Cold winds blew in from the west. The aspen high on the hillsides turned a lovely gold and Corbin brought up coal from town. But an Indian summer intervened and one day Shay and Thora K. sat on the porch sewing blocks for a quilt. The Cornish woman told stories of phantoms of the dead appearing to loved ones at the moment of their deaths.
“’Appened to me granny, it did.” It seemed everything that’d ever happened had happened to Thora K.’s grandmother.
“Her were laying in bed worrying about me fayther’s brother being so late home. ’Twere bright with the moonlight and ’er did get up and look out the window. And there ’ee were, walking toward the ’ouse. Her went to the door but when her opened it, no ’un be there. Soon they did bring ’im home, and dead ’ee was. Struck down by a runaway ’orse and wagon.”
“Thora K., do you really believe your uncle appeared to your grandmother like that? When he was dead?”
“Aye.” She put down her sewing and stared at Shay. “Tez easier to understand that than why a ’unman of twenty years don’t know how ter cook, sew, preserve or anything else, Brandy,” she said quietly.
Indian summer passed and so did Shay’s confidence in the mirror. She put on Brandy’s scratchy woolen underwear to fight the drafts that crept up her skirts.
Dr. Seaton persuaded Samuel Williams to make the trip down the canyon to the Sanitarium. His cabin was boarded up.
One Saturday night she awoke to hear Corbin and Thora K. talking. He must have just returned from the “kiddleywinks,” which was Thora K.’s word for saloon. “Look around ’ee, son. Do ’ee see wot her’s done to the ’ouse?”
“I think you and Brandy have fixed it up pretty.” There was a slight slur to his consonants.
“Her’s nesting, Corbin Strock. Her needs a babe.”
“Brandy’s not a bird and you know she shouldn’t –”
“I did tell ’ee about the reservoir. ’Er edden daft. She ’ave the sight and can’t be helping that.”
“And where did Brandy tell you the reservoir would be, Thora K.?”
“On the meadow. Same as her told ’ee.”
“Mr. McLeod is contracting to buy land for it up on Sulfide Flats, not on Barker Meadows. I just heard tonight.” Corbin’s footsteps on the stairs were none too steady.
“Well, it edden built yet,” his mother called after him.
Shay’d never heard of Sulfide Flats. She rolled over in the cold bed. When she slept, she dreamed of Rachael and woke longing for her mother. Lying still in the lonely dark, her eyes dry but burning, Shay wondered why she was such a child. She and Rachael’d never gotten on all that well when they were together. Her father, Marek, her friends were becoming like fond memories. Why then this morbid fixation with her mother?
The snow came first as powder that melted with the next day’s touch of sun. Golden leaves fell from the aspen. Tim Pemberthy came to supper at least once a week and spent half the meal looking over his shoulder at the wedding mirror. He told them that it’d been in the house when his brother’s family moved to Central City. But he’d heard its previous owner’d found it on a garbage dump outside a “fancy” house in Cripple Creek.
Thora K. had run out of scraps for sewing and Shay was running out of patience and busywork. She read all the books Sophie’d sent up. None would have made the bestseller list.
Shay scandalized Thora K. by buying new yard goods and tearing them up for quilting blocks and rag rugs. One morning she watched from a window a real wild bear rummage through the refuse heap beside the cabin. And she wasn’t even moved by the sight.
But she waited several hours before going to the spring for water, listened for his heavy body crashing around in the trees or breaking sticks.
Shay saw or heard nothing until she followed the path back to the cabin. As she approached the outhouse the trees tilted and a familiar feeling tugged at her. A thin mist rose from the ground, pulling her over.
Instead of fighting it as she had before, Shay tried to thrust herself into the fog. But it was so thin and instead of continuing to fall, she hit hard earth almost immediately, the bucket overturning on the path in front of her, spilled water staining the earth dark around it.
Shay began to swirl.
A faint image of a girl with ratted hair, bending closer, mouthing words Shay could almost hear. A modern light fixture above her head. But trees and the bucket showed through the girl as if she were translucent film.
