The Mirror

by Millhiser, Marlys

  They parked the truck in the trees across the road from the mine and carried the wooden cases up the mountainside in several trips, rain striking their faces like cold pellets. Entering the Brandy Wine was no problem. The boards across the entrance were new and firm but the wood of the framing where they attached had rotted. Pulling some of the boards loose on one end, they let them dangle with the nails still in them and stacked the crates inside.

  “How am I going to get the haying done with you as well as the boys gone?” Hutch flexed his arms and shoulders, rubbed his neck. He looked fit for fifty-seven, lean and hard from ranch work. But Lon knew the day was coming when his twin would have all he could do to get his arthritis out of bed in the mornings. He stuffed a wad of bills in Hutch’s hand.

  “Here, hire a haying crew this year. Maybe this is all May Bell’s imagination and I won’t have to go nowhere. I’ll scout around after dark and find out.” Lon noticed a tall shape hovering behind Hutch on the other side of the entrance. “What the hell’s that?”

  Whatever it was, it was wrapped in a dirty blanket tied on with rope and stood almost as tall as they did.

  “Probably something of Thora K.’s. You better keep this money for your trip.”

  “Naw. I’ll get paid for the hooch tonight. You get yourself and the truck into town. Don’t worry if you don’t hear from me for a while. Somebody might be watching the mail.”

  They shook hands and Hutch ducked out into the rain that fell hard now. It might delay the rodeo but it would also wash out any tracks they’d left in the dust. Lon settled down beside the whiskey. He selected a bottle from one of the crates to keep him company.

  He took a nip and blinked as lightning flashed through the opening. Something resembling a metal claw gleamed at the base of the blanket-wrapped shape across from him. The covering rippled as if wind had gotten under it and couldn’t get out.

  Lon put down the bottle and rose to untie the rope, letting the blanket fall to the floor of the mine.

  “Ooeee, now if you ain’t the ugliest thing I ever did see.” It was a full-length mirror surrounded with hands and claws made of what looked to be brass. But that was impossible unless someone came in regularly to polish it. There was no sign of tarnish.

  Lon had gone back to his whiskey before he realized there was more wrong with this mirror than its appearance. He sat facing it but it was not reflecting his image. And it was making a humming sound.

  “Queer,” he muttered to no one, and raised his bottle high. The surface of the mirror ignored the movement completely. “Goddamn queer’s what it is.”

  Perhaps this batch of hooch was bad and affecting his mind. But he’d drunk so little of it.

  Again lightning flashed, briefly flinging the mirror’s contorted shadow across the rusting tracks along which ore cars had once traveled. But it made no impression on the cloudy darkness within the bronzelike frame.

  Wind stirred the blanket at its feet and the heavy scent of wet pine needles drifted in as rain splashed against the glass. Instead of beading and sliding down the slippery surface, the raindrops seemed to disappear on contact. Thunder rattled bottles in the crates behind him.

  Bewildered and forgetting his distrust of the whiskey, Lon brought the bottle to his lips and drank. When he lowered his head the haze had vanished. Prickles crawled among the roots of his hair.

  There was a picture in the looking glass now, but it was not Lon Maddon’s reflection, nor the reflection of anything inside the mouth of the Brandy Wine.

  6

  Lon stood, backed against the crates of illegal whiskey, the opened bottle overturned at his feet, its amber contents spreading out across the rocky floor of the mine.

  He watched a silent movie playing for him alone and with dizzying speed on the mirror’s surface. Random scenes flashed across the glass.

  A willowy girl with pale straight hair and a filmy costume that allowed the darkness of her nipples to show through and bared her legs to the crotch. A crowd of scantily clad people standing still on moving sidewalks. A giant machine that flew, hovered, and crawled across a concrete landscape.

  “Naw,” he said aloud, and shook his head, but couldn’t look away.

  Another girl in an old-fashioned dress. She looked like Brandy as a young woman. A city of tall buildings encased in glass under water. People appearing and disappearing when a man pressed a series of square, lighted buttons. Stooped people hovering naked around a fire, their jaws heavy and slack, their hair matted.

