The Threshold (27 page)

“Those fellows beat me and when I woke up I was inside the mine.” Cree tried to slow his words to match the relaxed style that prevailed here. “I don’t know what they wanted.”

“You ain’t the best liar I ever heard, Mr. Mackelwain,” Sheriff Cal Rutan said good-humoredly. “But I don’t approve of what they did to you. Have all three of those boys in the jail and all they do is complain about the cold, the food, and the lice. And the drunks in there with them.” He picked Duffer’s battery lantern up off the floor. “Suppose you could tell me what this is?”

“No, sir. Seems to be made of funny stuff.”

“‘Funny stuff,’ yes … well, watch this.” He pushed the switch and the light came on. Mr. Pangrazia sucked breath in between the gaps in his front teeth. “Maybe they were after this?”

“I’ve never seen anything like that before, sir.”

“Well, I’ve never seen anything like these before, sir.” The sheriff produced Cree’s running shoes. “And you came in here wearing ’em. Where’d you say you was from again?”

“Wyoming. Cheyenne. I had those specially made for me there.”

“And you have no money, no family, no previous occupation. Sounds to me like you got about as much trouble as those boys in the jailhouse. Winter’s coming on hard. I’ll get a wire off to Cheyenne. They didn’t teach you to talk like you do in Wyoming, friend.” Sheriff Rutan gathered the lantern and his overcoat and left Cree with, “You’re not careful, you’ll end up in Stringtown.”

“Stringtown,” Mr. Pangrazia explained, “is where the very poor live.” He practiced with his wooden leg and crutches in the aisle between rows of beds. Cree’s bed had the metal foot rail extended, with pillows to fill in between it and the mattress. The man with the gurgling lungs had been carried out dead. “Drunken men, Indians, prostitutes too old and ugly. My son, he tells me they eat stray dogs there. They live by a string, Mr. Mackelwain. Some don’t make it through the winter. It’s across the river on the east edge of the camp.”

That’s the town park, Cree thought. I’m in the museum, and skid row is in the town park. His injuries did not encourage laughter so he shook his head like Mr. Pangrazia. Snow still blasted the windows. Cree didn’t think his feet would ever be warm again. “What month is this, February?”

“November,” Mr. Sorenson answered. His bed was next to Cree’s. He was rarely awake.

“November 1901 … oh, God, they had the fire yet? At the Smuggler?” Twenty-eight men perished. There would be a mass grave in Lone Tree Cemetery. “I think it was 1901. Maybe it was eighteen men. Maybe it was the twenty-eighth. I’m sure it was November.”

“My son, he works at the Smuggler-Union. No fire there. November, she half-over already.” Mr. Pangrazia hopped and hobbled and shook his head sadly. “Bumps on the head, poor man. Bumps on the head.”

30

John O’Connell was feeling his age. He swung an empty dinner bucket and watched the younger men jounce along as if they hadn’t just put in a grueling shift. His wife but a poor bag of bones. The boy unfit to work probably ever. His prospect still not located. Little Callie forced to wipe up after swags. John could ill afford to wear down now. He did a man’s work and was proud of it but he was thirty-six and his tired bones told him he couldn’t keep this up indefinitely. He coughed as the smoke from the rounds firing below passed him on its way to the outside, and followed it to the cold mountain day already dimming toward night. The chill cut through his damp clothes and set his skin to bracing up with goosebumps. Spitting biting juices from the plug in his cheek, he waited as an overloaded hay wagon pulled up in front of him. When he stepped around it he could see more snow had fallen while he was down, feathering over the bare ground where the wind brushed it so, filling up rock crevices and drifting deep in the protection of buildings that clutched the mountainside. It spread over the stubble of stumps on the slope above like shaving soap.

Almost every inch of the flat shelf here that wasn’t road was given over to buildings, along with every additional inch that could be gouged and flattened out of the rock-hard mountain. The Smuggler-Union had several adits but the main passage to the fabulous Bullion Tunnel opened onto this steeply pitched slope, forcing most of the support buildings—machine and blacksmith shops, boardinghouse, assay office, storage sheds, and tram station—to crowd around the opening. There was little space for a man to stretch his legs except on the road. An old story told of a miner who walked in his sleep off the boardinghouse porch and was never seen again. The outhouse required no digging. It sat on a platform that emptied out over space. It was said when winter got deep enough the cold drafts came up the chute under the privy and made a man’s testicles try to crawl up his bunghole.

