by Ashna Graves
They had set out the last salt block and were heading back up the canyon, when Darla turned onto an overgrown track that angled up the east side. “You’ll like this,” she said.
The track leveled out, crossed a flat dotted with ponderosas, and ended at a path through mixed shrubs and trees. Darla led the way up the path, walking with the same ease she showed in the saddle, as though she owned the ground underfoot, the sky overhead, and everything in between. After about ten minutes, she stepped aside to let Neva come up beside her. Before them lay a small, sloping meadow with a stream running through it, that reminded her of the site of Lance’s line shack. But rather than a shack, there was a proper little house standing at the top of the meadow. That Neva regarded it as a house rather than a cabin didn’t strike her until later, when, recalling the scene in detail, she realized it was because the door and window trim were painted the same dark green as the roof shingles, giving a finished look. The porch railing, also painted green, enclosed a small sitting area where two rocking chairs stood. A path wound from where they stood through grass and flowers to the cabin. It was lined with chunks of white quartz.
“It’s a fairy tale,” Neva marveled.
“It was Gran’s. After you.” Darla waved for her to go first across the plank laid over the creek and up the path.
From the front porch, they looked out at a wide view of meadow, distant ridges, and sky. “No one lives here?”
“Not since Gran died. Sometimes I stay a night when I want to get away. It’s the only piece I own on Jump Creek.”
Darla pulled a small plug of wood out of one of the logs a few inches from the doorframe, retrieved a key, and unlocked the door. When Neva followed her in after a few moments, she was lighting a fire in a small Wedgwood stove in the corner that served as a kitchen. The inside of the cabin was as perfect as the outside, from the diamond-shaped windows in the front door to the firewood basket with braided fiber handles. That such a hideaway existed just over the ridge from Billie Creek seemed so unlikely that Neva asked again, “Your Gran lived here?” She sat down in a small armchair with a view out the front window. “Tell me about her, please.”
“There’s not much to tell.” Darla opened a tin, spooned tea into a blue ceramic pot, and unhooked two white cups from a rack made of naturally twisted wood. “She married Gramps when she was hardly more than a kid, had three boys before she was twenty-five, then a long time later when the boys were about grown she had a girl, Lindsey Ann. I guess she loved Lindsey more than anything in the world, everybody did. Those are her watercolors there on the wall. When Lindsey died in a riding accident Gran went kind of strange and never was the same after.” Darla was silent for a moment, her head bowed, before she concluded, “Gran thought I would be another Lindsey Ann. When I left for New York she moved up here and hardly came down for the rest of her life. They found her sitting in that chair looking peaceful as a baby.”
“She died in this chair?”
“Does that bother you?”
“Not at all. It would be hard to think of a better place. When was that?”
“Fifteen years ago.”
“But that’s when my uncle disappeared.”
“It was about a year later. They were real good friends. He used to walk over here and back in a day. I believe she would have lived a lot longer if he was still around.”
When the tea was ready Darla set it on a wooden table with an inlaid top, the small pieces of colored wood forming a simple picture of the ridge that could be seen from the chair. “Gran’s work,” she said. “Talk about patience. Sometimes I wish I inherited that instead of the ranch.”
“You don’t strike me as impatient.”
“She taught me that if you couldn’t be patient or decent or generous, the next best thing was to act like it. She said, ‘It’s better to feed a beggar with orneriness in your heart than not feed him at all.’ If it wasn’t for Gran, I’d just tell beggars and everybody else to go fuck themselves. Sorry, I’m not much of a lady.”
***
Darla dropped Neva at the turnoff to the mine in the early twilight. Again she refused to stay for dinner, and again blamed the stock. “If I’m late they’re as cranky as old goats,” she said.
“Thank you for taking me to the cabin. It’s a magical place.”
