The Threshold (47 page)

54

Calue found herself lying on the ground beside Pa and thought she must have been shot and unconscious because she didn’t remember Aletha going away. Pa said something in a voice that gurgled. Then he shuddered and went slack. Callie bent over him staring back at the glazing eyes, willing them to blink for her. She was bumped about by the men jostling around her but she held her place until someone seized her from behind and carried her to where the banked snow opened onto Townsend Avenue up which she’d come looking for her mother, days ago it seemed to her now.

“Are you hurt, girl? You must run from this place.” The soldier set her on her feet and glanced over his shoulder. “I have to go back. What on earth are you doing here?”

Callie walked down Townsend Avenue feeling as if she floated like Ma’am had done on the railroad tracks.

“You do have a place to go?” he called after her. “Here, you’ve lost your necklace.”

Callie would never remember by what route she came to the back door of the little crib. She didn’t knock. Aunt Lilly sat at her table, her head resting on folded arms. The room smelled of rancid bacon grease and old perfume. Callie stood listening to the snow water drip from the eaves outside and the wind rattles in the soffits. Finally Lilly gave a snort and raised her head. Her face was red and puffy. The dark centers in her eyes almost swallowed up the blue. She wrinkled her forehead as if looking at Callie hurt her eyes.

Then she took off Callie’s coat and dress, checked to see if any of the blood came from Callie, and wrapped her in a blanket. Aunt Lilly took a long drink from the ladle, doused her face with cold water, and set some to heating to wash Callie. She capped the bottle of whiskey and put it away in a cupboard. “And Bram was there?”

“And I think Pa died. He couldn’t live with so much blood out of him.” Callie felt as if she’d drunk too much coffee. Her voice sounded like someone else’s. “And Ma’am is still out there somewhere.”

Aunt Lilly cried and sniffed and cut bread and cheese for Callie. “I’ll go find out what I can. Promise me you’ll stay right here.”

Callie pushed the food away and washed herself with the water that hadn’t had time to heat. She floated out to use the privy and floated back inside. She had no idea how long Aunt Lilly was gone but she was sitting before the untouched food when her aunt returned. “I have friends out looking for Luella. The wounded have been taken to hospitals and the prisoners to Redmen’s. No one would tell me any names. Callie honey, would you do something for me?”

“I’m not hungry.”

“Oh, baby, just cry. Please? Just cry.”

Callie put on the old black dress from the hotel she’d left here and her aunt sponged stains from her coat and plaid dress. It was dusk and Callie was poking at some stew but seeing Pa and the gore on Colorado Avenue when a big woman with greasy hair brought Ma’am to the door. “Found her in an outhouse halfway to Stringtown.” She had Callie’s mother under her arm like a long package. “Her clothes must have been soaked because they’re almost frozen to her.”

“They’re after me. They’re trying to keep me from my medicine.” Ma’am’s voice gurgled like Pa’s had and then she began a cough so racking it took them all to hold her up.

Bram stood next to Bulkeley Wells at the undertaking parlor. Wells had cleaned away all signs of fight except for a swelling under one eye, but Bram was smudged and stained. He wore a bandage around his head and rope tied his wrists together in front of him.

“Where do you want the body shipped?”

“Lone Tree Cemetery.”

“You know that’s not possible. He was deported.”

“He’s dead.”

“He was warned. Deported again and again. I even spoke up for him in court.”

“He came back for his family.”

“You had good marks in school. In every subject. Why did you quit when you were so close to victory?”

“I wouldn’t march with the town against him.”

“Ah … the cadets. That hadn’t occurred to me. What will you do now?”

“Make a home for my sister and mother. Here.”

“You know no member of the union will be allowed—”

“I never belonged to the union.”

“You marched with them. It’s the same.”

“I came with him, to protect him.”

“You attacked an officer.”

“I didn’t kill you. And you shot me.”

“I want to know what has become of Mr. McCree Mackelwain. He was on Colorado Avenue this afternoon but disappeared again. Who is he?”

“A man who always seems to know what’s going to happen. I didn’t see him today.”

