The Black Train (6 page)

“You’re more than welcome to join us,” Collier was telling Mrs. Butler at the front desk while he helplessly stole glances at her bosom, hips, and plush pelvis.

“Oh, thank you, Mr. Collier but I’ve got more folks checkin’ in tonight. It’s a wonderful little restaurant, though, and I doubt that you’ve got anything close to it in California.” Her bosom jiggled a bit; she quickly rose at the sound of people entering the vestibule. “These must be my Philadelphians.”

Collier stepped aside as another tourist couple stepped perkily to the desk. He found himself looking up at the oil portrait of Harwood Gast…

Stereotypical Southern plantation guy,
he thought. The stern face had been painted with detail—the eyes seemed to look specifically at Collier with disdain.
What’s so evil about this dude?
He was still piqued by
Mrs. Butler’s comments.
Just an old racist slave-driving stick in the mud.

Several old-wood bookshelves flanked the large portrait, and between two of them Collier noticed a recess, about a yard wide. He figured it used to be an alcove where one might put a statue, but instead there was an old veneered table there, with an odd arrangement of small drawers and letter slots. A tag read:
ORIGINAL MAPLE WRITING TABLE—QUEEN ANNE-STYLE
—
SAVERY AND SONS
—1779. When Collier looked harder, he noted an elaborate webwork of minute carvings. Yet on the side of the alcove hung a small oil painting he hadn’t noticed before.
Strange
…It almost seemed to be hung in that spot so as
not
to be noticed.
MRS. PENELOPE GAST
, a tiny plaque read.
Gast’s wife
…An attractive woman with eyes that seemed wanton looked off the canvas, standing before a landscape of trees. A bonnet, a great billowy dress, frilly knickers; the plunging neckline offered a creamy bosom.
So this was Gast’s version of the American Dream? This woman, and this house…
Yesterday’s version of a corporate magnate.
I guess they’re all assholes when you get right down to it.
He wondered if they’d had kids.

Mrs. Butler’s twang reverberated as she jabbered of the house’s historical wonders. The man asked, “Would it be possible to get one of the second-floor rooms facing the mountain? We’d love that view in the morning.”

“Oh, I’m terribly sorry, sir,” the old woman informed, “all those rooms are taken. But I’ve got a lovely room for ya on the west wing that opens right on the garden. And you can still see the mountain a bit…”

The oddity struck Collier at once. The room right next to his faced the mountain. He remembered Jiff telling him they didn’t rent that one out.
I wonder why…

Another display case showed more relics; one caught his eye immediately.
HAND-CHISELED STONE MOLD FOR WOOLING SHEARS
, and there was a flat piece of stone with a recess shaped like half a pair of big scissors. Beside it lay an
actual pair of shears.
THESE SHEARS WERE MADE AT THE GAST IRON FORGE LOCATED IN THE BACKYARD
—1859.

That’s some real work,
he thought. He couldn’t contemplate how hard things were back then. Even something as simple as a pair of shears took many steps to produce.
Smelting ore, skimming slag, pouring molten iron into a mold without burning the living shit out of yourself or becoming brain-damaged from poisonous fumes.
More handcrafted items from the family forge lay in the case: nails, hinges, door latches.
That stuff must’ve been hard as hell to make.

He overheard the Philadelphia woman whisper: “Oh my God! Is that the Prince of Beer over there?”

Shit!
Collier had been made again. He acted like he hadn’t heard them and slipped out the vestibule doors.

The sun was turning orange as it lowered, a blaze on the horizon. Collier gazed across the well-landscaped front court, smelling mint, moss, and wildflowers. The quiet beauty almost stunned him.

Jiff bopped down the porch steps a moment later, wearing the same jeans and work boots but now he’d put on a black button-down shirt.
Gussied up,
Collier thought,
redneck-style.

“Ready when you are, Mr. Collier!”

“Okay, Jiff. But if you don’t mind, could you show me that little furnace in the back first?”

“My pleasure, sir.
Lotta
interesting things ’round here.”

“Yes, there are.” Collier followed him around the side of the main house, where a trail skirted the additional wings. “I guess I’ve lived in L.A. too long, but coming to a place like this really opens your eyes. We take so much for granted these days. Even the displays in the lobby: handmade boots, tools, and even nails that someone hammered out on an anvil, carpet and clothing stitched by hand instead of processed by machinery. It reminds me that this country was built on hard work.”

