32 - Family History

“You don’t happen to be a Civil War buff, do you?” Cassidy inquired, shaded eyes turning briefly in his direction as she pulled off the freeway.

They hadn’t talked much during the thirty minute highway stint, primarily because the damn Jeep was so loud.  Jon had offered to rent a car for the trip to Cassidy’s cabin, but she’d waved him off insisting that the Jeep would handle the back roads better and it wouldn’t matter if it got dirty since it was a piece of junk, anyway.  That last part she had whispered so the Jeep wouldn’t hear her, to his surprised amusement.  

He didn’t remark on her assessment at the time but, right now, he was thinking the damn thing could seriously use a new set of shocks.  There was one pothole back there that had him grabbing to hold his favorite black cap in place and re-seating the sunglasses more securely on his face.  His guitar, which she had picked up on the way out the door, couldn’t possibly be in tune once this jaunt was finished.

Now he lifted his voice to be heard above the road noise and answer her Civil War question.  “Not really, why?”

“Just curious.”  One ruby-slippered foot engaged the clutch and the other pushed the brake as they came to a stop at the end of the exit ramp. 

When she’d emerged from the bedroom in her Levi’s and a white t-shirt, he sure as hell hadn’t expected her to step into the bejeweled shoes.  He’d said as much, eliciting a snort of disbelief from her along with, “Honey, I’ve waited most of my life for these shoes.  Hell yes I’m wearin’ ‘em with jeans, and you’ll be lucky if I don’t sleep in ‘em tonight.”

He did admire a woman who knew what she wanted and didn’t care who else knew it.

“Did you have ancestors in the Civil War?”

“Yessir.”  They went zipping down the country roads, albeit not as fast – or as noisily – as they’d come down the freeway.  “My great-great-great grandfather, who we refer to as Pappy Sam, was in the Georgia Infantry.  Company H of the 17^th Regiment.”

“So you are from Georgia.”

The Jeep lurched into fourth gear, giving him a minor case of whiplash as frown lines carved themselves around her normally smiling mouth.  “Yeah.  Startled the everlivin’ outta me when you popped off with that, which is why you got a Coke shower.  How did you know?”

Her admission had Jon grinning at the curvy road ahead.  He hadn’t really.  It had been pure supposition on his part, just because of that whole Coke conversation with Obie.  The only people he’d known who generically referred to all soda as “Coke” were from Georgia.  He’d simply taken a stab in the dark.

“Lucky guess.”

She braked again, flipping her turn signal to leave the reasonably smooth asphalt road behind for a bumpy gravel one.

“I’m not buyin’ that load of bull puckey," she snorted.  "But if that’s the story you wanna stick with, far be it from me to quarrel.”

It was a good thing she didn't want to quarrel, because Jon was more engrossed in the dwindling evidence of civilization.  The spotty gravel was transporting them into an area that, when all the leaves had come fully in for the year, would be nothing but wall-to-wall green foliage. There were no houses, no people, no… anything – except blooming trees and weeds.

Thank God I took my allergy pill this morning.

“Anyhow,” she continued as though the rutted road and shitty shocks weren’t about to jar out her teeth.  “Pappy Sam got shot in the hand durin’ the war and was furloughed for sixty days to recover.  He went back again but got shot in the leg  his second time around.  He was still recuperatin’ from that wound when the war ended in 1865.”

Once again, she braked the vehicle but he had no idea why.  They hadn't suddenly stumbled upon a subdivision or even a storybook cottage in the forest.  There was still nothing but deep woods and he had a crazy passing thought that she was a black widow who planned to kill him and dump his body out here in the wilderness.  It was only the realization that she didn’t stand to gain anything by his death that had him pushing the notion away.

“Here we are.”

Jon lifted the sunglasses from his nose in case the tinted lenses were hiding something obvious. 

Nope.

Still nothing but trees.

Maybe her sunglasses were showing her something he couldn't see?  Kind of like that crappy Roddy Piper movie back in the eighties where there were special glasses to see the bad guy?

“And here… is where?”

Her laughter was saturated with utter delight when she swung her feet out of the Jeep.  “Home, as it is, for the time bein’.  It’s a little ways down that path.”

Looking in the direction that she’d tilted her chin, he saw no path.  Okay, well, if you were a chipmunk maybe you could call it a path, but Jon barely recognized it as a part in the weeds. 

“You’re fucking kidding me.”

