Lilac Mines

by Cheryl Klein

  Anna Lisa props herself up on one elbow and nibbles on a leftover slice of raisin bread with her free hand. Sid’s bread is so good it doesn’t need butter. He adds things to it that most small-town bakers wouldn’t dare: dates or walnuts or pumpkin seeds, and once, pimentos. Anna Lisa admires his ability to just make things, to conjure something delicious or strange out of flour and eggs and odds and ends. She wonders if she could do it.

  “What do you think, Chelle?” she asks. Chelley makes slurping noises at Anna Lisa’s chunk of bread. “Could I open my own bakery and make up recipes? What if I opened it in Lilac Mines? Then I’d stay out of Karyn’s hair. What if I did what she and her dumb old fiancé can’t seem to do?”

  Because she doesn’t have to make sense when she talks to her dog, she lets the idea become almost real, a secret between the two of them. She could get a loan, if not from the bank, then maybe from Sid. She could revive one of the restaurants on the edge of town, so that people driving from Beedleborough to San Andreas might stop when they’re hungry.

  It begins with a piece of old mining machinery Anna Lisa must have passed hundreds of times, but since she’s started wearing her glasses all the time, distances are harsh with detail. It’s 100 yards or so from the road—a few miles from town—a jut of wood and metal. At first she thinks it’s a fruit stand. Even after two years in an empty town, she’s always looking for signs of life, with a mix of hope and dread. She slows her car, then stops. It’s a huge contraption, taller than the younger trees that partially obscure it from the road. Its skeleton is composed of wooden beams wider than her body. Even when she worked at the Clarkson Sawmill, years before the logging regulations began, there were no trees this size coming in. These are the proportions of another century. What is not wood is heavy, rusted metal: cogs with teeth the size of her fist, cylinders as thick as her torso. She guesses that this was where the ore from the mine was crushed, the silver forced out. It’s definitely not a fruit stand. but it does provide a certain amount of shelter from the elements. There’s a wooden bench attached to a cement platform. With a little plywood and a portable cooler, it could become a fruit stand. Or a baked-goods stand.

  “Let’s see if we can make them stop,” she tells Chelley a few weeks later, as she unfolds the legs of a card table. It has to stay a game. It has to not matter too much if she wins or loses.

  She has a large thermos of coffee, two signs that says FRESH BAKED GOODS—one for the side of the road and one that she strings from the rusty metal girders of the converted machine—and a few trays of muffins. They are her own recipes. Following Sid’s lead, she’s elaborated on the basics of muffin science. She’s added shredded carrots, mashed bananas, currants, cherries, lingonberries. The lingonberries were terrible. She sits with her dog and her muffins and her cash box for two days before anyone stops. But on the third day, she gets a whole family. Mother and father, boy and girl. The little boy, who is antsy and smeared with whatever he was eating in the car, devours his blueberry-cheese muffin before Anna Lisa has even counted out the change and handed it to his father.

  “Alexander, you are a little piglet!” scolds the mother. He’s a scrawny boy, the sort who consumes food like a fire devouring a forest.

  “Mmmm, they are good,” says the father, taking a bite of his zucchini-bran muffin and pocketing the change with his free hand.

  “Maybe we should get some extras to take Grandma Tess,” the mother considers. “Could you give us an extra dozen of those berry ones, Miss?”

  “I only have six of the raspberry,” replies Anna Lisa with a smile. “But I could give you those and then six banana.”

  And so Anna Lisa sells out her very small stock to her very first customers. She assumes that they’re just passing through this string of mountain towns—they drive a clean black sedan and have an urban look about them—but somehow, word spreads. Maybe Grandma Tess is responsible. Maybe it’s the cold snap that prompts the oak and aspen trees to turn East Coast shades, encouraging scenic drives. Whatever the reason, Anna Lisa sells out of her FRESH BAKED GOODS over and over that fall. She doesn’t make a lot of money, but she has almost no overhead, so by the first snow, she has enough to approach Sid about matching her sum and opening a real store.

  “There are so many empty places in Lilac Mines,” she tells him. “I don’t even know who owns them—I guess someone must—but they have to be super cheap.”

