Auraria: A Novel

by Tim Westover

  Chapter Thirty-One

  All the next day, the rain fell. The paths around the hotel were abandoned and the mineral baths were empty. Emmett’s stage wagon was stained with spilled drops of that sensory-enhancing remedy, Professor W’s Pleasant Potation and Universal Wine Draught. Shattered bottles littered the ground.

  Out on the dam, there was a buzz of activity, despite the cold, constant rain. The tourists had raffled off land claims by lottery. Three dozen smallholders dug with spoons and ladles that they had stolen from the kitchen. They scooped sand into china bowls and the crowns of fine silk hats, trying to pan out nuggets; their poor technique left them with nothing.

  The actual baroness and the steel baroness ran a more organized effort. They had set up their gold-mining cooperative beside the spillway and flume. Under their orders, a work brigade composed of eligible sons and daughters had already taken down the breakwater beams from the dam’s face, and now they were carting away the protective stones from the dam’s facing so they could reach the rich mud beneath.

  “Get off!” cried Holtzclaw. “All of you!”

  “What, what?” said the actual baroness. The hem of her dress was caked in mud. “You can’t mean that your dam is so flimsy that it cannot stand up to a few gold hunters?”

  Holtzclaw demurred, not willing to confess his fear. “You’ve no right to dig here. It’s private property.”

  “We’ve paid for full use of the resort facilities,” said the railroad baroness.

  “That privilege does not extend to undermining important structural features.” Holtzclaw broke up the work brigade and expelled all the diggers, even the baronesses, waving them away with his hat as though shooing flies. But when he returned after dinner, they were back in greater numbers. His protests had only convinced them that something must be hidden inside the earthworks. Water swirled into scars, widening them.

  •

  The Billing, Wooing, and Cooing Society did not participate in the mining activities. The rain hurt their bones, they said. Instead, they occupied a lonely table in the lobby, playing faro under inconsistent misconceptions about the rules. Holtzclaw hurried past them, but they rose and barred his way.

  “Walk with us, Holtzclaw,” said Almeda, the Reader of Mysteries.

  “Not on the verandas,” said Vera, the Tender of the Entwined Rose and Briar.

  “We’ve worn them out,” said Luella, the Poetess of the Stirring Heart.

  “I have to see to urgent matters,” said Holtzclaw. Alarmed employees had reported that the far side of the dam showed peculiar upwellings of damp earth.

  “We are more urgent,” said Almeda. They steered him by his elbows, out into the weather. Holtzclaw, captive to the Billing, Wooing, and Cooing Society, followed the path to the white cairn. The woods rang with rushing water; the waterfall roared, churning with mud. The pavilion beside the white cairn was empty. No other guests took their constitutionals, and no employees were on hand to offer mineral waters in fine silver cups.

  “It’s not much of a resort, Holtzclaw,” said Almeda, the Reader of Mysteries, “if everyone is wasting their time at work, not leisure.”

  “Perhaps they consider treasure hunting more enjoyable than match-making.”

  “That’s rubbish,” said Almeda. “Your guests are a poor sort of people if they are led astray so easily. We are bored, Holtzclaw. And boredom breeds restlessness, which breeds indigestion, which breeds bad dreams.”

  “Too many bad dreams,” said Vera.

  “Can’t sleep,” said Luella.

  “I have it on good authority,” said Holtzclaw, “that many nightmares attributed to indigestion are really the work of revengeful fish ghosts.”

  The three yellow-hatted women made gestures with their hands like a bird flying away. “The birds of happiness will coo no more for you.”

  “The birds have always been our enemies,” said Holtzclaw.

  •

  On the third day of rain, the pipes burst in the basement of the Queen of the Mountains. All the waters in all the baths—saline, sulfur, white sulfur, chalybeate, epsom, lythia, plyant, freestone—overflowed their basins and mingled together in a single pool.

  Nothing could be done to unmix them, so Holtzclaw took his bath anyway. He swam from one end of the long bathing hall to the other. The stairs, grates, and basins below his feet reminded him of the roads and foundations one could still glimpse through the clear waters of Lake Trahlyta.

  He heard someone clear her throat. “What is it, Princess?” said Holtzclaw, not turning.

  “No princesses here,” said Abigail. She stood on the highest step of the entryway, above the level of the rising water.

  Holtzclaw floundered for solid ground, finding none.

  “Are you practicing your frog-kicks for the flood?” said Abigail. “Not out trying to save the dam?”

