Eden Mine

by S. M. Hulse

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  For my parents

  My brother’s bomb explodes at 10:16 on a late April Sunday morning.

  I don’t know. I’m a hundred and fifty miles northwest, in the house he and I share. I’ve just taped together the first cardboard moving box, and it sits on the hardwood before me, yawning empty.

  Later, I’ll imagine the explosion with such regularity and intensity the details become etched in my mind alongside my own memories, sharp-edged and indelible. I’ll be hounded by those details, haunted. The shattering glass, thousands of jagged pieces slicing the air, capturing and fracturing the light. The enormity of the sound, the brute physicality of it, and then its numbing absence. The clouding dust, the crumbling rubble. The blood.

  But at 10:16, I know nothing. Packing my biggest problem.

  Twelve injured, one critically. A child, the daughter of the pastor of the church across the street from the bomb. Services barely begun, only the first hymn sung, the first reading spoken. The child’s father prays over her for the three minutes it takes her to lose consciousness, for the four minutes more it takes the paramedics to arrive. He cradles her as he prays, and he’ll find flecks of red on his skin and under his nails for days afterward. So much blood, he will say. So fast.

  I don’t know any of this. There’s no tingle at the back of my neck, no sudden catch of breath at the moment of detonation. I have no idea. None, until the radio cuts off the newest country star in the midst of his climb up the weekly countdown, replaces his easy twang with the clipped voice of a reporter. If my gut contracts when I hear the word courthouse, it is only because we got bad news there not long ago. If I try calling Samuel’s cell phone, and then try again, and again, it is simply because a person wants to talk to family after a disaster like this, and he is the only family I have. And if what I feel when the knock comes and I open the door to the sheriff is not exactly surprise … well, that’s just the shock.

  * * *

  Jo, what can I say to you?

  * * *

  “You heard about what happened down in Elk Fork?”

  I’ve known Sheriff Cody Hawkins all my life. His son was Samuel’s best friend when they were young, and for that reason Hawkins has always seemed as much a family friend as an agent of the law. When I was a girl, he was the first to confirm my mother’s death, to say aloud what I already knew.

  “The radio said there was an explosion.” The final word a whisper, the syllables reluctant to leave my lips. I swallow. “A bomb.”

  Hawkins nods. He’s still on the porch; past him, a young deputy stands near the truck, a hand on the butt of his gun. Hawkins looks more casual in jeans and a threadbare Prospect High Miners T-shirt, an ugly windbreaker thrown on top. Sunday, off-duty, at least until this. But his weapon is there at his hip, beside the star on his belt. “Samuel here?” Hawkins takes a single step forward. I don’t move from the doorway.

  “He left for Wyoming this morning.” Still sounds like a fact. “To see about work. Sheridan and then Gillette.”

  I remember breakfast. The eggs I made, the way I pushed Samuel’s bread into the toaster a second time because he likes it black. He’d cleaned his plate. Helped with the dishes before he left. Smiled from the door. That’s all. I think about it again, study each recalled minute and second, but there’s nothing else. Breakfast. Dishes. Smile. He’s somewhere beyond Bozeman by now, I tell myself.

  “Wyoming,” Hawkins says. Like he can taste the truth of it.

  The deputy starts toward the barn. “Nothing out there but some hay and an old mule,” I call. The deputy stops midstride, looks at me, Hawkins. Seems to consider going back to the truck, settles on standing awkwardly in the middle of the drive.

  Hawkins turns back to me. “He ain’t in there, is he?”

  “Hay and an old mule,” I repeat, clinging to this bit of certainty.

  Hawkins squints a little the way he does when forcing himself not to look away. I want to slam the door, clap my hands over my ears, but I make myself wait for the words. “See, Jo, we’ve got, uh, reason to believe Samuel might’ve been involved in this business down in Elk Fork.”

  “He’s gone to Wyoming.” I hear the desperation in the repetition, the effort to build truth from speech.

