The Mirror

by Marlys Millhiser

  She pondered this as they neared Main Street, Jerry walking ahead acting as if he wasn’t with her.

  Dorothy and Mary peeked at them around the side of the old meat market.

  Rachael hurried to catch up with him. “I can show you where a real witch lives, though, right here in town.”

  “Oh yeah? What’s her name?”

  “Miss Smith. But the grown-ups call her May Bell.”

  “How do you know she’s a witch?”

  They were walking together again by the time they passed the boarded-up market. Rachael looked over her shoulder to see two heads pop out behind its other end. “Because when you ask big people about her they shut up and won’t say anything, like they’re afraid to.” They walked past the general store, where Rachael should have stopped. “Her house is down this street before you get to the reservoir.”

  Dorothy and Mary crossed a vacant lot, running bent over. They probably thought Rachael couldn’t see them.

  When she and Jerry reached the livery stable, he dodged behind a gas pump. “Which house is it?”

  “The one over there with the pretty glass in the door. What are you hiding for?”

  “I remember the last time you tried to scare me, even if you don’t.”

  On either side of Miss Smith’s steps, a skinny lodgepole pine poked into a gray sky. The cold west wind slammed shut the trapdoor of the livery stable’s unused haymow and they jumped at the sound. It blew away the heavy scent of oil.

  Jerry ran to a carriage that crouched on one wheel in the dead weeds beside the stable. Weather and abandonment had ripped away the leather of its seats. Rachael followed him in case the girls were still watching.

  “Just because nobody talks about her don’t mean she’s a witch,” he whispered, his nose as red as the bright stocking cap Thora K. had knitted for him.

  “Remy told me that on Halloween the bravest of the big boys in school have to tip over her outhouse. If she isn’t a witch, why would they do it on Halloween? Want to peek in her window and see if we can see her?”

  “Yeah … well … I guess so. But you go first.”

  Some boyfriend he’d make, Rachael thought with disgust.

  Making a dash for the truck parked at the side of the street, she pretended to hide behind it as Jerry joined her. Rachael wasn’t that afraid of May Bell Smith, nor was she convinced the woman was a witch. But if she didn’t make this little adventure interesting, the boy at her side would have no reason to stay there.

  Black clouds tumbled above the house with the oval of colored glass in its door. Lace curtains lay still at the edges of the windows, making the interior look dark. White foam capped the leaden waves on the reservoir and wind growled low through the lodgepoles.

  “I’m getting cold. Are you going or aren’t you?”

  “Stay close behind me.” Rachael crossed to the side of the lot where they could step over broken wires in the fence. She raced to flatten herself against the house on one side of a window while he did the same on the other.

  Rachael waited long enough to convince him she was building up courage and then peeked in.

  “Do you see anything?” Jerry’s eyes looked enormous over his cheekbones. “Is she dead?”

  “Dead? No, of course not. I can’t see. It’s too dark. Let’s go around to the back.”

  This time Jerry looked in first. “All I can make out is a kitchen table. I don’t think no witch lives here.”

  “Uncle Lon says May Bell got mad once and burned down almost the whole town. How could she do that if she wasn’t –”

  “If she wasn’t what?” a gruff voice said behind them.

  Rachael whipped around with a squeal and dropped her lunch pail.

  “What are you up to, Rachael Maddon?” Miss Smith seemed monstrous in a fuzzy coat that made her look like a bear. Orange bangs frizzed around a woolen scarftied under one of her chins. She swung a metal chamberpot by its handle and breathed puffs of steam onto the air. “And who’s this with you?”

  The children stood frozen. Behind the outhouse at the back of the yard Middle Boulder Creek roared into the silence, trying to crash the ice forming at its edges.

  “Well?”

  “Jerry Garrett,” Rachael heard herself say in a tiny voice.

  “Jerry … Garrett,” May Bell repeated softly, her little pig eyes moving to him. “But you’re so … so big.” She raised a hand as if to touch his cheek.

  Jerry pushed past Rachael and darted across the yard to the hole in the fence.

