Auraria: A Novel

by Tim Westover

  Chapter Twelve

  Negotiations with the dead had come to a standstill. The dead sat on their gravestones and refused to move. Holtzclaw’s hired gravediggers idled on the perimeter of the cemetery, but sentiment and superstition prevented them from digging up coffins while being watched by the occupants.

  Holtzclaw was annoyed at the impasse; it was yet another expense, more wasted money. They had spent so much already. At the tent meeting, Holtzclaw had thought that he and Shadburn would be run out of town in a turnip cart. But Shadburn had sent Holtzclaw forth with a pile of money: federal notes, gold coins, shining promises. Such treasures softened the hearts of the townspeople, and because the golden leader was one of their own, they put their trust in him. Holtzclaw was authorized to spend whatever was necessary to unseat the owners. It rankled him to be so undisciplined, and yet these were his employer’s orders.

  It had taken months and a thousand thankless errands, but now all the living landowners had been bought out, save one. For those who had concerns beyond money, Holtzclaw could promise them housing and jobs in the coming hotel. A neat company town was taking shape above the flood line. There was a gleaming set of offices for Dr. Rathbun, a three-story guesthouse with a large sign announcing the new location of McTavish’s, and two dozen pretty white houses with wide porches.

  There was still so much, though, that Holtzclaw had to do. He did not need more troubles from the petulant dead.

  “Who is in charge here?” said Holtzclaw, passing the gravediggers and addressing the dead, who were sitting on their stones, squatting on his land.

  “There is no authority,” said a man whose beard tangled around his bare feet. “There is only the wind.”

  “I meant, someone who can negotiate for you,” said Holtzclaw. “With whom can I speak?”

  “You may speak with any of us,” said a woman, calico-clad. “So few do. We would be glad of the company.”

  “But whom can I speak with who can authorize relocation?”

  “There is no authority. There is only the wind.”

  “Well, who has been here the longest?” said Holtzclaw.

  The dead pointed blue fingers at a small girl. Her gravestone was a crude boulder, and she huddled on the top with her knees drawn to her chest. Like the others, her skin was clammy, and her face was streaked with dirt. She looked as though the rain had eroded her, left her smaller and more worn than she should have been. Around her eyes and mouth were wrinkles that should not have been found on a young girl.

  “Hello,” said Holtzclaw in as neutral a tone as he could muster. She looked like a small girl, but if she were the earliest laid to rest, then she was many dozens of years his elder. It was a delicate situation that was not addressed in etiquette manuals.

  The girl drew her knees closer and began to turn away.

  “Hello there. My name is James. What’s your name?” Holtzclaw’s voice softened.

  “Emmy,” said the girl.

  “Hello, Emmy. How old do you think you are?”

  “Six,” she said.

  “Six, that’s almost grown-up! Your friends say that you have been here the longest. Is that right?”

  Emmy nodded.

  “So if you asked them to do something, do you think they’d listen?” Holtzclaw hoped that she would not wax oracular about the authority of wind, but Emmy only nodded again. “I have a problem, Emmy, and you can help me.”

  Emmy uncurled her legs and let her feet rest on the earth so that her gravestone was now a stool.

  “Emmy, my employer is very mad at me.”

  “What’s an employer?”

  “I suppose it’s like a father, but for your work. Did your father or mother have work?”

  “They were farmers. They were always very busy. They didn’t have fathers for their work. There was no one else here.”

  “That must have been nice. You could do whatever you wanted.”

  “It was lonely for a long time until the rest of the family came here.” Emmy looked over a row of gravestones. The family resemblance among their occupants was noticeable. “Why is your employer mad at you?”

  “Because I cannot do my work,” said Holtzclaw.

  “Sometimes I didn’t do my work,” said Emmy. “I was being lazy or sleepy, or I was dead. You should do your work.”

  “Did you have any chores like feeding the chickens? You took the corn out to the chickens, but the chickens wouldn’t come in, or the chickens wouldn’t eat? Was it your fault that the chickens wouldn’t eat? You did all you could, but the chickens got you in trouble!”

  Emmy laughed.

  “Well, my employer has told me that I need to clear this graveyard. Soon it will be cold and dark and not pleasant at all. It will be under water!”

  Emmy curled up again on the pinnacle of her stone.

  “I know, it is scary. You and your friends don’t want to be here when that happens. So we have a new home for you. There are men with shovels who will take the dirt and bones to a new field, which is very lovely.”

  “Is it far away?” said Emmy.