  Hawkins’s features close; he’s heard it, too. He maintains that resolved eye contact, and I try to silence the echoes of his last statement—reason to believe, might’ve been involved—so I can brace for whatever comes next. “There’s a smoke shop kind of kitty-corner behind the courthouse,” he tells me slowly. “Been having some trouble with vandalism in the alley, apparently. They installed a security camera just yesterday; Samuel wouldn’t have known about it.”

  After my mother was killed, Hawkins drove to the hospital and then the rehabilitation center every Sunday afternoon. He’d bring me an orange soda, maybe an Archie comic or a copy of Western Horseman. Afterward, he’d walk around the grounds with Samuel, who always came back to my side with his jaw a little more relaxed, his smile a little easier to coax forth.

  “Can I come in, Jo?”

  “No.”

  Didn’t expect that. I see it in the stunned blink, the twitch at one corner of his mouth. An apology rises in my throat, and I swallow it. I want to tell him it’s not personal. I want to tell him no is the only word I can form right now, the only sentiment I recognize. No, this is not happening. No, you’re wrong about Samuel. No, this sick dread squeezing my chest doesn’t mean I believe you. No.

  “I got a warrant.” The words apologetic, but with an edge behind them.

  I stay in the living room with the deputy while Hawkins searches. Down the hall to my bedroom and studio—hardly a moment there, a cursory, courteous glance—then to the bathroom, the hall closet, the kitchen. Then upstairs.

  I pick up the tape gun and start assembling a second box, though the first is still empty. The deputy watches, looks away when I meet his eyes. He’s my age, early twenties, but the patch on his uniform says Split Creek, not Prospect, and I don’t know him. Bits of hay cling to his boots; he checked the barn after all.

  I listen to Hawkins’s footfalls above. He steps more heavily than Samuel, his strides longer. He stops at the doorway to my childhood bedroom, at the end of the upstairs hall. I hear the groan of the floorboard swell and fade as he leans into the room and back out. Hasn’t changed since I last regularly occupied it at ten: lavender walls, lace curtains, plastic ponies standing at attention on the bookshelves.

  Next Hawkins inspects the bathroom—I hear a second’s pause—and then he is in Samuel’s room. What does he find there? I rarely go upstairs, and when I do, Samuel’s door is shut. His bed is there, of course, probably with the same bear paw quilt he had as a teenager, meant to look like an heirloom but purchased on clearance at Kmart. Clean clothes in the closet, laundry on the floor. Bookshelves filled with veterinary texts, survival manuals, law books, maybe a novel or two. I wonder if he ever replaced his Bible.

  What else? There was a Nazi flag on the wall, back when I was in high school. It was an identity Samuel tried on and almost immediately discarded, his racist phase brief but committed. (He still disparagingly mentions “the Jews” now and then, and says things like “our kind” and “those people” more than I wish he did, but that’s nothing like the old tirades.) He burned the flag in a barrel in the yard
a couple months after I spotted it, but the swastika tattoo on his biceps wasn’t so easily disposed of; he wears long sleeves year-round now.

  So the flag is gone, but what has replaced it, I don’t know. Until today I have been content not to know.

  Hawkins comes downstairs. “Where do you keep your guns?”

  “Haven’t got any.”

  “Samuel does.” It’s not a question. Twice he caught Samuel poaching, back when there wasn’t much money for food. Twice he let him go with a warning. Twice I opened the back door to find a bag of groceries on the stoop.

  “He’ll have taken the rifle with him,” I say, and immediately regret it.

  Hawkins nods. “The FBI is sending some people out,” he says. “I’d guess they’ll be here in a few hours. News folks will be, too.” He looks at the empty boxes behind me, and a wince crosses his face. “You still have the number of that lawyer?”

