Power in the Blood (67 page)

“Banty boy,” said the man with the gun, “if you step outside now, you belong to me, understand?”

“Sounds fine,” said Drew, and pushed past the quaking constable. He would have liked to trip the man and push his face into the pissed-on earth floor, but time would not allow such self-indulgence. He sprang onto the nearest riderless horse and took the reins from the man who led it. The bearded man seemed in no hurry to depart. Several townspeople had gathered to watch.

“Lodi, we got to go.”

“I’m coming.”

The bearded man hit the constable’s head with his gun barrel and watched him fall slowly to the sidewalk, then he walked into the street and mounted his horse. Drew wanted to ride out at a gallop, but the leader of his three abductors had a brazen confidence that kept them all at a trot. Drew waited for bullets to come flying at them from store doorways, but none did.

When rescuers and rescued were beyond sight of the town, the leader beckoned Drew forward to ride alongside him.

“What’s your name, boy?”

“John Bones.”

“You want to learn how banks are robbed the right way?”

“Might come in handy.”

“It better, or I don’t have any use for you, or your lip. You belong to me, remember?”

“I recall it.”

“Don’t be forgetting. We lost a man three days ago up around Silver Plume. You’re his replacement, but things better pan out right between us—understand, Bones?”

“Mister, I’m grateful to be out of there, and willing to learn what I didn’t know before.”

“That’s good. I like you, boy. Call me Lodi. That’s Nate Haggin and Clarence Dustey back there, and we work like a team. I believe you’ll fit right in.”

Drew was not so sure, but smiled anyway.

It had been seven months since her husband touched her. It was more than a reluctance on Leo’s part to visit her bedroom; it seemed he did not wish to touch her at all. He would not kiss her cheek or take her hand. He seldom spoke to Zoe, even over the rare meal they shared. She had never been overwhelmingly in love with her husband, but his neglect of her now stung Zoe more than she cared to admit.

Early in their marriage he had mounted her often, then less frequently as the years passed, and finally not at all. She drew the conclusion that his attentions to her had been solely for the purpose of impregnating her with a son for himself. As miscarriage followed miscarriage, he had apparently given up hope of ever getting the one thing he lacked. While the act itself had given Zoe neither pleasure nor pain, its absence from her life created a void deeper than she had anticipated.

Leo’s withdrawal from her company left Zoe without any meaningful role to play at Elk House. If Omie had chosen to ignore her, Zoe felt her life would have been without purpose. As it was, Omie was more secretive now than she had ever been. Zoe assumed this was a result of her daughter’s recent illness, and did not resent the hours she had to spend in ignorance of Omie’s whereabouts or thoughts. The closeness between them had lessened, but Zoe would not cling to Omie any more than she would to Leo; her pride would not permit it.

During this time of isolation, Zoe’s daydreaming turned to the brothers she barely remembered. If only they could have been there to comfort her, Zoe’s lot would have been tolerable. But they were not, nor would they ever be, she told herself. It was a fool’s wish, and Zoe knew herself to be no fool. Her moments of weakness, as she called them, were becoming more frequent, and she scolded herself for indulging in such sentiment. It was necessary to remind herself that she was the wife of Colorado’s wealthiest man. That someone in her position should feel miserable was ridiculous, and so she would not allow such thoughts into her mind.

The thoughts and misgivings came anyway, and sometimes Zoe found herself in tears over nothing. She distracted herself with needlework, but abandoned that avenue of escape when she looked hard at the picture taking shape inside her hoop and discerned a gravestone hidden in the pastoral scene there. She had not intended any such thing, and the fact that her fingers had conspired to place it there, stitched into undeniable place, upset her for an entire day.

A rich man’s wife. The actuality was far removed from the popular conception of so privileged a creature. Zoe saw no one but the domestic staff and her own daughter from one Christmas to the next, not that she demanded or desired to meet with anyone other than Leo. It had long since occurred to Zoe that she was not equipped for social intercourse; certainly she had no wish to sweep like some storybook princess into chandeliered halls to dine with the nation’s elite; any such scenario embarrassed her even to think of. Her life at Elk House would have been sufficient, circumscribed though it was, if only her husband cared for her. He did not even have to love her with any great passion, just care for her and make known in simple ways his affection. That would have been enough.

