He said: are they old coins?
I said: yes.
He sat down at the edge of the hole.
He did not say anything for a while.
Cass came out of the house.
She saw the box.
She said: oh.
Joel said: yeah.
She said: what is it?
He said: coins. Old ones.
She said: how old?
I said: I don’t know yet. I’m waiting for my friend.
Cass sat down next to Joel at the edge of the hole.
The three of us waited.
Patricia arrived.
Patricia is the kind of person who does not dramatize situations unnecessarily and who also does not underestimate them, the specific balance of someone who has been through enough to have calibrated perspective.
She looked at the hole.
She looked at the box.
She climbed down without being asked.
She picked up one of the coins.
She looked at it for a long time.
She said: Linda.
I said: yes.
She said: where did the first coin go?
I said: I put it back in the box.
She said: good.
She said: don’t touch anything else.
I said: why?
She said: because we need to do this correctly.
I said: what does correctly mean?
She said: it means calling someone who knows what they’re looking at.
She said: do you know what this is?
I said: old coins.
She said: very old coins.
She said: the kind that have value not just as metal but as history.
I said: how much value?
She said: I don’t know. That’s what correctly means.
She climbed out of the hole.
She stood at the edge.
She said: first, the document.
I said: yes.
She said: that’s the key.
She said: the document will tell us when this was buried and by whom and why.
I said: if we can read it.
She said: yes. If we can read it.
She looked at Joel and Cass.
She said: you two. The excavation is stopped until we know what we’re dealing with.
Joel said: we weren’t going to.
She said: I’m not asking.
She had the specific authority of someone who has spent decades managing other people’s properties and who has developed a manner that does not leave room for negotiation when negotiation is not the appropriate response.
Joel said: yes. Of course.
She looked at me.
She said: do you have a lawyer?
I said: the one I used for the property.
She said: call her tonight.
I said: it’s Saturday.
She said: call her tonight.
I called her that evening.
My lawyer’s name was Margaret, and she had the quality of someone who had heard most things and who received new information without excessive reaction, which was a quality I valued specifically in that moment.
I described what I had found.
She was quiet for a moment.
She said: do not move anything. Do not open the document. Do not let anyone else access the site.
She said: I need to make some calls tomorrow. There are reporting requirements for archaeological finds on private property, and I need to understand exactly what applies in this jurisdiction.
I said: archaeological.
She said: potentially. We don’t know yet. But if this is what it might be, there are laws and there are procedures and we need to know them before we do anything.
She said: do you understand?
I said: yes.
She said: and Linda.
I said: yes.
She said: well done for not opening the document in the hole.
I said: thank you.
She said: I’ll call you tomorrow afternoon.
I went home.
I tried to sleep.
I did not sleep particularly well.
In the morning I went back to the property.
Joel and Cass were in the house and they had, to their credit, completely stopped the excavation. The equipment was still but nothing had been disturbed.
I climbed back into the hole.
I sat beside the box.
I looked at it for a long time.
Not touching.
Just looking.
The box was old in the specific way of things that have been in the ground for a long time, the surface oxidized and pitted, the metal beneath the oxidation still solid. Someone had made this box to last. They had made it with the specific intention of preservation, which meant they had put something inside they believed was worth preserving.
I thought about who had owned this property before the house was built.
The house was built in 1961.
Before 1961, this had been a larger lot, part of a farming property that had been subdivided in the postwar period when suburban development consumed the agricultural land that had surrounded the town.
Before that.
I did not know exactly what had been here before.
I thought about the oilcloth document.
Whatever was written on that document, it had been written before 1961, by someone who buried a box of old coins in this ground and sealed a document in oilcloth and closed the latch.
They had buried it with intention.
Which meant they had intended to come back.
Margaret called at noon.
She said: I’ve spoken with the state archaeologist’s office and with a lawyer who specializes in found property law.
She said: the situation is as follows.
She laid it out.
The find qualified as what the law called a significant cultural artifact, pending expert assessment, which meant there were reporting requirements. The state had an interest in documented historical finds on private property, which did not mean ownership but meant that the state could require a proper excavation and assessment. There was a process.
I said: what about the document?
She said: the document is the key. If the document is legible and establishes the origin and nature of the find, that determines most of what comes next.
