The Threshold (9 page)

“But there’s nothing there now,” she said, glad she’d not come alone after all. As soon as she’d said it the sound wasn’t there either. “I heard someone in the car.”

He gave her an unnecessary squeeze and crushed the piece of quartz on the souvenir necklace into her skin. He bent to look in the Datsun.

“And someone standing right here said, ‘Tap her light, John.’”

“I heard them too, Aletha.” They waited, eyes searching the air. Gray twilight descended, making everything colorless, putting the day sounds to bed, not yet waking the night sounds. Just the furry wind high in the trees.

Finally they drove up the hill to what a Forest Service sign assured them had once been a commissary. While he fought an interesting combination of slender poles and line, she hunted for sticks and “squaw wood,” the brittle twigs at the ends of dead branches on the lower trunks of pine trees that snapped off and hurt her hands. “Even Indians were sexist,” she grumbled when he’d pointed out this source of kindling.

“Everybody was sexist. Natural way of things. Still is in most places,” he said. “Notice you didn’t bring a woman up here with you.”

Aletha didn’t bother to answer. She didn’t wander too far from him either. An old bank safe lay on its side next to a flattened building. It had feet and four iron wheels rusted immobile. The outer door was gone, the inner door stood open. The sky was a fading purple-pink over a distant mountain range that had an absurd phallic protuberance standing alone as if it had erected away from the mountains around it. The guidebooks called it Lizard Head. Aletha could see no resemblance to a lizard.

Cree pumped away at a small circle of metal as she deposited her pitiful offering for a fire. “Camp stove,” he answered her look, “upon which I shall prepare your evening kitty litter.”

The tent, blue-and-yellow nylon-awful, hunkered in the weeds—graceless, small, cozy. She should have come alone, stayed in the car. What were ghosts and bears against an automobile? It took forever to boil the water to rehydrate the packet meal, and shadows deepened into darkness with just enough glow on everything to make it impossible to ignore the boardinghouse across the road staring at them with vacant windows. The wind came down out of the trees to flutter weeds. It hummed in the dead boards of buildings still standing. Night things rustled just out of sight. Cree poured something steamy into plastic cups and handed her a spoon. The food, part crunch and mostly mush, tasted of seasonings only but felt warm and good going down. The cup warmed her hands. Aletha watched the Lizard Head disappear into gloom through the window holes of a roofless commissary. “What do you suppose ‘tap her light’ means?”

“Could be an old mining term. Or maybe a drinking term.” He formed a little tepee of twigs inside a circle of rocks and grinned. “Might even be dirty man-talk.”

They had coffee and Hershey bars around the tiny fire. They waited and listened, started every time a stick cracked somewhere off in the forest, listening to the wind whisper and rush, sigh and grow still. Stars came out and the sky grew brighter as the earth grew darker and lights appeared on the side of the boardinghouse. The Datsun split slowly in two and disappeared. Outside lights on poles reflected in the glass of the boardinghouse windows. And then one by one those windows lit up from behind. The boardinghouse had grown a porch. Drifts of snow mounded up to partially cover it and the windows on the lower floor. The thundering sound of this place was almost overcome by the screaming of a shrill whistle. Men’s voices shouted above it. Figures still slipping into coat sleeves came off the boardinghouse’s new porch on the run.

“You can’t have a fire there, man.” A man came up from behind and ran off toward the lights. “What’re you thinking of?” Aletha reached for Cree as another form hurtled out of the dark and collided with the tent. Making cursing sounds in another language, he struggled free and rushed past with a mere glance for them. “Must be a cave-in!”

The panic in his voice pulled Aletha forward, tugging Cree with her. The light chill in the evening had turned to biting cold. Her tennis shoes crackled on icy snow. The drift under them grew higher as they moved away from the tent, and put them on a level with the eaves of the commissary roof as they rounded a corner of it. They faced a lighted area filled with people and buildings. A long low snowshed ran down from the mouth of the mine and disappeared into a large building at the edge of the blur. Smaller sheds sat drunkenly amidst drifted snow.

“We’ll freeze to death here,” Cree said in a steam drift from his mouth. “We have to go back. What if we can’t?”

Women in ankle-length coats wore shawls draped over their heads as in old pictures of Ellis Island immigrants. Some turned to put their heads on the shoulder of the woman next to them, were embraced and patted. Some had small children standing close at their sides. The men yelled at each other what sounded like commands but looked like puffs of cloud above pinched faces. They passed long-handled tools over peoples’ heads and gradually disappeared into a door in the side of the snowshed.

