The Mirror

by Marlys Millhiser

  Her father razed the old Strock cabin and, mortgaging the ranch, he built a small comfortable cottage on the site. It had electricity and indoor plumbing and it was built for two. His arthritis prevented him from working the ranch alone now and he leased the valley to a neighbor. Hutch moved into the cottage and waited for Brandy.

  Rachael was thirteen and a good head taller than her mother when Brandy left the Sanitarium. Brandy spent a few weeks at the Gingerbread House and the constraint between mother and daughter was more marked than ever. They were strangers.

  Rachael ached to bridge the gap but Brandy’s only interest was in her husband. “All the years of his life I’ve wasted in that Sanitarium …”

  So Brandy moved to Nederland. But Rachael stayed in Boulder because, she was told, the cottage was small and besides she had friends in Boulder.

  Rachael didn’t consider friends a substitute for parents, but she was allowed to spend most of the summer months at the cottage. And many weekends Hutch would drive down for her.

  Remy had a job training horses for a movie studio. (Rachael told her friends in school that her brother was a movie star.) Dan had married a girl whose father owned a used-car dealership in Los Angeles.

  By the summer of 1939, when Rachael was fifteen, Remy and Elinore had two little boys and Dan had a daughter. The Bar Double M sold to a big outfit for a good price and several companies asked permission to inspect the Brandy Wine with an eye to leasing it. Tungsten from cheaper foreign sources was being diverted to Germany and Japan.

  “So we’re sitting better than we have for years right now, Bran,” Hutch said one evening as the three of them sat in the living room at the cottage. “I want you to get on the train and go out and see those grandkids of ours before they get any older. Bring back pictures.”

  “But I can’t leave you –”

  “Holy Jesus, Bran! I promise I won’t die for a month. You watch me like I got one foot in the grave. Nobody ever died of arthritis. You make me so nervous I’m afraid to go to bed at night.”

  “Well, it would be nice to see the twins again.” Brandy’d lost her sanitarium fat, and it seemed to Rachael that she looked years younger than Hutch.

  It took a good deal more persuasion but her mother finally boarded the train in Denver. Rachael and her dad drove home in silence.

  They turned off on the ranch road to the Bar Double M. One of the things they’d planned to do while Brandy was away was to clear out the remaining Maddon possessions stored in the ranch house. The buildings would stand empty, as the new owners intended to combine the valley with a neighboring ranch to form one giant spread.

  Hutch stopped at the top of the lane and they sat looking down at their old home and the valley. Even at this distance the empty house looked sad and betrayed.

  “We had a good life here.” Her dad cleared the huskiness from his voice and spit it out the window but it was back when he spoke again. “I remember that first day I brought your mother here.” He leaned over the steering wheel and chewed on his thumb.

  Rachael blinked back tears. “Why does everything have to change?”

  “She was sitting beside me as you are now. Only on the seat of a buck-board.” The lines on his face deepened under silver-gray hair. “You know, she told me that day we’d have twin boys and a girl?”

  “How does she know things ahead of time?”

  “She says if she told me how, I’d think she was crazy. I just quit asking her.”

  “She’s not crazy like people say.”

  “It’s like living with a witch.” The car started down the lane into the valley. “But I wouldn’t have missed her for anything.”

  Most of the personal items had been removed from the house but some of the furniture remained.

  “Dad, can I have this? There’s room for it at the Gingerbread House.” Rachael pulled out a drawer of Thora K.’s old buffet. The beveled mirrors were clouded with dust.

  “Take anything you want. The rest we’ll sell if anyone’ll buy it.” His voice carried hollow across the emptiness of the house. “About the only old thing your mother’s interested in is me.”

  “It’s funny she didn’t want your wedding picture.” It still hung on the wall by the front door.

  “Take that too if you want.”

  Rachael decided she would. That way she’d have her parents with her at the Gingerbread House.

  Early the next morning they walked along the path behind the cottage to the Brandy Wine and pulled the boards off the entrance. Investigators from a mining company were coming to determine whether or not it would be worth starting up again.