Neva did not add that the image of her uncle and Gran drinking tea there together had been deeply moving, but as soon as she reached home she went straight to her uncle’s photograph to see if she could discover something different in it. She had left the picture on the table with her mother’s ashes, and now stared, dumbfounded. The picture was there but the ashes were gone. Where they had sat for weeks there was only a clean rectangle of wood that stood out on the otherwise dusty surface.
Lighting the lamp with shaking hands, she carried it through both rooms, searching frantically but knowing she would not find the ashes. They were gone and she knew why. Someone from the valley who had heard Dietering’s story had come up to scour her cabin in turn, had mistaken the heavy box for Reese’s gold, and had hurried away with it before looking inside or having to ransack her cabin. At least she could be grateful for not coming home to chaos, with her papers, books and clothing flung across the floor.
Despite the faint nausea that sent her to the porch to take deep, slow breaths, Neva felt laughter rising inside. What a joke. What a colossal, crazy joke. Her mother would have loved it and so would Ethan. If only Darla had come for dinner she would have had someone to tell, but even as she imagined relating the tale to friends her amusement gave way to a crushing sense of loss. The rifle would come back, but the ashes were gone for good.
Hunger at last drove her to heat a bowl of beans, but every few minutes she went into the big room to look again at the empty spot on the table. At last she got out what remained in the bottle of wine that Gene had brought, carried it to the porch, and drank as she listened to coyotes cry. A year ago, the loss of the ashes would not have meant much. Now it felt as though she had lost her mother all over again.
Chapter Twenty-six
“We’ve been talking it over at the office and we’ve decided you should leave Billie Creek.” Andy Sylvester half sat against the porch railing holding a cup of coffee and looking down at Neva on the settee. He had taken off his green Forest Service cap and appeared even younger than usual with pale hair sticking out randomly from a pointed head. “Just until this business is cleared up. Then you can come back. As long as you camp, of course.”
“Leave Billie Creek? Andy, this is nonsense. I’m spending the summer here. Period. I’ll leave the cabin if I’m forced to, but not the mine. Even if I wanted to leave, my house in town is rented out for the summer. I have nowhere to live in town until September.”
“There’s been a murder,” the young man said with ill-disguised impatience. “Murder. As in, someone was killed just four miles down the road. Nobody knows who did it or why. Everyone says McCarty has the wrong man. In fact, I think he knows he has the wrong man and is up to some plot of his own, but that’s got nothing to do with your safety.”
“Come on, Andy. Murders aren’t random. Roy DeRoos was killed for a specific reason that has nothing to do with me. Remember, this is the Old West. We are in gold mine country, land of the natural outlaw.”
“You seem to know a lot about it.”
“Oh, for Heaven’s sake.” Neva shook her head but managed not to laugh. “Thanks for your concern, but I’m far more interested in talking about how you came to be working out here.”
“All right, then, be that way. Nobody can say I didn’t try. As for your curiosity, I followed in my dad’s footsteps. An old story.”
“He also worked for the Forest Service?”
“Not only that, but for this same district. I got the job when he retired. Not very original, is it? I just like it out here.”
Disregarding the note of self-disparagement, Neva said without forethought, “Do you ever wish you’d taken up mining instead?”
“God no! I couldn’t do that, tear up the streams and rivers. Do you have any idea how long it takes for this kind of dry country to heal? One day there’s a creek flowing happily along, minding its own business like it did for hundreds of years, and the next day there’s devastation. And now that gold is back up above six hundred dollars an ounce, it’s bound to get worse.”
Neva found herself beginning to like him a little but she couldn’t help teasing. “Reese said they can’t dig a test hole without filling in ten forms in triplicate.”
“And a damn good thing, too! You have eyes. Can’t you see what was done to this creek? It was assaulted and left for dead.”
“Bravo! Well said.”
Blinking in confusion, Andy flushed like a thirteen-year-old. “I don’t know how you do it but you make me mad every time I come up here.”
