Could someone have left Margaret on Elsie’s steps with a note as Bram had been left? Callie untangled the chain from her hair and let the necklace hang down her front to please the little girl. It looked almost like the one Aletha had worn when Callie had supper out at the Senate with the lady of the painting. Could Margaret have anything to do with Elsie’s going into a room when the gentleman was present? “Mrs. Stollsteimer dismissed me too. Because of Pa and the union, I guess. Opal Mae says they’ve hired a new girl and the hotel’s filled with soldiers, and Mr. Moyer, the president of the whole union, is a prisoner in a front room on second with his own toilet.”
“I don’t want them to hurt Margaret,” Elsie said when yet another distraught family was shoved aboard. “She’s so little and can’t help herself. My pa says Margaret’s an abomination.”
She just smells like one, Callie thought, but she said, “She’s very pretty. She must take a great deal of cleaning up after.”
“Callie, you haven’t introduced me to your friend,” Luella said in a perfectly normal voice and startled them. “That is impolite and I’ve taught you better.”
“Yes, Ma’am. This is Elsie Biggs and her little Margaret.” Callie peered up anxiously at her mother. “And this is my mother, Mrs. O’Connell.”
Luella trembled as would someone very elderly and her face was fever red but she smiled at Elsie and complimented Margaret. When Elsie returned to her own mother and brothers and sister, Luella asked, “Callie, where is my Bible?”
“I didn’t have room for it. But Mrs. Pakka promised to send our things as soon as we’re settled.”
Ma’am squeezed Callie’s arm with surprising strength. “You must run back and fetch it, quickly, before the train starts away.”
“They won’t let anyone off the coach. I saw a lady try to leave and a soldier pushed her back inside.”
“They won’t allow anyone off the coach,” Luella corrected and her flush paled to chalk as the whistle blew and the rattling cars began to roll. “All my medicine is in the Bible, between the pages. Without it I shall die.”
“Maybe we can buy some in Ridgway.”
Luella reached around for Callie’s other arm, drew her up against the arm of the seat and off the carpetbag. “You meant to leave it behind. You and Mrs. Pakka planned it this way.”
“No, Ma’am, please.” All the ladies and infants had stopped wailing to stare at them. “You mustn’t behave this way.”
Luella released Callie and leaned back in her seat, wrung her hands, muttering words no one could understand. Callie wanted to cry but instead she rubbed her sore arms and prayed Pa and Bram would be at the depot in Ridgway to meet them. The railway spur that serviced Telluride and Pandora met the main line at Vance Junction. The main line led to the Ophir Loop and eventually Durango and the smelter for the ore shipments in one direction and to Placerville, the Dallas Divide, and Ridgway in the other. At Ridgway this narrow-gauge Rio Grande Southern met the standard-gauge tracks and the rest of the nation. Callie’s train stopped now at the junction to allow the tracks to clear ahead. The guard at the front of the car allowed several small children with their mothers off to take care of bodily functions and he went with them. The guard at the back of the car didn’t seem to notice Luella rise, step past Callie, and follow.
Callie had been caught by surprise too, but she hurried down the crowded aisle after Luella, who seemed to be floating at an unbelievable speed. Callie heard the guard order her to stop but couldn’t believe he’d shoot her in the back. She had to get her mother to Ridgway where the rest of the family could help care for her.
As she jumped off the coach steps to the cinders below, Callie couldn’t see the women and children led away by the first guard and she couldn’t see Ma’am. But she knew her mother would wet herself before she’d stop going back for her medicine. Callie raced down the tracks toward Telluride with the guard still shouting behind her. If he came after her he could help her with Ma’am. If he shot Callie she wouldn’t have to worry about this family problem that had grown faster than she had.
51
Word of the train carrying strikers’ families reached Ridgway too late. Most of the fathers and husbands who made it off the Dallas Divide were secreted among various crates, barrels, and supplies loaded on the train bound for Telluride. And this time they were armed. The two trains passed each other at Placerville with the incoming one pulled off on a siding.
