Searching for Silverheels (27 page)

Though Robert's battalion had not yet been in battle, there had been an accident in the boiler room of his ship. He was badly burned, and word was he had lost a leg in the explosion. Robert was due to be shipped back home within a month, and Frank would stay in Denver to help Annie. She would have her hands full with the invalid for some time.

“I think Annie has had second thoughts about her marriage since the incident in Como,” Frank wrote, “but this seems to give her a new resolve to work everything out. That's the thing about Annie. She never gives up hope, so I know she'll get Robert through this, no matter how bad it is. But, oh, Pearl! I wish it were different for her!”

I wished it too. Somehow, tragedy was not as beautiful in real life as it was in stories. Yet I knew Annie would be every bit as heroic as I had always believed Silverheels to be.

In Como things were settling back into place, but not necessarily the same places they had been in before. Josie quit coming into the café entirely. Russell came in daily, but I could see he was still suffering from a broken heart. I didn't know what to do for him, so I offered him what kindness I could, and I kept his secret.

As for me, I was back to serving food, clearing plates, and selling maps to the occasional tourist. I wasn't telling them
the Silverheels story so much now, though. I guess I couldn't quite decide what the truth of the story was. I hadn't given up on it. I just decided it needed a rest until I could settle on what to tell.

Toward the end of the fifth week after our return, Josie showed up at the café for the first time. She wasn't on foot as usual, and she didn't come in for coffee. She was driving the trap from Johnson's Livery, with good old Strawberry hitched to it. The lunch train had been gone for nearly two hours when she arrived.

“Good afternoon, Mrs. Barnell. I'm wondering if Pearl would be free to accompany me on an errand this afternoon?” she said politely. I almost dropped a stack of plates in surprise. My mother looked a little surprised too, but she smiled and nodded.

“If Pearl would like to go, I'll finish the washing up.”

“Where are we going?” I asked as I climbed up onto the seat beside Josie in the trap.

She cracked the reins and “gi'yad” to Strawberry before she answered.

“Buckskin Joe,” she said. “I've got a score to settle.”

“A score to settle?” I repeated, wondering if I should have asked before agreeing to go with her.

“Ghosts to put to rest,” she said.

We rode in silence for a time. The afternoon sun shone brightly, and it didn't seem like the right time to be seeing ghosts, but I figured for Josie they would be everywhere in
Buckskin Joe, whether anyone else could see them or not. I thought again about what Frank and I had talked about so often, about how terrible it must have been for all those young men, dying alone, far from home. Now I thought it might have been more terrible to have lived.

“I am sorry about what I said to you on the train, Josie,” I said.

“But you still think I'm a cowardly old woman, don't you.”

“No,” I said, remembering what I had seen in her eyes in the jail. “I think you're brave to stand up and fight for what you believe in. I never had the courage to do that until I got to know you.”

She looked at me suspiciously. “You've known me all your life.”

“I guess so, but I never bothered to understand you until now. I stood up to George because I finally understood how brave you were, and I was ashamed of myself in comparison. You were right about me, hiding behind my good manners so I didn't have to stand up for what I wanted.”

She chuckled. “You may grow a spine yet, girl.”

“Pearl,” I said. “My name is Pearl.”

“Pearl,” she agreed.

We rattled on in silence for a few more minutes before she spoke again. “You weren't wrong about me on the train,” she said. “About me and love. I suppose we all have our ghosts and demons, and the longer we let them haunt us, the harder they are to dispel. Mine have been with me for nigh on sixty
years, but no more. We're putting them to rest today.”

“I think that's brave too,” I said. “Mighty brave.”

By the time we arrived in Buckskin Joe, the sun was riding low over Mount Silverheels, and the sunlight was falling in rich golden shafts between the trees. Josie brought Strawberry to a stop and set the brake on the trap. We sat for a long moment in the silence. I was glad no one was there but Josie and me. It seemed right that it should be still and peaceful, slipping back as it was into nature. Great sadness and tragedy had happened here, and for Josie great pain had hardened into bitterness. It was right that the place should welcome her back now in peacefulness, as she came to put those feelings to rest.