“Sorry, I was just teasing this time. To be honest, I’m finding it pretty confusing out here myself. My sympathies are with the environmentalists and always have been but listening to people talk, particularly ranchers like Darla, I can’t help sympathizing with their problems too. If the ranchers, loggers, and miners are driven out there won’t be anyone left but the recreationists, retired stockbrokers, and enforcers, people like you and me, in other words. Pretty boring, if you’ll excuse my saying so. We have no roots here, no survival stake in the land. And now I need to ask if you’ll do me a favor.”
Enjoying the look of pained amazement that grew on his face as she talked, Neva explained about the stolen funeral ashes. “I’d like you to mention it to everyone you see on the chance that rumor will reach the thief and he’ll realize how important the ashes are and get them back to me, no questions asked. By now, at least, whoever did it knows it’s not gold.”
“You are beyond weird,” Sylvester said with a real smile at last. “You’re so crazy you probably are safe. They say insane people and drunks survive things that would kill anybody else. Sure, I’ll tell people but they aren’t going to believe it.”
The dust of the Forest Service pickup still hung in the air when Neva got into her car and also headed down the canyon. It was too true, what she’d said to the mining technician—whoever had taken the box knew by now that they had carried away ashes, and every hour that passed made the chances of getting them back slimmer. They would throw them on the ground or into a stove, and the ashes would be gone forever.
She must get the word out herself, now, by going to Angus.
***
Bumping past the Barlow Mine she did not allow herself more than a glance at the closed cabins with the lone truck still sitting out front and, as had become her habit, she did not look at the road down into the pit. When she reached Gene’s she was glad to see his truck, which was parked right up against the small porch rather than in the usual spot to the side of the cabin. He must have returned early from Pocatello. She knocked on the weathered plank doors of both the cabin and the lab shack but got no response. Where had Gene gone without his truck? The road up to the mine site was steep and at least a mile long.
On a scrap of paper from her purse she wrote: “Sorry to miss you. How about coming up for dinner sometime this week? Tonight would be fine. Something kind of crazy has happened and I’ve had to go out to Angus. I’ll be back by afternoon. Hope to see you soon.”
The next disappointment was the locked post office door. It could not be the weekend again already, so Bernice must have got sick or decided to go fishing, so to speak. Neva slid her letter to Ethan through the mail slot, and then, before her courage could fail, she marched across the stark gravel lot to the café. Three men sat at the bar staring in silence at nothing, not even the T.V., which was off. Al Fleck stood at the grill with his back to the room.
No one looked at her or greeted her as she slid onto a stool at the end of the bar. Al took his time but at last approached wiping his hands on the stained once-white apron.
“What can I do for you?” he said as though they’d never met.
The rumors about her had done their evil work, as she feared. Drawing a deep, slow breath, she said, “You can give me a cup of coffee and kindly tell everyone who comes in that I did not ransack Reese’s house for any reason whatever. I’m far too tidy to make such a mess, even for a pot of gold. It’s just a stupid rumor.”
After a startled moment he guffawed, winked, and reached for a sturdy white mug. “How about some fries? The grill is just right.”
“Sounds great, thanks. And a nice fat steak, on the rare side.”
She had not got a clear look at the men at the bar. The one on the end farthest from her now stood, stretched audibly, slapped a bill onto the table, said something low to the man next to him, and walked out. It was Tony Briggs. He let the screen door slam behind him.
Al brought the ketchup squeeze bottle and winked again. “So much for Smiley. He was just telling us he saw you in Elkhorn coming out of Archie’s Gold and Silver.”
“Nobody believes him, I hope?”
“Some people don’t have enough to think about. Of course, we all know Briggs, too. Wouldn’t surprise me if he took the gold.”
“You know,” Neva said, “it strikes me that everyone seems more worked up about Reese’s little stash than about Roy being dead.”
“Whoa, now. That’s not fair, not a bit. What can anybody do about it? The kid’s dead but the gold’s still there somewhere. It’s a shame about Reese, too.”
