The Bride's House (34 page)

Susan’s mother took out her shears and began to clip the grass around Nealie’s grave. “They were married less than a year, and my father’s grieved another seventy for her. Maybe he’d have been better off if he’d never met her.”

Susan looked up, waiting for her mother to explain, but Pearl was watching a hearse pull out, driving slowly—respectfully—over the rocky road to the cemetery gate. The mourners, some of the men in Masonic regalia, the women in black dresses with high heels and nylons that would be ripped by the weeds and brambles before the women reached the cars, turned away from the open grave and went to their vehicles.

A few of the mourners stopped at graves to throw out bunches of dead flowers stuffed into rusted tin cans or to discard Decoration Day flags, their red and blue already bleached by the sun. Pearl waved to a couple placing a tin can of daisies beside a tombstone. “How do?” she called, and the two came over to chat, the woman tipping from side to side because her legs were angled from rickets.

“We brought flowers to decorate Mother’s grave,” the woman explained. “She was a multiplying woman. The old man wanted babies, and she just had them. She asked him once not to have them too close, but he cuffed her. He wasn’t the one having the babies, and she had to obey. Then he took off with her money—took her lucky dime and spent it on tobacco—and all she got was babies. My whole life, I raised them, raised her come-after child all by myself. That’s why I never had any of my own.”

“What’s a come-after child?” Susan asked.

“One that’s born after its father’s gone.”

“Its father?”

“Well, it wouldn’t be born after its mother died, now would it?” The woman chuckled.

“Oh,” Susan said. “Is your father buried here, too?”

“He is,” the man answered and shook his head. “We was letting the coffin down in the grave when he knocked on the inside of it. Knock. Knock. We buried him anyway.”

Susan’s mouth dropped open, and the woman said quickly, “Oh, you know that’s not true.” She thought a moment. “But it could have been. Yes, it could. You think twice about who you marry, young lady.”

The man cleared his throat, and his wife put her lips together in a straight line. After a moment, she said to Susan, “It won’t be long before your grandfather joins Nealie now. He’s waited a long time. I guess she has, too. Funny how it was him that lived in the Bride’s House all those years, when she was the bride, and she didn’t live there hardly at all.”

Susan studied the woman, not sure what to say, while Pearl only nodded.

“That woman’s too sentimental,” the man put in, meaning his wife. Then he turned to her and said, “Sounds like you’re trying to put the old man in his grave. You don’t know if he’ll go on up to heaven.”

“Oh, for goodness’ sake! How can you say such a thing? And in front of Pearl and Susan, too.”

“He’s in his ninety-seventh year, so I imagine it won’t be long,” Pearl said. “My mother was only seventeen when she died, just Susan’s age.”

The realization her grandmother had died so young shocked Susan. Of course, she’d
known
that, but it had never registered that Nealie had married, had a baby, and died when she was younger than Susan was now.

*   *   *

On Saturday morning, Susan dressed in blue jeans and shoes with hard soles, because mine sites were graveyards of rusty iron and old nails sharp enough to penetrate tennis shoes. She put on a plaid blouse and tied the tails together the way Peggy had, but it looked stupid. Then she tried on a blue blouse, but it was dowdy. Finally she put on a white shirt, which showed up the tan she had acquired sunbathing with Peggy. She hoped Joe would notice.

She packed a picnic—making deviled eggs and ham-salad sandwiches, and she’d talked her mother into making cinnamon buns for breakfast, because Joe had told her once that he loved the smell of cinnamon and dabbing the spice behind her ears didn’t seem like a good idea.

Joe showed up at ten, saying the sky looked like rain, so he’d take a look at Charlie’s car in the afternoon, after they returned. They rode in Bert Joy’s old Ford truck, Joe’s now. It wasn’t as good as an army-surplus Jeep, but it was high off the ground and was better on a rocky trail than a car.

“I brought along lunch,” Susan said, as Joe helped her up onto the running board.

