by Ashna Graves
“No reason you should go. You can’t undo what’s done.”
They walked on in silence, their feet finding the way. Despite her inclination to believe Holland, Neva could not help wondering whether he would have come up to the house had she not discovered him. Why couldn’t he wait until morning to check the water line?
But her doubts were settled when she lit the lamp and he produced a bottle of Cabernet from a canvas bag, followed by smoked trout, clearly meant for a social occasion. He wore clean jeans and a button-up blue shirt, and smelled faintly of floral scent that seemed familiar, though she couldn’t place it.
While she got out glasses, he arranged fish and crackers on the lone China plate from the cupboard. She was hunting through drawers when he said, “The corkscrew’s hanging on a nail just inside the pantry, if that’s what you’re looking for.”
“You know this cabin better than I do, it appears,” she said, flourishing the new-looking corkscrew.
“That’s where I’d put it.”
They carried everything out to the porch, which was softly lighted by the glow of a lamp burning in the main room.
“To Billie Creek gold,” Neva said as they touched glasses. “That includes everything from the evening light to what comes out of the ground. This is really a lovely treat, Gene. Thank you.”
“Thank you,” he said. “If you weren’t here I’d be falling asleep in my bunk over some technical article or other. This feels like a holiday. To be honest, I didn’t feel like being alone after the funeral. I needed a good long walk with a friendly face at the end of it.”
“I’m glad you came up.”
“You’ve got the dog, I see.”
Neva told the story of Juju’s midnight arrival, which made Gene chuckle, easing the somber mood. Even so, conversation did not come readily, and after a particularly long silence, Neva gave in to her curiosity. “Do you have a family somewhere?”
“A stepson is all. I was married for six years. She didn’t like the mine but it’s hard to blame her. You have to be a little crazy to like this life.”
“Does your stepson like it?”
“He’s a real nice kid but afraid of everything that moves, snakes, mice, porcupines, even cows. All his life he was so afraid of getting shots he decided to go into acupuncture to get used to needles. That’s what he’s studying. He said he’d like to practice on me sometime but I said I preferred to take my chances with the rattlers, thank you.”
Neva laughed, then waited for him to perform the usual social echo of asking about her family. He said nothing, so she volunteered, “My husband died kayaking when our son was little.”
“That’s a real shame. I’m sorry to hear it. Where’s the boy now?”
“At Berkeley. Studying geology, as it happens.”
“Not for mining, I hope?”
“If so I’ve never heard a hint of it. He’s always liked rock, which I’ve been thinking must run in the family.”
“You didn’t get hitched again?”
“It seemed more important to focus on raising Ethan. Now, if you wouldn’t mind, Gene, I’d like to talk about a different part of my family. Is this a good time to tell me what you know about Uncle Matthew? You must have known him far better than I did.”
“Well, I didn’t really know him all that well, I’m afraid. He was so quiet, and it was a lot of years ago that I last spent much time with him and Orson.” After a moment of reflection, Gene said in a storyteller’s voice, “To understand your uncle’s life, you really need to know something about mining, about this mine in particular. I suppose the place to start is with Johnny Jorgerson who first staked the claim. That was in 1898, and as it happened, it was the very first mine out here. Jorgerson and his partner spent the first winter in an 8-by-8-foot shack they built in two days, believe it or not. That one burned down a few years later, not much of a loss, I’m sure. Anyway, they worked all winter cutting a serpentine through the pastry so they’d be ready with plenty of ore to sluice by spring.”
“Wait,” Neva said. “Could you please put that into English?”
“What’s that? Oh, I see. I guess I’ve been around mining too long to know what I sound like.” What he meant to say was that the partners had cut a zigzag trench through the surface soil of the slope to get at the gold-bearing gravel from the old riverbed. When spring came they constructed a trough of split logs to bring water from the creek to process their heaped ore through the sluice box. “You know sluice boxes?”
“Kind of like a big sieve?”
