Auraria: A Novel (7 page)

“As I was saying,” continued Edgar, “since Eleanor died, I’ve had to do the housekeeping, or make the children do it, and I’m not very good at either. I’m lucky to get any kind of supper turned out. Folks were nice to us right after Eleanor passed. We ate real well after the funeral, real well. Then they didn’t keep it up. I think Eleanor scares them. I wish she would move on! Silly ghost! Get going!” He waved his arms at his ghost wife as though he were trying to shoo chickens. Eleanor’s expression was unchanged.

Three faces appeared, spaced along the ladder. “Is that Momma you’re talking about?”

“Who else?” said Edgar. “You three, come meet this man. He says his name is Holtzclaw. He wants to talk about the farm here.”

The three children presented themselves in a ragged line for Holtzclaw’s inspection. The smallest, a girl, had a corn husk doll. “Momma made it for me.”

“I hadn’t seen that before,” said Edgar, taking it from her. The doll had a long dirty-white dress, fringed in rough fabric that resembled lace at the collar and cuff. Black thread stood for hair that tumbled below its shoulders. It was the spitting image of its supposed creator. “Ain’t that a thing?” Edgar gave it back, and the child clutched it to her chest.

Eleanor turned to watch the children climb the ladder. In the dark of the cabin, a milkiness of light clung to her skin. She was so pale that she seemed to glow.

The two men and the ghost wife took seats around the kitchen table, which held, among the remnants of a past dinner, a reed basket of porcelain doorknobs.

“It’s for the chickens,” said Edgar. “If they’re not laying, they get lonely, and that makes them even less likely to lay. Then they’re restless; they walk around and maybe drop the egg in some secret nest, in a bush. So you put a doorknob in their real nest, in the coop, with the pointy part down and the smooth part up, so the chicken thinks it’s sitting on an egg. If you’re a rich person, you can buy a real porcelain egg for your chicken, but poor people have to make do with some old doorknobs. Doesn’t work as well. They know the difference. Chickens aren’t laying right now, haven’t had more than a dozen eggs since Eleanor died. She gives them the fright! See some white lady stalking about in the bushes in the dead of night. You wouldn’t lay either.”

Eleanor placed her hands on the table. Her slender fingers were capped by translucent nails.

Holtzclaw presented his scenario about scrap metal and inquired if the Stricklands were willing to sell. Edgar invited an offer with a sweep of his hand. As Holtzclaw enumerated the value of the property, Edgar remained silent. He did not grimace at particular sums, nor did he correct Holtzclaw to say, “We just put a new roof on that corncrib” or “What about the chickens? You didn’t count the chickens.” Edgar’s chief interest was the running tally. When Holtzclaw’s running total exceeded a certain sum, Edgar leaned back in his chair and sighed.

Eleanor turned away, her face in profile against the window. Her hair was up in a bun now; Holtzclaw had not seen her do it. The sharp angle of her nose was softened by the sunlight.

“So, Mr. Strickland, do we have a deal?” said Holtzclaw.

“Where do I sign?” When Edgar had finished making his last mark—a curious pattern of geometric shapes that, while bearing no resemblance to a cursive rending of his name, was actually more complicated—Holtzclaw counted out a stack of bills.

“What do you think you’ll do with your money, Mr. Strickland?”

“I have plans, yes, very definite plans, Mr. Holtzclaw, now that I’ve got your money and you’ve got my land. You’ve got some new plans too. You get to deal with all the corn coming up; some you got to feed to the chickens and some you got to feed to yourself and some you got to cart down into the valley and try to sell it for sugar or coffee. And then you’ve got to wake up the next morning and do it all again, and there’s never an end in sight.” Edgar gesticulated toward an empty chair; Eleanor sat on the opposite side of the table. “When your wife dies, then you get to deal with a farmhouse and all the washing and the cooking too and sweeping out the house because you get dirt and spiders and evil spirits—can’t keep ’em all away, least of all your ghost wife. And you got to try to make it all mean something, doing the same work day after day with never an end in sight, thinking if you could save a penny here or a penny there you could get out, but you never do.”

Eleanor’s eyes fixed on his husband. Her mouth was hard set. A red flush spread to her pale cheeks.

