Behind the Masks

by Susan Patron

  He was rewarded with a shove by a deputy with hair like straw and a big, ruinous nose, who said, “Don’t be mocking the bereaved, you mud-caked piece of jerky, or I’ll arrest you.”

  I nodded at Antoine Duval but did not acknowledge the deputy. My father has said that some men who enforce the law are little better than those who break it, and this deputy had tossed a match onto the kindling of my temper. As has happened before, my indignation overcame my public shyness. “Mr. Duval,” I said, “are you in trouble? Are you in need of a lawyer?”

  “Not yet, miss,” he said. All the men laughed. I flushed, for it was as if they shared a joke I was too young to understand. Mama would have seared them with her eyes and her beauty and then turned away to remove herself from their vulgar presence. That is what she would have expected me to do, too.

  But Papa says the voice can be a powerful weapon, if aimed right. Eleanor moved closer to me. I saw from the corner of my eye that her chin was high so I copied this position.

  I said, “Because Patrick Reddy, Esquire, would be glad, I’m sure, to represent you, should you ever require his services.” More laughter and some exchanges among the men that we could not hear and clearly were not meant to.

  “Ain’t that just like a daughter of Pat Reddy,” Sheriff Kelley remarked, “talkin’ her head off on some subject on which she is dismally ill-informed. Sorry to say, your daddy’s dead, miss.” He didn’t sound too sorry. Ellie squeezed my arm, which reminded me not to answer him.

  Mr. Ward emerged from inside the shop, and with him a well-to-do man I had seen before. “That’s my father,” Ellie said. Like her, Mr. Tucker was tall with elegant posture, well-kept and well-dressed. He had the bearing of a powerful man accustomed to being in command. I was not at all sure I wanted to meet him.

  Then a strange thing happened. Mr. Tucker abruptly let out a loud, high moan and clutched his chest. Ellie broke from me and ran to him as he cried, “Hope is piercing my heart!” This odd, strangled lament, uttered with the anguish of someone bereaved, brought sudden tears to my eyes. His knees buckled just as Mr. Ward pushed a rocking chair under him from behind. Ellie kneeled beside him. “Oh, Father! Father! Get a doctor, please, someone,” she said, placing her hand on his chest.

  Mr. Tucker leaned his head next to hers and rested his cheek against her hair. He did not look ill so much as surprised and afraid, as if he’d been ambushed.

  After a moment he took something from his pocket and shook it in his hand as if he were going to roll a pair of dice. He’d regained his normal voice when he said, “Eleanor, my dearest girl, you know I don’t want you walking on Main Street. It’s dangerous. Stay home with your mother.”

  “But then I wouldn’t have been here when you needed me. I will get some of these men to carry you to the doctor.”

  He said, “No, Eleanor, nothing a doc can do. Go home now, go home. Do as I say.”

  “Come home with me, Father. Let me help you,” she begged, pressing her face into his chest. He raised her chin, frowning. “I said, go home. I have more business here.” He opened his hand and there on his palm was a pair of dice that shone as if they were made of pure gold. He stood, his expression once again stern and distant. But I saw in his face a sad weariness.

  Ellie seemed to gather herself. She pressed her handkerchief to her eyes. “Oh, Father,” she said with feeling. “I cannot bear to see you suffer as you just did. Are you truly recovered?”

  He shook his dice. “It was a momentary pain. Go now.”

  She rose, gave him a last imploring look, and returned to me, the front of her skirts soiled from kneeling on the dusty porch.

  We walked away from them in silence. When we came to my street I began to say my good-byes, for I needed to check on Momma. But Ellie surprised me by asking if she might accompany me home.

  “But he ordered you to go home, Eleanor. You had better obey him,” I said.

  “I know I had, but, Angie, a stronger force compels me to go with you.”

  “‘A stronger force’?” I frowned at her, amazed that she would disobey her father’s command. “It seems unwise …,” I began. She looked so stricken that I added, “But of course you are welcome. Yes, come home with me.”

  As we walked, she told me that her father was often with those men, who were not real deputies. Some of them were miners who were angry because they had lost their jobs.

  “But his attack?” I asked. “Has that happened before?”

