The Threshold

  “The same. Are the soldiers hurting you, Pa?”

  “No, and don’t you worry now. This is the United States of America and justice will be soon done. Rest of the county don’t approve of what this camp has come to.” He removed his hat, rubbed his scalp as if there were hair to brush back off his forehead. “And the union has power in the state. Best not be telling your brother I’m here. With his temper, there’s no knowing what he’ll do.”

  That night as the girls were preparing for bed, Mrs. Stollsteimer came to the doorway of the third-floor room and ordered Callie to pack her carpetbag. She was being dismissed. “I’ve sent for your brother to come fetch you. The streets of this town are no longer safe, thanks to men like your father.”

  43

  “We really do have to get out of here,” Aletha told Dr. Barbara.

  “She settles down so at the sight of you. She’s probably terminal.”

  “I just don’t want this whole room to get terminal.”

  “Believe me,” Tracy added from the doorway, “Aletha’s the one who can do it.” She came in from the parlor with an anxious Cree behind her.

  “Snoop? It was Brambaugh O’Connell in that room,” the old lady said, as if Aletha should know what she was talking about.

  “Please don’t get upset, Miss Heisinger. I’m sure everything’ll be fine.” When Aletha tried to move away from the bed an ancient hand clasped her wrist and the IV bottle swung on its rack.

  “You were there, and the cat,” Mildred said.

  “Talk about callous.” Renata tried to keep Aletha from freeing her wrist. “Now, stop this paranoia and help comfort the old woman.”

  “After all that came later, I forgot, you see,” Mildred explained.

  “Don’t leave.” The doctor bent to Mildred’s chest. “I may have to send someone out for oxygen.”

  “She’s just trying to die,” Tracy said. “Hell, she’s earned it.”

  “True. And so will we all someday.” The doctor looked into every pair of eyes but Mildred’s. “And so we are all obligated to make her death as comfortable as possible. As we’d like someone to do for us someday.”

  Mildred didn’t see the expressions of guilt mixing with the panic of those edgy to leave her house. The mysterious hole had closed over the cat and the couple behind it and Mildred was too shaken and confused to be interested in the bath. But the door to the hall had been locked against her. There was no window. She’d lost her clothes somewhere. The hole with the dancing edges had swept the champagne bubbles from her head. There was one other door and she backed toward it, keeping her eyes on the mysterious wall. Shudders of cold and fear rattled her teeth.

  In her desire to quit the smaller room she slid so quickly into the adjoining one she forgot to worry about what she might find there until it was too late. Mildred had an impression of crowded warmth, bright colors, a crackling sound from the stove in the corner, a bed with an excess of pillows. And a tall man, his back to her, his fists raised against the door to the hall. “Let me out or I’ll break everything in this room!”

  The laughter of both male and female voices came from the other side of the door. “Promised your pa I’d see you to your first bedding. Now, mind your pa, boy.”

  The man swung around, arms lifted as if to clutch the first thing he touched and smash it against the door. He was not quite the boy in her schoolroom in Alta, not the skeletal figure on the steps of the boardinghouse a year later, but the transformation was not so great that she didn’t recognize the eyes under the colorless hair. The body had regained its flesh, added muscle. The face had matured to smooth planes and shadowed angles. But the rage was the same, the violence unleashed, checked momentarily by his surprise at finding himself not alone. The dignity she had sensed in her classroom was still there, and outraged again. His voice broke now from astonishment instead of adolescence. “Miss Heisinger?”

  “Bram, I don’t live here. I’ve been made the brunt of this joke too.”

  “You’re trying to haunt my life.” He picked up a small table from beside the bed and hurled it to splinter against the door; a trail of towels and washcloths marked its passage across the room.

  Mildred pulled the bath towel tighter around her, tried to regain some of her own dignity. “I was about to take a bath and the wall—”

  “You were about to take a bath here. But you don’t live here.”

  “Someone took my clothes. Perhaps there’s clothing in here. Turn around. Don’t look at me. I can explain this as soon as—”

  “It’s not that I don’t know what to do.” He looked about as if for something else to pick up. “I’ve had enough teasing and mocking tonight.” He picked up Mildred.

