A work of fiction that seeks to decipher who is the worthy heir to a military hero, a seafarer, and a builder of banks. The hunt for the treasure of Archibald Bates…
by: Kevin Duffy
To a twelve-year-old, the stories made sense. If you were going to bury a treasure, it was logical to bury it in a grave, because no one would want to dig up a dead body. It had a certain moral logic, too, in the minds of young boys seeking to prove their bravery: you weren’t just digging up a hole in some field somewhere; you were facing death itself, and walking away with a just reward. When I think of it now, I’m surprised that we were the only ones that tried it. Then again, given the way it all ended, maybe a whole bunch of kids dug that same hole, before and since.
The cemetery was on our street, so while the Bates grave was famous throughout the whole town, we had a special connection to it. It was part of our neighborhood and part of our lives. We rode our bikes through that cemetery every day, ducked behind the headstones playing hide-and-seek on summer nights, and helped plant miniature flags around the plots on Memorial Day. If anyone should have found the treasure of Archibald Bates, it was us.
The maritime museum in town had a huge portrait of Old Archie, standing erect in a uniform with big gold-tasseled platforms for shoulders, one hand on an oversized globe, his gray-bearded face staring sternly at you. He was a Civil War colonel, owner of a whaling fleet, and the founder of the town’s first bank. The Bates Family had been there for generations, old-line Puritan folks with their name on the library and two different streets (Bates Court and Bates Lane). Some Bates still lived there, in a big house behind a tall iron fence by the harbor. Their kids went to private school somewhere and none of us had seen them since they stopped playing Little League in fourth grade. Why didn’t they try to unearth the treasure you might ask. It was their ancestor, after all. We would talk about that all the time, and, leaving only the most logical answer out, we’d list off the reasons. Perhaps they were rich and didn’t need it. Or they were scared of some other family secret that might be dug up with the gold (I always pictured it as gold). Or they didn’t want to defile the grave. Or rather they were from the branch of the family that Old Archie was trying to keep the treasure away from in the first place. I liked that last one the most, because it fit the story that everyone already knew — Archie Bates took his whaling and banking treasure to the grave with him just to keep it out of the hands of a hated brother. So no Bates descended from that brother had any right to that prize (and they must be descended from the brother if they weren’t claiming the treasure). It might as well go to the brave boys, the neighborhood kids that planned and executed the dig, the worthy heirs to a military hero and seafarer and builder of banks.
My best friend Tim and I used to get off the school bus at the end of the street and run over to the Bates gravesite just to look at it. Over the years we’d talked about every possible way of getting to that treasure. Once when they were digging out the foundation of a new house around the corner, we talked about stealing the backhoe and using it for our secret job, then returning it before morning so no one would even know we used it. But in the end it didn’t take a backhoe for us to finally try it. It took the Coogans.
Eddie and Frankie Coogan were cousins who lived in houses next door to each other at the end of the street, directly across from the cemetery.Neither one of them had a dad, and their moms were out a lot, sometimes I guess at their jobs. We grew up with an unspoken sense, an unspoken knowledge, that they were different from us.They were bad at everything, from school to sports. They never joined any of the organized basketball or baseball or soccer teams. They were the type of kids who ate with their mouths open.
Frankie was the loud one, chubby and almost proud of his stupidity. He could never keep his mouth shut, as if his presence was nullified in silence, or like he was scared that if things became un-stupid, he would lose control of them. He was the first of our class to find rap music, the early nineties kind, and by sixth grade he started to talk and act like some type of city gangster. He addressed us all as “bitches,” or worse.
Eddie was different, more quiet, more dangerous. In winter, he would lick across his top lip to where his nose ran freely, until the whole space between mouth and nose was raw, red, and chapped, a sad moustache of pain. He talked so little that it gave you the idea not to talk to him either. He would usually start the violence, with Frankie lending his fists at the end (and generally some words, some veneer of stupidity that confused how you felt about the attack).
I remember their worst beating, when Tim’s little brother Jason was on rollerblades and Eddie grabbed him by the shirt and pulled. Jason spun down to the ground in a circle, scraping his face and the heels of his hands along the pavement. When Jason tried to stand up he’d slip right back down over the wheels of the rollerblades, with Eddie holding the shirt tight and hitting the same side of his head with the same right fist, again and again. Tim ran in and shoved Eddie, who did not let go of Jason, just leaned back and punched Tim on the nose. Tim shoved again, weakly, and bent and grabbed where Eddie’s hand was grasping Jason’s shirt, not caring about getting hit himself, trying only for the small victory of freeing his brother.
