The Threshold (13 page)

The tram house was a small wooden building on a tower with a long ladder instead of stairs. Empty buckets coming uphill entered a doorway to one side of the wooden ladder, rounded a horizontal wheel inside and were filled with concentrates from a chute leading down from the mill. The filled buckets emerged from a door on the other side of the ladder and the concentrates began their ride down to Ophir Loop and the railroad which carried them to the smelter in Durango.

Callie was startled to see a large clothing trunk strapped on top of a bucket emerge from the tram house. A flash of emerald green beneath a black coat caught her eye as Mr. McCall tried to help Miss Heisinger up the steep ladder. But he had to back down or find himself peering up her skirts and she meanwhile kept stepping on those skirts each time her foot attempted another rung. It was awkward and embarrassing. Callie turned away. Some of the men shouted encouragement. A few of the ladies snickered. Johann Peterson, the school troublemaker, hooted.

When Callie turned back, another trunk exited the tower and several buckets later her teacher swung out sitting atop the dirty concentrates, clumsy arctics jutting from beneath her skirts, lovely head all but covered by scarves, one arm wrapped around the cold center pole. Even the bucketmen leaned from the tower to watch the spectacle. Her head and back straight as a pick handle, Mildred Heisinger disappeared down the hill.

“You ever seen such a ridiculous sight?” Mrs. Fisherdicks asked Mrs. Traub.

Callie had lost her desire for an afternoon of play. She made her way back to a cramped and stuffy cabin.

Bram was deep in the stopes working a muck stick and so did not see his tormentor leave the camp. But he heard about it when his shift gathered around the potbellied stove in the commissary after tally. Luella was touchy and tired at supper and so no one brought it up. Callie ate in silence with only recriminating glances for him.

“Teacher’s work was done here,” he whispered to her in the fleeting moment after she’d left the kitchen and Ma’am still worked. “If she hadn’t gone down on the tram she’d be here the winter.” One of the things Bram enjoyed about working rather than being a student was the unspoken understanding that he had no household duties other than carrying in water, coal, or firewood.

But what he enjoyed the most about working, he decided the next morning, was the mornings. Not the rousing from a deep warm slumber, but meeting the other men at the changehouse, his belly full of breakfast, lining up outside, and parrying insults with his friends. It was dark when he went into the changehouse these winter mornings and dark when he came out. Bram would not see daylight until he worked the night shift. Tiers of pegs along the walls, a row of benches beneath. Bram lifted down a pair of overalls frozen so solid he had to beat them against the planks of the floor to limber them up enough to step into. He exchanged his clean jacket for the mud-crusted one he’d worn the day before and pulled on boots that came to his knees. Beneath this outer layer he wore a full layer of wool clothing.

And all around him the man sounds—grunts, snorts, coughing. And unending clearing of throats, the rumble of belching, the sharp blats of men farting. Bram loved it and the splendid feeling of belonging.

The back door of the changehouse opened directly into the long snowshed where he followed John O’Connell along a narrow lane between stacks of baled hay for the mules and piles of heavy timbers for bracing. Once inside the adit, the air dampened but warmed. In the depths the temperature varied little from its approximate forty degrees winter or summer. They stopped to collect their ration of candles and Pa his powder, then moved on along rusting tracks. Boots crunched on rock and grit between the rails. Pa snorted and spit into the inky drainage ditch at the side of the track, his stiffened slicker crackling as his pick swung rhythmically on one side, his dinner pail on the other. The clearing of rheumy throats sounded hollow in here. There was little talk now. The workday had begun.

Bram fitted a candle into the black-iron candlestick in his cap and waited his turn at the hoist that lowered the men into the sublevels. John O’Connell went down with his own crew and a “Tap ’er light, lad,” for Bram. Bram crowded into the cage with his foreman, a taciturn Finn named Knut Talse, and a big Swede. They were careful to keep elbows and heads away from the jagged rock walls rushing by.

Electricity lighted the major tunnels, but followed behind the drilling, mucking, and timbering. The new carbide lamps were expensive and used mainly by the supervisors and surveyors. Each station had open wooden lockers for storing dinner pails, extra gear, and candles. After stopping at the lockers, Knut placed his crew along a drift face and motioned Bram on down a side tunnel.