“Same idea, different design. It’s basically a big flat box with ridges on the bottom. You wash the gravel over it and the heavy gold lodges against the ridges. It’s like panning but you can process a lot more material mechanically than by hand. Out here we do placer mining, which is nothing like hard rock mining, where you blast and tunnel your way along veins of gold or whatever mineral you’re after. Placer mining gets at the alluvial gold, that is, the stuff washed down by rivers and creeks. You understand that gold is heavy? So even in nature it settles out lower than anything else. Miners look for deposits that have settled out over eons. The gold gets left behind in rock fissures and the bottoms of pools in the creek bed after the lighter material is washed away by the river, but still you have to sort the material, getting it down to finer and finer grains. Gold even gets trapped in the roots of rushes and other plants that grow right along the bank. Does this all make sense?”
“Fine so far. I had a general idea from seeing Reese’s operation.”
“Good. Now to get back to Johnny, he and his partner soon began turning up some real nuggets and when the news reached town, it started a small gold rush on the creek.” Back in those days, Elkhorn had been such a boomtown that the local banks minted their own money. Miners dug ditches to bring water for sluicing, and for spraying away the soil as they followed rich deposits, often deep into the hillsides, which is why there were a few tunnels still to be found. But it wasn’t until the Depression that the creek’s biggest rush hit. “You had whole families out here working the claims. Men, women, and children too. A claim is twenty acres, and the person that claims it is called the locator. You can put up to eight names together to get a hundred and sixty acres. By all accounts, things were lively out here until Roosevelt put the lid on it by capping the price of gold at thirty-seven dollars an ounce.”
Gene shook his head with an air of regret. “I know it was a rough life but I can’t help wishing I’d been around for the heydays, when everybody and his brother expected to strike it rich and at least some of them did.” When he was a kid, he said, a few of the 1930s cabins were habitable, with homemade furniture, cooking pots, and jackets still hanging on the walls. Artifact hunters, packrats, and weather had done for most of it. By the 1950s when his dad began mining, there were only half a dozen active claims on the creek, and it stayed that way until the 1970s when President Nixon deregulated the price of gold.
“It shot up to eight hundred bucks an ounce, and you had miners prowling all over the place again, mostly digging where it’d been dug before, but still finding gold. Your uncle was in this place by then, along with Orson. I think they didn’t do too bad, but you wouldn’t know it from how they lived. That’s why the stories started up. If they never bought anything, what was happening to the gold?”
Before Neva could ask what Gene thought they had done with it, he said, “Orson had a sister, Enid Gale. She was nothing like Orson. She was tall, with a big laugh. It seems to me she was around for a couple of years and then one day Orson said she’d moved to Whitefish or some such place in Montana and I never saw her after that.”
“Bernice Pangle at the post office told me about Enid. She said she moved to Kalispell.”
Gene nodded but did not reply for some time, and when he did it was in a thoughtful, almost sad tone. “Your uncle had a secret of some kind. Even when I was half-grown I knew there was something about him. Most people assumed that it had to do with gold. An
d maybe it did. But maybe it didn’t. For whatever reason, I wasn’t very curious back then, but after he died—or whatever happened—I really kicked myself then. Now I think the secret most likely did have to do with gold, either a new strike or a stash he kept all those years and was worried about. You couldn’t get anything out of Orson. He was always close-mouthed, and losing Burtie made it worse. Burtie had done the talking for both of them, you see, even though he was no great talker himself. Forgive me if I’m being nosy, but do you know what might have been bothering him all those years? Or what he did with his gold?”
“Not at all, not even a hint. I think I mentioned this, but he and my mother had a falling out and didn’t talk for years before he disappeared. Basically, I grew up without an uncle. What do you make of his rifle turning up on Tony Briggs’ porch?”
