by Jen Bryant
I glance to see if my answer satisfies Malcolm.
I can’t tell. He’s reading the letter
over and over again, and then—
I don’t know why—
I have to turn and look out the window.
I bite my lower lip. Jeez, Lyza—don’t cry.
Meanwhile, Carolann jabbers on about
some of the new kids at school—
where they moved from, what they say or play or own.
(She’s convinced one of the ninth graders
is in the Witness Protection Program:
“He forgot his name the other day,” she explains.)
The drive takes a little more
than an hour. We make a quick stop
to pick up Harry Keating, who’s been staying
at a hotel near the Princeton campus
and working with our new lawyer, Mr. Jarvis,
on the legal details
so we can stay home and start school.
Dad turns off Nassau Street,
steers us through the granite gates of the university,
beneath the canopy of ancient maples,
between old stone buildings
with Gothic arches and neat brick sidewalks,
until we reach the one with the sign
we’ve seen in all the newspaper photos:
MCCORMICK HALL, DEPT. OF ART & ARCHAEOLOGY.
Professor Taylor greets us and leads us
to his office on the second floor. Our
lawyer is there and he speaks for a few
minutes with Harry, then with my father.
Dad smiles over at me once. I think
he’s still confused about all of this,
but somehow he also seems relieved.
I guess there was a part of him
that thought I was heading for trouble,
spinning into some kind of delinquency
from which I would never return. The truth
about what I’ve been doing all summer,
though strange in its own way, is a lot better
than what he’d been afraid of. Professor
Taylor leaves them, motions for us to
follow him down the long, dark hall
posted with neat red arrows that say:
ARCHAEOLOGY LAB—EMPLOYEES ONLY.
Opening the padlocked doors, he takes us
into a separate room with rows of
low tables
and special lamps hanging from the ceiling.
It’s dark, but we can see the walls,
which are lined with shelves, filled with boxes,
beakers, and bags,
all carefully labeled and tagged
with the numbers and names of excavation sites:
Santa Fe, New Mexico;
St. Louis, Missouri;
Bismarck, North Dakota;
Williamsburg, Virginia.
We follow Professor Taylor to the back,
to the very last table, which is covered with
a piece of black plastic. He asks us to stand beside it
while he pulls the plastic off.
He flicks on a switch.
The lamp hanging from the ceiling spotlights
the neatly typed label in the center:
Site 164, Bradley, Mott, Dupree;
Willowbank, NJ; August 1968.
There are framed newspaper clippings and photographs
of the three of us standing next to
the chest
just as Professor Taylor and his team of archaeologists
are lifting it carefully—oh so carefully—
with a special set of pulleys (not too different from the one
Malcolm drew that night on a napkin in the diner)
from the hole.
I get goose bumps again just remembering that day—
we taped interviews for several TV stations,
and the New York Times even sent a reporter
down to meet us.
“Teens Dig Up Riches in South Jersey Churchyard,”
the headline said.
Professor Taylor adjusts the light so we can see
the whole display:
the contents of the treasure chest
cleaned up, labeled, and laid out across the long lab table.
Almost everything is there:
the two big gems;
the English gold, the Spanish silver;
the jeweled necklaces and rings;
the small metal box that held the strange white powder
(which is opium, as it turns out; used as medicine
at sea, then sold if the crew made it home safely);
the few pieces of mostly disintegrated cloth, now sealed
in plastic and marked silk, linen, or cotton;
and finally the two bezoar stones, which the captain kept
as an antidote for poison (too bad they didn’t prevent hanging).
“Far out!” Carolann squeals.
“I wish Dixon could see this,” Malcolm whispers.
“Gramps, too,” I add.
“I’ll be in the next room if you need me,”
the professor says. “I’ll give you three
some time to enjoy this privately—
then I’ll come and close up.”
For the next half hour or so,
we walk around and around that table,
pointing and looking, laughing and joking,
reliving all the nights we spent searching—
then digging, digging, digging—
remembering all the planning and worrying,
all the hard decisions.
Now, looking back after all of that, it feels like
the whole summer went past in a flash.
And here we are: three local kids who followed
some maps left in an attic
and found a real pirate treasure.
