SHORT STORY

THE TREASURE IN THE BACK YARD

One's own self is well hidden from one's own self;
of all mines of treasure, one's own is the last to be dug up.

--Friedrich Nietzsche

Astrid had always been a little eccentric, but after her husband died, she graduated to being completely nuts. No one talked about it of course; no one mentioned it at Christmas dinners, birthday parties or christenings. But it was one of those open secrets—the knowledge that when Astrid started speaking at the dinner table, the rest of the family, all thirty five members should shut up and listen, even if she didn’t make any sense. No one interrupted her or made faces or rolled their eyes.

               When someone had lived for as long as Astrid had, it was ridiculous to not respect them. Astrid and her husband, Ulrik, bought the farm that Astrid still, at ninety-three years of age insisted on living alone in, before Hitler came to power. They had more land then and more cattle, but Ulrik had kept the farm working and profitable till he was nearly ninety. But then his hip, his diabetes, his heart—all body parts started to give him trouble and he had to divest. The farm was now just a farm house with a few chickens in the coop. The barn was empty, save for a few pieces of old furniture and stacks of firewood.

               Gunnar worried about his mother living alone in that farm, thirty minutes from his house and the worry drove him to his mother’s house at least twice a week. If his wife Anna felt that he ate too many dinners with his mother, she didn’t say anything, just like Gunnar didn’t say anything to anyone when Astrid asked him to start digging up her back yard.

               “You tell no one, Gunnar,” she said to her youngest son, now nearly sixty years old himself, but still her little boy and her favorite.

               “I won’t,” Gunnar promised.

               “Ulrik buried a treasure,” she told Gunnar as she directed him to the first spot, the first time she made him dig a hole, “and I want you, only you to find it.”

               Gunnar felt privileged and the pleasure of sharing a secret with his mother that none of his siblings knew about made his heart swell. It had always been like this, even when they were children, Astrid always saved the last slice of cake for Gunnar.

               When Gunnar had children he swore he wouldn’t be like his mother and play favorites but it had happened all the same. Lars had been Anna’s son and Julie had been his daughter—his special daughter, the one he would walk through fire for.

               “You’ll walk through fire for Lars too,” Anna assured him when he voiced his concern to her.

 ***

               Gunnar didn’t mind digging the holes. Amongst all his siblings, one brother and one sister, he was the only one who mowed his mother’s lawn, threw out her trash, cleaned the house, did the grocery shopping, and so on and so forth.

               He never complained about it. His siblings didn’t live as close as he did and they were older than him, older and more tired than he was.

               “What kind of a treasure is it?” Gunnar asked Astrid once as they sat down for coffee, taking a break between digging holes in the yard.

               Astrid took a long sip of coffee before she answered. “I’m not sure.”

               “But you know that there is a treasure?” Gunnar asked.

               Astrid took another sip of her coffee and then looked at Gunnar. She crinkled face, curved it into a smile and put her hand on Gunnar’s. “You mustn’t tell anyone what I’m telling you.”

               When Gunnar nodded his head in assurance, she continued.

               “Well, it was a long time ago. You were just a month old and awake at all hours of the day and night. You were a colicky baby. Ulrik used to go away on long trips to meet with other buyers, sometimes to Aarhus, sometimes to Copenhagen. Whenever he would come back, he would handover the money to me. I did all the accounting and put the money in the bank,” she said and then paused, looking frantic.

               “Are you sure you won’t tell anyone?” she demanded again.

               “I won’t,” Gunnar said, now intensely curious.

               She sighed. “Okay then, as long as you promise to not tell anyone.” She took a deep breath then and let it out slowly before continuing with her tale. “One day Ulrik came home with no money. It was one in the morning but I was up with you, walking you up and down the living room. That was when I saw him in the backyard, digging. He put something inside the hole and covered it.”

               “You didn’t ask him what he buried,” Gunnar asked.

               His mother shook her head. “It wasn’t really my business.”

