by Tim Westover
Chapter Twenty-One
A bush of wild love-apples grew on the promontory where Holtzclaw and Ms. Rathbun had built their dock. The wild love-apple, cousin to the humble tomato, is poisonous, a descendant of nightshade. Two perfect red globes hung near the top of the love-apple plant. Holtzclaw picked them both and placed them in his traveling satchel.
The Maiden of the Lake was tied up by sturdy ropes, as thick around as Holtzclaw’s arm. It was more than was needed, he knew, but boats are expensive and ropes are cheap.
From end to end, the boat was one hundred and forty feet long and thirty feet wide. Despite the size, it was light and had a shallow draft. Once the steam boilers were installed, it could carry its guests up even the shallowest arms of Lake Trahlyta.
The hull was painted a cheerful white, set off with a red ribbon that ran from bow to stern like a pinstripe. Large green lights burned fore and aft; between them were smaller points of starlight for decoration. The drivewheel at the rear was red and black and gold, with fine ironwork on the frame.
The bottom deck was for the crew. There would be pleasant, if small, rooms for the cook, the captain, the helmsman, as well as a common area for the stevedores and servants to sling their hammocks and take their meals. Executive staff—Holtzclaw, Ms. Rathbun—had rooms on the main two decks, along with the other guest cabins. Perched atop the highest story was a wheelhouse, capped with a weathervane.
From a distance, the only flaw in the Maiden of the Lake’s appearance was the second funnel. One funnel was finished, capped with a decorative finial that was meant to evoke a flower, but its twin was stunted, a half-formed stem that grew from an empty engine room.
He climbed up the gangplank. Everywhere, there were costly mistakes. Since he’d last been aboard, the deck planking had been installed, but the surface had not yet been stained. Rains—of water and of peaches—had begun to eat at the boards. They were popping and swelling at the joints and would have to be replaced if the best people were to be welcomed aboard.
Entering the main gallery, Holtzclaw saw the balconies that faced into the open interior. The shells of twenty guest cabins, a dining room, and a reading parlor on the prow wrapped the three sides of a common area, which was meant for dancing, cards, and social activities. A wall of glass at the stern looked over the drivewheel. The ceiling of the common area too was made from glass—or it would be, after the final installation. For now, a taut canvas served as the roof.
The upper balconies lacked their railings; they ended at unguarded drops to the floor below. Throughout the lower floor, carpet had been laid, but it was a cheap weave. The wood trim was a facade, an inferior amalgam of sawdust and glue.
Holtzclaw ascended the grand staircase, which connected the two stories of the common area. The stairs were finely made, an organic curve, but unfinished. Lighted golden figures he’d ordered for the banister had not been installed. At the head of the stairs were double doors to the grand suite. These were the only worthy pieces that Holtzclaw had yet seen—slabs of shiny curly maple, inset with frosted windows of yellow glass. The doors stood ajar. Holtzclaw passed through the bare vestibule, through the bare receiving room, and knocked at the door to the bedchamber, which was framed in candle glow.
Ms. Rathbun wore a red silk dressing gown that formed an uninterrupted field of carmine from her throat to the floor. Her hair was pulled back, twirled around a chopstick. Her eyes swept him up and down. Then understanding passed across her face, but she did not smile.
“Oh hello there,” said Ms. Rathbun. “Having a look around?”
“I came to see you,” said Holtzclaw.
“Of course. How pleasant.”
Holtzclaw cast an intentional look over his shoulder, back through the unfinished vestibule and toward the lobby. “Things don’t look any further along than a week ago.”
“Did you come to see me or to have a look around?”
Holtzclaw flushed. Ms. Rathbun stepped aside, admitting him to her chamber. A shadow passed across her pale face—the door was shut.
The bedroom was furnished with familiar objects retrieved from the Grayson House. Her four-poster bed, piled high with blankets. Her dressing table and mirror. A wardrobe that barely fit below the ten-foot ceiling. Two wide bowls on a table.
Holtzclaw placed one of the love-apples in each of the bowls. “They make a nice decoration there.”
“Tomatoes?” said Ms. Rathbun.
“They are love-apples, from beside the dock. Please don’t cook them up thinking they’re tomatoes!”
Ms. Rathbun sat down opposite him to study the love-apples on the table.
“What are you trying to say with such a gift, Holtzclaw? They’re not practical, nor are they costly. You didn’t go through much trouble to get them—you practically had to climb over them to get here.”
Holtzclaw fidgeted; he had no good reply. “This room looks comfortable,” he said, to change the subject.