She wondered if all women felt as she did, and became aware, not for the first time, that women and their ways were largely unknown to her. Zoe had moved among men, for better or worse, and had no clear notion of the best way to approach other females, even the maids, with anything like confidence or basic understanding of their femaleness. She was herself a sexless entity, she sometimes felt, despite having given birth twice, been the wife of two men and the victim of a third. Looking at her reflection in a mirror did nothing to alleviate Zoe’s growing sense of unreality. The remarkable business of Omie’s ability to foresee the future and move articles of furniture without effort was no more dreamlike than the face Zoe saw staring back at her from an elegant frame of gilt. I have no idea who I am, she mouthed at her mirror image, and the image responded with a forlorn smirk that boded no improvement in matters.

The town had developed as Omie said it would, in advancing waves of ugliness that crept up the valley walls, the smokestacks of Leo’s empire spewing darkness into the air. The rumble of the crushers and stampers, the humming of the massive pithead wheels, the constant clash of couplings from the railyard: these sounds and the subtle undertone of human activity day and night kept Zoe isolated inside Elk House, where most of the cacophony from far below her windows was filtered by distance and glass and stone. But the isolation itself became more than Zoe could bear, and one morning she made a firm decision: she would demand of Leo a vacation, if not for the family, then at least for herself and Omie. It was not some glittering metropolis she wished to escape to, but a place such as Glory Hole once had been, with none but the most rudimentary evidence of man’s presence. It was natural silence, the whispering of trees and the sounds of bird song she required; that and the company of her child. With these simple things it might be possible to regain some sense of wholeness.

She would not delay another minute, now that her mind was made up, but would demonstrate her newfound strength by doing what she had never done before; she would not wait for Leo to arrive home, but would go directly to him, down below in the grime of Glory Hole. She was under instruction from Leo never to bother him with anything but matters of great consequence during his long hours away from Elk House, but Zoe was in no mood to obey such dicta.

She placed a hat upon her head and walked out the front door without bothering to call for her carriage and team. The task would be accomplished on foot. Zoe felt such an approach had merit, but could not decide, as she headed down the lengthy driveway, if she was a humble beggar asking favors of the king, or a barefoot prophet come to demand changes in the land before fate should bring down the mighty. Both roles played themselves out as she descended. The very stones of the driveway became less clean, the pinkness of the crushed rock turning to gray. The trees, already leafless in October, revealed their smoke-blackened bark, and the air itself became not only more difficult to breathe but less clear. It was a peculiarity of the valley that temperature inversions would hold much of its airborne filth close to the ground rather than allowing it to disperse, and so it was that morning as Zoe walked down to confront her husband. Before long she was obliged to hold a handkerchief across her lower face, and hold her skirts clear of soot covering the ground.

The driveway became a road leading directly to Glory Hole’s main street, but as she drew closer, Zoe chose a side road instead, and asked herself as she veered from the usual route if she was doing this to postpone her confrontation with Leo. She was sure that was not the case; she simply wished to go another way, owing to the novelty of her being on foot. It would allow her to pass through more of the residential area of the town than she had ever seen before. It was unorthodox behavior, but such seemed to be the only kind Zoe was capable of that morning, and she struck out into the unknown with a confidence that had been missing from her step for a long time.

Down past the miners’ shacks she went, and was stared at from the doorways and windows by wives with careworn faces and eyes that became flinty when they recognized her for who she was. Her presence among them, face covered as if seeking anonymity, was some kind of perverse insult. They could not understand why the wife of Leo Brannan would choose to walk the muddy rows between their shacks, averting her eyes guiltily from the unpainted boards, the lines of gray laundry slung across alleyways and the faces that looked her way. Poorly clad children ceased their games and stared at the woman from the Big House as she passed them by, a being from another world.

