He walked the length of the barn, peering into each stall, then stepped outside. I followed him. He unzipped his pants. We stood side by side and urinated against the old oak boards, then got in the car and left. We made the drive home without talking, the longest period I ever saw him silent. He never mentioned the trip again.
The deprivation and indignity of growing up during the Depression imprinted my father with intense frugality. Dad salvaged narrow slivers of soap, the grimy remains of bars that he rescued before the water rinsed them down the sink. He dampened each piece and formed a new chunk of soap, lined with dirt and hair. He placed it by the sink, where it lay untouched, hardening as it dried, cracking into dark fissures.
My father didn’t trust banks and disliked large government. After his death I found small bundles of cash tucked away in various areas of the house, and enough canned food, liquor, and ammunition to survive a prolonged siege. In the early years of writing, he was often broke or nearly so and had legal trouble with the IRS. My aunt and grandmother had set up a college fund for my siblings and me, but Dad took the money for himself. He sold my comic book collection of fifteen hundred titles and kept the proceeds. My brother changed his mailing address after Dad cashed his college financial aid check.
My siblings and I grew up with the specter of the Depression and our father’s belief in its return. For our future benefit, he stockpiled gold, silver, and jewels. Each time I visited home, Dad took me aside to deliver private information about his hiding places, always with an attitude of utmost secrecy and the implication that he was telling me and only me. When the time comes, he said, his voice lowered for dramatic effect, and it will. He told me to search the furnace vents. He pointed to the top of a custom-designed bookshelf in his office, the molding of which concealed three secret compartments. Up there, he said. Gold for the family. I felt honored by his confidential tone, his trust.
Questions were seldom a good idea with Dad, as he tended to interpret them as criticism. Peace was maintained by agreeable nods and his preferred response of “Yes, sir.” As a result, I never asked which particular heating ducts held the bounty. Neither did my siblings, who’d also been repeatedly informed of secret caches about the house. He told each of us that he’d stored semi-precious stones outside the back door, strewn among a “rock garden” consisting of gravel and creek rock. It was a miniature shrine to a crumbling statue of Thulsa Doom, a powerful necromancer in the fictional world of Conan the Barbarian. Dad wrote nine novels set in Robert E. Howard’s imaginary Hyborian Age, using the profits to enclose a side porch. Etched into the cement floor was “Crom,” the name of Conan’s personal god. In a very real sense, the new room represented the booty of Conan, while the valuable gems in the yard turned out to be worthless rocks polished smooth in a geologist’s tumbler.
Many years ago a friend of mine from a wealthy family in New England told me that, upon hearing of an elder’s death, the survivors rushed to the bank to clean out the safe-deposit box. Cash, jewelry, and bearer bonds were up for grabs. After Dad died, my brother and I undertook our quest for plunder as a team to avoid the appearance of “rushing to the floor vents.”
We began with those nearest to Dad’s chair and expanded concentrically, room by room. The metal vent covers rested in slots above the ductwork, which ran like veins throughout the house. I got on my hands and knees and inserted a mirror into the openings while my brother bounced the beam of a flashlight along the horizontal passages. We found plastic soldiers, Tinker Toys, Barbie shoes, spiderwebs, mouse droppings, and finally a canvas bag layered with dust. We lifted it onto the floor and crouched before it. Inside was a velvet fabric wrapped around objects with very little weight. We slowly unfolded the cloth, rapt and solemn in the face of our father’s fabled treasure: a soup ladle, a salad fork, and two very small cups, all made of sterling silver.