In Focus

Treasure in the Earth

Dr. Curtis L.E. Barnett

The half-dull machete blade came down hardagainst the short stem of a spreading weed plant that Butchy wastrying to uproot. The weed shook and dust scattered.

Something other than a mangled stem and flying dust caught hiseye. It was a brittle, aging piece of brown paper that was halfburied in the soil. There were some faded words on it. Butchylooked at the dull letters. These were not too difficult to makeout, but he couldn't tell what all the words were or what theysaid when they came together.

At the age of ten, Butchy had already made up his mind that hedid not want to learn to read. What good is it going to do me,anyhow? he thought. At that young age, he had already convincedhimself that he had no desire to go to work in an office, as hisseventeen-year-old sister had just begun to do.

But perhaps his real reason for rejecting reading was his subconsciousrejection of his teacher, Mrs. Dwarkin. She was his teacher forthe second year running. To him she seemed rough, unkind and forceful,in contrast to the teacher he had had in his first year of primaryschool.

He still remembered her winsomely pleasant countenance. What littlehe had learned of the alphabet and how to use it, he had learnedit from that first teacher, and if he'd learned to recognize afew simple words like rat, cat, be and tree, it was neverthelessstill a painful process for him to put such words into chainsof thought when they came together in phrases and sentences. Andthe difficulty of reading any sentence at all only increased hisaversion to all reading.

As far as Butchy was concerned, going out to work in the fieldswith his Grandfather Henry was preferable any day to spendinglong, boring hours in Mrs. Dwarkin's classroom. In fact, Butchyoften accompanied his grandfather, sometimes to fish, sometimesto look mangoes, or sometimes to prepare a grasspiece for thehalf dozen cows his grandfather owned.

He and his grandfather had gone out that afternoon to remove pricklypears and pull up Spanish needles, touch-me-not vines and otherweeds, and that's what they were doing when Butchy came acrossthe faded brown paper with the mysterious-looking handwriting.

Although the reluctant schoolboy had so far gained little successin learning to take in messages by the sense of sight, he hadbecome much more accomplished at it through his sense of hearing.He liked to hear his grandfather tell stories, especially talesof the grandfather's own boyhood days and of the old people whowere long since dead and gone. Grandfather Henry somehow justseemed to bring them to life and he made those long-ago eventsand people seem so near and interesting.

Nothing made listening to these old stories more pleasurable thanhearing about Grandfather Henry's own father. Butchy learned fromthe stories that his great-grandfather, Zariah by name, owneda lot of land at Spanish Bay, including a large plot right onthe beach. Old Zariah was an independent-minded man, who didn'tdepend on anybody else for anything. "Can't hire me, can'tfire me, can't discourage me," he used to say.

He constructed his own house, with only a little help from a neighbourwho lived a ways down the road. He built his own dory, a coupleof them in fact, and went fishing three or four times a week.He made himself a plantation ground in which he cultivated cassava,sweet potatoes, pigeon peas and yams. He planted a coconut groveand exported coconuts to Tampa.

All of these things he succeeded in doing, all with the help ofhis wife, who had more than enough work of her own, what withall the domestic chores and the care of the children, seven ofwhich she bore for him. And Grandpa Zariah, as everybody calledhim, except his own children, still took time every evening toretire early. He went to bed just after dark set in, a coupleof hours before most everybody else's normal bedtime of aboutnine 'o' clock. He used to enjoy his leisure, in the midst ofall his work.

With a blurred vision of Zariah and other ancestors who filteredthrough the memory of Grandfather Henry, Butchy drifted off todreamland that night after they'd worked in the grasspiece. Amongthe many dreams that played out on the screen of his unconsciousthat night was one in which Henry appeared.
He was in the pasture tending his cows.

Suddenly somebody else appeared in the dream and talked with him.Butchy tried but could not get near them, but somehow he knewthat the second person was Great-grandfather Zariah and he couldhear that Zariah was scolding his son for neglecting the matterthat he had put in his charge. Henry seemed ashamed and, withaverted and lowered countenance, confessed that he had lost thedirections. Zariah promised to provide them again, then disappearedin the direction of the dreamer, too fast for the latter to distinguishhis features.

Butchy made some groaning sounds which roused his older brotherwho was sleeping next to him. His brother touched him, shook him,called his name and woke Butchy out of his dream. It was not thetype of dream from which you would normally awake shuddering andin a sweat, but Butchy's dream was disturbing enough to causehim to wake up disturbed. He threw a sheet over his head and laythere for a while until he drifted off to sleep again.

Next day, Butchy could hardly wait for school to dismiss so hecould join his grandfather in the grasspiece to finish the workthey had begun. What he really wanted to do was see if his grandfathercould tell him something that might help him figure out the meaningof his dream.

"Grandfather," Butchy began tentatively when he thoughtit was appropriate to broach the subject, "did you ever receivesomething from your father and then lose it later?

His grandfather hesitated, wondering what Butchy might know, thenanswered, "Yes, he once gave me a paper which he said hada very important message on it, something about a treasure. Itook it out every now and then, but I could never quite completelyread or understand it. Then I lost it."

Grandfather Henry did not ask Butchy why he had posed his question,and Butchy said nothing about his find nor about his dream. Thefading old paper which Butchy had found contained this messagethat was now only partially complete, due to the fact that partsof the brittle paper had broken off:

the ironwoodtre
that Chas found yrs
ago forty yds from th
beach is a treas
that must not be dug
up or choppd down
ever. It forms the SE
boundry of the

Being the young non-reader that he was,Butchy was unable to read all but a few words of the message.He wished in vain with all his heart that he could understandwhat the message was all about.

For the next couple of days, Butchy couldn't get the dream outof his mind. Then, as if in a sequel to the first dream, somethree or four nights later Grandpa Zariah "dreampt"Butchy, as the old-time Caymanians used to say. The old man appearedto the boy and told him to look ten yards due east of the ironwoodtree and twenty-five yards north towards the sea.

The boy took the dream quite literally and earnestly and determinedto urgently pursue the instructions. He confided to his olderbrother and to another trusted friend in the neighbourhood whathis great-grandfather had dreampt him, and he solicited theirhelp in finding what he believed was a buried treasure.

Continued nextweek

About the Author

Curtis Barnett was born in West Bay.He attended private and public schools in Grand Cayman beforehe emigrated to New York with his family shortly before he becamesixteen. He pursued university studies in the United States, Mexicoand Spain and eventually earned his Doctor of Philosophy degreein Hispanic language and literature at Columbia University inNew York.
After teaching high school and college Spanish for several yearsin New York and Minnesota, Dr. Barnett returned to the CaymanIslands, where he is active in the educational, cultural and spirituallife of the community. He enjoys writing, especially poetry andnarrative prose. Dr. Barnett has published a little book of poems,'Something About Us', and a book of short stories and essays,entitled 'Toes in the Sand'.

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