Vincent St. John and the others had similarly passed up Bram’s snow cave in the night, and when John O’Connell and Bram reached Ridgway the next day, word of the outrage on the divide had spread to angry union men throughout the San Juans and many were filtering into Ridgway. While some joined search parties for those still lost on the divide, others milled around town demanding action. A few, those with families left behind and those hotheaded enough to find and bear weapons against General Sherman Bell and his troops, had formed a disorganized but quiet band bent on revenge. While St. John met with other union leaders to draft protests to the state and federal governments, this quiet band managed to hop a train and be gone with their leaders unaware. And the only sure plan they had was to jump off the train as it slowed for Vance Junction and to take cover, stay hidden until the soldiers had searched and gone on about their business, and then regroup on the road to march together into town. There was even talk of marching on the hotel and saving the union president, Mr. Moyer.
Bram was opposed to the whole thing. His father limped as if one leg were shorter than the other, and should not be jumping off any train. There were bound to be patrols on the road. And even if they made it to town, their anger was no match for the superior numbers that could organize to meet them.
But Bram was on the train headed for Telluride, wedged between crates of eggs and boxes of canned fruit, because John O’Connell was there, because he worried for his sister and ailing mother, and because he had an unreasoning urge to draw blood. These were men he’d be proud to work beside. He wanted to believe their assurances that because they were moving so quickly they would take the town by surprise. Yet a voice as fey as a tommyknocker’s patter told him this was suicide.
Callie heard the train departing without her but kept after the figure still moving with that strange floating glide. The tracks were clear but the snow banked high on either side and the ties were either wet or icy. Running made her slide on the ties or slip in the mush between them. So she hopped from one tie to the next, her toes bruising and her ankles turning. Snow and sky soaked up her shouts to her mother. Callie couldn’t figure how someone so weak and sick could move with such speed. If the skirts of Luella’s coat hadn’t whipped about with her steps, Callie would have thought Ma’am on wheels instead of human feet. The figure ahead grew smaller, darker, the bright snowy world grew pink.
This as all unfair. She was too young to control her mother. She’d been too young to be sent out to clean things at the hotel too. Bram should not have gone back into the mine. He’d been warned of the cave-in. Pa should not have had dealings with the union. And Ma’am should be taking care of her child instead of the other way around.
Callie’s body pleaded to stop and rest, but guilt drove her on. She’d avoided spending all the time she might have with her mother, had not really listened when Luella talked, had been impatient with her illness. Callie’s two petticoats, long dress, and coat fought young leg muscles that could have carried her faster if unhampered. She slipped on ice and came down on her backside, jolting her spine, sending pain the length of it to compound the thumping stamp mill in her head. Cold slush slid up her skirts, weighed them down when she managed to get hopping again.
By the time she reached the depot, Ma’am was nowhere in sight. But one of the guards who’d forced them onto the train was mounting a horse and he took off toward the town. Callie followed, thinking he was chasing Luella, but lost him in the massing of troops on Colorado Avenue. She turned and ran back to the boardinghouse. “I haven’t seen her. I
told you to keep an eye on her.” Mrs. Pakka squinted her disapproval. “Knew you weren’t to be trusted.”
Callie left Mrs. Pakka’s kitchen, which was filled with the yeast-and-cinnamon smells of baking, her stomach muttering but her head high. She stood uncertainly in the middle of a deserted street in Finntown. Over the distant murmur of men and horses up on Colorado Avenue came the clear peal of the school bell across the valley and the squawk of crows startled by it.
Should she run to enlist Aunt Lilly’s aid or just begin knocking on doors to find someone who’d seen her mother? In her confused state, Ma’am could be anywhere. Callie started back toward the depot and saw an old man leading a burro out from between the snow banks that bordered Townsend Avenue. “Thin woman? Without her hat?” he asked when Callie questioned him.
