by David Boop
“I’m sorry for her loss, ma’am. How old was the boy?” She might have been thirty, a businesslike and pragmatic presence, like many mountain women. Her dress was clean, and her skin glowed in the morning light. Sprig suddenly felt particularly unwashed and grubby.
“Timkins just turned two. A tiny thing. The shits got him.”
“Of course. It’s a tragedy. I haven’t found a studio quite yet.” He’d seen a hotel when he came into town with southern facing windows. He bet their lobby would be a fine, well-lit room. “I will have to make arrangements, or do you have a preferred location?”
“Our houses are nearby. Timkins so loved the tree between my house and his that I think his mother would want to remember him there.”
“Of course, that would be best.”
She took a step back as if to go, then reached into her basket. “You look like you’ve been some time between meals. Would you like a bun? They’re just out of the oven.”
He took it and bowed. “You are a Christian saint, for sure.”
By sunset, Sprig had scheduled four other sessions, three for children who’d died in a spate of fever and intestinal distress in the last week, and one formal sitting for a finely dressed lady who had promised to send a remembrance to her fiancé in the East. His money bag jingled pleasantly. Enough for room, drink, bath and shave. Nothing like a good dose of scarlet fever, mumps or rubella for business. Of course, a mining accident could be just as lucrative. Grieving widows would dig deep to pay for a portrait of their deceased. Either way, Sprig profited. Memorial portraits made up two thirds of his business.
He folded the signs back into the wagon. He swept the canvas off the gleaming coffin. Whoever built it surely loved fine woodwork. His face peered back at him from the buffed varnish. The interior was just as fancy: a quilted, padded bottom would give the dead the most comfortable bed they might ever sleep in. For an extra dollar, Sprig offered to pose the deceased within it; a coffin that elegant reflected well on the family.
* * *
Traveling from town to town frightened Sprig more than he liked to admit. Maps were poor, and a miner’s directions for getting to the next camp were worse. Often he found that the road he followed led to an abandoned shaft or a dead-end canyon. Once, he spent a night next to a cemetery filled with weathered crosses. Another time he’d been stuck with nothing to eat for four days beside a long, steep trail no wider than his wagon while he worked to repair the axle. Everywhere he went, he found evidence of the gold rush: rusted mining equipment, broken wagons, claims signs and survey stakes. Sometimes he’d meet lone prospectors. Often times they were eccentric, irascible, unstable men who seemed more at home with the rocks and a gold pan than with human beings.
Nothing surprised him, but he worried that anything could kill him. Bears crossed his path. A mountain lion skirted his campfire as he sat tending the flame one night—a huge cat whose shoulders were higher than Sprig’s head. Dangerous men might ambush him.
He found the coffin at the end of one of those exhausting days.
The two mules who pulled his wagon kicked at each other until one went lame; a stream where he’d hoped to replenish his water was yellow with mine tailings, and he’d developed a deep cough that rattled the top of his head. The setting sun told him he wouldn’t reach Florrisant before nightfall. He’d heard the town had two churches, which meant it had at least six saloons.
The wagon turned on the trail into a clearing among the pines. It was an odd kind of clearing, though. Fifty-foot-tall trees leaned away from the center, their branches scorched. Some had fallen. Bushes and grass had burned to black ash, and in the clearing’s center, broken metal shards, some several feet across, jutted up from the raw earth. He picked up a thin sheet of it as big as a cabin door that weighed much less than he expected.
Maybe the clearing had been where miners stored dynamite or gunpowder. The explosion must have been tremendous. Sprig wondered if what had happened there was more than just dynamite. A wagon loaded with nitroglycerine might cause this kind of destruction, but what fool would drive a load with the unstable substance over a road this rough?