  The old lady seemed to be sleeping, if fitfully. Her body jerked and her hand let go of Aletha.

  “Is she dead?” Renata stepped back from the bed.

  “No, in fact she’s breathing easier.” Dr. Barbara picked a limp wrist off the covers, checked the pulse against her watch. “This particular crisis might be over.”

  “If we could just get Aletha away from town,” Cree said, “everybody else should be safe.”

  “I cannot understand why Aletha is so dangerous.” Doris Lowell slipped Mildred’s arm back under the covers. “You’d think she had dynamite strapped to her chest and was about to spit the fuse.”

  “We’ll explain when there’s time, and I promise you won’t believe it.” Cree guided Aletha to the door. “We’ll be at Renata’s.”

  “I’m going too.” Tracy practically pushed them through the parlor and into the entryway. “We came in Renata’s jeep. The Datsun’s still at her place.”

  “Never mind,” Renata said behind them. “I’m right with you. Mildred doesn’t like me anyway and I don’t want to miss any magic film effects.” They all crowded outside the door and stopped. Renata walked around them and stepped onto the shoveled path between looming snowbanks. “It snowed all this while we were in there?”

  Aletha hugged her jacket sleeves. “It’s not night anymore.”

  Cree tried to open Mildred Heisinger’s front door. It was locked. There was now a glass pane in it.

  Renata walked back from the gate, looking dazed. “The jeep’s gone. There’re all kinds of people in the street.”

  “I could kick this door in or break the glass,” Cree said.

  “And explain it to your friend Sheriff Cal Rutan?” Aletha asked. “Or Mildred’s friend Bob Meldrum?”

  “We’ll freeze out here.” Renata pounded on the door. “Doris?”

  “Doris Lowell isn’t in there, Renata,” Tracy said.

  Piled snow hid the street from them, but there was shouting coming from that direction, then a gunshot. Renata pointed to the building towering over the snowbanks and Mildred’s little house. “How did that get there?”

  “It’s the Big Swede,” Cree said dejectedly, and opened his jacket to envelop Aletha against him. “I suppose we could all go and huddle in a boxcar.”

  Aletha could hear his heart and could almost hear his despair. Then she heard shouting close at hand and felt him stiffen. When she peeked out of his jacket the cold tried to freeze the tears to her cheeks and two men had entered the snow tunnel from the street. One stopped hitting the other over the head when he saw them. He stood with a board raised while his victim ducked beneath it and escaped, leaving blood drops on the path.

  “Hey, Duffer, come here quick!” Maynard Bellamy shouted.

  “You let the guy get away. We were supposed to—” Clyde Duffer appeared in the tunnel to gape at them, scratching the stubble on his chin. Together they looked like a couple of clown bums in their baggy clothes and slouchy hats. “Mackelwain and the girl. After all this time.” They moved toward Mildred’s house in step, blocking the path, with identical dreamlike expressions, carefully, eyelids blinking rapidly as if they expected the group by the door to dissolve any minute. “It’s time you took us home,” Duffer said to Aletha. “Do your stuff.”

>   Aletha hid her face back against Cree’s chest.

  “You want to freeze standing here? We’re the ones with the warm clothes this time, Mackelwain. Better get her in gear.”

  “Well, I’m going back in this house,” Renata said decisively, and stuck her fist through the glass panel in Mildred’s door.

  Aletha was in jail again. But this one didn’t smell of evaporating plastics, steam-table vegetables, or disinfectants; this one smelled of the smoky wood fire in the potbellied stove at the end of the alleyway between cells. It smelled of the dirt of the floor and of human feces. It smelled of woolen clothing in need of dry cleaning and reminded Aletha of the long coat she’d bought just for visiting this world. The coat now hung in the crib on Pacific Avenue a good eighty years away. In eighty years this jail building would sit across Spruce Street from the Senate and would be the San Miguel Public Library, the tiniest library Aletha had ever seen. One room with a concrete floor and decent heating, it would have shelves of books and plastered walls. Now it was still across from the Senate but the inner walls were the same mortared rock of the outside and made for cold, bumpy leaning.