  Rachael turned to follow but May Bell grabbed her shoulder. “You forgot your lunch pail.” She still stared after Jerry. “You keep him away from here. You understand?”

  “Yes, ma’am.” Rachael watched a tear roll down the fat woman’s cheek.

  5

  One Saturday Rachael was playing in the horse barn when Uncle Lon returned from one of his trips. She’d snuggled into the hay with a couple of cats to keep warm and was pretending one of them was Dorothy Kinshelow and the other Mary Powers. He didn’t see her when he entered carrying a crate of bottles and hunkered in front of a window. His breath steamed in the dusty light as he took a jar of paste from his coat pocket and stuck a piece of paper onto an empty bottle.

  One cat took a sudden notion to spit at the other and her uncle looked up into her eyes.

  For a moment he reminded Rachael of an outlaw like the ones in the old-time wanted posters Mrs. Sweeny kept tacked on the wall at the post office as a joke. “What are you doing, Uncle Lon?”

  He grinned and the outlaw went away. “Can you keep a secret, Rachael?”

  “Cross my heart.” Still clutching a rangy tom, she left the hay and sat on the floor beside him as he drew a bottle from his overcoat pocket. “Why, that’s molasses. What’s it for?”

  Lon Maddon glanced over his shoulder as if he worried that the mare pawing her stall behind them might overhear. Then he squinted and leaned close to Rachael. “I’m making up some tonic for Thora K.”

  “I didn’t know you made it.”

  “Neither does she,” he whispered. “That’s the secret. ‘Chief Geronimo’s Tonic, Magic Elixir of the Fabled Apache Medicine Men. Offers wonderful relief from the grippe, neuritis, neuralgia, rheumatism and pains in the extremities,’” he read from the colorful label he’d pasted on the empty bottle. “‘Guaranteed to restore hair when applied regularly to the scalp.’”

  “That’s like the one on her tonic in the kitchen. Where’d you get it?”

  “Took an old label into a printer and had him make me up some more of the same.” With his tongue over to one side and between his teeth, Uncle Lon carefully poured Thora K.’s bottle well over half full of whiskey. “You see, Rachael, as she gets older the tonic Thora K. buys at the medicine show on the Fourth of July don’t last as long as it used to. I told her I saw a store in Cheyenne that keeps it in stock.”

  He drank from the whiskey bottle and coughed. “Now this stuff ought to grow hair on something,” he gasped, and wiped his eyes.

  “But Thora K. hates whiskey.”

  “That’s what the molasses is for.”

  Rachael watched gooey blackstrap slither down the sides of the tonic bottle and thin when it met the whiskey. He corked the bottle and shook it till the amber and black had combined to cloudy dark.

  “I don’t understand. All that molasses without sugar or anything’d taste ick.”

  “Whiskey without molasses tastes good and that makes it bad.” He touched the cork to the end of his tongue and wrinkled his nose. “But whiskey mixed with molasses tastes bad and that makes it tonic.” He laughed suddenly and a startled cat jumped from her lap. “And that’s good.”

  Rachael laughed too … but she still didn’t understand.

  Lon passed the tonic under her nose and the mixture’s fumes made her think of rotting things soaked in motor oil. “Must need something. You’re still sittin’ upright.”

  He brought yet another bottle from his pocket, this
one small and amber with no label. “Now this here’s the kicker.”

  “What is it?”

  “Chloroform.”

  Brandy Maddon caught a cold that winter and the cough lingered even after the other symptoms had disappeared. Thora K.’s tonic proved to be a fairly effective if bad-tasting cough medicine.

  Several blizzards snowed them in and Rachael braced herself for a scary time. It started as usual with her mother snapping at everyone.

  Despite Thora K.’s efforts the meals grew tiresome. “I don’t feel like cooking tonight. Let’s just warm that roast over and cut it up for sandwiches,” Brandy would say wearily.

  Or…

  “Rachael, will you stop that racket! Pencils are for writing, not clicking against the paper.” And the skin around her lips would turn white.

  “This house is driving me bananas,” Brandy yelled at the ceiling and Rachael curled up in her chair and tried to make herself small and quiet.

  Mrs. Sweeny called on the telephone from the post office and read the mail to them.

