The Threshold

by Marlys Millhiser

  “So that’s how she keeps her tan.” Aletha pulled the pendant up over her head and slipped it into her pants pocket, feeling a little silly, but maybe … She found a door to the side of all that glass and stepped out. “Renata, I hate to bother you on your day off, but I’ve got trouble.”

  Renata, with a white towel wrapped around her head and a white bathrobe, looked like a blue-eyed Indian as she handed them Perrier with ice and lemon. “You saw a shelf with a candlestick and beer stein on the wall and decided you must escape Telluride,” she summed up what Aletha had told her with a studied blankness. “Aletha, there’s a woman in town, a sort of counselor. I wonder if you’d consider telling her your story.”

  “It’s not just her, Renata. Cree and I can vouch for this stuff,” Tracy said as Renata led them down the staircase from the kitchen.

  “That’s my father’s,” Aletha said when she came abreast of Jared Kingman’s pueblo scene. “I mean, he painted that.”

  “You’re that Kingman family? Any idea where I can get more of those? They’re worth a fortune now.”

  “How can you afford this setup on Renata’s Helpers?” Tracy asked bluntly.

  “Business”—Renata settled on a couch, drew her legs up under her robe, and stared Tracy down—“is good. And with two marriage settlements, the sale of a business in Aspen, and some wise investments I assure you I can afford my life-style. I do not deal drugs, if that’s what you were thinking. And, Aletha, please tell me why you honored me when you decided to escape Telluride.”

  “I thought if I came someplace where there wasn’t any history it couldn’t catch me. There’s no history here, is there?”

  “As I remember, there used to be a sawmill on or very near this site, and for all I know, Indians camped here while hunting before that.”

  “You see a buzz saw coming out of a wall,” Tracy warned, “don’t stand around and try to figure it out.”

  Renata called the marshal for them and then she called Cree to persuade him to prepare dinner for them all. “He’s one of the best chefs in town.”

  She drove in to pick him up and buy some groceries and he made them a creamy lobster-and-vegetable casserole. He and Tracy went over their experiences in old Telluride while Renata came up with sarcastic remarks. They were finishing their coffee when Doris Lowell called.

  “Mildred Heisinger is poorly. Mrs. Lowell’s worried.” Renata held her hand over the mouthpiece. “The old lady keeps asking for ‘Snoop.’ Doris thinks she means you, Aletha.”

  “Tell Mrs. Lowell I’ll come in tomorrow. I’m afraid to go back to Telluride tonight. It’s like things are starting to happen again, and—”

  “At Mildred’s age, Aletha, there may be no tomorrow.”

  40

  The O’Connells finally decided that after Christmas, when the new school term began, Callie could give up her work and go to school. Both Pa and Bram were earning now, and most of their debts had been paid. Mrs. Pakka had agreed to allow Callie to share her mother’s tiny room off the parlor. Callie danced from cot to cot in the hotel’s third-floor room when she surprised the rest of Mrs. Stollsteimer’s girls with her wonderful news. She vowed secretly to end her visits to Aunt Lilly’s.

  Arthur Collins left a wife and two young children. The vicious murder sickened union and nonunion men alike. Vincent St. John, president of the local chapter of the Western Federation of Miners, offered a five-thousand-dollar reward for information that would lead to the capture of the murderer. This worried Duffer and Maynard, who hid their blood money under a floorboard in Mrs. Pakka’s attic and took jobs carrying crates at the Telluride Transfer Station across the street from Mildred Heisinger’s haven. A grand jury convened to charge Vincent St. John with the murder of Arthur Collins. A district judge threw out the murder charge for lack of evidence. However, in the minds of the majority in Telluride, the “Western Federation of Murderers” had been tried and found guilty. Mr. Bulkeley Wells, a man Callie had merely glimpsed during his stays at the hotel, arrived in his personal railroad car with his family and valet. He moved them into Collins’s house and took over management of the Smuggler-Union. He closed operations down for a month in mourning for the slain manager, and John O’Connell had no work. Callie’s reprieve was postponed for another school term.

  “You’d be so far behind now, they’d just put you in with the little kids,” Opal Mae Skoog said, thinking to comfort her friend.

