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The Secret Of The Barn Allan Rubin January 2006

Sixteen years we have owned this house and we still don’t know if there ever really was a buried treasure. They say you can’t take it with you but I think he probably did. As I sit holding the forty year old photo of the balding, chubby old timer in the mesh brimmed cap, I can picture him laughing from the grave at the nutty way I behaved about it and the suspicious things some folks did to try to get their hands on it. I never knew him but I had to love the guy.

The first we heard of Jim’s treasure was from our friend Pat who knew the house. She had considered buying it when it lay abandoned and forlorn on this lonely, scenic bit of rural road. But it would have taken too much money, even if she found the treasure, to convert it from the rabbit warren of tiny bedrooms that remained from its days as a depression era rooming house, and its later service as home to large extended family. It did sell to an artist couple who went to work on the hundred fifty year old structure, gutting it and turning it into an open space with exposed beams, cathedral ceiling, and balcony bedrooms. Pat lived in a double wide farther down the road. One snowy day she slid into a ditch just outside the house. The artists invited her in to call for help and in the course of social talk had dropped hints about the treasure. It was part of the house lore. They hadn’t found it, though.

Years later, Candy and I bought the property from the artists. We were looking for a small house with large painting studios for ourselves. We had driven by this house many times while taking “the scenic route” to the rented cabin that we used for three summers until we decided it was time to leave the city and treat ourselves to air and space and lower stress levels. We laughed at the funny gingerbread shape and the round river stones that covered it and the double terraces in front by the lawn. It had rounded red roof edges and a big glassed in porch in front and was was framed by two large blue spruces on the ends of the lower terrace like triangular sentinels in blue uniforms. It resembled a European country house and was totally out of place on this farm road in the Catskill foothills. It looked out on a glorious vista north to an infinity of rolling hills and valleys. We wondered what kind of folks would occupy such an odd looking home. We hadn’t guessed it would turn out to be us.

One day we walked into the real estate office in town to check out the latest additions to the wall of photos of available houses. There it was, just put up that day. We chuckled and said, “we know that house”. Just then we noticed the surrounding photos of the additional outbuildings. There were eight more structures in all: block barn, horse barns, stone covered bungalows, garages and two large studios converted from chicken houses. We had never noticed them from the road as they were behind the house up the hill and to the side as if belonging to another property. Between ridiculing the fairy tale house and enjoying the view we had overlooked the rest of the property. We glanced at each other and both spun around to demand an immediate viewing. The agent said “No way, it’s not for you. It’s twice your budget. It has too much land. Don’t waste my time taking you there.” We pleaded that if it already had studios we wouldn’t have to build them. The budget we had told him was very conservative. We hadn’t found anything suitable within our budget so far. He relented and piled us into his car for the ten minute drive.

When we pulled past the stone covered mailbox and up the steep driveway and parked by the garage we finally got the true picture of the place. It looked like an Italian villa. It was sprawling and charming. It had a flagstone patio between the house and two squat, square bungalows. We could use them for storage and a guest room. Looming above the scene was an abandoned, rusty roofed giant block chicken coop and cow barn. The small horse barn was semi-finished as a small studio guest house. Up the driveway were the two, huge contiguous studios. Each of them was as large as any of the three lofts we had lived and both worked in for the previous fifteen years in the city. The owners were out of town but we could look in the house windows and see that it was compact and crowded but very charming. We were enchanted. It was beyond perfect. We would have this house, whatever it took. And it took nine months of tense negotiations and more money than we actually could afford to spend to get hold of it. We have had no regrets.

Before they finally vacated, the owners teased that we should try to find the treasure that Jim had hidden somewhere. The story was that when he became incapacitated and had to be moved to a nursing home, he had left behind a pile of cash buried somewhere on the property. We learned from them and other locals that Jim was quite a character and might have actually done something crazy like that. Some descriptions portrayed him as a short, squat, loudmouthed “blowhard”. He entertained the whole neighborhood with summer barbecues on the large front lawn, cooking up hundreds of chickens in the “summer kitchen” bungalow with the stainless steel stove below a giant rotisserie in front of a wall of stacked charcoal. Parts of the kitchen were still there so we knew that was true. He served home made pizzas cooked in the adjacent wall oven. In the evening Jim invited the adult men up behind the barn where he showed 8 mm skin flicks. His storage room below Candy’s studio still had ancient nudie pinups papering the walls. I believed that part about him, too.

