The Mother Lode (21 page)

“Mr. Joseph Moss has come to see his daughter, Jessica,” Beth was explaining while the nun now stared at Joe as if he were a messenger of Satan. “And I know this is all very sudden and difficult, Sister, but we do need to see the girl and discuss how soon Mr. Moss can take her into his loving custody and care.”

The nun made the sign of the cross. She looked about to faint. Joe started to reach out and support her, but she backed away as if he might bite.

Finally, Sister Barbara cleared her voice and said, “I think that Mr. Moss needs to see Father O'Connor.”

“That would be a good idea,” Beth said, trying to smile.

“Please follow me,” the nun said, making the sign of the cross again and then heading up the aisle.

Joe had to be pushed into the church by the women, and he was almost shaking until the nun veered into a big room where an old priest was having tea with several nuns.

“Father, this is Mr. Joseph Moss,” the nun announced. “He has come to take our Jessica because he . . . he is claiming
fatherhood.
”

The nuns let out a collective gasp. Father O'Connor spilled tea on himself, and there was a heavy silence that seemed to last forever. Finally, the old Irish priest managed to smile and said, “Dear friends, please sit down and share a cup of tea and a pastry with us this morning.”

Ellen and Beth joined them at the table, but Joe couldn't move his feet, so he said, “I have been waiting four years to find out whether I fathered a boy or girl with sweet Fiona McCarthy. I'd sure like to see my daughter right now . . . if it is okay with you.”

“I'm afraid that it is not ‘okay,' ” the priest said softly as he clasped his hands together so tight that the knuckles went bloodless. “Mr. Moss, I feel that we need to have a quiet conversation . . . just the two of us. Father to father.”

“Okay,” Joe said, looking around for a place to go off with the priest.

“Sister Barbara, would you please pour these dear ladies tea and give them refreshments while Mr. Moss and I go have a pleasant little conversation?” O'Connor suggested.

All the nuns nodded in unison.

Joe followed the priest through a narrow hallway into a small room with a table, chair, and bookcase filled with titles he could not begin to read and whose religious concepts he could never hope to comprehend.

“Please have a chair, Mr. Moss. Are you by chance one of our faith?”

“No, sir.”

“A Protestant, then?”

“Not that, either.”

“Please sit down, Mr. Moss.”

Joe sat stiffly. Heart hammering. He had a feeling he had lost this argument before he had even had a chance to speak his true heart and mind.

Father O'Connor took a moment to compose himself and perhaps to say a quick prayer for the right words. Then he began with a question. “Mr. Moss, are you aware of the circumstances that have blessed us with the presence and responsibility of Jessica? How her mother came to us in the dead of the night with bloody hands and gave us this child begging that we love and protect her?”

Joe stammered, “I don't know. . . .”

“Mr. Moss, we agreed to love and protect little Jessica because this is a haven, a sanctuary . . . a
holy place
filled with charity and spiritual grace. But we did ask only one thing in return for our promise to take in that child, and that was that we be given full legal custody until Jessica was twenty-one years of age. I have the document that Fiona Moss or McCarthy signed, and the page has a drop of her own blood to seal this covenant.”

Joe started to protest, but the priest held up his hand silencing Joe's tongue. “Mr. Moss,” he continued, “I have no doubt that you have the very best of intentions for that beautiful child of God. That you think you love her even though you have never been her father and have never even seen Jessica. However, for the sake of the child both physically and spiritually, I must insist that you not only do not try to take her, but that you have no contact whatsoever with Jessica. It would only cause her pain and confusion . . . both of which she has had to suffer already because of the tragic circumstances surrounding her mother.”

“But . . . .”

“I must
insist,
Mr. Moss! There can be no possibility of reconciliation.”

Joe cleared his voice. “I will do whatever it takes, Father. I just have to have that girl who is of
my
blood, not the Church's.”

“We are
all
God's beloved children and members of the one Church,” O'Connor said, “only some have not yet been shown the true path to eternal salvation.”