“You’ve given our office a real lift,” one reporter said
after she interviewed us. “We’ve had so much bad news
coming in from the war,
it’s high time we reported something happy like this!”
I considered telling her that we still think about
the war, about Dixon and other guys like him, every day.
But she was so clearly enjoying our story …
I didn’t.
After we leave the lab, I think about
the spyglass,
hidden at home under the winter sweaters
tucked beneath my bed: the one that,
when I held it up and looked through my window,
let me see over all the roofs in town
and down along the Mullica River
and up the hill, almost to Gramps’ grave;
the one with the initials of William Kidd,
the one my two best friends know I have,
the one Professor Taylor and his team of archaeologists
must have surely figured out
made the indentation in the half-disintegrated linen
they found in the chest… the one
no one, so far, has asked me about.
Before we go back to Willowbank,
the professor asks us to wait in the next room
while he speaks alone
with Harry.
The day after we first met Trent Taylor,
we voted to make Harry
the “executor” of our treasure,
and he’s been overseeing everything
that the university’s been doing
since we gave them permission to excavate the chest
and to study and catalog
every object in it.
Harry—who’s still Hairy, but seems a lot more
grown-up and reliable than before—
has been calling us almost every day,
telling us which museums have inquired about
buying the coins and gems, telling us what
Pro
fessor Taylor and his team have discovered
about the objects: where they came from,
how much they could be worth,
and how Captain Kidd
might have come to have them
in his chest.
Harry even got us Mr. Jarvis, whose specialty
is watching out for people
who have won gameshows
or who suddenly have a lot of money for some reason
and need protection from all the schemers
and other greedy sorts
who might try to take advantage of three
South Jersey teens who just happened to make
history
in the backyard of a church.
Five minutes later, the office door opens.
Harry steps out, walks across
to where we are standing by the window,
watching the Princeton kids filing out of class.
He hands me a piece of paper
folded in half.
“That number is the total projected value of your treasure.
Divide by three and that’s—”
“FOUR!” I remind him. “We wouldn’t have
finished this if you hadn’t—”
“Forget it, Lyza,” Harry interrupts.
“This has been more interesting than
anything I’ve ever done.” He nods toward
his professor-friend. “I might have a job here next year,
as Trent’s lab assistant. That wouldn’t
have happened if you hadn’t trusted me.”
Jeez. Harry Keating working at Princeton!
(Dad perks up at this news. I picture Denise’s Janis Joplin
poster in one of the nice houses we saw
on the way over here.)
I look down at the paper folded in my hands.
“Wait!” Carolann commands.
She takes my arm, leads me to an
overstuffed chair. “Sit there … your new habit
of losing consciousness makes me nervous!”
She sits on one arm of the chair, Malcolm
stands beside the other. I flip up
the top of the folded paper so that the three of us
can read the number together:
12 … followed by six zeros.
And this time, I do not faint.
We’re only thirteen and that means
we’re legally minors, so even though our treasure
is worth a LOT,
our lawyer, our parents, Harry, and Professor Taylor
will help us decide if and when
we put the treasure up for auction
or if we sell it to museums, and then
we have to keep the money in a trust fund
till we turn twenty-one.
In the meantime, our parents are very
happy. Well, OK. Carolann’s parents are very happy:
They’re together and they don’t fight.
They don’t have a son in Vietnam.
They’re setting up a college fund for Carolann.
Mr. Mott came over after dinner last night
to visit with Dad and to watch
the Phillies play the Pittsburgh Pirates.
Carolann came, too,
and showed me the book she’s reading:
Pearson’s Guide to Starting Your Own Detective Agency.
“It’s still what I want to do,” she told me.
“Now I’ll just have nicer office furniture
and a larger sign—and maybe an assistant or two.”
As for Malcolm’s parents,
they’re as happy as they can be, given all the depressing headlines
they read about the casualties in Vietnam.
(Two more guys from Willowbank came home
in flag-draped coffins last week.
Another neighbor, Alex Palmer, who lives just down the street,
came back with no legs. All day, every day,
he sits in his wheelchair on the porch.)
I think we could have dug up a treasure worth
a billion dollars
and if it didn’t bring Dixon back home safe,
the Duprees would just ignore it.