  They’d each been given a blanket which Aletha was sure must be crawling with lice. They sat wrapped up on a bench at the back of the jail as near to the stove as iron bars would allow. There were two cells, running the length of the building. The alleyway between had wooden flooring and led to the stout front door. Each cell had a small wooden seat with a hole in it in one corner and a high barred window that looked out onto the street.

  They’d all been charged with vagrancy, Renata with vandalism, and the three women with indecency, probably because they happened to be wearing jeans. Duffer and Maynard had evaporated after pretending to have discovered them breaking into Mildred Heisinger’s house while hunting vagrants. When the black woman came home to find them crowded into the entry hall she’d run screaming for the marshal. Most of the inmates were vagrants awaiting a hearing or union men the mine owners refused to rehire. They answered Cree’s questions readily enough but huddled away from his end of the cell, obviously embarrassed that females would be “vagged” and placed in a jail along with men. The blankets hid some of the women’s form of dress but there were many curious glances at their shoes and the hair hanging loose about their shoulders. Renata’s careful makeup became more apparent as she grew more tired and frightened. Several men singled her out for special smiles.

  The door hinges squawked and screeched when a man came in to rebuild the fire. He ignored the miners’ questions about when he thought they could expect to be fed. Just after he left, the door opened again and the man who entered this time practically blocked the alley between the cells. All grumbling hushed.

  “Sheriff Cal Rutan,” Cree whispered to Aletha, and sighed long and hard.

  The sheriff searched the faces behind the bars on either side of him and stopped when he came to Cree. “Mackelwain, isn’t it? Let’s see … McCree Ronald?” In the pause that followed, Aletha figured she could have heard a worm turn in the dirt floor. Nobody even spit. “Looks like you got yourself some more of them fancy shoes and some fancy women too. And here I been worrying you’d been killed by your rough friends. Those boys got themselves jobs, been helping round up vagrants, becoming upstanding citizens. Misjudged them and you too. Thought you was smarter than to come back to Telluride, having skipped out on your debts.” Sheriff Rutan turned his backside to the stove and rocked on his feet. “That sure wasn’t smart, Mr. McCree Mackelwain.”

  44

  Bulkeley Wells had been a captain in the National Guard in Denver, and Major Hill, the commanding officer of the troops in Telluride, persuaded him to form a local company of militia from the general citizenry to be known as Troop A, First Squadron, Cavalry. Captain Wells in his blue tunic and jodhpurs took command of Troop A. The enthusiasm of the town was such that a detachment of cadets from the high school, organized back in the days of the Spanish-American War, marched and drilled as well. Those “foreigners” would think twice before returning to Telluride. Bram O’Connell, refusing to march against his father, quit school in his last term before graduating and went to work full time at the Wunderlich and Rella Company Bottling Works. Ma’am was too sick and preoccupied to stop him.

  On February 21, Major Hill and his troops withdrew from Telluride, leaving Captain Bulkeley Wells supreme military commander of San Miguel County. Wells continued the curfew and closed down the saloons, gambling halls, and the bordellos to keep the troublemakers from congregating. He ordered a stone fort built on top of Imogene Pass to keep any strikers from returning by way of the closed end of the valley while members of Troop A searched all trains, wagons, and coaches coming in from the open end.

  Callie had wanted to leave the Sheridan Hotel for so long she was surprised at her thoughts that first night out of it as she lay in the narrow bed and tried not to touch her sleeping mother. At the hotel she’d had her own bed. She already missed the indoor toilets and the running water. It would be wonderful to be out from under the tedious work but she’d miss talking to her friends at night in their third-floor room. Mrs. Stollsteimer’s girls had become a family to her. Ma’am had declined so, Pa was never around, her brother had grown to such a man he was unlike the Bram she’d loved before the cave-in or after when he was sickly and ashamed. She felt uneasy around him now, yet she daydreamed of herself and Bram living alone in a cabin high in a mountain meadow. The cabin was small so she didn’t spend much time cleaning it and, impossibly, it had an indoor toilet.

