The Threshold (2 page)

Luella was halfway to the mill when the change in the clamor—the clanging, thundering, screeching constant in her life—stopped her. The thundering eased and halted altogether. The screeching increased to a scream as if brakes had been set in motion and then it halted too. Silence shocked the world and rooted her to the spot. In the eight-odd months the O’Connells had lived in Alta, she had known the mill to shut down completely once and that had been for repairs too major to remedy while work was in progress. That shutdown had been announced well in advance. She heard the rush of Callie’s shoes on the porch, braced herself as Callie bumped into her and clutched at her skirts. “Ma’am?”

“I don’t know, Callie. Perhaps something has broken down.” Luella realized she was shouting, as they’d all become accustomed to doing.

Young Mr. Ivorson came to a side door in the mill, a hulking frame building composed of a series of connected sheds each on a level higher than the one below and reaching up in giant steps to the mine that fed it. He began to retch with such violence the spasms drove him to his knees. Luella started toward him, dragging Callie with her, when the mine whistle shrieked its dread warning to everyone within miles. Not the summoning of a shift at this hour.

Men came running from the boardinghouse, some still pulling galluses over their long johns, others tucking in their shirttails. Decorum was no issue when the whistle shrieked out-of-hours. It did so only for accident, death, and destruction and it brought a shudder to the spine of every woman in the camp.

“They don’t shut down the mill for a cave-in,” someone said behind Luella, echoing her own relief. Cave-ins claimed the most souls and were thus the most feared. “Trouble must be in the mill.”

When she realized Callie was no longer attached to her, Luella moved again toward the door and poor Mr. Ivorson. He hung out halfway to the ground and she could see over him to the gray-crusted table floor, the lowest floor of the mill. A gray-begrimed mill hand lowered something down a wooden-ladder stairs to another hand below. She recognized what passed between them at the same time as did the men to either side of her, and they all inhaled involuntarily more of the noxious fumes of the mill than they wanted. It was the naked arm and shoulder of a man. Bloodied stringy things dangled from where it should have been attached to the body. The lower portion that would have led to a wrist and hand was bruised and flattened. It reminded Luella of the raw beefsteak she’d tenderized for supper.

“’Tis Haskell Gibson.” Mr. Crowe, the shift foreman, leaned over young Mr. Ivorson and mercifully blocked their view. “Got ’is clothes caught in the workings, he did. Got pulled in. Would you find Ora, Mrs. O’Connell, and head her off before she gets here? She shouldn’t see wot’s left of the man.”

Luella swallowed back gorge and pushed through the crowd that had formed behind her. As she turned up the road to intercept Ora Gibson, she saw Callie slip into the house.

Callie stared at the pencil pictures, trying to understand what she saw. Then she hid the lady’s book under the mattress of Bram’s cot that also served as sofa in the sitting room, feeling distinctly sly and secretive. Ma’am had warned her that no one liked little girls who were sly and secretive. She turned over the pants and overalls and brought the dry clothes in.

Ma’am still had not returned, so she pulled the book out and looked at the pictures again. Then she shelled the peas the vendor had brought up by wagon that morning, silence hanging strange and heavy all around her. A dog barked somewhere far away and Callie stopped to listen, realizing she hadn’t heard that customary sound since coming to live by the mill.

When she’d finished everything else, she opened
Barnes’s Complete Geography
and read aloud to ease the uneasy silence. “‘Within the torrid zone, where food and shelter are obtained with but little exertion, there are no powerful nations. In the North temperate zone, where extremes of climate demand the greatest skill and energy, are found the most perfect types of man.’” When Bram came home, Callie was back staring at the lady’s drawing book and the cabin smelled of sage and onion.

“You had better not, Bram,” she warned as he cut a hunk of cake and ate it in two bites.

“I’m a hard-rock stiff now, Callie child, and I need my food.”

“You’re just a nipper. Ma’am had to go to Mrs. Gibson.”

“Hear poor old Haskell’s spread in pieces from one end of the mill to the other.” He reached for the cake again. Bram had smudges of dirt still streaking his face and hands, matting his once sandy hair. Fourteen years old and over six foot, he could out-eat all the rest of the family put together. It was obvious Bram didn’t come from any torrid zone.