  Sid twists a strand of his flat, gray-black hair nervously. “But who would go there? Lilac Mines is a ghost town.” He’s stating the obvious, but she nevertheless feels slightly insulted to hear her home referred to as a ghost town.

  “I’ll find somewhere on the edge of town,” she promises. “Somewhere right near the highway.”

  Amazingly, he agrees to it. Maybe he’s still in love with her, or maybe he likes the idea of having a chain, more or less.

  Anna Lisa visits the county courthouse in San Andreas, where she descends an ornate marble staircase to a stuffy basement room. She explains to the clerk—an elderly woman with bright red lipstick and trembling hands—that she wants to find out who owns several abandoned buildings in Lilac Mines.

  “Lilac Mines? That’s a ghost town, dear.”

  “I know, but I’m thinking of buying some property there. If I can figure out who owns it.”

  “Well now, that’s sure to be a bad investment.” Her voice shakes too, but there is no doubt in it. She has dark gray hair that has been braided and coiled tightly at the nape of her neck, and the deep lines on her face remind Anna Lisa of wagon ruts. “Don’t do it, dear.”

  “Can I just see the records, please?” Anna Lisa wipes sweat from her forehead.

  The clerk sighs and returns—a long, sweltering time later—with a thick, leather-bound book. The pages at the beginning are filled with slanting, purplish writing inked by a metal nib. The more recent listings of names, addresses and prices are written in small, black ballpoint letters. The column that says “Owner” is a tall tower built of one name: Clarkson Land Trust. Anna Lisa flips backward, and finds that almost every property purchased since the 1940s has been bought by the Clarkson Land Trust. Lou’s is there. Lilac’s is there. Meg’s house is there.

  “So all that time we were living on the Clarksons’ land?” Anna Lisa says to no one in particular. When they were dancing on Lilac’s ancient wood floors, bound breasts pressed to stuffed bras, they were dancing on the Clarksons’ floors.

  “You’d better believe it, dear,” the clerk offers. “I should know, I used to live there. When we ’bought’ property, we really bought a 99-year lease. See that column to the right?” She points with a gnarled finger. “Where it says ’Lessee’? That’s you and me. Clarkson still owns most of the town. They just sit on it. They get more from the property now as a tax write-off than they would if they sold it.”

  This too feels like betrayal. How can they just let the town rot? How can they not even care? She realizes that she has already been thinking of Lilac Mines as hers. It is her rebellious teenage child; she will comb its hair and cook its dinner no matter how hard it tries to run away, no matter how much it hates itself. To the clerk, she says, “You lived in Lilac Mines?”

  “I surely did. My husband worked for those goddamned Clarksons for 19 years.” Her jaw begins to tremble in time with her hands, a one-woman percussion section. “If you ask me, the town is cursed. When a little girl dies and a town shrivels up, you’ve got to let it rest in peace. But we were at war then, we marched right over the top of things. They say that little girl, that Lilac girl, went looking for gold in the silver mine. She got greedy, tired of being a poor miner’s daughter, thought she’d do a little mining herself. Should have been a lesson to all of us, but nope. The town just kept that Wild West spirit, with the mill gobbling up all the trees and folks doing unnatural things in the bars on Calla Boulevard. I don’t miss it one bit, dear, believe you me.”

  Anna Lisa continues to study the ledger. She supposes that, for enough mon
ey, she could buy her very own 99-year lease. She supposes everything is tainted, in one way or another. Every night she sleeps on Meg’s sheets, the Clarksons’ floor, the bone-dust of Indians. Finally she finds a property, at the corner of Washoe and Moon, that is not owned by the Clarkson Land Trust. She maps the address in her head. It’s the old church, she realizes. According to the ledger, it was purchased in 1971 by one Petra Blumenschein.

  She traces Petra to an address in Berkeley, a rose-pink bungalow with a wild-looking yard. Anna Lisa visits on an October afternoon. She waves bees away as she makes her way down the brick footpath in the pre-Halloween heat. A broad-shouldered black man with only one and a half legs opens the door. A pink scar straddles his upper lip like a wormy mustache. He looks at Anna Lisa with dark, glassy eyes; he looks like he could wait forever.

