The Threshold (11 page)

While the manager fumed, Luella had to take Callie and Bram out of school because loitering miners pestered them to explain the manifestation of trousered angels who’d spoken to them personally and even accepted Callie’s offering of a stray cat. John O’Connell finally took Bram off prospecting. Uncle Henry traveled down to Telluride to see Aunt Lilly. Fighting broke out sporadically in the boardinghouse, where young men spent too much time, energy, and money over a pack of cards. Poor Miss Heisinger grew bilious because of the difficulty in sneaking in and out of privies with both shifts from the mine and three from the mill hanging about to watch her every move. Callie became sluggish and lonesome for Bram and Charles, missed the stimulation of school.

But while the company watched the “angel strike” eat into its profits, the single miners and mill hands accrued no pay and still owed a dollar a day for room and board at the cookhouse. Those with family could afford the layoff even less. And so they drifted back to work. But they moved warily through the levels and drifts, the crosscuts and stopes. They started each time a tommyknocker tapped over their heads or a drop of water splashed too loudly. And when a miner spit a fuse he hurried away from it a little faster than before.

Luella put up wildberry jams and jellies, ordered up sacks of cornmeal and flour, potatoes and dried pinto beans, coffee beans and sugar. At night mice chewed holes in the corners of the sacks. She set out traps for the first time since they’d moved to Alta. The kitchen was so crowded only a path remained between the table, stove, and back door. Sacks of provisions huddled along the wall under the stairs and beneath the beds in the loft.

Alta’s children ranged far and wide to cut down aspen trees with yellow-gold leaves for firewood. Men with chains and horses hauled whole tree trunks to Alta, sold sawed-off sections to people squirreling away for winter. Heaps of firewood grew massive on the back porch.

Callie began knitting a neck scarf in the evenings while her mother knitted woolly mittens. The O’Connells nailed heavy blue denim over the floor and walls of the sitting room. At night under their naked electric bulb the room took on a somber winter hue and the skin on their hands and faces looked blue-tinged and eerie.

Late one afternoon as Callie and Bram dragged silver aspen up Boomerang Road, they met Miss Heisinger out for a walk. Callie and the teacher chatted while Bram walked on stolidly, saying nothing. Miss Heisinger wore a hat of black straw with a wide brim that shielded her face from the sun and from his view.

“It must be tiresome for you to not be able to go anywhere except Bertha’s house and the schoolhouse,” Callie said.

“To be unable to go anywhere except,” Mildred corrected. “I don’t know how I’ll manage this winter when I can’t sneak off on these little walks.” She tilted her head to peer prettily up at Bram from under her hat. “I’ve worn a path between the tree stumps behind Mr. Traub’s coal shed and through here.” She gestured up an incline that led to the backyards of the nice houses on the hill. “This way I can avoid the camp altogether and take the air without causing some old grand commotion. Don’t you tell anyone. It’s just a secret I’m sharing with the two of you.”

Bram didn’t figure anything she did could be much of a secret for long, and soon there’d be men lining her path. He wished they hadn’t met up with her. Callie always slowed down when she talked and the teacher couldn’t walk very fast in all her long skirts and pointed shoes. That gnawing need to eat, which rarely left him, practically made his head swim now and he knew a dinner of chicken and dumplings was readying at home.

Miss Heisinger stopped them with a hand on his arm and one on Callie’s shoulder. “Before I turn back to my private path, I must speak with you. Your birthday is next week, Bram, and so is Jennie Tyler’s. I thought we might plan a little celebration. Perhaps carry our lunches to Alta Lakes and—”

Bram took a firmer grip on the aspen trunks and pulled them away from her skirts, trailing leaves the size and color of gold coins. They gave off a smoky, mossy smell. Why this woman took such pleasure in tormenting him he did not know. But if the wrath she raised in him ever got out, he was doomed and that he did know. “Birthday celebrations are for children.”

He walked off and left Callie calling after him. Bram wanted to hurt Miss Heisinger physically and he wanted to hold her, caress around on her body. He was shamed by both thoughts.

“Bram, wait. Stop.” She was running up the road after him. “I merely thought—” She cut off with a gasp and he didn’t hear her heels clicking on pebbles behind him any longer.