I didn’t ask the reason for the beating. I knew there was no reason. There never was. And I was ashamed for not doing anything. But this was how our group worked. The Coogans did what they did and we couldn’t imagine anything different. We were stuck there together as our neighborhood was a couple miles away from the next closest one, where there were other twelve-year-olds, other options. We were a strange brotherhood of small circumstances, trapped together by a sense that this was the only size our world could be.
So in this way Tim and I were best friends, and we hated Eddie and Frankie, and they were our friends too. It wasn’t all bad. We did have free reign at the park in our neighborhood, no older kids around to bother us, and we could turn on the lights and play baseball or basketball late into the night. Four boys, living a cycle of play through the New England seasons: the winter numbness on bare arms, the sugar-thick air of spring, the summer with its sweat and moths, and the light-fading fall with its wind scraping dry leaves across the pavement. But the threat was always there, just below the surface, waiting for a moment that violence could suit. More often than not, it came out. Mostly just a shove here or a rock thrown there, a trip or a kick, and either victim or aggressor would eventually leave the scene.
But it was all about to change. Grade school was over and junior high was waiting ahead of us as we counted down the summer days. The junior high and high school were together in one building, so we were essentially headed to high school, with its cars and team sports and older kids who were almost adults. The neighborhood wouldn’t be any type of boundary for us anymore. We felt it like the summer heat; we were pressing up against the shell of our small little world, knowing with certainty that it was about to break just as the humidity that pressed down upon us would give way to autumn. For the first time in our relationships to each other, we felt the strain and meaningfulness of a thing in the intensity that immediately precedes its end. The first conclusion of a fake reality that any of us would know. The first in the series of such that characterize life.
Before all that, one day that summer Tim rode his bike into my driveway. I had been throwing a tennis ball off the garage door. He pulled up and stuck a leg out to prop himself while sitting on the bike. “We’re doing it tonight,” he said. And I knew what he meant.
“Who?”
“Coogans and me.”
“Man, fuck them. One week is high school.” It was the first time I remember using the F bomb.
“They have the shovels, they’re going to do it and we can be there or not. I’m not scared,” he said. He pushed off with his foot and rode away.
We hadn’t talked like that to each other before that, hadn’t fully indulged in the dismissiveness that young men especially equate with power. I decided to be angry, to ignore him and let him go with the Coogans and let him see what happened alone with them in the graveyard at night. I went to bed convincing myself I didn’t care. But I didn’t sleep, and Tim’s words played over and over in my head: I’m not scared. What did he mean? Did he think I was scared? Was I? Maybe this was the last chance for us to do this, to find the treasure of our childhood imaginations, to show the Coogans they weren’t bolder or stronger than us, to have one last big night together and then cut them out of our lives for good. And four guys could do it, and Tim and I should be together, and what if they find it and I’m not there, and it was an adventure and a story and a fulfillment of boyhood at the end of boyhood. I remembered that day Tim jumped in to save his brother on the rollerblades. I got up and slid out my window.
“Who the fuck is that?” I heard a hostile whisper as I approached the grave. It was Frankie.
“I’m here to help,” I whispered back, trying to sound confident.
The moon was fairly bright that night so I could see things pretty well right away. Tim and Eddie were digging, about ankle deep in two separate and unconnected spots that roughly lined up with the head and the foot of the grave. Tim looked up at me for a second and then back down. I couldn’t notice his expression. Eddie did not acknowledge me. They went on in silence for some minutes, soft grunts and the occasional scrape of metal on small rocks. Tim stopped, stepped away from his hole and tilted his shovel handle towards where Frankie and I were standing. I looked at Frankie. “I’m the lookout, bitch,” he snorted lazily, and shoved me toward Tim. turned and took the shovel and stepped into the hole. “Thanks man”, Tim said, softly and seriously.
We went on this way for an hour or so, Tim and I taking turns, Frankie standing with crossed arms, looking vacantly out at the road, Eddie never stopping, never speaking. The circles merged together so that now we had one big hole. We got to knee deep, the dug soil tossed all around us in no particular pile. Eddie took his shirt off and threw it to the side. I did the same, and so did Tim. The heat seemed more intense than when we started. I felt sweat rolling down my back and had to wipe my hands dry occasionally to grip the shovel handle. Our shorts and bare legs were caked with dirt. Mosquitoes buzzed by our ears. No one spoke. At waist deep, I pulled myself up out of the hole and scooted to a sitting position. My hands burned and my shoulders pulsed with pain. Then, Tim did not slide into the hole to take his turn. He sat down next to me and looked right at me. I knew what he meant. We wanted to quit, but didn’t know how. Eddie stopped as well. He looked back over his shoulder at us sitting, then turned and climbed out at the opposite end of the hole. He stood there for a minute, wiped his face with his t-shirt. Frankie stared at the ground.
