by Tim Westover
Chapter Eighteen
In the morning, Holtzclaw went up the mountain to the camp of the railroad men. It was set into Asbestos Hollow, against a vertical face of Burnt Rock Mountain. Holtzclaw’s ostensible purpose was to recruit a wrecking team to clear the remaining houses in old Auraria, but he was also drawn by the promise of Sampson’s cuisine, which he could smell from a half mile away. Holtzclaw waited his turn at the chuck wagon, where the ritual inherited from the Grayson House was carefully observed. A customer placed his piece of gold on a burned wooden spot and turned away; moments later, a bowl of stew was in its place. This morning, it was a variant of groundhog stew, spiced for breakfast with cinnamon and nutmeg and decorated with a raw egg.
As Holtzclaw waited his turn and then ate his breakfast, he surveyed the camp. The men were mostly imported. Holtzclaw recognized only a few faces, Dan and Moss among them. Fires still smoldered from where men had warmed themselves after a cold night. Some who’d lost their pay in gambling cooked a poor breakfast of beans rather than buy a bowl of groundhog stew. Gaming paraphernalia was in evidence—illustrated decks of cards, dominoes, a standing roulette wheel.
From one of the caverns above the camp, a man staggered out, supported by two women. All were still in evening clothes. One of the women tried to manage a parasol while handling the slumping figure; the other did not pause to pick up her hat when it slipped from her head.
The man raised his face and looked out at the world through bleary eyes.
“Shadburn!” cried Holtzclaw. “Hiram Shadburn!”
“Is it Holtzclaw?” he said. “I can barely see through this fog. Holtzclaw, if it is you, give these good women some money. I made a pest of myself last evening, and I could not adequately recompense them. My billfold was lighter than I’d thought.”
“Perchance you were robbed when you were in some indisposed condition.”
“Oh he was quite in his right mind,” said the first woman, tugging on Shadburn’s arm to thrust more of his weight onto her back.
“A rich man!” said the other woman, who had missed her hat. “I like rich men.”
Holtzclaw withdrew a pouch of some loose gold dust from inside his vest pocket and poured a measure into the outstretched palms of the two women. They released their charge at the sight of money. Shadburn could not keep his footing under his own power; he slumped into a heap.
Holtzclaw had two men fetch a wheelbarrow. They loaded Shadburn into the vehicle while Holtzclaw rounded up the wrecking crew that he needed.
“Bella and Isabella did a number on your fancy friend there, Holtzclaw,” said the pilot of the wheelbarrow.
“Which number?” said his companion. This was met with uproarious, suggestive laughter.
“Gentlemen, a little respect,” said Holtzclaw. “Your Bella and Isabella are professional flatterers. That Shadburn, a naive soul, could not resist them is a virtue, not a flaw. He is only trying to do right for you, to uplift this valley.”
“Well, he has contributed to the uplift of those two women,” said the driver of the wheelbarrow.
“His own uplift too!” said a man with a mattock over his shoulder.
Holtzclaw took over command of the wheelbarrow and shooed the men back to their work. Working one limb at a time, Holtzclaw managed to get his employer gathered into the wheelbarrow. Shadburn looked like a tangle of cable, arms and legs twisted together unnaturally, but his blank expression disguised any discomfort that he was feeling.
“Hiram Shadburn, I cannot believe how you have fallen,” muttered Holtzclaw.
“I said that I was thirsty.” Shadburn suppressed a noxious emission. A whistling sound came out of his nose.
“But I’ve never even see you drink a drop of claret.”
“Auraria has better liquors than claret. Wonderful things. The best of them you don’t even drink. You should have seen me when I was a little one. I could stare full into the moonshine and never stagger. How they praised me!”
“And now that we’re back in Auraria, you’ve returned to old habits? This is what you’ve been doing, then, rather than negotiating and solving and toiling with me? You weren’t cultivating an air of respectability. You were off debauching yourself.”
“It is an old habit, Holtzclaw. You know what they say about old habits. They have to be drowned. Washed away.”
“And until they are, you are indulging in them with the same gusto that got you run out of town in your youth?”
“It’s very hard to be a new person in an old place.”
