by Margo Catts
“Really?” Leo looked as if someone had just told him he’d won a prize. “You know the stories about these places?”
“Well, I know a lot of stories. I might not have them attached to the right houses.”
“Really,” he said again. “That’s so cool. What about that one?” He pointed to one with a collapsed chimney a couple of lots away from the first.
“That’s easy. The Diazes’. They had twin boys my dad’s age, Jaime and Jorge. He played at their house all the time. The mom’s name was Juanita, and I think she was probably Tuah’s best friend.”
“Wow. That one. The one that’s leaning to the left.”
“I’m not sure. Maybe the whore. Or the bootlegger.”
“Wait—bootleg? Wasn’t that a saloon back there?”
I shrugged. “Yeah. Or music hall and coffeehouse, depending on who the customers were. I think they kind of did their own thing up here. Not a lot of G-men around.”
“I guess not.”
We’d turned uphill, then turned again so that we were heading back toward the track that cut through the trees to Tuah’s house. We passed an empty foundation and a patch of bare ground, then Leo tipped his head toward the next house. The siding boards had started to cup, but the roof was intact, the walls perpendicular, so that it gave off an air of prim shabbiness, a proper lady fallen on hard times. Other than the window glass, only the front step was missing, the board split in half lengthwise and fallen into the opening.
“What about this one?”
“My favorite. It has the most stuff in it—furniture and clothes. Well, had. The clothes are gone now. But I used to put them on and play house, then put them back exactly the way they were. Sort of my secret place.”
“It has stuff inside?” He reined his horse, and mine stopped beside it. “Can I see?”
“Sure.”
Leo dismounted and dropped the reins. “We’ll only be a minute,” he said. “They won’t drift too far. Lead on.”
I swung down, stiff now as I hadn’t been at lunch. I lifted the door against its hinges, enough to open it but not enough to keep it from scraping against the plank floor. Inside, debris showed animals reclaiming the space for themselves—tangled twigs, bird droppings, feathers, shredded cotton and newspaper. The empty fur of a dead chipmunk tufted one corner. A stovepipe hole now jammed with a bird’s nest. The room smelled of dust and decay and time demanding its due. I stepped inside and Leo followed.
“Man,” he said. “What a relic.”
Like Tuah’s cabin, it had three rooms: the front room in which we now stood, then two rooms dividing the back of the house. Neither of the small rooms was big enough to hold a modern double bed. In front of us stood a table. A single chair with a broken leg lay on its back nearby.
The floorboards creaked under Leo’s boots as he crossed to the table. He traced its surface with his fingers, then squinted at a piece of paper tacked to the wall above it.
“How long ago do you ’spose this was written?”
“Most people left here in the thirties and forties. So not the Wild West exactly, but what, maybe … forty years?”
He took off his hat to get closer, then leaned back. “Yeah, too faded.”
He peered in the doorway of the first bedroom. It had an iron bedstead with the springs unattached at the bottom and one side scraping the floor. After looking around for a moment, he took a couple of steps to the side and went into the other bedroom.
“That was still a mattress when I was little,” I said, following him. I leaned against the doorjamb and pointed to a pile of shredded cotton and droppings now drifted against the wall.
“And this is where the clothes were?” he said. He stepped over broken wardrobe doors lying on the floor to peer into the cabinet. Bent and darkened hinges marked where the doors would have attached.
“Yeah, women’s clothes,” I said.
“Just women’s? In a mining town? There’s usually only one reason for that.”
“Ha. You wouldn’t think so if you saw the clothes. Lots of gingham and buttons. Tuah never gave me much of a story about this place, but I remember when I did ask, she just said, ‘John and Olive ended bad.’”
He turned to look at me, then back into the empty wardrobe as if ghostly clothes might appear. “That’s it? You never found out anything else? Who they were? Where they went?”
“Never asked.”
“How come?”
“I dunno.” And I didn’t. I really, truly didn’t. There’d been a sense of finality about Tuah’s answer, I remembered—or thought I did now—but fresh from my week with the children that hardly seemed reason enough. The children I had left yesterday were not only far too self-absorbed to care about an adult’s tone, but aimlessly, irrationally, unstoppably curious, puzzling over their books, following bug trails, trying to understand where I’d come from and why. Could I really have been nothing like them? How was it that I had stories for all the other houses but not the one I’d always felt was especially mine? The year I returned and found the clothes gone, I felt personally violated. But I hadn’t said or asked anything about that, either. What was wrong with me? I kicked at a sliver of broken lath. This place was mine to know about, not his. And what were we doing, stringing the day on like this? It wasn’t a date. I straightened and turned away.
“I think I heard thunder,” I said. “Let’s go.”
I already had my foot in the stirrup by the time he pulled the door closed. I swung up onto my horse and turned away, along the road toward the turnoff to the cabin. Within a few moments he’d caught up.
“Hey,” he said as his horse fell into step beside mine. “You want to go for another ride next week?”
“I have to watch the kids.”
“No, I mean, just, sometime when you’re back up here.”
“I think Tuah needs a lot of help with the painting.”
“And if she doesn’t?”
