Savage Girl

by Jean Zimmerman

  “Shut up,” someone else said.

  By this I understood that the crowd was made up of an uneasy mix of first-timers and regulars.

  Directly below us, on the floor of the barn, a torch blazed up in the darkness, wielded by Dr. Scott. He began to speak.

  “Gentlemen!” he shouted. Then, with a bow toward my mother, “Ladies.”

  He waved his torch in a circle as though it were a baton. The pine-pitch flame traced loops and flowery arcs in the darkness.

  “Cast your minds into the blank and trackless emptiness of the Sierra wilderness. Savage, wild, forsaken by God and man. Thronged with ferocious packs of bloodthirsty beasts!”

  A high, keening howl tore through the darkness of the barn, and I nearly jumped out of my skin.

  2

  Two hours later my groin tightened and my stomach fluttered as I felt myself dropping down, down, down, a thousand feet deep into the earth, riding in a sweltering wrought-iron hoist.

  My mother, Tu-Li and the berdache remained above, seated comfortably inside the clapboard office of the Brilliant Mining and Milling Company. I had volunteered to go down and fetch my father for them.

  I was assigned Colm Cullen, security chieftain at the Brilliant Mine, a guide to the underworld for the stripling son of the firm’s owner. I met him up top, at the mouth of the mine, where he seized my hand with a grip that could mangle steel.

  “I’d like to see my father,” I said, sounding, to my dismay, like a child wanting his daddy. “Will you take me to him?”

  Stepping into the lift, I craned my head up to the purple sky above me, with just a dusting of stars emerging. Below, the blacker pit.

  We rode down in the “Elephant,” the mine’s number-one steam hoist, which hurtled fully as fast as a train. The heat rose up to greet us like a fist.

  “Gives the impression of warmth, don’t it?” Colm said. False bonhomie with the owner’s son.

  It did for sure give that exact impression. Other mines I had ventured into—just a cautious step into one here and there, never beyond where I could safely see the light of day, being afflicted with a bit of physical impatience in tight places, “claustrophobia,” my physiology professor labeled it—were cold and clammy. This one a steam bath. As wet as the tropics, but dirtier.

  “Can I take a look at your iron?” I asked.

  Colm Cullen had a big LeMat pistol strapped to his thigh, and when he unholstered it for me, I reached out, and it, too, was hot to the touch.

  Sharp-jawed, red-haired Colm wore a navy flannel shirt and navy work pants tucked into his knee-high boots. All miners preferred dark blue clothing, he explained, since it showed the dirt less. He had a bit of a squint and an almost invisible scar that ran along his cheekbone. He appeared coolly unaffected by heat or vertigo.

  I must have looked a little dazed, still in recovery from my recent encounter with Savage Girl in the barn.

  A breast, as white as any moon . . .

  I was not helped by the uniform that the Brilliant Mining and Milling Company had given me to wear: heavy rubberized shoes, thick cotton shirt and trousers, a felt hat and, for this swift trip down into the mine, a coarse woolen coat.

  The car did not ease into the mine. It dropped. The grille to the side of me—the hoist remained open on two sides—scorched my fingertips when I brushed it by mistake. Another cage passed us, rising up with a full load of ore that looked like a heap of blue-black sand. Steam rose from the pile.

  “Do you know what the body of a man sounds like when it falls a thousand feet?” asked Colm.

  A thousand feet was how deep we were going.

  Below, when the cage crashed to a stop, I stumbled forward into a finished-off gallery. I was aware of almost nothing but heat and closeness. The rock walls glistened with water, and drifts of vapor obscured the timbered reaches above me. I saw no one but could hear human voices. The acrid smell of nitroglycerin.

  A tremendous bang sounded somewhere close, its echo feeding off itself until the reverberation engulfed the whole space.

  “This is level one!” shouted Colm. “We got two more below, a thousand feet then another thousand feet more.”

  Pumps and pipes pulled steaming water out of the walls and ran it up to the surface. Otherwise, Colm told me, scalding floods would spout from the cavern’s sides. In the early days of the Comstock, untold numbers of mine workers had been boiled alive.

  “Do you have an egg?”

  “What?” I said.