John chuckled and it eased his exhaustion. There were some good stories of this place and some of them might even be true. And the working stiffs here had shown the owners they wouldn’t stand for unfair wages. Next they’d work for safety measures so a man needn’t risk too much every day—proper timbering and ventilation, no shooting of rounds till dinner break or tally and the boys safely away.

He stood at the edge of the precipice and watched the camp robbers fly and screech around the kitchen slops dumped over the side, as the gulls had done when he’d been to sea. The Smuggler’s mill was down in the valley at Pandora, but he could hear the muted thump of the vast mill over at the Tomboy across the abyss, the clickety-clack of the tram buckets, the braying of mules, the clink of the smithy’s hammer.

He straightened sore shoulders and inhaled the clean brisk air. Well, it was a grand country and a man like John O’Connell could find his fortune yet. And he’d managed to pay some ahead for Luella and Bram at Mrs. Pakka’s from the sale of that white powder he’d found up in Alta. Too bad the stuff wasn’t worth more.

John was swapping stories with the boys in the dining hall halfway through a supper of boiled beef, cabbage, and potatoes and looking forward to the selection of pies even now being sliced on a nearby sideboard when the hay wagon he’d met coming out of the tunnel caught fire. Every man was called out to fight it. The wagon had been unhitched on the road and left right where he’d seen it. The night shift had just gone to work and wasn’t available to help. John had no doubts they’d lose the wagon but still figured they’d have it out in time to eat some of that pie. They’d always been short of water at the Smuggler, there being no mill to demand it. Most of it was hauled in winter. A horseman was sent racing off to the Tomboy for aid and water. Men began shoveling snow at the burning hay and flapping at it with wet blankets.

A wind with whirly, thin snow swept up the valley just when the fire looked to be containable and by the time help from the Tomboy arrived there were burning patches on almost every building and the few barrels of water the visitors could spare were about enough to wet more blankets to fight sparks on roofs. The wind howled as if in glee at this. Then it bellowed the sparks into conflagrations that sent the firefighters and their blankets off the roofs fast and backing down the road. John wasn’t the first to notice the smoke leaning toward the adit instead of spiraling upward. The foreman from the Tomboy ordered anybody who would listen to close the safety doors on the tunnel.

“Don’t have any,” John yelled over the snap and whoosh of the flames.

“Then we’ll have to dynamite it, fast!”

“That’ll ruin the tunnel,” Mr. Collins, the manager, shouted. He and a horde of others had just stepped off the tram, having come up in the buckets from Pandora.

“There’s a whole shift in there. They’ll die from the smoke sucked into the workings.”

Thor Torkelson, the shift boss, handed John a wet blanket. “Men dying vile they ben yapping. Got to tell those still alive to run to the other adits, not try this von.”

It certainly wasn’t that John O’Connell wanted to risk his life. But it didn’t take a man long to die breathing smoke that thick. There wasn’t time to reach other adits and then gain the workings. The boardinghouse came down on his pie as John wrapped the blanket about and over him, leaving only a slit to peek through. The heat outside scorched his skin; inside it was heavy as a locomotive and airless. Flame had been sucked surprisingly far in. A horse, screaming like a banshee, came out of the smoke and nearly trampled John in its panic. The man hanging on to its tail and racing along behind had his hair on fire.

John lost track of Torkelson. He came across another horse dead in its traces, the trammer hanging lifeless over the edge of the tram car. John’s blanket had gone as dry as the linings of his nose and lungs. Each breath was choking, burning agony even filtered through the blanket, and about as satisfying as rocks to a starving man. He’d stumbled into walls and across huddled shapes of more dead before he heard the thunder and whump of the explosion. Someone had finally blown the adit.

Bram O’Connell was out walking the tracks that night. Ma’am kept warning him to stay in Mrs. Pakka’s heated parlor with his studies, to conserve what little strength he had and not risk cold and pneumonia. But sharing that tiny divided room with her was suffocating him, and the parlor where the boarders gathered after supper was even worse. Yet neither compared with school. He’d been attending for about a week now and had already earned the nickname “scarecrow.” He was not allowed to wear his cap in the classroom to hide his baldness. The girls giggled behind their hands, the boys yelled insults from around corners. And in his dreams he repeated the slow agonies of drowning.