“You just keep away from that cake, Bram O’Connell.”

“Don’t get wrathy with me, little girl, or I’ll tickle you.” Callie squealed and tried to wiggle off the powder keg as he lunged with his favorite nasty leer. But he stopped, noticing the lady’s book open on the table. “That’s some fine drawing, Callie. Who did it?”

“A lady. She left it. Want to see our house?” She turned the page to the picture of their cabin, falling down and deserted, the porch gone, a whistle pig lying across the doorsill. “She only draws sad pictures.”

“That can’t be our house with the trees all grown up around it. But this sure looks like the boardinghouse gone to rack and ruin. Where’s the mill? And the sheds at the portal, and the changehouse?”

“I think this is the commissary all fallen in.”

“Who
is
this lady?” His voice broke in anger. “Why would she draw everything destroyed and all the people gone?”

“She left before I could ask her. Maybe she’s from Telluride. There’s pictures of there too, and Ma’am says they have every kind of lady in Telluride.”

Bram flushed and looked surly. But he kept turning pages. “Maybe you better set the table.”

“Passed the hat for Ora and the baby. It’ll not go easy for her with no insurance or family,” John O’Connell said at supper. “Burying’s in Telluride tomorrow.”

“It’s been an unsettling day altogether, what with poor Haskell …” Luella pushed the piece of steak she’d cut to the side of her plate and speared a potato slice instead. “And Bram eating half the cake and Callie seeing imaginary ladies and sneaking that book in here.”

“She can’t be imaginary if she can make pictures like this.” John picked up the book and chewed some more on the tough meat. “But this lady sure has imagination. Lookee here. This is the Senate in Telluride and a tumble-bumble rendering of the Silver Bell. But this building across the street sure ain’t the Gold Belt Dancehall. Why would she draw things that way? I’ll show you tomorrow when we go to the funeral.”

“You will not. No lady goes to that side of town, John O’Connell. And not to sketch pictures of it either. There’s more pie, Bram.”

“You keep feeding him up and he’ll grow into his feet. Then where’ll we be? Have to rent two houses.” John ladled meat pie onto Bram’s plate. “One for him and one for the rest of us.”

When Ma’am wasn’t looking, Callie slipped some meat scraps from the edge of her plate into the waxed bag on Bram’s lap under the table. The bag had once held candy from the drugstore in Ophir but was now used to collect food for Charles.

“I wager you peek around corners when you go shopping to see what it is that’s there on ‘that side of town,’ Mrs. O’Connell.” John raised the book so he could slip some meat for Charles to Callie, and lowered it again. “And look at here, now, them’s the cribs around the corner.”

Luella put her hand to a flaming cheek and Callie leaned across Pa’s arm. It smelled of muck and smoke. “What’s a crib, Pa?”

“That’s a wee house, hardly bigger than a baby’s own crib.” And John O’Connell laughed his big-bear laugh that shook the table and tickled something in Callie’s middle. The lady had drawn a row of tiny houses with peaked roofs all crowded together. Two long windows and a door took up almost the whole of their fronts. John sobered at his wife’s stunned look. “Well, now, Callie’s all of ten years old and soon to be a woman.” But he squirmed and couldn’t meet Luella’s eyes. “Can’t keep her in the dark about everything … forever.”

“What Callie doesn’t know won’t hurt her.”

“Haskell Gibson didn’t know better than to get too close to the workings,” John O’Connell answered his wife in an ominous tone, and waggled a finger at them all, “and he was hurt mortal bad.”

2

Aletha Kingman stood inside the miner’s shack and stared toward the exposed floor on which she’d sat while marmots whistled all over what was left of Alta. The rough wood of the door frame felt withery dry under her hand. Houses, like people, dry up when they get old. Was this where Callie had lived? Alta had not been abandoned until the 1940’s. That’s why so much of it was still intact. But that forest had taken more than forty years to grow back. Probably lots of people had lived here after Callie.

Daylight penetrated cracks between the bare boards of the outer wall. Whole swaths of cloth hung colorless, worn to a gossamer thinness. Wads of newspaper had the print drowned out by weather stain. Odd patches of sheet metal and even squashed tin cans with the ribbing bumps still running through the middle and pieces of shredding linoleum—all bore witness to the desperation of generations to stop the herculean winters from leaking in. A heavy beige paper had been applied throughout at one period, and more recently a series of once-gaudy wallpapers now aged to pastel and gray.

