The Threshold

by Marlys Millhiser

  “And dirty old men like me could visit the cribs on the line and leave nice young things like you alone? You have the nicest, roundest little buns I ever squeezed.” And that was the last he would say.

  Removing clothing in their cramped space without socking each other was nearly impossible and the awkwardness might have ruined the mood for Aletha. But the thought of Alta’s dead people standing around outside the tent shivering in their shawls, up to their crotches in snow, their gasps of surprise shooting steam puffs into the night, mittened hands pointing to a galloping blue-and-yellow tent that must appear filled with a convention of whirling dervishes—the thought began as a humorous one and then slipped into a fantasy so erotic she scared herself. And when movement quieted down in the tent a few of the bolder, moral leaders among Alta’s women bent to peek in the open fly of the doorway, shielded now only by mosquito netting. Of course, they wouldn’t have been able to see anything, but in Aletha’s fantasy they saw plenty. And to be caught in forbidden fornication by a bunch of Victorians …

  “Uh … history’s a real turn-on for you, isn’t it?” Cree said finally.

  Aletha took her rehydrated scrambled eggs and her new sketchbook onto the roof of the Datsun. She sketched what she saw and tried to add what she could remember from the night before—the porch on the boardinghouse, the snow-shed, and the top level of the mill. But she kept seeing Callie’s stricken look in the harsh lights reflecting off night snow.

  “For an old-fashioned girl, you look pretty this morning.” Cree handed her a cup of coffee. The softening of the usual edge in his voice had startled a squiggle from her pencil. “See, you can even blush.”

  “I’d hardly call my behavior last night old-fashioned.” She drank in a gulp instead of a sip and burned her mouth. “Or pretty.” “Pretty” was an old-fashioned word too. She loved it.

  “It’s not last night.” He glanced from her sketch to the boardinghouse and gave her a slow smile. “More your reaction to it now that’s old-fashioned.” He drained his own coffee, set his cup on the Datsun’s hood, and wandered down to the mouth of the mine, peering into the air around him as if he too were trying to reconstruct the snowshed that had connected it to the mill. For a time he stood with his hands sunk deep in his pants pockets and rocked back and forth on his heels. Aletha thought she could detect his lips moving and wondered if he was talking to himself. She tried to sketch him into her drawing, but she wasn’t very good with bodies. The proportions were always wrong. Aletha hadn’t taken up drawing until prison, part of a rehabilitation program. It had helped save her sanity then and had become an entrenched hobby since. But now she struggled with a form she’d drawn too large for the picture, his legs too long for his body and top half too bulky in his waist-length jacket.

  Aletha threw the sketchbook onto the car seat and walked down past the boardinghouse to join him. The hole in the hillside gaped mammoth and black. An ominous turquoise drool of water bubbled out of the darkness to one side, flowed over rocks and humps to a crest that had once supported the mill. A few yards inside the opening stretched an iron wall set with a door locked in rust and padlocks. The chill felt deep and permanent here. “How could they get people to work in places like this?”

  “It was dangerous, exciting work. Paid well, involved gold and silver, took he-man strength, and offered a chance for a tiny few to strike it rich. And everyone thought he’d be numbered among the tiny few. Life was one big lottery.” On the side of the iron wall where the water escaped, the earth that abutted it had crumbled away in places, possibly helped along by tourists. Cree slid sideways through the opening.

  “What’s in there?” Aletha stood at the edge of the vertical crevice and tried to peek in without blocking his light. The black looked like a solid thing. The odor of damp dirt and mold blew out at her on cold air.

  “Narrow-gauge tracks. Couple of ore cars. And one Mountain Dew pop can. I’ve been in here before.” His voice came hollow, as if he spoke from a vast cavern. Then he was back sliding through the opening. “Feel sorry for that Bram, whoever he is … was.”

  “I can’t even stand to think about it.” Aletha stepped quickly out into the sun.

  “Well, you’ve had your night in Alta,” Cree said.

  “Maybe if I stay awhile longer, I’ll have another experience.” He dropped an arm around her as they walked up to their camping area and she added, “I mean with Callie.”

