by D. J. Butler
Hiram clearly couldn’t take Michael with him, because that would stop him from asking the questions he wanted to ask of Gus Dollar. Michael was aware of Grandma Hettie’s wisdom, but Hettie had died when Michael was just nine years old, and Hiram had been careful to hide the fact that he followed in her footsteps.
He took the revolver from the glove box and carefully rotated the barrel, taking the hammer off the empty chamber, and putting it over a live round. Then he laid the pistol on the seat between them, near Michael’s hand and pointed forward.
“This revolver is loaded and ready to fire,” he told Michael.
“Okay.” Michael’s breathing sounded shallow.
“I’m leaving it with you.”
“Yeah.”
“Don’t be excited. Don’t be nervous. Nothing’s going to happen.”
“I get it, Pap. You’re worried because of the fighting we saw today, and because you got shot, so you’re leaving the gun with me. While you go in and, I don’t know, talk with this shopkeeper some more. Because, clearly, the guy who sells Coca-Cola is secretly running everything and has all the answers.”
Hiram ignored the barb. “Don’t shoot unless you have to, but if you think you have to, don’t hesitate. I’d rather have you dressed up for a jury than dressed up by a mortician. Keep the car running. I’ll approach in the headlights, so I’m clearly visible. I won’t be long.”
He walked up to the deep porch in the bright yellow glow of the truck’s lamps, then stepped up to the well-worn planks and examined the door and the front windows. He saw no posted hours, no sign saying either open or closed.
He saw again the strange curls of lead in the front windows, black in the light of a dimmed kerosene lantern sitting on Gus Dollar’s countertop. What did they mean?
Hiram knocked, setting off a furor of barking within. Through the window he saw the two Rottweilers, bounding over each other to get at the door and sink their teeth into him.
Hiram waited for Gus.
The shopkeeper arrived. “Go on, shoo!” He chased the dogs into a back room, and then he let Hiram in. The dried mint and other herbs gave the room a pleasant odor, as did the sweet pine burning in a squat stove on the side.
“Evening,” Hiram said.
“I like that,” Gus said, a twinkle of a laugh in his voice. “You don’t want to commit to the quality of the hour.”
Hiram was caught on his back heel. “What?”
“Is it a good evening? Is it a bad evening? You don’t want to say, so you just tell me it’s evening.” Gus shut the door. “Which I had already noticed.”
“I’m sorry,” Hiram said. “I was raised in a home where…you didn’t talk about some things. I learned to listen more than I talked, in most conversations.”
“Ah, yes.” Gus laid an index finger alongside his nose and winked as he walked behind the counter. “I understand.”
“Not just that.” Hiram felt a sudden urge to explain. He felt safe here, talking with this fellow practitioner of the old arts. Gus knew the world in the same way Hiram knew it. “My father was a polygamist. Still is, I suppose, if he’s alive.”
“You don’t know?”
Hiram fidgeted. “He left us. When I was very young.”
“Ah,” Gus said. “Now I understand everything.”
“What do you mean?”
“You.” Gus shrugged. “You were abandoned when you were very young, so now you work hard to prevent other people from being abandoned.”
“No.” Hiram shook his head. “I’m just trying to do what’s right.”
“Hmm,” Gus said. “But you are, what, forty years old?”
“Forty-four.” Hiram crossed the store to stand in front of Gus at his counter.
“So the practices that were mandatory when you were a child became the oddities that were winked at when you were a young man and then the crimes that are now prosecuted, when you are grown. The world you were born into has disappeared.”
Hiram nodded. “How long have you lived in Utah? You sound like you know it well.”
“I was in the state as a younger man,” Gus said. “And then in Colorado for many years. So as a boy you had to keep the secret of your father’s other wives, as well as your…lore. Were they nice to you, these other wives?”
“I never met them.” Hiram’s eyes stung. From the kerosene smoke? “I only learned they existed late, and I never knew their names.”
Gus frowned. “Did you have brothers and sisters, at least? By the same mother, I mean?”
Hiram shook his head. How had the conversation gone in this direction?