  “The one who lost our house?” Not fair, maybe. The lawyer warned us it was unlikely we’d be able to keep the house; he was right. When the eminent domain notice came, Samuel wanted to handle it sovereign-citizen-style, by filing dozens of lengthy documents, cluttering up the court with pages upon pages of pseudo-legalese. He went to a few of their meetings a couple years back and ultimately dismissed them as overly focused on tax protest to the exclusion of what he called “broader concerns”—by then I knew better than to ask what he meant—but he admired their ability to use the government’s judicial system against itself. I talked him out of it—it was one thing to appreciate a tactic like that, another to actually try it—and convinced him to hire the lawyer. We did it my way, the ordinary way. And we lost.

  “Call him,” Hawkins says. “You’ll need a statement and someone to read it for you. And you maybe ought to talk to him about … anything else you think you ought to talk to him about.”

  I don’t know whether to be insulted or flattered that Hawkins seems to think Samuel has let me in on something, offered me hint or warning. Of course I’d have stopped him if I’d known. If there was anything to know. If it was him. Hawkins mentioned a security camera, but I’ve seen the grainy images they produce; they’re never very clear. So my brother holds some fringe beliefs. He talks, that’s all. Talks and talks until he loses interest in whatever he’s been talking about and goes in search of something else. It doesn’t mean anything. Hawkins should know that, shouldn’t have accepted Samuel’s guilt so readily. It’s too early for certainty.

  Hawkins starts toward the door. I want to challenge him somehow, prove I don’t share his certitude, but I’m afraid to ask about the bombing itself, so instead I say, “You’re so sure Samuel had a part in this, how come you bothered to knock?”

  There’s something like admonishment in the downturn of his mouth. “Jo, you know there ain’t no way I’d bust through the door of this house with a gun in my hand. Not ever.” He hesitates at the threshold, gestures toward the young deputy. “Carson’s gonna stay till the FBI folks get here.” Takes me a moment to realize it’s so I don’t destroy evidence.

  I wonder whether there’s any evidence to find, if I would recognize it if I saw it. What I’d do with it if I did.

  * * *

  So many things I should do. Call the lawyer, like Hawkins said. Call my boss at Fuel Stop. Make sure Hawkins closed the gate across the drive, check that its NO TRESPASSING placard is still legible after weathering so many winters. Maybe try to surreptitiously search the house, see if there is anything here, anything that might prove Samuel went where he said he’s gone. Anything he left me to explain this.

  Instead, I go to my studio. The deputy follows, glances around the room, then positions himself outside in the hall. Still just a step away, only the illusion of privacy. I do my best to ignore him, stare at the half-finished painting on my easel beside the window. I started it two days ago after a brief but substantial rainstorm, energized by the brightening green of the late April meadows, the clouds fading from gray to white as they scattered high into the warming sky. Mountains. Meadows. Trees and streams, slopes and sky. My materials, as surely as brush and acrylic.

  I am not an artist. Not the way people mean. I’ve never been to art school, never had a teacher, never hung my canvases in a gallery. I have talent enough to know what talent I lack. But I am good at painting what people want to see, good at rendering this corner of the West the way visitors and residents alike often expect or wish it to be. My brushstrokes are sweeping, my hues vibrant. The elk and deer who populate my paintings are never mangy or scarred, the cabins always sturdy and lit warmly from within, the mountains unscathed by mines, and on the rare occasions winter descends upon my scenes, there’s always a fire crackling in a corner of the canvas.

  These are largely practical decisions. I don’t paint as a hobby, or not only as a hobby. My canvases are meant to be sold, and the folks buying paintings in Prospect are mostly tourists on their way to or from more spectacular parts of the state; no tourist wants a painting that includes mine tailings or aging trailer parks. So there’s some calculation in it, yes, but it’s not purely mercenary. I enjoy casting the world in its best light. I take satisfaction in creating the most beautiful version of this landscape I have known all my life. Each idyllic portrait of this valley feels like a gift to the place that is my home. If I overlook the flaws of that which I love, I’m no different than anyone else.