She took a deep breath, and, reaching under the seat of the trap, she pulled out a big bundle of daisies. She gave a few to me, then clambered down to the ground. Together we walked through the silent grassy field that had once been the center of town. Josie did not turn her head to look at the dance hall or the old store, or the old cabins, where men had once died and she had once lived. She walked straight for the creek, her eyes on the broken-down fence beyond. Of course that's where we were going, I thought. Where else would we find the ghosts of Josie's past.

She only paused once, right on the edge of the cemetery, just outside the leaning picket fence. I stepped through first and seeing her pause, extended my hand back to her, but of course, she refused to take it. She straightened her shoulders,
took a deep breath, and stepped over the threshold into that hallowed ground.

Carefully, she picked her way through the tangle of weeds and leaning markers to the back. She did not pause to read names or to orient herself. She walked directly to Buck Wilson's grave and stood before it, her jaw set, gazing down hard at the cross with the name freshly scratched into its crossbar. I could not bear to look. I wished I wasn't there, intruding on her private grief. As quietly as I could, I stepped back from her and moved away through the cemetery. I laid a few daisies on each one of the graves of the men who had died so long ago in that freezing, lonely winter. Josie just stood, staring down at the ground where Buck Wilson lay. The sun dipped down behind the peak, and with a sigh of cool air, the rays of sunlight died from between the trees. That's when Josie spoke at last.

“I came to say good-bye, Buck. To say that I forgive you. But I can't.”

My heart fell. She had come all this way, but in the end it was too much to give up the bitterness that had imprisoned her heart for so long.

“I can't because there's nothing to forgive.” She bent and put the flowers on the grave. “You never did anything wrong, Buck Wilson, except to die. And in that, you wronged only yourself, my friend. So I guess I'm just here to say good-bye, and to let you go, fifty-six years too late.”

I stepped up beside her, looking at the white flowers, bright on the ground as dusk began to settle around them.

“What about Silverheels?” I asked. “Have you forgiven her, too?”

Josie frowned. “One thing at a time,” she said. “Some wounds are deeper than others.”

“I guess we will never really know what happened to her,” I said.

“She went off into legend,” Josie said. “Where she could be anything to anybody.”

“But in real life? What do you suppose really happened? She could have taken all that gold she'd collected and sent it to their families like she promised, you know.”

“Doesn't matter, does it? Maybe you're right and she was a hero, made strong by love. Maybe she was a charitable angel of mercy.”

“Then you do forgive her,” I said.

Josie looked at me with a spark of challenge in her eyes. If I had thought she was going home from this a sweet old lady, I was sorely mistaken. “Or maybe she was a money-grubbing thief and a liar, who lived out her days like a queen in Paris or New York.”

She looked up toward the summit of Mount Silverheels and shrugged. “Or maybe she just froze to death in the hills before anyone even knew she was gone.”

“I don't think she froze to death,” I said. “She had love, like my mother, and brains and determination, like you. She wouldn't have frozen to death.”

Josie shrugged. “Then we can each live with our own
convictions about the truth, can't we.”

We turned and walked from the cemetery and back down toward the creek.

“What about Russell?” I asked as we walked. “He seems mighty brokenhearted since we got back. He's miserable.”

Josie nodded. “Someone needs to put him out of his misery. And since I can't shoot him, I guess I'll have to marry him.”

“Oh, Josie! That's wonderful! We can have the wedding feast at the café! I'm sure my mother would—”

“Hush up, girl! Honestly, I only just faced Buck for the first time in fifty-six years and you're already pushing me into the arms of another.”

“That's not true. I know you've come up here every spring to clean Buck Wilson's grave, Josie.”

She looked blankly at me. “I have done no such thing.”

“Sure you have,” I insisted. “You cleaned it and freshened his name on the cross in June, just before I brought Frank up here.”

“Don't be ridiculous,” she snapped. “I haven't been up here since 1875, when I left and vowed I would never come back. I'm not a romantic ninny like you, Perline Rose Barnell.” With that, she splashed grumpily across the creek and lumbered up the slope toward the waiting trap.

