The Mirror (27 page)

Rachael didn't remember much of that afternoon. And she didn't remember the drive home, but merely awoke there the next morning.

However, she would never again come near a cave or a dark hole without knowing panic. Her childhood nightmares would be filled with monstrous black spiders emanating from forbidden dank caverns.

Everyone seemed overly concerned with that day and Doc Seaton asked her into his little house after school to talk about it. She repeated the details of Jerry Garrett's feeding spiders until she tired of it.

Her parents took her into Denver several times to talk to another doctor who didn't even flatten her tongue with a stick and tell her to say "Ahhhhh." He asked her the same questions as Doc Seaton had. This was all confusing because she didn't feel sick. One night she awoke to overhear her parents and Thora K. talking of "trauma" and "leaving it be." Whatever a trauma was, Thora K. pronounced it a blessing.

Whenever Tim Pemberthy was mentioned everyone would glance at Rachael and look worried. She'd been told he'd died. It wasn't too surprising since he was an old man. But she didn't really want to think about it. So she didn't.

There were more serious concerns in the household.

Dan received a letter from Joe Tyler in California. His grandmother, when she was alive, had been a great friend of Thora K.'s. Joe had a job "trucking cabbages" and thought he could get Dan one too. Dan wanted to go and everybody but Brandy was against it. One night he left without telling anybody.

Her dad was quiet after he read the note Dan had left on the table. Then he picked up a chair and broke it across his knee. "Cabbages, Jesus!"

He'd always been two people to Rachael. The one who loved her and the other one who could hit back at Uncle Lon and knock the twins' heads together when they needed it.

"Hutch, take your temper outside." Her mother was sad but dry-eyed. "I told you-"

"You said used cars. And I didn't even want to believe that."

"He'll be there when the need arises. You can't keep a grown bird in the nest."

"But the ranch-"

"Is going downhill fast and you know it."

Her parents stood holding onto each other, excluding Rachael. They didn't even notice her tears.

Uncle Lon led her to the door. "Let's saddle up and take a ride." Then he said over his shoulder, "Can't bring him back, but if you want to stake me to a game or two in Denver, I might rustle up some cash."

"Get out of here," her dad snarled and lowered his face back to her mother's hair.

Things settled down some when Uncle Lon returned from Denver. But then Remy started seeing her teacher, Miss Hapscot. He even had her out to dinner, and Rachael sensed more changes coming.

Rachael didn't like changes.

She missed Dan and didn't care for Miss Hapscot sitting in his place at the table.

To her the changes seemed to correlate with the arrival of the Garretts in Nederland.

Jerry had avoided her since that afternoon at the Strock cabin. But one day when snow scudded across the road to fall into frozen ruts and Rachael was making her solitary way past Doc Seaton's, swinging her lunch pail, he came up beside her.

He slowed his pace to match hers. "How come you don't ride the bus like the other kids who live out of town, brat?"

Rachael decided the two of them had an understanding. They didn't like each other. "Because the bus only comes to the road. If I walk that far I might as well walk all the way. I do sometimes in the mornings."

He reached into the ditch for a handful of snow and tried to form it into a ball but it powdered away between his mittens like sugar. "Do you ever have dreams about Mr. Pemberthy?" he asked casually.

"No. Why should I? He just got the stroke and died." Rachael thought stroke must be something like measles or mumps.

Jerry stepped in front of her so she had to stop. "My ma says I'm not supposed to talk to you about him."

"Then don't."

"The mirror's gone," he whispered, as if telling a secret. "It was gone the next day. I looked."

"What mirror?"

"The one in the cave." He sounded frightened and Rachael was trying to figure out why when Dorothy Kinshelow walked by with Mary Powers.

"Rachael's got a boyfriend," they chimed in unison and ran down the hill laughing.

"Dorothy says your ma's a witch." Jerry turned to walk ahead.

"And you're just dumb enough to believe her." Rachael'd never been accused of having a boyfriend before. And she thought she'd caught a look of admiration on Dorothy Kinshelow's face.

She pondered this as they neared Main Street, Jerry walking ahead acting as if he wasn't with her.

Dorothy and Mary peeked at them around the side of the old meat market.

Rachael hurried to catch up with him. "I can show you where a real witch lives, though, right here in town."

"Oh yeah? What's her name?"

"Miss Smith. But the grown-ups call her May Bell."

"How do you know she's a witch?"

They were walking together again by the time they passed the boarded-up market. Rachael looked over her shoulder to see two heads pop out behind its other end. "Because when you ask big people about her they shut up and won't say anything, like they're afraid to." They walked past the general store, where Rachael should have stopped. "Her house is down this street before you get to the reservoir."

Dorothy and Mary crossed a vacant lot, running bent over. They probably thought Rachael couldn't see them.

When she and Jerry reached the livery stable, he dodged behind a gas pump. "Which house is it?"

"The one over there with the pretty glass in the door. What are you hiding for?"

"I remember the last time you tried to scare me, even if you don't."

On either side of Miss Smith's steps, a skinny lodgepole pine poked into a gray sky. The cold west wind slammed shut the trapdoor of the livery stable's unused haymow and they jumped at the sound. It blew away the heavy scent of oil.

Jerry ran to a carriage that crouched on one wheel in the dead weeds beside the stable. Weather and abandonment had ripped away the leather of its seats. Rachael followed him in case the girls were still watching.

"Just because nobody talks about her don't mean she's a witch," he whispered, his nose as red as the bright stocking cap Thora K. had knitted for him.

"Remy told me that on Halloween the bravest of the big boys in school have to tip over her outhouse. If she isn't a witch, why would they do it on Halloween? Want to peek in her window and see if we can see her?"

"Yeah . . . well... I guess so. But you go first."

