Digging For the Comets in the Yard

The painted rock was near the place I remembered, but I wasn't altogether sure. 

Jack Summerland, my father, had been in the habit of burying things in different places so that he could dig them up again.

The earth yielded easily to the shovel.  If the gold isn't under the red rock, I thought, I'd have a lot of ground to cover.

The back hill is about two acres of hemlock, eucalyptus, overgrown shrubs of dubious origin, and date palms.  When I was a child, Grandma Flossie's yard had seemed vast:  there was plenty of room to play movie stars on location, cowboys and Indians, and pioneers coming West.

Later, after Flossie died, and my parents and I moved here, I was more interested in real boys and not getting dirty.  So, only when Father wanted to show me the new location of the gold coins, did I venture down the back hill.

Whitley HeightsHotwordStyle=Frame;  is a small outcropping of  "old Spanish" houses on the knoll between the Hollywood Bowl and the freeway-- an island of historic California in the shabby metropolis. The slope ends at the apartment houses on Franklin Avenue.  You can sail a Frisbee over to Hollywood Boulevard from here.

In the daytime, the streets that border the fence are visited by the lost--tourists, teenagers, and the homeless. 

That's why I was digging for the gold at dawn.

When the hole was a foot deep, I decided to make it wider.

The thing about this burying exercise was that my father wasn't the only one who liked the idea of buried gold.  Hiding your treasures was a family trait.  I believe that they did it for pleasure as much as safety.

Hope was the attraction, the source of joy.  Should life become barren of prospects, well, there was always the almost-forgotten piece of worthless landHotwordStyle=Frame; , the oil stock certificates languishing in the strong box, the Bette Davis jewelry collectionHotwordStyle=Frame; , the Baja Mission Gold Mine Map.

Secrecy was also a big element, so I didn't have very much concrete information about my great great-grandfather's gold mine or the strange circumstances of  John Summerland'sHotwordStyle=Frame;  death, Uncle Erk'sHotwordStyle=Frame;  plane crash, or Aunt Rosalind'sHotwordStyle=Frame;  days of archery and Hearst CastleHotwordStyle=Frame;  parties. When Grandma Flossie had related stories of the generations, they'd seemed fragments of fanciful legends, distant and imaginary.  Like playing make-believe on the hill.

But, by the time I was an adult, I recognized the family mythology as the wishful thinking of a bunch of eccentrics. 

And the buried treasures might be priceless or worthless, depending on your faith in the long shot.

The gold coins were real, though.  I'd seen Father dig up the large, gray tube, add another year's collection of Mexican Eagle coins or Kruggerands, and bury it again in another spot on the hill.

I was sure there was enough money under the ground somewhere to take care of bills for good while.  I kept digging.

Father had started accumulating the gold coins when we moved into the house after Grandma died.  Despite my aversion to chiggers and dirt, he would take me with him down the hill every time he added more money.  

He'd dig up the container, carefully undo the tattered, blue woolHotwordStyle=Frame;  wrapping, add the new coins, and quickly transfer the package to a freshly-dug hole.  He'd spend a long time camouflaging the location, placing the red rock nearby, compacting the dirt, arranging the weeds. 

Then, he'd straighten up and say: "Now, Augusta, if anything should happen to your mother or me, or there should be an earthquake, or the banks close, or the aqueduct fails, I want you to remember where the cometsHotwordStyle=Frame;  are buried now."

Once, I asked him why he called the coins "comets."

"Because they are round.  And because we don't want anyone to know what we are talking about if we have to mention them in public."

Even after I got married and then divorced, Father continued to remind me about the movement of the gold around the hillside.  I'd go for dinner every Sunday, and, after dessert, every year or so, he'd invite me into the study for a private talk. He'd always show me the neatly filed Last Will and Testament and then say:  "Why don't we take a walk down the hill and check the location of the comets?"

Father's anticipation of calamity and preference for private banking spilled over into a distrust of lawyers and commercial institutions.  He came by these suspicions the same way that he inherited the love of buried gold and secrecy--a legacy from the life and death of his father, John SummerlandHotwordStyle=Frame; .

The story told about my grandfather was that, due to his untimely death, the Califia mine, and the lack of a Last Will and Testament, his estate was tied up in the courts for ten years.  When the lawyers and creditors were done, nothing was left.