“By that, you mean that it doesn’t look grand?” said Ms. Rathbun.
“It is the grand suite. Hadn’t we ordered furniture? And artwork? There was a large format piece. Pastoral, a landscape.”
“It hasn’t been delivered.”
“We paid for it months ago,” said Holtzclaw. “Have we been swindled?”
Ms. Rathbun shook her head. “No, I cannot be swindled. I tore the federal notes in half. The eagle sides went with the order; the seal sides will be delivered on receipt. When the painting arrives, then the artist can glue the notes back together. Until then, they’re in the strongbox.”
“Here?” said Holtzclaw. “On the boat? There are safer places. The vault at the Queen of the Mountains, for instance.”
“Shadburn’s vault must be the least secure place that a dollar bill or piece of gold could ever land. It will be spent in two moments.”
“For a good cause. To keep the dam whole. To make the hotel profitable, faster. If we don’t spend, then we are all doomed.”
“Do you think that, even if you charged twenty dollars a night and another twenty for board—or two hundred—you would ever reap more than what’s been sown into this valley?”
“I must believe it,” said Holtzclaw. “Otherwise, it would only be prudent to stop now. Close the hotel. Break open the dam and let the waters out. Save what money is left for recovery. Poor Abigail could have some to rebuild the Old Rock Falls. But Shadburn would never let that happen. He is dedicated to the lake, above all else. He would let every penny go first.”
“Is that sound business?” said Ms. Rathbun.
Holtzclaw shook his head in the negative. “No, not at all. The most profitable business would be gold mining, but of course that is impossible now.”
“Maybe that’s what we should be doing,” said Ms. Rathbun. “Hang all this ship work. I’ve read that the French have created a diving bell with powerful bellows.”
“Then what would we do with our half of a floating hotel?” said Holtzclaw.
“Let it sink,” said Ms. Rathbun, “or let it drift into the dam and have the slow current grind it to splinters. Not put more gold into it. Why take mountains of money and wear it down into pebbles? And speaking of wearing down our mountains of money, no doubt you’ve noticed the flooring on the deck? Workers are coming in three days to repair it. They’ll need their pay when they arrive.”
Holtzclaw brought out a sheaf of federal notes from his satchel. He’d had the underground gold changed into paper money through visiting bankers and merchants. “This is for the insurance policies too.”
“They are paid already. I paid them first.” Ms. Rathbun reached for some golden-colored speck on the floor, near her foot. Her red silk dressing gown conformed to the series of sharp lines and piercing angles of her body—leg, calf, back, shoulder, arm, neck.
“Did you know,” said Holtzclaw, “that I was a silk entrepreneur once?” He gestured toward Lizzie’s sleeve, but did not quite touch it.
“Really,” said Ms. Rathbun,
regarding the speck between her fingers. “Oh Holtzclaw, you do go on.”
•
The Queen of the Mountains encouraged its guests to take constitutionals and perambulations after meals. Many visitors confined themselves to the loop of linked verandas that girdled the hotel. But for guests that wanted a longer ramble, the Queen of the Mountains provided many groomed trails.
The most popular path wandered through a shady bower and then followed a trickling creek for a mile, inclining slightly. The creek tumbled over a cliff, and the path looped behind the falls before continuing up a short run of stairs. Some people stopped here, judging the waterfall pretty enough. Those who climbed the stairs followed the path for a quarter mile until it ended at a spring flanked by two structures. The first was a pavilion under which guests could obtain mineral water, mixed drinks, and salted snacks. The second was a cairn of white stones.
Holtzclaw liked to take the walk twice per day, once upon rising and once after dinner, to aid with digestion, but after returning from the Maiden of the Lake, he had missed two constitutionals in a row because of a sudden crisis. A muddy rain of stones had fallen down the back of the dam, and Holtzclaw had to supervise a crew to shore up the earthworks. Because they were working forty feet above the ground, harnessed and tethered, they demanded hazard pay. Holtzclaw wished he could plumb the innards of the dam, but exploratory diggings would only exacerbate the decline.
Without his constitutionals, his creativity and digestion were suffering. And the good functioning of both was essential, if he was to lead the hotel to a rapid success. On this occasion, he made a point of a leisurely late afternoon stroll, to see if some great advertising campaign would spring from the land.
Princess Trahlyta, in hotel livery, sat at the spring, running a toe through the water. She was about to begin a story, and a crowd of children pressed near her. Holtzclaw did not know why she took the time to tell tales for the tourists. Perhaps she felt compelled by a sense of rural hospitality. After all, her name was enfolded with the advertising materials. Perhaps, with so many of her springs and rivers plugged up, she was bored.