“No big deal, I’d guess. Tony had probably borrowed it from Burtie sometime before and didn’t want to admit he couldn’t afford his own gun and just made up the story about finding it on the porch. You can’t believe him, unless he’s talking about ranching. He knows his business when it comes to ranching.” Gene reached for her empty glass, refilled it, set the bottle back on the porch boards next to his foot and said, “Now I’ve told you everything I know, don’t you think it’s fair to tell me what really brought you out here?”
“It really is very simple. I hoped to get healthy again where there’s lots of sun and no stress, where I could relax and rest and so on. Some people seem to think I was hoping to find Burtie’s gold, but it had never occurred to me there might be any. I hadn’t thought about this before, but looking back I can see that my family considered my uncle’s mining a sort of eccentric survival activity, to the extent they thought about it at all, and certainly not something profitable.”
“So what you’re telling me is that you came to Billie Creek to get a good night’s sleep, more or less?”
“Exactly. And it’s so successful I’m thinking of giving up the newspaper business and turning the mine into a health retreat for the sad and bewildered. Those with money, of course. Now it’s your turn. You don’t quite fit the image of a miner, you know.”
Summarizing the facts as though they could not be more boring, Gene said that he worked as a chemical engineer in Pocatello to support the mine, and had done so for more years than he was prepared to admit. He took frequent leaves from the job to work on the Oregon or Nevada mine, depending on the season and the state of his finances. “You’ve heard about the miner who won the lottery?” he said. “They asked what he planned to do with his new wealth and he said, ‘Keep on mining till the money runs out.’”
A comfortable silence followed their laughter. The stars were thick and brilliant, and the air moved just enough to bring them the complex perfume of the dark canyon without creating a breeze. “I do love it out here,” she said. “It may seem odd, but this feels like a family place.”
“I’ve always liked this spot myself. I used to like visiting Burtie and Orson when I was a kid. I would have come more often but I wasn’t supposed to hang around here.”
“Didn’t they like company?”
“It wasn’t that. My being a young male, you know. My dad was uncomfortable about it.”
“About what?”
“You really don’t know? You weren’t aware that your uncle and Orson were, shall we say, married?”
“My uncle? Gene, are you saying he was gay?”
“That’s what I always understood, at least when I was old enough to figure it out. Before then, I didn’t understand why my dad was always asking what I did up here. I thought he was hoping to hear some mining secrets, that they’d struck it rich or something. It was never said right out. Even now I wouldn’t go asking about it in Angus, not straight out. I hope I didn’t upset you. I assumed you knew.”
“I’m not upset, just surprised. And also puzzled. If it was true, my mother should have known and so would the rest of us. It just wouldn’t have been a problem in my family. I’ll have to think about that one for a while.” After another, longer, silence, Neva said, “I’ve been trying to understand the attraction to gold. I don’t find it very pretty in its raw state, not like some of the other rocks out here, particularly the orange-tinted quartz.”
“It may not be pretty when it comes out of the ground, but there’s nothing like gold, and that’s been known since the cavemen. They’ve found gold amulets dating back some forty thousand years in Spanish caves. And when Columbus landed in the West Indies he found the natives fishing with gold hooks. Gold isn’t just a nice yellow rock. It doesn’t rust, or corrode, or tarnish. It’s chemically inactive and unbelievably workable. An ounce can be stretched into a wire a mile long or pounded into a sheet like a tissue a hundred feet square. Believe me, it grows on you. Reese Cotter really has a case of gold fever. It’s the old Midas syndrome. He likes to look at it, not sell it. I hear he’s had a few run-ins with mine owners who suspect he’s hanging onto more than what he’s due. I’ve seen some nice nuggets in his little box of goodies. I’m sure he’d be happy to show you, if he hasn’t already.”
“Was he at the funeral?”
“McCarty said he was too drunk to let in. He’s taking it hard, worse than I expected, to be honest.”
“He must wonder whether he could have saved Roy if he’d stayed on the job instead of going to town to look for Lance. You didn’t happen to hear anything about Lance, did you?”
