The Threshold (7 page)

Just as Callie and Mable scurried back and Mildred Heisinger was about to order her students to put their heads down on their desks—a proven method of restoring calm and order in an unsettled classroom—a particularly sharp lightning crack followed by a thud jarred the floorboards. Callie O’Connell headed for the arms of her brother instead of her seat. The littlest girls squealed and one began to cry. Even the boys were struck round-eyed and still. The two light bulbs flickered out. And the thunder of the mill silenced.

An onrush of wind-driven rain pushed in on great peals of thunder that carried much more of a clamor without the steadying of the mill throb in the background. Lightning snaps ignited all around them. Charges of electricity sizzled down the stovepipe and crackled and danced on the potbellied stove. It seemed to Mildred as if she and her students were isolated innocents caught on a battleground under cannon siege. She tried to fight some authority into her voice. “Callie and Johann, return to your seats and everyone put his head down upon his desk. This will pass very soon, as have the others. Callie, will you please—”

It was a small still breath while the weather tamped and reloaded, and into it came Brambaugh O’Connell’s voice—level, low, and relaxed. “She’s afraid and she’ll stay right here.”

The burnout from the storm lasted only two days before the mill thundered once more and the people of the mining camp breathed easier. When the mine and mill did not prosper, neither did they. The next thunder Callie heard was in her father’s voice. “Payday! The first in a while, wouldn’t you say? And it’s in scrip. All because of the shutdowns at the mill, says they. And me looking for a little time off to prospect.” He pounded on the cable-spool table and that thundered too. “What do you think of that, Ma’am, huh?”

Callie saw her mother cringe but continue to ladle soup. “The supper’s ready, John.” Her tone was steady like Bram’s had been when Miss Heisinger had called Callie back to her seat and Bram had held her so she couldn’t go. “There’s much that we need we can’t buy at the commissary, but scrip will pay the rent. Bram, will you offer the Lord’s thanks, please?”

Halfway through the meal the thunder was still on John O’Connell’s face. “Sure, it’s no wonder the union men been hanging about so much of late.”

Their one light bulb hung above the table, its braided wires draped over a hook. There was another hook in the sitting room where they could move the light after supper was cleaned up and all could read under it in comfort. This was the first Callie had lived with electricity too and she much preferred it to oil lamps. But now the miraculous bulb, of clear glass with a wormlike filament ablaze inside it, cast shadows across her father’s features. Odd shadows, unfamiliar, threatening. She looked away and dribbled a crisscross of stripes in dark syrup on her cornbread.

“I hope they don’t start trouble here. They’ve caused so much bloodshed and heartache elsewhere.” Ma’am’s face sagged, as did her shoulders. She’d been spelling her sister on night watch over the cradle of a sick baby Henry. Even the wonderful tonic did not seem to restore Luella. One bottle was already empty, the other over at Lilly’s was more than half gone. And this was the tonic that was to have lasted through a winter not yet arrived. Shadows played across her face and Callie looked up to see if the bulb was swinging. But it was still.

“All they’re asking is a day’s wage for a day’s work and a day that’s not so long as to kill a man. And conditions safe for a man to work under.” Payday came once a month. John would hand his pay—usually in silver and gold coin—over to Luella, keeping back a tenth. He would then go down to Ophir or sometimes into Telluride and squander it on masculine pursuits, missing a day or so of work in the bargain but ready to take on another month of grueling seven-day weeks when he returned. Single miners often returned to the boardinghouse in the same amount of time with a month’s pay gone. At three dollars a day they out-earned most laboring men. But as a popular saying went, “The miner mines the mines and the ‘line’ mines the miner.”

Most miners’ wives had an ongoing fantasy of reforming their men to more righteous ways, and rarely did a woman marry a man she didn’t plan to change. Luella was no exception. Men in mining camps dreamed their own fantasies. It was only a matter of time before they stumbled across their strike. This would happen, of course, on one of the few days they could afford to devote to prospecting.

“Well, if they don’t pay in coin, they pay in other ways then, do they not?” John reached to lift a large chunk of rock from the pocket of his coat and laid it on the table. A milk-white rock on the top and one side with specks of silver and specks of gold glinting back at the electrical light bulb. “What is this white stuff here, lad?”