“I see. Your mother was the disfavored wife. You were kept in a corner. Perhaps hidden from the others. You were abandoned more than once, my friend. But have you met your half-siblings as a grown man? They must be easy to find, no? All with the same name. What was it, Woolley?”
“My father stopped coming around while I was still young. Later, I learned he had moved to Mexico. The other families went with him.”
“To avoid prosecution. Ah, your mother truly was disfavored. I am so sorry to hear of your suffering, my friend.”
Hiram plucked his bandana out of the back pocket of his overalls to blow his nose. He bit his tongue and managed not to tell Gus Dollar the rest of the story: after his father had moved to Mexico, his mother had spent weeks weeping, and then months staring out the front window at the road up to Salt Lake City; then his mother had disappeared, and Grandma Hettie had told him she had died, without ever identifying a cause of death, and leaving Hiram with the unsettled impression all his life that his mother’s end had been dark and maybe shameful.
“Every person suffers tragedy.” Hiram cleared his throat. “I guess what matters is what you do in response to it.”
“And in response to your tragedy, you became a kind of knight-errant, riding around the deserts of Utah helping the poor. And a braucher, we Germans would say, or you English would call it a ‘cunning man.’” Gus smiled warmly. “You are not a man of this century, Hiram Woolley.”
“I don’t know,” Hiram said. “I do like my truck.”
“So you learned to keep secrets,” Gus said. “And since we know each other’s great secrets now, you thought you could share something else with me. Or ask a question, perhaps.”
“I only got here this morning,” Hiram said. “But I’m beginning to suspect something…occult behind the closing of the Kimball Mine. Something caused the Kimball brothers to shout at each other over the heritage of their father.”
“Heirs who squabble are more common than heirs who don’t.” Gus shrugged.
“But these men…each was convinced that the other was lying. But they weren’t.”
“You have a charm?” Gus’s eyes gleamed.
“I carry a stone. And Samuel Kimball seemed certain that Ammon had access to some shared piece of knowledge, and Ammon denied it. Some person they both had talked with, I think. And whatever it was, it was too sensitive for either of them to speak about it clearly. Something of their father’s, or something about him.”
“The stone you carry…it’s a peep-stone?”
Hiram shook his head. “It’s a bloodstone. A heliotropius.”
Gus added a smile to the gleam in his eye. “It’s a shame you don’t have a peep-stone. Maybe a seer stone would give you the knowledge you seek.” He furrowed his brow. “Maybe the brothers saw their father in a séance?”
Hiram shrugged, feeling tired and baffled. “That might be. Some of the men think the mine is haunted. Is it possible it’s haunted by Teancum Kimball, and both his sons have seen the shade? Or it might be something more like a…document they both have access to?”
“Or you are misreading what passed between the brothers.”
“Or I’m misreading it.” Hiram nodded. “So this is why I’ve come to you. If there is something occult being done at Kimball, you might be in the best position to know it. What have you seen, Gus? What might there be between these men
?”
Gus shook his head. “I’m afraid I have no idea.”
“Do you know why the mine is closed?”
Gus took a deep breath. “I know enough about mining to know what sorts of things miners and their wives would like to buy, and I know that mostly because they ask me. I think the Kimballs have run out of money, and so they can’t stock their store. It is unfortunate for them, the miners, their hungry families. I hear some have taken to banditry. All because the two brothers can’t agree on where to dig.”
Hiram thought about Naaman Rettig, and the offer he was being sent to make to Ammon Kimball. Might the railroad tycoon have used some means to create dissension between Ammon and Samuel? He was ambitious and driven and he wanted the land, but Hiram couldn’t imagine how the railroad man could be fueling strife between the siblings. And beyond that, he didn’t want them in conflict; he wanted them in agreement, and accepting his offer. Also, he hadn’t seemed the type to use a hex.
Perhaps Hiram had misread him.
Hiram spoke in a low voice. “Maybe it would solve their problems if someone bought them out?”
“Well, you know,” Gus said. “If someone bought your farm from you, you wouldn’t have to worry about farming anymore.”