Zoe felt the eyes of the women on her, felt herself riddled by their antipathy and contempt. She had not intended drawing attention to herself by coming this way, had not expected so many people to be outside their dwellings on so chilly a day, but they were, in knots of conversation here and there that broke off into silence at her approach. They were dowdy women, their shawls hugged tightly about them, their hair untidily pinned or hidden beneath shapeless hats, their boots thick-soled, without grace. Some smoked pipes, a sight Zoe thought bizarre, and one woman had a chicken perched like a parrot on her shoulder. Altogether, they were citizens of another country, and Zoe felt open hatred emanating from them in waves. She wanted to take the handkerchief from her mouth and tell the women she had suffered also, in her way, and been envious of others who seemed to own the best of everything. She was not so very different from them; chance alone had elevated her above their smoke-wreathed shacks and muddy streets. They should not blame her for not being down there, one of them, a miner’s wife waiting for her grimy man to return exhausted at the end of the day. Each of these women probably saw more of her husband than did Zoe, but she could not tell them that, or any of her other stifled musings, and be believed. She must simply walk on until the last row was passed, the last stares put behind her.

Once she stumbled, dragging the hem of her skirts in the muck, and after that she did not bother to keep them high, but walked with a peculiar, stiff-legged gait further down the slope that would bring her to the soot-encrusted heart of Glory Hole. This place of high windowless walls enclosed machinery of such vast proportion it dwarfed the human attendants scurrying among pistons and pulleys and hammers that seemed big enough to crack the world beneath their relentless pounding. Zoe glanced inside various doorways as she passed, witnessing the controlled pulverization of ores, the hellish light and heat and roaring inside the smelters, and the whining, humming wheels drawing miles of steel cable up from the bowels of the mine and sending it down again.

She felt sick, made ill by everything that surrounded her, and her brain seemed to spin with the towering wheels and their blurring of mighty spokes and the rush of air their spinning displaced. She came closer, drawn by the siren song of these mighty wheels, and the thrumming of the massive cable drum spinning on its axis, and the snorting, piping, panting of the steam engines driving the mechanical dervish. The cable house was filled with stray wisps and blasts of vapor that swirled in the eddies and vortices and blew by Zoe’s face like playful phantoms. She felt the floor beneath her shivering like the skin of a gigantic beast made nervous by her feet upon its back, and she felt the pounding of its faraway heart, and took the oily exhalations from its lungs into her own, and choked on the underground moisture and smell of human sweat it bore. She felt herself drifting sideways, closer to the hypnotic spinning and humming and breathing, heard distant voices raised in alarm but lost in steam, then felt the beast swipe her with its steely paw.

His office had not known many visitors, even at the height of his company’s production, and Leo was reluctant to admit the man who presented himself that day. He had been expecting an emissary from Denver for some time, following a series of letters alerting him to a wish on the part of certain unnamed gentlemen of influence in that city to include his name among their ranks. Leo had formed the opinion he was being asked to join some kind of exclusive rich man’s club, and the notion held little appeal. He was proud to be the richest of all men in the state, but had no need of self-styled kingmakers and fellow millionaires around him to reinforce his own sense of importance.

The man’s name was Rowland Price, and the written message he sent through to Leo by way of Mr. Jenks, Leo’s personal secretary, was an exercise in polite beseechment that cunningly flattered and cajoled, and yet warned of hidden consequences for the nation if the bearer was not granted an audience. Intrigued despite himself, Leo read it through twice, then told Jenks to allow the fellow in.

The visitor was young, not much older than Leo, and he seemed both genuinely pleased to be in the presence of a legendary figure and at the same time very sure of himself. Leo invited him to be seated, uncertain if he had done the right thing by allowing him where few others had been.

“Mr. Brannan,” Price began, “I am indebted to you for this meeting. I know you’re the busiest of men.”

“No one is in my debt until I give him something, Mr. Price. What may I do for you?”