“Quartz,” Bram answered.

“And the little speckles of silver and gold?”

“Mica and pyrite.”

“And this here, Bram?” He turned the rock over. Luella and Bram hissed in on their breaths. Callie thought the other side was prettier. This one was almost solid with a dull and dirty yellow. “What would you call it, now?”

“That’s highgrade, Pa.” Bram looked confused. “You’re highgrading.”

“How do you steal from a thief? Tell me that.” John O’Connell’s hair had grown ever thinner and farther back on the top of his head. He ran his hand over it now, as they had seen him do so often when agitated. “Paying in scrip is thievery. And taking it all back in rent and at the company commissary is slavery.”

Luella stared hard at Callie and Bram. “You’re not ever to breathe a word of this to anyone.”

Callie knew of two other such rocks hidden under the house. She’d helped bury them. Those two were a secret among herself, her father, and Charles. “Taking me a little walk down to Ophir tonight,” John said. “Be back tomorrow with some real money.”

When he’d left, Luella sighed and stretched her back up and then her shoulders. “Callie, you’ll have to do the dishes alone. And, Bram, don’t look at me that way. John O’Connell is an honest man who can be pushed too far. Did you know that when he was working the Molly Deal the owners in Boston closed the mine owing the men three months’ pay? How do you think we survived that?”

“If you’d let me work like I should, there’d be two earning a wage and he wouldn’t have to steal.” Bram’s voice seldom broke now. It was taking on a low rumble.

“You’re not happy at school, are you, Bram? I’d think with such a pretty young teacher you’d—”

“You’ve already taught me more than she can. And she’s not a good woman. Not like you.”

“Miss Heisinger? She’s hardly more than a girl. What do you mean by ‘not good’?”

“She’s different. She looks at me … different.”

“I like her,” Callie said, pouring boiling water from the teakettle onto soap shavings in the dishpan. “Just because she’s pretty doesn’t mean she’s bad.” She dipped cold water from the five-gallon oil can into the hot water and stirred with her finger until the water turned milky-colored. “Everybody looks at you, Bram, because you’re too big to not see.” She turned to find Bram’s color rising and her mother studying them both.

“Too big not to be seen,” Luella corrected distantly, as if she were concentrating on something else.

“I never lied to you, Ma’am,” he whispered. “You know that.”

“I do know that.” Luella stood behind him and put a hand on each shoulder. “And I couldn’t love you more if you’d been born to us. I don’t know how I’d have lived through the loss of the first two, if we hadn’t had you with us. I will think on this, Bram, I promise. Now, help Callie finish up and then both sit to your lessons. I’d best go back to Aunt Lilly’s.”

“Callie, why must you keep looking out the window?” Bram asked when they had books spread out on the table.

“To see if the lady has come back to the hole in the wall.” There were enough lights on the mill to see her even at night.

“There couldn’t have been any hole. It would’ve had to have been boarded up and that’d left a mark too.” He’d patiently explained all this before, but it was no help to Callie because she knew what she’d seen.

“I just want to give her book back to her. She must be missing all those fine drawings. And I’ll ask her how she made the hole and then tell you.” It gave her a good feeling that there were some things even Bram didn’t know about.

John O’Connell did not return until the next evening, and late enough that Callie and Bram had finished their studies. They were allowing Charles a little sniff around the kitchen, thinking it was safe enough because Luella had left long ago for Aunt Lilly’s house. When they heard the first footfall on the porch they thought she’d returned early. Callie grabbed for Charles and missed. Bram sat up from a reclining position on the floor so suddenly he hit his head on the undersurface of the spool table.

But it was John and not Luella who stood in the doorway, staring back at them a little uncertainly. “Walked down to the Loop and took a tram bucket up,” he explained, and began to nod his head as if agreeing with himself. “Brought your Ma’am some of her tonic. S’pose she’ll be at Lillian’s again.” He set the wrapped bottle on the table rather hard. He smelled of cool mountain night, alcohol, and snouse. Soon the whole kitchen did. “And I brought a bag of something sweet for Callie and a bag of something sweet for Bram and I even brought a wee something for the kiddy. Whadaya think of that?”

