Power in the Blood (44 page)

“But I am not. File your own claim if you believe so much in Omie’s visions. I’m sorry, but I can’t begin to consider this notion seriously.”

“Very well,” Zoe said, and turned from him.

On her way back to the cabin, she fought against resenting Leo for his reluctance. It was no fault of his that he could not accept what she told him. But she did truly believe it herself, and not to act according to her belief would have been foolish. She would do as Leo had suggested, although his words had been flippant.

Omie was still staring at nothing. Zoe took her purse, marched to the claim registration office and asked how she might stake out a particular section of the mountainside above town.

“You mean next to where those fellers you’re with have got theirs?” asked the registrar.

“No, somewhere else. Up high.”

“High?”

“I would say halfway up the side of the valley, on the eastern slope.”

“Way up there? What for, ma’am, if you don’t mind my asking?”

“For mining, what else?”

“Mining.”

“Yes.”

“Ma’am, that area hasn’t even been surveyed. I’d have to send someone up there special, just to get the claim recorded right.”

“And could that be arranged for today? I want to start mining as soon as possible.”

“Ma’am, are you absolutely sure about this?”

“Absolutely.”

“Ten dollars,” said the registrar, “and ma’am, I’m going to have to charge you an extra ten for the inconvenience.”

“Of course.”

Zoe laid her money down.

She announced her claim at dinner that night, and was met with expressions of amazement. Leo said nothing as Yost and Chadbourne asked for an explanation.

“I simply feel there is gold to be had up there,” said Zoe, her manner perfectly self-contained.

“Just … out of the blue?” Yost inquired, smiling as one would when questioning a simpleton.

“So to speak.”

“Woman, you’re cracked,” was Chadbourne’s response.

“Perhaps. May I borrow a pick and shovel from you, gentlemen? I’m afraid I spent almost all I have on registering my claim.”

“Certainly,” said Leo, overriding Chadbourne’s protest.

He watched Omie for her reaction, but the girl simply looked from one adult face to the next as they spoke, as if the conversation were held in some exotic language beyond her comprehension. Leo wondered for the first time if mother and daughter were afflicted with some kind of mental disease that made such ridiculous goings-on appear sensible. It was a depressing thought. He was very fond of them both, but further involvement with such types would be impossible if his suspicions proved to have foundation. An uncle of Leo’s had once married a woman who at the time appeared quite sane, but within two years had developed the habit of speaking with invisible entities and sleeping on the floor like a dog. Séances and table rappings were interesting phenomena, but illnesses of the brain were something else entirely. He felt very sad for the Dugans, and a little sad for himself.

“If you’re thinking of going into business on your own,” said Chadbourne, “you’ve drawn your last wage from our pockets.”

“I can do for you as I’ve done, and still find time to work my claim, Mr. Chadbourne.”

“Oh, really? That means you must have been doing considerable amounts of nothing until now. Maybe we should be reimbursed for your wasted time.”

“That will do, John,” warned Leo.

“I’ve said all along that a woman to cook and clean is a needless expense, and here’s the proof of it, from the lips of the
lady.
”

“I said that’s enough!”

“I meant,” said Zoe, her voice rigid with distaste, “that with a great deal of
extra effort
I will be able to spare an hour or so each day on my claim.”

Chadbourne snorted, his expression sour. “I guess you don’t know the other reason friend Leo hired you,” he said.

“No, I do not.”

Leo interrupted. “To have a civilizing influence on us all,” he said, glaring at Chadbourne. “Men alone are apt to degenerate without the presence of a decent female.”

“Such low beasts we are.” Chadbourne smiled.

“Well,” said Zoe, “I hope I may have aided you, or at least some of you.” She stared pointedly at Chadbourne, who sneered in return and looked away. Zoe could willingly have shot him at that moment, if she had had a gun to hand.

Sell Yost proposed that the new arrangement, incorporating Zoe’s efforts on the slope above, should go into effect the following day, to ascertain its worth. “If it turns out to be impossible, which I believe it will, given the time spent getting all the way up there and back, then we can reconsider our options, one and all.”

