The Threshold

by Marlys Millhiser

  “I hope you didn’t spend another night in your car.” Renata wore tight designer jeans and a blue work shirt unbuttoned halfway down the front.

  “Cree lent me a spare bed.”

  “Wonder what that man is up to,” Renata said slowly and more to herself than to Aletha. “Always asking questions.” She sat on the corner of her desk, chewed on the end of a ball-point without touching her lipstick to it. She giggled. “You don’t suppose he’s a narc, do you?” She stared through Aletha and then straightened. “Oh, I have a job for you today.”

  Aletha sank onto the long bench beside the door and tried to sound casual. “What makes you think Cree’s a narcotics agent?”

  “I was just making silly guesses. Some of our citizens and visitors have been busted over the last few years for dealing cocaine, and it’s become a half-scandal, half-joke around town. I really doubt that Cree’s a narc. He’s too obvious. The Sheridan needs a maid today.”

  “How long have you known Cree?”

  “Just the week or so he’s been in town. He introduced himself right away. We had a mutual friend. Our friend is dead.”

  Renata’s office was upstairs in an old store building that seemed to have kept its original dust. Traffic patterns had worn hollows in the wooden flooring and stairs. Wainscoting reached shoulder-high on the walls and the ceilings were lined with embossed tin. Footsteps echoed up the stairs from the street now, passed the doors of several other offices on this floor. A woman with a trowel and gardening gloves came to stand in Renata’s doorway.

  “Hi, Mrs. Lowell, been out to the cemetery?”

  “Yes, and a fine morning for it too.”

  “Mrs. Lowell, this is one of my new helpers, Aletha Kingman. Mrs. Lowell was assistant to the county clerk at the courthouse before retiring, and before that she taught English at the school here. Now she’s president of the San Miguel Historical Society.”

  “I’ll bet you’re really here for the skiing.” Mrs. Lowell poked Aletha’s arm playfully and turned back to Renata. “I think it’s time Mildred had a good cleaning up again.”

  “I can get somebody over there tomorrow. Clean … Miss … Heisinger’s,” she repeated slowly as she wrote on a scratch pad. “How’s she like the Meals on Wheels?”

  “She won’t say, but she’s eating again anyway. I swear she’ll outlive us all. Incredible woman.”

  Aletha hurried up the street to the New Sheridan Hotel, wondering why the name “Heisinger” should sound so familiar. It kept nagging at her as she stripped sheets off beds, scrubbed down sinks and toilet bowls. She was sitting on the staircase waiting for some late risers to pack up and check out and staring at the life-size portrait on the wall where the stairs ended when it came to her. She’d seen the portrait before, but now the woman in it looked familiar.

  The portrait was done in oil on a dark background that suggested either a dim red sunset all but overpowered by swiftly encroaching night or the faint fires of hell abroil behind the powers of darkness. The nude in the center foreground was about twenty pounds overweight, pearshaped, with long kinky hair flying out behind her. Her pose in midair suggested she might be running, one arm thrown up as if in panic, the other crooked so she could place the back of her hand on her brow to show deep distress. Amidst this drama her expression was surprisingly composed, if not a trifle bored. She’d shaved her underarms and pubic hair but there was a suspicious suggestion of darkness on her lower legs. A swath of gauze with tiny stars peppered all over it swirled about her loins, concealing much of nothing. And all this was enclosed in an ornate gold frame.

  Aletha had dismissed it as a cornball tourist-grabber until now. Now she recognized the face as that of the woman who had been eating with Callie at the Senate when the oval had replaced the freezer and the cabinet. The woman who’d dropped her spoon and spattered her soup and … that’s when Aletha had heard the name “Heisinger.” That’s when Callie had said a Miss Heisinger had taken Aletha’s sketchbook. She left the pillowcase stuffed with dirty sheets on the stairs and raced down to the pay phone in the odd little room under the staircase that connected the lobby and the bar. She called Renata Winslow. “Is this Miss Heisinger you’re going to have cleaned tomorrow a native of Telluride?”

