by M Dressler
I don’t tell her what I’m thinking: Time isn’t like that at all. It doesn’t shrink the past. It stretches it.
“You are so right, Martha,” I say and stir my tea. When she isn’t looking, I tip my cup over the side, slopping some of it into my saucer. “And surely we deserve some reward, after all we’ve been through.”
“Damn straight!”
“And thank you so much for letting me stay. I’m so happy I came here, even if it was only by accident I did. Because what I say is, why should it matter how you get somewhere you need to be, just so long as you do?”
Her eyes shine at me. Philip Pratt, he says I’m evil and a curse to everything I touch. When all I do is speak truth to the living, even if they don’t always know what I mean by it.
“That’s exactly right, Rose! And I tell you what: I believe things always happen for a reason. Like, sometimes you need help, and boom! Help arrives. Which brings me to something else. I have an idea. Why don’t you take today to just look around our little paradise, and see if you like it, and maybe meet a few more people, and if you like what you see, why don’t you stay on, not just for a few days but for the whole winter? I could sure use your skills and help getting everything shut down for the season. And so could the Berringers. They’re getting on in years, you could probably tell. Every season gets a little tougher for them . . . And maybe Bill at the café could use some help, or Harold over at the store, or Ruth at the museum . . . We’ll see. But in the meantime, I can give you the room, though you’ll need to get a better coat and some boots. I can maybe get you started with some things, and Harry can, too—and most important, you can recover from whoever that scumbag was who didn’t do right by you, and let us help save you. Because that’s what we do here, Rose. We save. We preserve. It’s what we’re especially good at.”
I’m being taken in so easily. Now why is that?
“What are you thinking, Rose?”
“Only how lucky I am.” For no matter what the reason is for all this kindness and flattery, it will give me time to find the ghost with the flowered sleeves. And that’s what I want to do now. More than anything else. I want to find someone who knows time, long, long time, the way I do. “Now, what would you say is the best way for me to get started?”
“I’d say with Ruthie, Ruth Huellet. She’ll be over at the museum, organizing things before she shuts down for the season. I’ll just give her a call and let her know you’re coming.” She stands. “She can tell you all about us. A museum, history, is always a good place to start, and so important, don’t you think?”
“I do.”
“Are you sure you don’t want anything to eat before you get out and about?”
“I’m only hungry to find out everything I can.”
“Well then, I say we’re the lucky ones! We can sure use your youthful energy around here. Okay. I’m telling Ruth that Christmas has come early, and not just weather-wise, but because we just got the sweetest little gift. That’s how I want you to see yourself, Rose, you got that? Not as somebody down on her luck, hiding out. But as our Rose in winter.”
And she looks down so kindly at me, I can almost forget she’d want me blasted to nothingness, if she could see underneath this pale skin.
6
A bright, sparkling veil lies at my feet.
I step from the hotel’s tall porch. My shoes sink in with a gentle rubbing sound. I bend to touch the whiteness.
Snow. So this is snow?
Not a veil, but a thousand tiny crystals clinging to the gloves the mayor has lent me.
The stones on the square are twinkling. The town’s metal statue wears a jaunty shawl across his shoulders, and the balconies all around him flash, coated in light.
It’s only a few inches, the mayor’s just said, opening the door.
Not so deep it could bury a man, I think.
But wonderful. Oh, such a thing it is, to be able to see and touch the world!
The mayor is laughing behind me, on her porch. “Can’t believe you’ve never seen snow before! Nothing compared to what we sometimes get. But watch your step, okay? That stone building over there at the far end of the square, that’s the museum. Ruth’s expecting you. Have fun.”
I go, carefully. Not only the streets glisten. The sky gleams like marble. The trees are trimmed in a bright, drooping glaze. I walk with Martha’s borrowed coat wrapped around me and the knitted scarf I took quickly from her, so she wouldn’t see the dried wound gouging this body’s neck. The smell of the mayor’s clean hair rises from the muffler’s wool. Of course I’m used to wearing a stranger’s clothing by now, and walking inside another. Still, it’s different when the warmth is handed kindly and intentionally to you.
