The Mirror

by Marlys Millhiser

  May Bell moved back over the new saloon.

  Washing hung interminably on a slatted frame behind the cookstove.

  The copper penny kept falling out.

  Corbin brought home news that the Maddon twins were fixing up the ranch house on the old Tandy place.

  Shay thought of Hutch Maddon and pushed the thought away.

  Sometime in May the snow turned to rain and the melting drifts rushed down the slopes. The creek roared from its bed in the valley and kept Shay awake at night. Main Street turned to mud and passing wagons and hooves flung it against storefronts and windows in ugly blotches.

  But the dazzle of sun and sky and new grass, the scent of pine and wildflowers beckoned Shay from her lethargy.

  Tim Pemberthy was bursting with hope because he’d heard the “knackers” in the Brandy Wine and knew a big strike was near. These knackers were some kind of little people who went around knocking to show favored miners where the best ore was located. Thora K. sent food with Corbin to leave for them. She warned Tim to be careful, reminding him that “tammy knackers” also knocked to warn of impending danger.

  One afternoon a thunderstorm caught them with clothes on the line. They raced to gather them in as lightning snapped to the earth on the hill above. When it was over Shay hung out Corbin’s overalls to dry longer.

  Thora K. lifted the empty washtub off the sawhorses. “It do seem to me, tez been way back along since I seen any rags a-soaking round ’ere.”

  “Rags? Oh, you mean my period.” Shay tried to remember when Brandy last flowed. “I can’t remember just when –”

  “Hush, ’ere comes Corbin,” Thora K. whispered and said aloud, “’Ee be ’ome early, you. Edden close to suppertime.”

  Shay turned to see him coming along the path, a strange expression on his face, sunlight dancing on raindrops still coating pine needles over his head. She slipped a clothespin on an overall strap and then jumped as the washtub hit the ground and narrowly missed her foot.

  The Cornish woman bent over and held her middle.

  “Thora K., are you sick? Corbin, your mother –”

  But Corbin wasn’t there.

  “Edden me. Tez him. ’Ee disappeared.” She straightened and clutched at Shay. “’Twere ’is phantom.”

  “I saw him too, so he wasn’t any phantom. Probably turned off at the cave or the outhouse.”

  “No, I were looking straight at ’im and ’ee did vanish.” Her little eyes bulged.

  Shay checked the outhouse, the cave, and walked clear to the spring. No Corbin. Thora K. met her on the way back.

  “What did you mean by phantom?” A tiny chill probed Brandy’s neck. “Where are you going? Thora K.?” Shay yanked her around by the arm. “Speak to me!”

  “Just like it ’appened to me granny. Oh, my dear sawl –”

  “You superstitious old woman, now stop this. He probably forgot something and turned back.”

  “’Ee be dead. Me poor beautiful lamb …” She finished with an eerie wail. Her eyes glazed over now, she broke away to run along the trail to the Brandy Wine.

  This is ridiculous. But Shay picked up Brandy’s skirts and followed. That chill was creeping down her spine.

  They were stopped at the top of the first rise by Tim Pemberthy. He was reeling up the path, red streaks splashed across his clothing.

  19

  Shay cringed as she heard the sound, but looked out the window to see the cloud of smoke and dust rise across the valley. They were blasting out a grave in Nederland’s rocky cemetery for Corbin Strock.

  Shay’d wanted to bury him in Caribou with the rest of the family but Nederland officials objected. It was too far away and wasn’t used any longer. His mother didn’t seem to care.

  Thora K. just rocked. That’s all she’d done since Corbin’s death.

  “’Ee knew. ’Ee knew ’twould ’appen.” Her voice came with a hiss and startled Shay. Thora K. hadn’t spoken for so long.

  “I didn’t know when.” She leaned against the icebox. “I … didn’t … know how. That it’d be that awful …”

  They’d had to scrape him off the walls of the Brandy Wine. He’d been setting a charge, planning to explode it later, but the dynamite had gone off in his hand.

  Tim hadn’t been badly hurt. The blood they’d seen on his clothes was Corbin’s.