She said: I’ve arranged for a conservator to come on Wednesday. She specializes in historical documents and she can open the oilcloth properly without damaging what’s inside.
I said: Wednesday.
She said: I know it feels like a long time.
I said: it does.
She said: Linda, there is something else you should know.
I said: what?
She said: if this find is what it appears to be, the age of it.
She said: there may be a finder’s interest. A legal mechanism that in some cases provides compensation to the person on whose property a significant find is made.
I said: meaning what?
She said: meaning that if those coins are what they might be, you may have found something that has monetary value beyond the metal.
I said: how much value?
She said: I can’t tell you that. I don’t know what’s in the box. But I spoke with a numismatist this morning, a coin specialist, and I described what you described to me.
She said: she said that if the coins match what they sound like, they could be colonial-era American coins, pre-revolutionary or early revolutionary, and if that’s the case the individual coins could be worth significant amounts, and a collection of them in documented good condition could be worth considerably more.
I said: how considerable.
She said: I don’t know. More than the hole in your backyard, probably.
I almost laughed.
She said: the document will tell us more. Let’s get to Wednesday.
I said: all right.
I spent Sunday and Monday in a particular state.
Not quite suspense, not quite excitement. Something more specific, the state of someone who has found something and does not yet know what it is but who has been told that it might be significant, and who is therefore in the gap between not knowing and knowing.
I went to the library.
I spent Monday at the local history section, reading about the land that had eventually become the subdivision where Clover Street was.
What I found, in a history of the county published in 1947, was this.
The land that would become the subdivision had been a working farm from approximately 1790 to 1940, when the last of the original family sold it to a development company. The farm had been established by a man named Robert Caldwell, who had come from England in the late eighteenth century and who had, according to the county history, been a merchant before he became a farmer.
The county history noted that the Caldwell family had been locally prominent in the early nineteenth century, with connections to the commercial trade routes that passed through the region, and that the family had declined in the latter half of the century, selling portions of the property to meet debts.
It also noted, in a single paragraph that I read three times, that local legend held that Robert Caldwell had buried a portion of his merchant wealth on the property during the period of the Revolutionary War, when he had feared the disruption of commerce and the instability of paper money.
Local legend.
I looked at the publication date again.
Fourteen years before the house was built.
I called Margaret.
I said: I’ve been at the library.
She said: tell me.
I told her.
She was quiet.
She said: Linda.
I said: yes.
She said: that changes Wednesday considerably.
I said: yes.
She said: how do you feel?
I said: like I need to sit down.
She said: sit down.
I sat.
She said: this is yours. Whatever is in that box, it is on your property. The reporting requirements still apply, and there will be a process, but the property owner’s rights in this situation are significant.
She said: I want you to understand that.
I said: I understand.
She said: do you want me to be there Wednesday?
I said: yes. Please.
Wednesday came.
The conservator’s name was Dr. Anita Varma, and she was exactly what you expected a document conservator to look like, which was someone who moved carefully and who treated objects with the specific reverence of someone who understood their fragility and their significance simultaneously.
She brought equipment.
She photographed the box before opening it.
She photographed the coins in situ.
She photographed the oilcloth package.
Then she opened the oilcloth.
We watched.
It took forty minutes because the oilcloth had to be opened in a specific way that did not stress the document inside, and Dr. Varma did not rush.
What was inside the oilcloth was a letter.
Handwritten.
The paper had been preserved remarkably well by the oilcloth and the sealed wax, and though it was fragile in the way of very old paper, it was legible.
Dr. Varma read it under magnification.
She read it slowly.
She read it again.
She looked up.
She said: it’s dated 1779.
The room was very quiet.
She said: it is a letter from Robert Caldwell to his children.
She summarized it as she read, carefully, translating the eighteenth-century syntax into something we could follow.
The letter said that Robert Caldwell, merchant, was placing his most portable wealth in the ground for safekeeping during the war, which had made commerce dangerous and paper currency unreliable. He had calculated, he wrote, that gold and silver held their value across all circumstances, and that what he was burying represented the proceeds of twenty years of trade.
He had written the letter to his children so that if he did not survive the war, they would know where to look.
He had described the location in terms of the property as it existed in 1779, relative to a stone wall and an oak tree.
The oak trees.
I thought about the two old oak trees in the back left corner of the yard.
The same trees.
Two hundred and forty-five years old.
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