The old timers raved about these feasts and the younger ones had fond memories of Jim. They told of how, after his wife died, he dedicated himself to covering the main buildings with the river rocks. They recalled him driving down to the creek and filling the trunk of the old Chevy with stones. Sometimes he used a motorcycle with a side car to transport them. One artifact we found in the garden was a twisted wire gauge he had used to measure the stones to keep them uniform. He worked alone and took seven years to complete the work. I could see where he had started and could tell how his stone cementing technique had improved over the course of the project. I became sensitive to this when I had to teach myself to duplicate his handiwork while repairing crumbling segments of walls and terraces.

Another story about Jim was that he never bathed. He panicked when immersed in water. Something about a ship he was on sinking during World War II and being in shark infested waters and seeing his shipmates get eaten. I thought maybe that was the famous Indianapolis that had been torpedoed after delivering the atomic bombs but later learned it was another incident. Anyway, a picture emerged of Jim as a warm, loud, smelly, friendly, capable, generous, perverse, lovable chicken farmer. I could only hope to follow in select aspects of his tradition. At least I tried to keep the place looking close to how he had left it.

I preferred to hire contractors and workers who knew the house and had good stories about Jim. When the furnace needed servicing or repair I used the same guy who had worked for the artists and for Jim before that. Service people seem to work for the house more than the owner. They get to know it and stay with it. Smoky of Smoky’s Burner Service served up some of the best information about Jim. Smoky himself was old, round and grizzly and a real local character. I worried that his plumbing work might leak and his old looking parts would fail. But his stories kept me hanging out with him while he worked so I stuck with the tradition. After several years’ acquaintance, Smoky asked me if he could bring along his metal detector next time he serviced the furnace. It was his hobby, he said, to search along the river bank for lost coins and jewelry. He wanted to see if there was any interesting antique metal stuff around the property. I called him at his game right off and laughingly suggested he wanted to look for Jim’s buried treasure. He turned serious and said, “So you know about that?” Then he admitted that he had always wanted to try to find it but he didn’t want to trespass without permission. His story was that when Jim was old and failing he took Smoky aside and whispered that he didn’t trust banks because of what happened in the depression so he always kept his money at home. Smoky gestured to where Jim said he had buried all the money he had saved in an iron crock up by the barn. Jim told Smoky he didn’t want his sister to inherit the money. “If anything happens to me you might as well have it,” Jim had said.

That was the wildest version of the story yet, I thought. Why would Jim give his life savings to his furnace service man? But Smoky insisted he knew approximately where to look and that he just wanted the thrill of finding it. He said that I owned any treasure on my property, but maybe I could give him some small share. I humored Smoky and agreed to the plan, offering to give him ten percent. He whined his approval. I waited for him to leave and, for the first time, I walked around and around that old barn looking for some place where a pot might be buried. The previous owners had done the same thing but had given up the search. I even priced metal detectors at a store but didn’t seriously pursue it.

Not long after that a pipe broke in a plumbing shaft up near the barn. I called Smoky to see if he could fix it and he came right over with his metal detector in the back of his rusty old brown van. This is where things started to get very strange. I showed him the pit with the leak and told him to fix it first and then to call me out and not to go searching for the pot before I joined him. I was baking bread and couldn’t stop in the middle of kneading the dough. Just as I got the loaves formed I glanced out the kitchen window up towards where Smoky was supposed to be working. He was walking uphill with the metal detector dangling from his hand. “What the...!” I cursed to myself and rushed to get the bread into the preheated oven. By the time I went out the door Smoky was stowing the apparatus back in his truck. “What’s going on Smoky? I thought I told you to wait for me! What were you doing up there without me?” He shut the doors to the van and drawled his excuse. “I was done with the pipe so I thought I would just take a quick look before calling you out. Let’s go together now for a good look see,” he chirped as he reopened the van and removed the detector. I craned my neck to look over his shoulder into the van but it was dark and disorderly, full of tools and metal pipes and whatnot. I was flummoxed. I didn’t have the nerve to challenge him. He had made such a point of asking permission to come on the land to search. He had insisted that whatever he found belonged to me, the land owner. I couldn’t accuse him of purloining the treasure. What if I insisted on looking in the van and found him innocent? His feelings would be hurt. Then who would do my plumbing? He might bad mouth me to other repairmen. I might never be able to hire roofers or electricians or get my driveway plowed. These were important considerations. I contained my mistrust and followed him up the hill.