“I just want to have Jessica!”

“I'm very, very sorry.”

Joe jumped up. “Listen, priest, I demand that you give up that girl!”

“Never.” O'Connor's voice had changed to steel. “Not even if you killed me this very moment would I give her up to a heathen who is not even a Christian.”

Joe began to shake. “Where is she right now!”

The priest shook his head, lips pressed tightly together.

Joe whirled and ran from the room. He heard voices calling him, but he kept running down hallways searching, searching room after small, spartan room, until at last he burst into a space where a very old nun was reading a book to a very small and beautiful girl with hair as black as a raven's wing and eyes as large and luminous as a harvest moon.

“Jessica. Jessica!”

She smiled, and Joe found himself on his knees with tears streaming down his cheeks.

The old nun closed her book and then took the child in her arms, her billowy black habit almost engulfing Jessica.

“Dear sir, you are
upsetting
this sweet, innocent child,” she said with firmness but without anger. “Please go away.”

Joe found himself nodding and crying and backing up on his knees through the doorway with his eyes fixed on his daughter. The girl's eyes were round . . . not with fear . . . but with curiosity, and then she glanced up at the nun for some explanation and perhaps reassurance.

“God bless you, now go
away,
” the nun said, rising to close the door and shut out the only light now left in Joe Moss's streaming eyes.

J
OE MOSS GOT blind drunk that afternoon, and he stayed that way for twenty-four hours, until Beth and Ellen threatened to shoot him and then throw him down an abandoned mine shaft.

“Joe,” Ellen scolded, “getting drunk just isn't going to help get Jessica back or figure out how you can find Fiona. And just because that high-priced lawyer that Mr. DeQuille recommended told you that you had no hope of winning in court, that shouldn't mean that you just give up.”

“What else is there to do?” Joe said with a groan as he forced down a strong cup of coffee that Beth Hamilton had given him. “My wife is wanted for murder and my daughter might as well be locked up in a prison for all the good it does me.”

“That's not true about Jessica. She is in a safe and loving place where you don't have to worry about her. The thing to do now is to sober up and go to work on getting them both back.”

“How?” he asked, hands a little shaky on the coffee cup.

“Beth and I have been talking about that while you were getting sloshed, and we think the best thing for you to do is to make a lot of money on the Comstock Lode so that when Fiona returns for Jessica . . . and you know that she will . . . you'll have the financial means to hire not just one, but a team of the best lawyers that money can buy. If you can do that, I'm sure that you can win both Fiona and Jessica back.”

Joe almost wanted to laugh out loud at the ridiculous suggestion. “Sure,” he said, “what I'll do is stake a claim about six miles from here along with the other poor prospectors, then strike it rich right away. That'll work, won't it?”

Ellen wasn't amused. “You are a man of many abilities and we will be your advisors. Why not give it a try? The alternative is just to stay drunk and give up on your wife and daughter. Are you a
quitter,
Joe Moss?”

His chin snapped up. “Ladies, I've never been a quitter. I've often been a failure, but it wasn't because I didn't try.”

“Then let's get you started,” Beth said.

“On what?”

The two women exchanged glances and Ellen said, “First, you need to know a little about mining. That means you have to go down in a mine and—”

“No!” Joe shouted. “I won't go down on one of those cages.”

“Well, then,” Beth said, “I guess that our plan for you goes out the window. You might as well move out of here and stay drunk.”

“Why do I have to move out?”

“Because I won't tolerate a drunkard,” Beth Hamilton said. “And neither of us wants to watch you go the way of poor Brendan McCarthy.”

Joe was sitting back on the veranda in the rocking chair, and although his stomach was sour and his brain felt busted, as he gazed down on Virginia City and all the little camps and hardships, he realized he didn't want to go down there and try to make a living. So he was either going to accept the plan these women had for him and trust that they were right . . . or he was going to get on his horse and leave the Comstock Lode far behind. Only thing was, if he left, he would never see his wife and daughter again.