  “Most of the tourists bring an egg,” Colm said. The water down here, he said, had boiled its share of souvenir eggs. Someone once brought a big one from an ostrich, and the waters had cooked it fine. Hadn’t I got one?

  “I’m not a tourist,” I said, although in my ill-fitting rig I am sure I looked the part. “I’m just here to find my father.”

  We crossed into the first chamber, a square space barely taller than a man and about the same distance wide. Then into a larger gallery. Rough-hewn timber stock and plank ladders stood propped up from one end to the other.

  Deeper and deeper we penetrated into the mine. Workers stripped to the waist, their shoulders and biceps gleaming like marble, wielding sledgehammers and drill bits, jamming charges into seams in the quartzite rock. The pick handles burned so hot that the job required gloves.

  I suffocated. From the heat or the fear of small spaces, I wasn’t sure, but I felt a fountain of panic bubbling within my chest. Get me out of here!

  Thousands of candles illuminated the gallery, flickering faintly, their tiny warmth swallowed within the larger furnace, like puffs of breath in a cyclone. The candle boxes affixed along the crumbly walls, Colm said, doubled as receptacles for human excrement.

  Bowels of the earth indeed.

  Staggering, I extended my arm and grabbed for Colm’s shoulder. It felt hard, like a seam of rock itself. I would faint.

  “Hugo!”

  “Father,” I said, half swallowing the word.

  Freddy made his way into the chamber, pink-faced, his graying walrus mustache drooping, spangled with tiny droplets of water. He had shed his coat, and his cotton shirt stuck to his torso, having been wet through and through.

  With Freddy were a half dozen men, his engineers, mine foremen, surveyors.

  “What are you doing down here, son? It’s dangerous for you to come!” Meaning I had been sick and was too weak for such exertions. I had been down, over the past year, not only with emotional illness but physical ones: erysipelas, infections of the eye, then bronchitis resolving into pneumonia.

  “I’m fine,” I lied. I was always the weakling in the family. My younger brother, Nicholas, who wasn’t along on this Western trip, was the strong and sturdy one, more like my father.

  I had seen Freddy just that morning, but it was different encountering him in the mine he owned, catered to and cosseted by his minions.

  “Isn’t it a marvel?” Tom Colfax, Freddy’s construction supervisor, said, gesticulating so broadly that his arm swept the cavern’s wall. “Every day we bless the name of Philip Deidesheimer. All these timbers.”

  A honeycomb of wood framed up the soaked, sludgy walls of the mine. The famous German engineer Deidesheimer had invented the structural design, enabling the further disemboweling of the earth, keeping the death toll among miners down to an acceptable number.

  “Square-set timbering,” said Colfax. “Six hundred million feet of timbers, buried now in Virginia’s mines.”

  “That’s an amount of wood enough to build a town of thirty thousand two-story frame houses,” said one of the vaguer underlings.

  Freddy reached over and gripped my arm, seeing what none of the others saw, that the heat was about to overcome me.

  “We send down ninety-five pounds of ice each day for every man working,” he said, propping me up. “And if you’ll accompany me, you can have a lemonade up top.”

  Cullen and Colfax stayed below while Father and I took the Elephant upward. Rising slower than it had
dropped, but still fast enough to make my stomach heave.

  Do not vomit on Father, I told myself.

  “Why’d you come down, son? I told you not to.”

  “Anna Maria and I have something to show you,” I said. “Tu-Li found it.”

  He went silent, the hoist cranking upward. Do you know how the body of a man sounds, I asked him, when it drops a thousand feet? I provided the answer as well as the question.

  “Like the whistle of a cannonball,” I said. “Just exactly like the whistle of a cannonball.”

  Freddy did not respond. Unlike Colm Cullen, he had probably never heard a cannonball scream past him, having not attended the War of the Rebellion. Freddy had in fact paid substitutes to serve in his place, a common enough practice for the wealthy.

  I couldn’t read my father. As I often did, I felt as though I were disappointing him. Going into a swoon on a mine visit.

  Back on the surface, I immediately recovered my equilibrium, my nausea vanishing to leave behind only a faint sense of embarrassment.

  My mother came to us across the equipment-cluttered yard.