“Very hard work, sir,” Jiff agreed. “You wanna build a
house back then, you had to dig the clay and bake the bricks, cut the clapboards from trees ya chopped down yourself, blow the glass for the windows, you name it. And while you’re doin’ all that hard work, ya gotta eat. So you till the land to grow your food, find a spring or river to water the seeds, and if you want some meat to go with it, you gotta raise the pig yourself, butcher it, and cut
more
wood to cook it. And while you’re choppin’ that wood you better find the right kind of bark to tan the hide so’s you can make the boots on your feet. But a’course if you’re gonna do
that,
ya better find some cassiterite to melt down so’s ya can make a tin bucket to do your tannin’ in. That was life back then. Now we just go to the grocery store and The Home Depot.”

Collier chuckled at the parallel. The walk gave him a closer look at the additional four wings of the house. “Why are these wings so differently styled than the main house? It almost—”

“It almost don’t look right.” Jiff got his point. “The wings are all made’a wood while the main house is fancy brick’n stone. It’s ’cos the South was piss-poor for a long time after the war.”

“The War of Northern Aggression—”

“Yes, sir. Harwood Gast had a million in gold when he moved into town, and everyone figured he spent it all on his railroad. He finished the railroad in 1862, ’bout a year after the war started. Then he came home…and you know what he done?”

“What?”

“Killed hisself. Just after that last spike was drove at the very end of the East Tennessee and Georgia Railroad, way past the border in a place used to be called Maxon.”

“Why did he kill himself?”

“Aw, who knows?” The younger man seemed to deflect the question. “But folks figured he bankrupted hisself layin’ all that track, but you know what? Turns out he
still
had a million in gold in his accounts. Like he never spent a dime.”

“Strange,” Collier said, trying to keep the information sorted. “So it wasn’t bankruptcy that urged him to commit suicide. I wonder what it was then?”

Jiff still didn’t comment. “After the fightin’ was finished, Lincoln’s boys seized all Gast’s gold, but they sold the house. Point I’m trying to make is that the new owners—some’a my ma’s kin—could only afford cheaper building materials to do the add-ons.”

It made sense. Collier knew that the South fared about as well as Germany after World War I; the people were kept destitute for a while—punishment for their attempted secession. But Jiff had still evaded the topic he was more interested in.
That’s…curious…

“We live in this wing here. Two’a the others are more guest rooms, and the fourth—you gotta see the fourth, Mr. Collier, since you’re interested in this stuff. It’s loaded full up with more things from the old days.”

“I’d love to see all that.”

“And don’t forget the bath closet—that’s the door just to the right of your room. That’s one way rich folks back then showed how well-off they was—by havin’ a bath closet and toilet on the second floor near the bedroom. Plain folks just had outhouses and washin’ sheds outside.”

I guess I even take THAT for granted,
Collier reflected.
A pot to piss in.

They passed the second wing—through a window Collier spotted the newest guests checking in, Lottie lugging their bags—then followed a path through the garden. A slight breeze shifted countless hundreds of colorful blossoms.

When they arrived at the small clearing, Collier found the old furnace larger than it had looked from his room. Flat rocks fixed by mortar formed the large conical structure, which sported several vents at various heights.

“This is incredible,” Collier said.

“Yes, sir, it is.” Jiff pointed. “That there’s the charcoal chute, and there, the ore drop. That l’il one there is the outflow, and there a’course, is the airway,” he said, pointing to the pipe that extruded from a bellows the size of a refrigerator. “The smith’d yank this chain, to pump the bellows”—he demonstrated, and they could hear the device whistling air—“and the air’d shoot into the bed. It’d get up to 2,300 degrees in there, turn iron ore or damn near anything else into a red-hot puddle.”

Now Collier noticed other features: a cooling barrel, a tool hanger, a grinding wheel and stand. The anvil, which he’d spotted earlier, had a date engraved: 1856. Collier was finding himself staggered by the nostalgia. These weren’t props; they were genuine relics of a longdead way of life.
Real people built this thing,
he thought.
Some guy, in 1856, MADE that anvil with his own two hands.