  “Don’t you ever get tired of painting the Disneyland version of Montana?” Samuel asked once. I shrugged, knowing he’d take that as acquiescence, but really I don’t. Didn’t.

  But I’ve been thinking about Samuel’s question more in the weeks since the court’s decision. I’ve painted the view from my studio window countless times. Always the idealized version: a willow instead of the wind-whipped juniper, a barn paneled in classic red wood instead of practical gray steel. Most of those canvases I sold, and I was glad to trade each for the few dollars it brought, but suddenly they seem precious, and I a fool to part with them. It seems impossible I might someday forget this land, the rise and fall of the hard line between earth and sky, the easy spread of grass and trees, but I feel a new urgency to record them, and, for the first time, to do it honestly. To paint the juniper, not the willow, the gray barn, not the red. To prove that they are real, and mine.

  I paint, and try to forget the radio, the knock on the door, the deputy in the hall. I try to imagine Samuel in his truck, approaching Billings now, humming along to a country CD and tapping one hand against the wheel. I paint and try to lose myself in the colors, to appreciate the way cerulean eases to dove gray at the height of the canvas, the yellow-white dance of sunlight on the arcing green of the grass. I mix the paints precisely, apply them meticulously. Build another beautiful world. But it isn’t right, because I’ve done it again: painted the version I create for others, the version I’ve always been content to pretend is real.

  And have I done the same thinking of my brother? Have I painted him into his truck in my mind, into the story he told me this morning?

  I carefully dip my brush in bone black and cross it over the canvas again and again.

  * * *

  The first time my cell phone rings, I answer, then hang up before the reporter finishes telling me his name. Answer again the second time. Another reporter. I answer—and hang up—the third, fourth, and fifth times, too, and only after the sixth ring in half an hour do I mute the thing, though I keep it in my palm, watching new calls light up the old flip phone’s tiny screen. The numbers are never ones I recognize, never Samuel’s. I let it ring until the battery gives out and don’t plug it in to charge.

  The gate across the driveway isn’t visible from the house, and I doubt anyone is out there yet—it’s a two-hour drive from Elk Fork even if you take the curves too fast—but I use the back door anyway. The sun is bright overhead, the day younger than seems possible.

  The barn and house are separated by eighty yards and a small stream that runs strong this time of year; the water rushes
just below the wooden planks of the footbridge when I cross it. The creek looks clear, but the mines have laden it with lead, zinc, and arsenic, and we have to fence part of it off so the mule can’t drink the poisoned water. Lockjaw, grazing in the pasture, sees me coming and brays loudly before sauntering into a stall. There’s a radio in the barn aisle—Samuel says the music soothes the mule—and I let my hand hover over the dial for a second before I switch it off:… were attending services at Light of the World Church at the time of the explosion … All I hear. More than I want to hear.

  I saddle and bridle Lockjaw, promise the deputy who has shadowed me to the barn that I’ll stay in sight, then mount and begin riding toward the rear of the property. I’ve always loved Lockjaw’s easy, relaxed stride, the way her long ears dip to the sides with each deliberate step. I let the reins drape and try to settle into the rhythm of the mule’s gait, but the shock of the day’s events collides with the simmering worry of the last couple months, and I know I’ll never again enjoy riding the property the way I once did. The day is like any other for Lockjaw, though, and she heads for the barbed wire and then turns left, hooves raising dust in the narrow, worn track beside the perimeter fence line.

  Our great-great-grandfather Eli purchased this land in 1920, after thirty years working in Eden Mine. He built the house in the center of the forty acres, the barn to the southeast; to this day they are two of the last structures visible from the highway before reaching the Canadian border twelve miles north. The mountains rise from the eastern edge of the property, and the oldest depths of Eden burrow into the hardrock slopes behind the house. The mine expanded to the south in the years since, Eden’s tunnels and adits reaching farther and farther before being overtaken by the newer Gethsemane Mine. The town followed, the newest homes and businesses always built just south of the ones erected prior.