Auraria: A Novel (28 page)

“Graciousness! It’s lucky that Emmett sold me a solution for the mules.” She ducked into her cabin and rummaged. Holtzclaw heard the sounds of metal on metal, glass on glass. Something shattered, and heavy piles slid and tumbled. Mother Fresh-Roasted emerged with a glass bottle.

“I normally like to mix up my own,” she said. “But none of my brews made those stubborn mules get up their get-up.” She uncorked the bottle, filling the air with a strong smell of alcohol. “Emmett called it highlife and said I should put a dab just so. I need you to lift up his tail. Don’t hold on too tight!”

She dunked an index finger into the bottle as Holtzclaw grasped the switching tail of one of the mules. He lifted it, and Mother Fresh-Roasted placed her dripping finger at its base. The mule brayed fiercely, lurched forward, and galloped into the sloppily cut underbrush. Holtzclaw was left holding several tail hairs.

“I told you not to hold on too tight,” said Mother Fresh-Roasted.

“How does he know where to go?”

“I sent the singing tree up there already to tidy the place up. They’ll hie to his voice.”

She approached the next mule; Holtzclaw barely held the tail between his two fingers, and Mother Fresh-Roasted’s finger gingerly touched just the base. This mule too was shot through with vim and courage, barreling away uphill into the woods following the beaten track of its brother.

“That is some strong stuff,” said Holtzclaw.

Mother Fresh-Roasted upended the bottle into her mouth and took a long swig. “It’s all right,” she said. Holtzclaw waited for her to explode into green sparks, but when he saw only a small shiver, he reasoned that the special effects of the highlife were confined to either mules or topical application.

“Your mules will be all right on their own, with just a singing tree to look after them?” said Holtzclaw.

“If you’re worried, we can put a little highlife under your tail, and you can catch up with them.”

“I would prefer not!” said Holtzclaw. But he took a sip from the bottle that she held out to him. It burned clear and tasteless—a fine spirit.

“Besides,” said Mother Fresh-Roasted, “the Admiral will keep them in line and pick them up if they get lost.” Hearing his name, a gray mop-like dog snuffled between Mother Fresh-Roasted’s feet. “He executes my orders, and all the animals follow.”

The Admiral wheezed and spun around in place half a turn, pursuing his tail until it escaped him.

“Only trouble is, sometimes he gets to chasing after ghosts. He doesn’t like them, even if they never harm anybody. So I have to put a glass button around his neck to stop him. Oh, Admiral! You’ve lost your button. It’s a good thing that mushroom girl hasn’t been by here. You wouldn’t have given her any peace, would you?”

Mother Fresh-Roasted knelt down and removed the lowest button from her dress. She tied it to the Admiral’s collar with a piece of thread drawn from her pocket.

“There, now you’ll stay on task. Keep those mules moving, sir!” The Admiral wheezed and plodded toward the trees.

“He needs some highlife,” said Holtzclaw.

“The Admiral is a teetotaler.”

They went next into a shed that served as a shelter for the chickens. The coops themselves were built into a wheeled cart—ten coops long, four high, two abreast.

“Eighty hens, and each one has a window seat,” said Mother Fresh-Roasted. “They’ve been so cold lately, so cold. I bring them into the house at night in the worst weather and put them right in front of the hearth, but they’re still laying snowballs.” She lifted one of the hens and withdrew a packed clump of snow, oval just like an egg.

“How do they cook up?” asked Holtzclaw.

“Tastes like ice cream,” said Mother Fresh-Roasted.

“That could be a very profitable treat to sell by the roadside, when there are more visitors to the valley, as long as the weather cooperates.”

“It may not be the weather after all. It may be unnatural fraternization with the cows,” said Mother Fresh-Roasted. “We have seen the strangest signs. Rainbow-colored clouds in the sky. Ghosts and cats playing chuck-luck. My pond spring has flowed with gravy on two occasions.”

The wheeled coop was hitched to a brace of oxen, and Mother Fresh-Roasted set this ungainly creation on its way with a clicking of her tongue.