I froze, the hairs on my neck prickling. Josie hadn't been the one to clean the grave?

Slowly, I turned and looked back toward the cemetery.

She stood tall and slender in her black gown and veil, barely
more than a shadow at Buck Wilson's grave, gazing down at the flowers Sefa had left there. When she sensed me looking, she raised her veiled face, and through the filmy cloth, her eyes met mine.

I recognized her at once, because I had seen those eyes before. They were my mother's eyes, gleaming with love. They were Annie's eyes, hopeful despite her regrets. They were Josie's eyes, shrewd and defiant.

I knew then that I would tell her tale again, to anyone who would listen, to anyone who dared to call women the weaker sex. She knew it too, and she smiled as she faded into the twilight shadows among the graves. I turned and hurried back to the waiting trap, knowing that I had at last found the spirit of Silverheels, only to realize it had been with me all my life.

I grew up in Colorado and spent many hours of my childhood camping and exploring around the old mines and ghost towns in the mountains. I can't say where I first heard the legend of Silverheels—I have known it for as long as I can remember. As a child, I loved the romantic ideal of the tragic, self-sacrificing angel of mercy, as Pearl does. I hadn't thought about the legend in years, when I heard it again recently and found myself wondering why, if they had loved her so much, the miners did not know her name. I realized a cynic might interpret the story very differently, and thus this novel was born.

Various historians and old-timers alike have tried to learn the details of Silverheels's story, but, as Josie says, she has gone on into legend, and no one really knows for sure. The names Gerda/Gerta Bechtel or Gerda Silber have been attributed to her, as well as the name Josie Dillon. Likewise, in various versions her lover has been identified as Buck Wilson or as Jack Herndon, who owned either the dance hall or the saloon. While various communities in and around South Park
have claimed her story, most place her in the town known as Buckskin Joe, which was officially named Laurette, in honor of Laura and Jeanette Phillips.

A manuscript by Albert B. Sanford, preserved by the Colorado Historical Society, records Tom Lee's version of the story. As Frank gets the story out of Mr. Lee in my book, I let him borrow Mr. Sanford's last name. Lou Bunch was the last famous madam in the Central City red light district. Sefa Weldon and her family are my own creations and do not appear in any version of the legend. Likewise, with the exception of Tom Lee, the people of Pearl's time, and the organization of Como, are all fictional. Como, Colorado, is a real town and was a key stop on the railroad lines connecting Denver to Fairplay and Breckenridge, Colorado, but I have taken liberties to make the town what I needed it to be in my 1917 version. I have also placed Buckskin Joe considerably closer to Como than it really is, to make Frank's visit a little more convenient.

Because the various interpretations of Silverheels's story raise questions about the traditional roles of women and their sources of strength, I felt the World War I era was a time that threw those issues into sharp relief, and so I chose it as the time period to tell this story. As many women were sending their sons, husbands, and sweethearts off to war, others were fighting for the vote. The National Women's Party was a radical suffragist organization that split from more traditional suffragists in 1913, when Woodrow Wilson
was newly elected. Rather than fighting for the vote in individual states, they believed the fight had to be for a national constitutional amendment, and so they picketed the White House. When the United States entered the war in 1917, they publicized the hypocrisy of Wilson's claim as a champion of civil rights in Europe while opposing women's right to vote at home. Their message, which had been tolerated in a time of peace, became considered seditious in wartime, and their arrests in the summer and fall of 1917 led to harsh treatment. These are the real national events alluded to in my story that drive Josie's actions. The rally and arrests in Denver, however, are fictional.

Liberty Bonds were first issued in the spring of 1917 and were not widely accepted by the general public. A variety of strong-arm tactics were taken up across the country to sell the bonds, among them suggestions of un-American behavior for those who didn't subscribe. Bond subscriptions were made starting with a pledge of one dollar, but requiring payments totaling fifty dollars over six months, which, in rural communities, was a large sum of money.