“But that doesn’t mean I’d be interested in selling,” Hiram concluded. “Of course, someone else buying the mine and investing more cash in it might mean work for the miners. So that might be a solution for the workers, even if the owners didn’t like it.”
“Are you thinking of getting out of farming, and digging for coal instead?” Gus smiled like an imp. “I don’t think it’s an easier business.”
Hiram shrugged. “Just thinking. I only brought enough food for the miners for a couple of days. That mine has to start up again.”
What if the railroad man was some kind of witch? Or one of the Kimballs was? If magic was afoot, it would serve Hiram well to prepare additional defenses. Stepping to the window, he reached up and took the bunch of bay in his hand.
“I wish I could help,” Gus said with a sigh. “But I don’t know what’s causing all the trouble at the mine.”
A dull pain throbbed in Hiram’s thigh and he sucked in a sudden breath.
No, not in his thigh. Against his thigh. In his pocket.
The heliotropius.
“Is something wrong, my friend?” Gus Dollar asked.
The bloodstone pulsed again.
Gus Dollar was lying to him.
The green stone was an imprecise tool. It did nothing if a person was being merely evasive. It also wouldn’t tell Hiram what truth Gus was concealing, but it warned Hiram of deception.
“I hurt my back up at the Kimball Mine this morning.” Hiram grunted, bringing the cluster of bay leaves to the counter. “I don’t suppose you have anything I could take for it?”
“You don’t mean a charm?” Gus smiled, but now the smile felt like a threat.
Hiram smiled back, and as his gaze swept the inside of the shop, he noticed things he had missed before. Lamens—metal sheets inscribed with arcane symbols—standing in discreet corners, a heavy Bible resting on a butter churn behind the door, pierced stones on leather thongs hanging as if by accident from larger appliances, the corners of a sheet of paper protruding from underneath the book of accounts, paper that looked virgin, and therefore might bear a written spell.
And in the windows, the queer twists of lead. They moved in and out of Hiram’s vision as he looked at them, disappearing and reappearing again.
Gus Dollar wasn’t merely a braucher. There was a good chance he was a witch.
“I can do that myself, of course,” Hiram said. “Maybe aspirin?”
Gus produced two yellow tins of Norwich Aspirin tablets, 5 grains each. “It says take one or two,” the shopkeeper said, “but for a serious pain, I’d take as many as four, and at that rate, a tin will only last you a day.”
Hiram took the tablets without setting down the bay leaves. “And the herbs.”
“You’re going to cook?” Gus asked.
Hiram smiled as blandly as he dared. He must bluff, and bluffing was not his strong suit. “They’re a good counter magic,” he said. “In case I’m right about the Kimballs.”
“Of course.” Gus looked at the purchases. “Make it an even dollar,” he said. “A dollar for Gus Dollar at Dollar’s.” He laughed.
Hiram laughed too, then paid, then did his best to exit without stumbling. He stepped carefully into the beams of the headlights and approached the Double-A as evenly as possible.
When he had slid into the cab and was sitting beside Michael, he took a deep breath.
“You okay, Pap?” Michael asked.
“Yes. Drive around that corner, please.”
Michael drove and Hiram looked back, until the lights of Dollar’s were obscured by a wall of rock and the turn of the canyon. “Okay, wait here.”
“If you’re heading back to burgle the shop,” Michael said, “I could go for another dope.”
Hiram left the aspirin and sneaked down the cold, empty road, back to Dollar’s. He crept around the darkest side, where no light shone from the windows, looking for the spot where the shingled roof came closest to the ground.
It was the porch. At the far end of the wide porch from the shop’s door, Hiram carefully stepped onto the planks. Earlier, the dogs hadn’t barked until he had knocked, and he counted on them to have the same response now. Taking one of the rocking chairs and moving slowly to avoid creaks, he crept to the edge of the porch and set the rocking chair on the ground.
Standing on the chair’s seat, he was able to reach up and touch the fringe of the roof’s shingles. With his clasp knife, he cut away half of a shingle and tucked it into his coat pocket. The shingle was wooden; so much the better.
