Liminal States

by Zack Parsons

  The employees of the Long foundry and the other businesses were scattered throughout and their dwellings tended toward cheapness and disorder. A hearty few solitary miners worked private claims beyond the limits of Spark and came into town to spend away a nugget. In the short years Warren Groves had held the office of sheriff these solitary folk had mostly gone. Their claims were bought up and the land stirred into the Pearce holdings. The sheriff lived beyond the town himself but did not bring law down to the drainage of Red Stem where the Chinese camps had grown and stayed.

  They had their own justice down in the mountain’s shadow. It was dirty and served the needs of industry for a price paid in men’s misery. Would the Pearce family have their way that law would be imposed on Spark as well.

  “Good to meet you this morning, Warren,” said Mayor Partridge. “Should I be concerned that you are on patrol this early hour?”

  The portly mayor was outside a parlor house in undershirt and suspenders. He appeared to be washing his hair out of a bucket. Soapy water dripped from his fingers. His cheeks were red with a fresh shave.

  “I will let you know on that,” said Sheriff Groves.

  Deputy Cole gave Sheriff Groves a sidelong look and a smile. They continued to ascend the mountain up Spark’s rutted main thoroughfare.

  They met Bo Fairway outside the Whitney. He sat beneath an umbrella at a table drinking coffee. It was the largest hotel in town and sported a three-story theater palace with gambling and saloon. Its ramshackle appearance owed to the gradual nature of its many expansions. No surer sign of a boom time in Spark than the sound of saws and hammers at the Whitney. Sheriff Groves reckoned it quiet enough to hear the ring of a spittoon in the hotel.

  “Have a coffee, gentlemen,” said Bo. “Sit down with me. The rowdies have all packed up, and it’ll be nice and peaceful. Have a breakfast.”

  “Had both already, Mr. Fairway, but I do appreciate the offer.”

  “Annie large?” asked Bo Fairway.

  Sheriff Groves slowed his horse with a light tug on the reins. “She is. Big as a barn.”

  “God willing everything goes well for the two of you. A good man deserves a break from hardship.”

  “Deserving got nothing to do with who draws a hot hand in this world.” Sheriff Groves saluted Fairway with a tip of his hat and rode on.

  Farther up Red Stem Sheriff Groves and Pat Cole turned their horses off the main road and followed a path worn between houses and rain barrels. Their destination was tucked away amid miners’ shanties. The large adobe house was finished in gaily painted wood and a sign above the porch read simply IDA’S. The woman herself stood in the doorway. She leaned against the frame like a cat against its owner’s leg. Ida was a cat for sure. She long-legged and tanned and since retired to open her own establishment. Her corset wasn’t as full as once it was and her thin limbs were drooping with the waste of age.

  Sheriff Groves and Deputy Cole tied off their horses at the post and walked into the shade of the porch. Ida Pinkney stepped aside to allow them in. There wasn’t much to her establishment, and it had no reputation for fine or tender women.

  The parlor was shabbily finished with a bar and a few tables and clay spittoons overflowing onto creaky planks. A cheap Walinford piano was intended for amusement and to keep men from fighting while they waited for friends. The real business was done in back with the Mexican Indian and Chinese girls in windowless mud cells separated by hung sheets. Space enough for six beds in four rooms.

  “Sheriff,” said Ida. “Glad Tom found you.”

  “It’s been a while. You are looking fine today.”

  “You are a bad liar,” Ida said. “Deputy Cole. How is Libby?”

  Pat Cole frowned and said, “Elizabeth is doing well. I am sure she will be happy you asked after her.”

  Ida chuckled. Her thick whore’s plaster turned the half of her face caught in the light into textured clay. She sat them down at one of the tables and flopped into the chair across from them with an unladylike weariness. “I have been at it since the day afore, so if my manners are not what you’ve come to expect, please forgive me.”

  Sheriff Groves set his hat on the table. “Your man Tom the Indian said you had concern the outlaw John Vargas was on the premises in the night. Said I ought to come talk with you on that. So here I am. Say what you felt you needed to.”