  Just as she was falling asleep, Bram went off to work a little mine he owned and Callie went out to ride one of the wild horses who lived on the meadow (they would allow no one but Callie to ride them), when along came Olina Svendt to visit, on the pretext of needing to borrow some sugar. Of course she stayed until Bram came home and asked him when he intended to marry and he said, “No need to marry. I have my little Callie girl.”

  The next day Callie ate the noon meal alone with Ma’am, Mrs. Pakka, and Mrs. Pakka’s two daughters because all the men were at work or in jail. Just as they’d finished there were loud knockings at both front and back doors and outcries from the neighboring house.

  Mrs. Pakka answered one door, her oldest daughter the other, and both ushered in members of Troop A. Mrs. Pakka wore her hair braided on top of her head like Olina Svendt. But the landlady’s braids were thin and gray, the scalp beneath pink with irritation at being pulled so tightly. The pink spread down over her face now and she tightened her lips against her teeth. “They’re here to search the house for weapons. We’re to stay in this room until they’re done.”

  Luella put a hand to her chest and knotted it to a fist as if her heart hurt. “I need my medicine. Callie, could you—”

  “No, she can’t leave to get it now.” Mrs. Pakka gave Callie a look that said she didn’t expect Callie could ever do anything useful and poured tea into Luella’s cup.

  “I’ll fetch it when they’ve gone.” Callie took her mother’s hand and pondered Mrs. Pakka’s look.

  “It’s me they’re after, isn’t it?” Luella peered up at the corners of the ceiling as if she expected members of Troop A to be poised there ready to leap at her. “I’d best hide.” Callie’s mother crawled under the dining table, leaving Callie and the Pakkas staring at each other openmouthed.

  “That medicine is affecting her head,” Mrs. Pakka said, “just like spirits do when a man can’t stop the drinking. I can’t get her to eat. Blood’s so thin it makes her nose bleed. You and Bram ought to make her see a doctor. See what he thinks of this medicine she can’t be without.”

  “Ma’am, come out from under there now.” The thought of children “making” a mother do anything seemed fanciful to Callie. But she softened her voice as she would for Lowri Kesti or a kitten. “They’re not looking for you, they’re looking for guns.” Still her mother didn’t move. “I wish Bram were here.”

  “Not with his temper, you don’t.” The landla
dy winced as the searchers tipped over something upstairs. “And speaking of whom, he’s not come up with the week’s board money and I’ve given him more time. Now you’re an extra mouth to feed on the poor boy’s wage. You can work some of it off around here, miss. Must have taught you something up at that hotel besides swishing your skirts.”

  And so Callie found herself cleaning things again and tied down to the boardinghouse, keeping an eye on the increasingly erratic behavior of her mother. There was no hope of starting school until the fall term anyway. But one afternoon she saw Luella to her room for her nap, put on her coat, and made her way up to Colorado Avenue. There were surprisingly few people on the street and she noticed the closed doors on the saloons. She stepped into the boot shop, waved at the bootmaker, and slipped into the alley in back. Callie hoped her Aunt Lilly wasn’t entertaining a gentleman. They needed money for the boardinghouse. She’d tell Bram and Mrs. Pakka the money came from her back wages at the hotel, although Mrs. Stollsteimer had made it clear there’d be none. Sly. Secretive.

  “Oh Callie, I’m glad you’ve come.” Aunt Lilly had two lady friends at her table. “I have something for you.” She shook out her hair and disappeared into her front room. The other ladies had their hair down too, and damp, as if they’d just washed it. Their faces were scrubbed of paint. “Here, honey, have some coffee,” one of the ladies said, “and see what Floradora has for you.”

  Aunt Lilly brought out a lovely dress—red-black-and-green plaid with lace at the collar. “It’s almost new. And I know how you hate that black hotel thing.”

  The dress was a tad large but Callie was glad to take off Mrs. Stollsteimer’s uniform. “I’ll tell everyone it’s a hand-me-down from Olina’s sister.”