“Did you see your sister? She was there with one of Mackelwain’s women. And I have a report from a militiaman who claims he carried a girl from the battle. The girl’s description sounds like your sister. She was also seen at the Pakka boardinghouse asking after your mother, who, it seems, left the train sending families out to their deported menfolk in Ridgway. Had you waited in Ridgway you might have found no need to march to this end.” Wells gestured toward Pa, who was already stiffening on his pallet. “But no one at the boardinghouse has seen either of them since.”

“Callie was there? Did she see what happened to him?”

“It’s possible. She was bloodied but could walk. She left this behind.” He held a piece of stained rock on a broken chain.

“If they’re not at the boardinghouse … My sister was bloodied?”

“If it was she,” Wells said, “she’ll not want reminding of this place.”

“We’re staying. Every time you see us you’ll be reminded of him, and so will the town.” Bram watched Pa until the captain turned aside to speak to several men in uniform who had come looking for him. Then Bram bent to lay his cheek against John O’Connell’s. When he straightened no one seemed to be looking his way so he slipped around the pallet and broke for the door to the alley.

Callie wiped her mother’s face with one of the towels from her aunt’s bedside table. Lilly had removed all the pictures of herself from the walls and stuffed them under the bed. Ma’am shook so hard she rattled the iron bedstead, even with Callie sitting beside her, but large drops of moisture on her skin glistened in the candlelight.

The woman who’d found Luella had stayed to help them put her to bed. “She’s burning. She’ll not last long if that fever don’t break. Sounds like pneumonia to me, or what’s about to be. And I’ve seen enough of it to know.”

Aunt Lilly started crying again. Callie had never heard of anyone recovering from pneumonia in these high mountains. It was probably the biggest killer of people of all ages in the camps. But she didn’t cry. She just kept doing things that needed doing or just sat doing nothing. She didn’t particularly care which.

Several candles flickered on the high shelf that bordered the room, and the soft light made Ma’am look pretty again in her sister’s ruffled nightdress. Across the room a candle burned between a beer stein and a plate painted with purple grapes. When Callie saw a white cat like Charles, but cleaner and fatter, sitting on the windowsill beneath it she thought it must only be part of this awful dream-day. But her mother sat up suddenly and watched it too. Luella screamed when the cat leapt into the room and disappeared.

Aunt Lilly raced in from the kitchen. Ma’am fell back on her pillow making choking sounds, her eyes rolling back under their lids. Lilly pushed Callie away, turned Luella over, and pounded on her back. She shook Luella by the shoulders. She called her sister’s name over and over so loud it was a while before Callie realized she’d been hearing a commotion in the street, men’s voices, running footsteps, and then a scuffling on the step.

“Callie girl,” Bram called, and there were more scuffling sounds. “Callieee—”

The deadness dropped from Callie with a shock that left her reeling as she rushed for the door. There was enough light left to illuminate Bram’s pale hair and the white bandage wrapped in a band around his head. He was trying to shake off two soldiers but his wrists were tied together in front of him.

Callie ducked under his bound hands and wrapped her arms around his chest so the soldiers couldn’t untwine them. He smelled of that awful combination of blood and black powder she’d never forget. “I thought they’d killed you too.”

Bram stopped swinging his shoulders to shrug off the men and brought his arms down tight to lock her to him, put his face in her hair.

“Pa’s dead, Bram.”

“I know, I know,” he whispered and held to her tighter as the soldiers tried to force them apart.

“Let them be,” a deep voice said behind her, and the rough hands stopped tugging at her arms and shoulders.

Bulkeley Wells wondered why he should feel such relief to see Callie whole and unhurt and why he kept thinking of the O’Connell children as children. They looked more like man and woman standing there, haloed by the light from the open door behind them. She had turned her back to her brother and rested her hands on the rope that tied his arms around her. The only resemblance they bore each other was the defiance in their expressions.

“The young man who saved you wanted this returned to you.” Wells held out the worthless quartz fragment entwined by its chain. “He’ll be happy to know you are safe.” The militiaman had accosted Wells while he was still surveying the carnage, trying to rise above the sickening feeling it induced. The soldier had a leg wound but insisted on speaking with Wells before allowing his stretcher to be carried off. “You’re of the town, sir,” he’d said through his pain. “Could you find her and tell me if she’s all right? How could her family have let her out in this?”

