Jaime Fernandez stopped his burro beside the dusty road and slid off the back of the little animal.  He took a long drink out of his water pouch before continuing on foot with the burro trailing him.  It had turned especially warm that day.  

 

Jaime wondered if his mother was also feeling the heat as she prepared the mid-day meal for his two sisters.  She had been in his thoughts a lot lately, but, he knew for the rest of the day, he had to focus on what must be done – to find and recover his family’s property.  It was up to him since he was responsible for losing it in the first place.  He knew that it would be tough - the Cresenda boys wouldn’t turn it over willingly.

 

As he drew nearer to the poor little farm where the Cresenda family had made their home for six generations, he stopped again to prepare himself.  Tying the burro to a small clump of mesquite brush, he scattered some oats from a bag onto the hard ground and poured a bit of his precious water into his hat for the animal to lap up greedily.  “I won’t need my little friend for now”, he thought.  He wetted his hands and ran them through his stiff black hair and then brushed the dust off his open shirt.  The angry glare of the noon sun was bringing on a headache, something Jaime rarely had felt.  He knew that his thirteen years hadn’t prepared him for this but he had no choice.  It was about family.

 

Turning down the rocky lane with a lively step that belied his real feelings, Jaime soon arrived at the small, adobe main house.  The door hung open so he took a quick look inside.  Soiled clothes were strewn about the front room and he could see dirty dishes and pans littering the kitchen in the back.  No one was in sight.  For a moment, he thought that he might be able to sneak in, find what he was there for, and be gone.

 

As he considered his options, he was startled by a very angry and very close voice.  “What are you doing here?” it said.  He turned to see the legendary ruffian, Rafael Cresenda, sixteen years old and already a veteran of the local jailhouse.  He had stolen sheep from a neighbor and tried to sell them in town, Jaime had heard.  The younger boy’s heart raced but his voice held just long enough to stammer out a weak “I’m here for what is mine”.  Rafael exploded in laughter.  “You’ll never get it.  It belongs to us now”, he sneered. 

 

Knowing he had to act quickly, Jaime darted a look around, seeking an escape route.  Survival was the most important thing right now.  He feinted left and ducked right - away from Rafael’s big hairy paw that came crashing through the hot air and into the wall where Jaime’s head had been.  Scampering through the door, he heard Rafael’s painful shriek.  

 

The small boy bolted first to the ramshackle barn and then quickly down to the dry creek bed just beyond.  He spotted a small animal hole of some sort in the soft creek bank.  “It should be enough”, he thought, as he slid in, pulling dirt and loose brush over his head.  Rafael very shortly could be heard above on the creek bank, not ten feet away, loudly puffing and screaming his wrath.  “Come out and face me you little coward”, he blared.  Jaime thought the bigger boy would certainly hear his own hammering heart.  

 

After an agonizing five minutes, he heard Rafael move away, cursing and stamping his feet.  Peering over the top of the creek bank, Jaime saw that he had headed off in the direction of the low hill to the west where he soon dropped over the top.  Scrambling to his feet, Jaime knew he had won some precious time. “Quickly …. I must have a plan”, he thought.  “Where would I have hidden it?”  

 

Keeping low, he ran back down the stream bed in the direction of the house.  With another glance behind him, he scampered up the steep bank and flung himself down behind a large stump smeared with chicken feathers and dried blood.  He hoped he wouldn’t be the next victim.  

 

Sprinting towards the house, he noticed a mound of garbage next to the back door.  Strictly on instinct or maybe in response to the prayer he had offered earlier, he grabbed a pointed stick and began digging through the smelly pile.  In the distance, Rafael’s silhouette on the hilltop suddenly stood out against the dark blue sky.  He was coming in a hurry.  If it wasn’t here, Jaime had no time to begin another search.

 

Jaime quickened his pace, the accumulated trash and dirt flying into his eyes and hair.  “There must be a hundred years worth of goop here”, he thought.  “Wait, what was that?”  He pushed aside a big piece of bone and there, a glimmer – something shiny.  His hands were feverishly clawing at the dirt and rocks now with fingers that were cracked and bloody.  There, he had it in his fist!  

 

Turning in the direction of his still far-off adversary, Jaime screamed triumphantly, “I have it – don’t ever bother us again!”   Then, clutching it tightly, he turned and ran in the direction of his tethered burro.  He would need his stalwart friend to get home now.  The exhausted Rafael could only watch as Jaime raced up the lane. 

 

Much later that night, Jaime raised his tired head from the burro’s back and gazed down the road at the welcoming light in his mother’s kitchen window.  He knew there would be warm tortillas and a loving embrace waiting for him.  The first part of his mission was over.  He could rest for a while.