“Mr. Yost’s plan is fair,” said Zoe, and all talk thereafter, until the lamp was turned out, was of the most banal and inoffensive variety.

Zoe found out soon enough how correct Sell Yost was. It required three quarters of an hour to reach the deer lick, and a half hour to return. While there, she dug for a solid hour, but managed to accomplish little. Deer watched her from the trees as she attacked their salt lick with inexpert swingings of the pick. Her laborious spadings of loosened, partially frozen earth were accompanied by clouds of exhaled breath that disappeared immediately into the crystalline air. She exhausted herself several times, and had to sit on her meager pile of displaced soil to regain her normal heartbeat. She must ask Omie how deep the golden elk lay. With luck, it would be just beneath her boots.

For more than a week Zoe struggled to maintain work on her claim. Omie was unable to say how far below the surface her golden elk lived. Leo offered Zoe the use of one of their two remaining mules, but Zoe refused. She changed her mind the very next day, when new snowfall made struggling up the slope with her tools even more difficult than usual, but learned, on arrival back at the cabin, that Chadbourne had sold one animal that afternoon to pay for supplies; the remaining mule would, of course, be kept hard at work raising the still-barren earth from the Engineers’ claim.

Zoe knew the timing of the sale was not coincidental. It made her angry at first, then more determined than ever to prove them all wrong, especially Leo, whose initial rejection of her plan had hurt the most. His attitude toward herself and Omie had changed since then, becoming more distant, apart from the offer of the mule. She could not tell if he wished her to fail so that he and the others should be proven right, or if he hoped somehow to have his former opinion of Zoe restored, by an admission on her part that the mountainside mining scheme had been pure foolishness. She felt herself being judged, and did not like it. The El Dorado Engineers had been cockily proud of having chosen to stake their own claim where no other cared to join them, but in doing the selfsame thing, Zoe had earned their scorn. She supposed this was because they were men of education, while she was neither male nor learned. Leo had still not told his colleagues the reason for Zoe’s having chosen the spot she had, and she felt some small gratitude to him for that; word of Omie’s gift would only complicate matters.

Late in November it became impossible for Zoe to continue; the air was simply too cold. For all her effort, she had barely been able to lower herself into the ground to the depth of her own shoulders. The hole was surrounded by a ring of its own material that froze solid each night, as did the earth to be taken from the bottom. Zoe had to swing her pick against a substance more akin to rock than soil. She would have to wait until the spring thaw before resuming her attempt to unearth the golden elk and its attendant herd. They paraded like carnival creations through her dreams, gleaming like creatures of sunlight, led by the elk that seemed always to bound just beyond her reach, its antlers gaudy as a Christmas tree.

Her reward for abandoning temporarily the highest claim in the valley was to be informed by Leo that the Engineers could no longer afford to pay her for taking care of their food and washing needs. He told her reluctantly, knowing that if he did not, it would be John Chadbourne who broke the news of their new state of impoverishment, and John would have dismissed Zoe with a kind of glee. “You and Omie are welcome to continue sharing the cabin with us, and we’ll share what food we have, in return for your usual duties. All back wages will be made up when we make our strike, naturally.”

“I accept your offer,” said Zoe, mustering what dignity she could. Whichever way she chose to look at it, she and Omie were now charity cases, cared for directly by the Engineers, who could scarcely meet their own requirements.

Unable to work her claim, smitten by guilt over Leo’s benevolence, Zoe took herself to the general store in Glory Hole and paid fifteen cents for a square of cardboard and the use of a brush and paint. She then stood on the main thoroughfare, exhibiting in her mittened hands the result:
SEEKING HONEST WORK. SEW, WASH, CLEAN.
The results were fast in arriving; Zoe was invited to put her talents in these dreary fields to work almost immediately, and the miners in need of her services were generous in their payment.