  “Yes, at home, never in public like this. There is something wrong but he won’t speak of it and he won’t allow my mother or me to speak of it.” Her face, usually so serene, was for a moment a map of worry. She kicked aside a broken bottle in our path. “But what about your father? And why would there be another man in the coffin that’s supposed to be his?”

  I told her Papa must have some kind of plan about letting people think he was dead even though he wasn’t, maybe so that lawbreakers will be less fearful, less careful … maybe letting things get worse so they could get better.

  She shook her head. “I don’t really understand these fathers of ours,” she said, and I agreed with all my heart.

  Now I must stop, dear diary, for this one long day has already taken me many days to record, and what follows will require the greatest of fortitude to write. I must leave myself time for the whole story.

  Later

  I wanted to show Eleanor the envelope I’d seen in Papa’s antechamber, sealed with wax and marked “601” on the front. Once I made sure that Momma was comfortable, I asked Ellie if she would come with me to the little locked room. Though she had never been there or heard it mentioned, her head turned exactly in its direction and she stared fixedly toward it, like a dog will do when it hears a sound, inaudible to humans, on the other side of a wall. She nodded gravely, as if gathering courage. All this would have seemed strange to me had I not myself already sensed some kind of presence and otherworldliness in Papa’s study.

  It must have been the particular slant of sunshine through a window that made the words on the plaque glow, as if hammered out of gold. They, the words, invited Truth to enter and be witnessed. Eleanor seemed blinded by them momentarily, as she stopped and looked down at her feet, blinking, then back at me. “Angie?” she said, and her voice sounded so odd. She searched my face, as if to be sure of who I was. “Water?” she asked in that same tremulous voice.

  I looked down at a little stream of clear water emerging from beneath the door. It flowed, contrary to God and nature, around our shoes, not touching them.

  I had smelled that water before; now I saw it, and the sight made my throat clamp shut; I almost couldn’t breathe. Yet Papa had led me here; I knew he would not let harm come to me. I felt cloaked in his protection. “Nothing in there will hurt us, Ellie,” I said, trying to sound calm. “It is only the truth.”

  She grabbed my wrist as I reached to put the key in the lock. “But there is water coming under the door!” She danced back a bit, lifting her skirts, and the water still flowed around her shoes, not touching them. “And”—her voice was like a sob—“it does not cause us to be wet!”

  “I’m certain it is just some kind of illusion, Ellie,” I said, as if speaking of a drama where clever manipulation behind the curtain fools the audience. “Or … a vision.” In fact, my heart thumped around in my chest like it was trying to escape. “But it is for you to decide. You said a stronger force than your father compelled you to come here. Do you want to go home now? Or do you want to find out what is in the room?”

  She stood gazing at me, still clutching my wrist, caught between some invisible force that pulled her in and her own natural reluctance to face whatever awaited us. In truth, I hoped she would be sensible, for I felt I might bolt at any second. I was rooted only by trust in Papa and loyalty to my friend. One word from her would have sent me gratefully to the safety of the kitchen.

  She nodded, as if coming to a decision, and touched the inside of my wrist to her cheek. A wave
of hair had come loose; she pinned it back and said, “Let us be bold, Angie. It is not by chance that we are here. In we go.”

  But when I unlocked the door and we stepped inside, she took in her breath and stopped in her tracks. “Oh, Angeline,” she said, “Oh, dear God.”

  “What? What is it, Eleanor?” I surveyed my father’s disorderly stacks of papers and folders. Nothing worthy of alarm—unless you counted the stream running through the room, and I had already determined to ignore it.

  “Do you not see it? The little pool upstream? The—” She covered her eyes.

  I feared she had gone mad and then there it was, past my father’s desk and off in the distance: a large puddle, a place where water from the stream collected on the side and was still.

  “A tiny child,” Eleanor whispered.

  Gradually I saw it, too, as if emerging from a mist. A girl barely old enough to walk, toddling along beside the stream, her back to us. She headed toward the puddle, beautiful tiny red leather shoes on her feet, a hooded red cape tied under her chin. I would have gone to pick her up but held back because I knew, despite what I saw and heard with my own full senses, that this was a place and a time I could not and should not enter.

