The Mirror (13 page)

Her picnic lunch struggled to return. The muscles in Hutch's neck relaxed onto the whiskey hanky. He went limp against her knees. The knife came loose in her hand.

"You can open your eyes now, Dr. Strock." Doc Seaton was tying the straightened leg to a board that looked suspiciously like a piece of the corral fence. "Our patient won't give us any trouble for a while."

Hutch Maddon looked dead. His lips had parted slightly to reveal the lack of a gap between his teeth. His face had drained of life and color.

But his chest moved with slow rhythm.

The crowd made way for Corbin with the doctor's horse and buggy. If Shay could have felt anything more, she knew she wouldn't have been comfortable with the look Corbin gave her.

"I apologize, Mrs. Strock, if I was overly brusque with you. But we had to hurry," Doc Seaton said too loudly, as if he'd also noticed Corbin's expression. "For a town-bred girl, you'd make a fine nurse."

Shay watched as they loaded her limp grandfather into the buggy. The spreading stain on the back of his head looked almost black against the pale hair. Lon and the doctor held him as Corbin drove them off.

Thora K. dragged her across the meadow to the creek like an errant child and sponged dirt and a blood smear from her skirt. "S'pose it can't be 'elped, 'ee being there when it 'appened and all. There, might be this'll keep it from settin' till us gets back to the 'ouse."

"I've seen things like that in the movies but I didn't think they really happened," Shay said as they collected the picnic things.
Booze for anesthetic, knife between the teeth . . .

"Moving wot?"

"Moving pictures."

"Might be 'ee know things I don't, you." Thora K. pushed her face close, and one eye wandered. "But I do know pictures don't move. Edden possible."

As they walked up the road to the cabin, Shay kept staring at the hand that still had a dark streak across the palm.
Someday this will be part of my blood. He couldn't be more than twenty-five. My grandfather will be dead before I'm born, and I'll never know him.

"Brandy . . ." Thora K. stopped beside the cabin. "Yer a strange 'un, but I've come to like 'ee, child." She smiled so wide that Shay knew why the old woman chewed her food the way she did. Her front teeth were all that was left. "Tez possible 'ee 'ave the gift of healing as well as the sight."

"I didn't heal him. I just helped Dr. Seaton."

"In the uld days in Cornwall"--she dropped her voice and looked over her shoulder--"them as would a burned 'ee with the fire and hunged 'ee from a tree. But us modern Cornish know things. 'Ee edden a black witch."

On Thora K.'s next day off, she and Shay trudged up out of the valley to the north, their destination Caribou. It would be mildly famous in Shay's time as a ghost town and for its cemetery.

She, Rachael and Jerrold Garrett had jeeped the road she now walked, to gather material for one of Rachael's books.

The thought of her parents sent Shay's mind racing over schemes to get back to the Gingerbread House, since the mirror apparently wasn't coming to her. She'd considered running away to Boulder, but Brandy's shoes wouldn't permit it. There might be bears in the canyon. It'd be another instance of her behavior that could be labeled crazy. If the mirror wouldn't cooperate, she could yet be "put away."

"I didn't realize Caribou was ever this large." They stood on the main street. Empty storefronts on one side. Heaps of blackened boards on the other.

"Twere bigger afore the fire last winter. Terrible it were. Wind ablowin' flames and men with buckets doing no more good than if them was spittin' tobacco juice. Miners be proper ones fer digging 'oles in the ground but not much fer taking time to lay pipes. So when there's a fire. . ."

About half the town stood unburned on the high mountain meadow. The elements had erased all but a trace of the paint on ugly wooden buildings. It looked like an arsonist's paradise still.

"Caribou were dying way back along. Now tez dead fer sure." Her crackly epitaph moved hollowly on a wind that stirred dust from empty streets through glassless window holes, moved building shells to groan and creak in response, sent a forlorn tin can banging down a gray and rippled plank sidewalk.

Shay followed Thora K. down a side street. A cookstove with a hole in its underside lay on a pile of rusting cans behind an abandoned house.

"What do the people do who still live here?"

"Them be mostly caretakers fer they mines now," Thora K. said sadly. "And them few as is too uld to give it all up."

She stopped before a tiny one-room cabin with a caved-in roof and sighed like the wind that blew through it. "Me Harvey did build this 'ouse fer we. A mite crowded it were, but 'appy fer a time."

The old woman straightened her shoulders and went on. That shack made the one in Nederland look like a palace.

It was a shock to come across a curtained window with glass, or yellowed long underwear strung on a clothesline among all the abandoned dwellings.

Caribou was a sad and dirty mutilation of the meadow. Nature would erase it almost totally, green over the scars, and leave only shapes of foundations, signs of earth unnaturally leveled for buildings, a few heaps of wood marking the collapse of a structure, hillocks that when dug into produced broken bottles and bedsprings. Only the rusty mining scars would remain on the ridges around.

On the outskirts Shay recognized, by its location, a large building still in fair repair. She and her mother would poke around the decaying pile it would become and wonder about it.

Shay stared at the building, remembering the future. On this spot Rachael would speak of a Thora K. . . . someone from her childhood . . . and in that book there'd be a Thora ... an old woman with a frizzy white bun on top of her head . . . who was never without her bottle of tonic . . . what else? Shay'd helped proof the manuscript for that book, but she could bring no more to mind. Thora K. must live to be very old.

They walked up the hill toward the cemetery where Shay and her parents would be saddened at all the graves of children.

"Thora K., how old are you?"

"I be forty and five years. Gettin' to be an uld 'unman."