  Shay sensed she would soon convince herself they’d imagined seeing Corbin walk toward them on the path. But now it was comforting to remember him whole, the sun sparkling on pine needles and raindrops over his head.

  “Yer a witch, Brandy McCabe,” Thora K. said hollowly. “’Ee and that mirror.”

  “Where did you hide it?”

  “Them took it to the mine.”

  “The mine? I told you it was dangerous. You don’t think it caused –”

  “Dynamite don’t need no mirror ter blow a man to bits, you.”

  “Was it damaged?”

  “’Twere at the mouth, far away from the blast, Tim said. They bury yer ’usband tomorrow and ’ee can ’ave thought fer that uld mirror?”

  Shay’d never been close to anyone who had died before. John McCabe’s death hadn’t touched her.

  It wasn’t that she’d been in love with Corbin. But even with the strange nature of their relationship, she’d loved him and knew that in time she might well have come to be in love with him. She’d always thought of him as Brandy’s husband but she realized now, that she – Shay Garrett – would miss him terribly.

  A whispered sob escaped her and Elton put an arm through hers. Sophie pressed her hand. People around her looked sympathetic, all except Thora K., who stood alone at the foot of the grave, her face stony. When the service was over she ignored the people moving toward her and, without a word to Shay, walked down the hill. Thin shoulder bones made sharp patterns through her dress.

  “Come home with us, Brandy,” Sophie whispered. “There’s no reason for you to stay now.”

  Shay stared after Corbin’s mother. “I can’t leave her.”

  She turned to see Sophie McCabe’s stricken face that so resembled Rachael’s. I’ve been selfish. “Not yet anyway. She’s lost everyone. Sophie … I mean, Ma … if you don’t mind my funny handwriting I’ll write to you … and come to visit. She’s all alone.” Shay did something she wouldn’t have dreamed possible even moments before. She embraced Brandy’s mother and kissed her cheek.

  Turning to follow Thora K., she bumped into Hutch Maddon’s chest.

  “Just wanted to say how sorry I was.” He held his hat in his hand, his platinum head tilted back.

  She stared up at him, an edge of panic stabbing through the numbness of sorrow.

  “Oh, oh, no …” Shay pushed past him and stumbled down the hill to catch up with the old Cornish woman.

  Brandy was pregnant.

  Shay tried not to think about it but Thora K. couldn’t think of anything else. It was the one thing that seemed to lift her out of her mourning. It was only “fit” that Corbin should leave behind a child to take his place.

  As Thora K.’s spirits revived, Shay grew more despondent. She struggled to remember any mention of a Strock child in the family. Shay and May Bell met often for secret walks. May Bell felt “real bad” about the penny.

  “Do you ever wonder what became of your babies?” Shay asked her.

  “Yeah. One of ’em was a girl. Catherine. Hope she gets out of there the first chance she gets.”

  Tim Pemberthy still worked the Brandy Wine. They hired him to stay on for a portion of the profits. There would be a town called Tungsten in the canyon. If it was named after the ore, there must be something in all the speculation. Others were mining it and the slope-roofed mill at the west edge of town that once milled silver from Caribou was being re-outfitted to process it. A company in Pennsylvania had offered to buy all the tungsten Tim could produce.

  One day in August when she knew Tim to be in Boulder, Shay walked the path to the Brandy Wine, trying not to think
of Corbin, wondering why she’d never bothered to make this trip before. She was looking for the wedding mirror.

  Maybe Brandy survived whatever was happening when she’d seen her last.

  The path led to a road and the road soon led to another path with a shed next to a hole in the side of a mountain.

  The dark hole gaped like a threatening mouth in the sunlight and a narrow railroad track lapped out of it like a tongue. A metal wagon sat on the track just inside. She waited for her eyes to adjust to the dark and then walked in as deep as she dared. A claustrophobic panic forced her to back out … and the grim memory of what had happened to Corbin here. There would still be stains. The mirror was no longer at the mouth of the mine. Somebody had moved it.