  Lon wanted to go behind the mirror to discover the secret of these projections, but fear and the tantalizing images kept him rooted. He was aware of the rain having stopped as he watched the mirror pictures. Thunder grew distant. The sound of water dripping from the trees outside … sunshine filtering through the opening … the grind of an engine down on the road …

  In a more rational moment he would have picked up a case of whiskey and flung it, shattering the mirror. But being confronted so unexpectedly by the impossible destroyed his self-control.

  With a huge effort, fed by terror, he pulled his eyes away and noticed a mist writhing along the floor from the direction of the mirror and toward his feet.

  He lost any control that might have remained and for the first time in his adult life Lon Maddon screamed.

  Then he was running … in the wrong direction … toward the inky bowels of the Brandy Wine.

  On the road below, Chief Geronimo, known to his mother as Edward Slack, heard the scream over the sick rumblings of his truck. He was so startled his foot jerked from the gas pedal and killed the engine. He leaned out the window and looked up the slope of old tailings, rubbing shivers from the back of his neck.

  Was there murder going on up there? It had sounded like a man’s scream. The intelligent thing to do would be to leave the scene quickly. Chief Geronimo Slack grabbed the hand crank from the seat beside him and slipped out of the truck quietly so as not to irritate anyone feeling murderous up on the mountainside.

  Steam seeped from under the truck’s hood. He’d meant to fill the radiator before he left Nederland but his uneasiness over the presence of the sheriff’s deputy and the ominous-looking man with him had caused the chief to leave town in haste and after just one show. The labeling on his medicine bottles didn’t bear looking into any more than did the contents.

  The chief loosened the radiator cap, using a chamois skin to protect his fingers. He kept water in the truck for just this occurrence, but if he poured cold water into the radiator without waiting for it to cool, he’d have a cracked block and no truck at all.

  He cursed himself and looked nervously up the tailing pile. These hills were full of old mines.

  The sound of another vehicle coming along from town was just as distressing. His truck blocked the road and it might be the sheriff.

  “Lord, you get me out of this and I’ll quit tonic and go back to working kidney pills,” he promised silently, and crept up the side of the tailings to where he could see the road and the partially boarded entrance to the mine at the same time. What if there was some old coot up here with a gun? The chief flattened himself on the ground and instant sweat covered his face as he recognized the sheriff’s deputy driving the approaching car. The gent with him was probably the one he’d seen in town.

  When the deputy turned off on an old ranch road and disappeared into the trees with no more than a glance at the truck, Chief Geronimo slipped his fingers under the iron-gray wig and scratched his barren scalp.

  The sound of the engine faded gradually, as if the car had kept going rather than stopping for the men to circle back and inspect the truck. No sound from the mine either. A robin bathed in a puddle in front of the opening where some boards hung loose, then cocked his head and hopped inside. He returned a moment later, showing no concern, and began to peck the ground between the metal tracks.

  Chief Geronimo gave a slight sigh and the startled bird flew off. “You’re gettin’ too old for this business, Ed.” But
he stayed where he was and watched the ranch road for a while.

  At first he thought he imagined the smell of whiskey. But then he made out the shape of an overturned bottle just inside the mine entrance. That scream he’d heard could have been some drunk having a nightmare. Nothing in there to even scare a robin.

  He hesitated and chided himself for being so skittery. To prove himself to himself he peeked into the opening. Nothing fearsome came hurtling out of the dark. He stepped inside. His eyes adjusted to the dimness and focused on stacked crates of bottles like the one on the ground, only these were full.

  “Sure would make a lot of tonic,” he thought aloud. “Hello? Anybody here?”

  He looked around outside. No sound. No sheriff. Should he risk it? “Maybe just one crate.”