  “I don’t think I want another experience.” He pried tent stakes out of the ground. “Ten minutes after they happen I begin to doubt they happened. It’s disorienting as hell.”

  “I suppose you do have to get on with your mission.” She unzipped her parka as the sun began to penetrate. “Is it something to do with the dead friend you and Renata Winslow have in common?”

  He sat back on his heels and studied her. When he spoke the edge had returned to his voice. “I see no need for you to know.”

  “Look, if you think all this secrecy makes you sexy, forget it,” Aletha snapped. “You couldn’t have any secrets worse than mine.” She stood next to a building, the back portion of which was still upright. In the center of a room mostly roofed over was a large iron-and-porcelain stove with a pipe that vented straight up through the roof. A waist-high shelf lined the room for work space, with rows of open shelving above and below for cupboards. Two great metal sinks proclaimed this a kitchen geared to feed a fair number. “Cree, come see this.”

  He already had the tent packed into its little bag with the draw strings and was beginning to batter a down sleeping bag into a stuff sack. “I really have to get back sometime today.” But he came to stand beside her. “So what’s to see?”

  She pointed to a wooden seat with three holes in it. “What’s left of an outhouse. But it’s almost attached to this building which was probably a restaurant by the size of that stove. Can you imagine the smells and the flies in summer? I always thought an outhouse was out and away from the house-house. Think of the germs. No wonder people used to be sick so much.”

  Cree stepped around the shelf seat to stand on a heap of boards. “Probably the dining hall for the boardinghouse. With a door right here so the miner full of a hot dinner didn’t have to wade through cold snowdrifts to relieve himself. Germs are fairly recent anyway. Before germs, people got sick due to bad air, bad blood, bad luck, and the good Lord.”

  “When you get going you’re a philosopher, historian … what are you really?”

  “Bad news.” He pulled her close for a kiss and their sunglasses clicked. His face felt warm and scratchy against her nose and men’s voices chanted far away. Chanted something that sounded like “cots is” accompanied by a rhythmic rumble of stomping feet. Ghostly sounds to be hearing in a ghost town, like the special effects in a scary movie. It drew closer, louder. As she turned around, Aletha wished she’d listened to Cree and they’d not stayed in Alta for any more of this. The sun dimmed. She pulled off her sunglasses to a darker world.

  A spreading hole in the air with edges that sizzled parted the view and opened onto the interior of a room in which Callie held up her arms toward a white cat leaping across midair, its claws extended, ears back, and tail bushed out. A tall boy stood beside her in highwater pants and a collarless shirt with a slit in the front so he could slip it over his head. His arms cradled awkwardly as if he still held the cat. The room behind them had open beams with bare, clear light bulbs. It had tables cluttered with dishes and glasses and men in high boots, little mustaches, and suspenders. The chanting choked off in groups as they noticed Aletha and Cree. Smiles straightened. Raised forks or hunks of bread lowered carefully to plates.

  A youth in knee pants set a metal pitcher down on a table and backed toward a door across the room. Aletha could see the Lizard Head and corner of the commissary roof through a paned window. Chairs scraped. Throats cleared mightily. The men began to follow the youth’s example.

  “Callie, don’t go to Telluride,” Aletha said quickly, remembering h
ow short-lived these glimpses into Callie’s world were. “Promise me you won’t.”

  A heavy man leaning out of the service window from the kitchen finally lowered his arm on the sweat-stained triangle in his shirt. After asking Aletha’s name and without warning, Callie shoved the cat and all its claws through the hole. Aletha reached for it automatically, touching the back of one of Callie’s hands. The cat smelled of sulfur.

  “Ma’am’s going to poison him. Please find him a home.”

  The cat stood against Aletha’s chest, legs stiff, body trembling. She held him under his armpits, afraid to move. The cat had murder in his eye.

  “Are you Bram?” Cree said behind her, and the tall boy looked up, closed his mouth to swallow. “If you are, don’t go in the mine. There’s going to be a cave-in if there hasn’t been already.”

  Callie offered to find Aletha’s book. The cat hissed like a snake and waved one set of claws at her face while the rest dug through her T-shirt and several layers of skin. “I thought you said Miss Heisinger had it.”

