CHAPTER EIGHTEEN (INTERLUDE CONTINUED)

NOVEMBER 23, 2012

DAVID

It's a convergence event. A stationary snowstorm sitting over the Snake River Plain that rotates, two weather systems, one from the north, one from the south, fighting it out. A Civil War, of sorts. Or the meteorological equivalent of WWI trench warfare: no movement, constant turbulence. Rare, they typically occur in the spring, when the melt is on, not at this time of year. In March or April, the atmosphere is warmer, swollen with evaporating moisture, eager to drop its load at a mere suggestion. Every few years one occurs: April of 1978: eighteen inches of snow in a two mile strip downwind of the Reservoir—lake effect; April, 1992: two feet, from Pocatello to Idaho Falls. This, where four to six inches of snow exceeds the norm. This convergence, a temporal aberration, spins just after Thanksgiving.

David watches the big flakes collect, the porch light on and his curtains open, an inch an hour accumulating on the deck, layer upon layer upon layer. No wind, just precipitation dropping from the sky, Pompeii in slow motion using an alternate material, blanketing all, stilling everything, all animals surely clustering together to wait out the weather.

The gravesite is covered, evidence of last night's activity erased. An occasional impulse to go back, dig up the gold, keeps circling in his mind, its own convergence event, his curiosity not diminished by his find. Questions blossom. How much gold is buried there? What is it worth? What are the legalities? Who owns it, the finder or the property owner? How can he cash it in? He chastises himself for removing the papers but not the gold—who would do that?

A question that his father might have asked rises: do you deserve it? His father wouldn't attach judgment to the question but David does. The answer, as always, is no. He has never been able to determine that answer's source—he is never enough, always unworthy. Digging up the gold, thinking it as his own treasure, seems a theft and still he can't shake the urge to collect it. And the notion, part accusation, remains—he would be committing a crime, if not a sin.

He has showered, multiple times. Tried to sleep. His mind churns and he expects it to keep doing so. He brews yet another pot of coffee though he is jittery and grabs the papers that include Henry's map. He opens the box. The coffee is done. He brushes dirt from his hands and pants, realizing too late he should have cleaned the box before bringing it into the trailer. The coffee's too hot to drink but he sips it anyway.

There are two sandwich bags inside the container, each with paper inside. The presence of plastic surprises him, tells him his find can't be too old. He takes out the first, the one on top, opens it, retrieves the note inside. Its' texture is unfamiliar. It may be parchment, it feels vulnerable to the touch and he fears destroying it. His curiosity overrides the concern, he carefully unfolds the note.

The ink has faded considerably, some letters so faint that he only can tell where the writer's pen has momentarily lost its flow and created blots. He gets the magnifying glass that came with his Oxford English Dictionary (he knew it would come in handy someday). Applying the cumbersome glass, heavy enough he doesn't want to place it directly on the paper, he sees enough shading to discern the words. The cursive penmanship is of an era that predates his own. Styled idiosyncratically, yet readable. The most rudimentarily educated people, if they learned nothing else, learned to fashion their letters beautifully. Even when they couldn't spell the words.

The note reads: This gold was taken from Ed Long, who stold it from the stage. It is not all the gold he stold. He did not no we stold it at ole Fort Hall but he will be missing it so we went acrost the river where Josie our daughter drowned. My wife made me bury the gold with Josie I dont no why. We are going to where Fort Lemhi was and possibilly Deer Lodge but I intend to come back for Josie and the gold. If you find this gold please no it is stold and of bad luck as witnessed in Josie's death. The gold is not ours but it is not yores neither and we have paid for it with our daughter's life. We come from Fort Connor so if you find us dead please tell those people of our sorrow that we did not believe any more but we wish them well.

It is signed "Uriah and Louisa Johnson 1863".

David lets the information strike him but can make no immediate surmisals. He sets the paper down, puts the magnifying glass to the side, gets a blank sheet and, full of trepidation that the note might deteriorate and become unreadable, writes down what he just read. Then he reaches for the other note, this bag taped to the inside of the box, the tape another telling detail of a more modern time. David unseals the bag, unfolds the paper inside. It is a more brittle paper than the other, more modern like the plastic. It is in another hand he immediately recognizes as Henry Herr's. He is not surprised. He seems to be everywhere. This note, more easily read, has penmanship far less ornate:

No doubt you have found the gold and the little girl. I hope you leave it, unless you need the money. Not because of bad luck but because who the gold rightly belonged to was long gone when I found it so they are gone still. Uriah and Louisa Johnson were Morrisites. They believed in the Mormon Church but not in polygamy or Brigham Young and suffered accordingly. After the Church slaughtered Joe Morris and some of his members, Captain Connor escorted the rest to Soda Springs, where the Johnsons must have left from. They leave no record of their journey across the desert to Lost River or Lemhi. I have looked hard and found nothing. Likely they could survive the trek without water but any mishap would have ended those hopes. Other possibilities exist but there are no known family so far as I have been able to determine who would feel a need to re-bury the little girl elsewhere. I am not a man who believes in the supernatural but there also is no reason to disturb the past nor one to take from either it or the future. Take the gold if you need it but leave it if you don't. Whatever you imagine might be solved by sudden wealth is no different than the drunkard's belief his present feeling will forever erase his old ones.