  Hutch stood back from the opening, the last board still in his hands, as if he didn’t want to go into that dark hole any more than she did.

  “Last time I ever saw your uncle was right here. Left him and ten cases of hooch in there.” He was really talking to himself. “Eight years ago.”

  Rachael bent down to wipe a streak of dust from one of her anklets. Why did her father have to dwell so on all the sad happenings of the past?

  “When I came back, the place was boarded up and Lon and the hooch were gone. Never saw him again.”

  “We don’t have to go in there, do we?”

  But Hutch was smiling to himself. “Jesus, we used to fight dirty.”

  “Dad, what’s that?”

  “Hm?” He tilted his head back so he could see under the rolled brim of his cowboy hat. “Oh, that’s been there for years. Figured it was some old thing Thora K. stored here and forgot. Better get it out. Just be in the way.”

  Rachael couldn’t bring herself to go inside and help, though she didn’t like him lifting things. She knew whenever he overdid he’d be in such pain he couldn’t sleep nights. As it was, he moved differently than other people. She’d overheard one of his friends remark that Hutch Maddon walked like he’d got a wagon tongue stuck up his rear. Which wasn’t very nice but was a fairly good description of his unnatural stiffness.

  Hutch stood a tall object in front of her and removed the blanket and rope that covered it.

  “I remember this … from somewhere.” She was looking at her tall awkward self in a full-length mirror. As usual, Rachael wasn’t happy with what she saw. Her shape was like a pear’s, all hips and no bosom. Little wonder boys never looked at her twice.

  “If you’d seen it once you wouldn’t forget it, that’s for sure.” He touched the molded metal hands of the frame. “Funny. Feels warm. You’d think it’d be cold after sittin’ in there.”

  Rachael caressed a smooth bronze hand. The warmth seemed to be cooling even as she touched it. “Do you suppose it came from Cornwall like the buffet? Maybe I’ve seen it in Thora K.’s old cabin when I was little.”

  “Question is, what do we do with it? Might just haul it to the dump.”

  “But, Dad, it must be ancient. You can’t throw it away. Let me have it.”

  “Rachael, what are you? A young lady or a pack rat?”

  “Please?” She looked at the back of the mirror, which was covered with some kind of black wood. “We can take it down to Boulder in the truck with the buffet.”

  “Your grandma’s got a houseful of junk now. Where’s she going to put any more?” But the gold-flecked eyes told Rachael she’d have her way.

  He tied the blanket back on to keep it from getting scratched. “Although a few scratches couldn’t hurt its looks none.”

  As they rounded the curve by the cave in the hillside, Rachael had the sudden thought that that’s where she’d seen the mirror before. But she didn’t like to think of caves. So she didn’t.

  The next day they loaded Thora K.’s buffet onto the truck at the ranch and when they returned with it to the cottage a county sheriff’s car was parked in front. Mr. Skinner, a deputy, several local men and one of the mining-company inspectors were gathered around it, smoking.

  Her dad leaned out of the truck. “What’s going on, Skinner?”

  “Hutch, I think we found yo
ur brother,” the deputy answered solemnly.

  8

  They buried Lon Maddon and held the inquest before Brandy returned from California. The probable cause of death was determined accidental.

  “Nothing she can do about it now,” Hutch said. “She’ll find out soon enough when she gets home. No sense in spoiling your mother’s vacation. Can’t help but wonder if somebody didn’t push him down that shaft and steal the whiskey.”

  Brandy bubbled with news of the twins and their families when Rachael and Hutch picked her up at the depot in Denver. They waited until they reached the cottage to tell her of Lon.

  “Oh, God, I knew I should have moved it.” The blood drained from Brandy’s lips. “But I kept putting it off.”

  “What are you talking about, Mom?” Rachael poured her a cup of coffee.