“All right,” he said, giving in. “I'll go down and do some deep, hard-rock mining. But I don't know how I'm going to get hired. There are a lot of experienced miners begging for jobs.”

“I know important people who own and operate some of the best mines,” Beth told him. “We can get you a job.”

“How long do I have to do it?”

“A month ought to teach you all you need to know about finding and extracting gold and silver.”

Joe bent his head and shook it sadly. “When do I have to start?”

“I'll make the arrangements tomorrow for you to go on the noon-until-midnight shift at the Belcher Mine.”

Joe had the strongest urge to get drunk all over again, but he didn't. He'd need every bit of his mental and physical ability in order to survive deep under this mountain where men were dying every day, some never to be found.

It was almost noon and Joe was standing on the loading platform waiting his turn to go down to the eight-hundred-foot level. Joe had been given a miner's hat with a candle, and a pick had been shoved into his fists. There were five other men in the same group that was to be lowered in the cage, and the surrounding din from the heavy steam engines and massive machinery in the hoisting works was louder than a locomotive going through a train tunnel.

Joe wanted to ask these men what it was going to feel like when they were lowered down on the cable, but it was too noisy to be heard, so he just stepped onto the little cage, gripped its center bar, and closed his eyes.

Suddenly, the world seemed to drop away as if he'd stepped off a cliff. Joe felt weightless, and his stomach pushed up hard against his hammering heart, and the cage gathered speed on its wild plummet into darkness. As the cage shot downward, it passed cavernous work stations where, for just an instant, he saw bare-chested miners. Then there was more darkness, followed by a quick glimpse of another level and another.

Finally, the cage came to a hard, springy stop, and Joe thought he was going to vomit on the other men packed up against him. But he was shoved off the slightly bouncing cage, and tumbled face-first into a cavern, which was about the size of a boxcar. Five weary and blackened miners took Joe's place in the bouncing cage and disappeared toward the sun.

“Get up,” the mine shift foreman ordered. “We got a lot of work to be done today on the south face. Moss, light your candle and get steady on your feet.”

Joe climbed unsteadily to his feet. The air was very hot and it tasted foul. He immediately began to sweat and feel sick. He looked up and then around the work station next to the main shaft, wondering if it was going to collapse in on him at any moment.

“It's called square setting,” the foreman explained. “In most mines they support the ceilings with what is called ‘post-and-cap' timbering, which looks like a whole line of doorframes. Other mines I've worked in Colorado use what's called a ‘room-and-pillar' method in which thick columns of ore are left standing to support the heavy weight of the ceilings. But what you're looking at down this deep is called ‘square-set timbering,' which was invented by this bright young German mining engineer named Philipp Deidesheimer. Because this Comstock Lode rock down here is porous and expands when exposed to the air, we were having so many cave-ins that we couldn't work at this depth.

But Deidesheimer came up with this square-set timbering using short, massive timbers and tyin' 'em together in blocks or cubes. Each cube can be interlocked with the next one forming what you see all around you now.”

The foreman smiled. “It kinda looks a honeycomb, doesn't it?”

Joe nodded, too stupefied by his dizzying descent and first impression of this unearthly work station even to speak.

“All right, Moss,” the foreman said, taking no more time to admire the engineering, “you've had your lesson for today. Now it's time for us to get to work.”

Joe struggled to his feet and lit the candle stuck to his metal helmet. The miners all carried picks and shovels as they trudged along a narrow tunnel supported by miniature square sets. Joe followed his crew, feeling the sweat running off his chest, back, and shoulders to soak into his pants.

They followed a pair of narrow-gauge iron rails, and most of the time the tunnel's ceiling was so low that they had to stoop and duck in order to move forward. Joe's back was bent at the waist and it soon began to ache. The rock walls seemed to close in tighter and tighter, so that Joe found himself fighting off claustrophobia.