Gold Coins in the Wall
By Scott D. Zachary
Copyright 2003
A week and a half ago, my wife, Bobbie, and I participated in an auction where a farm was sold off in sections to the public. The offering totaled 155 acres, surveyed into eight tracts. I had my eye on the largest tract, measuring forty-one acres. I wanted to build our house on the crest of a large hill in the middle of that acreage. From there, you can see the water tower in Santa Claus, Indiana—nearly fifty miles away. What a view! We ended up buying that tract as well as an adjoining six-acre tract. There’s one access road from the main highway that winds into our land. Along that road is an old, dilapidated house, built during the early part of the last century.
While exploring our newly-purchased homestead last week, Bobbie expressed a juvenile-like excitement about the possibility that there might be valuables hidden away behind the bricks of the two fireplaces in that old house. She told me it was common during and after the Great Depression for people to hide away small fortunes. She explained that after "The Crash," they had little confidence in the banks. I inwardly scoffed. During this last week, several of Bobbie’s co-workers expressed identical interest in hidden treasures. Inquisitive, I asked an old farmer across the road about the history behind the old house. My question drained his rosy face of its color. "Be careful!" he boomed. I asked him what he meant by that, but he wouldn’t expound. He just turned and walked away. The previous owners had said Uncle Dan was the last to live there. They said he disappeared, and nobody ever found his body.
This is a story about what happened today while Bobbie and I set out to explore our forty seven-acres. The first light sprinkling of snow this year had powdered the landscape. Heavily water-burdened flakes parachuted from the gray-stained clouds above. The weatherman had alerted road crews of the probability of two to four inches.
"Careful, dear; don’t pull too far off the road," I warned; "we might not be able to get out of here."
Bobbie turned the car around and parked so that it pointed downhill toward the road. We pulled wool caps over our heads and snugged our fingers into gloves. The first indication that something wasn’t quite right was the stiffness of the passenger door of her car. I strained to open it. Someone, or something, seemed to be pushing from the other side. As I stepped out and closed the door, a rabbit dashed straight between my legs. I thought, "rabbits don’t do that, unless something has really frightened them." Trying to put the car door and the rabbit behind my thoughts, Bobbie and I held each other’s hand as we walked down the old farm road. But, I still couldn’t get that rabbit out of my mind. It reminded me of when I was a small child, watching a combine as it harvested corn. Rabbits streaked to escape its path. But there was no combine here; everything was calm and still.
Hand-in-hand, we walked down the old farm road, bordered by an overgrown ditch. Thirty, forty, maybe fifty crows clung to the weeds that sprung from that watery channel. We walked close by them. They didn’t flinch. Their beady eyes followed us like spectators at a slow-motion tennis match. Eerily, they watched us. I strutted intimidatingly toward them, but they just balled up and peered at me in a defensive posture. They held their ground. A shot of adrenaline tingled my spine. I thought to myself, "Crows don’t do that; they vanish at the sight of a human being."
By the time we walked in front of the old house, I had nearly forgotten about the door, the rabbit and the crows, but my mind was not at all settled. A primitive response within me expected something to happen. But what? It was a cozy day—cold, but windless. The snow had begun to obliterate our view to the extent that I couldn’t see our car 200 feet away.
Bobbie said, "I’d love to check out this old house."
"Now’s a good time," I said, "before the wasps, hornets, and critters come out in the Spring. Let’s do it."
As we walked up the slight incline to the old house, our visibility through the snow had dropped to fifteen or twenty feet. We waded through the dense, thorny underbrush. I supported Bobbie’s hand as she carefully stepped onto the wooden slats of the old porch. It creaked ominously. A bellowing sound regurgitated from the bowels of the deteriorating house. I can only describe it as what you’d hear if you stomped on the chest of an old, dying man. The car door, the rabbit, the crows, and this horrid sound, all seemed to warn us. But warn us about what? Surely, I’m letting my mind go astray. This is an old house that should have been bulldozed thirty or forty years ago. None of this slowed Bobbie’s eagerness to tear into its walls.