  “Miss Heisinger? Why would she have your book?”

  “Callie, never mind that now. Just remember to never go to Telluride and, honey, I can’t take your kitty.” She pulled the cat loose to pass him back. He slipped like grease through her hands, mounted her front, and jumped off her shoulder.

  “Please, Aletha, you’re the only one who can help. His name is Charles,” Callie said as the oval began to close. The last thing Aletha saw in Callie’s world was the window across the room filled with mustachioed faces and rounded eyes. Then the dining room was gone and they had a clear line of sight to a roofless commissary and the Lizard Head in the distance. Cree held Charles now and Charles sniffed at his chin on a wary inspection.

  “Looks more like a ‘Charlie’ than a ‘Charles’ to me.” A certain gruffness beneath the casual tone suggested just how shaken Cree was.

  “Waaaaa,” Charles said, sounding like a baby with laryngitis instead of a cat. He twisted and sprang away, landing on the three-holed seat and then in the weeds. He vanished around the kitchen, to reappear as a white flash racing past the commissary.

  “This is the Charles Callie asked about when I saw her at the Senate. He’s living proof that what we’ve been seeing is real, Cree. I don’t think you can deny it now, no matter how you try to fool yourself.”

  Cree had a long scratch on the back of one hand. Blood bubbled out in droplets between black hairs. “Well, he’s living anyway.”

  “Living now. And all those people he was with a moment ago have probably been dead for years. Other people will have to believe us.” She skirted the dining room’s rubble and started after Charles. “We can’t lose him. That’s a real Victorian cat.”

  “What are you going to tell these other people? A bony white cat born around the turn of the century is alive today because a little girl pushed him through a hole in the scenery? You’re going to end up in a kind of place that reminds you a lot of prison.”

  Charles sniffed around the foundation of a vanished mill but ran across the road and under Callie’s house when he saw them. They called him “kitty, kitty, kitty.” They called him “Charles” and “Charlie.” Cree even called him a few un-Victorian names. But Charles remained cold and aloof and always out of reach. His dull-hued eyes reminded Aletha of the ancient Mildred Heisinger’s.

  12

  Management was most unhappy at the latest shutdown of the mine at Alta. First the unfortunate Haskell Gibson had been caught in the works at the mill; then a lightning storm had shut down operations in the same summer. Now in the first week of September men refused to enter the mine for four days in the belief that angels had appeared to them to warn of an impending cave-in.

  “You expect me to believe an angel would appear in the cookhouse?” A rising blood pressure showed up as blotches beneath the skin on Timothy Traub’s face. The mine manager fairly danced around his office in the building behind the cookhouse. “I’ve heard the language and the stories bandied about in that place. No angel would go near it!”

  “Where would you expect an angel to show hisself here, in the privy?” one of his men asked. “Ain’t no church, you know.”

  “And they tommyknockers has been cutting up something fearsome,” another offered. “’Tis a double-edged warning and sure as a gun it is too.”

  Traub beat a fist on the same metal safe Aletha had seen on its side in the weeds, rusted and doorless. “You try to explain tommyknockers and angels to the owners.”

  While the manager fumed, Luella had to take Callie and Bram out of school because loitering miners pestered them to explain the manifestation of trousered angels who’d spoken to them personally and even accepted Callie’s offering of a stray cat. John O’Connell finally took Bram off prospecting. Uncle Henry traveled down to Telluride to see Aunt Lilly. Fighting broke out sporadically in the boardinghouse, where young men spent too much time, energy, and money over a pack of cards. Poor Miss Heisinger grew bilious because of the difficulty in sneaking in and out of privies with both shifts from the mine and three from the mill hanging about to watch her every move. Callie became sluggish and lonesome for Bram and Charles, missed the stimulation of school.

  But while the company watched the “angel strike” eat into its profits, the single miners and mill hands accrued no pay and still owed a dollar a day for room and board at the cookhouse. Those with family could afford the layoff even less. And so they drifted back to work. But they moved warily through the levels and drifts, the crosscuts and stopes. They started each time a tommyknocker tapped over their heads or a drop of water splashed too loudly. And when a miner spit a fuse he hurried away from it a little faster than before.