  “You’re not the only one who doesn’t think about things she doesn’t want to, Rachael.” She took a deep breath and closed her eyes. “Thora K. and I once stored a large freestanding mirror in the mine to –”

  “We found it. And as Thora K. would have said, it was ‘some hugly.’” Hutch spooned sugar into his cup. “But your daughter had to have it so we took it down to Sophie’s along with a few other things Rachael wanted. That girl’s going to grow up to be a junk collector.”

  Brandy stared at Rachael through the steam of her coffee. “So that’s how it gets back there. You.”

  Her mother’s gaze was haunted and so direct that Rachael squirmed. “We’ll bring it up here again if you want it. I –”

  “No. What will be will be, I guess. I just wish I knew how to get rid of it. Or what would happen to me if I did. Exactly where is it in the Gingerbread House?”

  “I wanted it in my room but Grandma made us put it in the attic. She doesn’t like it either. She said it was a gift to you from Grandfather McCabe a long time ago. Why did you keep it in the mine?”

  “Oh … to get it out of the way. It’s a big thing. Was it covered at all when you found it?”

  “There was a blanket tied over it.”

  “Are you sure? That’s odd. Maybe it didn’t have anything to do with it. Maybe …”

  “Anything to do with what?” Hutch asked.

  But Brandy would say no more. Her delight over her trip to California seemed to have evaporated.

  On December 7, 1941, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor and May Bell Smith dropped dead of a heart attack at the age of sixty-six. There was no known connection.

  “You said December 11,” Hutch said of the air strike.

  “The only dates I can keep absolutely straight are 1492 and Rachael’s birthday,” his wife answered.

  The Brandy Wine and several of the larger mines in the area were in full production. Nederland and the smaller town of Tungsten just below the dam showed renewed signs of life. No boom this time, but steady employment for the miners still in the area and others that would come. The Wolf Tongue Mill just above town belched forth steam for the war effort and dumped its wastes into Middle Boulder Creek.

  Rachael was in her first year at the university in Boulder on the proceeds of the leasing of the Brandy Wine. She’d enrolled in liberal arts with an eye toward a teacher’s certificate because her mother said she would become a writer and Rachael was out to prove her wrong for once. Her figure had reapportioned itself more to her satisfaction and she’d begun to date.

  In January the abandoned house on what had been the Bar Double M burned to the snowy ground. Rumors of Nazi spies and “Jap” infiltrators sending signal fires made the rounds in Nederland. But Deputy Skinner told Hutch winter winds had whipped up the poorly doused remains of a fire left there by some cowboys who’d camped in the house the night before.

  On Decoration Day Rachael helped her aging grandmother decorate the family plot in Columbia Cemetery in Boulder and then drove to Nederland in the secondhand Chevy her folks had given her on her eighteenth birthday.

  When she reached the cottage her father was out, but her mother, as usual, refused to accompany her to Nederland’s cemetery.

  “Graveyards remind me of pink granite tombstones,” was all she’d say.

  Rachael walked across the valley. Decoration Day was often late in Nederland because the cemetery sat on a shaded hillside and would normally be piled high with snow. But this year the thaw had begun early and though she picked up some mud on her penny loafers, she didn’t have to walk in snow.

  Flowers would still get pinched by night frost here, but she carried a trowel and clippers. Snow melt trickled down the gullies beside the road. Drifts hovered yet in the shadows where pines stood thickest.

  Thora K.’s grave was bare of snow and Rachael cleared away winter-dried weeds. She rearranged the ring of white rocks that outlined the plot.

  Here lies the body

  Of Thora Killigrew Strock.

  But her spirit is in Cornwall,

  As it do belong to be.

  Thora K. had talked so often of returning to Cornwall. But death hadn’t waited.

  Rachael straightened the weathered wooden marker where little Penny Strock slept beside her father, Corbin. Rachael wondered what he had looked like and why Penny’s name had not been Penelope.

  A sad job, but comforting in a way … as if these mounds of earth retained an essence of lost loved ones. She left Lon Maddon’s grave till last. She didn’t like to think of him lying all those years in the dark hole of the Brandy Wine.