  Ida packed her lip with tobacco before answering. “I weren’t sure at first,” she said. “He is uglier than the scrawl on them posters. Is his hide really worth five hundred dollars?”

  “Alive and for his capture,” said Sheriff Groves. “To be paid by the Bank of New Mexico on account of evil done in Santa Fe. Not from my pocket, just so you understand. I am only concerned with outlaws in our town.”

  “I’ll trust your honest reputation not to usurpate no reward money from me.” Ida spit across the room with fine accuracy. A bit of brown juice dribbled from her lip. “There’s more to it than just John Vargas. He was here with a pig of a Mexican. They were talkin’ up some sort of train robbery. Spending money like they’d already done it but talkin’ like it was still to come.”

  “Did he say where and when?” said Deputy Cole.

  “By my own ear I cannot say. He spent money with one of my girls. Rose the Indian. She told me his lips loosened once he’d wet his prick. Says he’s got a whole gang, and they were planning it for tomorrow.”

  Sheriff Groves tapped the table. “Did he speak to his methods?”

  Ida rolled her eyes up as if she might see her memories. “Yes, actually, he sure did. Or maybe so. Rose told me John Vargas bragged when he got real drunk and sought her again about having a whole wagonful of powder. Stoled it from the engineers. You think he’s set to blow up a train?”

  “Vargas blew up a bank to get at its money. You said there was a Mexican with him?”

  “He didn’t do nothing except laugh at everything. Just laughing and laughing at even things that wasn’t jokes.”

  Sheriff Groves thanked Ida for the information and the water and left with Deputy Cole following him. They mounted up and began to navigate their way back out to the main road. The day was lighter and less colored, and the wagoneers and tradesmen were beginning to show their faces.

  “If you had to rob a train headed to Las Cruces, where would you lie in wait?” Sheriff Groves asked.

  “Jessup is the only stop between there and up north,” said Pat Cole. It was a well-known fact. In recent years Spark had directly competed with Jessup for the rail. A few years back the Pacific Southern’s surveyors had decided the grade favored Jessup. It dealt a blow to Sparks’s economic future. “They wouldn’t need a whole wagon of powder to rob a stopped train.”

  Sheriff Groves was glad his deputy was catching on. “They ain’t robbing a stopped train,” said Sheriff Groves. “They aim to stop it before it gets to Jessup.”

  “If Ida’s story was true.”

  “That bank robbery Vargas was in on went wrong in Santa Fe. He was just a part, not its leader, and they was a pack of wild idiots anyway. They accidentally burned all the money. Most of the gang was caught or killed.”

  A drunk lay passed out in their path. He was facedown and snoring into a puddle of sick crawling with flies. His feet were bare. Pat Cole guided his horse around the drunk. Sheriff Groves was sure enough in his mount to ride over the man.

  “I am curious,” Sheriff Groves said. “How does John Vargas have money to waste before a train robbery? I ain’t heard of a robbery that pays out in advance.”

  They emerged onto the main road and Sheriff Groves reined his horse to a halt. It danced in a nervous circle.

  “Vargas has been paid to do the robbery,” said Pat Cole.

  “Ride to the office. You and Turk lasso whoever you can and hand out stars. Good riders only—might be need to cross tough terrain. I intend to check Bo Fairway’s and the other cribs on the chance Vargas and his Mexican are still laid up in town.”

  “You reckon we sho
uld tell Colonel Midlinghall?”

  Sheriff Groves thought on the consequences of involving the Army and then nodded. “Mildenhall,” he corrected. “Yes. Army ought to be told,” he said.

  “What about Annie?”

  “We’ll stop by,” said Sheriff Groves. “I need to be certain she can hold for another day.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  There was Annabelle and Clarice and Penelope of the name Moraud; three beautiful daughters to a doting father. Monsieur Moraud was dedicated to the hand-making of violins. He was successful enough to employ a number of craftsmen, and the Moraud label was well respected and valued by musicians from Moscow to London. This business afforded Mr. Moraud and his three girls their tutors, housekeepers, and a luxurious home in the beauteous green massif of the Vosges, in the between where France and Germany folded together.