“And I brought some beer,” he replied. He pulled onto the highway, and the truck being noisy, they were silent as they drove down the asphalt, then turned off near the old town of Red Elephant, starting up a road that was no more than a dirt trail winding through evergreens and aspen. Joe drove slowly, bouncing over the ruts made by trickles of snowmelt, dodging rocks and stumps that could have punctured a tire or high-centered the truck, gearing down to go up the steep grades. At last, he stopped where there was a place wide enough to pull off and said the truck could go no farther. They got out, Joe carrying two bottles of beer, Susan with the picnic basket over her arm.

She didn’t mind leaving the truck, because she loved to hike, especially with Joe, and she followed him up the trail, staring at his broad back, picturing what he looked like without his shirt, imagining how it would feel if he put his arms around her and held her against his bare chest.

Aspen trees had grown up in the middle of the trail, and wildflowers bloomed in the faint ruts. “Look, there’s a lady’s slipper. I bet I haven’t seen a dozen of them in my whole life,” Joe said, pointing to a pale green plant in a spot where rain collected in a protected area under an aspen tree. They stopped to admire the flower, and Joe said he’d pick it for Susan, but it was so rare that it ought to be left alone.

They saw the tracks of a Jeep that had come up through the timber. “I hate those damn things,” Joe told her. “Why can’t people leave the mountains alone? And the trash!” He leaned down and picked up a discarded Chesterfield cigarette package, shoving it into his pocket. “Someday they’ll ruin this land. I wish we could do something about them.”

“They shop in Georgetown. Peggy says the tourists are the best customers she has. Her store couldn’t make it if it had to rely on local people.”

“That’s the problem. It’s damned if you do and damned if you don’t. The only way these old mining towns can survive is tourism, but the tourists destroy the mountains.”

“So what do you do?”

“Conservation’s the best answer. You have to teach people to be careful, people like the idiot driving that Jeep. See those tracks he made? Other people will drive there, so before long, it’ll turn it into a road. That’s how erosion starts. There ought to be laws.”

“To keep people from going into the mountains? Lots of luck. Who’d introduce laws like that?”

“I would.”

Susan switched the picnic basket from one arm to the other, as she thought Joe could do that. He could protect the mountains or make people pick up trash or do just about anything he set his mind to.

They reached the mine and set the picnic basket and beer on a round wooden structure that had once been a cable spool. The area was littered with the detritus of mining days—piles of machinery, discarded dynamite boxes, shacks that had fallen in and were no more than boards containing rusty nails, an ore bucket. The mine tipple sagged, its boards weathered to a rich brown, but it had not caved in.

“You’re not going inside?” Susan asked, alarmed.

“Too dangerous. You could fall down a hundred feet and never be found.”

Susan was relieved. If Joe had gone inside, she’d have had to follow to show she wasn’t chicken. She looked around then and found a cache of old bottles, some of them purple from the sun. She picked through the glass and pulled out two that weren’t broken. “Aren’t these pretty?” She felt a little foolish asking that because men—she thought of Joe as a man now—didn’t care about pretty things.

But Joe held up a bottle and nodded. “I always look for old bottles. My mom likes to keep them in the window.”

“She can have these,” Susan said, pleased that she had found something to give Joe. Maybe he’d be reminded of her each time he saw the sun shining through the purple glass.

He held up a glass jar that had a label on which something had been written in pencil. “I bet this was a still. There were plenty of them up here during Prohibition, dozens. Peggy’s grandfather had one, although she won’t admit it.”

“No lie?” Susan wished he hadn’t mentioned Peggy. She thought there ought to be a moratorium on mentioning Peggy that day.

Joe nodded. “Ask her, and see what she says.”

“No, thanks. I’ve seen her get mad before.”

“Who hasn’t? For all I know, her dad still makes moon. He sure drinks enough of it. What a jerk.”

Susan wanted to reply that Peggy probably drank it, too, but she held her tongue for fear Joe would think she was catty.