               Gunnar’s eyes widened. If he buried something in the backyard and Anna saw him do it, she’d definitely think it was her business.

               What if it was not a treasure, Gunnar thought on his way home. What if it was a dead body? Or something as terrible?

               Since he’d promised his mother he wouldn’t tell anyone about the treasure in the backyard, he didn’t even tell Anna what he was doing when he visited Astrid.

               The digging of the holes stopped a few months later when Astrid broke her hip. She was nearly ninety years old, no one expected her to survive the surgery, but she came back home, her hip better than it had been in nearly a decade.

               Gunnar continued his visits and she once again made him dig around the backyard. She would sit down on the patio with a cup of coffee and they’d talk as he dug.

               “When I was a little girl,” Astrid told him once, “I had a treasure box.”

               Gunnar straightened to take a break and looked at her. “What’s a treasure box?” he asked.

               “Well,” she said and then shook her head. “You’ll think I’m foolish.”

               “I won’t,” Gunnar said. If he wasn’t thinking she was completely cuckoo to make him dig around the backyard, the story about some kind of a treasure box wasn’t going to change his mind.

               She smiled then, almost like a little girl and her eyes twinkled, lighting up her wrinkled face. “My father gave it to me,” she said. “The box was black with a red rose painted on it. It was really a small box. But it contained treasures—from the past.”

               Gunnar found out that the box in question had been passed on from girl to girl for nearly two hundred years and contained a souvenir from each girl. He didn’t believe her but he listened all the same.

               “There was a blonde lock of hair from a girl who was executed in France during the revolution,” Astrid told Gunnar, her face enchanted with the memories of the box.

               “Is that what Far buried here?” Gunnar asked.

               “No, no,” Astrid said, shaking her head vigorously. “I gave it away when I turned thirteen, that’s what you were supposed to do.”

               “What did you put in the box?” Gunnar asked.

               “I put Den Grimme Ćlling,” she said, referring to HC Andersen’s The Ugly Duckling. “It was my favorite book because I used to be so ugly as a child.”

               “You were?” Gunnar asked surprised because he had grown up hearing people talk about how beautiful his mother was.

               “That’s for another time,” Astrid said, standing up, leaning on her cane. “Now it’s time for you to go home. Come back on Friday and then you can dig some more. I think around that birch tree this time. Yes, maybe that’s where Ulrik had buried the treasure…yes, by the birch tree next time.”

               But Gunnar never did hear the story about how his ugly mother transformed into a swan. Early Friday morning, Astrid had another stroke and she quietly passed away in her home, lying in the bed she had shared for the better part of her life with her husband Ulrik.

***             

               There was sadness at the funeral. Young grandchildren cried profusely, while the children, Gunnar, his older brother Henrik and older sister Ruth, sat solemnly together in a pew at the church Gunnar’s family had visited for generations, the church outside which, his ancestors were buried.

Vor Frue Kirke, Our Lady’s Church was small, high up on a hill with a brilliant view of Skive. The church was almost torn down in the early nineteenth century because it was considered too small. But then murals from the sixteenth century were discovered underneath the modern plaster and the church was saved.

               Gunnar didn’t care for the religious sentiment portrayed in the murals, said to be the largest presentation of all known medieval saints in Denmark, but he did think they were beautiful. The church was built around the year 1200 and rebuilt several times, with the latest renovation in 1992. Gunnar had taken his students from Carpentry School for a tour of the construction to show how the workmen were restoring the windows and doors.

               There was a lunch arranged after burial service in Astrid’s house. It was summer so they had decided on outdoor seating. Ruth and her husband Henning had offered to take care of the dinner.

               “We couldn’t use the back yard,” Henning told Gunnar as they drove from the church back to Astrid’s house. “It was dug up all over the place and it would have taken too long to fill the holes and then set the tent there. Do you know anything about this?”

               Gunnar shook his head, not wanting to flat out lie, but also reluctant to reveal his mother’s secret or admit that he’d been a complete idiot for digging holes in her backyard, looking for buried treasure.