The coffin lay on its side at the crater’s edge. It was the only identifiable object in the debris. He righted it. Six feet long. Two feet wide and deep. Silk padded sides and bottom. His hands tingled when he touched it, but the sensation quickly faded. Like the metal pieces he’d examined, it weighed much less than it looked like it should. He bucked it into the wagon easily. That night, he slept in it for the first time—the padding was so much more inviting than the rough ground. The stars shone crisply. They always hung like shimmering diamonds, but that night they seemed benign and unexpectedly beautiful. He slept easily for the first time in the mountains alone, and when he woke in the morning, his cough had faded to just a tickle at the back of his throat. By midday, he realized that he was not on the road to Florissant and had to backtrack. The clearing was still there, but the metal he’d examined the day before was gone. He stared at the ashy spot for some time, trying to understand what had happened before moving on. After a second night in the coffin, the cough disappeared completely. He woke unaccountably happy, and the coffin turned into a money maker in Florrisant, when he charged extra to pose mangled miners, gut-shot gamblers and disease-killed babies in it.
* * *
At midnight in the Cripple Creek boarding house, he still couldn’t sleep, although the bed was deep and soft. For weeks, he’d been sleeping in the coffin as he traveled from mining camp to mountain town, fighting to move his wagon over rocky and washed out roads, and now that he lay in a real bed, he missed the hard wood against his elbows. Nights passed pleasantly in the solid box. It kept the wind out, and he didn’t worry about snakes. Now, despite how much he’d looked forward to it, the boarding-house room seemed too spacious. Someone in the next room snored enthusiastically, and he imagined the mattress crawled with bed bugs and lice.
When he staggered down the stairs for breakfast the next morning, he’d hardly slept, and the familiar throbbing in his back had returned. His humor didn’t revive until he’d had a third cup of coffee and a second heaping of biscuits under gravy. Sprig cooked poorly on the trail. The well-prepared meal was a treat. The boarding-house owners were as unlikely a couple as Sprig had ever met—the husband looked to be eighty if he was a day, a bald head fringed with gray—and the wife might have been nineteen if Sprig was generous. Her voice rose whenever she talked to her husband, who must have been hard of hearing. Sprig wondered if they’d like a portrait. The old man didn’t appear to have many days left on this Earth. What he did have, though, was a work shed with a sink in back that would serve as a place for Sprig to develop his exposures.
The widow Armundson waited for him on her porch, a small bundle in her arms. A matronly woman sat in a chair beside her, with a defeated and distracted look in her eyes. Sprig carried his tripod and camera under one arm, and the rest of his equipment in a heavy valise in the other hand. The early morning clouds had cleared away, so he had plenty of light to work with. “You said he had a favorite tree?”
“Molly, I told you there ain’t no need,” said the sitting woman. Molly put her hand on the woman’s shoulder.
The blanket fell away from Timkins’ face. Despite its closed eyes, no one would mistake Timkins’ repose as sleep. Sprig wondered if the “couple days ago” Mrs. Armundson indicated wasn’t closer to a week. “Your boy’s angelic,” he said. “Many mothers prefer to be holding their child for the portrait.”
Mrs. Armundson glanced at the grieving woman, and her expression told Sprig no.
“Or we could surround him with his toys by the tree.”
The woman said more to herself than to them, “I brought out his crib. Carried it over two mountain passes. It’s the same crib I had when I was a baby. My mother gave it to me before she passed.”
“That will be perfect.”
Sprig arranged Timkins in the crib under the tree, careful not to squeeze t
he child. The body felt like it might be oozy. Thirty minutes later, after making several exposures, they were done.
During the session, Mrs. Armundson coughed and coughed. Her petite frame shook from it. Sprig looked at her with concern after one long session. “I’m fine,” she said weakly. “Mountain air doesn’t agree with me.”
He didn’t believe her. In the lungs like that, it could be pneumonia or whooping cough. His own throat felt scratchy again. If his symptoms went as they did the last time, he’d sound as bad as her in a day or so. “A tablespoon of honey in a shot glass with whiskey might feel good, ma’am. Always works for me.”
“It might at that,” she said.
