Speak Through the Wind (46 page)

he death of Katherine MacGregan was barely noticed by the residents of the Silver Peak camp. There had been a brief service, of course, attended by a few of the miners and the women from Jewell’s house. Gloria had stayed away, saying she wanted to keep her son out of the sharp, chill wind, but MacGregan stood at his wife’s graveside, holding his newborn daughter in one arm, dropping a handful of earth into the open grave with the other. Afterwards they retired to Jewell’s house for sandwiches and coffee—all but MacGregan.

“Looks like she was loved most by those that knew her least,” Jewell said as the little party made its way down the path to the red-roofed house.

“Hush that,” Kassandra said, nearly elbowing the woman off the path, but smiling a bit at the comment.

As the weather grew warmer, rumors persisted that the lode at Silver Peak was about tapped out, but that didn’t stop a new influx of men who came to coax out what little might be left. With them came two new women to work in Jewell’s house—Yolanda, a lovely, dark-eyed Mexican girl, and Donna, a dark-skinned quadroon from the brothels of New Orleans.

“That’s what we’re needin’ around here,” Jewell said, tickled at their arrival. “A little more color.”

And the men couldn’t have agreed more. The simple, quiet evenings at Jewell’s house were soon a thing of the past. There was dancing to the music played on the piano that had recently made its precarious ascent up the pass. Whiskey and beer flowed more freely than ever, and more and more miners’ boots tramped up the parlor stairs to the second floor. It was obvious in no time that Yolanda and Donna would each need a room of her own, and Kassandra graciously took Biddy back into hers, if for no other reason than to protect her from an inevitable fate, given her fascination with the music, dancing, and increasing attentions of Ben Danglars.

Mae moved in with Jewell under a fair amount of protest—surprisingly from Mae.

One person not caught up in this new burst of life was John William MacGregan. And Gloria. He’d given over the care of his daughter to her, and according to the men gathered at Jewell’s, he’d been selling off a lot of his mining equipment, making trades for a wagon and a team of horses.

“He is going to leave that baby here,” Kassandra hissed into Jewell’s ear one night after hearing that MacGregan had just purchased a leather driving harness. “How can he do that?”

“When you find somethin’ better, you walk away,” Jewell said, pouring a drink. “You know all about that, don’t you?”

But it turned out MacGregan wasn’t leaving. Not alone, anyway. One afternoon, after watching fitfully from Jewell’s kitchen window for MacGregan to leave Gloria’s cabin after his daily visit to his daughter, Kassandra ran across the yard to ask Gloria what his plans were.

“We’re leaving on Saturday,” Gloria confessed after some attempt at being coy. Kassandra felt a pang of envy as she took in the news of Gloria’s life to come. Two beautiful children. A strong, caring man.

“It’s not forever,” Gloria said, as if trying to comfort her friend.

Kassandra felt immediate shame for not rejoicing in this, another life saved.

“Nothing ever is.”

The rush to get everything ready for Gloria’s departure was unlike anything Kassandra had ever seen. Mae immediately took to making Gloria some new clothes from the bolts of calico that had been delivered on the last supply.

“We don’t want her going off to Oregon looking like some tart he picked up at a whorehouse,” Mae had said, using her arm to measure out lengths of a serviceable brown sprigged print.

“Oh, no. We would not want that,” Kassandra said, cutting her own bed quilt in half to make a soft lining for the babies’ baskets. She knew the scraps from Gloria’s new clothes would be made into a new quilt for her before the winter came.

Biddy was beside herself with happiness, and she found every available bit of cloth to cut and hem into diapers for the babies. One night, as she and Kassandra sat up in bed, she whispered in the dark, “You know, I wish they would take me with them. I could be an awful big help with the babies—I’ve taken care of lots of them. I wouldn’t be any trouble at all.”

“Have you asked her?” Kassandra couldn’t imagine a more wonderful means of escape for this child, who seemed to daily become more enticed by the life Jewell had to offer.

“No,” Biddy said. “I figure if it’s God’s will that I go, He’ll lay it on Gloria’s heart to ask me.”

Kassandra smiled into the darkness. “I would not bet on that,
Liebling.
I’m not sure Gloria has a heart for God to lay anything on.”

“Of course she does. Everybody has a heart for God. She just hasn’t found it yet.”

The night before Gloria was to leave, Kassandra, Mae, and Biddy squeezed themselves into Gloria’s tiny cabin for one last evening of chat like they used to enjoy before the new women came to turn Jewell’s house into Jewell’s dream. Mae brought over the new clothes, and Gloria tried them on right in front of the other women, transforming herself into a pioneer before their very eyes.

“All you need now is a sunbonnet and a hunched back,” Kassandra said, laughing through a mouthful of one of Mae’s cookies.

“Let me just take up the hem on this one,” Mae said, taking the brown skirt covered with scattered red flowers. “I don’t want it to get dragged through the mud and ruined.”

Gloria tried to stop her from leaving, but Kassandra knew Mae wouldn’t want to be a part of the conversation should it turn maudlin. For as long as Kassandra knew her, Mae had found true comfort in serving others. Besides, she had a suspicion that some of the leftover fabric would soon become a sunbonnet for the trail.

Later in the evening, after an uninvited and rather unpleasant visit from Jewell, Kassandra and Gloria sat in the darkness of the little cabin. They talked a little about their pasts, but often they were silent, listening to the sounds of sleeping babies nestled in baskets around them.

