The Bride’s House

by Sandra Dallas

  “I love Colorado more than anyplace, and if I go to DU, I can spend time here with Grandfather. And you talked it up so much last summer. You said I ought to go there.” She added quickly so that Joe wouldn’t get the idea he was the reason for her decision, “Mother says she would have gone to DU.” Susan hadn’t known her mother had even considered attending college, until Susan brought up the University of Denver and Pearl told her she would have gone there if her father hadn’t needed her at home.

  “Maybe we’ll have classes together,” Susan told Joe.

  She could not make out the look he gave her in the dark. “I’ll be an upperclassman.”

  “You mean you won’t have anything to do with a freshman?”

  “I might if you show the proper respect.”

  Susan leaned over, bowed her head, and stretched out her arms so that they touched her feet. “Will that do?”

  “For a start.”

  “It’s good Susan will know at least one person when she begins school,” Pearl said.

  “DU has a lot of kids from Illinois,” Joe replied, to Susan’s disappointment. She’d hoped Joe would promise to show her around, to look out for her.

  * * *

  Susan was sitting with Joe and Peggy and several others from the group she’d played with as a kid, when Peggy invited her to go on a snipe hunt. “Do you know what that is?”

  “A what?” Susan asked.

  “A snipe hunt. I bet you never heard of it. Maybe they don’t have snipes in Chicago? Maybe they’re just in Colorado.”

  “What’s a snipe?” Susan asked

  “Oh, it’s a sweet little animal, like a kitten sort of. It’s real friendly. You never see them in the day. They come out just at night. There are a bunch of them at the cemetery.”

  “Are they dangerous?”

  “No, of course not.”

  “Do you shoot them?” Susan’s eyes were big.

  Peggy glanced at Joe, who had been watching her, and asked, “Why don’t you tell her?”

  Joe thought a moment and said, “You sure you want to do this, Peggy?”

  “Of course. It’s so much fun.”

  Joe thought that over, and to Susan’s disappointment, he said, “Okay, then.” He turned to her. “We don’t kill them. It’s not like you eat them or anything. We just play with them, like cats, just capture them, then let them go.”

  “How do you do that, capture them, I mean?”

  Joe glanced at Peggy, who told him to go on. “Like Peggy said, we go to the cemetery. You walk very quietly and touch the gravestones. That brings them out.”

  “That doesn’t sound like much fun to me.” Susan stared at Joe, wishing he’d wink at her or give some sign he wasn’t going along with Peggy.

  “You won’t have to do that. You can hold the bag, since you’ve never been on a snipe hunt before,” Peggy told her. “You can be the first to catch them.”

  “Do they bite?”

  “They don’t have teeth,” someone interjected. “They don’t have much of anything.” The others laughed.

  “We’ll go tonight, after dark,” Peggy said.

  “I don’t know,” Susan told them.

  “You aren’t afraid of ghosts, are you?” Peggy turned to the others. “Maybe she’s chicken.”

  Susan shook her head, then said, “I guess it’s all right.” She’d show them, show Peggy and Joe, too. She was disappointed that Joe was being as big a jerk as Peggy, had hoped he would look out for her.

  “Okay, then,” Peggy told her, and she nudged Joe with her elbow.

  That night, just as the sky was turning an ominous dark gray, Susan met Peggy and Joe and four others on the road to the cemetery. “I don’t know about this,” Susan remarked. “It looks like it’s going to rain.”

  “Snipes love rain,” Peggy said.

  Susan turned to Joe, but he was silent.

  “Don’t worry. We’ll be with you,” Peggy said, and the group set off along the long road lit only by stars and a sliver of moon. They could hear the rushing water in the creek and the sound of the wind as it bent the aspen trees, making the leaves quiver. The air was damp on Susan’s skin, with the feeling of rain—not a soft summer drizzle as in Chicago but a cold mountain rain.

  “It’s sort of spooky,” Peggy said. “Did you ever read that story in school about the headless horseman?”

  Susan nodded. Then because Peggy couldn’t see her, she said in a small voice, “Yes.”

  “Don’t worry. Nobody here’s ever seen a headless horseman,” Joe said.