The sickness … the sweating … Shay fought to sink deeper into the fog but the tugging weakened. The girl faded as though melting on the cold damp air.
Corbin found her lying sick and shaken on the path and carried her into bed, but she recovered in a short time. The wedding mirror was still safely under its quilt shroud.
It probably hadn’t worked at this end of time – but at the other. Her grandmother must finally have left the farmhouse with the sliding glass door and returned to the Gingerbread House and the mirror. But the girl in the vision hadn’t been Shay Garrett even in body. She was a stranger, had dressed like a hippie.
Whatever Brandy’d done on her side of time hadn’t been enough, but it gave Shay renewed hope that a reverse in bodies was not far off.
Winter arrived on screaming winds. Snow piled in drifts against the cabin. Corbin stayed home to tunnel to the cave for supplies and read aloud Brandy’s books to his mother, who could neither read nor write. With his bulk, the place seemed suffocated with people. But on Saturday nights he managed to get out to the saloon.
One such night, a blizzard wailed particularly strong and Thora K. pleaded with him not to go. By now Shay rarely spoke to him at all.
But he left and the women sat in front of the open oven. It was too cold to go to bed. Grains of snow seeped through cracks in the walls, formed little piles on the floor that looked like sugar.
They sat in silence for what must have been an hour, listening to the wind’s shivery sound, and then something snapped in Shay. She stood and pulled the quilt from the mirror.
“Do ’ee come back to the stove, child.”
“Thora K., I know this is going to shake your faith in me. But you’re the only person I can talk to. Brandy will need your understanding when she returns.”
“But ’ee be Brandy.”
“No, I’m Shay Garrett.” And standing in front of the mirror, with the lantern’s light making shadows in the corners of the room and lending a dull sheen to bronze hands, Shay told her story. The wind screamed to get in at them and provided an eerie background for her tale. As she talked she saw the muscles of Brandy’s face and throat relaxing. It was good to confide in someone at last.
When she’d finished, Shay went back to the stove. Thora K. poked up the coals and put the teakettle on.
“You don’t believe me, do you?”
The Cornish woman broke bread into two bowls and added herbs without looking up. “Edden zackly easy.”
“You believe a lot of strange things – piskies and phantoms of the dead. I thought you might be the one person who would understand.”
“Well, I’m some mizzy-mazzed, I can tell ’ee.” She looked at the wedding mirror thoughtfully. “’Twould explain why ’ee know things ’ee shouldn’t and don’t know things ’ee should, I s’pose.”
They ate hot kiddley broth and listened to the wind again.
“’Ee be used to a fine big ’ouse and tez a bad winter early ’ere. Sure it edden the cabin fever ’ee got, Brandy?” she asked hopefully. “Being shut up in ’ere and all?”
Patiently Shay went through her story again, trying to fill in any gaps she might have left the first time.
Thora K. mopped up puddles where the seeping snow had melted on the floor. “And this mirror – ’ow do it do this thing?”
“I don’t know what makes it work. Most of the time it doesn’t.”
“And John McCabe did speak of it as ’ee lay dying … fearfullike?”
“And he had his stroke in the same room with it. I
don’t know how much the mirror had to do with that but I think it would pay to be careful.”
“Mmmmm.” Thora K. draped the quilt over the mirror. “And this’ll ’elp, do ’ee think?”
“I don’t know that either, but I hope so.”
“This Rachael ’ee speak of would be Corbin’s daughter then? Wot’s wrong now, child?”
“There’s no Corbin in the family stories that I remember, nor any Strock children. But my mother, Rachael, did speak of a Thora K., who was an old woman she remembered fondly.”
“Do ’ee leave ’im then?”
“If I did … I mean Brandy did … why would there still be a Thora K. living with my mother’s family?” Shay answered miserably.
“Him do die afore me then and ’ee don’t know when?”
“No. I’m sorry I told you. It isn’t fair but I’m trying to be honest about it. You’re beginning to believe me, aren’t you?”
“Don’t want to outlive me Corbin as I ’ave the others.” She reached for the teakettle. “Let’s ’ave some tay.”
