LITMIR.BIZ

      Late at night on Christmas Eve, she carried us each to our high bedroom, and darkened the room, and opened the window, and held us awed in the freezing stillness, saying—and we could hear the edge of tears in her voice—“Do you hear them? Do you hear the bells, the little bells, on Santa’s sleigh?” We marveled and drowsed, smelling the piercingly cold night and the sweetness of Mother’s warm neck, hearing in her voice so much pent emotion, feeling the familiar strength in the crook of her arms, and looking out over the silent streetlights and the chilled stars over the rooftops of the town. “Very faint, and far away—can you hear them coming?” And we could hear them coming, very faint and far away, the bells on the flying sleigh.

      Next to one of our side yards ran a short, dirty dead-end alley. We couldn’t see the alley from the house; our parents had planted a row of Lombardy poplars to keep it out of sight. I found an old dime there.

      High above the darkest part of the alley, in a teetering set of rooms, lived a terrible old man and a terrible old woman, brother and sister.

      Doc Hall appeared only high against the sky, just outside his door at the top of two rickety flights of zigzag stairs. There he stood, grimy with coal dust, in a black suit wrinkled as underwear, and yelled unintelligibly, furiously, down at us children who played on his woodpile. We looked fearfully overhead and saw him stamp his aerial porch, a raven messing up his pile of sticks and littering the ground below. We couldn’t understand his curses, but we scattered.

      Doc Hall’s grim sister went to early Mass at St. Bede’s; she passed our house every morning. She was shapeless and sooty, dressed in black; she leaned squeezing a black cane, and walked downcast. No one knew what Mass might be; my parents shuddered to think. She crawled back and down the alley.

      The alley ended at an empty, padlocked garage. In summer a few hairs of grass grew down the alley’s center. Down the alley’s side, broken glass, old nails, and pellets of foil and candy wrappers spiked the greasy black soil out of which a dirty catalpa and a dirty sycamore grew.

      When I found the dime I was crouched in the alley digging dirt with a Popsicle stick under one of the Lombardy poplars. I struck the dime and dug around it; it was buried on edge. I pulled it out, cleaned it between my fingers, and pocketed it. Later I showed it to my father, who had been until then my only imaginable source of income. He read the date—1919—and told me it was an old dime, which might be worth more than ten cents.

      He explained that the passage of time had buried the dime; soil tends to pile up around things. In Rome, he went on—looking out the kitchen window as I leaned against a counter looking up at him—in Rome, he had seen old doorways two or three stories underground. Where children had once tumbled directly outside from their doors, now visitors had to climb two flights of stairs to meet the light of the street. I stopped listening for a minute. I imagined that if the Roman children had, by awful chance, sat still in their doorways long enough, sat dreaming and forgetting to move, they, too, would have been buried in dirt, up to their chins, over their heads!—only by then, of course, they would be very old. Which was, in fact—the picture swept over me—precisely what had happened to all those Roman children, whether they sat still or not.

      I turned the warm dime in my fingers. Father told me that, in general, the older a coin was, the greater its value. The older coins were farther down. I decided to devote my life to unearthing treasure. Beneath my 1919 dime, buried in the little Pittsburgh alley, might be coins older still, coins deeper down, coins from ancient times, from forgotten peoples and times, gold coins, even—pieces of eight, doubloons.

      I continually imagined these old, deeply buried coins, and dreamed of them; the alley was thick with them. After I’d unearthed all the layers of wealth I could reach with a Popsicle stick, I would switch to a spade and delve down to the good stuff: to the shining layers of antique Spanish gold, of Roman gold—maybe brass-bound chests of it, maybe diamonds and rubies, maybe dulled gold from days so long past that people didn’t manufacture coins at all, but simply carried bags of raw gold or ore in lumps.