Holtzclaw only half listened to her, since the essence of the tale never changed. She recounted how this spring had once been the home of a beautiful maiden, the Queen of the Mountains, after whom the hotel took its name. The maiden bathed herself daily in the waters of the spring, and they keep her eternally young, eternally fresh, eternally happy. She saw many ages of the world from within the waters of her spring. Mountains grew from pebbles to mighty peaks to pebbles again. The mighty creatures that once lumbered across the land shrank into the tiny animals we know today. The Queen of the Mountains watched as the cold turned the water, drop by drop, into a sheet of ice, and then watched as the sun undid that work with ease.
Then a warrior and his party came over the mountains. They were surprised by their enemies, and the warrior was mortally wounded. His comrades left him beside a river to die, as was their custom. Blood rose from his wounds like a fine red thread, twisted into knots by the current. His blood sacrifice opened the bowery to the queen’s spring, which had been hidden from the eyes of birds and fish and men and mountains. The spring waters knitted his flesh back together. The flowing stream laved away bruises and straightened broken bones. It smoothed the wear and worry from his face and plucked the gray hairs from his head.
The warrior lifted his head and saw the beautiful young maiden. She swam through the shimmering waves, her long slender arms parting the water. He believed that she had healed him out of love. But the Queen of the Mountains did not love any man or woman. They were like pebbles to her, like mountains, like fish or birds. The Queen of the Mountains loved water, which was eternal, and loved rivers, which flowed forever. She had not healed the warrior. This was the power of the spring and its minerals.
But the warrior wanted to take the maiden back to his people to be his bride. He bound her hands and feet, because she frothed and crashed like an angry rain. He took her up on his back and carried her away from the spring.
They traveled for an hour, and the maiden wept. They traveled for a day, and she stopped weeping. When the warrior set her down, he saw that her face was lined with wrinkles. He thought it was from weeping. They traveled for another day. The maiden grew thin and frail. Her hair was streaked with gray; white moss grew on her hands and feet. On the third day, her breathing was raspy and shallow, a hollow whisper of age and death, and the warrior found that he was carrying an old woman. The Queen of the Mountains had aged with every mile she had traveled away from her spring and her valley.
The warrior turned back. He could not take an aged, dying woman home to be his bride. He came back into the valley while the Queen of the Mountains still breathed, but he could not find the spring. The bowers had closed again. He pleaded with the maiden to open the way so that she could be restored, but she did not hear him or she refused to obey.
The warrior remembered how the bowers had opened for him before, when he was mortally wounded, and he drew his dagger to strike a blow to himself, knowing it would not be fatal, but his hand hesitated at the apex of its rise, and he saw that the maiden was already dead.
So he laid her to rest beside another spring that he found. It was not her healing spring, but perhaps one spring would lead to another, under the earth. He buried her there and set up a marker of white stone.
“Do you mean that one?” said a child, pointing to the cairn beside the walled spring. The princess—the storyteller—nodded.
The monument to the Queen of the Mountains was easy to find and frequently visited. It was near a hunting path that became a route for fur traders, then a road for emigrants passing through the mountains, then a passage for carriages and stagecoaches carrying miners and chests of gold. Travelers stopped to water their horses at the spring, and they saw the cairn of white stones. They found other white stones and placed them on the cairn.
“Do we make a wish when we add a white stone?” said a man.
“If you like,” said the princess. “But it won’t come true, unless you wish for the right thing, for certainties. Rain. Or a flood.”
“I’m going to wish for a mountain of gold!” said a boy with a raccoon-skin cap.
“That’s a waste of a wish,” said the princess, and the boy began to cry.
“Did you have to put this place at such a height from the hotel?” asked a young fat man, wiping away a thick layer of sweat with a handkerchief.
Holtzclaw knew that they could have put the monument anywhere they liked. It was not really a grave. The white stones were chipped fragments of marble, left over from the bathroom in Shadburn’s suite. Shadburn conceived of the idea of a grave site as a walking destination and memento mori. Holtzclaw wanted to place it above the waterfall, thinking that the combination of sights—the grave, the waterfall, the spring—would make a more attractive whole. Princess Trahlyta concocted the backstory on her own and, in her telling and retelling, made the canonical version.
Holtzclaw’s mind turned around the tale, searching it for inspiration. Could he write up the story in a book? Send it to the bookshops in the city, drum up interest in the hotel with this romantic tale? Never any money in books, he decided. And the literary treatment would only make the flaws in the princess’s tale easier to spot.