Charles was already rubbing one side of himself on John’s pants leg. Callie and Bram opened the waxed bags and selected a choice candy each. John stumbled the few steps across the kitchen to hang up his coat on a peg and didn’t notice when it promptly fell to the floor. He knelt, untied the string on a tiny package, and spread out a paper with bits of bloody meat on it.

“Shopped liver,” John said with a conspiratorial wink and still nodding agreement with himself, “made me a special friend at the butcher’s, I did.” The four managed to take up all the available floor space in the kitchen and together they held the edges of the paper flat so the cat could lick up the last lingering flavors, and laughed at the silly creature who was usually so self-collected.

That’s why they didn’t hear the footfalls on the front porch. Charles was the first to notice Luella standing above them. He backed into Callie with a hiss. She held him against his struggles and held her breath too. Luella stood for long uncomfortable moments staring at her family and at Charles, her hair hanging down on all sides, her face and eyes reddened. She had never looked so wild.

“Ma’am?” This time Bram’s voice did break.

Luella put her hand against the wall for support. “Mrs. Traub says she has some poison that’ll rid us of that filthy creature.” Her voice held no expression. “I turn my back and you bring it into my kitchen. Knowing full well how my feelings run about the animal. That’s the thanks I receive for all I do.”

John O’Connell stretched his arms toward her. His head shook from side to side, this time in disagreement. “Oh now, Ma’am, you’ll not be thinking—”

“And you, Mr. O’Connell, you with three sheets in the wind. And baby Henry.” Callie had never heard her mother’s voice go so low and so flat. “I came to fetch my sewing basket. The babe is dead.”

When Callie tripped on her father’s coat on her way to the back door Charles scratched her throat but she held tight to him.

“We gave him some tonic,” Luella was saying with a touch of disbelief. “Label said it was recommended for languorous infants, and he certainly was that. But even tonic did no good.” John was “tut-tut-tutting” and “now there, there-ing” and stroking the top of his head. But it was Bram who held Luella against his chest as finally she wept.

Callie sat in the dark of the back porch and cried too while Charles perched on a stump and washed liver and blood from his whiskers with the side of a wet-licked paw. She cried for baby Henry and Aunt Lilly and Ma’am. But most of all she cried for Charles.

8

Aletha stepped through a gate rusted open and stoppered by vegetation. Miss Heisinger’s house sat on a large lot with trees along one border and three crumbling outbuildings lined up behind it. A low iron fence, elaborate with spikes and curlicues, surrounded the property. The fence sat black in patches, rusted in others against an exuberance of vibrant green and yellow weeds—many with blossoms gone to gauzy seed. The weeds pushed right up to the front door with just a hint of footpath worn between the door and the gate.

The house itself was far more worn. The paint on the wooden siding had weathered away long ago, the boards rippling or bulging or sagging. The bricks at the top of the chimney were blackened. Yellowing curtains drooped at high narrow windows under a peaked roof of metal gray and of more recent vintage. Broken gingerbread filigree traced the eaves. An odd cupola perched above the door, with one window in its center that faced the Pick and Gad. The house was small, almost dwarfed by its outbuildings. Their sides seemed to be sliding slowly into oblivion, as if a giant stood within and pushed outward. Their windows gaped, empty of glass and dark. All the buildings looked shabby-gray and cold amidst the brightness of sun and weeds and the spectacular backdrop of rearing mountainside.

Easily spooky, if one were so inclined, but Aletha’s shiver was more that of expectancy. Doris Lowell answered her knock. “Are you from Renata? Oh yes, I met you yesterday … Alice?”

“Aletha.” She stepped into a tiny entryway on linoleum so worn that small ovals of wooden flooring showed through. She saw pieces of herself and Mrs. Lowell in round mirrors, oval mirrors, rectangular mirrors that were small and beveled and grainy, all in ornate frames, some with knick-knack shelves attached, all crowded in on each other to make room. Doris motioned her into a narrow kitchen with more depression-era linoleum scrubbed almost clean of color and pattern.

“Mildred, this is Aletha. She’s come to clean your house for you.” Doris raised her voice, spoke distinctly and slowly. “She’s from Renata.”

A tiny, withered person sitting at a table turned to look at Aletha. “Renata’s a slut.” Her S’s sounded slushy because she had no teeth.

“Now, Mildred, you don’t know anything about Renata Winslow.”