He lifted a pine branch that had fallen onto the ground and picked off the needles, while Susan turned her face to the dappled sunlight coming through the aspen trees, her eyes closed. There was just enough of a breeze to keep the sun from being too hot. She’d like to take off her shirt so that she could get a tan. She and Peggy did that sometimes when they were hiking in the back country, but of course, she couldn’t do it now, because Joe would think she was a tramp. Besides, Susan thought, she was so flat-chested that he’d be disappointed.

“So, you’re really going to DU?” Joe asked.

Thinking of the two of them together at school in Denver brought back her good mood. “My father wanted me to go east to a women’s college, but what fun would that be?” Susan asked, a little sleepy from the sun now. She wished she could put her head in Joe’s lap instead of on a log, and he’d run his hands through her hair. She opened her eyes, thinking if he were beside her, she could lean against him, but he sat some distance away, his legs crossed.

“I’ll tell you the best sororities. Heck, I could even tell you what guys to date.”

Susan shaded her eyes so that she could look at him. “I don’t think I need your help there.”

“No, you wouldn’t. You’d probably have so many guys on your string, you wouldn’t even look at me.”

“I’d consider it. You might be a Big Man on Campus.”

“BMOCs always have pretty girls hanging around.”

Did he mean she was pretty? Susan couldn’t think how to respond, and Joe didn’t say any more, so she stood and said, “Let’s go look inside the mine shack.”

They walked over to a small building whose door was ajar. The steps had rotted through, and inside, the floor was buckled. Weeds grew up through the floorboards. Wires hung down from the ceiling, and an old shirt and a pair of overalls were pegged to the wall. A boot, its sole half off, lay on the floor under rusted springs that had fallen through a makeshift bed. A tiny cookstove that had been used for cooking as well as heating was still standing, although its stovepipe had crumpled and lay on the floor.

On impulse, Susan opened the oven door, which shrieked from disuse, and they discovered a pot inside filled with mummified beans. “Somebody expected to be home for supper, but he never came back.”

“He could have died in a cave-in or just walked off the job.”

“Or maybe a woman left it here. She might have been the one who died.” She might have died in childbirth. Susan suddenly remembered her grandmother. She thought how awful it would be, dying when your life had barely begun, leaving behind a husband like Joe and a baby for him to raise. “I feel like an intruder, like we walked in on ghosts.” She went outside and sat on a log in the sun, its warmth taking away the chill of the shack.

Joe brought the picnic basket and the beer and sat down beside her, and they ate the lunch, throwing bits of sandwich and cinnamon bun to a striped chipmunk that perched on a boulder across from them. A black-and-white camp robber flew down from the branch of a pine tree and pecked at a crumb, then flew off.

“I’d miss this if I ever left Colorado,” Joe said, picking up a rock and tossing it at a bucket whose bottom had rusted out.

“You’d leave?” Susan felt a sort of panic. She’d never thought about Joe living anyplace but Georgetown.

“I’m not planning to. I wouldn’t want to live anywhere else. It’s my home. But who knows? Would you live here?”

Susan nodded. “It’s my home, too, even though I live in Chicago most of the year. I love Georgetown. There’s a foreverness to this place, to the Bride’s House.”

“I know what you mean.” Susan waited for Joe to say more, but he stood and reached out his hand. “Come on. Let’s see if we can find any candlesticks.” He helped Susan rise and led her through the piles of machinery and waste rock. Joe looked into an ore cart that lay on its side, poking the rubble with a stick. A mouse ran out, and he shouted, “Careful. There are living things in here.”

“Yuck,” Susan said, thinking she should have shrieked and grasped onto Joe, as Peggy would have done, but it was too late now. She walked a little away and spotted something in a boulder field. “I found one of those old leather hardhats,” she called, and reached for it. Then she stopped. A rattlesnake that had been sunning itself on the rocks began to slither toward her. In a moment it would curl, and shaking the rattles on its tail, it would lunge at her, sinking its fangs into her leg or arm, even her chest or neck. She knew she should jump back, should run, but instead, looking into the snake’s eyes, she froze, unable to take even a step. “Joe,” she called in a high voice.