  “Don’t know what you’d want to waste your time with books and figures for anyway.” Olina Svendt stroked Callie’s head in a motherly way. She’d begun to notice Callie’s brother. The sun had mysterious ways of highlighting the bones in his face under the colorless, unruly hair when he met his sister in the alley behind the kitchens. Callie always found unused food, bread or meaty bones or cake, to take to him, and Olina had learned to hunt such things herself, to step out and offer him extra. His eyes said more than a schoolboy’s should and his hunger intrigued her. Olina wore her long braid coiled on top of her head now.

  Callie became a woman that winter, going through the messy menstrual rites with the aid of the other girls, who taught her the proper shame of it. This winter was not as harsh as the previous one and melted away sooner. When it did, the body of W. J. Barney was found in a ravine, nearly destroyed by predators and weather. Barney had been a Smuggler-Union shift boss missing since the 1901 strike during Callie’s first summer in Telluride. She and the girls took turns sneaking out to see the horrible skull with a matting of red hair displayed in the window of a store. The sign next to it announced that this was the work of the union murderers.

  Sometimes, when Callie had leave to visit her mother, she’d take roundabout routes between the boardinghouse and the hotel. This served to lengthen her time away from both. Luella had become difficult to talk to. Often Callie would go by way of the railroad station and clear up to the magnificent schoolhouse, then back down to the hotel. One of these times she noticed Miss Heisinger on the front of a livery buckboard, her huge trunks in the wagon bed behind. She’d not stayed at the hotel in a very long time. Curious, Callie followed and stood in the shadows of the stone Transfer Station as the liveryman handed Miss Heisinger down at the gate to a pretty white house.

  Callie remembered Bertha Traub saying that the teacher had many fine books in her trunks in Alta. Perhaps that’s why the liveryman struggled with them so now. Perhaps Callie wouldn’t be as far behind in school if she could do some reading.

  “Callie, why should she give you books?” Olina said when Callie discussed this with her friends that night. “And if she’s a teacher, she might need them.”

  “Don’t you think she might lend me just one?”

  “Well … you might have to give her something of yours to keep so she’d know you’d bring it back and not damage it. Like the men leave a deposit at Van Atta’s when they rent a suit.”

  “I don’t have any money for a deposit.” Callie reached under her cot for her carpetbag and looked through it. “What about Aletha’s drawing book?”

  “I can’t think what she’d want with that.”

  But Callie took the sketchbook with her on her next trip out and marched right up to the pretty white house. A Negro woman answered the door and stared at her as if no one had ever visited here before.

  “What is it, Letty?” Miss Heisinger called from the interior of the house.

  “It’s me, Miss Heisinger. I mean it’s I, Callie O’Connell,” she shouted past the black woman, who was clearly not going to invite her in.

  Miss Heisinger appeared and nodded Letty away. She had a flush in her cheeks and no welcome in her voice. “What would you want here, Callie O’Connell?”

  “Please, ma’am,” and Callie told her ex-school mistress about her desire for books and her offer of a fine book of drawings as a deposit. Mildred stood poised and still as Callie rushed her sales pitch. She barely blinked all the while Callie talked. “If I’m to ever begin catching up with—”

&nb
sp; “Ever begin to catch up.” Miss Heisinger took the drawing book. Her face looked cold as marble as she leafed through it, and did not change when she finally looked over it to Callie. “Do you treasure these drawings for some reason, Callie O’Connell?”

  “Oh yes, they’re very grand. Everyone says so.”

  Miss Heisinger smiled a tight little smile and closed the door in Callie’s face. She still had the drawing book and Callie had nothing.

  In August the state government, now headed by a newly elected pro-business governor, sent one thousand National Guardsmen into Cripple Creek to crush a miners’ strike, and less than a month later, just when Callie hoped to quit work and resume her schooling for the new term, the millworkers around Telluride decided they wanted an eighthour day like the miners had won earlier instead of the twelve-hour shifts they worked. The union called a strike against the Smuggler, the Tomboy, and the Liberty Bell mills. One hundred millworkers walked out and the giant crushers ceased their din. The mines had to shut down and John O’Connell was thrown out of work. The family needed Callie’s wages once more.

