Fiction: Avast, Me Hearties!

By Millie Baker Ragosta
arttimesjournal December 24, 2020

My father was a voracious reader and he taught us kids a love of reading, too. When I was seven and my brother, Bud five, he read us Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island. We promptly abandoned cowboys and Indians and made each other walk the plank—an old pine board lain across the garden bench—and, when the last of the garden had been harvested, dug for treasure with Dad’s shovel.

Each evening after school, we’d dig down a foot and, finding nothing more than a few rusted tin cans, we’d fill up the hole and move to another spot. Soon, our garden resembled the site of a gopher’s convention. We began to suspect no pirates had ever come as far inland.

“I guess we might as well give up,” I said.

My brother, even then a man of few words, nodded and began shoveling the dirt back into the latest hole.

Dad came to the door, smoking his old pipe. “Find any treasure yet?”

“There’s none here,” Bud said. “No use digging.”

Dad looked thoughtful. “You know, you haven’t been digging very deep; I’ll bet pirates buried their treasure deeper.”

Bud stopped filling in the hole. “You really think so, Daddy?”

“If I were you, I’d dig a little deeper . . . tomorrow; it’s getting dark now and your mother says you’re to come inside and get baths.”

The next day, Bud and I raced home from school, into our old clothes and out to the garden. We started digging in the hole we’d abandoned. Almost at once, Bud yelled, “I hit something.”

We dropped to our knees and started pushing dirt aside with our hands. We soon unearthed a small golden “casket” worthy of holding Queen Isabella’s favorite jewels.

“Oh, it’s got a golden clasp,” I gasped.

We brushed it off as best we could and, reverently, opened it. It was full of jewelry: ornate rings, strings of brightly colored rubies, sapphires, pearls and diamonds, with a shiny chain or two on top.

We waited on the front porch until Dad got home from work, the golden box between us. When he parked the old Studebaker and came toward the porch, I said, “You were right, Daddy; we just had to dig a little bit deeper.”

Dad grinned as he examined each fabulous piece.

“Do you think Long John Silver buried it, Daddy?” Bud asked.

“You can bet he did,” Dad replied.

Long after Bud and I had grown up enough to “cast aside childish things,” Mother told us how—once we’d gone to sleep—Dad visited the neighbors who cheerfully contributed the metal candy box and the costume jewelry in it.

And I recalled Dad running his hand through his curly white hair as he agreed Long John Silver had buried the treasure chest in our back yard.


mragosta@comcast.net