“Do you think he’s guilty?”
“I don’t know word one about this whole thing. That’s McCarty’s job.” He went to the grill, flipped the steak, and shook the basket of potato chunks. He didn’t return to her end of the bar until he brought the food on a large, hot plate.
Neva whistled. “That’s not a steak, it’s a side of cow.” Encouraged by his smile she continued, “I have a favor to ask, if you wouldn’t mind.”
“What’s that?”
The two heads at the other end of the bar turned toward her at last as she explained about the ashes. “They were sitting on a table in a little box. Yesterday they disappeared while I was out of the cabin. What I think is that someone who heard the rumor that I had Reese’s gold took the ashes thinking they were his stash. Doesn’t that make sense? The point is, I want them back. I want everyone in the valley to know that that’s my mother and I’d like her back, no questions asked.”
Al was shaking his head just as Andy Sylvester had done, and the other two men, both strangers to her, began talking in low voices but stopped to listen when Al said, “I’d love to have seen their face when they opened that box. Damn me, that’s rich. Tough luck about your mom, though. I never have had to make any decision like what to do with mortal remains and I hope I don’t any time soon. I’m not much on fancy funerals myself.”
“You mean you’re not shocked or horrified that I had my mother’s ashes?”
“Each to his own I always say.”
Relieved and grateful, Neva bit into a fat fry with sudden greed for grease and salt.
The café door opened. For no logical reason, she assumed it was Tony Briggs again, but it was Darla Steadman who slid onto the stool next to Neva, and said before she was fully seated, “Hey Buster, give me what she’s got, only more fries. And a lemonade.”
“Will do, Miss Pendleton Round-up.”
Neva’s jaw would have dropped had her mouth not been full of fries. What had come over Darla? The usually cool rancher had turned playful, and rather than scowling at the reference to her beauty contest days, she was happily pulling napkins from the dispenser. When she had a good wad she dipped it in her water glass and wiped the dust from her face and hands.
“In case you’re wondering,” she said, “I’m allergic to the soap in the washroom. I should just bring in my own and leave it here, but I never remember until I’m already in the door.” She examined the grimy paper and wrinkled her nose. “You’d think I work outdoors or something. Ever since Al found that old newspaper article about me being the rod
eo queen, he brings it up some way every time, so I figure the least I can do is eat his food with a clean face.” Darla wadded the dirty napkins tighter and pitched the ball in Al’s direction. It landed with a sizzle in the grease vat, but Al had turned to the cooler and didn’t appear to notice.
Darla shrugged. “They’re my fries, anyway.”
“I bet you were a holy terror in high school.”
“Nothing holy about it. But don’t tell Father Bernard.”
“Where is the high school?”
“Over in Charity.”
“You grew up on the ranch?”
“I did, my dad did, his dad did. Before that, they ran the stage over the pass to Elkhorn.”
“What happens next, I mean, who takes over from you?”
“Nobody. I mean it. Everybody but me was smart enough to kick the bucket before things got too bad. I’ll never have any kids”—here a micro-glance in Al’s direction put a new idea into Neva’s mind—“but you can’t leave your ranch to your kids anyway because the taxes will kill them. The land might be worth millions on paper but you have most of your ranch families in debt. I know some that figured out ways to give it to their kids piece by piece so they can keep the operation going, but most don’t figure that out. And this life is about over anyway. You can’t make a living like it used to be. Used to be you could count on good enough prices every few years to get mostly out of debt, but now you have all this South American beef coming in. The price is flat. This never was the best range, not like over in the Willamette Valley, or even John Day.”
Al had drifted close and chimed in with, “That’s why these rich boys from California can buy up the ranches so cheap.”
The man sitting closest to Darla said, “They can afford to ranch just for the hell of it, for a goddamn hobby. You have your old ranch families going broke, and some jackass investor from Modesto comes in and buys three ranches just for play.”