I cross the square. I’m balancing on the snow in my flat shoes, walking evenly as I pass the brooding statue, a man carrying a great pack and a pick and shovel on his back, his slouch hat sharply brimmed. Beyond him the wind chimes dangle in flutes from their porches, and a sign hangs motionless on the low stone building Martha pointed out to me. It reads, in curled letters, WHITE BAR JAILHOUSE MUSEUM.
Deep-set, iron-barred windows greet me, queerly livened with calico curtains. The museum was once the town keep, Martha told me, but really, she said, there was no need for anything of that kind now, since there was no crime to speak of in the Bar—“unless you count being trapped when the passes close with only whatever Harry in the general store has in the way of coffee.”
I pull at a bell rope beside an iron door, and a deep chime sounds. A voice inside calls to come in. More bells jingle over my head as I push the door open on its heavy hinges. The people of White Bar, I notice, like their visitors announced.
A round woman with blue eyes comes toward me from between bookshelves and mounted trinkets cluttering paneled walls, her face smiling and soft. She’s middle-aged, younger than the mayor, and much more so than John and Mary Berringer. She’s been doing some kind of work, I see—cleaning, maybe, since she wears an apron. Her neck is shiny and her eyes are puffed with sweat and labor.
“Rose!” She smiles and holds out a damp hand. “Martha said you were coming over!”
I take the hand, keeping my gloves on so she won’t feel the ice of me.
“And you’re Ruth,” I say. “It’s so very nice to meet you.”
“Come on in! Welcome to the Jailhouse Museum. Where the past meets the present and the law meets the lawbreaker.” She laughs, then coughs, half choking, patting her chest as though the heated air is too close for her.
It is a close, crowded place. I stand at the front of a narrow, beamed room made narrower by stacks of metal pans, folded horse blankets, rusting post boxes, butter churns, a wicker baby carriage strung from the ceiling above, worn saddles and frayed harnesses, sawblades nailed to posts, wooden chests opened and spilling unsorted clothes, crates filled with polished stones, photographs in every size, and baskets filled with ribboned soaps. The air smells sickly sweet and cloying. Cobwebs swing loose from the dark ceiling. Low glass cases are spotted with fingers and dust, some half polished away.
“Sorry everything’s a bit of a mess,” Ruth Huellet says. “I’m just getting started on winter cleaning.”
“Have I come at too busy a time?” For there’s nothing more grating than being slowed down when you want the drudgery finished.
“No, I don’t mind taking a break.” She pulls off her apron and with a sigh wipes back her bangs. “Plus, it’s nice getting a visitor this late in the season. It’s your first time in the Bar, Martha says.”
“It is.”
“How do you like us so far?”
“I love the quiet and the snow.”
“That’s nice!” She beams and seems happy. “Martha says you might even stay for a while. She says for me to get you introduced to the Bar and some of our history. I don’t know how much of a gold rush buff you are, or how interested . . . there is a lot of stuff in here.” She waves her damp, soapy hands. “It can seem a bit much, at first.�
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“I’m very interested, Ruth,” I say. I’ve come, I don’t yet say, to know who here might have died in a fire.
The fire that burned her pleading hands. A ghost speaks from the pain that haunts her. But I must be careful not to give her, or myself, away with too eager questions. Not with Pratt prowling the countryside.
“You’ll notice not all of this, strictly speaking, is museum quality,” Ruth apologizes, leading me past a row of opened boxes. “Every time someone leaves the Bar, they dump all their old stuff on me, like this. Like I’m a Goodwill donation site.”
So, White Bar is a place people are leaving, then. If it’s such a happy town, as the mayor says, why would that be?
“Is this your museum then, Ruth?” I ask, skirting a stack of chipped china plate.
