The Threshold

by Marlys Millhiser

  All of Dutch’s property and most of Cree’s had been confiscated by either the courts or the IRS because it was held in joint ownership. Cree got away with one plane and his car. It was in his car he found the folder. He came across it one morning while looking for a whisk broom under the front seat. Dutch had hidden it there when he knew there was trouble, which proved Dutch Massey was no professional and no genius either. “Just dumb luck I found it instead of the narcs.”

  “Well, old buddy,” Dutch had written, “if you’re reading this it probably means the worst happened and I didn’t get a chance to remove it. Which also means I’m probably in jail or had to leave the country. Anyway, I just want you to know I haven’t left my partner high and dry.” Dutch went on to inform Cree where he’d buried some “cash deposits” and that the key taped to the folder was to a condominium in Telluride, Colorado, that Dutch had bought in his mother’s name and had been using for several years. His mother had died the day the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor.

  And then Dutch had explained to Cree about the cache in the ghost town of Alta.

  18

  Several days passed before Bram could keep any Water down. Even though he could hear the stiffs working their way toward him, most of his hope had gone out with the candle. In the darkness sound intensified, perhaps because his eyes could no longer focus his attention elsewhere. The dripping water, the snoring sounds of sleep, the groan as a man turned over, and the clump of his boots on the platform kept Bram awake and abraded his nerves. One moment he felt weak and listless and wanted only to die, and the next he felt angry and sure he could not withstand one more irritation. That it would send him screaming in madness up the drift to bash at the wall until he bled to death.

  They were all weakening sooner than they should because of the sickness the food had brought on. He knew they couldn’t last until help arrived. No songs now, no jokes or stories. Just the dripping, snoring, coughing—none of it in unison but all in a senseless off-rhythm that made his body want to twitch and jerk in accompanying spasms.

  “Water’s risin’,” Shorty announced after a trip to the end of the workings.

  So that was how it was to end. Drowning. One of the things Bram had enjoyed about the cold, damp, exhausting work in the stopes was the anticipation of the warm, dry comfort of home after tally and the pleasure of having earned it. Now he longed for the comfort and loved ones there and could not imagine how he’d ever chosen to leave it for work in the dank earth. His tears were silent and private in the dark, but scalding hot on his skin.

  Knut gave up trying to find encouraging things to say and only spoke when he decided it was time to send someone to tap a signal to the stiffs. Gus, the stalwart Swede, took over the morale boosting and would periodically swear that he heard the shots coming closer. The water was dripping less. The air was freshening up a bit. “Soon tings ben hunky-dory, you vill see.”

  When next it came Bram’s turn to signal on the pipe he had to crawl on his hands and knees up the drift. The rescue efforts sounded fainter than they had the day before. He had to sit and rest a long time to clear his head enough to start back. It seemed the harder he breathed the less satisfaction he drew from the air. When he reached the platform, again on hands and knees, the water was up over his wrists.

  His waterlogged clothing chafed against his skin and seemed to soften the flesh beneath. It felt to Bram as if there was no longer any connecting tissue between his skin and his flesh, nor between his flesh and his bones. The different layers would slide about independently when he rolled over. He came to picture his insides as a glass of Ma’am’s slippery, clear, red-berry jelly. Tossing about became agony, lying still impossible.

  The cold drips from the roof kept his topside frozen while whatever part of him contacted the platform warmed up. He was always half hot and half cold and his teeth took to chattering uncontrollably. He would hold on to his lower jaw for a while to keep it still and give it a rest. And when he did he heard teeth chattering all around him with that echolike emptiness sound makes in the drifts.

  The water stopped its rising for a time as it filled up a stope lower in the workings. Bram realized that Knut wasn’t sending anyone to signal anymore. He was going to mention it but lost track of his thoughts and forgot. It was Gus Lundberg, the strongest, most fearless, most hopeful of them all who broke first. He started an endless angry moaning and crawled over Bram’s legs, making him cry out in pain. The moan grew to an unearthly intensity Bram would not have had the strength to produce. It sounded as if the Swede was bashing himself back and forth against either wall as he stumbled up the drift.

