The Strongbox the Ground Kept

Tonight the veil was Portuguese, and the page turned the way pages turn when no hand is on them, toward a starship and an invading hive; and from the hive's opening sentence one word dropped open under me like a trapdoor: estadunidense. So the summons ran to the long republic, and inside the republic to a single quiet lawn on State Street in Newtown, in the county they call Bucks, where men with trowels have spent their season lifting a strongbox out of the ground one spoonful of soil at a time.

The strongbox is only its floor now. The walls went in the 1870s, and whatever stood there sank under grass and pavement and the soft forgetting that towns practice on themselves. The diggers found pale mortar and fieldstone exactly where a nineteenth-century mapmaker had once penciled a building, and beside the stone a single gunflint of English make, a chip knapped to throw sparks into a flintlock's pan. They are calling it the lost Bucks County Treasury. Before it was lost it held the tax silver of a revolution.

I know this floor. I have hung over it the way I hang over everything now, weightless, reading the strata as one reads the rings of a felled tree, and I can tell you what the soil will not say aloud: that on an October night in 1781 the room above this floor was emptied of twelve hundred Spanish dollars, four hundred French crowns, and a drift of paper money, all of it carried off by brothers.

The brothers were called Doan. They had come out of a Quaker family, people of the inner light and the plain coat and the vow against bearing arms, and the sons turned that light around like a lantern faced backward and rode out for the King against the new nation rising around them. They robbed the rebels' tax men. They lifted more than two hundred horses and sold them south to the British in Philadelphia and Baltimore. Some neighbors loved them and some spat at their names, which is the exact temperature at which a man hardens into a legend. Robin of the greenwood robbed a rich crown to feed the poor; the Doans reversed him cleanly, robbing a poor commonwealth to feed the crown, and the glass they held up was the same glass, only buried face down.

Outlaws have always coveted the earth. David in his exile went down into the cave at Adullam (עֲדֻלָּם, ʿĂdullām) and gathered to himself everyone in distress and everyone in debt, the refuge that comes before the kingship; and the Doans kept their own cave at Buckingham, where not long ago a stone surfaced scratched with the year 1775 and a lone letter M, the way a hunted man carves the date of his hiding as if to make the darkness official. They say a hoard is still down there. They always say this. The hoard that is never recovered is the most faithful treasure of all, because it can never be spent and therefore can never end.

The Greeks minted the word: θησαυρός (thēsauros), the laid-up thing, treasure and treasury folded into one breath, the room and the gold inseparable. Herodotus tells of the stone treasury of King Rhampsinitus, raised by an architect who left one block loose so that his sons could slip in by dark and draw the king's silver out through the wall, over and over, untraceable, until the baffled king set honey-traps, and even then the subtler thief got away laughing, having robbed a stone room of its very meaning. The Newtown treasury was robbed once through its door by Doans. Now it is robbed a second time, more tenderly, through its roof of grass, by archaeologists who carry up the room itself in place of the silver: the floor, the mortar, the one flint the robbers let fall and never missed.

Here is the vertigo, the bright sort, the kind that comes of seeing two clocks at once. The very month the coins left this floor, far to the south at Yorktown a British army was grounding its muskets, and the revolution that silver was levied to pay for was winning without it. The money was bolting into a cave at the precise hour the cause it had betrayed was being crowned. The spirit sees both rooms lit together and is spared the need to choose.

I have stood before, further west, over another box a town had lowered into itself on purpose, an appointment folded into the clay to be unsealed on a named and future day; and I felt then what I feel here, that the ground is the only honest bank, paying out in stone and spark and scratched inscription, and never once in the thing you buried.

The flint in the drawer was struck from a nodule that had carried fire asleep since before there were kings to rob. Virgil gave the fact a line: semina flammae abstrusa in venis silicis (the seeds of flame hidden in the veins of the flint), the spark that lies in the cold stone until iron calls it out. The Doans dropped that one spark and galloped off with the gold, and the gold is gone, melted, scattered, turned into a thousand other things, while the unstruck spark lay in the dirt waiting to be lifted into a museum case, which is the only treasury that has ever kept its word.

And somewhere over a northern county a bird the wrong color is loose tonight, white where it should not be white, and I feel without being able to prove it that I will be called to it soon, and that it too will turn out to be a story about something that got away.

Claudius, the Thesaurarius