Shadow on a Weary Land

It was Frank James, not Jesse, who buried the treasure in Brown's Ridge. This is what the Musician tells me as he pulls the metal detector out the back of his pickup and slings it over his shoulder. We find a deer path through the woods behind his cabin and take the back way up the ridge. The Musician breaks through low branches and lopes up the steep loose ground. But Frank didn't have half as much dough, I say, out of breath when we get to the top. To the south, the Nashville skyline crouches on the horizon like a stalking animal. But he was smarter, the Musician grins. He planned ahead. For future generations, I say. Exactly, the Musician says, tapping the end of his nose.

Life in Brown's Ridge is like this: at night, the howl of the coyotes can split you in two. In the morning the sun is slow to rise over the spine of the ridge, and starlings and wild turkeys pick their way across the dark fields and into the trees. When the coyotes come by, Greenup Bird lifts his old head and howls, overcome by something ancient inside him. The woods hold pockets of cool air in the summer, and warm air in the winter, and walking through them you tend to look over your shoulder, thinking something is following you. On the steepest parts of the ridge grow oaks and hickories over three hundred years old, saved from generations of loggers by their inaccessibility. Up there I have seen bald eagles, bucks with antlers like coat racks. In the valley below, Katy Creek rushes south to the Cumberland. Brown's Ridge Pike runs beside it, all the way to Kentucky. Out there on the horizon, Nashville seems to be hundreds of miles away. Not many people live here: less people than cows, less people than copperheads, coyotes, possums. They call it Brown's Ridge after Kaspar Brown, the first man killed by Indians here. No one knows exactly, but that was sometime around 1799.

The Musician and I have lived here since 1985, and never before has there been any talk of treasure. I can't believe that no one has thought to look for it yet, in the same way I can't believe that the Nashville developers have only now discovered Brown's Ridge. When Joe Guy's father bought his farm in 1935, the James brothers had only been gone fifty years. There were people around who remembered passing them on the road, seeing them at the horse races, smiling to their wives. It's a wonder that it never occurred to Joe Guy to look for some sort of a treasure buried somewhere on his thousand-acre tract. Or to anyone else, for that matter: the families in the trailers on the other side of the ridge, the dairy farmers, the kids in grubby t-shirts who miss the school bus day after day. Lacy, the pretty young waitress at the Meat 'n Three, talks every once in a while about striking it rich in the new state lottery, buying a plane ticket to New York. Even Preacher Jubal Cain would not be above scratching around in the dirt for a few thousand dollars worth of gold. So why are we the first? The Musician tells me, none of them would have even known where to look. The woods are quiet, the hot hush of late summer as it turns into fall. Have you got a map? I ask him. Don't need one, he says, handing me a shovel. I got Steve.

Since he showed up on the Musician's doorstep last winter, Steve has claimed to have a direct line to the spirit of Jesse James. He is quick to point out that it is not Jesse's ghost, that he is not among us. The first time Jesse spoke to him, Steve was lying on the Musician's floor, and he sat up and said, Holy shit, the Lord speaketh, and Jesse said, No, man, listen, it's Jesse James...