“We’re gonna move,” said Edgar. “We’ll go to California or maybe Alaska, where they still have gold. Strike it rich. We won’t be saving pennies anymore. Buy a mountain of sugar, buy a ton of coffee. Move in to the city and have twenty butlers. They still have butlers in the city? Somebody told me about it once, but that was a long time ago. A maid too, and some golden slippers. They don’t have to be real gold, because that would be heavy. Just gold colored. And expensive.”

Edgar stood up, scooping the money into his pocket. “If you’ll excuse me, Mr. Holtzclaw, I’ve got to get ready. We have to load the wagon. Hitch up the children. Shake off all these old ghosts.”

Holtzclaw went to the door, and Eleanor followed beside him. He tipped his hat to her, but she did not return any courtesy. She looked at him with sadness welling in her eyes.

“I am sorry for any trouble I have caused you, ma’am,” he said, with as much tenderness as his profession would allow.

Eleanor took the small broom that hung upside down and swept his dust from her house.

Chapter Four

Holtzclaw’s success compensated the eerie feeling that he brought with him out of the Strickland house. Eleanor was not a ghost, even if her children seemed not to see her, even if she said nothing, even if her luminous skin had its own light. Holtzclaw resolved not to think on it any more. It mattered little to him what Edgar Strickland did with the money that Holtzclaw had paid him; the strained relations between Edgar and Eleanor, ghost or not, were unimportant to his mission. Holtzclaw’s interest in the matter should have ended when Edgar signed over the deed.

The next property, which Holtzclaw feared would come with its own mystery, was at the head of the valley, upstream, at the foot of Sinking Mountain. Today’s road proved much less bewildering than yesterday’s. After a half hour’s walk, Holtzclaw arrived at a property owned by Shadrach Bogan.

On Holtzclaw’s map, Shadburn had written “Vast empty swath of useless cleared land leading to empty mine tunnels,” but this was incorrect. The land was covered in close-packed pine trees, thick scrub, and patches of laurel and mountain hemlock.

Holtzclaw found the property’s owner sitting in front of a crack in the mountainside. He was carving a new handle for a pickaxe from a tree branch. The knife he was using was far too large for the job, and yet Bogan whittled and whistled.

“Help you?” said Bogan.

“I am hoping we can help each other,” said Holtzclaw. “You are in possession of a piece of land, and I may be interested in purchasing it.” The direct method, Holtzclaw had found, was universally appropriate when facing parties that held large knives. They did not care for verbal tricks.

“What do you need it for?” said Bogan.

“I am a dealer in scrap metal.”

“Well, there’s a ton of it down there under Sinking Mountain,” said Bogan. “Mostly gets in my way. Want to go take a look?” He gestured with his head toward the crack in the mountain. The passage was not braced up against collapse. Loose boulders were stacked to each side. “It used to have another way in, over on the widow’s side of the mountain, but I had to blast my own way in. Imagine, blast into my own mountain, ’cause I didn’t buy a front door! Look what I got instead.”

Bogan got up and scurried over a line of boulders. On the other side, there was a lake.

It was the last thing that Holtzclaw expected to see; he did not think lakes could emerge from hiding so suddenly. It ambushed him with its beauty.

The lake was filled at one end by a waterfall and drained at the other end through jagged rocks. Stone, blasted into a crater, embraced the body of water; the sidewalls were deeply concave and fifty feet tall. The water was a deep blue, darker than a summer sky. Within the water, a vein of paler color—robin’s-egg blue—concentrated in one shaded pocket and then diffused in thin tendrils.

“It’s astounding,” said Holtzclaw. “Does it have a name?”

“’Course it has a name. Every hump and hummock has a name. Get two horses pissing next to each other, and someone will name the river they make. This started out as a fat spot in the creek. Some fellows were getting good pans just below here and then nothing higher upstream, past where the waterfall is. So they figured—smart fellows—that the gold must be right in here. They took some dynamite … what am I saying, some? They took a mess of dynamite and packed it all around here. Boom! Sudden lake, or sudden hole for a lake, and it doesn’t take the water long to fill it in. They must have blasted down into a spring to get that color. So they called it Cobalt Springs Lake.”