 

 

Chapter 2

 

After a night filled with stops and starts, Jaime woke to a bed that had been thoroughly thrashed and fell to the cool dirt floor.  The little canvas bag containing his recovered property was right where he had left it a few hours before.  He took it out and examined it closely.  It didn’t look any worse for wear.  He recognized the carefully engraved set of initials in the brass inlay of the heavy old skeleton key.  His grandfather’s initials, T.F.M. – Tomaso Fernandez el Mercaza, were painstakingly carved there.  He looked lovingly at his treasure.  This key was what he had risked life and limb to recover from the Cresenda boys.   

 

He didn’t know yet what it opened, only that his father, Juan, had given it to him.  Juan must have had a surety of his approaching death from the summer fever which had him confined to his bed when he had told Jaime that the key would someday open a new life for him and his family.  Jaime mourned his father’s passing for several weeks but then, while in town on an errand for his mother, he had mentioned the key to one of his best friends.  At least he had thought Pedro was his friend.  Now he knew differently.  

 

Word of the key had quickly reached the Cresenda boys.  They had waited a few days until they saw Jaime making his way alone to the small field where his burro grazed.  They tied him up to a fencepost and beat him with green willows that they had brought along.  Jaime had carefully hidden the key in an inside pocket but the sticks soon tore through his pants pocket and it tumbled out to the ground.  The Cresenda boys whooped and hollered as they ran off with the key in hand.  Jaime knew they had taken it just to spite him.  They hadn’t known what it fit either.  

 

 

Chapter 3

 

Now that he had the key back, he was ready to discover what it opened.  His father had given him no other clues before the fever had completely clouded his mind.  But, he knew that Juan had worn the key around his neck for many years and he had often wondered its purpose.  He also had observed his father occasionally trudging across the fields behind his home in the direction of an ancient shack used by shepherds in his grandfather’s time.  Thinking back, he knew he wasn’t meant to ask questions about it at the time.  

 

Now, as he made his way across the barren fields toward the rising sun, Jaime had lots of questions.  He remembered how careful his father had always seemed to be with the key.  Lifting it now, he looked at it closely.  It didn’t look like it had been used much but it might have rusted a bit in the Cresenda’s garbage heap over the past several weeks.  He wiped at the tarnish with his ragged cotton shirt and trudged on.  “Maybe the key didn’t go to anything”, he pondered.  “Maybe it was just a test of some kind that father had dreamed up”.  But then, he both knew and felt that couldn’t be true.  His father wasn’t much for tests or jokes - life was always serious to him.

 

Soon, he reached the small, rough shack.  It had never been much, just the one occupant that he had heard of, many years before he was born.  Jaime didn’t know how it had come to be there in the first place; maybe the original settlers had built it.  The door had vanished years before, so he carefully wedged through the hole under a sagging beam that looked like it wouldn’t hold up for another minute.  He surveyed the rafters for snakes.  They liked to get out of the sun in places like this and he didn’t care much for the slippery devils.  

 

Jaime paced the dirt floor from front to rear and side to side - nothing seemed out of place.  An old rusty cooking pot was leaning against the back wall which he sent flying with a well-aimed kick.  There were also some rusty and forgotten spurs still hanging on a nail.  He considered them for a moment as his mind spun with the possibilities.    

 

After a few more moments of exploring, Jaime turned to leave.  “There’s nothing here after all”, he thought.  “It has to be somewhere else”.  Clouded in thought, he didn’t remember the low entrance.  With a terrific thud, his forehead bounced into the  

gnarled wood of the old beam.  The blow sent him reeling backwards several feet, crashing to the floor in a heap.  As he tried to recover from the shock, the entire front wall of the shack shuddered and groaned and collapsed in on itself.  Jaime groggily turned to look but the billowing dust stung his eyes and nostrils.  He lay still for a few moments and then touched his head.  Examining his fingers he saw there was no blood, but he knew that an ugly knot was already rising where the heavy beam had done its damage.  

 

After a few moments, the dust had finally settled and he saw that the entire front wall of the old shack had come down.  Amazingly, the rest of the structure, including the roof, was still intact.

 

Dizzily rising to his feet, Jaime groped towards the pile of rubble.  He thought perhaps some of the planks could be salvaged to mend fences back at the house.  Wood was precious in the desert.  He pulled out several good-sized pieces that might be useful and stacked them off to the side.  

 

Then he saw a stout-looking piece of wood about three feet square.  Maybe he could saw it up and make shelves for his mother.  As he tugged on it, it quickly became apparent that it was attached to something else and no matter how hard he pushed and pulled and struggled, he couldn’t get it to budge.  