“You’re the only friend I’ve ever had, Sadie,” Gloria said wistfully. “I’d almost want to stay just for that.”

“Nonsense,” Kassandra said. “You have a child. You have to do what is best for him.”

“Do you miss your little girl?”

“Yes. I wish I could say every day, but I don’t. Sometimes—and this is terrible—but I will think about her and realize it is the first I’ve thought about her in perhaps a week or more.”

“I hope I’ll be able to be that strong,” Gloria said, “when it’s time to leave Danny.”

“Oh, Gloria, why would you even think about leaving him behind?”

“Because I don’t know how to live that life.” Gloria gestured to the pile of clothes strewn across the chair. “This is what I know. This is all I’ve ever known. It’s what I was born for.”

“Nobody is born to be a whore,” Kassandra said. “It’s something that happens when your choices are taken away. You have a choice now.”

Early the next morning they all gathered to bid farewell, and a definite sadness was left in Jewell’s house. Yolanda and Donna missed the send-off entirely, sleeping late into the afternoon, but the rest of the women puttered around the parlor and kitchen as if in constant search for something.

“I think I’m even gonna miss them babies,” Jewell said, smoking a cigarette and staring out the kitchen window.

“You won’t think that way tonight when you get to sleep through without hearing one of them crying,” Mae said, punching down a lump of bread dough.

”I’ll miss all of them,” Biddy said. Her fondness for Gloria had grown akin to hero-worship, and only Kassandra knew how badly disappointed she was at having been left behind. “Mae, do you think tomorrow you could start working on the dress?”

“Of course I can!” Mae reached out and left a floury pinch on Biddy’s cheek. “We’ll start first thing.”

Gloria had given Biddy her best dress—a beautiful green with black velvet trim—and Biddy’s grateful reaction to it worried Kassandra even more that she was becoming enticed by the life that accompanied it.

The house was quiet that night. Jewell imposed a sense of mourning. Whether it was the loss of Gloria or the reminder of the life none of them would ever have, she didn’t say. She declared she wasn’t in the mood for music and fun tonight, and therefore nobody else was, either. Yolanda and Donna simply took the festivities up the mountain to the miner’s cabins, accompanied by several bottles of whiskey

“I’m movin’ them two out back first thing in the mornin’,” Jewell declared, watching them cross the yard, looking like two bright silk birds picking their way across a barren field. “I want my own bed back.”

And so she did. That same evening, they all worked together lugging trunks full of dresses and arms full of various other luxuries out to the two cabins behind the main house. Jewell was all for dumping the mess in the middle of the cabin floor and letting them sort it out later, but Mae and Biddy insisted that they put the rooms together nicely, giving the girls something pleasant to come back to.

Kassandra noticed the curtains hanging in the window of Gloria’s cabin and remembered a promise she had made to Gloria. “Don’t let Jewell have them,” she’d said. “Take them to your room and keep them for yourself.” At the time such a promise seemed silly, but now, with the void left by her departure painfully raw, she took the yellow sprigged fabric down and clutched it to her.

Later that night, as Kassandra lay in bed, there was a knock at her door and Biddy stepped in, carrying a candle that took the room from darkness to a soft, promising glow.

“What are you doing here?” Kassandra asked, scooting over and patting the mattress beside her. “You have your own room now Don’t tell me you have grown afraid of the dark.”

“Oh, no,” Biddy said, setting the candle on the table by the bed and crawling under the covers. “I was just thinking, then I got a little sad.”

“What were you thinking about?”

“Would you ever want to leave this place, Sadie?”

“Yes.”

“Where would you go?”

“I have not given it that much thought,” she said, though the seeds of her desire had been planted the night Gloria’s Danny was born, and she’d thought of little else since. “I think I would like to go back to New York. To my daughter.”

“That sounds wonderful,” Biddy whispered. “I wish my mother could come back to me.”

“I do not know if my daughter even knows that I am alive,” Kassandra said. “Or what she thinks of me. But I need to find out.”

“Do you want to get married?”

“No, no,
Liebling,”
Kassandra said, laughing. “Not any time soon.”

“Why did you become a prostitute?”

“Ha! That is a very good question. And one with a very long answer. Too long for this late hour.”

“I’m not sleepy.”

Kassandra sat up in bed, and Biddy did the same, tucking her thin legs underneath her, facing Kassandra in the candlelight.

“I was not much older than you, dear. And I felt I didn’t have any choice.”

“Do you … do you think I’ll have a choice?”

Her eyes were huge in the dim light, her soft brown hair loose in waves around her narrow shoulders. Though hidden now beneath the loose nightgown, her body had developed quite womanly curves, and the men who came down from the mountains were beginning to notice. Some were new arrivals, ignorant of the taboo against touching Biddy; others had been around long enough to have forgotten. The easy antics of Yolanda and Donna had fueled their lust, and it was a common occurrence now to hear some whoops and whistles whenever Biddy entered or left a room.

“Of course you’ll have a choice,” Kassandra said, reaching out for Biddy’s’ hands. “Don’t get into this life, Biddy. You will never be able to leave it behind if you do.”

“There’s that boy, Ben Danglars—”

“My life was ruined by a boy named Ben. Stay away from him.”

“He seems nice.”

“They all do. But when they see you here, in a place like this …”

“Is that what happened to you? Were you a prostitute when you met Ben?”

“No, dear, I was just a young girl like you. A good Christian girl in a good Christian home, waiting for something exciting to happen to me.”

“Isn’t that what you are now?” Biddy asked with a coy smile.