•
Holtzclaw deposited Shadburn in his chambers to sleep off his debauchery and then met Abigail at the Old Rock Falls. It was time for a last inspection, then to have the structure cleared, before the rising water turned it into dangerous debris.
“I’m not sure whether to be disappointed or impressed,” said Abigail after Holtzclaw told her the story of finding Shadburn among the women.
“Disappointed,” said Holtzclaw. “Very, very disappointed.”
He and Abigail began at the kitchen and continued up through the guest rooms. The Old Rock Falls was stripped to a shell. Shadburn had acquiesced to Holtzclaw’s plan for two dining rooms at the Queen of the Mountains. The main one would be luxurious, as befitted a first-class hotel, and the second would be authentic, as near a recreation of the Old Rock Falls as could be managed, using the original materials.
Abigail checked the corners, the cabinets, and the caches. She lifted floorboards to reveal hiding places already cleaned out. Only once was there a moment of excitement, when a tin of Pharaoh’s Flour was discovered inside a hidden nook. Abigail opened it—it was empty. She grasped a bookshelf with two hands, and it swung open to reveal a passageway. Inside was a dusty room with no furniture, artifacts, or spirits.
“Who lived in this one?” said Holtzclaw. “Mr. Bad Thing?”
“No, he couldn’t have opened the passage. This was a special suite that we kept for adventurers and children, who wanted a bit of mystery instead of an ordinary room.”
In the attic, they found a large wasp’s nest. Thirty of its inhabitants flitted perpetually perturbed around their home.
“These little ones want to travel,” said Abigail.
“You can’t mean to install them at the Queen of the Mountains. A decent hotel cannot be infested with wasps.”
“They’ve been here longer than I have. One time, there was a rough rider that came into town. He got stung on the nose and moved along. He could have been trouble.”
“So you will reward these wasps for an instinctual action performed by their ancestors years ago?”
“That’s the history of the world,” said Abigail. She took the wasp’s nest from its perch in the eaves. Between her hands, it was very fragile. She pressed on the two far ends, and the nest yielded in the middle along a natural fault. Twice more she was able to crease it until the nest was no larger than a folded handkerchief, and then she put the nest into her pocket. The wasps permitted this. “I won’t let them drown.”
Holtzclaw and Abigail could only examine the dining room by peering through the doorframe—the wooden floorboards had been removed and put up in storage near the framework of the Queen of the Mountains. The basement gaped from below. Across the void, two daguerreotypes still hung on the wall. One was the ten-year-old boy wearing a gold pan like a hat above his hard cleft chin. The other was the Old Rock Falls at high water.
“We’ll fetch them,” said Holtzclaw. “I’ll find a ladder.”
“It’s not worth the trouble,” said Abigail. “I remember them well enough, and I suppose I’m the only person who would find them interesting. There are plenty of others for the New Rock Falls.”
“Oh I think that a fair number of visitors to the Queen of the Mountains would pause and look, if only because the images are somewhat unusual. That is, if there are ever any visitors. If the hotel ever opens.”
“This argument again,” said Abigail.
“Please, M
s. Thompson, hear me out. We need you. I need you.” Holtzclaw tried to look directly into her eyes; he found holding her stare to be very difficult. Her burning pupils accused him, but he had to make his plea.
“You said once that for some people, gold is a certainty. Well, I don’t believe Shadburn has that certainty any more. Down in the wire-grass, in Milledgeville, he may be the very muse of commerce, the paragon of business wisdom. But here, among his own habits and flaws, he has squandered it all. I—we—have followed him on a fool’s errand. The plain fact is that he hasn’t the money to finish what he’s begun.”
“You’re sure he can’t just scoop up more?” said Abigail.
“But you,” continued Holtzclaw, “you threw away that nugget you found in the stream, after the moon maidens had fled. You said that your mother’s hand passed just above the place where gold was hidden. That means you can see it, somehow, yes? In your dreams, in your mind’s eye, with whatever supernatural gifts being a child of this gold-soaked place has given you. And you may think that this gold can never be washed away. But this dam will drown it. And all that will be left is what we can take with us, up the mountainside to the Queen of the Mountains, and then what we can make ourselves. You said you never cared if the Old Rock Falls was successful. That must change. We have to care, Ms. Thompson. Abigail. We have to care, or there will be no more Old Rock Falls.”