Still, when we stopped in on our way
back from Princeton, Mrs. Dupree hugged me
about twenty-five times. She cut me a big piece
of lemon cake and made me sit
down in their kitchen to explain again
how I found the maps, how we—all together—
located the treasure, how we dug it up as much
as we could before we told anyone else.
“Your gramps would be real proud of you, Lyza.”
And to Malcolm: “I guess that explains
why I was always finding dirt clods in your pockets!”
But she hugged him, too, and you could tell
she was proud of what he’d done,
even though he did have to sneak out a lot.
Mr. Dupree says any money that comes to them
he’ll use for a new church roof
and keep the rest for Malcolm’s and Dixon’s futures.
As for my dad, he does seem happier than before.
He’s actually talking about taking
a sabbatical
and fixing up our house.
All along I thought he was working so much
to avoid being with us—
but really he was just trying to pay off
the debt Mom left.
I remember how Gramps used to say:
“Lyza, there’s two sides to a coin, two sides to a ship,
and two sides to every story,”
and though I never quite understood how
that could be true for a family, I see now
that he was absolutely right.
Tonight, for a change, we cook dinner together:
Dad makes macaroni and cheese, I make
corn bread, Denise burns the peas.
After we eat and Denise leaves for work, Dad and I take a walk.
I know he’s still trying to figure out why
his own father left those maps to me
and not to him. “I always thought he trusted me,” Dad says.
I try to explain: “He did, Dad. But, no offense …
you are so predictable,
and you thought his adventures were foolish.
Gramps knew if he left you his maps
and those numbers and that key,
you might never have even bothered
to go to Brigantine.”
Dad waves to Mr. Reece at the end of our street,
who’s letting his four kids
dance through the fountain of his garden hose.
In the next house, Alex Palmer rolls
back and forth across the porch,
his wheelchair squealing.
“You’re probably right,” Dad says at last.
“I don’t know if I would’ve taken the time
to do much about them.
To tell you the truth, I haven’t had the energy for anything
besides teaching these past two years….”
His voice trails off as we walk a couple more blocks,
turn the corner by the diner. We can see a few
of the waitresses and a busboy,
and after a minute or two
we see Denise waiting on a couple
seated in a window booth.
We stop on the sidewalk,
wave our hands over our heads.
She sees us and waves back, and in that minute
she looks just like Mom.
Dad keeps waving even after she turns again
to her customers.
I walk ahead a little to give him time.
He catches up, puts his arm through mine,
and we walk like that for a while.
Finally, he speaks: “So I guess now that you’ve found
the chest,
you won’t be sneaking around so much …
and I guess this also means you’re really
not taking any drugs.”
I give him my annoyed sideways look.
He holds up his hand, grinning: “I’m kidding, I’m kidding!!”
He sighs, runs his fingers through his hair. “I’m sorry about all that, Lyza. But I thought, you know …
the way you’ve had to be on your own
so much … with your mother gone
and me teaching all the time—everything is so crazy these days.”
His voice drifts off and is lost in the noise
of passing traffic on Main Street.
We buy two orange Creamsicles and sit
on the bench before Miller’s grocery store,
watching the sun set behind the line of cars
filled with families
coming back from the beach, looking tired
but mostly, happy.
Dear Dixon,
We are all doing fine here in Willowbank. By now Malcolm’s probably told you about our pretty weird summer, about what we found in the churchyard and all the rest. He says you’re a scout now—I guess that’s a pretty important job. So I am sending something with this letter to help you see what’s ahead. It’s old, but it still works pretty good. Don’t worry if you lose it—it’s been lost before and I’m sure someone else will find it and put it to good use. Be careful out there. We look forward to when you come home.
Your friend,
Lyza B.
P.S. Denise sends her good karma. Harry says,
“Hang in there, man!”
On my way back from mailing the spyglass
to Dixon,
I make a stop at Gramps’ grave. I tear away
a few of the weeds
that have grown up either side of the stone.
I sit next to him awhile,
telling him everything that’s happened to me
this summer, even though
I believe somehow he already knows.
Afterward, I walk to the A.M.E. Church, where
the choir is practicing
for Sunday and their hearty hallelujahs spill
from the open windows
and float out over the yard where we spent
so many late
summer hours. I slip into the back, kneel down,
and just like I