  “God, if they can get phone lines out here, why not electricity? This damned antique world. Hutch, can’t you at least pipe water in from the spring? I’m going crazy without plumbing.”

  “Got water into the sink. Hell, woman, what do you want? Man can go broke trying to buy the latest doodad.”

  “An indoor bathroom for one thing. We live like animals here.”

  “Calm down, Bran. You’re scaring Rachael.”

  “Well, what about me? The same routine day in and day out. It’s deadly.”

  There was no clue to Brandy’s behavior in the stories Rachael read or heard in school or Sunday school. Did other mothers, even such respected ladies of the community as Mrs. Kinshelow, get in these moods in the privacy of their own homes, and did their families keep it a secret like the Maddons did? Everything she’d been taught about true ladies and proper mothers indicated they would never badger a good man like her dad, but suffer in silence far worse indignities than her mother ever dreamed of.

  One day Mrs. Sweeny called to read a letter from Dan. His job didn’t pay much but he’d saved enough for Remy’s train ticket to California if he wanted to come.

  Remy promised to wait till the meadow had been dug and they’d got the water on to irrigate the hay in the spring.

  As soon as the roads cleared enough, Brandy drove down to the Gingerbread House for a visit and to “get away.” There she could use the plumbing and listen to the radio.

  The visit was to have lasted a week but three days later Brandy Maddon returned, tearful and apologetic. “I don’t know why I get that way. I love you all so much.”

  Remy left at the end of June. The house seemed empty without the twins. Brandy’s cough finally began to lessen but Catherine Garrett went into the hospital in Boulder. Jerry came to stay with the Maddons. Rachael enjoyed trying to teach him to ride but didn’t enjoy the fuss her mother made over him.

  On the Fourth of July, Brandy dropped the children and Thora K. off in Nederland and drove on down the canyon to see how Mrs. Garrett was feeling after her operation.

  They stopped to watch some of the double-hand contests and then wandered on to the vacant lot by the old meat market where Chief Geronimo once again held forth on the wonders of his elixir.

  He paced along the side of his truck, the tails of his bright headdress sweeping down his back, long iron-gray hair parted in the middle and gathered to the sides under each ear.

  Rachael could never quite follow his long sentences to their conclusions. But there was no mistaking his ability to convince. He could frighten people or make them laugh, and more by the way he spoke than by what he said.

  “Little girl!” Chief Geronimo turned on Rachael with an accusatory finger. She and Jerry had slipped between adults to join the children sitting on the ground in front. “Tell these people here the truth. Have you ever, I mean ever seen a bald Indian? The truth now.”

  “No sir, I haven’t but –”

  “No sir, she hasn’t. Did you hear that? Do you know why? Because there aren’t any and do you know why there aren’t?” he shouted. The chief always shouted and stared directly into eyes. “Because, my good friends, the Indian has always known the secret formula of the elixir. When I was a young boy, my father …” And he went into a long story about his childhood with many funny little stories in it that pleased the small crowd and its laughter attracted more people. The story had nothing to do with why there were no bald Indians but Rachael soon forgot this in her delight over the magic of his words.

  Pictures of Indians and lettering all in yellow and red decorated his black truck. The weeds lay crumpled over where he paced beside it. He gestured flamboyantly and often, shaking the fringe on his sleeves. Wetness darkened a circle on his buckskin shirt under each arm and formed a triangular patch between his shoulderblades.

  The air was still and hot for a mountain day and thunder growled behind Arapahoe Peak.

  Mr. Binder stood on the sidewalk between two men. One of them wore the uniform of a county sheriff and the other was dressed like a banker, with his hair slicked down and his brown shoes polished to gleaming. He was the handsomest man Rachael’d ever seen.

  Then she realized they were all three looking at her. Mr. Binder motioned her to join them. “Rachael, these gentlemen wondered if your uncle came into town with you for the celebrations this morning,” he asked uncomfortably.

  “No, but he and Dad are coming in for the rodeo pretty soon.”

  The warning in Mr. Binder’s eyes was unmistakable but Rachael’d noticed it too late.