Behind her cabin, in a stand of trees, were beehives. “My proudest creation,” said Mother Fresh-Roasted. She lifted the lid of a hive, and a green light shined forth. Holtzclaw approached the swarm without hesitation, drawn by light. When he peered inside the hive, he saw that each bee pulled behind it, through the twilight and shadows, a firefly-like lamp.

“I have made a marriage,” said Mother Fresh-Roasted. “A firefly has a light, but no purpose. A honeybee has a purpose, but no light. Their children inherit the best talents of their parents!”

“This is not unnatural fraternization?”

“No, not in the least. Can you imagine a more natural pairing? The fire-bees can work in the dark and make a double crop of honey. When the honeybees gained illuminated tails, they lost in recompense their stingers, which is a boon for the hides of my visitors.”

“So you have left your sweet and lucrative creations defenseless?”

“I have a gun, which is better than any stinger ever devised by Nature.”

“How will you persuade them to move ahead of the waters?”

Mother Fresh-Roasted motioned for him to stay put, then walked to a copse of chestnut trees that had not yet been cleared. Leaves rustled, and a smaller tree staggered forward. A deer, adult size but swayback and knock-kneed, carried a blooming peach tree. The tree was not held in a pot of soil but grew from the deer’s back. Despite this, the tree was in excellent health—shiny green leaves and bright white blossoms, even in this late season.

“That odious Sky Pilot shot her with an arrow he took from a peach tree, but he did not kill her,” said Mother Fresh-Roasted. “I could do little for the poor creature. The peach-wood arrow had already taken a root inside her, and to try to remove it would cause a bleeding that I couldn’t stop. The peach tree and the deer are one creature now. The tree shares the mast that she forages and the water that she drinks. The deer sleeps beneath a continual cover of shade and has a ready source of fruit.”

“No one has tried to chop her down?” asked Holtzclaw.

“As I said, I have a gun,” said Mother Fresh-Roasted. She clicked sideways out of her mouth, and a boy came out from the woods. He wore overalls and a straw hat, and he was covered in dirt across his body, but his hands and face were clean. He dropped his fishing pole next to Mother Fresh-Roasted, who inspected his hands and face approvingly.

“Keeping them clean, that’s a good lad,” said Mother Fresh-Roasted. “Do me a kindness and lead our lady up to the new farm. You remember where it is?” The boy nodded. “It’s a hard walk for her.”

“We can let her rest her middle on the wheelbarrow, and I can pull up on the handles and help,” said the boy.

“Why, that is a splendid idea and worth twice the pay.” She withdrew from her pocket two silver coins and two walnuts. The boy gobbled one of the walnuts quickly and placed the other three objects into the pocket of his overalls. He placed his hands on either side of the deer’s face. Her eyes, weary and wary and sad like the eyes of all deer that Holtzclaw had seen, regarded the boy; then a black tongue emerged to lick the boy’s hands. The boy laughed, the bees hummed, and the amalgamated creature—boy and bees and deer and tree—rounded the edge of the barn and disappeared.

Mother Fresh-Roasted’s turkeys lifted their heads and opened their throats to the sky, as if expecting rain. Their alien warbling filled the air.

Chapter Eighteen

In the morning, Holtzclaw went up the mountain to the camp of the railroad men. It was set into Asbestos Hollow, against a vertical face of Burnt Rock Mountain. Holtzclaw’s ostensible purpose was to recruit a wrecking team to clear the remaining houses in old Auraria, but he was also drawn by the promise of Sampson’s cuisine, which he could smell from a half mile away. Holtzclaw waited his turn at the chuck wagon, where the ritual inherited from the Grayson House was carefully observed. A customer placed his piece of gold on a burned wooden spot and turned away; moments later, a bowl of stew was in its place. This morning, it was a variant of groundhog stew, spiced for breakfast with cinnamon and nutmeg and decorated with a raw egg.

As Holtzclaw waited his turn and then ate his breakfast, he surveyed the camp. The men were mostly imported. Holtzclaw recognized only a few faces, Dan and Moss among them. Fires still smoldered from where men had warmed themselves after a cold night. Some who’d lost their pay in gambling cooked a poor breakfast of beans rather than buy a bowl of groundhog stew. Gaming paraphernalia was in evidence—illustrated decks of cards, dominoes, a standing roulette wheel.