  Tim was afraid of it. Of course he wouldn’t have left it there now that he was working the mine alone. But where would he have put it?

  Corbin’s baby moved like a heavy sigh inside her. What are we going to do about you and about me, little one?

  Shay didn’t feel young anymore. She felt as if she’d passed from youth to old age without experiencing the life stages in between.

  Even if she found the mirror, her conscience told her she shouldn’t risk anything until the child was born. Even if the child was probably doomed anyway. Even if there was a live Shay Garrett to go back to. The thought of the long years ahead was more than she could bear.

  A horse’s high whinny startled her from her reflections.

  Where the path to the cabin met the road, Hutchison Maddon stood in the shadow of pines, holding the reins of his horse.

  “Hope you’re not going to run away again,” he said when she stopped suddenly at the sight of him.

  Shay had the urge to do just that, but didn’t move as he led his horse from the shadows.

  “Just what is it about me that scares you so, Mrs. Strock?”

  She tried to smile at her grandfather. “Oh … I’m just … crazy Brandy. Hadn’t you heard?”

  “Yeah, I heard.” The corners of his eyes crinkled slightly. “And I’m one of the mad Maddons. You hear about that?”

  “Dr. Seaton says you’re wild.”

  “He oughta know.”

  Shay stepped around him to the path and he walked beside her, the horse following. She was so aware of him she could hardly breathe. “I … have to be getting home.”

  “I’ll walk you there. Or are you going to run?”

  “I’m not running. It’s just that –”

  “You know it’s not right.” He slapped he end of the reins idly against his leg. “Young, pretty thing like you looking so sad all the time.”

  “I don’t feel very young and pretty right now.”

  He glanced down at the bulge that had been Brandy’s waist and smiled. A full smile that transformed the hard cowboy into a vulnerable man.

  She was hot from more than just walking in the sun and stopped to drink at the spring. When she’d replaced the wooden top and got clumsily to her feet, he was staring back at a large mountain jay on a limb above them. The man and the bird looked as if they were communicating with each other.

  “What’s he saying?”

  Hutch blinked and looked down his nose at her. “He’s like you. Won’t talk to me.”

  “I’m talking to you.”

  But neither of them spoke until they reached the back door of the cabin. She hoped he didn’t expect to come in and was relieved when he mounted his horse with a creaking of leather. He stilled the animal’s eager prancing and leaned forward with his arm on the saddle horn. The hard cowboy was back. “I mean to have you, you know,” he said under his breath.

  “Yeah … I know.”

  In September President McKinley was assassinated. Nederland was in an uproar. Apparently no one had voted for him because he was against the coining of free silver, which would have brought the silver mines back into production. But he was the President of the United States and no one could talk of anything else for a month. Even May Bell seemed shocked.

  Shay was unmoved. Although the people around her were becoming all too real, President McKinley was only a dimly remembered name from history.

  But Thora K. had the strangest reaction of all.

  Shay came home from a walk to find the wedding mirror standing flat against the wall behind the rocking chairs, the quilt tied tightly around it with enough rope to hog-tie an army. Thora K. explained that if Brandy thought something bad might happen to Mr. Roosevelt, she should untie the mirror, see what it was, and warn the new President.

  Shay sank into a rocking chair and laughed until she cried.

  One night in early December, her labor pains started. Thora K. ran to the Tylers’ to send one of their boys across the valley for Doc Seaton and then rushed back to boil water.

  Shay wasn’t trained for childbirth without the help of anesthesia, had given it little thought until she knew Brandy was pregnant, and then forced her mind into a numbed state that refused to consider it at all.

  That was no help to her now.

  A broken arm from an accident on a swing, even the horrid illnesses from her transpositions in time hadn’t prepared her for this. She passed from screaming consciousness to blessed nothingness and back again.

  “This is going to be a long night,” a sweating Dr. Seaton announced to Thora K. and Lydia Tyler, who stood ready to help him. “Looks like it’ll be born buttocks first,” he whispered, presumably so Shay wouldn’t hear.

  Shay was praying for death before morning when Brandy’s baby was born.