“That’s her … I mean she. Please, where did you see her?”
He pointed back the way he’d come and then called after her. “Needs locking up, that one.”
There seemed to be not another soul out except for the soldiers up in the business district. And they were uncannily quiet for so many. A horse-drawn plow had banked the snow high to either side of the west end of Colorado Avenue and home owners had shoveled passageways to the street. The houses here were tall, narrow, stately. Their ornate trim peeked over the snow mounds in bright colors to relieve the unending white of winter.
“Run for your home, child,” a lady called from her doorway as Callie hurried from one tunnel to the next. “There’s going to be trouble.”
“I have no home to go to and I’m looking for my mother.” Callie leaned exhausted against the towering snow to the side of the lady’s path. “She’s thin and has no hat. Have you seen her?” The lady ran down off her porch, slipping on ice patches on the steps, grabbed Callie’s hand, and pulled her inside. The house was dark after the sun and snow outdoors. Callie could see only the lady’s shape and the light from a doorway at the end of a long hall. “There’s no one else to look after her and she’s not well.”
“You can’t be out now. You’ll have to wait here until it’s over.” The lady knelt to unbutton Callie’s coat. “You’re soaked through. I’ll have Dorothy warm you some soup.”
Callie’s eyes adjusted enough to pick out a staircase rising from one side of the hall and a loaded coat tree at its base. “But I can’t leave her out there.”
Another shape formed in a doorway across from the staircase. Callie knew the voice but couldn’t make out the features of the man. “What is it, Lydia? Has it started?”
“No, Father, a waif in the street looking for her mother. We can’t allow her out now.”
The man sighed. “You will find your strays, won’t you?”
Lydia guided her into a parlor and pushed her into a chair next to a stove. The air was old and stuffed with heat. She unbuttoned Callie’s boots and drew them off.
“Until what is over?” Callie asked, but Lydia was gone. Callie blinked until she saw the face of the elderly lawyer who’d accused her father of planning to blow up the railroad to keep the militia out of Telluride. He’d sounded so much more powerful in that room in the courthouse. He sat now and put one foot up on a stool, his hands cupping a goblet with dark drink at its bottom. “I’m not a waif or a stray,” Callie told him. “I’m Callie O’Connell.”
“I would have thought everyone had been warned by now. Those union devils are marching on the town and no one is safe until they’ve been … O’Connell?” He leaned so close to her she could see the hair in his nose. “You weren’t sent off on the train this morning?”
Callie explained about her mother leaving the train as Lydia presented her with a bowl of soup and some tea. If the union was marching into town, would Bram be able to persuade Pa to stay in Ridgway? Did Callie now have to worry about them too? She was too tired to find the strength to decide what to do next. The heat of the room and the food lulled her senses more. Finally she said, “You’re Lawyer Barada.”
“And you’re the spawn of an anarchist,” he answered. “But as long as you must be in our midst, you might as well make yourself useful, Callie O’Connell.”
“Father, she’s little more than a child and distraught over her mother. She—”
“She can help you take the children to the attics, where it’s safer. Dorothy and I shall hold the fort down here. Off with you.”
Callie swallowed some more of the soup in a tiny attic room with a narrow cot and a washstand. She sat next to a freckled boy and his younger sister. “May I please have my coat and shoes? It’s cold up here.”
“They’re drying behind the kitchen stove.” Lydia handed her a blanket and wrapped the children in quilts. Then she stood at the window and shivered. “Finish that soup and hush. We’ll find your mother when it’s safe to be out.”
“My pa is not an anarchist.” The soup was cold already but the chill in the air cut through Callie’s grogginess. “He’s an Irishman.”
“What’s a pa?” the little girl asked, eyeing Callie with suspicion. She had long sausage curls like Callie once wore.
“She’s talking about her father.” The boy snickered.
“Your children are rude,” Callie told his mother, and slipped off the bed. “I thank you for wanting to help me, but I have a family too.”