 

Off to the side of the old shack and partly leaning up against it was a pole about five feet long and six inches thick.  “That might just work”, he thought.  He wedged it under the thick board and pushed down with all his weight on the pole.  Hanging there in the air, he thought he had misjudged the problem.  With a bang, the board suddenly popped loose from the pile and down he went to the hard floor again.  

 

There was some sort of metal box now visible under the board.  “Where had that come from?” he wondered.  The heavy board had formed a kind of face plate over the box.  There was a small oblong hole in the center of the box.  His mind screamed at him: “Use the key, this is the answer, this is the treasure box!”  

 

 

Chapter 4

 

Quickly, he tore the key from around his neck and carefully fitted it into the iron box.  It fit, but wait - it wouldn’t turn.  Then, as Jaime strained, he felt the lock’s mechanism stubbornly move and the door swung open.  He couldn’t bring himself to look inside.  What if it was empty?  What if someone had gotten there ahead of him?

 

Through narrowed eyes, he took a quick peak.  There was something there!  Another longer look and he was able to see a cracked and faded piece of paper yellowed with age and rolled up tightly.  Jaime took it out and set it aside.  There was also a metallic gleam in a far corner of the box – “the treasure!” his mind screamed.  As his hand tightened around it, he suddenly had doubts.  What was he doing?  Was he supposed to be here?  The answer came: your father knows and approves, go ahead.  

 

He looked down into his palm.  It was an oval shaped, heavy piece of jewelry.  It was kind of like his mother’s favorite brooch but it was made of yellow metal and had a brilliant reddish-orange and very smooth stone set in the middle.  Sun beams streaming through the broken wall danced off the surface as he turned it in his hands.  

 

Laying it aside, Jaime leaned over and picked up the rolled paper.  Worrying that it would crumble to pieces, he handled it gently.  It was a letter, signed by his grandfather, Tomaso, and dated August 3, 1965.  “Wow, that was almost 40 years ago” he thought.  It was written to his father, he saw.  The writing was small and labored but the words were legible. 

 

“Dear Juan, you know I have tried to be a good father”, it began.  “I had a weakness though - I tried to be something I wasn’t, something that I thought would make our lives better”.  Jaime knew Tomaso had been a prospector.  He had never really been any good at it, his mother had told him.  “Just a waste of time and lives”, she had said.  The letter continued, “No one had any idea that I ever found anything.  That’s how I kept it.  But I did find something and now I want to share it with you, my son.  

 

On one of my trips to the mountains, I was caught in a heavy rainstorm.  I found a small hole in the cliff face and squeezed in.  It opened onto a sizeable room and there I found this little treasure - and then I found myself.  The most beautiful gem I had ever seen was lying there in a little leather pouch.  It must have laid there for many years because it was almost totally buried in dirt and leaves and pouch was crumbling.  I brought it home and put it in a setting of gold – the few ounces I had found in almost 30 years of prospecting.  It’s pretty, don’t you think?  The truth is it’s a rare form and size of fire opal, almost unheard of in these parts.  I had it examined by an assayer in the city.”  

 

Jaime took the stone out of his pocket and held it in the light again.  It was dazzling to his untrained eye.  “How could grandfather not have told us about this?” Jaime wondered.  Tomaso’s letter continued, “The assayer told me the stone is worth a king’s ransom.  More than our family could ever want in a lifetime.  I thought, we’re rich beyond our dreams.  I wanted so much for my family to have the things that it could buy.  But, another part of me worried, what if it changes us?  What if it makes us feel differently about each other?  What if our love grows smaller?”  As he read the letter, Jaime’s eyes clouded over and tears started spilling.  He felt his father and grandfather closer now than in a long time.  

 

“I couldn’t take a chance on that”, his grandfather went on.  “I took the stone and put it in this box.  I carved out a section of the wall of the old shepherd’s shack and put it in there with a stout piece of board over the front.  I figured it would be safe there until you found it and had a chance to decide what you will do with it.”  His note ended with a plea: “Do the right thing, Juan.  The decision is yours.  I love you forever”.  

 

That was all his grandfather had said, but there were a few words in a different hand at the bottom.  This hand was stronger and plainer.  Jaime quickly saw it was his father’s handwriting.  “Jaime, you will have questions.  Just know that after reading my father’s letter I too wanted to sell the stone and take us away from here and buy us a good life in the city.  It was very tempting, especially whenever you children had to do without things you wanted.  But we always managed to have what we needed and as to the things we just wanted, well, I decided they weren’t worth the risk.”  Jaime knew what was coming.  “Now it’s your decision.”  All my Love, your Father.

 

 

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