The marmots had quieted but Aletha could hear voices as the jeep travelers spread out to explore the ghost town. The dog’s barking sounded harsh and unnatural where memories slept and life had died. The shack had one small room and one tiny one, with a narrow staircase against the wall of the former. The tiny room had been a kitchen with a hole in the ceiling for a stovepipe, a back door, and two miniature window holes. A shelf under one window contained a sink that must have drained into a pail, because there was no sign of pipes.

The larger room had a hole in the wall for a stovepipe, a front door, and two windows. Aletha turned her shoulders sideways to creep up the bowed stairs and wondered how a hearty miner had managed his shoulders in this space. The loft upstairs was so low no adult could hope to stand upright even under the center of the steeply pitched roof.

Aletha supposed the woman who had come to claim Callie was the girl’s mother and she tried to imagine the two of them in this derelict place, unable to believe she was admitting that any of it had happened.

The mother didn’t seem to have noticed Aletha, but she’d never really looked up. She’d swirled into the oval in a mild huff, bent to grasp the girl’s hand, and turned away. Her eyes had been on Callie the whole time. The woman’s hairdo was turn-of-the-century or before, done up in a big plop on top of her head with wispies coming down all around. She’d be long dead by now, probably Callie too. The little girl anyone would want to hug on sight had aged and withered and died already.

Aletha left the shack to perch against the foundation across the road in as close to the same spot as she could remember. She’d stood for a long while, not particularly wanting to repeat the experience, when a head with a face and a monstrous bulge on the back of it appeared in the darkness of the doorway to the miner’s shack. Aletha gave a startled squeak. Eyes widened and met hers in a flash of anger. A man with a rolled sleeping bag on top of a fullframed backpack shifted and bent low to step out the door.

“Sorry.” She tried to straighten the silly look off her face. “Guess I was expecting a ghost.”

He forced a smile that didn’t pretend to go past his lips. His stubbled chin was as scruffy as Callie’s shoes. “Probably some around. Place like this.”

He clomped off up the road in heavy boots. He’d broken the spell. Aletha brushed grit from the seat of her jeans, made another useless check for her sketchbook, and followed him. A slight chill reminded her of the lengthening shadows and shortening daylight. She wondered what this place did at night. The window holes of the boardinghouse were even now sinking into slanted shadow, like eye sockets in a weary face. Rows of eyes with formless silhouettes behind them, like memories or thoughts. Wraiths?

Two couples and the dog were loading into the jeep next to her car. They ground off on what Aletha’s map showed to be Boomerang Road. The same map warned that her little Datsun would have to travel back the way it had come, which had been bumpy enough.

The man with the backpack was setting up a small tent on the leveled space in the midst of flattened buildings that once meant things to living people. He was unusually tall and she wondered how he could fit in the tent. Aletha slid into the Datsun, started the engine, and was about to close the door when the backpacker was suddenly there holding on to it. “Is there any way I could hitch a ride if you’re going somewhere near Telluride? Maybe just to the highway? I’m out of everything except granola. I hate granola.”

“Well, I … guess.”

“Thanks. Just a minute and I’ll get my tent.”

Aletha thought seriously of taking off without him. She’d learned how dangerous it was to trust people. But if he’d meant to do her harm he could have yanked her out of the car when he held the door. No need to get neurotic over a poor man who needed a lift. She greeted him with an apologetic smile when he stuffed his gear into the backseat and slid in beside her. With him came the reek of wood smoke so thick she rolled her window down for air. His smile was reserved and tightened her back up a bit. “Aletha Kingman. I’m staying in Telluride. I’ll take you on in.”

“Cree Mackelwain. Thanks.”

She backed and turned the Datsun on the road between the boardinghouse and the commissary, headed down the hill past Callie’s house slowly because of the rocks and washouts.

He studied her and she sensed he was nervous riding with her. He had to be half again her size. “Do you live in Telluride?”

“Just staying there. For a while.” Cree Mackelwain put his hand to the dashboard. “Will you please watch the road?”

“I’ve had a wild afternoon.” She laughed and heard hysteria. Only a trace.