  Annabelle was the youngest of the girls and had come into the world as her mother left it. The doctor had said it was bleeding caused by a natural defect of her mother’s biology. Mr. Moraud had never voiced any blame toward Annabelle, but as a young girl she had secretly harbored the shame that it was her own existence that took her mother’s life. When alone, she stared at her mother’s painted portraits on the walls and wondered what parts of her mother endured within her. Was it her blue eyes or copper-colored hair? Did Mr. Mendel’s alchemy bestow to Annabelle the gentle point of her mother’s chin or the rosy cheeks?

  Mr. Moraud said that the physical resemblance was uncanny, but it was Annabelle’s way that reminded him most of her mother. She knew he watched her from his bedroom on the second floor as she stood apart from her sisters. While they played and sang songs together, little Annabelle spent her afternoons alone and silent in the apple orchard. She plucked fallen apples from the cold stream and filled her dress with them. In the evening she would peel them and bake them with sugar or honey.

  This idyllic life did not endure. The Morauds were Huguenots whose religion more closely resembled that of the German Calvinists than of the Catholics who lived all around them. The Germans of Strasbourg wished for Mr. Moraud to join them, but Mr. Moraud said he was a French patriot. “And those Germans do not dance,” he was fond of saying. “I must dance with my girls.” The Germans closed their shops to his instruments and refused to transport his violins east. His countrymen did not repay his loyalty. The Catholics who supplied his workshop refused him tendon and rosin and fine, imported woods. They heard he traded with the Germans, so they refused to transport his violins west.

  Mr. Moraud never wavered in faith, for he said it was a duty to his beloved wife to share her beliefs with their daughters. He doubled his efforts to instill faith in his girls even as his fortunes waned. He soon realized he could no longer afford to provide his daughters with all the finer things to which they were accustomed. He gathered them up in the parlor and explained that they would have to leave. He wished to take them to America, where they would begin a new life. He told them tales of this distant and limitless country to excite their imagination.

  Penelope, who was the eldest, sobbed and fled from the parlor and shut herself up in the cushioned fastness of her bedroom. Clarice, who was too finely-mannered for such a display, buried her face in her folded arms. Mr. Moraud sighed and sat back in his chair. Annabelle came to his side and told him that she wanted to see America. She had read of it in books, mostly books of Louisiana but also tales of the north, where vast cities grew with speed.

  Upon arriving in Boston, Mr. Moraud opened a business and established his family in a small apartment. Almost at once reality diverged from his plan. Mr. Moraud was cheated by his business partner and left destitute. He produced violins himself, though his hands were growing stiff with age, and these violins were shabby in comparison to the masterworks of his youth. He made enough money to buy wood for his stove and food for his daughters and little else.

  Annabelle watched life shape her father into something hard and unhappy. He returned each day from stringing violins and carving their necks a little more stooped and a little cloudier in the eyes. He drank schnapps and slept in his chair beside the stove. He did not sing any longer. He did not dance with his girls, not even during the holidays. The Bible they brought from France gathered dust upon the shelf.

  Penelope left first. Annabelle watched her pack in the night, afraid to tell their father that she was marrying a man of German stock and modest means. Clarice’s departure was more gradual and yet more sudden. She served as an office girl in a textile mill and spent her nights wearing gaudy dresses and pursuing men in unladylike ways. Annabelle barely recognized her. Their father suspected vice, and every conversation became one of terrible shouting and breaking crockery. Clarice simply did not return from work one evening.

  After three days passed, Annabelle urged her father to visit the mill where Clarice was employed to ask after her sister. Mr. Moraud went in a dark and serious suit but was turned away and told to keep off the property. They visited the gendarmes together, Annabelle by her father’s side as the man in the blue suit with the brass buttons told them that many daughters disappeared in a city such as Boston and that, after all, Clarice was old enough to choose to do so.

