Mother Lode (34 page)

“Get out of here while you
can. I was set on going below and getting work at
The Detroit Tribune
, but
I stayed to support my widowed mother. My older brothers got away,
but it looks like I’m stuck for the duration.”

“Well, scholarship or not, I’m going down
there, toward the end of the summer, get a job, and go back to
school. Might have to be part-time, but it will be something.”

“What about your ma?”

“She said I could go. She’ll be used to
being a widow by then.”

If he believed it, why did his stomach turn
over when he said it?

Now that it was spring, rather than go to
bed right after work, Jorie stayed up to fill his senses with this
wonderful season that heralded the coming summer. He would sleep in
the evening before going to his midnight shift.

In the warm May afternoon, shadowed snow
banks still loomed high, but the hills were finally releasing their
keep of water, held frozen so long in winter’s clasp. Jorie stopped
to listen to the trickle of little rivulets and the rush of
broadening streams. Adding to the harmony was the call of starling
and blue jay. He wished it were as easy for him to discharge the
frozen, pent up waters of his mind. He leaned against the fence
imagining that all that troubled him was melting away, joining the
bubbling streams, leaving his head free and clear.

Finally, returning home, he went round the
back, and removed his muddy boots in the shed.

As he entered the kitchen, instead of being
greeted with the hot chocolate she usually had ready for him, his
mother was sitting with her head on the table.

“What’s wrong?”

She raised her tear-stained face. “We’re
done for, Jorie.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I’ve just come from the lawyer’s. Your pa’s
stock — it isn’t worth the printer’s ink.”

She ran her finger back
and forth over the words on one of the certificates. “Two of the
companies went under.” She tossed it in the air. “They don’t
even
exist
any
more.”

“What!”

She raised a fistful of wrinkled papers.
“You see these bills? All unpaid.”

Jorie was incredulous. “Why?”

“There isn’t any money!”

Eliza came in and crawled silently up on his
lap. Her tear-stained face implored Jorie. “Henna’s gone.”

Jorie looked to his mother.

“I had to let her go. We can’t afford a
housekeeper any more.”

Eliza buried her head in Jorie’s jacket. “I
want Henna back.”

Jorie added his protest. “She looks after
Eliza!”

“
We
’ll have to do that
now.”

His head reeled with the new information. He
sputtered, “But the new buggy, the oriental carpet, why did he buy
them?”

“None of them paid for!” She turned away
from him, her eyes overflowing with tears.

“How could that have happened?” Jorie
struggled to grasp this new information.

“Your father handled the money. He was known
as a man of means. He had good credit, but his investments had been
failing—”

“Did you know this?”

“I knew some stocks had dropped in value,
but I had no idea how bad it was. He kept saying that as long as he
left his stock intact, it would bounce back.”

“But it didn’t?”

She shook her head. “He
put most of his salary into buying
more
stock, in different companies,
hoping to redeem his losses. He was obsessed with the stock market.
And buying new things made him feel safe, I believe, as though it
weren’t actually happening.” Her lips twitched. “You didn’t know
your pa, Jorie.”

He was silent. He could hardly believe what
he was hearing.

She wiped the tears. ”Meanwhile, the debts
piled up. The creditors were patient, not wanting to converge on a
widow, but now they’re demanding their money.” She choked on the
words. “And I don’t have it.”

Jorie tried to take this
in. “He never let on to me he was short.”
My God! He gave me money for school when he didn’t have it to
give!

He felt his throat swelling up. An old
familiar feeling of guilt enveloped him. Maybe all these financial
problems caused his stroke, and he had added to the problem by
begging to go to the University.

“The Company isn’t doing anything for
you?”

She shook her head. “Had he lived ‘til
retirement, they may have given him a small pension. But death
benefits for his widow, no.”

They were silent while his head reeled with
this new information.

He could hear the robins singing in the
trees, and for a moment it was just another spring afternoon. He
tried to take himself out of the scene the way he used to, but her
words pulled him back.

“I could sell my grandmother’s china, and
some of the furniture, but it wouldn’t be enough.” She implored him
with her eyes. “We’ll have to sell the house. That’s the only
way.”

“Sell it! Where would you go?” Some vision
of his future was trying to come into focus but he kept pushing it
back.

“I don’t know. Take rooms in town, I
suppose.”

“With Eliza? You can’t do that!”

His mother turned to him. “What else can we
do, Jorie?”

We.
She was treating him like he was the man of the family
now.

The full implication of this news finally
penetrated.

I’ll never be able to go back to school.
I’ll never be able to leave her.

She was staring at him, waiting for his
offer to stay and support them, while he sat numbly feeling he’d
just consumed a meal of rocks.

He searched feverishly for
alternatives, but could find none. He heard the scream inside his
head.
What if he just ran off and left her
to work it out?

Pictures started rolling in, playing in his
head. Like the player piano at the ice-cream parlor, he saw the
brass pins with the little square holes turning unstoppably toward
their certain end. Pictures of being trapped. The anguished face of
a miner caught in a cave-in, squeezed to death by the pressure of
rocks, flashed before him. He saw this in some sort of dizzy spin
intermingled with flashes of his mother’s words, and all the time
those little brass pins kept going round and round and wouldn't
stop.

Suddenly the front door which she kept
locked was before him. He broke through the beveled glass with his
fist, then kicked the bottom part again and again. When it refused
to budge, he backed up, ran forward, ramming his body against the
door. Five, six, eight times he did this before it finally yielded
to his will.

Heeding neither her screams nor those in his
head, he pushed through it, feeling the visceral satisfaction of
muscling this barricade, knowing for one brief moment, a taste of
freedom. He ran across the veranda, around the house, and up into
the familiar hills, where he’d so often sought peace.