  The peculiar upwellings that Holtzclaw surveyed yesterday had been caused by springs that flowed inside of the dam’s structure. The rains made these springs—made all the springs of the valley—run with new strength, and thus, their discharge had come to the dam surface. There was precious little that he could do to fight these flows.

  “We’re trying to bake bread upstairs, in the kitchen,” said Abigail. “The bread won’t rise. The air is too wet. We’ll have nothing for breakfast.”

  “I’ll have some bread brought in by train. Some spoons, too. More than we need, because they are apt to disappear after every meal, if our guests keep wanting to dig.”

  “The tracks are washed out,” said Abigail. “We’ve just heard. That’s what I came to tell you. A freshet destroyed them at the Hag’s Head, just where you were blasting on the night of the gala. You’ve made enemies of the railroad twins, and they won’t make repairs. Too much muck, too few profits. We were never so trapped in the old days, Holtzclaw. We always had sweet potatoes. But you blew up our springhouse.”

  •

  On the fourth day of the rain, Holtzclaw spent too much time in the New Rock Falls with the tailings of his dinner—half a turnip, a few stewed ramps, a can of pineapple. It was the best that he could find as the supplies dwindled. He checked the sideboards, but there was no claret or white lightning or moonshine.

  His latest survey of the dam had been dispiriting. The springs inside, continuing to flow, had carved out hollows that revealed much greater troubles in the core of the dam. It was evident now that the railroad twins had used very poor clay in their construction, and they had not layered it with enough rocks to stop it from oozing downward. Cracks had occurred during the curing process. Holtzclaw blamed himself for not questioning their methods, but perhaps no earthworks could have withstood internal erosion from so many springs.

  Repairs, for the moment, were impossible. The tremendous quantities of necessary supplies could not be brought over the rain-gutted roads from Dahlonega, and even if, by some good grace, the railroad tracks could be returned to use, Holtzclaw had no money to pay for workers. It had all gone into the gala—he and Shadburn had catered their undoing.

  To distract him from fruitless worry, he studied the daguerreotypes on the walls. The people and places they showed were familiar. He’d crawled over the valley, buying every rock and hollow, and he’d come to know them well. A young Abigail, her hair in tiny curls, perched on the porch railing at the Old Rocks Falls. Just beside her was a young man with familiar shoulders—Hulen, the plat-eye. His eyes were soft, and he had a beard. Shadburn, as a boy, wore a miner’s pan on his head and held up a finger covered in gold dust. He saw Ephraim and Flossie with a woman, perhaps their mother, standing in front of a law office window that read “Deeds Notarized.” Walton rode atop an abnormally long cow. A skinny chap in a dapper hat played the piano at the Old Rock Falls. Picnickers ate beneath the Hag’s Head or on flat rocks in the middle of the Sugar Shoals. Edgar and Eleanor Strickland held hands. The princess watched a line of girls and boys toss their lines into the Lost Creek.

  Even if the lak
e were drained, these lost people and places would not be restored. Time and tides had done their damage. Mountains and valleys and dams cannot keep out all the forces of the world, and the dead and headless can never be made whole again.

  •

  On the fifth day of rain, a wrenching, keening song arose from the Terrible Cascade. Holtzclaw raced out to the dam at once, worried that someone had sounded an alarm. The gorge face of the dam was damp and soft.

  But the song was not being played by any who watched the dam. It came from the cave of the Great and Harmless and Invincible Terrapin.

  Holtzclaw ran down the wooden stairway that had been built to the cave. His feet threatened to glide out from under him at every step; Holtzclaw clung to the handrail and felt in more peril than when the Sky Pilot had lowered him down suspended on a rope.

  “Little morsel, I am angry!” said the Great and Harmless and Invincible Terrapin, shouting out to Holtzclaw when he saw him enter his cave.

  Ten guests, their dancing clothes stained brown with five days of digging in the rain, picked up stones in their puckered hands and tossed them at the fleshy parts of the terrapin. When the assailants struck a blow to some tender spot, the Great and Harmless and Invincible Terrapin let out a sharp note of pain from his internal instrument; though invincible, he could still be wounded.

  “Little morsels, why do you do this?” said the Great and Harmless and Invincible Terrapin.

  “We want to see if you’re really invincible,” said one of the guests.

  “Why?” said Holtzclaw.

  “It’s something to do,” said a guest. “It’s a challenge. If we did kill him, it’s no loss. He isn’t much use to anyone. He’s run out of stories, and the ones he tells over and over are boring.”