"When someone dies, they close up all the bank accounts, you know," Father would say darkly.  Then he'd take me out on the hill and have me commit to memory the new directions.  Finally, he'd hide a neat but unidentified drawing in his desk.

All those years, I was pretty relaxed about remembering each of the locations because I figured he'd be moving the coins again, sometime in the near future.  He hadn't said anything about the comets during the last couple of months before his death; I thought it was safe to assume that he hadn't moved the cache.

So what I was after was actual and concrete and (I believed at the time) a sure thing. But almost two feet down, it seemed like the ground had been disturbed recently.  That was a bad sign.

Perhaps my father had dug up the coins only to bury them deeper in the same spot.  Or maybe he had moved them again and forgotten to tell me.  Or maybe someone else had dug them up.  Or maybe I had the wrong place.

Still, there was nothing to do but continue.  It was almost effortless, shoveling out a hole in the lightly-compacted earth. 

How deep did he bury this stuff?  He had always dug deep holes, three feet at least to plant tomatoes.

It wasn't that I was anxious to run down to the discos (or the malls) of HollywoodHotwordStyle=Frame;  and squander this very small fortune. 

I was desperate.

I'd been divorced for a few years and I was broke.  By the time I had finally got my life together and a real estate license, the market was busted. I hadn't sold one house in over a year. 

Although Father had prudently pre-paid funeral, mortuary, and plot lots for himself and mother, it costs so much to die.

And it continued to cost so much for Mother.

And the bank accounts were closed temporarily.

And then there was the issue of my mother's signature.

Buried gold was just the thing for emergencies.

By the time the excavation was about two feet deep and pretty big around, the sun was up and it was getting hot.

But, no rubber tube.  Halfway into the next shovelful, the metal struck hard pack.  If someone had gotten deeper than this, it had to be with a pickaxe.  I dug some more around the edges, but all I found was a shred of the blue woolHotwordStyle=Frame;  wrapping. 

Then I heard Calvin Name=Calvin; HotwordStyle=Frame; walking his dogs down the hill.  Calvin lives alone in the house next door; he keeps a close watch on the neighborhood when he's not working on a movie—finding props for vintage films or something.  He'd be surprised to find me digging up the hillside first thing in the morning.

Time to ditch the shovel.  Covering up the hole could wait til later.  I tried to slip back up the hill to the garage.

"Augusta!"  Calvin shouted.  He came scrambling through the brush.

Beads of sweat ran down his round forehead and glistened in his spiky, orange hair.  His dogs, Fred and Ginger,HotwordStyle=Frame;  hustled up behind him.  Slipping away was out of the question.  I gave up, and we met at the fence.

"We have to stop meeting like this!"

He's about ten years younger than me, flirts a little.

I was grateful to him for all his help during the funeral, so I didn't want to snub him, exactly.  But I didn't want to answer questions, either. 

He said something about the beautiful sunrise. 

"Just what you should be doing.  Up and out—don't let the sun catch you crying."  Talks in old song titles and movie quotes.

I nodded.

"And...digging for something?"  The busybody.

"Tomatoes. Time to plant tomatoes." 

"Aah,"  Calvin said easily, "I thought it might be gold you were digging for."

Ten beats.  "Why would you think that?"

"Something VioletHotwordStyle=Frame;  said a few years ago...you know."  He was referring to the first years of my mother's Alzheimer's, when she was just confused, would get in long conversations with the checker at the market. Would think the UPS man was a dinner guest.  Would tell salesmen who came to the door that she was engaged in secret work for the City of Los Angeles.

Calvin probably got a lot of information from Mother.

"By the way...have you told Violet?"

 "Yes, a couple of times.  But I don't know if she understands." 

When I told my mother that Father was dead, she had looked sad for a few minutes.  But then she had reverted to a question she repeated often, "Where's Jack?"  Perhaps she only responded to my tone of voice.  But who knew what she remembered, what she understood?

"I miss them both,"  CalvinHotwordStyle=BookDefault;  said.  "Be glad to help you dig."

I shrugged.  "You know my father, he had some crazy ideas—the hole in his head, you know."

"Not crazy, he always had a grand plan.  If I were you, I'd leave no mattress unturned."

                                       ****