  Bram called after him listlessly but his throat seemed clogged with itself. The ringing in his ears finally drowned out the Swede. Gus didn’t return. Bram could tell when the water rose again because the bohunks came over to crowd onto his platform, theirs being lower. There was no room to turn over now, and breathing had become a gasping.

  Sometime after that, it could have been hours or days as jumbled as his mind had become, he realized the water was lifting him off the platform. Someone insisted he wade up the drift to higher ground. Bram saw the love in Ma’am’s eyes as she walked beside him and the pride in Pa’s as he offered him a hand. Even in delirium, Bram could not bear to think of his little Callie girl. That would have been the final agony.

  Callie tried not to think of Bram, but the reminders were endless. His cot in the sitting room, his spare pants on the peg, his hunting rifle under Pa’s on the wall, the piece of his old shirt she used as a dustrag. Callie and Luella threw themselves into cooking and baking for miners who’d come to help in the digging out. They carried loaves of bread and covered dishes and desserts up to the cookhouse to help Heinrich Mueller. There was always a crowd just come off the digging that had to be fed. They’d stop at the boardinghouse on the way back to pick up washing from the visiting rescuers, who were stacked like cordwood in the rooms and hallways. Anything to keep busy, exhaust themselves enough to sleep.

  Alta began to hurt for supplies and the call went out on the camp’s one telephone in the manager’s office. Donations of food and blankets came up the tram from Ophir, Telluride, Rico, Placerville, Pandora, San Miguel, Ouray, and great hunks of beef and mutton from the ranches and farms around. A doctor from the hospital in Telluride stood ready to take the train and ride the tram up when word came that rescue was close.

  Wicker body baskets were stacked in the snowshed entrance to bring up the dead and the basket cases—those alive but not enough to stand up in the hoist bucket. John O’Connell had to look away every time he passed them going to and from the digging out. He worked so desperately that sometimes he came home with his arms draped over the shoulders of other men, his feet dragging out behind. They’d sprawl him across Bram’s cot and help Luella remove his boots. He wouldn’t eat until he woke and didn’t want to pause long for that, but Luella would force food on him. “No sense in losing you both,” or, “Our Bram will have a better chance if you can hammer steel with fed muscles.”

  The outside world knew from the signals how many of the twenty-two men on Talse’s crew had survived the cave-in and who they were. There were widow’s weeds going about Alta already, even though no bodies had come up yet. A twelve-year-old powder monkey had perished. He’d been sent to Talse’s crew with an order. When Callie’d heard Bram was one who signaled, she dared to hope. But as time passed a heavy pain grew in her chest and she knew the meaning of the term “heartsick.”

  A special railroad car with two nurses arrived to wait on a siding down at the Loop to take the worst of the basket cases into Denver, where hospitals had the latest in lifesaving equipment. The ground was working on level four and the stiffs had to spile as they went, using up precious time the men at the end of the drift could ill afford. And the contrary weather turned warm, causing snow to melt away from the beaten paths until they stood up like bridges from the surrounding snow. Melting snow poured down the mountain and into old surface
openings and cracks where the ground had worked, leaving mud slick everywhere to further hamper rescuers.

  “Fair number of union men up here,” John O’Connell said one night over the food his wife insisted he eat before he took another turn at the drilling. “They say this wouldn’t happen if the stiffs was to be organized. If we was organized we could force the management to slow down the work so the timbering was done solid behind a man before he goes spittin’ fuses hundreds of feet down.”

  “The earth caves in on union men too,” Luella said. “And just today the management here, Mr. Traub, told me the company would help with expenses since Bram’s not insured.”

  “Funeral or hospital?” John said with a bitter sound that could have been a laugh. Both Callie’s parents were so white and drawn that the bones in their faces stuck out and their eyes and cheeks sank inward. Under the electric light bulb they looked a generation older than they had before the cave-in. “Callie darlin’”—Pa drew her onto his lap—“don’t you be listening to us now. We’re just tired, your Ma’am and me. He’ll be all right, our Bram.”