Now Callie looked at the stained gewgaw in his palm. “That’s Pa’s blood on it, Bram.”

She ducked out of her brother’s hold and took the necklace, held it to her chest.

“Ohthankgod, oh Bram …” A disheveled prostitute leaned out of the door and embraced the boy. “I couldn’t find out any of the names.” And the tart ignored them all to pull him inside. “She’s calling for you.”

Wells motioned his guards back and followed, but Callie wedged through the doorway beside him. “Why are you in this part of town?”

“She’s family,” Callie answered simply, and motioned toward the prostitute who stood behind Bram with her hands on his shoulders as he knelt beside the bed. His mother’s illness appeared to have progressed beyond recall.

These places all tended to resemble one another. Rarely did one discover originality in a sporting woman. But even so Wells realized at once that he’d had personal business here. The prostitute looked over her shoulder, her tear-smeared face filled with recrimination as if he alone were responsible for the fate of this shattered family, instead of its dead father whose illegal activities had brought such agony down upon his wife and children. Wells was more accustomed to admiration even from these, the least of women, and he turned to the door in anger, prepared to order his men to arrest them all. But the boy choked back a sob behind him and Wells paused on the step, on his way to more important matters demanding his attention. When finally he gave the order it was with great weariness and it was that the O’Connells were to be left alone.

55

Aletha had no wounds for all the blood on her clothing. She’d come across Callie while trying to crawl out of the conflict, had been pleading with the girl to leave her wounded father and flee, when suddenly she was hearing the static on the car radio instead of gunshots and shouting.

A sheriff’s deputy had confiscated her clothes as possible evidence in the disappearance of Sheriff Tom Rickard. Aletha sat now in fresh clothes Tracy had brought up from the crib in a back pew of the empty courtroom with one of the feds. “Well, you can corroborate our story, surely, you were there too.”

“All I know is that the three of you left the car at different times and you and Mackelwain came back and the sheriff didn’t.”

“What about the snow, the horses, the people in old-fashioned clothes—the war?”

“Nobody’s going to believe that.” He looked at his shoes and shrugged.

“You mean you’re not going to tell the whole truth just because it won’t be believed? You realize the predicament you’re leaving Cree and me in, don’t you?”

“I don’t have a lot of sympathy for dealers.”

“We are not dealers.” The clock on the wall was electric now. Aletha kept seeing that flat gravestone in Lone Tree Cemetery and was sure Callie hadn’t left the war on Colorado Avenue in time.

“Look, if I told what … what I think I saw, what good would it do you if nobody believed it? And it could lose me a job.” But he was clearly not comfortable with his decision. “Tell me what you know about Mackelwain and that condo, his association with Massey, the bullet holes in his plane, the whereabouts of Duffer, Pheeney, and Bellamy, and what happened to that highgrade rock of the sheriff’s, and I’ll see what I can do for you.”

So that was why she was sequestered off in this corner with this man. Cree was probably off in another corner with his partner. But Aletha told all of what she knew, the whole truth and nothing but. Like the man said, no one would believe it anyway.

Cree and Aletha were released on their own recognizance and ordered to stay in town for the investigation into the disappearance of the sheriff. The feds must have put in a good word for them.

“There is no case,” Cree told her, “just wild stories and a lot of suspicion.” They stood on the courthouse steps and he described it as it had been in 1901 with the procession of miners lined up for the burial of those killed in the Smuggler-Union fire. But Aletha stared down Colorado Avenue to Townsend Avenue and the scene of the battle.

The federal investigators stepped out of the door behind them. “We did what we could,” the one who’d sequestered her in the courtroom said. He told Cree, “I’m recommending the narcotics investigation be dropped at our level. Doesn’t mean it will be. We’ve promised to come back if the sheriff’s body is found. Hell, I don’t know what happened either. They’re taking the condo. You’re going to have to move.” He handed Aletha a business card. “If you ever come across that guy who said he was a Pinkerton agent … I just want to talk to him so I’ll know … whatever it was really happened, you know?”