She chortled with continued amusement when opening his door from the outside.  “Come on, city boy.  You’ll find out pretty quick why the cabin’s hidden in the middle of the woods.”

“Exactly how deep in the woods are we talking?”  The answer didn’t really matter, he told himself.  Jon ran.  He was in shape.  He could handle whatever backwoodsery this little journey warranted, as long as a bear didn’t come along and eat his ass.

“Not too far.  No more’n a quarter-mile.”

He slammed the Jeep door shut and red twinkling shoes caught his eye as she stepped onto the “path”.  “You’re going to hike the woods in those shoes?”

“Well, I might go barefoot if it wasn’t for the snakes.”

Jon’s eyes snapped up the instant his foot hit the vine-riddled terrain and he yanked his sunglasses off.  “That better be a motherfucking joke.”

The grin she threw over her shoulder when he stopped directly behind her was the toothiest he’d ever seen, and her eyes danced with hilarity when she pushed her own sunglasses to the top of her head. 

“Maybe, maybe not,” she flippantly taunted him.  “C’mon, sweet cheeks.  I’ll protect ya.”

Goddammit if she isn’t enjoying this just a little too much. 

“Just walk,” he growled, using a light touch to shove her along before hanging his sunglasses in the neckline of his black t-shirt.  “I’ll be fine.”

Birds chattered around him, making distinctive sounds that offered him no clue as to their identity, but he was convinced that they were mocking his city slicker status.  She wasn’t some kind of Snow White that had the animals at her beck and call, was she?  If so, they were probably choreographing a huge bird prank where they all dumped a load on his head and performed aerial acrobatics while they continued with the mocking calls.

Lema would hate to miss that.

There were sounds other than the birds, too.  Wildlife-y noises that extended beyond the crickets he could recognize from evenings on the Navesink.  It sounded like… frogs?  Did frogs live in the woods?  He thought they were only in lakes and ponds and shit.

He refused to think about the silent plethora of bugs that scurried around him.

“There a bed in this supposed cabin of yours?” he inquired innocently, in an effort to eradicate any and all thoughts of bugs. 

“Yeah.  Not much else, but there’s a bed.”

“Good.  Plan on having your ass tied to it.”

It was irrelevant how much he disliked this nature hike because her carefree laughter would always make him smile.  In fact, her bafflingly infectious joy might be the only thing that made this foray into the backwoods tolerable.  

“Vengeance is mine, sayeth the Jon?” she snickered.  “It honestly never occurred to me that this little walk might be a problem.  I apologize.”

She’s frolicking over tree stumps in mile-high spiked heels and you’re bitching about hiking in tennis shoes?  Pussy much?

“I’m just being a diva to pass the time,” he assured her, determined not to say another word about communing with nature.  As long as he didn’t end up with poison ivy or Lyme disease.

“Mhm.”  She totally knew he was full of shit, but was polite enough not to call him out this time.  “So, to give you a little interesting Civil War trivia that you may not know, France financially supported the Confederacy.  Jefferson Davis promised them he’d give their money back when the war was over, regardless of the outcome.”

“Probably the only way he could get the backing.”

Jon pushed an exceptionally grabby weed out of his way and tried to follow the Civil War talk, idly wondering why she'd chosen this topic.

“Could be," she concurred agreeably.  "So there they were at the end of the war.  The Confederate Treasury in Richmond was emptied of any remaining gold and the gold from a couple of Virginia banks was added to it until there was enough compiled to cover the debt.  Davis's plan was to send it by train to South Carolina, where it would then go by wagon to Augusta and on to Savannah.  There, it was to be loaded on a waiting ship bound for France.”

Finally, the endless parade of immature leaves and branches gave way just a bit and Jon could see a structure up ahead.  The details weren’t readily visible, but it was small and reflected any and all sunlight that found its way through the treetop canopy.  

“Sad to say," Cassidy went on without commenting on what he assumed was their destination.  "Davis's lookout scouts met with Union troops before they arrived in Augusta, leavin' the whole kit and caboodle without protection.  The group escortin’ the gold holed up on a plantation to keep it and themselves safe until they received further orders.  Durin’ the middle of the first night, some renegade – or renegades – came along and hijacked all that gold.”

He would take her word for it.  Military history had never been his thing, but her tale made had him engaged enough to inquire, “How much gold was there?”