  And then word came. The survivors had stopped signaling. Callie and Luella had been kneeling by Bram’s cot, praying silently to Jesus to save Bram. Callie had pointed out to him that since he already had Aunt Lilly and baby Henry, he didn’t need Bram too. But since Callie had only one brother, she did. Ma’am must have seen the stubbornness in her eyes because she said, “Little girls do not lay down the law to the Lord, Callie. I think you’d best start over.”

  When Pa and Uncle Henry came to tell them the bad news, Luella rose from her knees and leaned against a wall, hugging herself, staring dry-eyed at nothing. John took Callie on his lap again, hiding his face behind her back where she could feel wetness through her dress. She wished Bram had listened to the man who’d come with the lady to the hole in the cookhouse. She’d decided now she was not about to ask Jesus for anything again.

  The next morning, Mr. McCall came by. “We’ve hit water, John. Having to pump. But we’re about through to them. You want to be there? I’d understand if you didn’t.”

  Pa put on his coat and left without a word. Luella set down her Bible with a sigh. “Come, Callie, we might just as well go on up and wait for the news.”

  The door to the snowshed stood open and men were carrying the baskets off toward the adit. It was warm and sunny and the slush leaked through Callie’s arctic boots as she leaned against Ma’am. It seemed as if all the starch had gone out of Callie’s bones. A quiet crowd gathered with them. There was just the usual coughing and an occasional sniff. Every now and then someone would pat Callie on the head. The doctor from Telluride and Mr. Traub entered the snowshed all togged out in boots and slickers with carbide lamps on their hats.

  Sometime later a mule began to bray in the adit as if he was being beaten with a hot poker. He made such a racket it was a while before Callie realized there was a great shouting going on as well. The people around her began shifting from one foot to the other in dread and expectation and a need for any kind of end to this ordeal. Uncle Henry came running out of the snowshed door and refused to speak until he’d found Luella and Callie. “He’s alive. Just barely, but Bram’s alive.”

  Luella swayed and nearly knocked Callie off her feet. Uncle Henry turned to talk to those crowded around them. “Nine are still alive. But they’re in bad shape. Doc says he’s sending all nine on the train to Denver and going with them. Talse, Sullivan, Shorty, Bram O’Connell, and five of the bohunks.”

  Callie wasn’t allowed to see Bram when they brought him up. She just saw the edges of the body basket hanging over the tram bucket on its way to the hospital train down at the Loop. Luella rode standing in the next one.

  In Telluride Mildred Heisinger had heard of Alta’s tragedy. The newspaper listed the names of the survivors and Brambaugh O’Connell was the only one she recognized. She felt a certain ambivalence. Mildred had troubles of her own.

  The first week after she left Alta she’d reveled in the warmth and privacy of a room on the sunny side of the New Sheridan Hotel, hot baths, and gourmet food. She’d read and visited the shops and tried to recover from her humiliation. The second week she placed an advertisement in the newspaper offering herself as governess or tutor, hoping to find a position in a comfortable home. There was much wealth in Telluride and many of the rich had young children. The advertisement garnered two interviews but her lack of references ended both sessions on a cool and final note. And the town was not so large that word didn’t spread quickly. She was even told that there was no opening for one of such meager credentials at the public school.

  There were few other positions open to women except housewife, prostitute, and dressmaker. Mildred had been gently raised, but in the poverty of a homestead in Nebraska. Her parents, born to culture and wealth, had moved west when fortunes declined, determined to renew those fortunes on the dream of a fading frontier.

  Mildred’s mother had lost her dream and her life in a sod hut while giving birth to a stillborn. Mildred’s consumptive father moved her, the books, and the piano to Denver in hopes of regaining his health and wealth in the pure air of a gold-laden Colorado paradise. Instead he married a widow with some money and thereby managed to send his daughter to a normal school which trained teachers. Before he died, he did manage to instill in Mildred a hankering for the good life, something she knew of mostly by hearsay.