As he dashed up the muddy grade, he could
see in the distance the towering smokestack discharging its black
venom. To Jorie it was the apparition of a giant dragon whom the
whole village feared, spewing its poison by day and by night.

I’ll never be free. I refuse to live this
way!

Before him stood the silhouette of the great
shafthouse; its peaked structures, each higher than the last, rose
step-like toward the sky. With its enormous engines, belts and
gears, it mastered everything below, standing sovereign over the
whole village, and everything beneath it.

Surely a leap from the top would end his
misery swiftly.

Jumping first onto a pile of snow-covered
timbers near the building, he leaped to the roof of the lowest
part. From there, with the aid of the thick rope hanging from the
cupola, he continued upwards, scaling the whole series of slippery,
steeply pitched roofs, while at each level, melting icicles crashed
to the ground.

Reaching the top he teetered on the crest,
feeling the pull of the ground below.

I need time to think!

With shaking knees, he lowered his body,
straddling the ridge. A downdraft brought the never-ending smoke
from the towering chimney to his nostrils. A foggy web of ropes
encircled him, holding him prisoner.

He looked up through the smoke for the
sisters, which had always comforted, anchored him, somehow. He
found the stars, but the line was hazy, crooked. He couldn’t focus
enough to make it straight.

The roaring grind of the shaft belts
reminded him of the colony of men working even now below the
ground. How fortunate she’d said he was, to escape that fate. So
much misery in all those tunnels and shafts crawling with life. But
did anyone really escape it? He held his own dark tunnels inside,
was as much a prisoner of this community as they. At least the
miner could use dynamite, discharging outward what wanted to be
released within.

How could he live here,
how could he
leave
here —this community she’d taught him to hate, that she
wouldn’t let him quit.

He threw back his head, spread wide his
arms, and howled out his rage.

The shafthouse, with its own dissonance of
noise, devoured the impotence of his fury. Even his screams went
unheard.

I can’t. I can’t even do this!

“I don’t know what got into him, Earl, to
kick the door down like that. All he had to do was unlock it.”

Catherine had summoned the sheriff and was
relaying the incident over a cup of tea. She looked at the clock
ticking away the night. Jorie had not yet come home.

“He’s always been such a sensitive boy,
thoughtful and caring. Lately, though, he’s been acting
queerly.”

“Of course the news about your . . .
financial circumstances must have come as rather a shock.”

Catherine nodded. “I think
he was hoping to go back to school next year.” She turned to Earl.
“But considering our reduced circumstances, it’s hard to believe he
wouldn’t
want
to
stay and look after us. It’s as though he can’t stand the thought
of it.”

She drained her cup. “And this is the boy
who said he’d take care of me forever,” she added bitterly.

“I’ll talk to him.”

She took his hand in hers. “Would you, Earl?
He looks up to you, I know he does.”

“Perhaps you’d best go up to bed, and leave
him to me.”

“Thank you. You’ve no idea how much I
appreciate this.”

When Jorie returned the gaping hole where
the front door once stood now demanded that he buckle down
immediately and set things right. It could not even wait until
morning. Going round to the side of the house, he picked up what he
needed and headed back to the veranda.

The sheriff was waiting for him. Neither
spoke. Jorie set the lantern down and positioned the first length
of pine. Earl picked up a nail and the hammer, and pounded it in
place. They worked silently in this fashion until the job was
done.

“Thank you, sir.”

“Let’s go inside.”

They walked ‘round the house, through the
shed into the kitchen.

“Are you going to arrest me, sheriff?”

“Hadn’t planned to.”

“Isn’t that why she called you?”

“No. Let’s sit down.”

They sat at the kitchen table.

“Your mother’s upset. She knows you’re
disappointed about school and thought –”

“Why did she send for you?”

“I believe she was frightened — by your
behavior.”

Jorie looked away.

“What did you do when you left here?”

“Ran.”

“Where?”

“Up by the mine.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. I had to go somewhere.”

“What did you do up there?”

“Nothing.”

“Look, boy, now that you’ve had your temper,
you do understand that the only sensible course of action,
considering the circumstances, is for you to stay at home.”

“To support her, you
mean.”
Ad infinitum.

“There are hundreds of boys and men around
here doing exactly the same, some of ‘em not more than fourteen
years old. All those miners’ widows, most of ‘em looked after by
their sons. Some grown men have been doing this for years. Can’t
afford to get married.”

Jorie saw blood on his hand, shoved it in
his pocket.

“I know about broken dreams, son. Had a few
myself. But there’s a fresh bloom behind every drooping one. Things
will open up for you here, things you haven’t even thought of yet.
I hear you’re doing real well at the paper.”

How could he explain that
it wasn’t just his education that was at stake. It was his
life.
How could he tell
the sheriff that he had to get away from
her?
That if he didn’t escape soon,
the net would so entangle him that it would become
impossible.

“You can’t just leave her and the child to
the poorhouse. You wouldn’t want that, would you?”

It was getting hard to breathe.

Chapter 26

Jorie tried to keep an
ominous reality at bay by imagining it wasn’t true. The situation
was only temporary, and soon he’d be free to go wherever he wished.
But even in his dreams it didn’t last. Sometimes she’d find him in
another city, surround them both with the
Golden Bubble
, and bring him home.
In the worst nightmares, he’d go back on his own. She’d smile in a
strange sort of way, and lead him into her room. He’d crawl in bed
beside her and she’d pull him to her bosom the way she did when he
was little, but this time he would suffocate. Or she’d tell him to
fetch the blue jar, but it was he who was applying the balm to
her.