  Annabelle lay in the lonely room she had shared with her sister and imagined that Clarice, with her golden hair and bawdy American ways, had met a wealthy man and left with him for New York City. They dined in cafes atop the tallest buildings and rode in carriages that glowed at night with hanging lanterns. Father once said that he believed Clarice dead but spoke no more on the matter.

  Father left Annabelle last. The physicians told her it was a disease of his blood, contracted from an untreated wound. He lay sick for many days, growing grayer and grayer, speaking deliriously, mistaking Annabelle for her mother during his wakeful moments, until he was gone. She dried the last sweat from his brow and did not feel the urge to weep. Men from the church took the body the next day.

  She stood in his empty shop, no bigger than a shed, and touched the tools he had once used to make wood become a violin. She stood in the bedroom and looked at the small portrait of her mother beside his empty sickbed. She stared at the stuffed chair that still bore his shape. Her father was utterly gone. The burial was a matter of procedure.

  She returned home in her black dress and sat in his chair and drank his schnapps. In a despairing panic she searched the apartment for memories of the lives that had been stolen from her. She found pencils and scraps of notes and nothing. Nothing like what she wanted.

  Within a cabinet she discovered a tin box, small and green, painted by hand with the image of a woman wearing a wreath of flowers and leaves, and above this was the name Vervains. There were traces of corrosion visible at the worn edges of the box.

  It was so very quiet in the apartment. The stove had gone cold, and her foggy breath puffed into the room. Annabelle wiped her eyes and set the box upon the table. She opened it slowly, and the hinges squeaked. Within the box was a small pile of gold and silver coins and folded banknotes. There was an unpleasant, metallic odor but also the familiar smell of sawdust and string and the oils used to treat the wood her father had used.

  There was also a book, An Account of the West, its pages yellowed with smoke but its pasteboard illustrations clear and detailed. Within this book was described and illuminated a world without the stone tombs of tenements or the filthy alleyways prowled by criminals. It was an empty place, beautiful but waiting to be filled. Mountains, like the Vosges, capped with snow, and trains that seemed to paint the world behind them. Streams cut deep grooves into the world, and landscapes of impossible breadth were inhabited by mill wheels and stagecoaches and lonesome hotels.

  Annabelle was precipitously alone, and yet excitement fluttered within her. The whole of America stretched before her, where anything could be hewn from wood and stone and given form by perseverance and intellect. She decided the matter that easily. By this inheritance she would seek out the story that better suited her yearning. She would never re
capture the fairy tale of her childhood, but she could author her own somewhere far away from Boston. Somewhere west.

  Annie was alone beneath the quilt. Warren was gone. She recalled through the cotton walls of a dream his distant weight lifting from the stuffed mattress. He’d left early in the morning. Off to be Sheriff Warren Groves. She was accustomed to his settling disputes in town or arresting the rowdies, accustomed to wondering if he would come home with all his parts.

  It was a struggle to rise from the bed in her pregnant state. She padded to the door. Nel was puttering away in the kitchen. The old midwife must have been up early to fix breakfast for Warren.

  Annie returned to the bedside and knelt on the floor. She stretched a hand beneath the wooden bed frame and felt for the top of the box. Her fingertips found the smooth metal top and traced the corrosion upon the edges. She slid the box across the floor until it appeared at her knees. It was made from tin and painted with a portrait of a woman wearing a crown of flowers beneath the name Vervains.

  She stole a last glance at the door and opened the box. There were letters. Nineteen, she knew precisely, and each had been read a dozen times. Beneath the bundled letters were the gifts. There were golden earrings set with sapphire, a sparkling gold and exotic ruby necklace, silver rings, ivory and jade broaches, and bracelets—a treasure few men could afford their wives.

  She let her fingers drag across the jewelry, savoring each with the lusty guilt of an illicit lover. She lifted the stack of envelopes tied with a red ribbon. These letters were addressed to her as A, and her name was never penned within them. The bundle weighed a hundred pounds in her hands. She took out the most recent letter and found it seemed heavier than most.

  A, together soon, the beauty of the world will belong to you.

  Annie sighed. She never should have allowed him into that private world. They were her own words, repeated back many months later. Her romantic daydream.