In order to sleep, to work off a growing restlessness, to vent his rage at his helplessness, Bram had taken to walking the railroad tracks at night, where no one paid him much attention. He’d walk the track through the sporting section halfway to Pandora, turn around and walk it again. It took more walking each night to settle him.

This night Bram was on his second time back through the sporting section and ignoring occasional invitations from the hags who lived in the tiny shacks scattered along the tracks when he reached Spruce Street and heard a great commotion in front of the Senate. He followed the shadows until he reached the Silver Bell, where a crowd had filed out into the street.

“Fire at the Smuggler … smoke in the tunnels, down the shafts.”

“Men dead by the tramloads.”

“Old man Collins wouldn’t blow the adit till it was too late.”

“His lordship was afraid of losin’ his precious money while men was losin’ their lives.” There was a low rumble of male anger as the streets continued to fill. Bram took his own anger back to the tracks and ran to the boardinghouse, having to lean against Mrs. Pakka’s coal shed to recover from the exertion and to fight the terror. If only he could be a man again, he’d go up and fight through smoke and fire and worse to bring John O’Connell out if he was in that hellhole.

When Luella O’Connell heard of the disaster she went to her trunk for a packet of the powders she’d purchased from a peddler with a portion of her tiny funds. She’d come to prefer the straight powder to that diluted in tonic and found that when applied to the inside of the nose and mouth its healing of nervous disorders and exhaustion was much enhanced. The peddler had assured her that the powders were even better than food for nourishment and restoration of the energies of the body. And if John were one of the dead, she would need all the strength she could muster.

Callie didn’t learn of the fire at the Smuggler-Union Mine until the next morning. She and Opal Mae had huddled together on the same cot all night, partly for warmth and partly for comfort. The cot next to Callie’s was empty. Elsie Biggs had been dismissed that morning. She’d committed the cardinal sin for Mrs. Stollsteimer’s girls. She’d entered a room while the gentleman was present. “If she hadn’t been a ninny and screamed, no one would ever have known,” Opal Mae insisted. “The gentleman wouldn’t have told, would he?”

“Not on himself,” Callie answered. “Elsie probably didn’t even know he was in there.”

“Let this be a lesson to the rest of you,” Mrs. Stollsteimer had told them sternly. To be sure they behaved themselves, she decreed they would henceforth work in groups; the three youngest—Callie, Opal Mae, and Senja—would work together and Olina and Grace would do the same. “I don’t ever want to see any of you parading about separately.”

Callie, Opal Mae, and Senja were trying to scrub and scrape dried tobacco juice off the wainscoting in the dining room the next morning when they heard about the terrible fire at the Smuggler and the estimates of the dead.

“Bodies already being stacked like cordwood at the mortician’s,” a guest said to another as they waited at the door for the dining room to open.

“That’s what those foreign buggers get for organizing unions, if you ask me. Good Lord just ‘struck’ back.” And the man laughed.

31

Aletha found the coat at the Old Claims Trading Post among a wide assortment of items—secondhand, just old, and valuable antique. It was heavy, made of gray scratchy wool, with black piping and buttons. It had darts pulling it in at the waist and reached the tops of her tennis shoes. It smelled musty and dusty but appeared sound enough.

Her mouth felt considerably better. Her front teeth had not turned gray yet but she still ate carefully. The film festival was due to start the next day and the conversations in restaurants, stores, and on the sidewalk had taken on the broad A’s of those who had trained their speech habits or those who wanted one to believe they had. But the festival did mean work for her. Renata warned that after the festivals and before the skiing there would be an off season and work would be scarce. Aletha’s problem was keeping the coat and her black dress boots with her in case the hole opened up. She decided to wear them to work.

“What a cool coat,” one of her fellow laborers remarked at Sophio’s the next day. “It even stinks old.” No one else noticed it. You had to get pretty far off-the-wall to be noticed in Telluride. But she couldn’t wear it while actually waiting tables so she hid it behind the antique sideboard on the restaurant’s balcony where her tables were assigned and then was nervous whenever she had to go downstairs for burritos and margaritas. She needn’t have worried because nothing happened that day. It happened the next.