Abigail put the palm of her hand against a wooden beam, touching it gently as if it were a living thing. Holtzclaw heart was throbbing; he could feel his pulse in his feet. Perhaps there was a name he could give to this maneuver. The Holtzclaw Hopelessness. The Auraria Agony. But when could he ever use it again? It was not like the Fitzgerald Flip.
“We don’t seek to enrich ourselves,” said Holtzclaw, “or to become rich idlers. We only need to finish what we have begun. To decorate the Queen of the Mountains in fine style worthy of succeeding the Old Rock Falls. To keep our employees fed until the hotel is self-sufficient.”
“It’s altruism all the way down,” said Abigail. “Don’t pretend it’s all loyalty to Shadburn or charity toward our town, Holtzclaw. You have your side bet. Your pleasure boat.”
“But I’m not going to stuff the gold into my pocket. I will do something useful with it. Putting it into the floating hotel is for the good of the valley too. It’s another place of employment, another draw for visitors. It’s in line with Shadburn’s wishes, even if it is not under his ownership.”
“What he wants is to seal the gold under the lake,” said Abigail.
“And if he succeeds before we’ve taken up a little more of that gold, then the Old Rock Falls will be at an end. Auraria will be at end. You are your own last hope.”
As they exited the Old Rock Falls, Abigail gave a nod to a crew that floated nearby. Her silent instruction released them, and they set to the building like a wave. They crashed against supports and smashed against walls. Axes came through windows. Pry bars caught against stairs, against panels, against frames and fixtures, which lifted and shattered in the swell. The building shuddered from the tide; it fell into a drift of boards, splinters, and fragments.
“It’s a shell,” she said. “There is nothing sad about a shell.”
The can-man sloshed kerosene onto the rubble, and his companion, the fire bringer, threw on a torch. The rubble burned with a cheery, even flame that first glowed blue and then red. The sound was a low crackle, comfortable, like a cooking fire in a hearth.
“You will be all right, won’t you, Abigail?” said Holtzclaw. “Where are you staying?”
“At New McTavish’s. If I hurry, I may be able to catch dinner.”
“You can’t take the Sugar Shoals road,” said Holtzclaw. “I tried to come that way this morning, and the water is already too high over Arman’s Ford. I had to come by way of the Patterson track.”
“Then I will be too late for dinner,” said Abigail. She did not seem very disappointed. “Perhaps there will be a cold biscuit to be had, somewhere.”
She bowed slightly to take her leave, and Holtzclaw watched her go, to see if she would cast any backwards glances. Her path was aimless, only generally upward. Then a purpose flew into her boots, and she strode off in a direction that would take her farther into the valley. Where could she be going? Holtzclaw considered it an encouraging sign.
•
Before the stars were lit, Ms. Rathbun led Holtzclaw to inspect their pleasure boat. Rising water had come up to the construction area and touched the bottom of the hull. A struggle of gravity and buoyancy was underway. The water wasn’t strong enough yet to lift the boat from its cradle, but soon, the balance would change, and the vessel would float first six inches, then sixty feet, above its berth.
“How will we stop it from floating away?” asked Holtzclaw.
Ms. Rathbun, barefooted, sloshed into the water toward the prow. “Come here, I’ll show you.”
Holtzclaw undid his boots, removed his socks, rolled up the ends of his trousers, and tucked them into awkward folds at the knee. He had taken only three steps before his clumsy tuck unfurled and a trouser leg unrolled into the ankle-deep water. He bent over to fix it, but the other cuff came down as he worked.
Ms. Rathbun laughed. “It’s only water, not poison.”
Holtzclaw waded to her.
“The boat is anchored to the earth,” she said, lifting out a heavy chain from where it was coiled beneath the prow. “One at the front and one at the back. There’s plenty of slack to feed out to the boat at full pool but not so much that the boat would float onto one of the banks.”
“As simple as that?”
“No need for more complicated schemes. When the lake is filled, we will row out here in a launch and tow it to the dock. And never will there be anything bigger or grander on this lake than our boat.”