“Your own manners are not above reproach, miss,” Lydia snapped. The planes of her face were so much softer than Ma’am’s. Her scent was as delicious as that worn by the fine ladies at the hotel as she knelt and hugged Callie to her. “I’m sorry and I do understand your worry. It’s just that desperate men are marching on the town.”
Callie pushed away and went to the window. This “fort” provided a clear view of the street above the shoveled paths that could hide her mother if Callie were down there. She could see almost everywhere, but no dark form without a hat scurried below. “Do you have a window this high to look out on the back of your house?”
“There are only paths to the privies out there.” But Lydia led her to the door.
“Looking for her maw,” the boy explained to his sister, and hooted like Johann Peterson the school troublemaker up at Alta used to do.
But there was another high window in the narrow room across the hall. As Lydia had predicted, paths led only to sheds and privies in backyards as far to either side as Callie could see. All were empty.
“Did you find a maw?” Lydia’s daughter asked when they returned. She and her brother stood at the window now, their quilts at their feet. “Is that a maw?”
Callie rushed to look down where the little girl pointed to an oblong object in the front yard. It had a bar of different-colored glass across its top. Its sides opened outward and gentlemen with bare heads and light clothing stepped into the snow.
On Colorado Avenue horses tugged the Gatling gun from the direction of the hotel with the sheriff and his deputies riding to each side and a horde of mounted soldiers behind it and more on foot behind them. Across the street Ma’am darted from a shoveled passageway and turned down Townsend Avenue back toward the depot, her pins gone and her hair flying.
And Callie was flying out of the attic room and down two flights of stairs. The necklace Elsie’s little Margaret had insisted she wear flopped so that Callie grabbed onto it to hold it down. The quartz stone on the end of the chain felt hot. She turned at the bottom of the stairs and raced toward the light at the end of the hall, almost colliding with Lawyer Barada as he emerged from the parlor. She’d guessed right. This was the kitchen and a heavy woman sat at a table peeling apples.
“Here, you!” the woman shouted as Callie grabbed her boots and slipped them on without buttoning, yanked her coat from a hook on the wall, and took off back down the hall. This time she did collide with the lawyer. Lydia was there too by now and made a grab for her arm as Callie fought to slide back the bolt on the door. The bolt was well oiled and moved smoothly and Callie managed to slip out of two pairs of hands as if she too were oiled.
52
Ca
ptain Bulkeley Wells had argued with the general about bringing the wonderful Gatling gun on this expedition when word was sent on the telephone wire from the Junction that strikers were headed for Telluride. Moving the weapon was too slow and Wells preferred to meet the rednecks on the road before they made it to the camp. He shivered now in anticipation and frustration riding beside General Bell, behind the lumbering Gatling and Cal Rutan with his unpredictable gunmen. The latters’ duty supposedly was to see that any sympathizers in the town did not pick off the Gatling’s escort before it could be positioned to fire on the enemy. Actually there was not a man in the lot who would miss out on the bloodletting even with an army to do the job instead.
The sound of the army at his back straightened Wells’s spine. But he was stunned when he spied McCree Mackelwain. This was the second time he’d faced this man from horseback over a snowbank, this man who could seemingly disappear as if by sorcery through a door to another world. One of his women was trying to pull the O’Connell girl into an odd contraption—some sort of enclosed vehicle with glass windows. Homer Barada and his daughter watched from the doorway.
“Not here,” Wells shouted to the general as the order was given to release the horses from the Gatling and prepare for battle. “We’re in the town still.”
“No time,” the general answered. “The enemy is upon us.” The enemy had halted down the street, a ragtag band of ridiculously small numbers.
A man with huge green spectacles and signs sewn on his coat announcing him to be the sheriff of San Miguel County climbed the snowbank out of Barada’s front yard. “What the fuck?” he asked in amazement, and sank up to his crotch. “You making a movie or something?” He picked up a handful of snow and tasted it. “This shit’s real, man.”
The Threshold Page 35