“Smoky, what are we doing here by the horse barn?” I asked. “I always thought the money was up by the chicken barn.” “No, Jim pointed at this barn,” he groaned. “He said he buried it by the corner.” Well, I thought, that would explain why nothing was ever found up by the big barn. Smoky moved around the foundation quickly with the metal detector. Each time it beeped he bent down and dug up a piece of rusty old metal: a nail, a horse shoe. After a couple of minutes he quit and started back down towards his van. “Is that it?” I grimaced. “You give up? Treasure hunt over?” “Well,” said Smoky, “All I found before was old junk and now the same so I guess old Jim must have took it with him.” I was pretty suspicious now but with no metal detector of my own I was out maneuvered. Just then I tripped on a big flat rock. I looked down. The dirt and moss over the rock had been freshly removed. I bent down and lifted the rock up, revealing a hole that it had covered, a hole just about the size of a kitchen pot. It was empty. “Smoky, what’s this?” I pointed to the hole. “Oh, yeah, I looked under that rock. Nothing there, though.”

Smoky returned to the van, stowed the machine, said he would send me a bill and drove away down the driveway. I never saw him again after that. The next year I hired someone else to service the furnace. When the old furnace finally rusted out on the coldest day of the coldest winter, I called Smoky for an emergency replacement. His wife answered and said he had retired. I imagined him in a recliner on a beach in Hawaii, still smeared with soot, a colored cocktail in his greasy hand.

That’s not the end of the story. About the same time as Smoky’s disappearance a car with an elderly couple in it came up the driveway past the house, heading for the barn. Candy intercepted it. “Can I help you?” she questioned the old man. “I used to live here long ago and I just wanted to see the place again” the driver explained reticently, obviously unsettled at being caught trespassing. “My uncle Jim inherited the property and the rest of us had to move away. I always missed the place.” Next to him sat a nervous looking woman with nothing to say. Candy invited them to look around but they beat a hasty retreat. When she told me about this encounter it really creeped me out. What if Jim’s relatives had always wanted the farm back and were biding their time, plotting their revenge? Candy and I had escaped the city after having been tormented out of three different living situations by greedy, dishonest landlords. It could happen again. I started having nightmares and daymares of chicken farmer hitmen paying us a visit and making us offers for the place we couldn’t refuse. I imagined telephone threats and my cats mysteriously disappearing and one day finding the mailbox mutilated and my paintings being artnapped. I pictured going to the police who of course would be in league with the chicken farmer hitmen. I saw myself on a dark, cold night, barely escaping down the road with just the clothes on my back, or really barely with not even any clothes, hitmen dogs nipping at my ankles, the sound of laughter and accordion music behind me and Candy a hostage in their clutches and nothing I could do but run far, far away.

The chicken farmer hitmen never came calling but I sweated every time a car slowed down in front to admire the view or sometimes to look at the house and often even to take pictures of it. One day a couple of summers ago we were part of an open studios art tour. When a minivan pulled in I thought it was people coming to look at the art. I welcomed the occupants but they didn’t get out of the van. The middle aged driver said he just bought a house nearby and his dad used to live here and wished he could show his family around the old family compound. John, his father, was back at his house and didn’t want to impose. I rose to the occasion and invited them all to return later. I thought this might be my last chance to ask questions about Jim and tie up loose ends in some of the stories. The driver and his wife did not seem at all threatening.

After lunch two vehicles drove in behind the other visitors’ cars. I excused myself from the art tour people and went out to the driveway. The cars burst open and out poured a bunch of kids, too many to count, and their parents and then the old man, John, who had been the mysterious driver of the car that Candy met. John was wrinkled but tall and thin, with dignified looking silver hair. I greeted him and his son cordially by their vehicle but over his shoulder I spied the flock of children all making a beeline for the big barn. I must have lost my color as the blood left my head. Whirling around I yelled loudly at them that “No one goes in the barn without me!” but they stayed on course. All my paranoid fears returned. I felt I was being distracted by old man John the decoy while the crack troops went in for the money strike. As politely as I could I told John that the barn was dangerous and I was worried about the children’s safety. He nodded. Running to catch up to the group I intercepted them at the barn door, They were unable to figure out how to open the broken latch that only I knew the trick of opening. I stood between them and the door and smiled. “Looking for the treasure?” I suggested, knowingly. Now it was the kids turn to go pale and still. One of them mumbled a “How do you know about that?” Others tried to shush him. John and his son advanced up the hill toward us. I sized up the situation.