"Forty-five?" Rachael was in her fifties and looked decades younger than Thora K., who seemed elderly rather than middle-aged.

The cemetery was far larger than when Shay would visit it with her parents. Many of these gravesites would be erased by nature too. Trees would grow back in places. Now it had a tended look, with many weathered but upright wooden and stone markers.

Thora K. knelt to pull some weeds and rearrange rocks around one of them.

H
ARVEY
D. S
TROCK, 1
852-1880

G
ONE TO
J
OIN
H
IS
Maker

"Crushed 'is arm in a cave-in, 'ee did. In the Poorman Mine. Did turn to rot and 'ee died of it. But 'is heart were broken afore the cave-in." She nodded toward a wooden enclosure that had ornate newel posts at each corner. Inside it a solitary marble shaft pointed heavenward.

G
ONE
B
EFORE
U
S
O
H
O
UR
C
HILDREN

F
OR
O
THERS IN
Y
OUR
P
LACE TO
S
TAND.

O
LGA
M
ARY
S
TROCK. B.
1873,
D.
J
ULY
5, 1879.

Shay walked around the enclosure to find another inscription on the next face of the shaft. Elsie Strock had been three years old when she died the day after her sister.

The next side was mercifully blank, but on the last face Shay found that Jane Ann Strock was only a year old when she followed her sisters two days later.

Shay felt as if she'd been punched in the stomach. "Oh, Thora K.--"

"Me babies. All did die in the summer. And the next spring me Harvey joined 'is girls 'ere on the hill." Thora K. stood and brushed off her skirt, her eyes dry, empty. " 'Twere an awful time."

"But your little girls all died in less than a week."

"Fever raged the town, dipthery it were. 'Twere a new town then and most of the graves 'ere be children from that summer. Us was lucky it left Corbin. Some folks din't 'ave a wee one left."

"It's horrible. How could you bear it?" Shay sniffed back tears. "I mean three children gone in just a few days."

"Ahhh, bless yer sawl, child. Them be 'appy in heaven." Thora K. hugged Shay and kissed her cheek. "And I 'ave me a daughter again now, don't I?"

The next morning as she left the outhouse, Shay still pondered the courage of the little Cornish woman and the devastation diphtheria had left in Caribou's cemetery. She'd been depressed all the way back to Nederland. After a fitful night's sleep that depression had deepened.

"Brandy, look what I brought you." Corbin rounded the corner of the cabin with an expectant smile. "I asked Mrs. Tyler to save the next one for us."

The chicken he held by its feet still twitched. Blood dripped from a headless neck. "I told you I'd buy your chicken for you."

Corbin and the chicken blurred. Brandy's stomach rolled. "But . . . it's got. . . feathers."

"Of course it has feathers." He held it higher so she could see the blood better. "You can cook it for supper."

"That's not the kind you cook."
They come naked and cut in pieces and wrapped in cellophane and, oh God, stop twitching.
"That's the kind that lays eggs ... or something."

"Brandy, this is a rooster."

"But I don't know how to cook a chicken with feathers." She backed away as he approached.

"You scald it and pluck it first, of course. Don't tell me you've never plucked a chicken?"

"Don't bring it any closer, Corbin Strock. It's . . . it's bleeding."

He laid the murdered bird on the ground and wrapped his arms around her waist, laughing. "Brandy, my little Brandy. You can help set a man's leg and yet grow faint over a chicken with its head cut off."

"It's not funny, and that was a rotten thing to do to me." Her voice was muffled in his shirt and soon so was her crying. She relaxed against him, thankful for a good cry, if not for the poor chicken. It felt wonderful to have some release for her emotions, to be held and comforted.

Corbin pulled Brandy's chin up so Shay had to look at him. "Don't you cry now. I'll teach you how to pluck a chicken."

"Whoopee-twang." With tears still on Brandy's cheeks, Shay began to laugh. And then Brandy was kissing Corbin, and Shay was surprised at them.

Brandy was a nubile young woman and Shay no shrinking violet.
Between the two of us, there's no telling what trouble we can get into.
She tried to draw away, but Corbin wouldn't have it. He tightened around and against her, and returned that kiss till she thought Brandy's neck would snap.

Oh, hell, who was it said, if it feels good do it?

. . .
and then she felt the telltale ache of Brandy's uterus. Shay knew the signs . . . depression . . . moodiness . . . and Corbin seemed so sexy this morning and . . .
Oh, Brandy, not now . .
. had Tampax been invented yet? Even Kotex? Surely they did something.

An unwanted image of Hutchison Maddon interfered with her thoughts of Corbin Strock . . . the feel of his pain, the lurch of his body as his leg . . .

"Pardon me," a voice said behind Corbin. "But I got this telegram for Mrs. Strock."

Corbin let go of her so suddenly she fell against a tree.

Lon Maddon leered at them from the middle of the clearing.

"And why are you running messages, Maddon?" Corbin's voice was gravelly with embarrassment.

"I was in the office when it came. Deek said it was urgent, and I was coming up to Samuel's anyway, so . . ." He handed an envelope to Shay. "Ma'am."

The telegram was from Sophie. John McCabe was very ill. Brandy was being called home.

14

Home. Home to the Gingerbread House and to the wedding mirror and through it to her mother and father.
I won't marry Marek for a while and perhaps not at all. But the things I'll have to tell Mother!
Shay adjusted Brandy's bonnet.
I'll make the mirror work somehow.

"It do sound bad, them callin' 'ee 'ome. Might be yer fayther'll be better by the time 'ee get there. All set for the trip?" Thora K. glanced at Brandy's skirt meaningfully.