Shay scraped a peephole in the frost on the window. Nothing outside but a strange light darkness. “Shouldn’t Corbin be home by now?”
A clatter of cups at the table and Shay turned to see Thora K. blanch, her hand rise to her throat.
What have I done? Scaring this poor woman to death. “I didn’t mean to worry you. I didn’t listen very carefully to my mother’s stories. It’s really possible she did mention a Corbin and I’ve forgotten.” Which didn’t alter the fact Rachael grew up a Maddon and not a Strock.
They had tea and still Corbin didn’t come home. Please, God, don’t let it be now.
“Tell me more of this Rachael.” Thora K. finally broke the uneasy silence.
“I know her only as a mother, a grown woman. She taught school before she married. She looks a lot like Sophie McCabe, but she’s taller. She remembers you as completely white-haired so she must have known you when you were quite old. She grew up on a ranch somewhere near here. I’ve never been there, it passed out of the family before I was born and the buildings burned so there wasn’t anything left to take me to see – oh, she’s a writer.”
“Wot do ’er write?” Thora K. kept glancing at the door, twisting her fingers.
“Books for older children.”
“Storybooks?”
“Yes. Fiction about a lot of things. I haven’t read most of them. I wish I had now. But the ones I have are usually located in the West and have to do with girls growing up. Most of the girls have problems understanding their mothers and getting along with them. Now that I think of it, all that I’ve read do.” Shay pondered that discovery and wondered why. There’d been a lacking or flaw to Rachael’s novels. The other themes worked themselves out satisfactorily but always in the background the mother-daughter thing never quite resolved itself. Perhaps her mother was just being literary.
They brought their nightgowns and robes out to the stove to undress in the relative warmth. The wind stopped and the quiet was worse.
“’Ee should be off to bed, Brandy.”
“I’ll wait a little longer.” Had Corbin had too much to drink, gotten lost in the blizzard? Did he lie frozen in a snowbank?
They had another cup of tea and again Shay asked if her companion believed in her story.
“Some of me do and most of me don’t. ’Ee be a strange ’un fer sure.” Thora K. sat erect. “Do ’ee hear anything?”
The crunch of snow outside. The door opened.
Corbin looked astonished to see them still up. And even more astonished when Shay ran to hug him. “I thought you might be lost in the storm.”
He laughed and kissed her forehead. “It’s good to know I’m missed, but I’m not that easy to lose.” He held her a little longer than necessary.
By the smell of his breath, Shay figured he was stoked enough with antifreeze to sleep the night in a snowbank in comfort.
Thora K. gave a heavy sigh and trudged off to bed, her shoulders drooping. Shay felt an enormous guilt for having told her too much.
When she went to her room with a heated brick wrapped in rags for her feet, frost coated the nail heads on the inside of the outer walls. Shay lay shivering, listening to Corbin’s movements overhead, and then was surprised to hear him coming down the stairs.
He stopped in her doorway. “Brandy, it’s too cold for a man to sleep up there,” he whispered.
Shay moved over and opened the covers to let him in. More like May Bell didn’t have time in her appointment book. But she snuggled against him, tried to lie still and passive as he began to explore Brandy’s body. Nothing like a little alcohol to loosen the old resolve, huh, boy?
When he slept, she considered the fact that there were no planned-parenthood clinics in this world, no pill. What did women use now? There were no Strock children in the family’s history but that didn’t mean none had been born. The unwanted picture of one marble shaft marking the graves of three children in the Caribou cemetery invaded her mind and would not leave. Cara Williams and her newborn. Little Joshua McCabe, Brandy’s brother, had been only four …
She didn’t want Brandy to go through the heartbreak of losing a child and at the moment she was responsible for Brandy’s body. She’d have to talk to Dr. Seaton or even May Bell. Prostitutes must do something.
When Brandy came back she’d have enough problems to face without pregnancy. Though the time was drawing out impossibly, Shay held to “when” Brandy came back. It was her lifeline to sanity.