  Eleanor began crying softly, sobbing against my shoulder, as the child fell into the water. Helpless to help her, we watched as she struggled and then floated facedown. She sank, weighted by the wet woolen cape—a bright red smudge at the bottom of the shallow little pool. We heard a wailing, keening sound from far off.

  Then the child rose up, water streaming off her, and turned and looked directly at us for the first time. She reached for us, and her eyes were not eyes at all; they were black holes in her face. Eleanor screamed, and I felt the small hairs on my arms rise.

  Then, as abruptly as it appeared, the scene vanished. No stream, no pool, no red-cloaked little girl with black holes for eyes.

  Eleanor and I rushed for the door. It had closed behind us, and at first I could not get it to open. Panic rose in me as if I were being pursued by death itself; both of us scrabbled at the knob. I feared that Eleanor would wrench it out altogether but then finally we were quit of the room, slamming the door behind us, me inserting the key with unsteady hands and then dropping it in my pocket as if it were hot as a burning coal. In the kitchen, as she struggled to stop a ceaseless flow of tears, I gave Eleanor a clean handkerchief, a chair, and a teacup; my own hands trembled as I boiled water for tea. Finally I said, “Do you know her, Eleanor? Do you know the child?”

  She shook her head, but then her eyes lost focus, as if they were looking in instead of out. “I … seem to, or perhaps I once did. It is as if I should know her, yet never in my life have I seen her before today.”

  I tried to reassure her, and thus myself, that it was only a trick of the mind: There was no stream, no puddle, and no tiny child in Papa’s antechamber.

  She looked back at me with pity and disbelief pooling as tears in her eyes. “But a trick of both our minds,” she said. “We were called here, as witnesses, to a place where Truth may enter freely. You know, don’t you, Angie, what that poor child is seeking?”

  I did, because it shines like gold on Papa’s plaque. “Justice,” I said. I could not get that ghost baby’s terrible eyes out of my dreadful thoughts. “I would do most anything to help that child.”

  “Of course you would, Angie,” she said. “But now, I think, it is up to me.”

  Soon, overcome by exhaustion, she left for home.

  How can I continue to live in this house, walking past that door, after seeing what I did? Why have I not revealed this strange and dreadful occurrence to Momma? Dear diary, a story is unfolding, and Ellie and I were somehow meant to be drawn into it. But Momma, I fear, would collapse from the terror of it, added to her weak constitution, the infection, and worries about Papa. Then, too, it was me to whom Papa entrusted the key; he must not want to worry her. Thus one more secret must be held in my heart.

  Monday, June 14, 1880

  Dear Diary,

  Papa’s funeral took place without any of us in attendance, himself included. Today Momma’s good friend, the widow Sally O’Toole, came for supper, and how glad I was to bask in her cheerful good gossip and kindness. She seemed to spread warmth and light in the house, chasing all traces of the frightening ghost child apparition away.

  She began by asking how she might help us during this strange time of Papa’s supposed demise. For Momma had entrusted her with the truth: that we remain certain Papa is alive. “Do tell us about the funeral,” Momma urged, “so that we can later recount the story to Patrick.”

  To amuse us, Mrs. O’Toole provided a lively account of his wake, which all her boardinghouse lodgers attended. She said that from what she heard, Papa would have enjoyed the festivities. Mr. Ward drove his elegant hearse with its curved, etched-glass sides, pulled by a team of four gleaming black horses and followed by a long line of mourners. The casket with that other poor unfortunate man in it, the one who really was dead, got buried in the cemetery up on the hill, a place with a beautiful view that the occupants, unfortunately, cannot appreciate. Then it seems a great deal of whiskey was consumed, florid toasts were proposed, and guns were fired at ceilings all night long in every saloon in town. Grown men openly cried at the loss of Bodie’s greatest criminal lawyer.

  I thought to myself, But what is Papa’s plan? How might I help him?

  I had made cabbage salad and mutton chops and lima beans, which I served with Momma’s pickled onions and brown bread. Mrs. O’Toole had also brought a sweet roasted piñon nut cake nestled in a Kuzedika basket—she had traded with an Indian family for both the piñon nuts and the basket.

  Momma is still taking in very little food, so I ate her share of the cake.