  “Or lived to tell about it,” Peggy added.

  When they reached the cemetery, Peggy stationed Susan at the entrance and gave her a gunnysack, telling her the others would scare up the snipes. All she had to do was catch them. “Sometimes it takes time—a long time—so don’t worry. You’re not scared, are you? You don’t believe in ghosts?”

  Susan hunched her shoulders. “Is this some sort of joke?”

  “No, of course not,” Peggy said. She sounded indignant.

  Susan sat down on a headstone with the bag and watched the others scatter in the dark. She waited until they had disappeared into the mountains beyond the cemetery and she couldn’t hear them anymore. Then she dropped the bag and hurried back up the road to Georgetown, smiling a little, hoping she got home before the rain. But she was angry, too, not at Peggy but at Joe, because he shouldn’t have done this to her.

  She sat on the front porch in the dark, watching the rain come down, then stop, waiting, until finally Peggy and Joe walked by. They looked up at her bedroom window, which was dark, and she thought they laughed, and that hurt her feelings, hurt her that Joe would help Peggy play a trick on her like that. After all, they weren’t kids anymore. Susan wished Joe had told Peggy to forget it or that he’d whispered to Susan it was all a trick. She thought to let them pass, but instead when she heard Peggy giggle, Susan called out to them. “Did you get caught in the rain?”

  The two stopped and turned to each other, then stared at the porch. “When did you get home?” Peggy demanded.

  “Oh, a long time ago, just before the rain started.” She came down off the porch and walked to the gate and looked at Peggy, whose wet hair was plastered to her head. Joe looked sheepish. “It didn’t take me as long as you because I just went back up the road. You had to take the long way so I wouldn’t see you.” Then she added, “A snipe hunt! How dumb do you think I am?” She hoped she didn’t sound as hurt as she was.

  Joe grinned, and that made Susan feel a little better. But Peggy turned away and walked quickly up the street, shivering in her wet clothes.

  Susan called after her, “How many snipes did you catch?”

  Joe let Peggy go, then he laughed. “I guess you showed us. Good going, Susan!” he said.

  CHAPTER 14

  BECAUSE THEY DID NOT HAVE a car in Georgetown, Susan and her mother walked everywhere, and if they needed to go to Denver, Pearl hired Bert Joy to drive them. Every week or two, they walked down to the Alvarado Cemetery to tend to the Dumas plot where Nealie as well as Lydia Travers was buried under the wings of a stone angel. They took along implements to dig dandelions and trim the grass that grew under the iron fence that surrounded the plot. And they either brought lilacs or peonies or daisies in a jar or stopped along the way to pick wildflowers. Susan would spot them in the weeds along the road, shining in the sun like bits of bright fabric—the red paintbrush, the blue columbine, the magenta flowers the women called summer’s-half-over.

  Susan loved roaming through the cemetery with its elaborate tombstones carved to look like stumps or angels or lambs. There were a few marble slabs marking the graves of soldiers from the Civil War, World War I, and the last war. But she liked the wooden markers best. The wood was silvery with age, weathered and splintery, and the names once painted or carved into the wood had been sanded off by the wind and snow. Susan speculated about the men and women buried there, believing they were young people like Joe who�
�d come west to strike it rich, not elderly men like her grandfather. The old people lay under the stolid stone and marble markers.

  One afternoon, as Susan and her mother passed the filling station on their way out of town, they spotted Joe pumping gas into a Studebaker, a silver and green one, and stopped to admire it. “Isn’t this a honey?” Joe said.

  “It’s too low for mountain roads,” Pearl observed. “I wish we had an old car, one higher off the ground, for the summer.”

  “Why don’t you take that old car of Mr. Dumas’s off its blocks?” Joe asked. “Is it still in your barn?”

  “That’s a great idea, Mother,” Susan said, then turned to Joe. “Do you think it can be made to run?”

  Joe shrugged. “It’s a heck of a car.”