The next three sessions were in the mortuary, a grand, two-story structure with a beautiful hearse parked in the front. Dr. Livingston Johnson owned the establishment, and seemed much more concerned with polishing the beautiful wood-and-glass carriage than caring for the dead, who were dumped unsympathetically under a tarp on the floor in the back. “I only have one table,” the balding undertaker explained. Sprig helped him dress the first cadaver, a young miner whose skull had been partly caved in by a support timber that snapped directly over his head. “See,” said the mortician, “we turn him like this, so the pillow shields the injury.”
Sprig nodded. “Perhaps we can use my display coffin for the photograph. It is more stylish than your wares.” He pointed to the wooden coffins stacked in the back of the preparation room.
“A simple pine box is all these men can afford, sir.”
“I know, but for the photograph, they will look the way their loved ones hoped in their final moment on Earth. A tasteful flower arrangement beside them, or their favorite possession nearby will do the mourners more good than you can imagine.” Of course, when he placed the deceased in the deluxe coffin, the extra dollar filled Sprig’s pockets that much faster.
One man Sprig posed with a Brady stand, a set of rods and hooks that held the corpse up and the head straight. The man’s rifle leaned against him, as if he was holding it from a hunting trip. Sprig thought the photograph would turn out well. The flash impressed the undertaker most.
“Magnesium powder and potassium chlorate,” said Sprig. “Sorry about the smoke.” He coughed and cleared his throat.
The other two men went into Sprig’s coffin.
“That is a beauty,” said the undertaker when Sprig wheeled it in. “Never seen woodwork like that.”
With the window and back door open, fully lighting the room, the wood’s sheen showed to its best advantage.
“Can’t see the joints at all,” said the undertaker, running his hand around the corner. He drew his hand back quickly, then laughed. “I thought it vibrated when I touched it. Darnedest thing.”
Sprig placed a bible on the corpse’s chest and rested his hand on it. “Bodies are always better once they’re arranged.”
The undertaker handed Sprig a bouquet of flowers held together with lace. “Damned if you aren’t right. That’s Elliot Dareus. Cut his leg working the buckets in the Mount Rosa mine. The wound festered and the leg swelled up like a watermelon. Died before they could amputate. I swear he looks healthier now than he did a month ago.”
The dead man’s face seemed to have relaxed under the powder the undertaker had applied.
Sprig fought down the urge to cough as he placed the flowers and then made sure his camera was properly situated and primed. “It’s a magic box, that one is.” The flash filled the room with smoke again.
* * *
Sprig loaded a kettle of hot tea and a pot of vegetable soup, both wrapped in towels, a jar of honey, and a whiskey flask into a basket he borrowed from the boarding house. Before he set out for the widow Armundson’s house, he assured the young landlady that he would return everything.
She answered the door with a blanket wrapped around her shoulders, looking miserable. Her hands shook, holding the blanket against her chest. He imagined he could feel the fever radiating from her.
“Mr. Sprig, what can I do for you?”
He held up the basket smelling of vegetable soup and tea. “I thought that was a true kindness you did for Timkins’s mother. If you’re still feeling poorly, I could do a kindness for you.”
She opened the door wider for him. “If that’s boardinghouse soup in the basket, you surely can. I don’t have the energy to cook tonight.”
Her house was bigger inside than the front made it appear, and the furniture was store bought.
“My husband did very well in the mines before the accident,” she explained.
“How long ago, if you don’t mind my asking?” Sprig balanced a saucer on his knee while sipping tea laced with whiskey from a delicate china cup.
“Eighteen months come September.” She breathed shallowly and with what looked like some pain, although more relaxed since she’d downed three shot glasses filled with whiskey and honey. “Do you think another dose of your elixir would help?” she said. “I don’t know if it will cure me, but dying wouldn’t feel nearly as bad.”
“Certainly.” He carefully measured a tablespoon of honey into the small glass, then topped it with the liquor.
