I cut the wire, worked it loose, and unwrapped it right there on my knees in the dirt under the boards, and I called up to the homeowner, because it was not what a man braces for when he finds a bundle wired to the bottom of a deck. It was a cigar box, and inside it, careful as anything, was a little boy whole treasure.
Marbles, the good kind, the swirly ones. A plastic army man. Two arrowheads. A baseball card gone soft at the corners. An old pocket watch that did not run. A crayon drawing of a stick-figure family in front of a stick-figure house. And on top, folded up, a note in careful crayon printing that just about undid me. It said, THIS IS MY TREASURE. I AM BURYING IT LIKE A PIRATE. IF YOU FIND IT IT IS YOURS NOW EXCEPT THE WATCH. THE WATCH IS MY DADS. And it was signed with a name and a date from thirty-one years back.
The folks who hired me had only bought the place a year ago, so I tracked down the family that built the deck, and it turned out that little pirate was a grown man now, near forty, living a couple hours off. I called him and read him his own note over the phone, and the line went quiet for a long while.
He remembered. He was eight years old, he said, and his daddy helped him build that deck the summer they moved in, and his daddy helped him wire his treasure box up underneath it, the two of them flat on their backs in the dirt, laughing, because a pirate has to bury his treasure somewhere nobody will ever find it. And then he grew up and moved away and forgot the whole thing, the way you forget things from when you were eight.
My dad passed four years ago. I have been missing him so bad I cannot see straight some days. And you are telling me there is a watch of his down there, and a note in my own hand about a thing the two of us did together that I forgot we ever did. Mister, you have no idea what you just handed me.
He drove down that weekend. I met him at the house, and I watched a grown man get down on his knees in the dirt under a torn-up deck and hold a cigar box he had packed when he was eight years old, with his daddy old watch in it, and cry like the boy who buried it. He got his childhood back, and a morning with his father he had forgotten he ever had, and one more thing of the old man to keep.
I built that family a fine new deck. And under it, before I laid the new boards down, I wired that cigar box up again, watch and all, right where a father and his boy put it thirty-one years ago. It is a pirate treasure. It is supposed to stay buried. But now he knows it is down there, and that his daddy helped him hide it, and that is worth more than any treasure a box could ever hold.