  “At the top of the hill up there,” said Holtzclaw. “Do you want to come with me to see it? Can you come see it? No one will disturb anything while we are gone. I promise.”

  Emmy fiddled with string around her neck and drew out a leather pouch. She descended from the gravestone and scratched at the base with both hands until she had loosened a mound of earth and dust. She filled her pouch with this earth and hid it again beneath the collar of her dress.

  She held up a hand to Holtzclaw. It was gray with grave dust. Holtzclaw hesitated for only a fraction of a moment, then took it in his own.

  The town was soon behind them. They followed a narrow path made by occasional foot traffic. Holtzclaw had learned, in his four months in the Lost Creek Valley, that the roads and cart paths were often the least direct routes. A complex series of lesser pathways, made by the desires of valley residents, were far more expedient. The architecture of these desire paths was historical, not logical. They had been made by friendship, enmity, and courting.

  Holtzclaw and Emmy turned from the path that led from Harbin’s old turkey pasture to McConnell’s fallow fields, where the birds could forage without fear. For a while, they followed a route that the Lawrence children had taken to Snell’s barn. On Saturday nights, Snell shooed his pigs and put up a dance floor, charging a penny a head and selling pies and lemonade. The dances had not been popular with the Stone family higher on the ridge, so to continue their ascent, Holtzclaw and Emmy took an old fur traders’ trail. Near the top of the ridge, they came under a high-canopy forest, where the underbrush had been cleared by Trip’s pigs rooting for mast.

  Emmy clapped her hands and ran to the base of an oak tree, knelt down, and brushed away the leaf cover. A perfect yellow trumpet poked up from the soil. Emmy plucked it and gave it to Holtzclaw.

  “I was always the best mushroomer,” said Emmy. “I could see them before any of my brothers or sisters.”

  “Well, it looks delicious,” said Holtzclaw. “I will be glad to fry it up in butter when I get home.”

  “You can eat them fresh,” said Emmy. “There’s more goodness.”

  Holtzclaw looked over the yellow trumpet, which did not look so perfect now. The cap had a white smear, and an unknown fuzziness clung to the gills. Emmy looked on expectantly, so Holtzclaw popped the mushroom into his mouth.

  The mushroom had a nutty taste to start, like an almond, then finished with a fruit-like lingering akin to an apricot. The mouthfeel was not unpleasant. In his mind, Holtzclaw drew on the stock of adjectives refined by years of claret. To Emmy, he said, “Oh, very tasty.”

  “Let me find you some more.”

  Their progress on the last quarter mile was much slower. Emmy scurried from tree to tree, hole to hole. She looked under rocks and beneath fallen limbs, and by the time they emerged into the grassy field that was designated for the new graveyard, Holtzclaw’s pockets were stu
ffed with a dozen kinds of mushrooms: red-capped, spotted, black, yellow, stemmed, rounded, flat, tall, puffy, reedy.

  “You’ll have a lovely lunch,” said Emmy.

  “Did you ever look for ginseng?” said Holtzclaw. “I was told that was a popular occupation.”

  Emmy looked down at her feet. “I don’t like ginseng. He looks like a little man, and he cries when you take him out of the dirt. Mushrooms don’t mind getting picked. The real mushroom is down under the ground, and what you pick is just a tiny piece. You can come back later, and the real mushroom under the ground has made a new sprout for you to pick. You can be friends.”

  The forest broke into a bald at the top of Green Mountain. A rocky promontory afforded a view to the north. One could look down into the forest and see a breeze meander through a canopy of leaves. The sun would not be harsh here, nor would the rains be hard and driving. All of this Holtzclaw explained to Emmy.

  “And you can go into the forest for mushrooms whenever you like,” he concluded.

  “We don’t roam very much,” said Emmy. “It is not our time. But it is beautiful up here. Where will the lake be? And the town?”

  Holtzclaw indicated to the south and west, but taller trees blocked the view of the sites.

  “So far away? Now we are in the middle of town. We see everyone that walks past.”

  “Yes, but that is not the modern model. You might prefer a quiet place, away from the bustle, where you could reflect in tranquility.”

  “Where we would not bother the living. Where no one would have to think about us.”

  “No one could visit you if the graveyard were at the bottom of the lake. Here, you will have some visitors. I will come visit. We can go mushroom picking.”

  Emmy squeezed his hand, and Holtzclaw regretted his lie. It was not yet a lie, he decided. He would visit, at least once, before the Auraria project was finished.

  Holtzclaw and Emmy turned back toward the valley.

  “I don’t know if this is a polite question,” said Holtzclaw when they had passed under the forest canopy, again into the smell of leaf and mushroom, “but do you ever tell how you passed away? How you died?”