  “Friedrich,” she said to my father by way of greeting. “You are going to want to see this.”

  • • •

  An Indian drumbeat, hollow and repetitive.

  The deep-voiced tones of Dr. Calef Scott sounding in the dim barn.

  “In a draw in a rock-choked valley, John Trent and his pregnant wife, Dollie Bertles Trent, both from Georgia, had built themselves a sagebrush hut. The lowest habitation, just above a coyote hole. The valley being the site of a Paiute-Pawnee massacree, the newcomers all ignorant of its evil reputation, its hauntings by the ghosts of the dead, Trent and his wife toiled to establish a mining claim.”

  Freddy stood with Anna at the balcony railing. Tu-Li and the berdache had not returned to the Savage Girl show with us, but though I had seen the whole spectacle that afternoon, I judged myself eager to witness it again.

  Scott continued with his tale. “Espantosa, the Spanish call the little valley where John Trent unknowingly sited his humble domicile, a name that means ‘frightful or menacing.’ Americans have a different name for it. ‘Satan’s Vale.’

  “There, on a black night in 1860 marred by a thunderous storm, Dollie Trent, large with child, enters labor. The birth went to complications. The agonized prospective father leaps aboard his mule and rides to seek help—a doctor, a midwife, anyone who can aid his wife, wholly maddened by the pangs of birth.”

  The same script as this afternoon exactly, identical cadences, Dr. Scott applying matching theatrical emphasis to the phrases.

  I left my father’s side to claim my former place at the far corner of the gallery but found a lanky, clean-shaven cowboy occupying it. He stared intently at the cage on the floor of the barn. He knew what was about to happen. He had been here before. I attempted to move in on him. Without looking, he shouldered me backward.

  “As Trent rides on his heroic quest”—I braced myself, and there was a tremendous crash—“a thunderous bolt of lightning strikes him from his mount, and he falls dead.”

  The “thunder,” an immense sheet of tin, manipulated by Scott’s toady down below, died to silence. Into which rose an eerie sound, a newborn baby weeping (a kid goat, squeezed and poked by R. T. Flenniken). Then assorted yelps and growls (a trained dog) overcame the weeping and also died to silence.

  “When neighbors arrive at the little brush hut the next morning, they find Dollie Trent lying dead. There is no sign of the infant. The baby, it is surmised, had been dragged off and eaten by the rabid beasts of the wild. Fang marks showed on the woman’s breast. A pack of wolves left tracks in blood upon the scene.”

  Scott pronounced this last in perfect Shakespearean iambics. “A pack of wolves left tracks in blood upon the scene.” I could only imagine what my father must think of all this. But I was more intent on claiming my former vantage point at the rail. I nudged the cowboy. He turned to look at me, surly.

  I held up five fingers.

  Understanding immediately, he shook his head.

  I used both my hands, spread out ten fingers. He nodded, I gave him a ten-dollar silver piece, and, grudgingly, he moved aside.

  Freshly ensconced, looking down into the gulf of the barn, I silently mouthed the words: Our story has only begun.

  “Our story has only begun!” Scott shouted. “Ten years later a lowly shepherd is confronted in sheer panic by a pack of lobo wolves ravaging his herd. But that is not the true terror. Running alongside the wild beasts, dashing about manically on all fours, is the apparition of a human girl, naked as the wind!”

  The door of the cage on the barn floor clanged open, the crowd in the gallery above surged forward, the balcony rail groaning with their weight, and two forms appeared down below at once.

  A bleating sheep.

  And the quicksilver outline of an adolescent female, indifferently clothed, crossing the darkened space with amazing speed, slamming into the poor animal and knocking it senseless.

  A collective gasp from the audience in the gallery. The sight of a human being running about on all fours asserts an almost mystical sway upon the modern sensibility. It is difficult to describe. It possesses the ghostly power of a long-suppressed memory.

  Another burst of inexplicable speed and she was gone. Fled beneath the rickety gallery. The crowd craned over the railing but could not see.

  Down below, the Toad dragged away the dazed sheep.

  The shepherd’s tale is doubted, I said to myself.