Some boyfriend he'd make,
Rachael thought with disgust.

Making a dash for the truck parked at the side of the street, she pretended to hide behind it as Jerry joined her. Rachael wasn't that afraid of May Bell Smith, nor was she convinced the woman was a witch. But if she didn't make this little adventure interesting, the boy at her side would have no reason to stay there.

Black clouds tumbled about the house with the oval of colored glass in its door. Lace curtains lay still at the edges of the windows, making the interior look dark. White foam capped the leaden waves on the reservoir and wind growled low through the lodgepoles.

"I'm getting cold. Are you going or aren't you?"

"Stay close behind me." Rachael crossed to the side of the lot where they could step over broken wires in the fence. She raced to flatten herself against the house on one side of a window while he did the same on the other.

Rachael waited long enough to convince him she was building up courage and then peeked in.

"Do you see anything?" Jerry's eyes looked enormous over his cheekbones. "Is she dead?"

"Dead? No, of course not. I can't see. It's too dark. Let's go around to the back."

This time Jerry looked in first. All I can make out is a kitchen table, don't think no witch lives here."

"Uncle Lon says May Bell got mad once and burned down almost the whole town. How could she do that if she wasn't--"

"If she wasn't what?" a gruff voice said behind them.

Rachael whipped around with a squeal and dropped her lunch pail.

"What are you up to, Rachael Maddon?" Miss Smith seemed monstrous in a fuzzy coat that made her look like a bear. Orange bangs frizzed around a woolen scarf tied under one of her chins. She swung a metal chamber pot by its handle and breathed puffs of steam onto the air. "And who's this with you?"

The children stood frozen. Behind the outhouse at the back of the yard Middle Boulder Creek roared into the silence, trying to crash the ice forming at its edges.

"Well?"

"Jerry Garrett," Rachael heard herself say in a tiny voice.

"Jerry . . . Garrett," May Bell repeated softly, her little pig eyes moving to him. "But you're so ... so big." She raised a hand as if to touch his cheek.

Jerry pushed past Rachael and darted across the yard to the hole in the fence.

Rachael turned to follow but May Bell grabbed her shoulder. "You forgot your lunch pail." She still stared after Jerry. "You keep him away from here. You understand?"

"Yes, ma'am." Rachael watched a tear roll down the fat woman's cheek.

5

One Saturday Rachael was playing in the horse barn when Uncle Lon returned from one of his trips. She'd snuggled into the hay with a couple of cats to keep warm and was pretending one of them was Dorothy Kinshelow and the other Mary Powers. He didn't see her when he entered carrying a crate of bottles and hunkered in front of a window. His breath steamed in the dusty light as he took a jar of paste from his coat pocket and stuck a piece of paper onto an empty bottle.

One cat took a sudden notion to spit at the other and her uncle looked up into her eyes.

For a moment he reminded Rachael of an outlaw like the ones in the old-time wanted posters Mrs. Sweeny kept tacked on the wall at the post office as a joke. "What are you doing, Uncle Lon?"

He grinned and the outlaw went away. "Can you keep a secret, Rachael?"

"Gross my heart." Still clutching a rangy torn, she left the hay and sat on the floor beside him as he drew a bottle from his overcoat pocket. "Why, that's molasses. What's it for?"

Lon Maddon glanced over his shoulder as if he worried that the mare pawing her stall behind them might overhear. Then he squinted and leaned close to Rachael. "I'm making up some tonic for Thora K."

"I didn't know
you
made it."

"Neither does she," he whispered. "That's the secret. 'Chief Geronimo's Tonic, Magic Elixir of the Fabled Apache Medicine Men. Offers wonderful relief from the grippe, neuritis, neuralgia, rheumatism and pains in the extremities,'" he read from the colorful label he'd pasted on the empty bottle. " 'Guaranteed to restore hair when applied regularly to the scalp.'"

"That's like the one on her tonic in the kitchen. Where'd you get it?"

"Took an old label into a printer and had him make me up some more of the same." With his tongue over to one side and between his teeth, Uncle Lon carefully poured Thora K.'s bottle well over half full of whiskey. "You see, Rachael, as she gets older the tonic Thora K. buys at the medicine show on the Fourth of July don't last as long as it used to. I told her I saw a store in Cheyenne that keeps it in stock."

He drank from the whiskey bottle and coughed. "Now this stuff ought to grow hair on something," he gasped, and wiped his eyes.

"But Thora K. hates whiskey."

"That's what the molasses is for."

Rachael watched gooey black strap slither down the sides of the tonic bottle and thin when it met the whiskey. He corked the bottle and shook it till the amber and black had combined to cloudy dark.

"I don't understand. All that molasses without sugar or anything'd taste ick."

"Whiskey without molasses tastes good and that makes it bad." He touched the cork to the end of his tongue and wrinkled his nose. "But whiskey mixed with molasses tastes bad and that makes it tonic." He laughed suddenly and a startled cat jumped from her lap. "And that's good."

Rachael laughed too . . . but she still didn't understand.

Lon passed the tonic under her nose and the mixture's fumes made her think of rotting things soaked in motor oil. "Must need something. You're still sittin' upright."

He brought yet another bottle from his pocket, this one small and amber with no label. "Now this here's the kicker."

"What is it?"

"Chloroform."

Brandy Maddon caught a cold that winter and the cough lingered even after the other symptoms had disappeared. Thora K.'s tonic proved to be a fairly effective if bad-tasting cough medicine.

Several blizzards snowed them in and Rachael braced herself for a scary time. It started as usual with her mother snapping at everyone.

Despite Thora K.'s efforts the meals grew tiresome. "I don't feel like cooking tonight. Let's just warm that roast over and cut it up for sandwiches," Brandy would say wearily.