Henry Herr 1959

David's mind whirls, with none of the ideas juggling about inside emerging as prominent or connecting into a coherent, calming thought. He dislikes the dissonance, the event at the gravesite's many disparate emotional components, all sharing an adrenalin-producing effect that conjoins with the historical framework of the revealed site. He drinks, the coffee still plenty hot and not the best solution to his state of mind. He searches for a way to sort things through enough to settle him into a position of tolerable consciousness.

He copies Henry's letter. If he doesn't, he will keep unfolding it and folding it, eventually ruin it. He returns it to the box along with the Johnsons' note. He places the box under his bed, then neatens the pile of papers on his desk and puts it away, too.

He stares out at the snow. Stillness helps. It preserves a moment, depriving it of movement into a succeeding one. If he tried to swat his thoughts away—which he wants to do—he would just empower them, give them more speed and greater intensity. His face was buried in a young girl's skeleton. He has been surrounded by untold wealth, confronted with a confusing history and another layer of history, Henry's, regarding that history. He has time to think it through. All winter, in fact, given the blanketing snow. No thaw will come to loosen the soil, allow the earth to reveal its possessions, tempt him toward action.

***

He wakes later to a morning of bright sun and clear skies. A wicked storm often moves through to be replaced by a wake of stillness, a sheer, vivid white behind it that sucks any warmth from the air. There is a foot of snow, at least, the fence posts topped with white, suggesting no recent wind. Noise is absent, quieted by the thick, smothering blanket, one allowing any sound bold enough to live a widely encompassing space. Few cars will be moving today, at least until afternoon when the snowplow comes through, if indeed it makes it this far. Not on Thanksgiving weekend, with double-time wages to be paid. Bus routes come first on the plow's agenda, anyway, and no bus comes near here. Then the major thoroughfares get plowed, with progressively minor roads taken care of until this one finally appears on the list, there at the bottom. That hasn't changed in fifty years. A museum that gets few visitors in the summer and where almost none are expected this winter doesn't change the formula.

A child's skeleton. Loot from a robbery. Forty yards from where he sits. They will both rest through the winter months, having rested a hundred fifty years already. He knows his own mind won't rest. Rapid impulses will rise, which he'll spend hours quelling, only sleep resetting an overactive mind. Sit with it, Buddha would say, let it pass through you. That may work on fleeting emotions, the weak weather patterns of the mind but not the strong ones. Those sit with him as he sits, they move when he moves, shift when he shifts, rest when he rests. Convergence zones of the mind, waiting him out as he waits them out. Stalemate.

He can sort through this, devise a plan, enact it in spring. Situate himself in increments of potential action. Once the snow melts in spring. After the ground thaws, once that melt's over. When the consequent mud dries sufficiently—then he will dig. That's the easy part of the problem. The hard part? How does he sell the gold without the authorities becoming involved?

That, too, must be done in increments, he reminds himself. One small step at at time. Find the buyers. Vet their character and procedures.

But he has to keep it all secret, all along the way, from unburying to sale. He has to undertake it slyly. He has to skulk. Draw a line separating his visible actions from his audible words, from his plans and thoughts. Those thoughts, unfortunately, are composed of words, so could easily slip from silent to verbalized. A sloshing vessel, the mind is. Things spill out.

They're spilling out now. He needs to get out, enter a new frame of mind. He puts his snow boots on. He could drive but there's no telling if he'd get stuck or not, even with four-wheel drive. His father pulled more hunters and fishermen out—with his two wheel drive pickup, a little bit of commonsense and experience—after than before four wheel drive was invented. The illusion of being able to go anywhere, do anything, at the behest of a technique or gadget 'makes men stupid'—that was the way his dad put it, disgust accompanying the description.

Though dressed warmly, knowing it will be cold, when David heads out into the snow he is still taken by surprise.

The cold is settling in hard. Though no wind yet threatens, David bets that by nightfall the clear skies will free what heat remains into the upper atmosphere. He remembers now, a north wind follows, and it may be zero degrees now but it will be twenty, even thirty below zero by tomorrow morning.

A crunch to the snow is already on as he heads down to McTucker. The big tree overlooking McTucker's absent homestead still hasn't lost its leaves, surely it will soon. He resists the pull of the gravesite, knowing any trail will attract attention. He walks past the pump, over the bluff, to the shallow dam that backs up enough water to supply Griffiths' pump.

The burbling stream echoes across the banks and beyond. David's breath rises in clouds that barely move, that dissipate slowly. They are small, his breaths now short, otherwise he'll start coughing. Which reminds him of his condition. Another confusion to add to his thought process. This would be a smoker's moment, the time to pull out a cigarette to allow oneself both action and thought. It's a curious thing to him, the instinctive need to move—is it really there or is he just infected with guilt about not doing something?

On the way back, his ears chilling to the point of pain, he makes a tentative list: what to do first, what to do next. In regards to the loot, in regards to the cancer, in regards to Kali.

Be thorough and exact, he tells himself.

© 2025 Ralph Thurston