She tells me that no, the collection, all the artifacts, belong to the town—but the building had always belonged to her family. “My last name is Huellet. We Huellets go way back to when this was a gold rush camp. We weren’t the first non-indigenous people to arrive here—that would have been Mexican traders passing through—they found the first nuggets here and then got chased off by the whites—but we came not long after that. When this was a camp called Eno. First tent went up 1850. Here’s a sketch of what the camp looked like then.”
She takes me to a wall covered in maps and sketches. In their center is a small drawing of a group of pitched tents ringed by ugly, stumped trees.
“A lot of these buildings, including this jail, didn’t go up until 1852.” She taps the far edge of the drawing. “This building stayed a jail until it got converted to a museum this last century, by my great-grandmother, Cora Huellet. She started this collection. Now it’s my responsibility. My calling. Along with making my handmade Huellet’s Healing Soaps.” She points, proudly, at the baskets filled with ribboned squares. “All organic, all natural. Now, over here”—she turns—“there’s a photo of two of my ancestors. The Huellet brothers were doctors. This handsome one here, in the white hat, Caleb Huellet, was also our first mayor. His brother, Huston, was more of a behind-the-scenes guy. I hope you don’t mind me talking about my family.” She lingers, then turns away from the portraits of the serious-looking men. “I’m sort of proud of them. I try not to get carried away.”
“I don’t mind at all,” I tell her. Sometimes you long to speak of your family, and can’t.
She nods, grateful. “What I’ll do now is give you a bit of the talk I give most of the tourists. Sound all right to you?”
I agree, and she goes on chattering as we wind through more clutter. We stop beside a glass case filled with arrowheads. “The Miwok. They were here first. They’re all gone now.” Then beside another, filled with piles of gold stone. “These aren’t real nuggets. Only painted. It wouldn’t be safe to keep real gold out like this. Plus, if it was the real thing, White Bar would be as rich as Midas—and we all wouldn’t have to work so hard.”
“But,” she says, and her face turns proud again as she walks backward, facing me, “it’s the gold that put us on the map. At first there was so much of the yellow stuff lying around, the men could pick it up right off the ground, or pluck it out of the river. By 1851, though, all the easy pickings were gone, and the digging really started. It was a hard life for the men here. The prospectors, they mucked for pay dirt every day, even Sunday, except for the few who tried to keep to their religions. The winters were so cold, their hands froze black, and the summers baked their eyes. Still the camp kept growing.”
By 1852 there were three hotels, she says—“to call them by their polite name”—two undertakers, a stable, Chinese laundries, and goods stores, and also six saloons, and brawls, and accidents, and sickness, and disease.
Accidents, I think. Fires.
“What made us different from other towns,” Ruth Huellet goes on, coming back to the faded maps, “is that pretty quickly we tried to get civilized. You can see here the camp was laid out around a square. Not at all what you normally saw in a boomtown. Some of the men who came from the East, like my ancestors Caleb and Huston, wanted something that looked more like home. They also brought in law and order. If you’ll look here”—she leads me sideways to a small, doorless, stony room—“you can see the original jail cell. The bars are gone, and we’ve made it a nice display area; but you can still get a sense of how tight it was, with these granite walls. Nobody got away.”
“Tight as a coffin,” I say aloud.
“You bet.”
A hanging lantern throws a shadow on the wall, above a table with a brass scale and a standing medicine cabinet filled with blue bottles. Beside this, a photograph of miners with long, drooping beards and hollow eyes, leaning over a wooden trough belching mud and water. They look dazed and weary.
“These medicine bottles, here, belonged to my ancestors. They were part of the movement to get the camp healthy and civilized. They got help from Lionel Berringer, the first sheriff. Have you met the Berringers, John and Mary? They’re from old blood, too, like me. The Huellets and the Berringers got things in order and renamed the town, but unfortunately it was for a sad reason. The name White Bar refers to this white ridge of falls outside of town, over here in this picture. It’s not a natural formation. It’s what’s left from a dynamite disaster. In 1852, some miners were trying to change the course of the river, which was something they did back then, to get at the gold they thought was underneath it. But the blast went wrong and four men died. There’s a little marker out by the river in memory of them.”