  Susan’s father had bought Charlie a black touring car twenty years before, a high one, and her grandfather had driven Susan over the rough mountain roads in it when she was a small child. But the old man’s eyesight had grown poor, and the automobile had sat on blocks in the barn since before the war, its whitewall tires stored in a horse stall. When she was younger and by herself, Susan had played in the car, polishing the hood ornament or sitting in the front passenger seat, imaging Joe sitting beside her, one hand on the wheel, the other around her. She went through the glove compartment and took out the packages of matches and maps that Charlie had acquired in his travels, dreaming of places she and Joe would go. She picked sprigs of lilac and put them into the crystal vases in the holders between the front and back seats. Sometimes, she even rolled down the shades and lay down in the back seat with the plaid lap robe over her.

  Now, she turned to her mother and said, “Maybe Joe could fix it up.”

  “Maybe,” Joe said. “At least I could take a look.”

  “We’d appreciate that,” Pearl told him. She shifted the shears she was carrying from one hand to the other. “We’re off to the cemetery.”

  The two started on, but Joe called, “Hey, Susan, you want to go explore the old Poor Boy Mine on Saturday? Maybe you can find a miner’s candlestick.” Susan collected the twisted bits of metal that the miners had shoved into walls underground to hold their candles.

  “Great! I’d love to go.” She stopped herself from adding, “with you,” but that was what she meant.

  “I’ll take a look at your grandfather’s car when I pick you up.”

  Susan hummed a little as they walked on. Pearl looked at her but was silent. After a time, however, she remarked, “You like that boy, don’t you?”

  “I guess,” Susan said, turning aside so her mother wouldn’t see her blush, embarrassed that Pearl might know how much she cared about Joe. “But I think he likes Peggy.”

  “I’m not so sure. A boy with the ambition Joe has is too smart to tie himself to a girl like Peggy Purcell.”

  They walked along quickly then, since Pearl had never been one to stroll, and when they reached the cemetery, they passed the Bullock plot. Joe’s grandparents were buried there along with his aunts and his older brother, who had died in the war. There was room for other graves, for Joe’s parents and sister, for Joe and maybe Joe’s wife. If she were Joe’s wife, would she prefer to be buried there or with her own family? Susan wondered.

  She and Pearl stopped at the Dumas plot, a large one with a stone monument the size of a double-bed headboard, with “Nealie, Mrs. Charles Dumas, 1865–1882” on one side and “Charles Dumas, 1853–19—” on the other. Mrs. Travers’s grave was to one side with just “Lydia Travers.” “She never told us when she was born,” Pearl remarked.

  Susan’s mother took out her shears and began to clip the grass around Nealie’s grave. “They were married less than a year, and my father’s grieved another seventy for her. Maybe he’d have been better off if he’d never met her.”

  Susan looked up, waiting for her mother to explain, but Pearl was watching a hearse pull out, driving slowly—respectfully—over the rocky road to the cemetery gate. The mourners, some of the men in Masonic regalia, the women in black dresses with high heels and nylons that would be ripped by the weeds and brambles before the women reached the cars, turned away from the open grave and went to their vehicles.

  A few of the mourners stopped at graves to throw out bunches of dead flowers stuffed into rusted tin cans or to discard Decoration Day flags, their red and blue already bleached by the sun. Pearl waved to a couple placing a tin can of daisies beside a tombstone. “How do?” she called, and the two came over to chat, the woman tipping from side to side because her legs were angled from rickets.

  “We brought flowers to decorate Mother’s grave,” the woman explained. “She was a multiplying woman. The old man wanted babies, and she just had them. She asked him once not to have them too close, but he cuffed her. He wasn’t the one having the babies, and she had to obey. Then he took off with her money—took her lucky dime and spent it on tobacco—and all she got was babies. My whole life, I raised them, raised her come-after child all by myself. That’s why I never had any of my own.”

  “What’s a come-after child?” Susan asked.

  “One that’s born after its father’s gone.”

  “Its father?”

  “Well, it wouldn’t be born after its mother died, now would it?” The woman chuckled.

  “Oh,” Susan said. “Is your father buried here, too?”

  “He is,” the man answered and shook his head. “We was letting the coffin down in the grave when he knocked on the inside of it. Knock. Knock. We buried him anyway.”

  Susan’s mouth dropped open, and the woman said quickly, “Oh, you know that’s not true.” She thought a moment. “But it could have been. Yes, it could. You think twice about who you marry, young lady.”