  “Oh, excuse me,” says Anna Lisa, stepping backward. “I think I might have the wrong address. There’s not a Petra Blumenschein living here, is there?”

  “Yeah, you got the right place.” He has a soft voice for such a big man. Metal crutches dangle from his forearms. With a clicking gait, he leads her to a yellow-tiled kitchen, where a woman with shoulder-length blonde hair jumps up from the table and extends her hand. She has skinny arms, but her shake is strong. She’s wearing an oversized army shirt, presumably her husband’s. “You’re Anna Lisa Hill, right? I was so happy to get your letter. It reminded me of the letters I used to get from Meg when I was younger.” She lets out a nostalgic sigh. “This is Carver McAdams.” So maybe he’s not her husband, or maybe Petra is one of those girls who didn’t change her name.

  “Pleasure,” Carver nods, leaning on his left crutch to free his right hand. Then he drops into one of the four wooden chairs surrounding the table, exhausted from the effort. Anna Lisa sits down as well.

  “I’m filming a documentary about Vietnam war veterans,” Petra volunteers. “After the colony thing failed, I started thinking about failure, what it meant, and what people do afterward. Honestly, it was the first thing in my life that didn’t work out. I mean, I’d always gotten straight A’s… I figured that if I had an idea, it would just happen for me. And then the mill closed and everything else started closing, and I realized Imogen was never going to leave Jody, and then Meg.” Her breathless tumble of words catches in her throat. “God, I miss her. I always felt like she was the moon and I was the sun, you know? We complemented each other. You dated her for a little while, didn’t you?”

  Anna Lisa does not want to talk about Meg. Petra is the sun, forcing everything in her gravity to dance circles around her. She talks like Meg was hers. Nevertheless, Anna Lisa has to ask: “Do you know why she did it?” She stares at framed photo on the wall, a proud-looking, longer-haired Petra linking arms with Imogen and a girl she doesn’t recognize. They stand beneath a banner that says 1st Annual Lilac Mines Festival. Imogen wears her hair in a short afro.

  “Personally, I think she was lonely,” Petra says. “I always tried to get her to move into the colony with us, but she didn’t really get feminism. She was an individualist, which is cool, but you can’t take down patriarchy all by yourself. She thought she could manage all her happiness and all her sadness on her own.”

  Anna Lisa does not think this is why Meg killed herself. More likely, this is the story Petra needs to believe: her colony could have saved Meg. Nevertheless, Meg was an individualist; that much is true. She remembers Meg’s long nights on the porch, drinking coffee with whiskey, telling Anna Lisa to go inside when she tried to join her. I just want some time with the stars, okay? she would say. Anna Lisa thinks that maybe, finally, she understands that impulse. That feeling that no human being is enough. She clears her throat. “Um, about the church? The colony.”

  “Right!” Petra leans forward. “I am so happy you want to buy it. Just name the price. I hate to think of it out there just rotting. You said in your letter you want to open a bakery, right? I think that’s so cool. The kitchen’s not much—you would need to put in a real stove and a big fridge and whatever else bakeries have—but it’s big enough that you could live there too if you wanted. Oh God, I just think it’s great. Maybe you can bring back Lilac Mines, Al.”

  No one has called Anna Lisa “Al” in years. The fact that Petra does means that Meg or Jody or Imogen must have talked about her, at least occasionally.

  “I don’t know if I can do that,” Anna Lisa says hesitantly.

  “Oh, I know you can. I think history is so important. That’s what I’m learning from this documentary. Most of our country wants to just forget the war, forget that we lost, move on. But I think we should record it all, every little detail. You wouldn’t believe Carver’s stories about the shit that went on over there. He’s let me interview him probably 25 times, and his buddies, too. White guys, black guys, everyone. He’s going to edit the whole thing, the bedroom is practically overflowing with film canisters. My girlfriend is ready to kill me.”

  Carver interrupts, “If you know anything about Petra, you know she’s a determined woman. I ask myself once a day why am I doing this. But it ain’t like there’s a lot of jobs waiting for me.” He picks at an invisible spot on the kitchen table with his thick fingers.