I glanced sideways at him. Was he incapable of taking a hint? Fine, then. “I just don’t think it’d be a good idea.”
“Why not?” He looked at me with eyes wide, as frank as a child, as if he had not yet learned that all possible answers to that question are bad.
“Look—thank you. I’ve had a great day. But this just isn’t a good time for me.”
“Time for what? We’re having a nice day. I’d like to have another nice day. Seems pretty simple. What’s the problem?”
“Nothing. Can we drop it? It’s just me.”
“What is it?”
Oh, good God. “Maybe it’s none of your business.”
“Why?”
Would nothing make him stop? I’d only agreed to come today in the first place because I’d been backed into a corner. There was no point in dating, in creating some drawn-out romantic charade, in taking up with some other decent guy I’d only treat badly. Better to cut it off now. Firmly.
“Since you’re so curious, I’m pregnant, all right? I’m going to have a baby.”
But the embarrassed retreat I’d expected didn’t happen. Instead he stood slightly in his stirrups, centering the saddle. “Oh,” was all he said. “When?”
“What?”
“When? Like, when are you supposed to stop riding?”
“What?” I was completely disoriented. “I—I don’t know! That isn’t it! What are you talking about?”
“What are you talking about? I’m still talking about the same thing. Do you want to go for another ride sometime?”
“But I’m pregnant!”
“I went to prom with a girl that turned out to be pregnant, and we had a great time. It’s summer, it looks like whoever the guy was is history, and I’d rather spend my time with an attractive girl than a bunch of ranch hands any day. It’s okay for you to ride, right?”
“Why won’t you just let this go?”
“I thought I just explained that.”
The circle of logic had closed around me, leaving me nowhere to go. “Fine!�
� I snapped. My horse’s ear twitched and he bobbed his head. “Fine! I’ll go!”
“Well, I don’t want you to go if you’re mad.”
At that, the wave of absurdity that had been carrying me through the whole exchange curled over my head and tumbled me under. I collapsed over the saddle horn, laughing, rocking with the horse’s gait.
“What?” he said.
I sat up after a moment and ran a hand over my face. “Does nothing shock you?”
“I have a crazy brother, remember? He said he was pregnant once, too.”
11
I pulled the stirrer through the paint bucket between my feet, watching the pigment from the bottom lift and working the streaks through the lighter base. The shade Tuah had chosen was the color of daffodils, buttered and creamy. I could picture the bright yellow house alone in its clearing in the pine woods, dainty white curtains in the windows, a pot of geraniums on the front porch. Cheery and strange and wonderful. And so alone.
I sat on the edge of the porch with little curls of gray littering the ground at my feet, shadows long and blue in the afternoon light. Tuah had scraped the cabin while I’d been on the ride with Leo and was now at the truck, gathering pails and brushes.
“I’ve never painted, you know,” I called to her as I stirred.
“Just slop it on there.” Tuah folded her waist over the truck’s side wall and reached down into the bed. “You can’t go wrong. Do you see anybody looking?”
“Well, you.”
“Go with the grain, then. That’s my quality tip. All that matters is protecting the wood. The wind and the sun and the ice around here will bring a house down in no time if you don’t take care. You’ve seen plenty evidence of that.”
I kept twisting the stirrer through the paint. The color was even now, but I liked the weight of the paint against the stick, the way the tracks of movement melted away behind it. Was that all we were doing? Only forestalling the closure of time over our heads? At some point, unmaintained, the boards of Tuah’s cabin would warp and separate, the roof would cave in, and the cabin would collapse in exactly the same way as the houses already ahead of it on the road to decay. Who would tell the story of it, as Tuah had told me theirs? For how long? In time, all these lives would fade away along with the houses that had sheltered them, the joy and sorrow, good and evil. Did those things, as well, blend together and dissolve over time?
“Tuah, can you tell me about John and Olive?”
Metal pails clashed against the truck wall. “Janoliff?”
“John. And. Olive.” I looked up. “The house in town where I found the clothes when I was little. I know other stories from around town, but all I can remember about them is that you said they ended bad. Who were they? What happened?”
She pushed herself upright, a pair of small aluminum pails in one hand. Her reading glasses, perched on top of her head, glinted in the fingers of light that came through the aspen leaves.
“Well, all right then,” she said. She tipped her head toward the bucket between my feet. “I think you’re done stirring. Come pour us some paint and let’s get started.”
*
“John was no good, I’ll tell you, though Olive never said anything ill about him.”
Tuah and I stood on chairs, stroking yellow paint along the underside of the eaves where our work would be safe if it started to rain.
“Sure,” I said. My dad had never uttered a bad word about my mother, either, come to think of it.
“They’d been dryland farmers, blown out by the Dust Bowl. They got a fresh start here, but it didn’t take long for John to get restless. Then one day, he was gone. Just like that. Olive said he’d gone to look at a business opportunity or some such thing. Said he’d told the foreman he’d be back in a few weeks, but the foreman didn’t know anything. As far as he was concerned, John was fired. But they let Olive stay—no reason to throw her out of a house nobody needed in the dead of winter.”