  “That’s all right, honey. We just want to talk to him,” the handsome man said, and stepped backward, narrowly missing Miss Smith as she walked behind him. May Bell Smith crossed Main Street faster than Rachael would have believed possible for so heavy a woman.

  “Now you’re probably wondering what all this has to do with a bald head and this famous elixir,” Chief Geronimo bellowed. “Well, I’ll tell you.”

  Rachael turned back, anxious about Mr. Binder’s warning look and why the deputy and his friend wanted to talk to her uncle. But she had to know how the chief was going to tie together all those details in his talk and relate them to elixir.

  “Neuritis, neuralgia and rheumatism, my dear friends, sneak up on you like a snake in the grass on a warm afternoon.” His s’s hissed and his arm wriggled like a snake but his eyes moved nervously toward the sheriff’s deputy on the sidewalk. “… like a robber in the darkness of night. They spare no one, neither the wealthy nor the poor. But you are too young to worry about them, you say? Well …”

  Chief Geronimo launched an attack on something called dyspepsia and though Rachael listened closely she never discovered how the ancient Apache medicine men discovered the cure for all the ailments mentioned. Nor did this Indian ever say outright that the elixir would help someone who had them. But when the deputy wandered off, Chief Geronimo shuffled through a hurried dance accompanied by bells tied around his ankles and started selling tonic.

  Lon Maddon leaned against the truck and brushed a speck from the jacket of his summer suit. “We’re gonna be late for the rodeo, dammit. Get a move on,” he yelled at the screen door.

  Hutch came out of the house on the run, his good shirt unbuttoned and hanging out of his pants. Lon heard the snap as the spring on the door broke again. “Well, you don’t have to hurry that –”

  “Lon, you got any hooch stored on the place?”

  “Some in the horse barn, why?”

  “Jesus H. God! Get in the truck.” His brother had the motor running and was backing to the barn before Lon could get off the running board into the seat. “May Bell just called from town. A sheriff’s deputy was asking Rachael about you. And she told him we were coming in for the rodeo.”

  “Hutch, you know old Skinner and me got a deal.”

  “Wasn’t Skinner. Some deputy she’s never seen before and he had a man with him that looked like gov
ernment to her.”

  “A fed?” Lon helped his brother load the nine or ten cases that were left of the last run and to fork hay over them. “Probably just some dude visitor up from Boulder, all dressed up.”

  “Well, this dude wanted to talk to you and if anybody knows which way the stripes run on a man it’s May Bell Smith.”

  Thunderclouds rolled in fast overhead and Lon began to catch his twin’s fear as the truck bounced up out of the valley. This wasn’t the first time he’d wished there was another road out of here. “Hell, we’re just going to meet them head-on. The way you’re driving, those bottles will bust. They’ll smell the evidence coming right to ’em.”

  “Can’t let them find it on the ranch. May Bell said they were still hanging around town.”

  “Waiting to catch me?” A plop of rain the size of a half-dollar splashed the windshield. “Why not come out to the house?”

  “Maybe waiting for us to get settled at the rodeo so they could sneak out and search the place when nobody’s around. Maybe they don’t have a warrant.” Hutch stopped the truck. “You hightail it up to the road and see if they’re waiting for us.”

  Thunder threatened the treetops around him, sparse heavy raindrops spattered the dust at his feet as Lon Maddon approached the road that led to Nederland one way and Central City and Denver the other. As he was turning around he happened to raise his eyes up the mountainside across the way. Just the top boards covering the mouth of the Brandy Wine showed above the tailings.

  Lightning accompanied his dash back to the truck, and a bit more rain. “Nobody in sight. Let’s go.”

  “We can dump the stuff between here and Central City.”

  “Hell no, I got a customer for it. We’ll stash it and me in the Brandy Wine for now. You go on to the rodeo.”

  “They’re going to connect that mine with us eventually, Lon, and go looking there when –”

  “It won’t be there then. I’ll deliver it to my customer tonight, by hand if I have to. He’s local. Then I’ll take a little trip. If they ask where I went, say you don’t know. ’Cause you won’t. I’ll be back in a month or two.”