“Has anyone used it, I mean, recently?”

Jiff scratched at a mortar seam with a penknife. The material was still hard. “For iron forging? Naw. But there’s no reason why it wouldn’t still work. You melt the ore against a wall of charcoal while pumpin’ the bellows. All we use it for now is cookin’ during holiday weekends. Sometimes we’ll hang a couple of pig quarters inside and smoke ’em for twenty-four hours with hickory. But way back when, they even had to make their own charcoal; they’d pile up twenty, thirty cords of wood, light the middle, then cover it all over with sod. See, when the carbon in the charcoal mixes with the pig iron, it becomes steel. They didn’t even know it back then, but that’s what they were makin’. All by hand.”

Smart guy for a hayseed,
Collier thought. “This is pretty specified information. How do you know so much about it?”

“Grew up ’round all this stuff, so I asked. Most folks in these parts all have ancestors going back to even before the war. You learn a lot when you ask the right folks.”

“That you do.” Collier was impressed. Behind the charcoal shed he saw a pile of blocks. He picked one up. “Oh, here’s another mold like the one your mother has displayed. A scissor mold.”

“Shears,” Jiff corrected. “Probably took some poor bastard a full day just to chisel
one
of those things.”

But Collier saw a veritable pile of them. “That’s an awful lot of molds,” he pointed out. “Two blocks for each single pair of shears? There must be enough there for fifteen pair.”

“Yeah, that is strange. Shears were important tools, a’course, but I don’t know why the smith would make so many molds.”

“Almost like a production line. I’ll bet he made hundreds of pairs with these blocks.” Collier thought about it. “I wonder why?”

“Ya got me, Mr. Collier. But the funny thing is there was only one single pair of shears ever found on the property—the one in the display case.”

It was an unimportant question but one that needled him.
What the hell did they need all those shears for?

“Nice, uh, nice car,” Jiff remarked when he got into the Bug. “What, it’s foreign?”

Collier pulled out of the front court, chuckling. “I got stuck with it at the rental office at the airport. I know it looks ridiculous. It’s a woman’s car.”

Jiff raised a brow.

The horizon darkened as they drove down the hill, the air getting cooler. Collier saw the sign again—
PENELOPE STREET
—and remembered something. “Would this road be named after Penelope Gast?”

“Yes, sir. You must’a seen the portrait at the house. She was Harwood’s freaky wife.”

“Why do you say ‘freaky’?”

Jiff sighed as much to himself as he could. “Just more
bad talk. See, Mr. Collier, I love this town and got respect for it. I hate to spread garbage talk.”

“Come on, Jiff. All towns have their folklore and their notorious figures—big deal. I have the impression there’s quite a bit about Harwood Gast that’s actually very interesting. To you, it’s hundred-and-fifty-year-old gossip but to me, it’s fascinating. Let me guess. She killed herself right along with Gast, and now their ghosts prowl the house at night.”

“Naw, naw. It’s just that she weren’t the finest of ladies, if ya know what I mean. She got around.”

“Promiscuous wives are part of every town, Jiff.”

“Yeah, sure, but, see, she weren’t no good at all if ya believe the stories. There’s lots of ’em, and they’re all bad. Makes me feel like I’m bad-mouthin’ my home. We’ve always tried to tone down that kind’a stuff. It could give the town a bad name, hurt my ma’s business.”

Collier grinned, egging him on. “Come on, Jiff. Don’t jive me.”

Jiff shook his head. “All right. Penelope Gast didn’t kill herself, it was her husband that murdered her.”

“Why? Did he go crazy?”

“No, sir, he killed her ’cos he found out she’d been pregnant with some other fella’s kid. What’cha gotta understand is that once the railroad construction started to get close to the Georgia border, Gast would be away from home for weeks at a time. And for months, towards the end.”

“The more track they laid, the farther it took him from his house,” Collier assumed.

“’Zactly. To get back home to visit, he’d have to take one of his own supply trains that kept feeding track and ties. But there weren’t a whole lotta them. He’d have to wait.”

“And while he was away—”

Jiff nodded, morose. “She’d take up with other fellas
and got herself pregnant that way three times. She also got herself an abortion three times. They had abortions back then, ya know. I suspect Gast knew all along but waited till the railroad was finished before her killed her.”