               “So we set it up in the front garden,” Henning continued.

               Astrid had always taken care of her garden and now with the help of Gunnar and sometimes Henrik, the garden was in full bloom, just the way Astrid loved it.

               Astrid died at the ripe age of 90, the family, though saddened by her passing were not beating their chests with grief. It was a different kind of grief, mellow and melancholic.

               All of Astrid’s children made toasts at the dinner. People cracked jokes about Astrid, talked about her excellent cooking—related stories from the past.

               It was nearly two in the morning when the last guest left. Henrik, Ruth, and Gunnar stayed behind in the home of their childhood, the one they would now have to sell.

               Henrik was a real estate agent and it was decided it was his responsibility to sell the house and the farm. Ruth had agreed, to Gunnar’s wife’s dismay, that she would divide Astrid’s personal belongings, which meant that Anna could forget about getting any of the George Jensen table linen she had also coveted. Gunnar agreed to look at the finances and ensure that it was split evenly. These were practical matters—devoid of the emotion they all felt.

               There would be no fighting over this and that, they knew. Maybe their wives and husbands might argue over a lamp or a table or a chair, but they weren’t eager to split their parents’ belongings by tearing at each other. In any case, all three siblings were well off and didn’t really need the inheritance.

               They sat at the dining table, where they used to sit when they visited their parents as adults, when they ate dinner as children, sat with extended family for Christmas and Easter dinners.

               “I think Mia would like the table,” Ruth said, patting the dining table. Her daughter had recently gotten married and had bought an apartment in Copenhagen with her husband and apartment desperately needed to be furnished.

               “The rocking chair should go to Julie,” Henrik said. “She sat there with Far and he told her stories while he smoked his pipe.”

               Gunnar felt his heart tighten. They were gone, his parents were gone. And now he was the last generation, so to speak. He was just three years younger than his oldest brother and a year younger than his sister; they were all, standing this side of 60, nearly the same age. Now they were the oldest members of the family, now it was going to be time for them to start dying.

               “Do you think she was losing her mind these last few years?” Ruth asked.

               “What do you mean?” Henrik asked.

               Ruth shrugged. “She told me not to tell anyone,” she said and then smiled at her brothers. “But she made me come every Sunday and open each and every box in the attic.”

               Gunnar throat went dry. “What was she looking for?”

               “Treasure,” Ruth said on a soft laugh. “She said that when I was a year old she was walking with me late in the night when Far came home from one of his trips to Copenhagen or Aarhus. And…”

               “And he always gave her money when he came back,” Henrik added, a smile broadening his face.

               “Then one day he didn’t give her any money…” Gunnar said, feeling a burst of love for his mother.

               “...and he took it to the barn.” Henrik said and Gunnar started to laugh.

               Understanding flashed in Ruth’s eyes, “So that’s why you’ve been renovating that stupid barn.”

               “And that’s why there are holes in the backyard,” Gunnar added dryly.

               The three then looked at the picture of their mother by the dining table, a picture that was taken just five years ago at Astrid’s eighty fifth birthday party. She still looked active, excited—as if she were still enjoying life.

               “I came to visit her on Tuesdays and Thursdays,” Henrik said.

               “I came on Sundays,” Ruth said.

               Gunnar chuckled. “Wednesdays and Fridays were mine.”

               They both nodded their heads in understanding. She had sat with them, talked to them. Had she felt she needed to cook up a story about a treasure to be able to enjoy their company? Wouldn’t they have come anyway?

               “I never believed there was a treasure,” Gunnar said and he really hadn’t. He had just thought the old woman had lost her mind, which she apparently had not. She had known what she was doing, spending the last days of her life with the children she loved.  

               “She told me I was her favorite child,” Henrik said.

               “Me too,” Ruth said.

               Gunnar grinned then. “She might have said that to you, but we all know the truth. I was her favorite child.”

THE END