It became apparent from the start that one area of commerce she had not listed was what the miners required most of all—the sound of a female voice. While she worked at whatever task she had been hired for, Zoe was kept company by her new employer and a hasty gathering of his friends, all eager to watch and listen as she performed her menial assignments. She was offered life stories by the dozen, opinions on every subject under the sun, and was requested to say a little something about herself, including her reasons for staking a claim where she had. All this was for the sole purpose of hearing her speak. Zoe had only to open her mouth and the room she worked in would fall silent. It was as if she had become some great and wise leader of men, whose every utterance was treated with respect. Intimidated at first by this ludicrous status, Zoe quickly found herself enjoying the attention. She took particular delight in telling her audience that the claim she had staked was the result of a dream in which her dead mother appeared and spoke of the location in terms of golden salvation. The more sensitive among the listeners were prepared to accept this as reason enough to do what she had done; the rest decided it was pure bunkum, but were happy to hear it anyway, so long as it came from the throat of a respectable woman.

In less than a week of similar performances around the gold camp, Zoe was able to earn what would otherwise have taken her two months. She washed and ironed, darned and sewed, swept and cleaned; but above all, she chatted. Her only moment of alarm came when a man, considerably drunk despite the earliness of the hour, accused her of being “one of Leadville Taffy’s dancin’ whores, by God!” The drunk was ejected after a brisk pummeling that left him senseless. Apologies were offered Zoe on behalf of “the feller that had to leave just now, sudden-like.” Zoe accepted with a grace that did not sit well alongside the urgent galloping of her heart. If another man should identify her, general suspicion would likely follow, and Zoe’s lucrative reign of humble domesticity would be punctured in an instant. It had been the narrowest of escapes, accomplished only because the man had been disgustingly inebriated; a sober accuser would almost certainly produce different results. She jabbed herself painfully with the dull needle her latest employer had smilingly provided for the reattachment of his shirt buttons.

Her proceeds were spent not only on herself and Omie but on the remaining El Dorado Engineers. Zoe’s generosity was prompted in equal parts by her naturally sympathetic character and by a need to thumb her nose at the men who allowed her to stay on as their servant in return for food and shelter. Now she was able to support their needs for a time, and her satisfaction at their embarrassed acceptance made the financial sacrifice worthwhile. Chadbourne in particular was affected by the changed circumstances in the cabin; he would not look at or speak with Zoe unless in answer to a direct question from her, and even then would give only the briefest of replies.

Chadbourne began spending time at the drinking shack that passed for a saloon in Glory Hole. Work on the diggings had become sporadic, dependent entirely on the weather, and that was generally cruel at so high an altitude. Zoe visited her claim once in late December, and discovered almost a dozen elk licking at the ring of frozen earth around the hopelessly shallow hole. They bolted, abandoning the lick so quickly their bodies collided with and rebounded from each other with solid thuddings, and their blundering passage through the deeper snowdrifts sent up showers of whiteness. They were the first elk Zoe had seen, and although their size had been impressive, she thought them less appealing than the daintily bounding deer; the former were heavy, substantial creatures of the earth, the latter almost a part of the air.

Christmas Day found the cabin exactly as Omie had predicted, the atmosphere so unrelievedly glum Zoe was obliged to leave, just to escape the tension inside. She took Omie with her, and asked if it gave her daughter pleasure to know she had foreseen exactly how the day would transpire. Omie said no, because she had liked Lewis almost as much as she did Leo.

“And do you still like Leo?” Zoe asked.

“Yes,” said Omie, “but he’s very sad now, and wishes you were someone else.”

“Someone else? Who?”

“You, but different.”

“I see,” said Zoe, and they walked on through the forest beyond Glory Hole, in the crackling cold of the afternoon. Sunlight was all around them, refracted through the billion prisms of ice hanging from the trees. The valley walls shone with a whiteness so intense it glittered and hurt the eyes. Zoe thought it the most beautiful scene she had ever witnessed, and said so to Omie.

“It’s ugly,” Omie replied, her tone matter-of-fact.

“How can you say that? See how the sun shines off every tree.”

“There aren’t any trees, Mama, they’ve all been cut down. There’s a town all over, a dirty town with lots of smoke from big chimneys like they had in Pueblo.”

Zoe knew she was referring to the refining smelters.

“And what else do you see?”