A few minutes later, her chin settled to her chest and her breath whistled softly. The lone lantern she had directed him to light cast a wavering illumination on her face, a soft, buttery patina that made her both tragic and noble. Her house truly loomed around her. As they talked, she evoked the nights she’d spent since her husband died, reading in her empty house, dealing with grief and then emerging from it to help her friends, working with the city planners to make Cripple Creek a great town. Molly sounded like a force to admire, but no one likes to be sick alone. Even the strong can be brought down.
Sprig rearranged the blanket so that it covered her neck, and slipped out the front door.
The sun had set. Light streamed from the hotel on Bennett Avenue, and men’s loud voices from the saloons broke the mountain silence, but Sprig didn’t waver. He ran past the saloons, past the dry goods and barbershop, and didn’t stop until he reached the mortuary.
“I need my coffin,” he explained to the undertaker as he rushed to the back room.
Holding the long box over his head like a man portaging a canoe, Sprig returned to Molly’s house. The single lantern sputtered, nearly out of oil. Sprig didn’t know where she stored her oil, so he worked quickly, putting the coffin on the drawing room floor, carefully picking up Mrs. Armundson, and then laying her inside. He pulled the blanket around her, and before the lantern flickered out, he was sure she looked as if each inhalation was easier.
He pulled a chair with a high back and upholstered arms next to her, and when the light winked off, settled in for the night.
* * *
“What on Earth?” cried the widow Armundson.
Sprig blinked against the morning light coming through the drawing room windows. The woman sat in the coffin. “What is this, Mr. Sprig? Have you been here all night?” She sounded more puzzled than upset.
“I’m sorry, ma’am. I don’t want you to think badly of me, but I believe that coffin has medicinal qualities, like healing waters. I hoped that it would help you to feel better.” Even though she didn’t appear angry, her reaction horrified him. He hadn’t thought about how she would respond in the morning.
She clambered out of the box, pulling the blanket with her. “This is entirely improper. You must leave, and take this…this contraption with you.”
Sprig stood the coffin on one end. “Really, I believed it might relieve your symptoms.”
“Out.” She pointed to the door. “And don’t let anyone see you leaving. I have a reputation to uphold.”
Sprig trudged back toward the boardinghouse, dragging the coffin behind him. It wasn’t until he’d gone a couple blocks before a thought occurred to him. The widow Armundson didn’t cough once as she tossed him from the house. In fact, for a woman who’d drunk way too much the night before, and was sick to boot, she’d sounded remarkably vigor
ous.
He picked the coffin up, raised it over his head as he had the night before, and whistled the rest of the way to the boardinghouse. His first sitting for the day wasn’t until noon. He could get three or four hours sleep himself, if the boardinghouse owners didn’t think it too odd that he did it in the coffin in the work shed. If the coffin worked as he thought it would, he could rid himself of his pesky sore throat and painful bark. He was pretty sure that despite what he’d said to the undertaker, the coffin was not magic. It felt more like the workings of a machine. Maybe the box wasn’t made of wood at all. It was too light. It was too well constructed. The coffin buzzed like Edison’s electrical contrivances that filled the news.
* * *
Sprig finished the day’s work by late afternoon. The memorial portraits for the passed infants that he’d scheduled on the first day in town went quickly. Babies presented less of a problem to pose. The biggest challenge was dealing with the families who were filled with unreasonable requests. “Can you make my Lonnie smile?” “Jasmine loved her doll. Her hair should be done in the same style.” And, “I have seen photographs that have been colored as in real life. Can you give me such a photograph?” He had to explain repeatedly that hand coloring a print was beyond his skills.
Still he finished the baby pictures with time to spare. The “lady” who said she wanted to send a photograph to her fiancé presented a different problem. Sprig arranged to shoot her in the hotel’s lobby where the slanting light poured through the huge windows, using their elegant furniture for the image. The challenge was that the woman began undressing as soon as Sprig closed the doors for privacy.
“He’s my beloved,” she exclaimed as Sprig blustered that he didn’t take those kinds of pictures. He averted his face while holding out her jacket. “Only he will see the photograph,” she said.