  When he had it safely in the truck and no one had challenged him, Chief Geronimo Slack decided the radiator was still too hot to fill. So he dashed back up the mountainside for another case. This time as he was about to duck back through the opening he caught a movement out of the corner of his eye and almost dropped the precious load. It took him a moment to realize the man he stared at was himself reflected in a mirror. “Ed, you better have a swig of this stuff to settle your nerves,” he said as he returned to the truck.

  As long as no one was about, he thought he might be able to carry two cases at once and double his wonderful windfall. But the odd-looking mirror made him uneasy so he covered it with the blanket that lay on the ground in front of it. Wondering why anyone would keep a spooky old mirror and a stack of hooch in a mine tunnel, he filled the radiator and then sat with the truck running. “Oh hell, I can’t go off and leave all that.”

  When he returned to the mine the blanket had fallen off the mirror. Watching himself steal made him feel superstitious so he covered it once more and tied it with a rope that had been on the ground under the blanket. More secure now with the sound of the truck engine running and ready to go, Chief Geronimo cleaned out every last case and as an afterthought pulled the dangling boards into place, pushing the nails back into their original holes. True, he hadn’t found them like that, but if the deputy returned this way and decided to wonder about the truck that had parked below, the mine would look as if it hadn’t been entered in years. Perhaps then no one would investigate and find any tracks he might have left.

  One day when Brandy and Hutch were shoveling manure out of a corral, Thora K. sent the children to fetch Brandy to the telephone. They stayed to sit on the fence and watch Hutch work.

  “Did Uncle Lon leave because those men were looking for him?”

  “You just forget all about those men, Rachael.”

  “But you told them you didn’t know where he was.”

  “And that’s true, I don’t. You know your uncle, he’s always going off. He’ll come back when he’s ready.”

  When Brandy returned she asked Jerry to walk with her and they strolled off across the meadow without even a glance for Rachael.

  They sat on a boulder by the stream. He had his knees drawn up to his chin and his arms wrapped around them. Brandy tried to put her arm across his shoulders but he pushed it away.

  Jerry stayed alone on his boulder all afternoon. Rachael wanted to take him some food but Brandy wouldn’t allow it. “His mother has died, Puss, and he’s asked to be left alone for a while. We must be very kind and careful with him now.”

  Toward the end of August Jerry left for Pennsylvania to go to a school where, because he was an orphan, his living expenses and tuition were to be paid by something Rachael’s mother called the “Smith Foundation.” Rachael had Brandy to herself again.

  One night in February, Thora K. died peacefully in her sleep. The ranch house grew emptier. In the spring, Hutch Maddon made several trips trying to locate his brother but there was no word of him anywhere.

  “How is it you know things ahead of time but not where Lon is?” Hutch said at supper one night. “It doesn’t make sense.”

  “I don’t remember Rachael even mentioning him,” Brandy answered vaguely.

  She’d had a running cold since December and it had left her so weak that Rachael helped more and more around the house. They all missed Thora K.’s willing hands.

  By summer her mother could do little more than sit around and cough.

  “I’ve heard dying people sound better than you do, woman. You get in to see a doctor about that cough.”

  Grandma Sophie came for a visit and she agreed with him.

  “I’m sure it’s nothing. I don’t think Brandy was ever ill until her stroke,” Brandy said. “Rachael, why did you always talk so much about things and so little about people?”

  “You see, Sophie? She’s not even talking sense anymore. You stay with Rachael. I’m taking her in to the doctor.”

  “Hutch, I live to be at least ninety-eight.…”

  The changes in Rachael’s life that started two years before were not over. One by one family members had left the ranch house. And now her father would live there alone. Rachael moved into the Gingerbread House with Grandma Sophie, and her mother entered the Sanitarium in Boulder.

  7

  One day as Rachael fingered the beautiful shepherdess on the mantel, her grandmother came into the room. “Be careful with that, Rachael. It came all the way from Germany with your Great-Grandmother Euler.”

  Sophie explained the history behind each knickknack and stick of furniture until Rachael began to feel they were old friends that her grandparents and greats and great-greats had left behind to comfort her. “You seem to appreciate my treasures like your mother never did.”