Tuah got down from the chair, refilled her small pail, and stepped back up again. One hand on the back of the chair, no hoisting, no grunting, no wobbling. Seventy-three, just stepping up the same way I would.
“Olive was pregnant,” Tuah said, dabbing the bristles into a knot over her head.
I stopped painting. “You mean—John left with her expecting?”
“Well, to be fair he didn’t know that part. She didn’t even know until later.” Tuah dipped the brush in the pail, worked at the knot some more, then rolled her shoulders and looked at me. “Olive was my dearest friend, but she was a fool. A dear, gentle, hopeful fool. The way she kept faith in that man …” She shook her head, then turned back to painting. “She kept saying he’d send money soon, or send for her, that he’d written from this or that place and was about to get things fixed for her to come, but she never even had an address for him.”
“So what happened?”
“Everybody adopted her. There was a lot more love around her than she’d had before, I promise you. She’d find a loaf of cornbread on the porch, or a sack of beans, or flour. Ladies would drop off a dress here or there, saying it didn’t fit or they used it when they had their own babies. She was so grateful, dear thing. In tears. Then when time came for the baby, it was a terrible labor. She was just a tiny thing.”
“I remember the clothes,” I said. “In the house. They were my size.”
Tuah threw me a crooked smile. “You tried them on?”
“Yeah. I was eight or nine.”
“Huh.” She returned to painting. “Well, you were tall but still a child. Try to imagine having a baby when you were that size. We didn’t have a doctor, you know, just a lady helping her, and she was about ready to give up. I told her to just reach in there and get that baby out, no matter what it took. She did, and Olive was torn up something awful, but she made it. And the baby was healthy. A boy. She named him Charles Thomas. After her father and grandfather. Not a word about John from her or any of us, you can be sure of that. And rightly so. I don’t think she’d heard from him in weeks. Maybe months.” Tuah switched the brush to the hand holding the pail and stood on her toes to tug at a shingle that held firm. She resumed painting.
“She stayed in bed for two days. Third day she got a fever. Sixth she died.”
“Oh.” The tiny sound escaped me by surprise. I’d lost track of the tragic end I expected, and must have taken misplaced hope when I heard she survived the childbirth. Tuah dipped her brush and turned her back to me to work in the opposite direction.
“So the house was just left there after she died? Everything in it?” I asked.
“Yes.”
There had been an eyelet blouse, I recalled specifically. A skirt with buttons along the side. Two calico dresses with a print too faint to discern. The tiny shoes.
A drip of paint started to run down the back of my hand, so I wiped it against the edge of the pail. “No one else needed the house after that?”
“The place was too sad. Besides, folks started to leave during the war. The mine was about tapped out, and there was lots of work in Leadville.”
I could see why she hadn’t told me all this when I was a child.
“So that’s the story, then,” I said.
She nodded.
“What ever happened with the baby?”
“Adopted,” she said. She stepped off the chair and tipped her chin toward the horizon behind me. “Storm’s getting closer. We best get things cleaned up before it hits.”
We washed our brushes at the pump, icy water pulsing through the bristles, then gathered all the supplies onto the porch and sat there to watch the storm. The mountains sent grumbles of thunder back and forth to each other as the clouds thickened and darkened. The temperature dropped.
“I’m going in for a blanket,” I said, standing. “You want anything?”
Tuah shook her head without looking at me. “No. I’m fine. Thank you, though.”
I came back out with the quilt and an orange. I dropped into my ch
air, quilt across my lap, and dug into the orange with my thumb. A clash of thunder sounded overhead and a few raindrops plopped into the dust.
“So John never came back?” I asked as I kicked the quilt open around my feet.
“What?”
“John and Olive. John just disappeared? I mean, since the baby was adopted.”
“Not exactly.”
“Oh. So he didn’t want the baby?” I laid a cupped piece of orange peel in my lap and started filling it with shreds of pith.
“I didn’t say that.”
I looked up. “What?”
“It’s none of your affair,” Tuah said after a long pause.
“Good God, what happened? It’s fifty years ago.”
She looked up at me at last, eyes narrowed, and seemed to consider her options for a few moments. She got up and went to the edge of the porch, then squinted up at the clouds. She whistled and clapped the side of her leg, and Mac, who must have been lying in the dirt off the end of the porch, jumped up, tail waving.
“This storm isn’t going to do anything,” Tuah said. “We’re taking a walk.”
12
I pulled on a sweatshirt and followed as Tuah walked downhill from the cabin, strides firm over sage and weeds and rocks. A test pattern of raindrops struck us, but she paid no attention, and the cloud thought better and withdrew. She didn’t speak as we walked along Hat Creek’s upper road and cut through an empty lot, side by side, Mac ranging in front of us with his nose to the ground. The scent of dust and sage swelled up with the evaporating moisture.
Tuah took us to the charred remains of a house on the edge of town, which as I recall had burned down when a toddler tipped over a kerosene lantern. She picked her steps over the rocks and half-burnt stubs, then turned so that we were looking back at the town, the main street with Hamilton Brothers looming over the far end, the sagging rooflines, the weeded foundations, the utter and complete stillness. She sat on a log that was blackened on the underside and patted the spot beside her. I sat.