  “Well, I don’t know if she was born here, but nobody around can remember when she didn’t live here. Doris Lowell thinks she’s over a hundred. And still staying through the winters. Can you imagine? Why are you so interested in old Mildred Heisinger?”

  “Renata, I want that job tomorrow, the Heisinger job.”

  Renata laughed. “You make it sound like a bank holdup. Listen, Aletha, I got a call from Norwood, little town about thirty miles from here, for a job you’ll like better—fry cook. It pays much more.”

  “Please give me the Heisinger job. It’s important. Please?”

  “Oh … all right. I’ll scare up somebody else for Norwood. I honestly do not understand you. Hers is the little Victorian across Pine Street from the Pick and Gad and down a lot length.”

  Aletha was hoping to get back to the dirty sheets before they were discovered, when the girl in the registration cage in the lobby called to her. “Hey, if you’re still looking for a bed, there’s one in the women’s dormer tonight. Cheap by Telluride standards.”

  “I’ll take it. Do you know anything about the naked lady on second?”

  “There’s a naked lady on second?”

  “In the painting at the end of the staircase.”

  “Oh yeah. She’s supposed to be some kind of legend. I take all legends with a grain of salt and a bourbon-and-Seven myself. You can probably find out about her up at the museum.”

  But Aletha didn’t make it to the museum because Renata sent her to baby-sit three children in a pseudo-Victorian condominium for the rest of the day and into the night. When she did crawl into the dorm bed at the Sheridan, she had ambivalent feelings. She wished she could tell Cree Mackelwain about the nude in the painting. But she was relieved not to be sleeping in with a possible narc. Mostly she was excited about meeting Miss Heisinger in the morning.

  7

  Mildred Heisinger wore her black gathered skirt with a satin cummerbund, snowy blouse, and a black ribbon around her throat. This was her second post. Mildred was eighteen. Things had not gone well in her first position for reasons she still did not understand. She’d not been asked to return and came here without recommendation. Knowing she must succeed in Alta set a feathery, cold sensation to crawling in her stomach. It also caused her to withdraw, giving her the appearance of an icy composure far from her true state.

  Her students ranged from four to fourteen, the usual mix of bright, willing, obstreperous, and disinterested. Mildred believed she’d pretty well won them over. Except for one. Brambaugh O’Connell, the oldest, who stood much taller than she, who had to sit sideways with his legs in the aisle, who never spoke unless spoken to and never missed a word while reading aloud or in composition.

  She’d taken to seating him in her own chair when working with him, and standing herself so he’d be more comfortable and she’d feel more in control. He had a dignity she knew to be part resentment at being forced to attend her school and part attraction to her. Sometimes he was a little boy in an oversized body, sometimes his eyes held a maturity that made her drop her own.

  Mildred found herself engaged in small fantasies concerning her oldest pupil: She would surprise him with some sudden bit of knowledge that would light up the sullen expression. Or she would see him as a grown man returned to find his teacher whom he’d never been able to forget. She stood behind him now and watched his large hand make small, perfect ciphers on his tablet. She could almost feel the power growing in the restless shoulders, was tempted to touch him carelessly as she did the other children. But of course she did not.

  Johann Peterson reached around Callie O’Connell and stuffed something down the back of Mable Fisherdicks’ dress. Mable wiggled and screamed. Miss Heisinger tapped Johann on the head
and pointed to his destination in the corner. She asked Callie to accompany Mable to the cloakroom and help remove whatever forced her to squirm so. No one ever teased Callie with her brother in the room.

  Sudden thunder from the sky displaced the thunder of the mill, shook the earth beneath the school, rolled in on gusts of wind that rattled in the rafters. Raindrops splayed across window glass and lightning dazzled the room. This was the third day in a row a thunderstorm had flared shortly before the school day was to end. Yesterday she’d kept her students late to let it pass.

  “That was a wise decision, Miss Heisinger,” Timothy Traub, the Alta mine manager and her host, had said at dinner. “The ground was fairly crackling with electricity this afternoon. It’s a wonder nothing was struck here on the hill. Or, God forbid, the current from the plant below should arc and shut down the mill.”