It would be pleasant to own such a piece of property, thought Holtzclaw. He would put a cabin on the ridge, with a wide veranda that overlooked the waterfall. Perhaps he could persuade Shadburn to set aside this piece, which had no evident commercial value, and Holtzclaw could reinvest a part of his salary into this retreat. A cool place for his health to be sheltered from seasonal miasmas.

“It’s a wrong lake,” said Bogan. “Unnatural. No fish in it. Bluer than the sky—nothing should be bluer than the sky. I’d rather drink from an honest pond: brown, muddy, filled with skeeters and crayfish, frogs singing on the edge of it.”

That the lake was a product of industry only made it more attractive to Holtzclaw. He ran his fingers in the current—the water was cool and left his fingers tingling.

Bogan continued his narrative. “Worst of it was, after those fellows set off the dynamite and made themselves a lake, they couldn’t find a bit of gold, upstream or downstream. You can try it with that hat of yours. You can run the sand three times through the rocker box. Completely empty, not a cent in the whole lake. Boy, that was the biggest news here in Auraria for months! What most people figured was that when they opened up that spring—the Cobalt Spring—all the gold got washed away. Whoosh! Like some flood. But I figured the gold had been running out of some tunnel, and when the fellows made their lake, they closed up that tunnel, and the gold stayed stuck in Sinking Mountain. Maybe even built up, like it was sediment. When the old owners absquatulated, they sold me this here Sinking Mountain, and the bottomlands where they had their camp, and Cobalt Springs Lake—they wouldn’t sell it without the lake, even though I didn’t want it. That’s enough about lakes. Are we going to go look at some scrap metal?”

Holtzclaw eyed the precarious passage into the mountain. If he wanted to maintain his cover story, he had no choice. He nodded, and Bogan handed him a lantern.

“Always check it for fuel before you go in. See, that’s got plenty in it. Take some matches and candles. Don’t want to run out of light—you’ll never get out! I got ropes, though we probably aren’t going to need them. Got some water and victuals too—couple peaches.”

“Will we be gone that long?” said Holtzclaw.

“Never know,” said Bogan. “Might find a treasure tunnel. Might sprain your ankle.” They passed through the narrow crack and into the darkness under the mountain. Within a few paces, the light from the outside world was gone. Two lanterns floated in the gloom.

“You’d probably have to widen this part up a bit to bring up any of the larger pieces,” said Bogan. “I can help you with that. It would take some careful dynamiting. That’s what I’ve been doing for ten years now, careful dynamiting.”

Holtzclaw kept his lantern close by. Its feeble light did not penetrate the darkness very far. The floor was uneven and jagged, as were the walls. Numerous side tunnels cut off to the left and right.

“Those look like tunnels, but they only go a few feet,” said Bogan. Those were my mistakes. Took me eight months to make it through here. I didn’t want to bring the mountain down on me. Sometimes I had to feel out if the ceiling was going soft, and if it was, I had to back up and come another way. I was looking for the mine shaft, too, and if I felt like I was getting away from that, I would have to come back and rethink. Of course, the real aim was gold. A few times I chased a seam of quartz for a bit. Didn’t pan out, though! Sorry, that’s miner humor. Hey, here we go! I made this part nicer, so I wouldn’t need to pull out a rope every time I came through.”

The tunnel veered left ninety degrees and descended on a set of rough-hewn steps, and then it opened up into another tunnel of a very different character. It was eight feet square with a smooth floor, along which ran a narrow gauge rail.

“If you head left, you’ll get to the end of the old tunnel and then into my diggings. Not much there for a buyer like you. We’ll head to the right. You could pull up all this rail line here. I don’t need it. You might leave it until the end, though, because it would help you move the bigger pieces.”

“Bigger pieces?” said Holtzclaw, though he hardly needed to encourage the garrulous miner to continue.

“Like this mine cart up ahead here. All metal, even the sides. Wheels still turn. Not rusted because I’ve kept it out of the water. A solid piece of equipment.”

The mine cart straddled the narrow gauge track and filled the width of the tunnel. Holtzclaw squeezed past it along the far side, inspecting it for show.