  They worked over her until noon and then relaxed enough to present her with a wrapped bundle.

  “Brandy, I’d like you to meet your daughter.” He looked haggard, as if he’d had the baby.

  Shay turned Brandy’s face to the wall.

  “Look at her perfect head and little copper hairs,” he coaxed. “Don’t often see that well-shaped a head. Afraid all the damage was to the other end.”

  She couldn’t keep herself from taking a look.

  Brandy’s newborn resembled Thora K. without any teeth at all.

  “Have you thought of any names?”

  “Yes.” Shay came out of her exhaustion unwillingly. “Name her … Penny.”

  Doc Seaton returned the next day. “Sure you want to name her just Penny and not Penelope? You could call her Penny anyway.”

  “No. Just Penny,” Shay answered dully.

  “Now, see here, young woman. This mood of yours is no help to anyone, least of all yourself or the baby. You’re lucky to have her. Probably the only one you’ll ever have.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Just that this was a difficult birth and there’s been damage done. I doubt you’ll ever carry another child to term. Won’t be wise for you to remarry, even though you’re young yet. Best thing for you is to devote your life to Corbin’s child. And be thankful the Lord saw fit to bless you with little Penny. Another pregnancy could be the death of you.”

  “Someday I will have twin boys named Remy and Dan, and a daughter named Rachael. They’ll live to see gray hairs at least, and I’ll live far too long. So don’t try to scare me with your phony Lord business. I wonder if you men don’t trump up all that religious stuff to keep women in line.”

  “Brandy Strock, I’ll forgive you this twaddle you’re talking because you’ve had a bad time here. I never credited those stories of John McCabe’s daughter being mad, and I’ll not start now. We’ll talk about this when you’re yourself.”

  After he’d left, Thora K. brought the baby from her cradle by the stove to nurse.

  Shay snuggled them deeper into the covers, her heart aching with each pull at Brandy’s breast.

  I mustn’t love her. It’ll hurt too much. Besides, she’s Brandy’s, not mine.

  Brandy wasn’t even around when you married Penny’s father or conceived this baby. You did this yourself, Shay.

  She buried her lips in the coppery down coating Penny’s head.

  Penny Strock develope
d pneumonia and died at the age of two weeks. She would be buried next to her father when the ground thawed in the spring.

  Thora K. endured quietly except for long sighs and an occasional far-off look.

  Shay took to standing before the mirror again.

  The first day the canyon was passable, Sophie and Elton stormed into the cabin and insisted Shay and Thora K. spend the rest of the winter at the Gingerbread House.

  They were too listless to resist.

  Thora K. had her first allover hot bath in a tub and was amazed when she didn’t take cold.

  Some of Brandy’s girlfriends dropped by, and any of Shay’s awkwardness or lack of memory was chalked up to her state of double mourning.

  Elton drove them about town in the buggy when the snow permitted. He took her for rides on the trolley and to a theater for corny stage plays and an opera. She’d missed having a man around and enjoyed his company.

  But both she and Thora K. were ready to go back to Nederland when the long winter ended.

  Sophie reminded Shay too painfully of Rachael. Any roots anchoring her to Brandy’s life were in the little mining town, not at the Gingerbread House.

  And here where she’d buried Brandy’s dead the air was clear, free of the stuffiness of the Gingerbread House and Sophie’s questioning eye.

  And so Shay entered her third year in Brandy’s life. She took the quilt from the mirror rarely now, and when she did, it was without hope.

  On Thora K.’s first day back to work at the Antlers, Shay brought a rocking chair out onto the porch and watched Nederland, feeling too bored to sew or read. She’d never been that fond of either anyway.

  She heard the creak of wagon wheels, the jingle of harness and the snorting of horses before she turned her gaze from the meadow to see a buckboard moving up the hill toward her. Even with the hat covering the pale hair, she recognized the driver as one of the Maddon twins.

  Something inside her knew which one he was.

  20

  “Good morning,” Hutch Maddon said without smiling. He was on an eye level with her, sitting on the buckboard filled with a roll of wire and cloth sacks.