The silence was different now. We were failures. A pathetic hole over a dead body, a grave ripped open by boys too weak to finish the job. I felt sick about it, even stupid. I knew with the certainty of experience what was about to happen. I stood up, numbly, tapping Tim to rise with me. I felt a buzzing in my head and an intense dryness of my mouth. I turned and took one step away, towards home, feeling Tim beside me.
Instantly, Eddie’s arm slipped around my throat. He jerked me backwards towards his body, his shoulder squeezing on one side of my neck and the bone of his forearm on the other. I made a sickly gurgle as he twisted me off my feet, pushing me away at the end of the turn so I dove head-first into the hole. As I turned I saw Frankie pushing Tim back towards me, calling him “little faggot.” Tim landed at my feet but sprang back up immediately, posting his hands on the edge of the hole and boosting himself back out. Eddie came running forward and swung a kick, his foot swiftly smacking Tim’s face. Tim fell back down with a squeal, landing in a ball inside the grave as he hacked out crying little coughs.
I had no thoughts in my head, no feeling, not even any specific intention, as I reached both hands across my body and grabbed the shovel lying next to the hole. I didn’t know what I expected when I swung in a looping overhead arc, the head of the tool coming down onto Eddie’s face with a metallic twang that trailed off into a wet ripping sound. I dropped it as it cleared the hateful face, feeling like time had stopped. Eddie’s eyes remained open as his knees gave out and he crumpled limp-armed down into the hole. Tim scooted out of the way as Eddie fell. We both turned and climbed up out of the opposite side of the grave. Frankie hadn’t moved since the shovel swing. He stood there, his oversized idiot face gazing down at his cousin. He looked up at Tim and I, and whispered “you bitch” before he turned and sprinted away.
I looked into the grave. Eddie had pulled himself to his knees, head bent, blood leaking in a steady stream from his face down onto his chest. Unsteadily, he reached his hand out toward something in front of him in the dirt. He pried in with fingertips, clearly grabbing at the edge of something solid. He dug in with both hands, pushing soil away and trying to get leverage along the object’s edge. Finally the object broke away from the dirt around it, coming loose into his hands all at once. A rock. A square-ish dark rock about half the size of a toaster. He dropped it, leaned forward until his forehead touched the dirt, and convulsed with loud, shoulder-jerking sobs. Tim and I looked at each other and turned, running away towards our homes as fast as we could.
The next week we arrived at high school. Tim and I were in some classes together but I had no reason to deal with the Coogans although I would see them occasionally. We never heard anything about the grave, no complaint about vandalism or reports of the hole being found, nothing. I’d like to think the Coogans got scared and filled it all back in. They were certainly quiet for a while. But with time they became themselves again — it’s not at all true that bullies back down when people stand up to them, and only people who’ve never actually known a bully would say that — but they had so many new people to attack that Tim and I rarely fell victim to them. We never hung out again as friends, or whatever it was we were as kids.
It’s been more than two decades since that night at the grave. I visited my parents a couple weeks back and walked over to that cemetery, to where Tim and I used to daydream about adventure, where he and I and the Coogans half dug out an old grave and where, with one tremendous fight, our childhoods came to an end. Frankie is there now too — a heroin overdose a year back. I made a point to find his gravestone before I looked at Old Archie’s. It was a little up the hill, towards the side where the house he grew up in was. It was a small stone, one of those ones that’s like a plaque flat on the ground, his name in large letters above a smaller script showing the dates of his thirty-four years and the words “Rest in Love.”
I should love. I should forgive the Coogans for what they were, let love erase the resentment. I’m an adult now. I should find pity. But I don’t, I can’t. I hate those boys still, every last ugly bit of them. I stopped at Old Archie’s resting place, feeling bad even then for what was in my heart. But I knew some type of compassion died that night at that half-dug grave, when I picked up that shovel and swung. The Coogans, tormenting me still. Here I was, struggling with wanting to love and forgive, but not being able. And so I’ll always have to wonder — Is the wanting enough?
Kevin Duffy is an American writer living in Spain. He is the author of the Europe in These Times series at Dappled Things and has published short fiction in Relief: A Journal of Art and Faith, Variant Literature, Parousia Magazine, Grit and Grace, and Regina Magazine.