  “Yes, we talk and remember. Some of us died very badly, others sweetly.”

  “How did you die?” asked Holtzclaw.

  “Poison mushroom,” she said. She gave him another one, taken from the leaf litter at the base of a majestic chestnut—orange, bilobed, with a creamy swirl.

  •

  The Sky Pilot and Holtzclaw met on a rock jutting out over the Terrible Cascade. The Sky Pilot had put two chairs onto this precarious promontory, but Holtzclaw’s first act was to move his chair from its adversarial stance to a position right next to the Sky Pilot’s, on the same side of the table. The noise of the waterfall would have made any other configuration impossible.

  “Since we’ve sat down so many times,” roared the Sky Pilot into Holtzclaw’s ear, “I thought you would enjoy a change of scenery.”

  “I promise this will be our last negotiation,” said Holtzclaw, who was equally weary of the proceedings. Had Shadburn even once appeared in the flesh, he might have persuaded the Sky Pilot to move, and with far fewer fruitless trips. Instead, Shadburn stayed ensconced in his offices, as though such tasks as buying and selling were not sufficiently respectable.

  “We are prepared to accept your refusal. The railroad men have assured us that the alternate site is acceptable. We don’t need your property, Mr. Pilot.”

  “But here you are.”

  “Acceptable does not mean ideal. Here is what you’re forcing us to build because of your contrariness. On the one side of your property, the upstream side, you will have a dam, rising sixty feet above your head. And on the other, there will be a dry gorge. The water will be carried from the dam spillway through a wooden flume. We are going to put the river in a suspended wooden chute and carry it through the air for a mile, over your head, to the other end of the gorge and into the powerhouse. Imagine that! What acrobatics of engineering! There will be not a drop of water through the Terrible Cascade.”

  “You can manage all this with touching my soil?”

  “Yes, we can. We have spent a great deal of time on these alternate dam plans,” said Holtzclaw. “A great deal of additional expense too—engineering, scouting, construction. It took buckets of money, just buckets.”

  “Money comes in buckets?” said the Sky Pilot.

  “It does not come in buckets, but it leaves in them. We can put these plans aside, Mr. Pilot, if you are willing to sell. With your cooperation, we won’t need to build this foolish and fragile chute. Our dam can have a normal cascading spillway. As it stands, you will be the only person to get no money from this project. It is deeply disturbing to Shadburn. Everyone else in town will be compensated in some way. Even those that had no land have the promise of new industrial and service jobs that are much more reliable than farming and mining. Everyone has his reward, Mr. Pilot! But if you don’t sell, you’ll get nothing. You will get less than nothing—you will lose even the water and sunlight that you have now.”

  “I cannot leave my friend,” said the Sky Pilot. “As long as he is here, I will not be moved.”

  “Yes, your friend. Will your friend not be persuaded to relocate?”

  “He has special requirements.”

  “We have made spectacular accommodations for others. Can I talk with him, please?”

  The Sky Pilot thought for several minutes. He stared into the crashing waters.

  “I suppose that he won’t like it if the Cascade goes dry,” said the Sky Pilot. “That won’t do for him at all. You had better talk to him.”

  “Yes! Let us go see your friend. Can we go now?”

  “I will get the rope.”

  Minutes later, Holtzclaw dangled from a rope harness and was being lowered into the gorge by the Sky Pilot. His feet dangled in space above the churning current of the Terrible Cascade. With his eyes only a few feet from the cliff face, Holtzclaw could see that the rock was a complicated network of fractures, outcrops, crevices, and slides. Tiny trees clung to the face of the cliff, growing in teaspoons of soil that had found their way into depressions. The spray of the falls kept them moist.

  Holtzclaw had been so focused on his white-knuckled hands that the arrival of the ledge beneath his feet came as a surprise. The ledge was still a hundred feet above the water, but he did not need to descend any further. Holtzclaw stepped out of the loop seat and tugged on the rope three times, which was the signal that the Sky Pilot could let it go slack for a time.

  The ledge provided access to a rocky fissure, which opened into a cavern fifty feet wide and twenty feet tall at its highest point. Entering, Holtzclaw felt coolness caused not just by the twilight. Water gurgled unseen through the rock. The floor was glass-smooth and slick from moisture. The ceiling was domed, like an odeon. The space would make an interesting dance hall if it weren’t so difficult to reach. To one side of the cavern, Holtzclaw saw silk-and-straw-wrapped bundles—the Sky Pilot’s store of ice.