  The entire area had been electrified even before many large cities by mining interests who’d denuded mountain slopes of timber to fuel steam boilers and who needed cheaper power than coal to continue operations. This was the first time Mildred had actually lived with electric power and she’d been amazed to find a light bulb on a long movable cord available in every room of the manager’s house. There were two stationary bulbs in the schoolhouse. She switched these on now to brighten the storm gloom and calm the children.

  Just as Callie and Mable scurried back and Mildred Heisinger was about to order her students to put their heads down on their desks—a proven method of restoring calm and order in an unsettled classroom—a particularly sharp lightning crack followed by a thud jarred the floorboards. Callie O’Connell headed for the arms of her brother instead of her seat. The littlest girls squealed and one began to cry. Even the boys were struck round-eyed and still. The two light bulbs flickered out. And the thunder of the mill silenced.

  An onrush of wind-driven rain pushed in on great peals of thunder that carried much more of a clamor without the steadying of the mill throb in the background. Lightning snaps ignited all around them. Charges of electricity sizzled down the stovepipe and crackled and danced on the potbellied stove. It seemed to Mildred as if she and her students were isolated innocents caught on a battleground under cannon siege. She tried to fight some authority into her voice. “Callie and Johann, return to your seats and everyone put his head down upon his desk. This will pass very soon, as have the others. Callie, will you please—”

  It was a small still breath while the weather tamped and reloaded, and into it came Brambaugh O’Connell’s voice—level, low, and relaxed. “She’s afraid and she’ll stay right here.”

  The burnout from the storm lasted only two days before the mill thundered once more and the people of the mining camp breathed easier. When the mine and mill did not prosper, neither did they. The next thunder Callie heard was in her father’s voice. “Payday! The first in a while, wouldn’t you say? And it’s in scrip. All because of the shutdowns at the mill, says they. And me looking for a little time off to prospect.” He pounded on the cable-spool table and that thundered too. “What do you think of that, Ma’am, huh?”

  Callie saw her mother cringe but continue to ladle soup. “The supper’s ready, John.” Her tone was steady like Bram’s had been when Miss Heisinger had called Callie back to her seat and Bram had held her so she couldn’t go. “There’s much that we need we can’t buy at the commissary, but scrip will pay the rent. Bram, will you offer the Lord’s thanks, please?”

  Halfway through the meal the thunder was still on John O’Connell’s face. “Sure, it’s no wonder the union men been hanging about so much of late.”

  Their one light bulb hung above the table, its braided wires draped over a hook. There was another hook in the sitting room where they could move the light after supper was cleaned up and all could read under it in comfort. This was the first Callie had lived with electricity too and she much preferred it to oil lamps. But now the miraculous bulb, of clear glass with a wormlike filament ablaze inside it, cast shadows across her father’s features. Odd shadows, unfamiliar, threatening. She looked away and dribbled a crisscross of stripes in dark syrup on her cornbread.

  “I hope they don’t start trouble here. They’ve caused so much bloodshed and heartache elsewhere.” Ma’am’s face sagged, as did her shoulders. She’d been spelling her sister on night watch over the cradle of a sick baby Henry. Even the wonderful tonic did not seem to restore Luella. One bottle was already empty, the other over at Lilly’s was more than half gone. And this was the tonic that was to have lasted through a winter not yet arrived. Shadows played across her face and Callie looked up to see if the bulb was swinging. But it was still.

  “All they’re asking is a day’s wage for a day’s work and a day that’s not so long as to kill a man. And conditions safe for a man to work under.” Payday came once a month. John would hand his pay—usually in silver and gold coin—over to Luella, keeping back a tenth. He would then go down to Ophir or sometimes into Telluride and squander it on masculine pursuits, missing a day or so of work in the bargain but ready to take on another month of grueling seven-day weeks when he returned. Single miners often returned to the boardinghouse in the same amount of time with a month’s pay gone. At three dollars a day they out-earned most laboring men. But as a popular saying went, “The miner mines the mines and the ‘line’ mines the miner.”