  The man cleared his throat, and his wife put her lips together in a straight line. After a moment, she said to Susan, “It won’t be long before your grandfather joins Nealie now. He’s waited a long time. I guess she has, too. Funny how it was him that lived in the Bride’s House all those years, when she was the bride, and she didn’t live there hardly at all.”

  Susan studied the woman, not sure what to say, while Pearl only nodded.

  “That woman’s too sentimental,” the man put in, meaning his wife. Then he turned to her and said, “Sounds like you’re trying to put the old man in his grave. You don’t know if he’ll go on up to heaven.”

  “Oh, for goodness’ sake! How can you say such a thing? And in front of Pearl and Susan, too.”

  “He’s in his ninety-seventh year, so I imagine it won’t be long,” Pearl said. “My mother was only seventeen when she died, just Susan’s age.”

  The realization her grandmother had died so young shocked Susan. Of course, she’d known that, but it had never registered that Nealie had married, had a baby, and died when she was younger than Susan was now.

  * * *

  On Saturday morning, Susan dressed in blue jeans and shoes with hard soles, because mine sites were graveyards of rusty iron and old nails sharp enough to penetrate tennis shoes. She put on a plaid blouse and tied the tails together the way Peggy had, but it looked stupid. Then she tried on a blue blouse, but it was dowdy. Finally she put on a white shirt, which showed up the tan she had acquired sunbathing with Peggy. She hoped Joe would notice.

  She packed a picnic—making deviled eggs and ham-salad sandwiches, and she’d talked her mother into making cinnamon buns for breakfast, because Joe had told her once that he loved the smell of cinnamon and dabbing the spice behind her ears didn’t seem like a good idea.

  Joe showed up at ten, saying the sky looked like rain, so he’d take a look at Charlie’s car in the afternoon, after they returned. They rode in Bert Joy’s old Ford truck, Joe’s now. It wasn’t as good as an army-surplus Jeep, but it was high off the ground and was better on a rocky trail than a car.

  “I brought along lunch,” Susan said, as Joe helped her up onto the running board.

  “And I brought some beer,” he replied. He pulled onto the highway,
and the truck being noisy, they were silent as they drove down the asphalt, then turned off near the old town of Red Elephant, starting up a road that was no more than a dirt trail winding through evergreens and aspen. Joe drove slowly, bouncing over the ruts made by trickles of snowmelt, dodging rocks and stumps that could have punctured a tire or high-centered the truck, gearing down to go up the steep grades. At last, he stopped where there was a place wide enough to pull off and said the truck could go no farther. They got out, Joe carrying two bottles of beer, Susan with the picnic basket over her arm.

  She didn’t mind leaving the truck, because she loved to hike, especially with Joe, and she followed him up the trail, staring at his broad back, picturing what he looked like without his shirt, imagining how it would feel if he put his arms around her and held her against his bare chest.

  Aspen trees had grown up in the middle of the trail, and wildflowers bloomed in the faint ruts. “Look, there’s a lady’s slipper. I bet I haven’t seen a dozen of them in my whole life,” Joe said, pointing to a pale green plant in a spot where rain collected in a protected area under an aspen tree. They stopped to admire the flower, and Joe said he’d pick it for Susan, but it was so rare that it ought to be left alone.

  They saw the tracks of a Jeep that had come up through the timber. “I hate those damn things,” Joe told her. “Why can’t people leave the mountains alone? And the trash!” He leaned down and picked up a discarded Chesterfield cigarette package, shoving it into his pocket. “Someday they’ll ruin this land. I wish we could do something about them.”

  “They shop in Georgetown. Peggy says the tourists are the best customers she has. Her store couldn’t make it if it had to rely on local people.”

  “That’s the problem. It’s damned if you do and damned if you don’t. The only way these old mining towns can survive is tourism, but the tourists destroy the mountains.”

  “So what do you do?”

  “Conservation’s the best answer. You have to teach people to be careful, people like the idiot driving that Jeep. See those tracks he made? Other people will drive there, so before long, it’ll turn it into a road. That’s how erosion starts. There ought to be laws.”