Their boots sloshed in water now and the candlelight made the shadows of their legs move like elongated scissors on the walls. Water drops plinked. Picks clinked and hammers rang. A mule brayed objections that ricocheted through the network of stone passageways. Rocks thudded where men barred down the loose stuff from the last firing with crowbars. Machine drills spat “rat-tat-tats” interspersed with whines. A blue tinge hung on air heavy with the gassy smell of dead powder and the reek of water-soaked timber and human excrement.

Knut set Bram to mucking a round, which meant shoveling up the gob and rock brought down by a round of blasts. Nippers ran dulled steel drills up to the machine shops for sharpening. Powder monkeys took orders for and delivered dynamite. These jobs were handled by boys. Muckers needed more brute strength and were often older than Bram but still unskilled labor. It was Bram’s ambition to work up to be a quartz man. Pa and some of the other men were already showing him the intricacies of rock drilling, loading, tamping, and spitting fuses.

But for now he took the miner’s candlestick from his cap and jabbed it into a timber by its sharp iron prong. He took the muck stick or shovel and dug it into the mud-goo and rock, then shoveled it into a wheelbarrow, or “Irish buggy.” When it was full he pushed it back through the tunnels to the end of the tracks and dumped its contents into a wooden chute that emptied into one-ton ore cars. When a car was full a trammer, with the help of a mule, would tram it to the cage, where the hoistman would lift it to the surface level. There another trammer would tram it out through the snow-shed to the mill, where it would be crunched and sifted and jiggled and chemically tortured until only a coarse gray sand remained—the concentrates high in precious metals.

Mucking was exhausting work but Bram felt the exhilaration of prolonged exercise and pride in his growing strength. He was mucking out a stope—a room-sized cavity blasted into the rock where the vein ran deep. His shadow bent, scooped, rose, bent again. Mica crystals winked in the edges of his wavering light. A dislodged pebble clattered down a wall and made a “ploomp” when it hit the water on the floor. Glistening water drops from the roof worked their way beneath his collar and Bram was soon soaked to the skin. He paused to catch a breath and wipe a mucky coat sleeve across his forehead, heard his heart beating strong and true and a wee tapping noise overhead that caused a shiver to skip along the bones in the back of his neck.

The tommyknockers had come over the sea with the Cornish miners, although the Irish claimed them too. Tiny elfin spirits whose sole purpose, as far as Bram could determine, was to either warn or to bedevil the men who worked inside the earth. And there was never any telling which it was they were doing. Their quiet tappings came eerie in the stopes and drifts and sounded like nothing else at all. Tommyknockers warned a miner that either something was about to happen or that something wasn’t. The miner then cleared out of the area and saved his life if catastrophe befell or he cleared out of the area and was roundly cursed by his foreman when nothing happened. Or he gambled with fate and stayed where he was.

Ma’am declared tommyknockers to be only superstition. Ma’am had never worked the stopes.

Bram stood back and watched the play of candlelight on the walls and roof that made them undulate with shadow. But they appeared in reality to be standing firm. The earth did not seem to work. He could see no small circles tamped with mud in the rock face that would signal a missed hole, a charge not yet fired that could go off unexpectedly. He had a swift memory of Callie’s angel with the fluffy hair warning him not to come down here. But Bram decided to gamble and he went back to his muck stick and his Irish buggy.

Bram won that particular gamble and Alta drifted into spring, a highly illusory season at that altitude. The nights were still bitter although an occasional warm afternoon set the drifts to melting and seeping into the mine tunnels, and the blizzards hurled larger, wetter flakes. Before Bram went on night shift he had a long day—a thirty-six-hour break during the changeover. He ate and rested, made a snowman with Callie, and squinted like a mole in the snow-reflected sunlight.

Since John O’Connell still worked day shift, having Bram on nights upset the routine of the household. There seemed always to be someone sleeping and needing tiptoeing around. And food had to be organized for a dinner pail twice a day. Luella and Callie rose earlier to prepare a huge breakfast which was really supper for Bram and then reheated it when John came down from the loft.

One evening when Callie had dressed in her flannel nightgown in front of the stove and Luella had brought out the rags and dipped a comb in a cup of water to wet a strip of Callie’s hair, the siren’s shriek startled her so she tipped over the cup on the table. John came up from his doze on the floor, the blood already leaving his face. The three O’Connells looked at each other wordlessly.