  Luella put up wildberry jams and jellies, ordered up sacks of cornmeal and flour, potatoes and dried pinto beans, coffee beans and sugar. At night mice chewed holes in the corners of the sacks. She set out traps for the first time since they’d moved to Alta. The kitchen was so crowded only a path remained between the table, stove, and back door. Sacks of provisions huddled along the wall under the stairs and beneath the beds in the loft.

  Alta’s children ranged far and wide to cut down aspen trees with yellow-gold leaves for firewood. Men with chains and horses hauled whole tree trunks to Alta, sold sawed-off sections to people squirreling away for winter. Heaps of firewood grew massive on the back porch.

  Callie began knitting a neck scarf in the evenings while her mother knitted woolly mittens. The O’Connells nailed heavy blue denim over the floor and walls of the sitting room. At night under their naked electric bulb the room took on a somber winter hue and the skin on their hands and faces looked blue-tinged and eerie.

  Late one afternoon as Callie and Bram dragged silver aspen up Boomerang Road, they met Miss Heisinger out for a walk. Callie and the teacher chatted while Bram walked on stolidly, saying nothing. Miss Heisinger wore a hat of black straw with a wide brim that shielded her face from the sun and from his view.

  “It must be tiresome for you to not be able to go anywhere except Bertha’s house and the schoolhouse,” Callie said.

  “To be unable to go anywhere except,” Mildred corrected. “I don’t know how I’ll manage this winter when I can’t sneak off on these little walks.” She tilted her head to peer prettily up at Bram from under her hat. “I’ve worn a path between the tree stumps behind Mr. Traub’s coal shed and through here.” She gestured up an incline that led to the backyards of the nice houses on the hill. “This way I can avoid the camp altogether and take the air without causing some old grand commotion. Don’t you tell anyone. It’s just a secret I’m sharing with the two of you.”

  Bram didn’t figure anything she did could be much of a secret for long, and soon there’d be men lining her path. He wished they hadn’t met up with her. Callie always slowed down when she talked and the teacher couldn’t walk very fast in all her long skirts and pointed shoes. That gnawing need to eat, which rarely left him, practically made his head swim now an
d he knew a dinner of chicken and dumplings was readying at home.

  Miss Heisinger stopped them with a hand on his arm and one on Callie’s shoulder. “Before I turn back to my private path, I must speak with you. Your birthday is next week, Bram, and so is Jennie Tyler’s. I thought we might plan a little celebration. Perhaps carry our lunches to Alta Lakes and—”

  Bram took a firmer grip on the aspen trunks and pulled them away from her skirts, trailing leaves the size and color of gold coins. They gave off a smoky, mossy smell. Why this woman took such pleasure in tormenting him he did not know. But if the wrath she raised in him ever got out, he was doomed and that he did know. “Birthday celebrations are for children.”

  He walked off and left Callie calling after him. Bram wanted to hurt Miss Heisinger physically and he wanted to hold her, caress around on her body. He was shamed by both thoughts.

  “Bram, wait. Stop.” She was running up the road after him. “I merely thought—” She cut off with a gasp and he didn’t hear her heels clicking on pebbles behind him any longer.

  “Are you hurt? Bram, help—” Callie had dropped her branches and run to the teacher’s side. “She turned her ankle.” Bram fitted his teeth together hard, laid down his load, and walked back to them. Miss Heisinger, with a hand on Callie’s shoulder, tried to take a step and groaned, lost her balance, and sat in the dust in a billow of skirts. Her hat went cockeyed. “Oh, this is so silly. I’m sorry.”

  It was just then that the devil spoke to Brambaugh O’Connell.

  “I’ll stay with her,” Callie said. “You run for someone to help.” The evening cold that he hardly felt had turned her little nose red already.

  Bram handed Callie his hatchet. He stooped to gather up the fallen teacher and tightened the muscles in his buttocks and lower back as John O’Connell had taught him to do when lifting a load. He noticed how high her little boots were buttoned, how white was the lace of her petticoats. He was surprised at how light she was and how quickly the devil had implanted the idea in his head. The pain in her big flecked eyes almost caused him to waver. But things had gone deep enough, he’d had all a man could stand.