  “I have many more stories,” said the Great and Harmless and Invincible Terrapin, “but I do not wish to tell them. It is too wet and yet too dry, and my leathery skin does not bear it well.”

  “See, that’s boring,” said one of the guests. “He’s boring us.”

  “But he is harmless,” said Holtzclaw.

  “Then he won’t fight back,” said one of the guests.

  “But he is invincible,” said Holtzclaw.

  “Then he won’t mind that we’re trying to kill him,” said one of the guests.

  “I just don’t understand,” said Holtzclaw. “He is harmless, so there is no call to kill him; he is invincible, so you cannot kill him. You are only annoying him.”

  “Then we’ll drive him away, and we’ll take all the gold he’s guarding. He has to be guarding some treasure, yes?”

  “He’s blocking a cave,” said another. “A treasure tunnel or a grave made of jewelry or appreciated stocks and bonds or Old Masters.”

  “If I were a rich man,” said one of the guests, “I would hide my fortune behind a giant terrapin, because who would think to look there?”

  “He is guarding ice,” said the Sky Pilot, panting. He had heard the Great and Harmless and Invincible Turtle’s keening song; he had raced from high on the mountain to the aid of his friend.

  “Ice?” said one of the guests. “Ice comes out of an icebox.”

  “That is not the right sort of ice,” said the Sky Pilot.

  The guests laughed. “Who can tell the difference? Who cares?” They had already thrown most of the large rocks to be found in the cave, so they hurled handfuls of pebbles, river stones, and gravel, both at the terrapin and the Sky Pilot.

  The Sky Pilot drew his knife.

  “No, little friend, let them be,” said the Great and Harmless and Invincible Terrapin.

  “Must you be defenseless, even if you are harmless and invincible?” said the Sky Pilot.

  The Great and Harmless and Invincible Terrapin swung his head. “If I were no longer Harmless, then I would not be Great or Invincible, and all the Old Songs would be silenced. And yet I cannot stay here, if these little morsels persist with their violence. Their stones may chip my shell, and then the Old Songs would play out of tune. No, I must depart. I will withdraw from this valley, and the mountains that sit on my back will fall in on themselves, and the earth will shudder and shake and settle.”

  “You can’t go,” said the Sky Pilot. “I will kill these people who threaten you. I will kill six of them with a single shot of my bow, and the last two I will truss up like hams as a lesson.”

  “But there will always be more, little friend,” said the Great and Harmless and Invincible Terrapin.

  “Then I’ll pull up their rails and wash out their roads. I’ll burst their dam. I’ll plug up all their springs and wash all the gold down to the sea so that the speculators and developers will have no call to disturb us.”

  “You cannot do this, and I cannot let you do this. You are small and mortal, and I am great and invincible. But you may come with me, little friend, and we will let this valley be as it wishes to be, and we will be unchanged. I have been here too long, among the little morsels.”

  “Where will we go?” asked the Sky Pilot.

  “Down,” said the Great and Harmless and Invincible Terrapin. “Down where all the great and invincible creatures sleep. There is fire there and ice and fields of flowers too—so many flowers, you would have thought the world could not hold them all. It is like the old times, down in the deep. Take no possessions with you, little friend, if you wish to come; you need none of these artifacts of the mortal world.”

  The Sky Pilot sloughed off his equipment—bow, quiver, gun, and pack. The tip of his knife broke when it fell to the cavern floor. He flung his hat back toward Holtzclaw. The Sky Pilot pulled himself up onto the shell and climbed to the top; he curled into a hollow just behind the terrapin’s neck.

  The Great and Harmless and Invincible Terrapin blew a deafening chorus of the Song of Parting and then rose up on his claws and stepped backward into the deep. The little morsels scattered in terror. The mountains of the valley suspired and sank, and the dam wept fat tears down its barren, lonely, beaten face.

  •

  Shadburn ran to Holtzclaw, who stood outside of the terrapin’s cave, watching the dam shudder as the notes of the Song of Parting reverberated through the earth. “Tell me, Holtzclaw, what you are doing so that this dam does not fail me.” Shadburn put both his hands on top of Holtzclaw’s shoulders. “We can’t let this lake be emptied, not with so many rich idlers scouring the mountainsides. It is so much worse than before. They will find the horrible gold from the moon maidens. They’ll know where it came from, where I came from.”