“Bram,” Callie echoed all their thoughts and broke the spell. There was a scramble for coats and shawls and arctics.

“Whole shift working the mine and mill. Could be it’s nothing to do with Bram now,” John tried to reassure them as they slipped and slid on ice-covered snow up the hill, but Ma’am was already making crying sounds in her throat. Callie gasped at the shock of cold air in her lungs and hurried on ahead, only to stop at the edge of the crowd, afraid of what she might hear. She heard it anyway. It seemed to ripple toward her from different directions in cries and whispers and choked-back panic.

“She’s caved!”

“Level four.”

“Talse’s crew.”

Pa rushed into the snowshed where men shouted and passed around shovels and picks. Mrs. McCall hugged Luella. Luella turned to sob on her neighbor’s shoulder. Callie couldn’t breathe. She doubled over. When she managed to straighten she saw Aletha and her husband standing next to the commissary. They wore the same puffy coats they had last summer.

“Callie,” the lady called.

“It’s Bram. Bram! He’s in there.” Aletha’s husband had tried to warn Bram. Would he help them now? She reached out to him with a desperate hope. “What can I do?”

“Don’t go to Telluride,” the lady insisted as she had last summer. “Callie, do you hear?” This time the edges of a hole didn’t close up over them. This time they just began to fade. “Callie!” the lady screamed, and disappeared.

15

Aletha had called “kitty, kitty, kitty,” once. She now had a string of meowing friends following her down the alley like the victims of the Pied Piper. Some tried to rub against her ankles and trip her up. Not one of them was Charles. Most weren’t strays either. They were fat and trusting.

A dog barked and the felines scattered to the shadows and the streetlight at this end of the alley went out. Aletha looked over her shoulder to find the one at the other end still lit and turned back to a bowlegged bulldog baring his teeth in the small pool of light her flashlight made. He was standing in mud. She wasn’t—it hadn’t rained for days. He had the snub-snout and jutting lower jaw she’d seen only in pictures, the type of dog favored in her mother’s old advertising posters. His growl came low from a massive chest.

“Humphrey?” a woman called from somewhere. “Here, Humphrey.”

The dog didn’t move and neither did Aletha. A horse snorted as it cantered by on the street, riderless but saddled, stirrups swinging casually, hooves slinging mud. The piles of new lumber on the lot next to her had become a shedlike building. A man stood in front of it and held up a museum-issue lantern. “Well, Fanny, you’re late. Been nipping at the trail sides, have ya?”

“Humphrey—sorry, miss, he don’t mind the Lord, let alone me.” A small figure in a long silky dress and a hat choked with feathers stepped into the light pool, grabbed the dog by the loose folds of skin at his neck, and took a horrified look at Aletha. “You ain’t dressed for the night. Even here. In need of help?”

“No. I’m … uh … looking for Charles.”

“Like as not he’ll find you first.” She had a nasal voice and smelled strongly of funeral roses. “His money, ain’t it?” The woman walked Humphrey off into the dark.

Dread and curiosity mixed like bubbles in Aletha’s blood. “What if you get lost in time and can’t go back?” Cree Mackelwain would be saying. The comforting streetlight still shone at the other end of the alley. Her cat-following had disappeared into another decade.

Aletha held her breath and stepped off into the mud. It oozed cold through the open toes of her sandals, tried to suck the straps off her heels, insinuated through the mesh of her hose. When she’d passed the false-fronted livery stable she could see tiny lights twinkling high in the mountains at the head of the canyon and shadows of familiar peaks against dim moonlight. The sweetness of recent rain didn’t mask the stench of garbage and yeasty beer. Over the slamming of her pulse in her ears she heard voices raised behind closed doors and the splash of the San Miguel River down at the end of the street. The thudding sound of distant mills provided multiple heartbeats for this mountain night.

A woman carefully silhouetted in a window scratched her head. Row upon row of cribs, interspersed with larger frame houses. This part of Telluride was built up solid as far as Aletha could see in the night light. A few moments ago there’d been empty lots, raw condos in-the-building, and only remnants of the old left behind.