  “The shepherd’s tale is doubted,” Dr. Scott said, taking up his tale. But other reports begin to come in, fantastic tales . . . “But other reports begin to come in, fantastic tales, a cowboy alone in the high chaparral, confronted by a witch, half human, half wolf, a sheepfold ripped through and human footprints found, a stakeholder’s wife, frightened mute, witness to a piglet-stealing creature she cannot even describe.”

  The gallery was wholly silenced. Dr. Scott had his audience mesmerized. Even I felt swept up.

  This is where I myself enter the story. . . .

  “This is where I myself enter the story,” Dr. Scott said. “Hearing these reports, my curiosity was excited, my interest piqued as an esteemed natural scientist with several degrees from highly prestigious universities in the East.”

  He bowed modestly.

  “I organized a search party. By means of a simple subterfuge”—below, R. T. Flenniken tossed a raw beefsteak into the center of the barn floor—“I managed to take hold of the savage girl of Satan’s Vale.”

  The figure crept from below the balcony, snatching up the piece of meat, and Scott pounced on her. She screamed like a monkey, biting, clawing and kicking.

  It appeared a real battle, entirely unchoreographed. The two grappled and rolled about the floor, banging into the walls of the barn, shaking the whole structure.

  We saw that Savage Girl had been equipped with a ridiculous extension of her hands, a set of six-inch talons that acted as claws. Ridiculous yes, to the rational mind, but in the dim murk of the barn, terrible and horrifying.

  Another full-throated shriek, half sob, half howl.

  Savage Girl straddled the supine form of her erstwhile captor. She raised the hand talons above her head. With a look of fury, she drove them downward.

  “Watch out!” shouted one of the spectators.

  Scott rolled to one side, and the claws barely missed him but embedded themselves instead in the dirt of the floor. Thus immobilized, Savage Girl was easy prey for the triumphant Dr. Calef Scott. He roped her with a lariat and hog-tied her limbs, capturing the creature who only moments before had been on the verge of murdering him.

  The crowd erupted with hoots, catcalls and applause.

  Dr. Scott bounced to his feet. “Gentlemen!” he called out, forgetting, for the moment, my mother in the gallery. “I give you the Savage Girl of Satan’s Vale!”

  Clapping, shouting, stomping, the audience members sough
t to collapse the very balcony upon which they stood.

  Below, Savage Girl revealed.

  Bound, she remained ungagged and snarled pathetically. The thin muslin garb she wore might as well have been transparent. The stimulating display continued as Dr. Scott trod victoriously in a circle around her, the dominant, strutting male who had tamed the rebellious female.

  He peeled off her hand scissors and tossed them dismissively aside.

  From my post I could gaze directly down at her. Flashing amber eyes. Jet-black, thickly matted hair, tangled to the degree it resembled a swatch of carpet, not locks, more like a mane. I had expected her to be filthy, yet instead she gave off an air of catlike cleanliness.

  She was nothing but a child. Seeing her thus a second time, I felt the hand of pity brush against my heart. It passed in a moment. In that moment, though, I swore she looked directly up at me. Not supplicating. Not pleading.

  Challenging.

  With Savage Girl’s capture, some of the vitality went out of the presentation. But Dr. Scott was not finished.

  “By painstaking degree I have pieced together the story of this low creature, the Savage Girl. For years she had lived alone in the wilderness, accompanied only occasionally by her pack of lobos. How did she survive our terrible winters? She found a cave, and within that cave she found a hot springs.”

  Dr. Scott knelt down and began to untie his captive.

  Shouts of “No! No!” came from the audience. The spectators feared for his safety.

  “And with that knowledge I found the key to pacify my wild quarry. Because you see, gentlemen—and if there are those among you affronted by female nudity, avert your eyes—yes, gentlemen, there is nothing Savage Girl enjoys more”—pausing for effect—“than to take a bath.”

  Wild cheers, whistles, throaty, guttural catcalls.

  “She became accustomed to daily, sometimes hourly, lavations in her cavern redoubt. Would you wish to witness her tamed and domesticated, no longer savage but rendered meek and unresisting by her enthusiasm for hydrotherapy?”

  “Yes! Yes!” cried the spectators.

  “Show me!” Scott roared. “How strong is your desire? Is it a weak thing? Demonstrate your approval!”