Good Dirt

Treasure

Treasure

2017

W hat Ebby told Henry was this: Ebby and Baz were playing hide-and-seek and Ebby was hiding upstairs off the landing when she heard an unfamiliar voice downstairs. She ran to the banister and looked down. She saw two men in work overalls, their faces covered by ski masks. One of them was pointing a gun at her brother and talking in an aggressive way. Where is it? the man said to Baz. Just show us.

“He said it, ” Ebby told Henry, “not the jar . But I knew what he meant. He meant Old Mo.” The twenty-gallon piece, she explained, had been kept on a table all by itself in her dad’s study. It had a name of its own. Like a person. It was so special, a historian friend of her parents’ had come to see it. Ten-year-old Ebby was certain that even in a house like theirs, full of nice things, Old Mo was the only it of any real consequence.

But Ebby never told her parents. When the police questioned her, she said she’d run to the banister after hearing the gunshots, then gone downstairs. She was terrified that the men who had entered her family home might find out she’d seen them from above and come back to hurt her and her parents. She had grown up living with a kind of terror that she hadn’t been able to express.

As Ebby grew, the fear gave way to rage. In centuries past, people had kidnapped some of Ebby’s ancestors and taken control of their bodies and lives. And in the twenty-first century, Ebby’s identity continued to be shaped by what had been taken from her family. Her brother. Her first home. Her family’s privacy. Their heritage.

But alongside these feelings grew something else, a sense of guilt at not having told everything to her parents and the police. Ebby was certain she would never have been able to identify the people who committed the crime. But what if it could have helped the police? At least they would have known that the people who broke in had been looking for the jar.

When, a year later, Henry heard his father’s friend Harris mention the jar during that bridge game, he couldn’t help but think about what Ebby had told him. There were people who might covet a historic piece of American stoneware enough to have it stolen. Or to have it taken then returned to the original owner for a fee. And unlike Ebby, he actually knew the name and face of a person who might know something.

Holding art for ransom was a thing. It happened all the time. Robbers stole tens of thousands of pieces of art and artifacts every year, worldwide, and much of the loot could never be sold through legitimate markets. But who would know enough about how special that jar was to think of taking it? His father’s friend Harris might be the person to know. Harris was in the insurance industry. Not an agent. More like an executive and majority shareholder. But still. He knew these kinds of things. Only there was no way to raise the question with his father’s friend that wouldn’t be incredibly awkward, at the very least. It was Harris who had mentioned the jar during that bridge game. How had he come to know about it?

If he’d had doubts about anything else, Henry would have gone to Ebby with them. They used to talk about a lot of things. She knew how Henry felt when he put his camera up to his face. Which meant she knew more about him than most. She knew something about how Henry could be when he was at his best. But she also knew how much he hated confrontation. That he had given in to his father’s insistence that he go into banking instead of entering a fine arts program. That it had cost him to go up against his mother’s reservations about him marrying “outside of the community,” as she had put it.

Ebby knew Henry well enough to know that in a pinch, Henry might take what felt like the easier way out. Had she known what was going on, she might have been able to predict what would happen next. On the night before Henry should have married Ebby, he was freed from his dilemma by the following line of logic: The jar was gone anyway, and the robbers had run away empty-handed. Ebby’s brother was already dead, and Henry couldn’t do a damn thing to bring him back. Ebby was sexy and smart and kindhearted and she would find someone else to love her soon enough. Sooner than he liked to think. Breathing much easier, he slid behind the wheel of his Rover and drove off.

But when Henry saw Ebby by the river that first day at the cottage, tugging her boots out of the mud, he felt a rush of nostalgia for the woman with whom he had fallen in love. Then came the deep embarrassment of recalling his failure to show up on their wedding day. Henry thought he’d already paid the price for backing out of their engagement by giving up all possibility of a future with Ebby. But now, he sees the true cost of what he has done. It isn’t the what that counts so much as the how . The way in which he’s handled things.

Henry has taken himself down a notch as a man.