  Rachael brushed the dirt from her hands. Someone had laid a wreath on old Doc Seaton’s grave. Nearby, Mr. and Mrs. Binder slept side by side, hemmed in together by a low concrete wall.

  The faint scent of spring’s beginnings pushing green through rocky soil … the cool dampness that retreating snow left on the air … the musty dirt smell clinging to her still …

  A cloud covered the sun, taking away the warmth, muting the contrast of spring and winter colors.

  Rachael shivered, slipped her arms into her sweater sleeves and picked up her trowel and clippers. Shaking off her thoughts of the past, she noticed a solitary figure standing between her and the road.

  He had his back to her and wore the dark blue of an officer of the United States Navy.

  She felt an unreasonable resentment that he should bring the present and a reminder of that awful war to this quiet place of the past.

  As she walked behind him he turned. His liquid brown gaze skimmed over her without recognition. But Rachael stopped short.

  Jerry Garrett had grown into his bones. She could no longer look him eye to eye.

  He stood before two graves secluded in a darkened hollow formed by three pines and a bare thorny bush. Snow obliterated all but the small close-set headstones.

  Catherine Garrett’s stone leaned toward the newer marker of May Bell Smith.

  A broken branch of the bush swayed on a silent breeze, trailing an ancient cobweb across Catherine’s last resting place.

  He seemed to realize Rachael hadn’t left and he turned to her again, his look questioning and as cold as the snow on his mother’s grave.

  “Jerry?” she said a little nervously, still trying to adjust to the transformation of that boy into this broad-shouldered young man. “I’m Rachael Maddon. Remember?”

  Rachael blushed with the memory of Brandy’s prediction that she’d someday marry him.

  “Rachael Maddon,” he repeated as if his thoughts were returning from a distant place.

  He glanced her over in a fashion more in keeping with the U.S. Navy. “You’ve changed some, Rachael Maddon.” A brief smile.

  Rachael felt like an awkward girl again. “Have you been back long?”

  Jerry turned to the graves in the hollow. “I’m on my way to San Diego and the war,” he said, as if reporting in to his mother.

  “Won’t you stop by the house when you’re through here? Mom and Dad would love to see you too. They live in town now. Dad built a cottage right where you and … Catherine used to live.”

  “There’s nothing
here,” he said with a last look at the hollow. “I might as well go with you now. I didn’t really expect there would be anything,” he added defensively and followed her to the road.

  They walked slowly, pausing often so she’d have time to fill him in on the people he’d known during his year in Nederland, the sale of the ranch, her life in two houses and two towns. “I feel like a yo-yo. But here I’ve been yacking on like an idiot. You probably don’t even remember half these people or the things I’ve –”

  “I remember some of it. I remember finding that dead man in that cave, I can tell you. Had dreams about it for years.”

  “You found a dead man in a cave near Nederland? That would have been news I’d have heard about. You must have it mixed up with some other place.”

  He stopped. His hands had been jingling loose change in his pockets. That stopped too. With his head tilted, Jerry Garrett looked at her in the oddest way.

  “What’s the matter?” Rachael wondered if anyone noticed her standing in the middle of the road with this tall, good-looking serviceman.

  “You really blocked it out, didn’t you?” He removed his hat by its bill and smoothed his hair, replacing the hat in the precise manner she’d seen young officers do so often of late.

  “I see a lot of uniforms like yours on campus. The navy has a language-training course at C.U. Are you going to take it?”

  “Just finished it. I leave for San Diego tomorrow.”

  “You mean you’ve been here – what – six weeks? Why didn’t you get in touch with us?”

  “I don’t know, Rachael Maddon. I thought about it. But … I don’t know.” He shrugged and started jingling change again. “Who is May Bell Smith?” Jerry looked back up the road toward the cemetery.

  “You know, I didn’t know until last year? It was supposed to be a secret and Mom didn’t tell us till May Bell died. Come home with me and ask Mom, she –”