“Well, it’s quite the achievement,” said Holtzclaw. He slapped his hand against the hull. It responded with a satisfying, weighty ring. He tapped another place, and now the structure yielded under his touch. Was it a defect in the metal, or was the boat ready to lift from its moorings?
They walked above the wide and swollen Lost Creek to the place where their routes diverged—Holtzclaw back to the inn formerly known as McTavish’s, a foot above the rising water, and Ms. Rathbun to her father’s splendid new house near the skeleton of the Queen of the Mountains.
Above, kinetic green lights tumbled from the purple night and into the valley. They were falling stars.
“It is beautiful, this display,” he said. “Peaceful.”
“Anything but,” said Ms. Rathbun. “Up on the high ground, they must think they’re witnessing the end of the world. They’ll have broken down the chuck-luck wheel. Players will have sworn off it for good, or at least the night. At the railroad camp, men will have thrown their cards and dice and dominoes into the fire, but old hard bone does not burn. Chickens are laying eggs filled with green fire. Cows and pigs rise up onto their hind legs to dance. The usual nonsense of this place.”
“I’m glad I’m here, away from it.”
“Why Holtzclaw, you don’t want to explain to the people in calm and soothing tones exactly what is happening?”
“I could explain until I am blue and faint. I could tell them about the luminiferous aether and phlogiston and their interactions. How the motion of the Earth collects shattered fragments of electric fluid that are conducted through the aether, igniting as they drag against particles of smoke in the air. But that is not what they need.”
“What do you suppose it is that they need?” said Ms. Rathbun.
“They need one night of fear, as catharsis.” Holtzclaw stuck his hands into his pockets and pulled at the seams from the inside to hitch up his cuffs a little higher. “Their lives have been inverted. Valley folk now live on the mountainside. Miners have put away their pans for aprons. They are permitted a time of panic and distress. Then they will begin to accept their new circumstances.”
“It’s a nice enough moral,�
�� sniffed Ms. Rathbun, “but you don’t need to be the one to teach it.”
Two green sparks, following parallel arcs, crackled and bit and snapped at each other, and then they were extinguished together in the same damp hollow. In the sudden light of these falling stars, Holtzclaw reached out and caught Ms. Rathbun’s hand. It was a fragile thing, like a living creature, warm and soft, wrapped in its veil of silk and lace. He held it gently, hardly breathing. He did not lift it to kiss it, nor did he press her palm or attempt to intertwine his fingers with hers. He held her hand like he was cupping an egg.
They watching the dying sparks in silence. When Holtzclaw stole glances towards her, she was looking across the valley. She did not meet his eyes; he avoided gazing into hers. He wondered what to say, but maybe he should say nothing. Their boat was a fragile thing, like their … partnership. It could not be rushed. This simple act was courageous enough for now.
Ms. Rathbun, still permitting her hand to be cradled, finally spoke. “We need more money, Holtzclaw.” She said it to change the strange mood. People say funny things when they are in emotional moments such as these. She was turning to practical matters rather than face matters of the heart. For that, Holtzclaw could not blame her. She did not withdraw her hand but continued, “We don’t even have a dance floor.”
“I am very close to a solution. I’ve laid a snare in someone’s mind. Soon—maybe even tonight—the snare will be tripped.”
“Do you want to tell me any more about this?” She had moved closer to him.
“It’s superstition, but no. I would be afraid to jinx it.”
Ms. Rathbun made a rude sound between her lips.
“Give me time. A few more days.”
“Why, you sound like my customers when their bill comes due. ‘One more day, Ms. Rathbun, I swear it. I’ll pay it all in full when I have the money.’ Where is your money?”
“It is laid in the heads of certain friends. They are an unnatural lot, Lizzie—I cannot quite understand them. They are sitting on top of mountains of gold, and yet they have no interest in bringing it out. I must convince them to get it for me.”
Ms. Rathbun smiled. “Our methods are not so different, Holtzclaw.”
Her hand was still unmoving beneath his fingers. He could not let it go, for to let it go would be to let it drop. And Ms. Rathbun did not pull away. They stood together, meeting only by the lightest touch, and watched the green stars fall.