Then he replaced the rocking chair and crept back around the shop the other way. Only when he reached the truck did he realize that his heart rate was elevated, and his chest felt squeezed tightly, as if he were in the grip of a gigantic fist.
“It’s me,” he murmured as he approached Michael’s window. “Wait just a minute while I climb into the bed of the truck.”
Hiram carefully stowed the shingle in the bottom of his special toolbox, safely securing it all again before climbing down.
“Okay, Pap,” Michael said when Hiram finally stood beside the cab. “I won’t shoot you. But what were you doing back there, really?”
“I forgot something.” Hiram hated the lie. “You wanted Coke, didn’t you? I guess you drank yours.” Hunger pangs twisted in his gut. He had been fasting a full day, and was ravenous. He tried not to think of the Snickers bar he’d given Mary McGill.
“Pap,” Michael said, “I have a confession.”
Hiram imagined the worst. “Are you alright?”
“I already drank both our Cokes. You can’t leave me sitting alone in this truck with Cokes, and expect to find them when you come back.”
Hiram would have laughed, if he hadn’t been so shaken by his encounter with Gus Dollar. “Did you keep the bottles, by any chance?”
“Both bottles, yes I did.”
“Good. Hang on to them.” Hiram slipped into the passenger seat. “Let’s get up to the Kimball house.”
He took a deep breath as Michael put the truck into gear. Gus Dollar was a liar, and Gus Dollar had bested Hiram already twice, luring him into Gus’s store and then making him bare his soul. He’d defeated Hiram’s bloodstone, to boot. Only by sheer chance had Hiram put his hand on the bay leaves and learned of the deception.
Who was Gus, and what was he up to?
And what did he have to do with the closure of the Kimball Mine?
Hiram was so deep in thought, he almost didn’t notice that Michael took the hill in second gear.
Chapter Eleven
They sat parked by the side of the road for twenty minutes while Hiram worked.
He poured all the aspirin tablets into one of the Norwich tins. In the other, he mixed the tinct
ure with his fingers, standing beside the truck. On the farm, he would have used a mortar and pestle, but he didn’t carry those in his toolbox. A flashlight, balanced on the hood of the Double-A, let him gauge the consistency. Stars twinkled overhead, but no moon.
Hiram tried not to think about the cold.
Michael, wrapped up in his coat, sat in the bed of the truck strumming his Sears, Roebuck. For being the five-dollar model, the guitar didn’t sound half bad. Hiram didn’t know the song, but the lyric sounded risqué: Let me be your salty dog, or I won’t be your man at all. Hiram realized he was shaking his head, and forced himself to laugh instead. He couldn’t yell at the kid for not playing “My Darling Clementine” or “The Handcart Song.” And Michael’s love for music had given Hiram the space to prepare the cure for Ammon’s boils.
If he could cure the man’s boils, that might help soften his heart.
Hiram set the shovel in the bed of the truck and placed the Central Milling flour sack next to it. The company had started making their flour sacks with patterns, so women could sew dresses from the packaging. This one had golden peonies on a blue field, but no one would be making anything out of this particular flour sack, on account of the bloodstains.
“You ready?” Hiram asked.
“I guess,” Michael said. “But Pap, you giving me the gun, that was serious. How much more trouble is there going to be?”
Hiram shrugged. It was bad business: railroad men, union organizers, desperate miners, starving children, and a family torn to pieces. Throw in a powerful witch who might be causing trouble, and it just kept getting worse. Had Teancum Kimball really run off with his child bride, or was he dead? If he was, did he sleep peacefully or was he out and about causing mischief from beyond the grave?
Michael burst into laughter. “And that, ladies and gentleman, is my dear, old dad. I ask a question and he ponders it for five minutes.”
“We have to be careful is all,” Hiram said. “This might all be over tonight. Ammon might take Rettig’s offer. Or he might agree to extend credit, go easier on the men. Either way, we can go home to the farm. I expect you’re anxious to get back on the tractor.”