“Not sure, really.  Rumor has it valued somewhere around $185,000 for the time.  I think that would make it close to two million now.  Here’s the cabin.”  She drew to a halt upon a little flagstone patio that housed an above-ground fire pit and also wound its way to the front door.  Pivoting on her ridiculously out of place shoes, she offered a flourishing Vanna White wave of the hand.  “Now you see why it’s hidden?”

He did, indeed.  Every damn wall in the place was glass.  Technically, there were four connected glass panels that made up each wall.  Curtains that were visible at the edge of each panel were wide open to display the bed she mentioned, along with a couple of tables, lamps, a chair and a love seat.  He easily surveyed the entire contents of her home with a single glance to find one glaring omission.

“Where the hell is the bathroom?”

With a grin, she turned to point behind her right shoulder.  “See the wooden bridge behind the cabin?  It leads to another little buildin' with a bathroom and a teeny tiny kitchenette.”

Talk about your modest accommodations.  The cabin and "little buildin'" would both fit in his master bedroom in Jersey.

It was, however, quiet.  That was kind of nice.  The secluded privacy definitely didn't suck, either.  He was a city guy through and through, but...

“This could grow on me,” he mused optimistically. 

Cassidy gestured toward one of the two patio chairs that sat alongside the fire pit.  “Have a seat and I’ll finish my story.”

Nodding, he claimed the chair closest to the cabin and expected her to take the other.  God forbid that Cassidy do the expected, though.  Instead of sitting, she gingerly stepped out of the Dorothy shoes and put them in the chair with her sunglasses, while she dropped to her knees on the flagstone.

“The gold...” There were about a dozen good-sized rocks encircling the patio and she was reaching for the one in front of her – which was almost the size of her full torso.  The thing was big enough that she grunted with the force it took to tip it backward.  “…was never found.  Next month, it will have been missing for exactly one hundred and fifty years.”

She pulled a hand shovel from behind another rock, effectively distracting him from the conversation.

“What the hell are you doing?”

The first small spade full of dirt was flipped to the side, followed by another, until she was rapidly excavating a fair amount of earth from where the rock was sitting.  His eyes were riveted to the repetitive motions of the woman who was ignoring his question.  Cassidy was engrossed in her task right up until the moment he heard a metal ‘thunk’, indicating that she’d hit something.

The hand trowel was put aside and blunt-tipped fingers took up their work, dislodging soil at a slower pace.   

“Pappy Sam had a friend that he’d been in the war with – Arbutus.  Well, I shouldn't say he was a friend.  Pappy saved his life in an early battle, so Arbutus was kinda beholden to Pappy, but he wasn't a fella most folks claimed as a friend.  He wasn't one of those fine, upstandin’ Southern gentlemen.  In fact, Arbutus eventually got hanged for stealin’ horses.” 

Whatever she was trying to unearth was now exposed enough to suit her purposes and Cassidy tugged at it until he could identify the buried object as a metal box.  When it settled with a heavy thud on the patio, Jon saw that it was about the same size as the shoe box from earlier, but was much sturdier – and older. 

“Horses weren’t all Arbutus stole.”  She twirled a combination lock that was much more modern than the box it held secure.  “And, as I mentioned, he was beholden to Pappy, so he felt obliged to share half of his thievin’ bounty in appreciation.”

The locked clicked open and was slid free from the hasp to be set aside before she efficiently flipped up the latch and threw back the lid.  A soft clunk of the top against flagstone announced that it was fully open, but its contents remained untold, carefully wrapped in a measure of yellowed and aging fabric.

He could only assume the swaddled bundle of mystery was the "thievin' bounty" that Cassidy spoke of.

In seemingly no hurry to let him in on the big secret, Cassidy offered  an absent smile and flopped down in front of the box to cross her legs Indian-style.  She very slowly picked up one corner of the obscuring fabric, respecting its age with the gentle way she folded it back before following suit with the next corner.

This was where she paused, lifting intense blue eyes to lock into his.  It felt like she was looking for something from him.  A reaction, maybe?  

Seeing as there was nothing exposed, he didn't know how she could expect him to have a reaction.  There was nothing to react to, and he nodded his head to silently beseech that she continue.  His curiosity was starting to get the best of him and he'd like to have it sated. 

Without a word, she obediently retracted the third corner and he could feel that her gaze remained on him as intently as his remained on that weathered muslin.  When the fourth corner slid away to finally reveal what was inside...

Well, I'll be damned.

"Is that...?"  He let the rest of the question hang there, knowing there was no real reason to finish it.

Cassidy nodded.  "Part of the gold that folks've been huntin' for the past hundred and fifty years.”