Wind scoured much of the snow away. The weather warmed and melted more of it to mud. About every other Saturday night Corbin decided it was too cold to sleep in the loft. He’d wake up sheepish and angry at himself and at her. Shay watched for May Bell out for her customary walk but didn’t see her. She had no opportunity to speak with the doctor.
Christmas came and everyone gathered in the town hall around a community Christmas tree to sing hymns. It would have been boring if Shay weren’t so delighted to get out of the cabin.
One day when Corbin went to the Brandy Wine Thora K. left for her meeting of Independent Champions of the Red Cross. Shay gave the mirror another chance with the usual results and then walked to Main Street to buy a chair with a back on it for Thora K. Perhaps she’d buy one for herself too. It was hard not to be able to lean back and relax except in bed. Particularly when so much time was spent sitting around the cookstove.
The air was crisp and snowdrifts lay dirty on the shaded sides of buildings. Shay walked on frozen mud ruts till she came to wooden sidewalk. For once the cold winds off Arapahoe Peak did not rake the valley but she thought she could hear them in the distance.
Gray sky. Gray buildings. Brown mud. Nederland looked like something out of a war movie.
Main Street was curiously barren of people. Two women talked at the far end and a CLOSED sign perched in the window of the little butcher shop on the corner. This seemed odd since it wasn’t Sunday.
She glanced up at May Bell’s apartment over the saloon. For some reason the day appeared even grayer there. Would anyone notice if she slipped up the stairs? Shay wanted badly to talk contraception with May Bell. But the women walked toward her now and she recognized both as friends of Thora K. She didn’t dare risk it.
A small gust of wind reached her from behind as she turned in at the door of the general store. It was even gloomier inside and empty except for Mr. Binder behind the counter.
“Where is everybody? The street’s so quiet.”
“All the men are off to court in Boulder today. Trying to settle that squabble over the election.” It seemed that two town boards had been elected because there was a doubt in the minds of some about the honesty of the first election and another had been held. Both boards claimed to be the legal one. “Didn’t your husband go down?” Even Mr. Binder, who was always polite, watched her candidly.
“No, he’s at his mine.”
“He’s like me then, more interested in busines
s than politics. What’ll it be today, Mrs. Strock? More yard goods?”
“I’m interested in a rocking chair, but I see you don’t have any.”
“Don’t stock ’em but I can order you one up. Only take a couple days.” The sound of the door opening, the scuffle of boots, and Mr. Binder looked over her shoulder. “Well, and here’s someone else who didn’t go to court. Hutch, Lon, whichever one you are. When did you get back?”
“Yesterday.” The rising howl of the west wind swept into the room and flurries of sawdust scooted across the floor before the door closed.
Shay turned to look up at her grandfather. Funny, she thought, that she had no trouble telling which twin this Maddon was, when others who’d known them longer did. Even without lips parted to reveal the lack of a gap in his teeth. Hutch held himself more stiffly, tended to put his head back and gaze at the world down the bridge of his nose. He wore his hat farther down on his forehead than Lon did, held his eyes fully open so all of the amber iris showed, while Lon squinted. Hutch kept his face expressionless, rarely smiled.
“Ma’am.” He touched his hat.
Shay nodded and turned back to the catalog Mr. Binder’d opened for her. Recklessly she ordered two rocking chairs, very aware of Hutch behind her. He was like facing destiny.
As she left the store she avoided his eyes. Her throat felt dry. Outside she stopped suddenly to stare across the street.
May Bell stood coatless on the wooden landing by her door. She held an armload of dresses. Shay watched her dump them over the railing into the dirt and snow below and then rush back into her apartment.
Shay steadied Brandy’s body against a particularly hard gust and pondered the woman’s actions. Then she saw a flame curl against the inside of one of May Bell’s windows. Smoke seeped through cracks between boards, to be whipped away by the wind.
18
“Mr. Binder!” Shay almost fell back into the store. “Fire in the saloon. Call the fire department.”
Mr. Binder ran to the window. “What fire department?”
“Hutch, May Bell went back inside,” she told him.
The Mirror Page 13