  Most miners’ wives had an ongoing fantasy of reforming their men to more righteous ways, and rarely did a woman marry a man she didn’t plan to change. Luella was no exception. Men in mining camps dreamed their own fantasies. It was only a matter of time before they stumbled across their strike. This would happen, of course, on one of the few days they could afford to devote to prospecting.

  “Well, if they don’t pay in coin, they pay in other ways then, do they not?” John reached to lift a large chunk of rock from the pocket of his coat and laid it on the table. A milk-white rock on the top and one side with specks of silver and specks of gold glinting back at the electrical light bulb. “What is this white stuff here, lad?”

  “Quartz,” Bram answered.

  “And the little speckles of silver and gold?”

  “Mica and pyrite.”

  “And this here, Bram?” He turned the rock over. Luella and Bram hissed in on their breaths. Callie thought the other side was prettier. This one was almost solid with a dull and dirty yellow. “What would you call it, now?”

  “That’s highgrade, Pa.” Bram looked confused. “You’re highgrading.”

  “How do you steal from a thief? Tell me that.” John O’Connell’s hair had grown ever thinner and farther back on the top of his head. He ran his hand over it now, as they had seen him do so often when agitated. “Paying in scrip is thievery. And taking it all back in rent and at the company commissary is slavery.”

  Luella stared hard at Callie and Bram. “You’re not ever to breathe a word of this to anyone.”

  Callie knew of two other such rocks hidden under the house. She’d helped bury them. Those two were a secret among herself, her father, and Charles. “Taking me a little walk down to Ophir tonight,” John said. “Be back tomorrow with some real money.”

  When he’d left, Luella sighed and stretched her back up and then her shoulders. “Callie, you’ll have to do the dishes alone. And, Bram, don’t look at me that way. John O’Connell is an honest man who can be pushed too far. Did you know that when he was working the Molly Deal the owners in Boston closed the mine owing the men three months’ pay? How do you think we survived that?”

  “If you’d let me work like I should, there’d be two earning a wage and he wouldn’t have to steal.” Bram’s voice seldom broke now. It was taking on a low rumble.

  “You’re not happy at school, are you, Bram? I’d think with such a pretty young teacher you’d—”

  “You’ve already taught me more than she can. And she’s not a good woman. Not like you.”

  “Miss Heisinger? She’s hardly more than a girl. What do you mean by ‘not good’?�
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  “She’s different. She looks at me … different.”

  “I like her,” Callie said, pouring boiling water from the teakettle onto soap shavings in the dishpan. “Just because she’s pretty doesn’t mean she’s bad.” She dipped cold water from the five-gallon oil can into the hot water and stirred with her finger until the water turned milky-colored. “Everybody looks at you, Bram, because you’re too big to not see.” She turned to find Bram’s color rising and her mother studying them both.

  “Too big not to be seen,” Luella corrected distantly, as if she were concentrating on something else.

  “I never lied to you, Ma’am,” he whispered. “You know that.”

  “I do know that.” Luella stood behind him and put a hand on each shoulder. “And I couldn’t love you more if you’d been born to us. I don’t know how I’d have lived through the loss of the first two, if we hadn’t had you with us. I will think on this, Bram, I promise. Now, help Callie finish up and then both sit to your lessons. I’d best go back to Aunt Lilly’s.”

  “Callie, why must you keep looking out the window?” Bram asked when they had books spread out on the table.

  “To see if the lady has come back to the hole in the wall.” There were enough lights on the mill to see her even at night.

  “There couldn’t have been any hole. It would’ve had to have been boarded up and that’d left a mark too.” He’d patiently explained all this before, but it was no help to Callie because she knew what she’d seen.

  “I just want to give her book back to her. She must be missing all those fine drawings. And I’ll ask her how she made the hole and then tell you.” It gave her a good feeling that there were some things even Bram didn’t know about.