectus, we could buy your uncle’s share of this house.” Charlie’s hair sticks up in spikes as he runs his hand through it. “And if there’s anything left over, we could travel.” His eyebrows arch. “Maybe find ourselves an abandoned Spanish beach?”
I bury myself in his kiss.
Beyond the deck summer is ripening into autumn. The Solomon’s Seals in Gran’s garden have long since withered. Clouds race on a cold wind that, over on Oak Island, will be sending great grey waves up to pound the shoreline, and laughing through the trees in the brutal way it always does in the fall.
XX
MY BOOK AND BROTHER BART’S end in the same place.
You know the rest, Father. The last thing we did on that little island was remove every sign that we had been there. My stove was taken apart. Captain St. Clere had us pry up an enormous boulder. We deepened the hole and buried the stove, then pushed the rock back before sailing for France.