“Are you hurt? Bram, help—” Callie had dropped her branches and run to the teacher’s side. “She turned her ankle.” Bram fitted his teeth together hard, laid down his load, and walked back to them. Miss Heisinger, with a hand on Callie’s shoulder, tried to take a step and groaned, lost her balance, and sat in the dust in a billow of skirts. Her hat went cockeyed. “Oh, this is so silly. I’m sorry.”

It was just then that the devil spoke to Brambaugh O’Connell.

“I’ll stay with her,” Callie said. “You run for someone to help.” The evening cold that he hardly felt had turned her little nose red already.

Bram handed Callie his hatchet. He stooped to gather up the fallen teacher and tightened the muscles in his buttocks and lower back as John O’Connell had taught him to do when lifting a load. He noticed how high her little boots were buttoned, how white was the lace of her petticoats. He was surprised at how light she was and how quickly the devil had implanted the idea in his head. The pain in her big flecked eyes almost caused him to waver. But things had gone deep enough, he’d had all a man could stand.

“Oh, that’s a much better idea.” Callie skipped beside them. “Bram can carry you home.”

Miss Heisinger fitted nicely in his arms and he drew in a breath of power. This was the first he’d seen her so dangerously discomposed and in possession of not one iota of authority. When her hat had gone askew it left her hair untidied and his carrying her that way put a shocking amount of ankle and petticoat on display. “Thank you, Bram.” Her bones relaxed against him trustingly. “But we mustn’t go this way. What will people think? If you could just help me back to my secret path.”

“That’s right, Bram, and it would be shorter too.” Callie screwed up her forehead. “What
would
people think?”

But Bram kept on course, actually felt the smile as it spread across his face. He tightened his hold. Mrs. Fisherdicks, who lived next to Aunt Lilly and Uncle Henry, stopped shaking the loose flour out of her bread cloth and stared from her doorway. She didn’t even answer Callie’s bright “hello.”

“Brambaugh O’Connell, did you hear what I said?” Miss Heisinger whispered between her teeth. Her face had gone red and her bones stiff again. “Turn around this instant!”

“Bram, don’t you hear her? Oh, hello, Mr. Crowe. The teacher twisted her ankle and Bram’s carrying her home.” Cyrus Crowe, the mill foreman, tipped his cap and forgot to replace it, just stood with it half on and half off and watched them pass. Bram nodded manfully.

“Not past the boardinghouse. You must be mad.” Miss Heisinger struggled and kicked and her hat came off, causing more of her hair to come down. She was beginning to look as if a horse had run away with her.

Callie picked up the hat and found the long hat pin that had pulled out of it. She ran ahead so she could study his face while walking backward. “Are you just being mean to her?”

Bram would have given his soul to have never had to see that disappointed look. But he couldn’t stop now. Even with all the practice he’d had on Callie, it was difficult to tickle the teacher while carrying her. Finally one hand managed to find the spaces between her stays and he surprised a squeal and a giggle from her. Miners standing in line to get into the cookhouse turned to follow them instead. They picked up more from the boardinghouse porch.

“Need any help there, boy? Be glad to give you a hand.”

“What’d she do? Meet up with a bear?”

Bram pretended not to see John O’Connell coming out of the changehouse as they turned at the commissary and he led the procession up the road toward the fancy houses on the hill.

“He did it to be mean. She told him to not go through the camp. When we took her into Bertha’s house she even started crying.”

“Can’t go back to school now. It’s all anybody’s talking about. Some say they even heard her laughing,” John O’Connell said cheerfully, and slapped Bram on the shoulder. “Looks like you outsmarted the teacher and Ma’am too.”

“I can’t believe you’d be so cruel as to purposely endanger the reputation of a schoolteacher just to go back to the mine. She might never find work again.” Ma’am looked to be on the verge of tears herself. She set down her fork and left the table. Callie couldn’t eat her dinner either. She refused to speak or even look at Bram. Finally he stomped out to sit on a cold stump and brood. But not before he’d finished up two plates of chicken and dumplings.

While she washed dishes, Luella peered out the window over the dishpan as if she could see him in the dark. “It’s all my fault. If I hadn’t insisted on his going to school—”

“He knew exactly what he was doing and he wanted to do it. I saw it in his eyes. I’ll never forgive him.”

“What can we do for that poor teacher?” She handed Callie a cup to dry. “I’m afraid Mrs. Traub is already set against her.”

