Kim Robinson: The Wild Shore

“It wouldn’t really be grave-robbing,” Nicolin was explaining. “Just dig up a coffin and take the silver off the outside of it. Never open it up at all. Bury it again nice and proper—now what could be wrong with that? Those silver coffin handles are going to waste in the ground anyway.”

The five of us considered it. Near sunset the cliffs at the mouth of our valley glow amber, and on the wide beach below tangles of driftwood cast shadows all the way to the sandstone boulders at the foot of the cliff. Each clump of wave-worn wood could have been a gravemarker, swamped and washed on its side, and I imagined digging under one to find what lay beneath it.

Gabby Mendez tossed a pebble out at a gliding seagull. “Just exactly how is that not graverobbing?” he demanded of Nicolin.

“It takes desecration of the body to make it graverobbing.” Nicolin winked at me; I was his partner in these sorts of things. “We aren’t going to do any such thing. No searching for cuff links or belt buckles, no pulling off rings or dental work, nothing of the sort!”

“Ick,” said Kristen Mariani.

We were on the point of the cliff above the rivermouth—Steve Nicolin and Gabby, Kristen and Mando Costa, Del Simpson and me—all old friends, grown up together, out on our point as we so often were at the end of a day, arguing and talking and making wild plans… that last being the specialty of Nicolin and me. Below us in the first bend of the river were the fishing boats, pulled up onto the tidal flats. It felt good to sit on the warm sand in the cool wind with my friends, watching the sun leak into the whitecaps, knowing my work for the day was done.

“Why, with that much silver we would be kings of the swap meet,” Nicolin went on. “And queens,” he said to Kristen. “We’d be able to buy anything there twice. Or travel up the coast if we wanted. Or across the country. Just generally do what we pleased.”

And not what your father tells you to, I thought to myself. But I felt the pull of what he said, I admit it.

“How are you going to make sure that the coffin you take the trouble to dig up has got silver on it?” Gab asked, looking doubtful.

“You’ve heard the old man talk about funerals in the old time,” Nicolin scolded. “Henry, you tell him.”

“They were scared of death in an unnatural way back then,” I said, like I was an authority. “So they made these huge funeral displays to distract themselves from what was really happening. Tom says a funeral might cost upward of five thousand dollars. ”

Steve nodded at me approvingly. “He says every coffin put down was crusted with silver.”

“He says men walked on the moon, too,” Gabby replied. “That don’t mean I’m going to go there looking for footprints.” But I had almost convinced him; he knew that Tom Barnard, who had taught us to read and write (taught Steve and Mando and me, anyway), would describe the wealth of the old time, in detail, as quick as you might say, “Tell us—”

“So we just go up the freeway into the ruins,” Nicolin went on, “and find us a rich-looking tombstone in a cemetery, and there we have it.”

“Tom says we shouldn’t go up there,” Kristen reminded us.

Nicolin tilted his head back and laughed. “That’s because he’s scared of it.” He looked more serious. “Of course that’s understandable, given what he’s been through. But there’s no one up there but the wreckrats, and they won’t be out at night.”

He had no way to be sure of that, as we had never been up there day or night; but before Gabby could call him on it, Mando squeaked, “At night? ”

“Sure!” Nicolin cried.

“I hear the scavengers will eat you if they can,” Kristen said.

“Is your pa going to let you leave doctoring and farming during the day?” Nicolin asked Mando. “Well, it’s the same with all of us, only more so. This gang has got to do its business at night.” He lowered his voice: “That’s the only time to be graverobbing in a cemetery, anyway,” laughing at the look on Mando’s face.

“Graverobbing at the beach you can do any time of day,” I said, half to myself.

“I could get the shovels,” Del said.

“And I could bring a lantern,” Mando said quickly, to show he wasn’t scared. And suddenly we were talking a plan. I perked up and paid more attention, a bit surprised. Nicolin and I had outlined a number of schemes before: trapping a tiger in the back country, diving for sunken treasure on the concrete reef, extracting the silver contained in old railroad tracks by melting them. But most of these proposals had certain practical difficulties to them that became apparent at some time or other in the discussion, and we let them slide. They were just talk. With this particular plan, however, all we had to do was sneak up into the ruins—something we always swore we really wanted to do—and dig. So we talked about which night the scavengers were least likely to be out and about (full moon, Nicolin assured Mando, when the ghosts were visible), who we might ask to come along, who it would have to be kept secret from, how we could chop the silver handles into tradeable discs, and so forth.

Then the ocean was lapping at the red rim of the sun, and it got a good deal colder. Gabby stood up and kneaded his butt, talking about the venison supper he was going to have that night. The rest of us got up too.

“We’re really going to do this one,” Nicolin said intently. “And by God, I’m ready for it.”

As we walked up from the point I took myself off from the rest, and followed the cliff’s edge. Out on the wide beach the tidal puddles streaking the sand were a dark silver, banded with red—little models of the vast ocean surging beyond them. On the other side of me was the valley, our valley, winding up into the hills that crowded the sea. The trees of the forest blanketing the hills all waved their branches in the sunset onshore wind, and their late spring greens were tinted pollen color by the drowning sun. For miles up and down the curving reach of the coast the forest tossed, fir and spruce and pine like the hair of a living creature, and as I walked I felt the wind toss my hair too. On the ravine-creased hillsides not one sign of man could be seen (though they were there), it was nothing but trees, tall and short, redwood and torrey pine and eucalyptus, dark green hills cascading into the sea, and as I walked the amber cliff’s edge I was happy. I didn’t have the slightest notion that my friends and I were starting a summer that would… change us. As I write this account of those months, deep in the harshest winter I have ever known, I have the advantage of time passed, and I can see that this excursion in search of silver was the start of it—not so much because of what happened, understand, but because of what didn’t happen, because of the ways in which we were deceived. Because of what it gave us a taste for. I was hungry, you see; not just for food (that was a constant), but for a life that was more than fishing, and hoeing weeds, and checking snares. And Nicolin was hungrier than I.

But I’m getting ahead of my story. As I strolled the steep sandstone border between forest and sea, I had no premonition of what was to come, nor any heed for the warnings of the old man. I was just excited by the thought of an adventure. As I turned up the south path towards the little cabin that my pa and I shared, the smells of pine and sea salt raked the insides of my nose and made me drunk with hunger, and happily I imagined chips of silver the size of a dozen dimes. It occurred to me that my friends and I were for the very first time in our lives actually going to do what we had so often boastfully planned to do—and at the thought I felt a thrilling shiver of anticipation, I leaped from root to root in the trail: we were invading the territory of the scavengers, venturing north into the ruins of Orange County.