“Afraid not. He’s a different kettle of fish from Reese, you know. Not quite up to rowing both sides of the boat at once, to put it politely. Now, I’d better get going before I curl up with your little friend there for the night.”
“I’d be happy to drive you down.”
“That’s very nice, but I’ve been wandering around in the dark out here for so long it’s like a second skin. The walk will be good for me, downhill all the way, and it’s only to the Barlow Mine where I left my truck.” He stood up, stretched with a crisp popping of joints, then said, “You haven’t seen a monk wandering around up here, have you? No cassock, too hot he says, but he’s a big man, always in one of those collars they wear.”
“I certainly have not seen a monk. I thought this place was isolated but every time I turn around there’s someone new popping up.”
“Most don’t stay long, not like you. But Father Bernard’s something else again.” Father Bernard Shore was a Benedictine monk who spent several months every year at Angus. Although his local home base was the tiny priest’s house by St. Mary’s Church ten miles up the Dry River Valley, he traveled every other week to perform services for congregations scattered over hundreds of miles. “He’s been coming here for years. He says this is the only place he can work without interruptions. The funny part is that the rest of the time he lives at a monastery over in Montana. If there’s anyplace you could get peace and quiet to translate old church writings you’d think it would be a monastery. But he says there’s no place like the Dry River Valley for concentrating on antiquities. Sometimes I feel like an antiquity myself. If I could get a half decent offer, I’d sell out tomorrow.”
“I’m not sure I believe that.”
There was sufficient light to show Gene’s serious expression as he regarded Neva, started to speak, then shrugged. Without another word, he picked up his glass and led the way indoors. She followed him through the cabin and out the kitchen door, where they stood for a moment looking up at the sky.
“Johnny’s claim papers are in a pipe right up there behind the cabin,” Gene said. “The old claim cans have mostly been replaced with plastic because people take the cans, and the law says you have to keep copies of the original papers at the site. You might find them interesting.”
“I noticed the pipe but thought it was a survey marker. I’ll check it out in the morning. Do you know anything about a vehicle, a large truck by the sound of it, that sometimes comes up here at night?”
“There’ve been active mines up-canyon from me ever since I’ve been out her
e, so there’s always somebody coming and going. I’ve learned to sleep through it.”
“But this truck comes all the way up, past my cutoff, and only at night as far as I can tell. It’s been here at least twice.”
“Most likely just ranch kids from the valley horsing around.”
They were standing side by side in the dark, not far apart, giving Neva a particularly good taste of the floral scent she had found familiar. Now she knew why. “Gene, did you go into my cabin a week or so ago when I was out?”
“How in the hell did you know that?”
“I have an extraordinarily good nose. Your aftershave gave you away. I knew I’d smelled it somewhere before and it just came to me.” Neva spoke lightly but she stepped away from him, casually, as though to get a different view of the stars.
“Sorry not to let you know, but I was curious about who was staying in the cabin. You can’t blame me for wondering who was using the place after all these years. You must have the nose of a bloodhound—next time I’ll take a purifying sauna first.”
“Next time leave a note.” This sounded so sharp after the nice evening that she added, “Thanks for the lovely wine and fish. And the history lesson. At least some of the ghosts around here will now have names.”
When the crunch of his boots on the lane had dissolved into the night, Neva settled Juju on her porch bed, returned indoors, brushed her teeth hastily, and pulled the covers up high to keep out—what? She wasn’t sure, only that the friendly warmth of Gene’s visit had ended with a chill. Entering her cabin for a quick look around was one thing, but why had he moved the box containing her mother’s ashes? As far as she could tell, he had disturbed nothing else, so maybe he was checking the address label that was still on the package, hoping to discover her name.
Whatever else Gene Holland was, he knew the creek, though he must be wrong about Matthew and Orson. The family would have known that Matthew was gay, and not cared one way or the other. Gossip, that’s what it must be, just unverified gossip that lived on long after the subjects themselves were gone.