  Holtzclaw called out a hallo. From the deeper shadows of the cavern came a scrabbling noise, then the sound of an enormous weight being dragged along the stone surface. A leathery head emerged into view and, behind it, the idea of a shell that filled the cavern, floor to ceiling. “I am the Great and Harmless and Invincible Terrapin that Lives Under the Mountain.”

  “I am James Holtzclaw, pleased to make your acquaintance.”

  “Welcome, little morsel! I will tell you a story. Long ago, when the world was soft and had not yet been baked hard by the sun, I was a small terrapin. The sun began to blaze, and I fled from its heat. I burrowed into the mud, and as I grew, I made larger and larger channels. I came to this place where the rock was soft and the valley was cool and dark, and I have lived here ever since. I am old here.”

  “Well, I am new here,” said Holtzclaw. “We are developing this valley.”

  “What does it mean, ‘develop’?”
said the Great and Harmless and Invincible Terrapin.

  “We are going to build a hotel, a company town, and bring in industries. We are going to flood the valley and turn it into a lake.”

  “Long ago, a flood came over the lands. Much more than the valley was underwater. The whole world was underwater. The land became soft again, and I pushed my head out from the top of Sinking Mountain, which in those days had no name. I saw the Great Bird fly over the earth, looking for dry land, and his wings pulled up mountains and pushed down the valleys, and they were filled then with men and creatures.”

  “Were they men and creatures of ordinary size? Or were they all as big as you?”

  “Long ago, we were all small. Many died before they could become large. Those of us that lived on became Great. Not all who are Great are Harmless or Invincible. I think that the Armadillo is also Great and Harmless and Invincible. The Great and Harmless and Invincible Armadillo and I once ventured to the vast southern desert together. The sun had been hanging over that land for many years, and the earth was scorched into a red clay that burned the tender parts between our claws.”

  “But you said that you are invincible.”

  “Just because I am Invincible does not mean that I do not suffer pain,” said the Great and Harmless and Invincible Terrapin. “I suffer the pain of many, many long years spent under the mountain.”

  “Then perhaps you will be receptive to my offer. We would like to remove you from under this mountain and give you a new home.”

  “Where would my home be?”

  “Wherever the Sky Pilot chooses to live, I suppose,” said Holtzclaw.

  “He will go where I choose. Long ago, a Great Serpent lived in the mountains to the north. He was also Invincible, but he was not Harmless. He ate many creatures, including men. The Great Serpent and I quarreled, and he departed the mountains. He made this terrible valley as he descended. That is why it is so crooked and narrow and deep, because of the passing of his Serpent body. Below here are the flatlands, and there are so many tracks on the flatlands. The Great Deer ran across them in the time before the sun baked the earth. The Great Bird covered them over with fallen seeds. The Great Roly-Poly pushed them flat with his rolling and polling. I could not see where the Great Serpent had gone. I was not yet Great, and I could not roam forever looking for the Great Serpent. So I stayed where I could see the signs of his passing. Now I am like the Serpent. I am Great. There is one who follows me, who is the Sky Pilot. Wherever I will go, he will go. That is my choice and his destiny until he is Great or dead. Will my cavern be flooded when you have made your development?”

  “No, it will be dry,” said Holtzclaw. “There will be no more water coming through the gorge.”

  “That will be a sadness, but weeping will not make it wet again. I shall continue to live here.”

  “If there is no other cavern to suit you, we can build one. We can blast it from the rock with dynamite.”

  “I do not need your little fireworks to make a home,” said the Great and Harmless and Invincible Terrapin. “My beak is sharp and my claws are strong. My shell can raise the earth. I can bring down any mountain that I choose. I do not want another cavern. I will stay here and wait for the Great Serpent, or I will wait until the Sky Pilot or some other man becomes Great.”

  “I find your mythology very confusing,” said Holtzclaw.

  “Listen, little morsel! It is very simple. A long time ago I came here. Some far day, I may leave. As for now, I and my friend will stay. I will play the Song of Parting for you.”

  The Great and Harmless and Invincible Terrapin lifted up its head, which revealed a patch of pink skin along its throat. The skin vibrated as the terrapin wheezed. Its breaths became deeper; a long tone began to issue from its nose. Above and below this note, others sounded from within its shell. Ridges and fissures and gaps modified the tone; flexure of muscles changed the rhythm and pitch. When the pipes of the Great and Harmless and Invincible Terrapin’s internal organ were sounding at their full volume and pace, the Song of Parting had a jolly, jaunty swing—the sound of a mazurka, not a dirge.