  “The whole core of the dam is sodden,” said Holtzclaw. “The railroad twins did not use good clay, and they didn’t pack it well or leave it enough time to cure. We paid them for a dam, and they gave us a bath plug.”

  “They are treasonous, perfidious scoundrels,” said Shadburn. “Deal breakers. Base humans with hidden motives. Unfit to bear the title of businessmen.”

  “They can’t bear all the fault. We put the structure on top of running springs—though it could hardly be avoided in this valley—so the dam is washing away from the inside too.”

  “And we can’t open the floodgates?” said Shadburn.

  “They’re permanently sealed,” said Holtzclaw. “The railroad twins said it was necessary, given the weight of the water and the size of the lake.”

  “A lie, I’m sure. They left out the floodgates to save some money—my money, given in good faith—for their own pockets. Worse, you believed them! What sort of nonsense is that, a dam that cannot be opened?” Shadburn picked up a pebble and hurled it at the great and harmless and vulnerable dam. The stone glanced off its water-streaked face, and a new rivulet started to flow from the bruise.

  “Do whatever you can,” said Shadburn. “Pack on more mud. Bring in stone, bricks, and tree stumps. Tear down the hotel and dump the rubble down into the canyon, if it will help.”

  “If the water keeps rising,” said Holtzclaw, “then no reinforcement will save the dam.”

  “Then you mus
t ask the rain to stop.”

  •

  Holtzclaw wandered for a day, looking for the princess. She had never answered his beck and call; she’d just appeared, as she willed, near watery places. With the lake rising quickly, the rains crashing down, there was no place left that was more wet or watery than any other. The whole valley was one rushing river. Holtzclaw looked across the churning surface of the lake, choked with runoff and debris. Across the water, the Queen of the Mountains shone with a few feeble electric lights. The Maiden of the Lake rocked in the current; it looked gray and dingy, already worn and old and yet never opened. In the distance, the railroad bridge, abandoned, was buffeted by a sudden freshet bursting from the mountains above.

  Trahlyta was not in the baths of the Queen of the Mountains. She was not attending the white cairn, telling legends to visitors. She was not at the Sugar Shoals or the Five Forks Creek, which was an angry cataract. Holtzclaw was soaked to his core; mud caked his trousers to the knees. Only the crown of his head, sheltered by his fine Auraria hat, was still dry.

  He saw a small, familiar signpost: “water” and an arrow. It could have pointed in all directions and been just as truthful. But the sign once again guided him in his need.

  Holtzclaw followed the side path. Old chestnuts loomed overhead, dripping icicles. Tree trunks were rimed on the windward side with ice, layered like verdant moss. The frosted path widened into a clearing. In the middle of her rock-lined spring, Trahlyta reclined on her island.

  “Hello, James. Lovely weather, isn’t it?” She radiated delight.

  “The weather is causing me trouble, Princess. The lake is rising.”

  “Oh, it’s not trouble,” said Trahlyta. “It’s necessary.”

  “To do what?”

  “To stir up the deep currents. To impel the wild wonder fish to dig.”

  “Why wait until now? Why not wash the dam away months ago?”

  “Because, James, you were so excited about your gala. And I thought it might be instructive for everyone, but especially you.”

  “You won’t stop the rain then?” said Holtzclaw.

  “It’s the simplest act in the world,” said the princess. “But it won’t save the dam. Enough raindrops have fallen on the mountainsides; they will run off the stone summits and down through the channels of the earth, come out springs again, and they will all make their way into the lake.”

  “And then?”

  The princess made a popping sound against the side of her cheek, like a cork being pulled from a bottle of claret.

  “But I’ve worked so hard,” said Holtzclaw. “For silkworms, for Shadburn, and with so little to show. And if this dam bursts, and the lake rushes out, then I will have nothing.”

  “Then you have been doing the wrong work,” said the princess.

  “What about the people who live downstream? Won’t the dam flood their lands? Won’t there be a great disaster, like at Johnstown?”

  “Below us, the land is wide and flat. Some fields will get muddy, that’s all.”

  “Have you ever left this valley to see for yourself? How do you know what the waters do in someone else’s domain?”

  “I’ve met the Queen of the Lowlands at our conferences,” said the princess. “She’s blonde and heavyset, with wide footsteps—a hearty eater. Now James, you trust me, don’t you?”

  Holtzclaw searched himself and was surprised to admit that he did.

  “Then I will stop the rains for you,” said the princess, “and you will destroy the dam for me.”