From one of the caverns above the camp, a man staggered out, supported by two women. All were still in evening clothes. One of the women tried to manage a parasol while handling the slumping figure; the other did not pause to pick up her hat when it slipped from her head.

The man raised his face and looked out at the world through bleary eyes.

“Shadburn!” cried Holtzclaw. “Hiram Shadburn!”

“Is it Holtzclaw?” he said. “I can barely see through this fog. Holtzclaw, if it is you, give these good women some money. I made a pest of myself last evening, and I could not adequately recompense them. My billfold was lighter than I’d thought.”

“Perchance you were robbed when you were in some indisposed condition.”

“Oh he was quite in his right mind,” said the first woman, tugging on Shadburn’s arm to thrust more of his weight onto her back.

“A rich man!” said the other woman, who had missed her hat. “I like rich men.”

Holtzclaw withdrew a pouch of some loose gold dust from inside his vest pocket and poured a measure into the outstretched palms of the two women. They released their charge at the sight of money. Shadburn could not keep his footing under his own power; he slumped into a heap.

Holtzclaw had two men fetch a wheelbarrow. They loaded Shadburn into the vehicle while Holtzclaw rounded up the wrecking crew that he needed.

“Bella and Isabella did a number on your fancy friend there, Holtzclaw,” said the pilot of the wheelbarrow.

“Which number?” said his companion. This was met with uproarious, suggestive laughter.

“Gentlemen, a little respect,” said Holtzclaw. “Your Bella and Isabella are professional flatterers. That Shadburn, a naive soul, could not resist them is a virtue, not a flaw. He is only trying to do right for you, to uplift this valley.”

“Well, he has contributed to the uplift of those two women,” said the driver of the wheelbarrow.

“His own uplift too!” said a man with a mattock over his shoulder.

Holtzclaw took over command of the wheelbarrow and shooed the men back to their work. Working one limb at a time, Holtzclaw managed to get his employer gathered into the wheelbarrow. Shadburn looked like a tangle of cable, arms and legs twisted together unnaturally, but his blank expression disguised any discomfort that he was feeling.

“Hiram Shadburn, I cannot believe how you have fallen,” muttered Holtzclaw.

“I said that I was thirsty.” Shadburn suppressed a noxious emission. A whistling sound came out of his nose.

“But I’ve never even see you drink a drop of claret.”

“Auraria has better liquors than claret. Wonderful things. The best of them you don’t even drink. You should have seen me when I was a little one. I could stare full into the moonshine and never stagger. How they praised me!”

“And now that we’re back in Auraria, you’ve returned to old habits? This is what you’ve been doing, then, rather than negotiating and solving and toiling with me? You weren’t cultivating an air of respectability. You were off debauching yourself.”

“It is an old habit, Holtzclaw. You know what they say about old habits. They have to be drowned. Washed away.”

“And until they are, you are indulging in them with the same gusto that got you run out of town in your youth?”

“It’s very hard to be a new person in an old place.”

#

Holtzclaw deposited Shadburn in his chambers to sleep off his debauchery and then met Abigail at the Old Rock Falls. It was time for a last inspection, then to have the structure cleared, before the rising water turned it into dangerous debris.

“I’m not sure whether to be disappointed or impressed,” said Abigail after Holtzclaw told her the story of finding Shadburn among the women.

“Disappointed,” said Holtzclaw. “Very, very disappointed.”

He and Abigail began at the kitchen and continued up through the guest rooms. The Old Rock Falls was stripped to a shell. Shadburn had acquiesced to Holtzclaw’s plan for two dining rooms at the Queen of the Mountains. The main one would be luxurious, as befitted a first-class hotel, and the second would be authentic, as near a recreation of the Old Rock Falls as could be managed, using the original materials.

Abigail checked the corners, the cabinets, and the caches. She lifted floorboards to reveal hiding places already cleaned out. Only once was there a moment of excitement, when a tin of Pharaoh’s Flour was discovered inside a hidden nook. Abigail opened it—it was empty. She grasped a bookshelf with two hands, and it swung open to reveal a passageway. Inside was a dusty room with no furniture, artifacts, or spirits.