I doubted that the old porch would hold up under both of our weights, so I waited until Bobbie crossed over. She turned the doorknob on the front door—it opened too easily. She stepped forward. As she crossed the threshold, a firm hand grasped my left shoulder. Startled by this sudden presence, I whipped my head in that direction and balled my right fist defensively. I looked into the eyes of an ancient man, obviously beaten down by decades of hard living, his bloodshot eyes were layered with milky cataracts. He squinted and warned, "Be careful," and then awkwardly ambled down the hill into the curtains of snow flurries.
"Bobbie, come here, quick!" I summoned.
I started to jump onto the porch as Bobbie poked her head out of the door. "What, hon?"
"An old man walked by, put his hand on my shoulder, and said the same thing that the old farmer said: ‘Be careful.’ "
Bobbie looked around at the thin covering of snow on the ground, seeing what I saw—just our two sets of footprints leading up to the old house. I was ready to go home. I had encountered enough unnatural events for one day.
"Come on, dear," she persuaded; "you just want to go home and curl up on the couch. I know you."
"There really was somebody here," I exasperated.
"Come on. Quit playing around."
I looked over my shoulder in the direction where the old man had gone, surveyed the ground for the missing footprints, glanced back at Bobbie, and shrugged. "Okay, but we need to get out of here pretty quick, or we’ll have to call a tow truck."
"Give me ten minutes."
I realized then that she had a crowbar in her right hand. "Where’d you get that?" I queried.
"It was stuck in the wall beside the fireplace."
Before I had even stepped onto the creaky old porch, Bobbie had disappeared back into the old house and had begun plundering the walls with her crowbar. I walked carefully through the doorway and spotted my wife feverishly gouging a hole beside the antiquated fireplace. But louder than that, was a pecking, hammering sound on the roof.
"Let’s get out of here," I ordered. "I don’t like what’s happening."
Bobbie looked at me with blank eyes, turned, and reached into the wall that she had been demolishing. She pulled out an old leather bag caked with mildew. Bobbie grinned and tossed it to me. I caught it like a wide receiver in the numbers, and we both heard its loud chingle. I knew that sound from years as a jeweler when I purchased gold coins to melt along with alloys into custom jewelry pieces. It was the sound of gold—no doubt.
The roof of the next room in the old house slammed to the floor, and dust poofed into this room, obscuring any visibility. I stumbled over the litter toward my wife. I reached out and touched her fingertips. I grasped them and pulled her toward the doorway. The pecking overhead became like jackhammers. As we exited that room onto the porch, it collapsed. We jumped off the porch as the entire structure cascaded to the ground as though it had been dynamited.
We ran, slipping and tumbling in the snow to Bobbie’s car. Jumping into the car, she started the engine, threw it into gear, and floored the accelerator. The wheels spun with a high-pitched zeal. A large crow landed proudly on the hood. And then another. I opened my door to get out and push. Silvery blackness breached the jar in my door. I slammed it shut. Black energy and feathers pummeled the interior of the car. I grabbed the crow’s claw and slammed it against the windshield repeatedly. Finally, it lay limp on the dashboard. Zeal became grrrrr, and we rocketed toward the county road and bounced onto the blacktop.
For a mile or so, we drove in total silence, both of us staring straight ahead, concentrating on what had just happened. Then Bobbie giggled, "Aren’t you going to look in the pouch?"
"After that, I’m almost afraid to," I semi-jokingly said. Cautiously, I reached down to the floor in front of my seat and picked up the leather pouch, which weighed a couple of pounds. It reeked of rotting flesh. The leather strings that held it shut had hardened over the years into a stiff, wiry form. While driving, Bobbie repeatedly glanced over at me while I struggled to open it. I could sense her agitated excitement and anxiousness to know what it contained. The leather strings defied all my efforts to untie them. Exasperated, I reached into my pocket and retrieved my Swiss Army knife. I cut away the leather lashings. Bobbie stopped the car in the middle of the road; she stared at the pouch like a child waiting for Jack-in-the-Box to suddenly reveal himself. Carefully, I strained to pull apart the rigid opening of the pouch. I looked at Bobbie whose eyes bulged with anticipation, and then I slowly leaned my head over the opening. What I saw inside was beyond my wildest expectations.
"That was the last thing I remembered. Shhh. I have to be quiet now, or they won’t ever let me out of here."
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