  Sally O’Toole is a cheerful and tireless person who always finds time to help others, even though her eight boarders require constant looking after. (This day she set out a cold buffet and told them to serve themselves. She said, sighing, that she hopes her crockery survives the evening.)

  It’s well known that each of her boarders has proposed marriage to Mrs. O’Toole, some of them several times, and one, Mr. Gibson—a coachman and stage driver skilled with horses, mules, and donkeys—proposes regularly every fortnight. Plump, pretty, and young, Mrs. O’Toole always says eight boarders are easier than one husband, and more lucrative, too. She has a firm way with the men that keeps them in their place.

  I’d been hoping Momma and Mrs. O’Toole would exchange beauty secrets, as I know only those listed in Momma’s book, Practical Housekeeping, A Careful Compilation of Tried and Approved Recipes. How often I have examined the chapter titled “The Arts of the Toilet,” yet the cure for freckles (grated horseradish in buttermilk) did not work in my case. Nor did the recipe for hair oil (two teaspoons each of castor oil, ammonia, and glycerin, enough alcohol to cut the oil, and two ounces of rainwater), which made no improvement other than pasting down my wispy bangs most unflatteringly.

  But instead of revealing beauty secrets, Mrs. O’Toole admitted that she could no longer abide those most favored subjects: gold and the stock market. “’Tis all the boarders speak of,” she said, ticking off topics on her fingers. “Grubstaking, prospecting, discovery, claim-filing, claim-jumping, mining, refining, assaying. Talk of gold is passed around the table as often as the saltcellar, and it seasons everything they say. Who lost it gambling, who got robbed of it, which woman was made a widow because of it. And every day, after the news from the San Francisco Stock Exchange arrives, oh, my. Did the market rise? Did it fall? Will it recover? Now they’re all worried about the Standard Mine. Last week it was the Mono.” She turned the plain gold wedding band on her finger. “I hope, sweet Angeline,” she said, “that you will not tie up your future to some man’s pursuit of gold.”

  I looked at my lap, mindful that Mrs. O’Toole’s husband and dozens of others had been killed in a hoisting accident a few years ago, when an ore cart fell 1,000 feet down a mine shaft
. “It is dreadful that your husband lost his life because of gold,” I said softly.

  “Yes, to be sure,” she said, “my Tommy was killed in ’78, just like W. S. Bodie himself perished back in 1860—died, the two of them, pursuing the shiny stuff.”

  “‘Looking for color,’ they call it,” Momma said.

  Everyone knows the story of how our town came to be. W. S. Bodie (some say he spelled it “Bodey” or “Body”) was just another prospector, like so many others. He found a deposit in the middle of nowhere, filed a claim, was about to get as rich as Midas, and then he and his partner met their first winter here. Bodie expired in a snowstorm. The gold-seekers that rushed here named the camp after him.

  “I heard that those who discover rich deposits always die tragically,” I said.

  Mrs. O’Toole clucked her tongue and arranged the ruffles of her blouse like a hen preening its feathers. “Oh, it’s superstition, no doubt, but don’t forget what happened to his partner, E. S. Taylor.”

  “Killed in his cabin a couple of years later. They say people passed his skull around like a souvenir for years, and it was as smooth as a billiard ball.” After a moment I asked if Mrs. O’Toole’s boarders were superstitious.

  “Oh, yes, especially the miners. No women may ever enter a mine for fear of bringing bad luck, for instance. They take more stock in luck and chance than in common sense. Gamblers they are, even if they never touch a pack of cards or a pair of dice.”

  I listened carefully to Mrs. O’Toole’s stories as I wanted to put some of what she said in my Horrible skit about the Authentic Life of a Western Mining Town. It is, so far (nearly two pages of handwriting), both deeply tragic and richly comic. I am calling it The Bold Bad Boys of Bodie.

  I asked her what she knows about Sheriff Pioche Kelley’s investigations of Papa’s murder. She told us that according to her boarders the sheriff has been very busy, having arrested one man who was serving on a jury in Bridgeport that week, another who was in the hospital with a broken leg, and another who had actually been in jail. As soon as each suspect was subsequently released, the sheriff got to work finding his next one.