Lilac Mines

by Cheryl Klein

  Calla smiles sadly. “Your plans always involve some elaborate story. Look, just listen to what I’m saying…” Two jaybirds are quarreling in the branch above their heads, so it’s hard to do this. There are so many other voices. “Before I met you, I thought I had to be so good all the time, like God was watching me. But that’s just as impractical as being bad all the time. What I’m saying is, you’ll always be my best friend.” Her eyes are two dark knots in the plank of her face. “I’m saying we can still see each other.”

  Lilac takes this in. It’s true: before meeting Lilac, Calla would never have thought about taking her wedding vows with an indiscretion already planned, hidden beneath her white dress like the seed of a baby. But the squawking birds and the boiling afternoon and the cold sweat forging trails beneath her corset don’t allow anything like compromise. And so Lilac musters more mean words for Calla, more impossibilities, and then she begins the long walk home, alone.

  That night she breaks out in a fever. In the small looking glass above her bed, her eyes look greener than usual. Her face seems long and thin, but maybe that’s just because she’s so used to looking at Calla’s heart-shaped face. Her father paces the cabin. Usually he eats whatever Lilac has made for supper and falls straight into bed. He says he gave up drinking because he plumb got too tired to bring the glass to his lips, but Lilac knows it was because of her, and money.

  “I should call a doctor,” Harry Ambrose worries.

  “No, you shouldn’t.” Lilac’s throat is dry. She knows this is what her father wants her to say.

  He studies her in the dim lamplight of their cabin, which is too cramped for two waking people. Harry Ambrose has coarse brown hair that sticks up from his head if he so much as runs his hand through it, which he is doing a lot now. There are deep black lines in every corner of his face: the grooves around his mouth, the place where his nose meets his brow, as if he were drawn with a charcoal pencil.

  “Who’ve you been hanging around with?” he wants to know. “Who got you sick?”

  “No one,” says Lilac. “Just let me sleep.” Though she knows she’ll be awake all night.

  “I don’t have any idea what you been doing since you finished school,” Harry realizes. “I recollect when you were only this big and I felt awful leaving you to go work. Now you’ll be leaving me any day, I reckon.” It’s not nostalgia. He too looks vaguely feverish, with the wild look of a man who knows he’s already lost his daughter.

  It could end here. At a wedding, with wildflowers threaded to a borrowed trellis and a simple gold band glimmering hotly on the small pillow Robert Hogan clutches. There is only one reason Calla would marry so soon, and Lilac’s stomach clenches with this realization. She wonders if Calla’s is clenching, too, for her separate reason.

  It could end here, but Lilac has decided it won’t. It happens like a fever dream, a song building in the back of her head and pressing to burst out her mouth. Lilac sits at the back of the church with her father. He bounces his knee anxiously, touches his pomaded head. He has never liked churches. Lilac knows she will never like them either. Her good dress is wilted against her body. The hard, dark pew is the exact opposite of the beds that she and Calla pressed their shapes into. The pew doesn’t care if she’s here or not. She’s almost not.

  “So hot in here it seems evil,” a voice from another row says. “Doesn’t seem right for a wedding.”

  Lilac tries to think of a word for this kind of heat. It makes her body so real—her prickly armpits and damp neck and warm female parts—that her mind wants to leave town. She wants to become a ghost and float into the cool atmosphere. Calla is so far away. She is a ghost, too, in her cream dress with the mutton sleeves and high collar and rim of pearls. Barrett looks like the devil, standing there next to her with his red face. This is a lie that Lilac tells herself. If there is a truth in this airless church, it is that Calla Hogan and Barrett Lyman are a lovely couple. A breath of normal in a hell-hot church.

  When Reverend Lake asks the congregation to speak now, Lilac holds her peace. Her mouth opens, but she feels like she’s waiting for Calla to enter it, not for words to come out. Come into the cold cave of my mouth, she wills.

  There is a reception at the East Beedleborough Hotel afterward. The congregation trudges down the road to the hotel, like a pastel funeral march. The couple glides into the dining room from an upstairs room. Barrett is still wearing his black suit but has removed his top hat, and Calla has abandoned her heavy-cream wedding dress for blue cotton with small brown flowers.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, I present Mr. and Mrs. Lyman,” someone announces, and everyone claps. Lilac thinks about Calla’s discarded name lying on the church floor like a block of type.

  Calla shakes hands and receives kisses on her flushed cheeks. Lilac waits. Lilac holds her peace in a way she never has before, sitting at the bar even though it garners strange looks. She tries to order a beer, but the bartender gives her a warm glass of water instead. When Calla finally makes her way to the tall stool where she sits, Lilac says, “I liked your wedding dress.”

  “My stepmother made it,” Calla says. “I left it on the bed upstairs.”

  Lilac doesn’t want to think about beds. “I like this dress, too,” she says.

  Then the fever dream seems to take over. She touches Calla’s dress. She finds a loose thread and begins to pull. “It doesn’t have to end here,” she says. Lilac holds onto the thread because that is all there is to hold onto. No one sees them leave. No one hears the words that change Calla’s mind. That convince her the impossible is possible, that there is a world waiting for them.

  People will tell stories anyway, of course. They’ll shuffle things around, planting the baby in Lilac’s belly instead of Calla’s, or imaging suicidal thoughts in her head. As for the one who knows only how to be good, they’ll erase her altogether. What else is there to do with a person like that, really? History has no place for those who honor its rules.

  The mine waits for them. There are things that are real because of facts and dates and hard church pews, and there are things that are real because we need them to be real. We name the need and tonight it is called thread.

  The thread is invisible between Lilac’s sweaty fingers. She pulls Calla up the mountain. We’ll go somewhere cold, Lilac promises. Snowdrifts. Sarsaparilla. Ice cream made in a tin can rolled with salt on the damp ground. Lilac pulls for both of them. She pulls and plans. They’ll wait till dark in the mine. It’s a Sunday, and the mountain is empty as a hungry stomach. Then they’ll cross the Sierras on Indian footpaths into Nevada. They’ll eat yucca roots and quail eggs.

  What’s Nevada like? Calla wants to know.

  A glass bead, cold in your hand, Lilac lies.

  They are at the top of Moon Avenue, the edge of everything. No mules today, dead or alive. They look back at the church. It’s so small, says Calla.

  Like a house and not a church at all, Lilac agrees. Let’s pretend they’re our neighbors, a big family we just visited, and now we’re going home to gossip about them.

  You are bad, Calla laughs.

  The mine waits for them. They will spend just one night there then move on, they tell themselves. It is as cool as they dreamed. They go into it and keep moving until their bodies fill the mountain like silver.