  Anna Lisa doesn’t know much about Petra, and she knows less about Carver McAdams, but she feels like she has more in common with him. The exhaustion, the scars. She wants to put her hand on the stump of knee that juts over the cliff of the chair.

  Petra is ready to give Anna Lisa the church. She is a full person, bubbling over. She has a realtor friend who will handle it all for nearly free, she says. Anna Lisa imagines living in the church again. She hopes that the smell of yeast and cinnamon doesn’t cover up the woody, waxy scent she remembers.

  She has only one more question for Petra, the thing she will need to know to make the church hers. “What was it like all those years? What happened at the Lilac Womyn’s Colony?”

  Petra beams. She is clearly thrilled to tell the story.

  The winter starts cold and fast, but exhausts itself early on, content to drop occasional shawls of snow and light rain on the town. Anna Lisa spends the months scrubbing the walls and re-staining the floors of the church. Her boss-turned-business-partner, Sid, joins her on weekends. It takes all her savings to renovate the kitchen and take out extra walls and turn the front of the church into a café space. The building is too big and poorly ventilated, but the stained glass windows make red and purple shadows that look like magical placemats on her secondhand tables.

  By late February of 1976, they’re ready to open. They just need a name (and an assistant). “A new Anna Lisa,” Sid says kindly. He means the assistant, but Anna Lisa feels like a new Anna Lisa. The freshly cleaned windows open onto snow-speckled mountains and immense blue sky.

  “You should call it Anna Lisa’s Café, or Anna Lisa’s Bakery… something like that,” Sid suggests.

  She’s not sure why, but the thought terrifies her. Anna Lisa shakes her head, “I couldn’t do that. How about Fresh Baked Goods, just like my stand? Or how about Sid’s Bakery, so people know that it’s an extension of your place in Beedleborough?”

  “But it’s not an extension… or not just an extension. And Fresh Baked Goods is too boring.” Sid laughs, “I’m not a creative type, but even I know that. It’s gotta be something personal.”

  Anna Lisa sits down on one of the wooden chairs salvaged from Lilac’s. She likes having a piece of the old bar in her bakery. If she puts her face close to the wood, she can smell beer and oily skin, and, she imagines, a trace of perfume. Anna Lisa is and is not Al. Now she’s a patchwork of Al and Nannalee and Annie. She’s okay with that. “I know,” she says slowly. “Let’s call it… Al’s.”

  “Who’s Al?” asks Sid.

  “It’s a nickname I used to have,” she shrugs.

  “But Anna Lisa is so much prettier.”

  She states, “We’re calling it Al’s,” and that settles it.

  By spring, Toby’s has opened up next d
oor to Al’s. Toby Minnitt cuts hair and sells tires, sandwiches, and used coats. So it’s just “Toby’s” because there’s no single noun that could explain all he does. Anna Lisa brings him pound cake and cinnamon buns. He cuts her long brown waves into a feathered fringe that tickles her ears. Lilac Mines begins to stir. Anna Lisa could swear that the trees turn greener, the sun shines a little brighter. Like the town is preparing itself.

  Just after Easter, the Lilac Mines Hotel collapses. Anna Lisa is eating day-old bread with jam in the yellow-white patch of sun behind the bakery when she hears a noise that makes her think of ghosts, the sound of something old on the move. She thinks of her first night back, at the hotel. Later that afternoon, she learns that the burnt-out building has fallen in on itself. Bits of dry-rot, ash, and mold were at work all these years, shifting imperceptibly, adding up to something huge.

  A month later, a bulldozer rearranges the rubble and a dump truck hauls it away, mountain by mountain. Maybe it’s the parade of cement and wood through neighboring towns, but it’s as if Lilac Mines is officially open for business, its charred past cleared. A gas station opens. Two gift shops. Soon there are people, moving through the streets and occupying the old houses. New houses grow like toadstools after a rain. They push into the forested west side of town.

  When Suzy comes to visit late in 1976, she says, “Nice town you got here.” The mattress buckles under the weight of her suitcase.

  “You don’t know the half of it,” Anna Lisa says.