  The widow had children of her own and little sympathy for her good-looking stepdaughter. Mildred studied magazines for fashion. She’d learned much of decorum and language from her parents, but she’d come to find her looks and tastes to be more of a curse than a blessing.

  She sat now with her feet against the radiator in a third-floor room on the cold, shady side of the New Sheridan Hotel, its one window overlooking the alley. Her money was nearly gone. She couldn’t believe how quickly it had melted away. She’d managed to sell some of her clothes, but could find no buyer for her books. Reduced to one meal a day and washing in cold water from a basin, she’d soon be carrying slops in a boardinghouse. Or worse.

  Mildred stood to pace the tiny room to warm herself. What was it in her that called out such cruelties in others? She’d never harmed a soul. In neither of her posts had Mildred been openly accused of anything, so she’d been unable to defend herself against the charges, whatever they were. With her two trunks, mostly empty now, the room allowed her only a few paces in any direction and she grew dizzy moving with her thoughts. She stopped at the window to peer down into the alley. A stray cat, as gray as the weather and swaying from hunger or disease, lurched through mud and snow to a trash bin outside the kitchen. Mildred couldn’t bear to watch, see if it found food or collapsed trying to get into the bin.

  When Bram O’Connell had carried her through that horrid mining camp, no one had mentioned it to her afterward. But he had been taken out of school and that mysterious shutter other women wore behind their eyes had closed them away from her.

  There was a rapping on the door and Mildred paused before opening it for so long the rapping came again. It was Mrs. Stollsteimer, the housekeeper, a large-boned frump of a woman who wore nothing but deepest black offset by startling white aprons and white lace dust caps. She too had that shutter of the sisterhood behind her eyes that excluded Mildred Heisinger. “A gentleman in the lobby to see you.” She used the same tone she did to terrorize the poor children who worked for her. “He asks your company at luncheon in the dining room in half an hour.”

  “Certainly not. How dare you assume I—”

  “It’s Lawyer Barada, Miss Heisinger.” Mrs. Stollsteimer’s expression indicated that fact surprised her too.

  “Oh … well … yes. Of course. Please inform Mr. Barada I shall be happy to meet him for luncheon.” Lawyer Barada was a leading citizen of Telluride. He had represented the Smuggler-Union Mining Company against the labor unions, and the Tomboy Mining Company as well.

  Mildred Heisinger smiled at her image in the
mirror and ignored the hungry cramping in her stomach as she prepared a careful toilet. Lawyer Barada and his widowed daughter lived in one of the finest houses in town, and the daughter had two small children just the age to need a governess.

  19

  During his night vigil in Alta, Cree Mackelwain noticed a few differences from his previous visit. History stayed in its place this time. Alta’s ghosts did not awaken. And there was no horny woman to soften the night chill.

  When the three men emerged from the mine tunnel at dawn they didn’t appear to be carrying anything extra. Cree had been inside it several times. The lower levels were flooded and the main tunnel blocked by rubble after a mile or so. It seemed a logical place for Dutch to have hidden the cache but Cree had found no trace of it. He watched them from behind a tree on the hill above the tunnel entrance and wondered again exactly who they might be. They weren’t being particularly careful. Two were short and rather stocky, one was tall. All three looked to be something over forty. One was balding. There was little distinctive or memorable about them.

  From what Cree had been able to translate during the confusion of the investigation into his partner’s death and the subsequent trial by the newspapers, Dutch was one of several local lone entrepreneurs in a disorganized business that organized crime decided to organize. Others were eliminated by similarly nasty methods. There was to be no mistaking those deaths as accidental. Cree should have had an inkling of how deeply Dutch had become involved when he discovered apparently senseless break-ins both at the office and at Dutch’s apartment that went unreported. Dutch simply explained nothing had been taken. But the investigation uncovered the fact that sharks as well as organized crime were working the area.