Featured The Orangeburg Story

Oh, now you turn the tables on me, sir, and have me intrigued!

Naked wives can be fun, but it's the third bullet point - and your avatar - that has my attention.

(The latter has had my attention for some time.)

But I first must finish my tale, shouldn't I?

 

HB2U, @green18!

Ladymarcovan brought home Chinese carryout. Beef Lo Mein for me. I shared with Lily the Cat (aka "The Orange Bandit"). It is fun to taunt her with Lo Mein noodles or spaghetti. (Lily the Cat, that is. Not Ladymarcovan.)

PS- see what I did, there? "Orangeburg"? "Orange Bandit"?

Totally meant to do that coincidental.

Dunno. A few. Probably not that many. I still have to make it up as I go along compose my memories of the story.

 

...

So our homeowner stands for a moment, dumbstruck by the discovery of the box. It takes him a moment or two to realize that it must be a box. Then he seizes the shovel up again to dig it the rest of the way out of the bottom and side of the hole.

This takes some effort, but eventually he has the thing loose, and pries it from the earth. It is quite heavy.

It is an ancient strongbox of some kind - perhaps of brass, or wood reinforced with brass - though it is difficult to say exactly what the box was made of, since it remains caked with mud.

It was also reinforced with iron bands, and those have become large, lumpy blobs of rust in the decades if not centuries it spent in the ground. One large mass of rust on the front of the box proves (when hit with the shovel to knock the deposits off) to have once been an iron padlock- of the old heart-shaped kind seen in early 19th century illustrations. The lock holds, though it is severely pitted and deteriorated from rust.

The box is not particularly large, but it is perhaps the size of the microwave oven in the homeowner's kitchen. Underneath its remaining coat of greyish soil, it is the green of patinated, long-buried brass (except where he scratched the corner with the shovel), and the orange-brown of rusted iron.

There is a rectangular brass plate affixed to the top of the box, though if there is any inscription there, it cannot as yet be read beneath the patina and encrustation.

Grasping the box by the rusted iron ring handles on the sides of it, the homeowner lifts it out of the hole. As he does so, big chunks of rusty flakes fall from the handles, but they hold.

It is, as mentioned before, extremely heavy.

Breathlessly, he carries the heavy, dirty, rusty box inside his house.

...

 

...

Back inside his utility room, the homeowner lays the old strongbox atop the muddy coveralls he had worn when he first filled in the hole earlier. Completely forgetting to change out of the clean clothes he has on, he eagerly sets to work on the box.

He is about to permanently ruin the good clean shirt he is wearing, and normally would face a scolding from his wife for that, but by the time she sees the ruined shirt, that will have become an utterly unimportant detail and will be overlooked. Their lives are about to change.

He goes to his toolbench and selects a small jigsaw. He uses this to saw into the rusted old lock, seeing no other way, really - though he still tries to do this as carefully as possible, leaving as much of it intact as he can. He tries very hard to restrain his curiosity and growing excitement.

Even after its shackle is sawn through, the old lock remains stubbornly affixed to the side of the box, fused in place by more than a century's worth of rust.

So before the homeowner gets his big flathead screwdriver out to pry the box open, he uses some steel wool and a brass wire brush to attempt to make the hinges and hasp of the box as free from encrustation as possible. Maybe the hinges will still work after their outer layer of rust is cracked through.

While working on the hinges and the exterior of the top of the box, he brushes the green encrustation from the brass plaque on top, and notices some engraving there, beneath the thick patina.

At first he can't make any sense of the design. Eventually he realizes it is lettering of some kind, though a bizarre, overly ornate sort of lettering, almost like one sees on monogrammed antique jewelry.

There are three initials there, in a ridiculously curlicued sort of Victorian font, which would be difficult to read even if it were freshly engraved on new metal.

He's puzzled by the initials and fails to make any sense of the old script, thinking they look almost as though an alien civilization had carved them.

(Klingon? No, the font doesn't resemble Klingon at all, though our homeowner, raised on late-20th century American pop culture, thinks it does. He laughs at himself.)

He does not recognize that it is an Old English font with many extra flourishes.

Nor does he realize that the initials read "C S A", if in fact they do. (We do not and cannot know this for certain, either.)

...

 

Oh, I assure you I too was utterly spellbound when I first heard the story in 1994, though I was getting the bare bones of it and not the highly embellished version you are presently reading.

 

(To be continued)

...

Hadn't intended to stretch this little serial out quite so long, but now that I have, it's kinda fun. Not to worry, there isn't much more room for the story arc to run its course, so I'll wrap things up ...

... on Sunday.