  Callie decided to visit Aunt Lilly again. Aunt Lilly had given her small gifts of money or candy often, but this time she gave Callie a book. “It was left here by a friend, ever so long ago. I don’t think he’ll return for it, and since you fancy words so much, you can have it.”

  Indian Horrors; Or, Massacres by the Red Men. The colored engravings horrified, titillated, and astonished Mrs. Stollsteimer’s girls for endless hours. None of them would ever look at the few ragged red men on Telluride’s streets in the same way again. And while Callie read and reread the savage horrors aloud to the others at night with a blanket over the transom, the town roared outside. It was full of out-of-work men down from the mines. They slept on barroom floors and wherever they could, spending whatever they had on Pacific Avenue in a burst of holiday gaiety, sure that the owners must give in soon.

  In a back room of the upper story of the Pick and Gad, Audrey Cranston posed nude against a black velvet draping. She felt cold and highly ridiculous under the sexless scrutiny of the artist. Diamond Tooth Leona had this amazing idea of having the girls painted in oil and hung in the waiting parlor. Leona had in mind not only encouraging business in this manner but speeding it up as well. And at the Pick and Gad, as in most businesses, time was money. Not only could a gentleman get his interest up and have it ready by gazing upon the available lovelies in the paintings, but he could make his choice among them more promptly by observing them all at once.

  The artist was some bummer Leona had snatched off the streets when she’d seen the sketches he was trying to sell to buy food. Audrey noticed his brow furrow and his eyes squint as his concentration shifted from the form he painted to the human inside it. And she knew he was about to ask the forbidden but abiding question. “What would it be that could draw someone like yourself to this profession?” He colored slightly. “Or did you come upon some misfortune?”

  “I certainly did, mister. Or rather she came upon me.” It set her thinking of Mildred Heisinger again. Death was too good for that woman.

  “Nobody’s forcing you to stay,” Leona snapped at her once. “All you had to do was earn enough for a ticket out of here, and you did that long ago.” Which was true, but a ticket to where? Not back to Kansas City, where family and friends would question her about her time out West and surely read the guilt on her face. As a bookkeeper she’d made enough money to live in a spare room with two other women who worked at the same foundry and to dress frugally but respectably, perhaps indulge in some frivolity once a month. She’d worked twelve to fourteen hours a day. Here a Chinese laundryman and Sarah saw to her vastly expanded wardrobe, lodging and food were provided, and there was a party every night. No cleaning, washing, ironing, cooking, baking … Audrey didn’t like the life exactly, but she didn’t quite know how to give it up either.

  Just one more week, or one more month, she’d promise herself, until she had some money put by so that life wouldn’t be as grim as it had been in Kansas City. But if Mildred Heisinger had not lured her here, Audrey wouldn’t have thought Kansas City so grim and tedious. And the money seemed to disappear before she could get it together to count. There were always dressmakers’ bills and a backlog from the shops on Colorado Avenue. Audrey could never get ahead enough to feel good about leaving. The disillusioned expression of the hungry artist made her decide to try again. “And what brings a man of such talents as you to a place like this?”

  “I came to the San Juans to make my fortune and found instead that my slight frame and uncallused hands made me unfit to those who hire at the mines.”

  “You’d rather be a miner than a painter?”

  “I’d rather be a man of wealth than almost anything else.” He stepped out from behind his canvas and turned his head from side to side studying her. “Try putting your left arm up and your hand to your brow like this.” He demonstrated a ladylike gesture of distress that made her grin.

  He was puny but interesting. And his disappointment in her needled Audrey. The next day, as she returned from mailing a letter full of lies to her parents, she saw Mildred Heisinger. Mildred rode sidesaddle, and for once not gracefully, toward the livery stable. Audrey walked with Leona and a few others from the house, and Leona grabbed her arm. “Mind your manners, now.”

  They’d all heard Audrey’s threats against the hated procuress, and the rest laughed as they passed, but Leona stayed behind with her. “Think of the lovely clothes you have and the fun and the time to yourself. Don’t make a fuss.”