One small figure turned away from the edge of the crowd not far from the commissary. It doubled over as if sick, then straightened, took a few steps toward Aletha and Cree and stopped. Cree was trying to pull her backward but hesitated when Aletha shouted, “Callie?”

The figure moved closer, a white nightgown billowed beneath a jacket far too large. Callie wore a shawl hooded over her head too. “It’s Bram,” she said, terror rasping her voice. “Bram! He’s in there.” The little girl stretched a mittened hand toward Cree in a curious gesture. “What can I do?”

“Callie, listen to me. Don’t go to Telluride. Callie, do you hear?” Aletha could see the edges of things moving together out of the corners of her eyes. “Callie,” she screamed to a landscape suddenly empty of buildings and lights and crowd and snow. She dropped to the level of weeds and against the corner of a rotting commissary. There was moonlight now. The wind had risen from a sigh to a dirgelike moan. Her hands and feet were numb. Her ears and even her teeth ached with a cold that no longer existed. Only the pendant seemed warm between her breasts.

10

Aunt Lilly did not recover her strength as she should have after the death of baby Henry. Finally her husband and her sister took her down to Telluride and found her a room in the home of a widow. The widow would do her cooking and laundry and all Lilly need do was rest and convalesce with doctor, hospital, and drugstore nearby. Back in Alta the O’Connells made room for Uncle Henry at their supper table. Luella was rummaging through disorderly stacks of work pants and overalls in the commissary one day when Mrs. Traub, the manager’s wife, bustled in, a purpose in her eye. They exchanged pleasantries and then, “What’s this I hear about our new teacher and your boy, Bram?”

Luella’s mother had always said that suspicion once planted could grow its own evil, and Luella knew that to be true. “She’s his teacher, hardly more than a girl herself. What could—”

“Old enough to turn a boy’s head. And my Bertha says her color rises every time he so much as passes her desk. That’s not a good influence on the other children either, if you ask me. But Mr. Traub says to let it be. It’s either Mildred Heisinger or no teacher at all for us this year.” Mrs. Traub collected a parcel from the storekeeper and stopped at Luella’s side on her way out. “Oh, and, Mrs. O’Connell, do come up when you’re finished here. I’ve some of that poison you’ve been wanting to rid yourself of the mangy cat under your house.”

“No one’s going to take him, Callie. He’s not young and pretty.” Bram and Callie were supposed to be collecting wooden crates from behind the commissary to break into kindling. Instead they were trying to find another home for Charles. “He’ll just head for our cabin the minute he’s let out.”

“Ma’am cut a square of good beef from the middle of the roast before she put it in the pot and took it out the back door.” Callie was sure it was poisoned. She’d searched but couldn’t find it, had found Charles instead. “And she’d been to tea with Mrs. Traub.”

They’d tried to convince the storekeeper that the commissary needed an experienced ratter in its storeroom but had been unsuccessful. Now they entered the cookhouse, found it abustle with men at their supper, the sounds of crunching, slurping, burping, rough talk, and the clang of tableware. Young boys rushed among long tables carrying bowls heaped with boiled potatoes and platters of beef. A waist-high hole in the wall gave access to the kitchen for empty platters and dirty plates and egress for the mounds of food handed out to the waiters. Charles stiffened, moaned warning, and batted at Bram’s chin.

“When you coming back to work, schoolboy?”

“Why should he when he can look at that schoolmarm all day?”

“Hey, Miss Callie, I’m still waiting for you to grow up so’s I can marry them dimples.”

“What you bringing that dirty critter in here for?”

“That’s no dirty critter. That’s King Charles of Alta, ain’t that right, Callie, honey? Helps me eat my dinner at the mill every day. Right regal about it he is too.”

“Here! Take that animal from my cooking house.” Mr. Mueller leaned out the kitchen hole and gestured so wildly with one thick arm he nearly sent a bowl of gravy flying out of a young waiter’s hand. “What are you sinking?”

“But he’d catch the rats in your kitchen,” Callie pleaded. “And he’s wonderfully lovable.” Charles hissed, spat, struggled to get out of Bram’s arms.

“No catzes. Not one catz. For you, Callie, a piece of Heinrich Mueller’s apples pie, two pieces for your tower of a brother even.” Mr. Mueller’s red face reddened with emphasis. “But no catzes. None!”