“Tell us about the hidden treasure, John” I urged. He stiffened and looked at me a bit sideways but not meanly. “OK, so you know what they’re after,” he finally said straight back at me. He looked around at his skittish grandchildren. “I told them stories about how Jim didn’t believe in banks and kept all the cash from the chicken business in a metal box hidden behind a false brick in the wall of the barn. The kids must think it’s still there, I guess.” I softened. John didn’t look like a silly old man. He looked fit and serious. But now I had the whole thing in proper perspective. I broadly declared to the whole group that if they found the hidden treasure it rightly belonged to them because even though this was my property, I had no claim on the treasure money. It should go to the family of Uncle Jim. I didn’t complicate matters by saying anything about Smoky and the other hiding place and Jim’s alleged strange bequest.

John relaxed and thanked me with a wry wink, protesting that I deserved a share. I said they could give me ten percent. I yanked open the barn door and the crowd flowed in, struggling past each other to climb the stairs first. I waited for John, who moved slower. We mounted the stairs together and gingerly stepped over the piles of raccoon scat. I was embarrassed that I had never bothered to clean it up. The barn is in terrible condition. I almost never enter it. When John last saw it it must have been almost new and clean and filled with squawking hens and the latest machinery and ventilation. Now it is barren and beaten down by the years. Most of the windows are broken out. Electric wiring dangles, rotten and disconnected. Asbestos ceiling panels hang broken and crumbling. Bird droppings bespeckle the floors in layers from the swallows that fly down the ventilators and nest in the roof beams. Grape vines invade the gaping window holes. A dumb waiter elevator is rusted solid and dangles menacingly over the entranceway. I had swept the second floor a few years back to store defunct halloween costumes and some friends’ overflow paintings and sculptures but it had returned to a degenerate state because of the animal invaders.

Old John was visibly shaken. I realized that this barn spoke to him the truth about just how old he had become and what his physical state probably must be. He suddenly seemed dilapidated and frail. I sympathized and I didn’t want this to be a bad experience for him. I wished I had kept the barn in better condition but I had to prioritize expenditures in favor of the studios. The children were all around demanding the location of the secret hiding place and John was all in a sweat. He wobbled a bit and told them it was so long ago and the barn didn’t look the same anymore and he couldn’t remember where the loose brick was. The children’s spirits sunk like stones in a cow pond. John tried to rally and ascended all the way to the empty third floor pointing out features that corresponded to his stories and to relatives they knew and people he had told them about. I tried to locate some spot where a metal box could have been hidden at some point in time but this was a cement block structure with no inner walls. There was no such place that I could find. Then I spotted an old sign on the stairway wall that could cover a hole in a block. John saw it at the same moment and indicated it might have been under there. The kids tore at the sign until it fell apart revealing more solid cement.

The search for the hidden treasure was at an end. The children lost interest and filed out into the open air. I plied John for details about Jim as we descended to the house. I invited them all inside, hoping none of the many changes in the house would depress the old man further. On the contrary, he seemed to approve of the renovation. Our new kitchen was in the same place along the south wall that the old kitchen had been in his day. That was funny because we had recently returned it from the weird central site the previous owners had moved it to. He approved of the skylights and the open plan with no walls, not missing the five upstairs bedrooms that were now gone. He said he recognized things about the house, mostly the stone facing, but that it seemed like a different house, which made it easier for him to take. He didn’t think he could live in it the way it was now. I silently breathed a sigh of relief at hearing that.

The kids were bored and antsy and the adults were tired. After showing them the pond we had put in, I risked bringing them up to the studios for a quick look. Farmers sometimes appreciate art even when it is as wacky and unfamiliar as ours. And they did all get a big kick out of the odd objects painted in bright colors. They especially enjoyed one of my sculptures that detects an approaching viewer and suddenly comes alive with lights and motorized spinning swinging branches like arms flailing. I explained that art is sometimes dangerous. They drove away smiling.

I felt we were even. I had shown them something wild worth remembering in exchange for all the strange stories I had inherited from their family when I bought this farm. That, I now understood, was the real hidden treasure. Learning the history of the property and Jim’s bizarre behavior and the tradition of well laid stone and cement was what enriched my experience. Reviewing the events of the day I mused that even if John was a good actor and had led me shakily up the stairs through the barn while his son was furtively retrieving the metal box from a hole in the wall on the ground floor I still didn’t deserve any part of that large family’s money. Wait a minute, I balked, and hurried back up towards the barn.


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