Ah, but he could invent a holiday! What better way to commemorate the wounded warrior, the dying princess, and the pile of discarded bathroom marble that marked their love? He could put on a banquet. It was the next step in his plan of reconciliation—not to hide the supernatural tales of this valley, even if they were invented, but to celebrate and advertise them.
The Day of the Evening Star—that was as nice a title as any. Romantic enough and yet impenetrable and vague. He would have the banquet in two weeks; a deadline inspires the best work. That was precious little time for advertisements and announcements. He’d have clubs in Milledgeville and Charleston distribute fliers, rather than waiting for notices in monthl
y magazines. The urgency and suddenness of the affair would appeal to a clientele that considers itself wealthy enough to be carefree. They could come for the Day of the Evening Star, leave their money, and be off by Pullman car to the next fabulous celebration.
•
Holtzclaw came back from his constitutional vivified and hungry. It was not yet time for the formal supper seating, so he decided to take his meal at the hotel’s other dining room, a replica of the Old Rock Falls. A high corridor directed guests toward the main dining room, but those that cast a glance to the right, down a short passage, saw an impressive two-story facade that had been constructed for the New Rock Falls, complete with a wide indoor veranda.
Guests who continued inside found themselves in a truncated version of the Old Rock Falls. The New Rock Falls had no second story, despite the appearance of the facade, but guests were not bothered. The worn pine floor had been salvaged from the Old Rock Falls. Certain load-bearing pillars had interfered with the layout, and clever carpentry was needed to cover up replacement boards. The wall lamps, formerly fueled by oil, had been wired for electricity. For those that remembered the old dining area, the light in the room now was too bright, too clean, too steady. Guests who had seen only the electrified New Rock Falls complained that the lighting was too yellow, too dirty, too flickering. They wondered if country folk could be expected to dine in such meager conditions.
The walls were covered with the daguerreotypes and lithographs salvaged from the Old Rock Falls. Two were missing; the layout of the photographs was unbalanced without them.
Holtzclaw sat at a table beneath one of the gaps, covering the emptiness with his head. The piano in the corner plinked out a ragtime rendition of an old fiddle tune. Mr. Bad Thing was enjoying himself.
Hulen, the headless plat-eye, occupied his stool. Abigail promised that he could return to his familiar haunt, on the condition that his murderous head-snatching cease. Holtzclaw, suspicious at first, was convinced when he’d witnessed Hulen’s joy at being reunited with his old stool and mug. A test parade of wax heads was brought out in front of him; Hulen only laughed and called for another round, for which he’d paid in silver coins from a never-ending supply in his pocket. Hulen proved to be quite popular among the youngest of the visitors. Even now, three youngsters stumbled around the dining room, their heads pulled down below their sweaters, and chased their siblings.
“Don’t get ahead of yourself! Aha!” said Hulen from his stool. “You don’t want to get brained! Aha! Keep an eye out! Aha!”
Holtzclaw’s sweet potato stew was brought out by Abigail herself.
“Ms. Thompson, why don’t you have an underling here? Doesn’t the kitchen staff need your supervision for supper service?”
“I have to do this cooking myself. Anyone else would make a mess of it. They’d burn the sweet potatoes or give Hulen buttermilk instead of white lightning! I’ve spent a lifetime getting these rituals right.”
Holtzclaw smiled. “Ah, the sweet potatoes! How are they received?”
“The guests throw up their hands and plead for mercy! And it’s only the puree and the coffee that have sweet potatoes in them. I could give them what I used to serve at the Old Rock Falls. Sweet potato chips cooked in sweet potato oil, a salad of sweet potato shoots, a baked sweet potato, and a bed stuffed with sweet potato vines. Do they want an authentic experience or not?”
“They want their idea of an authentic experience,” said Holtzclaw.
“I suppose that’s why they complain that there are too few windows opening to the outside. Why would an authentic mountain boarding house, like the New Rock Falls, not have larger windows to enjoy the views over the water and breezes coming ashore? A man in a top hat asked me why the New Rock Falls didn’t have swinging half-doors and more ranch hands, gunfighters, and the like? I told him they had killed each other off. It was my little joke to serve toast with sheep-fruit marmalade in the formal dining room. The best people all praised it. They thought it was quince or lingonberries or some other imported wonder. When I told them it was a local fruit, some women said that they were gardeners and wanted to see the shrub. So I led them out to a grove, up the hill. All that weeping and screaming on the vine when we plucked some fresh sheep-fruits. They were horrified!”
“There is no food that one can eat without guilt,” said Holtzclaw. “Except, perhaps, for mushrooms.”