  The Heisinger bitch looked over their heads and guided the horse into the big doorway. “I think I shall take up riding,” they heard her say to the stableman. “In fact, I may purchase an animal of my own.”

  “She could have horses and even a carriage,” Leona said thoughtfully. “Hire a bummer from Stringtown to feed them. All those outbuildings behind her house and all.”

  The San Juan District Owners’ Association organized by Bulkeley Wells asked the governor of Colorado to send troops to Telluride because the lawless strikers threatened anarchy to the town, not to mention the free-enterprise system. Not only did they refuse to work, but they kept the honest workingman from his toil as well, causing hardship to him and his family.

  “What they want is troops so they can reopen the mills with scabs,” John O’Connell assured Simon Doud over a beer at the Senate, “and to be breaking the back of the union.”

  “But what can we do against trained soldiers?” Simon Doud was the ruddy-faced man Mildred Heisinger had seen on the train when she’d begun her travels, and again at the New Sheridan Hotel.

  “Keep the buggers out of town.” John stared glumly at his beer. No more rye-bright eyes for him. In fact he’d just finished a free supper at the soup kitchen set up by the union at the new Miners’ Union Hospital.

  “You mean … do something to the tracks?” Simon Doud looked astonished. He’d worked alongside John O’Connell at the Smuggler Union, mostly mucking, but John had been teaching him the ways of the hammer and drill.

  “Well, now, there’s an idea.” John marveled at his new friend’s ability to see solutions so quickly. Even drink didn’t seem to fog the man. “Spit a few fuses under a trestle between here and the Dallas Divide and troop trains would not come a-crawling into this camp. I might just be bringing it up at the meeting tonight.”

  “But what’s to preven … stop the foot soldiers and cavalry from unloading and walking into town?”

  “Slow them down a mite. Cause hell with the supplying of them. A thousand militia was sent into Cripple Creek. Must take a heap of provisioning.” John finished his beer and rose from the table. He’d put off a trip to Mrs. Pakka’s to visit the wife long enough. They had to talk in the parlor in front of others. She seemed interested only in her medicine and her Bible. Too long since he’d had a woman. Not that he’d want to bother poor Ma’am with that now. If he hurried he’d have time to stop off at the
bottling works and see the boy too. He longed for the day his little family lived again under the same roof. He nodded farewell to Doud and turned toward the door.

  John froze as two women stepped inside, Floradora she was now and one other. He’d seen her around but this was the first they’d met eye to eye. She was dressed to the teeth, and prettier than ever she’d been back in Ohio or up to Alta either. Lillian froze too. Her smile, set to welcome the whole room, caved in at the corners. Color rose to fire her cheeks. She looked down first, as well she might. He knew women turned to this life, had had business with a few, but this woman he couldn’t fathom. She’d had a good man to see to her and there was nothing so desperate in her life that time could not have fixed.

  They stepped around each other, carefully. But the scent of her perfume haunted him as it sickened him all the way to the boardinghouse.

  41

  Mildred Heisinger didn’t know that Aletha, Renata, Doris Lowell, and the young doctor ringed her bed in the room that was once a dining room. Or that Cree, Tracy, and Charles waited in the parlor.

  “Is she dying?” Aletha searched the room for any sign of history overtaking her, listened for any unearthly sound. “Shouldn’t you get her to Montrose to the hospital?”

  “It doesn’t make sense to move her.” The doctor prodded with her stethoscope. She made house calls because the local clinic had replaced her with a male doctor and she’d refused to leave town. “I’ll see if I can jack up the clinic for an IV unit.”

  Neither the doctor’s prodding nor Aletha’s anxiety disturbed Mildred. Bob Meldrum did. She was riding her new mare up Boomerang Road to practice in privacy when he rode toward her. Bulkeley Wells and the Owners’ Association had hired rough gunmen to help keep order and protect the mines from strikers, and Sheriff Cal Rutan had them deputized. Bob Meldrum was one of them. When she tried to ride past him, he turned his horse around to accompany her. “Ladies shouldn’t ride out alone in these troubled times,” he said. Mildred looked straight ahead, tried to hide her fear. “But then the other hens won’t ride out with you, will they, Millie? No matter which side of Colorado Avenue they live on. Must be lonesome for you.”