  In the attic they explored trunks full of old clothes and Rachael dressed in long dresses. “What’s in this one, Grandma? It’s locked.”

  “I think it’s just stuck. Your mother’s wedding dress and veil are in here.” Sophie lifted out cascades of delicate lace all gathered to a little hat. “Perhaps someday you’ll want to wear this at your wedding, dear.” But her voice broke and she lifted the veil to her face and wept.

  “Grandma?”

  “I lost her. The day Brandy wore this I lost her, forever.” Sophie replaced the veil and closed the lid “I didn’t mean to, Rachael,” she whispered, “I don’t know what I did.”

  On Sunday afternoons her father came down from the ranch to visit her mother. Then he and Rachael would ride the bus or go to the drugstore for ice cream. He seemed a sad and lonely man.

  “When is Uncle Lon coming back? He could keep you company at the ranch.”

  “I don’t believe he is, Rachael. I’ve had the feeling for a long time that something’s happened to him.”

  One Sunday he told her Miss Hapscot was going to leave school in Nederland at the end of the term and go to California to marry Remy.

  “Does that mean he’s not going to come back? Or Dan either?”

  “According to your mother they won’t be back for a long while.”

  Rachael looked up at the Gingerbread House as they approached it, and it seemed to say to her: “You can’t count on people. But I have been here since your Great-Grandfather McCabe built me.”

  The leaves had fallen from the trees and made whispery, scratchy sounds as they scuttled across the street. Rachael wore new white gloves and held Sophie’s hand as they stepped across the trolley tracks that were no longer used. She could barely breathe as they stood waiting for the bus and hoped she wasn’t coming down with “TB” like her mother.

  “Now, you may not run up and kiss her. You must sit quietly and, whatever you do, don’t upset her. Talk about happy things.”

  When they reached the Sanitarium Rachael was reluctant to get out. “What if Mommy won’t like me now?”

  “Don’t be silly.” Sophie led her along the sidewalk. “Long illnesses do change people though.” She stopped to straighten Rachael’s hat. “She will look different but you mustn’t say anything and, dear … if she seems … Oh, never mind.”

  The building was of dark brick and the steps at th
e entrance were overhung with a heavy shroud of ivy that encroached upon the sides and from which the leaves had not yet fallen. They’d begun to turn a dull orange that blended with the closed door to form the illusion of a shadowed hole. Rachael saw another hole that yawned in her mind as it had in many a dreadful dream. Her fear was automatic and shoved against her lungs.

  Sophie reached into the dark hole, pulled open a door and pushed Rachael inside. “It’ll be all right, dear.”

  When she could breathe again they were walking down a gray hall that smelled of boiled cabbage and ammonia. Rachael covered her nose and breathed through the filter of her glove. A muffled coughing from behind a door. The squeak of a nurse’s shoes as she hustled past. They turned into a room.

  The woman in the bed had her mother’s eyes but her hair was limp. The woman in the bed was fat. Her face was puffy. “Hello, Rachael.” Something in her tone told Rachael she’d never be “Puss” again.

  The lady in the other bed smiled at her encouragingly and went back to her knitting.

  “I have a new friend at school.” Rachael tried to sit still. She wanted to leave. “Her name’s Arlene.”

  Only the knitting needles clacked in the silence.

  Her mother scratched at the pink sleeves of her bed jacket. “You never told me about this,” she accused Rachael. “You never told me I was in this place for months, maybe years. Or did I not listen?”

  “Don’t be ridiculous, dear. How could Rachael know this would happen, any more than the rest of us did?”

  “She knew. Years from now, she knew and didn’t tell me.” Brandy Maddon turned her head to the wall. “And all this time wasted.”

  “If you’re going to live to be as old as you say you are, you’ll hardly miss it.” Sophie laughed uncomfortably and looked at the other patient, who’d stopped knitting to stare at Brandy.

  “But Hutch won’t. I’m missing what time I have left with him.”