Bram turned fifteen and stopped brooding on his misdeeds. Luella and Callie soon forgave him because he was theirs. He went to work in the mine and seemed to lose his clean, sun-browned look overnight.

Mrs. Traub delighted in nursing her captive schoolmarm. Mildred Heisinger was forced to be off a swollen ankle for two weeks and she limped for another two after she opened the school again.

The snows came early and heavy that year. Even before Christmas the roads were impassable and the only way in or out was the tram buckets. No lady would ride on the dirty concentrates down to the Loop. And riding the empty, swaying buckets back up was too dangerous for children. Only the men could get out of Alta.

Every day before and after work in the mine John and Bram shoveled out the path to the privy. In between shovelings, falling or drifting snow filled it up again. Callie walked in cold white tunnels with only a band of sky above. When the sky was clear it formed a blue ribbon overhead that contrasted sharply with her snow canyons and made her squint her eyes to slits. When the sky was overcast or snowing it sometimes seemed to blend with the walls of snow and put a gray ceiling on a gray prison. Where paths were not shoveled but packed hard by heavy traffic she had to walk a careful line on top of the drifts. One step off a packed trail and she’d flounder in a snow morass. Bram cut steps in the snowbank that separated them from the mill so Callie could climb up out of the house to go to school.

Miss Heisinger had grown distant. She seemed to have lost enthusiasm for her teaching. Callie felt miserable when she remembered how much more they’d all enjoyed school before Bram had humbled the teacher. It seemed to Callie that her own happy world had been changing for the worse since she’d given Charles away to the lady in pants.

One evening while she knitted on the neck scarf in the blue glow of the sitting room, the winter wind shrieked and howled around the house, causing the cloth lining of the room to puff in and out where it wasn’t held down by furniture or nails, and made the stovepipe rattle against the wires that fastened it to the wall. A coal fire was banked for breakfast in the cook stove in the kitchen and the little heating stove in the sitting room burned crackling aspen. It gave off so much heat Callie’s forehead felt scorched, yet shivers tingled up between her shoulder blades as winter seeped through the wall behind her. Bram and Pa lay out on the floor half-dozing. A wild pounding at the door startled them all and when Bram roused to answer it, Uncle Henry fell into his arms.

“You didn’t ride the tram up in this storm,” John said as Bram tried to hold the man and close the door on the gale at the same time.

Henry Ostrander was short and stocky with heavy brows and bright blue eyes. The dark brows were coated white now, and so was his mustache. His whole face looked frosted over. He stared speechlessly as John and Luella fussed about, helping to remove his snowy outer clothes. Finally Luella stepped back and said softly, “Henry? It’s Lilly, isn’t it?”

And Uncle Henry began to sob like a woman. Callie had never seen anything like it and it was the saddest sound she’d ever heard. She moved closer to Bram. When he could control his voice, Henry asked, “Would you please send the children upstairs?”

“Would you please send the children upstairs?” Bram mimicked. He was on his hands and knees trying to slap the snow off the coverlet on the big bed. “I’m not a child.”

Ma’am had let them bring up a coal-oil lamp and they’d set it on the floor at the end of the beds. Callie shook the snow from her quilt and crawled under it. She could remember when she and Bram shared a bed, and nights like this they’d huddle together. Then one day Ma’am had decreed mysteriously, “Bram’s too big.” Ever since then winter nights had been cramped because Callie had to curl up so tight to keep warm. He lay out on her parents’ bed now with his hands behind his head and his feet hanging over the end.

“Bram, Aunt Lilly’s dead, isn’t she?”

“Either that or terrible sick, Callie girl, to cause a grown man to break down that way.”

“But why couldn’t we hear about it?”

“Maybe he doesn’t want us to see him embarrass himself any more or he wants to spare us the sadness of the details of it.”

“Remember how she used to laugh and tease us before she grew all fat? And she was so pretty and always saying surprising things. I don’t want her to be dead.” They watched the shadows twitch around on the low ceiling as the drafts pried and dipped into the lamp’s glass chimney. Grains of snow sifted down like fine white flour when the wind shook the house. The salty smell of frying bacon drifted up to them as Ma’am prepared Uncle Henry a supper. “Tell me what it’s like down in the stopes again.”