“Aye, and wot’s a ‘catzes,’ Mueller?” Laughter and a chanting of “catzes” and then foot-stomping to the rhythm of the chant throughout the dining room sent Charles into a frenzy of scratching and biting and Heinrich Mueller into a frenzy of fist shaking. All but Charles came to a breathless halt as a hole sizzled into the wall beside Callie. Bram’s jaw dropped and his arms loosened.

Callie caught Charles in mid-leap and turned to face the lady who’d left her book of drawings on the ground by the mill. The lady wore pants again and an odd puffy mackinaw that hung open in front. She had a man with her, a man taller than Bram with hair cut rounded and fluffy and so long it covered the tops of his ears. His skin was darkened by sun and his cheeks cut vertically by deep creases. They were both in the process of removing huge eyeglasses, smoky-colored, as if dipped in flame. They stood on a pile of fallen, grayed boards. They stood in bright sunlight, a deep green forest behind them.

“Callie, don’t go to Telluride,” the lady said as though terrified at the thought.

“Who are you?” Callie asked. “Where do you come from?”

“Aletha, Aletha Kingman. Promise me you won’t go.”

Callie heard the scraping of chairs and benches against the wooden flooring and in the general rush of boots she shoved a writhing Charles at Aletha. “Ma’am’s going to poison him. Please find him a home.”

“Are you Bram?” the dark man asked her brother. “If you are, don’t go in the mine. There’s going to be a cave-in if there hasn’t been already.” A squirrel perched on a tree limb above his head and scolded them all. And above the tree in an otherwise cloudless heaven a narrow band of cloud trailed all the way across in a perfectly straight line.

“If you wait here, I’ll run and fetch your book,” Callie offered.

“I thought you said Miss Heisinger had it.”

“Miss Heisinger? Why would she have your book?”

“Callie, never mind that now. Just remember to never go to Telluride and, honey, I can’t take your kitty.” Charles climbed stiff-legged up the lady’s chest in agreement. The man caught him as he was about to jump off her shoulder.

“Please, Aletha, you’re the only one who can help. His name is Charles.” The fuzzy edges of the hole moved together and squeezed out the sunny green world, the strange couple, and the dirty white cat.

Mr. Mueller came from the kitchen doorway, cautiously felt the wall with the palms of both hands. “I see it, yes. I believe it, no. Who is that woman with the trousers on, Callie? Where did she go?”

“She’s Aletha.” The privy smell came through the loose-fitting boards of the wall. Next to the lady and her companion had been a seat still standing with the outhouse fallen from around it. She’d just sent Charles to a land where this building would be a tumbledown ruin. Either that or it was a fairy-tale land. Or maybe heaven. Whichever it was, poor Charles would be better off than he was here.

“Do you think Jesus lives with them?” Callie asked, but Bram pulled her out of the dining room, through the gathered miners, and around to the privy side of the building.

Mr. Mueller followed. “Go and eat your suppers, you brave men. The children and I have encountered with the danger.”

The privy stood whole and smelled even stronger than inside. The wall next to it was solid. “We forgot to ask her how she makes the hole without leaving a mark, Bram.”

Irregular rows of tree stumps marched to the curve in the road and continued on the other side in dots of gray up the mountainside. No green pine branches to harbor that chattering squirrel. And the couple in the oval had stood in the bright sunlight of morning, where here the light was dusty with the approach of evening. “I wonder how she knew Miss Heisinger,” Callie whispered.

But Bram just stared straight and still. “Where is Charles, Callie?”

“He’s with Aletha now. You know we couldn’t keep him.”

“Maybe he’s dead. Maybe they were angels.”

“Und so? What you do? That angel he said for you to not go into the mine. He said there is coming a cave-in.”

A silence overcame the small band of miners who’d straggled along behind them. It was followed by a low buzzing of male vocal cords and fear. It finally thinned out to one whispered word that passed around the building and even crossed the road to the boardinghouse—“cave-in.”

11

“Hey now. What if a lady with half a bedspread over her head peeks in here?”

“I just want you to hold me,” Aletha said. They both trembled with cold and reaction, lying on one sleeping bag and covered by the other, inside the tent, and still wearing their down parkas. The sudden and short-lived Alta winter had extinguished the fire. “And they were shawls, not bedspreads. Callie was small and young again. And it was winter there. Things … or time, is getting mixed up.”