A blast. Flames. Fire. “Tell me, Ruth,” I say, looking more closely at the photograph of the falls and the foam, “did any fire spread?”
“You would think it would have. Wildfire was always a big hazard here. That’s why this building is all stone and iron, when others were wood. Some even—I know it sounds stupid—had canvas roofs. But apparently, the blast didn’t hurt the town. Since it was at the river, maybe it was far enough away.”
“And who died in the explosion?”
“Only the four men. It was a day of mourning for the camp. We don’t have a picture of that, but we do have this one taken not long after, the same year.”
She points into another corner of the cell, and here I see the familiar photograph, the same one that hangs in my hotel room. The hatted and bonneted townspeople standing on the snow-draped square, their faces lifted.
“I know this one,” I say, looking up. “It’s at Martha’s.”
“Right, you’ll see it all over town. It’s on our postcards, too.” She leads me out of the cell and to a little rack of mementos beside a brass cash register. “It’s our signature image,” she says, showing me. “It really captures the look and the spirit of the times. You can tell from the flags it was some kind of winter celebration or thanksgiving. What you can really see are all the details, the clothes people were wearing, what the buildings and the square looked like, how so many of the trees were cut down, now all grown back. Notice even a few women”—she points them out—“though they were rare around that time, outside of the bordellos. I just love this image. All those people. Full of . . . ambition.”
I search among them for a glimpse of ruched, flowered sleeves. There are only women draped in black, in black coats and bonnets. A strange color for a celebration.
I ask, “Is there a graveyard around here?”
“No, we don’t have any cemeteries. Or graves.” She fusses with the card rack, rearranging it. “The ground here’s too pocked with mines and holes, which is why we couldn’t even get a tram built this past summer. Everyone gets buried over at Dutch Gap. It’s the next town over.” She turns to stand behind the register, formally. “That’s where we go when we need a big supermarket, doctors, things like that. We’re pretty isolated here. And our population tends to be older. My son lives with his father in Reno.” She looks down at the money tray. “Some people think we’re kind of a dead place now.”
It’s an opening. “You don’t mean dead like ghosts, do
you, Ruth?”
“Oh, no! You don’t have to worry about anything like that here. Whenever we’ve had trouble, we’ve always had it taken care of, right away. Please don’t think you have to be nervous, okay?” She looks up at me, hopefully. “Please know it’s safe and peaceful here. Martha told me a little bit, the little she knows about your . . . your situation. And I promise you, Rose.” Her blue eyes look into mine, directly. “We’ll protect you here. We’re just that kind of place.”
The same words Martha used. “You’re all so very kind. So you say there are no—”
“A lot of us know what it’s like,” she interrupts—then stops, and swallows, as if she’s holding back something inside her. “What it’s like to feel down and out. But don’t you let anyone get to you, Rose. I was in a bad relationship a while back. With my son’s father. We weren’t married. He tried to get me to leave the Bar. I thought I might, for a while. But I left him flat when I found out what a leech he was.” She holds her empty hands out to me, as if to beg. “Because we have to stand up for ourselves, right? Mary Berringer says life’s too precious to live out someone else’s idea of what we should be.”
“Ruth,” I say kindly, for though I’m dead and cold, I feel with every inch of my soul, and with this body, and I can see when a living woman has suffered and walks in skin that still aches. “You’re right. We should be who we are, not who others say.” Never can truer words be spoken. “Is there something more you want to tell me about your . . . trials?” For she seems about to burst, holding her life, her past, inside her.
She stiffens all at once and turns toward her soaps, rearranging them, too, before she reaches for a little pile of papers resting on a small table and shrugs firmly. “No. I’m fine. Just having one of those moments, you know. Would you like to take one of our walking-tour maps?” She clears her throat, smiles quickly, and holds out a sheet to me. “It’s self-guided, and shows you our historic buildings and what the layout of the boomtown was like, and then it takes you to the falls.”