The Mirror

by Millhiser, Marlys

  Shay didn’t answer, just leaned forward to see the horses’ hooves pawing Thora K.’s infant garden. The growing season was too short for a very successful garden up here anyway. It didn’t matter. She leaned back.

  “Ma’am, Mrs. Strock.” He swept off his hat. Still no smile. “I’m inviting you to go for a ride on this wagon.”

  “Why?”

  “Something I’d like to show you on this fine day.”

  “Go to hell,” Shay said through Brandy’s teeth. His eyebrows rose slightly. He stared at the horses’ rumps and shook his head. “And I used to think I was a patient man.”

  Laying the reins across the seat, he set the brake and slipped off the buckboard.

  As Hutch walked around the wagon Shay left the rocking chair. “What are you doing?”

  He moved leisurely to the steps and looked up at her under his hat until he’d had his fill. “Inviting you for a ride, like I said.”

  “And I told you what you could do about it.”

  He came up the steps and she backed to the door.

  “Hell, I feel like a bear stalking a canary bird,” he said with disgust.

  “Hutch, listen –” Before she could swing the door open and escape inside, he had her by the waist and before she could regain the breath to protest, she was sitting on the seat of the buckboard. Until now she’d thought he was slow-moving.

  “I just want to show you something.”

  “I can’t go anywhere without my bonnet. My nose’ll sunburn.”

  Hutch plopped his own hat on her head and backed the team until he could turn it.

  Where the wagon tracks met the road, he swung south away from town, left the road not far from the Brandy Wine and turned again onto a steep wagon path through pine trees.

  Shay knew they were headed for the old Tandy place. She even knew why. But she wasn’t ready for it when the horses struggled to the top of a wooded rise and he stopped them at the break in the trees.

  The wagon path sloped away below them and then swept across a broad valley to the house sitting on its knoll. Trees ringed the mountain valley but came only partway down the hillsides, leaving free the tall breeze-rippled grasses bright with spots of wildflowers and dotted with scattered horses. A frothy creek ran the valley’s length. High wind moved a puff of dazzling cloud across a deep sky and its shadow scudded over the grass toward them.

  Hutch shook himself as though awakening from a dream and prodded the team forward. A frisky brown-red colt with slender legs raced them and then tore off across the vast meadow. It reminded Shay of Penny, who would never grow to frisk and play. Life wasn’t fair, even when you knew what would happen.

  The house stood square and two-story, made of logs with their ends sticking out. The logs were shorn of bark and coated with something clear and shiny to give them a deep golden glow. Two corrals nearby – one old, the other new. An outhouse and a chicken coop.

  They drew up beside a covered porch that stretched along two sides of the house, just as Rachael had described it. This is where she lived, a voice screamed in her head, but when Hutch Maddon turned to her as if expecting some comment she couldn’t speak aloud. She could feel his hurt.

  He lifted her down and led her up the porch steps.

  Shay’d never been a nostalgia buff although it had been quite the rage when she was a teenager. She’d skied, hiked and camped in the mountains, ridden horses rented from tourist stables, but essentially Shay was no country girl.

  Yet something within her recognized this fairy-tale valley as one of the lost wonders of the world.

  “So you’ve got a ranch and a house and domesticated animals,” she fought back when she could unstick Brandy’s tongue. “And now you need a domesticated woman to do boring household chores – cook, wash, scrub, sew and –”

  “And tell me to go to hell.” His voice rasped with disappointment. He opened the door and motioned her inside.

  A golden glow here as well. Planed boards, coated with the same varnishlike substance as the logs outside, fit tightly against each other and formed walls, floor and ceiling. Sunlight added to the warm feel of the main room by streaming through paned windows that looked out on a vastness of meadow, mountain and sky.

  Bright oval braided rugs. Heavy, plain furniture made of the same colored boards as the room’s interior. It resembled modern lawn furniture but was brightened by cushions of the identical red-flowered calico she’d bought from Mr. Binder for the cabin. Panels of that material hung at the sides of the windows as curtains.

  She touched a cushion. “Looks like you’ve had someone sewing already.”

  “May Bell found a lady in town to do it for us. Lon and I put in new walls and floors these last two winters and made the furniture,” he said dejectedly.

  “You made the furniture?” She’d never known anyone who’d done that before.

  “Probably too ordinary for McCabe’s daughter.”

  At one end of the room a couch, chairs, rugs and tables grouped around a potbellied stove. At the other end a long narrow table with benches at the sides and captain’s chairs at each end sat near a cookstove. And though the furniture was primitive in style and all of a color, it looked just right for the room, the house, the valley …

  “It’s so … free – and open-feeling.”

  She lifted her arms and turned a circle. “You could put our whole cabin in this room, and more.”

  So different from the dark, stingy crampedness of the cabin. So different from the ornate, dusty stuffiness of the Gingerbread House.

  Three small bedrooms downstairs and two huge dormitory rooms upstairs with bunks along the walls. A shedlike enclosure attached to the house at the back door with stacks of firewood, washtubs, and other necessities.

  Spacious, airy and yet snug. Plain, simple and easy to clean.

  “Hutch, you and your brother have a beautiful home. I like what you’ve done with it.” She returned from her tour of inspection to find him staring out a window. “And your valley is beyond words.”

  “Not very fancy for a McCabe.”

  The house was immaculate. He’d worked hard to get it ready. And all for her. She’d been nothing but rude.…

  “You and Lon should be proud. Thank you for showing it to me.”

  “It’d be lonely out here for some.”

  “And free. Beautiful.”

  “I didn’t want you just for the cooking and washing.” He made a faint choking sound in his throat.

  “Lon would have to quit leering at me,” she countered.

  “If he leers, I’ll wipe it off his face with a fist.”

  “I hear you do that a couple of times a year anyway.”

  “We scuffle a bit.” He still spoke to the window.

  “From now on, you do it outside.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “I’m not a very good housekeeper.”

  “We’d help. And I’m going to hire some hands soon.”

  “I’d want to bring Thora K. to live here.”

  “There’s room.”

  “And I’d want a horse of my own.”

  “You can have your pick.”

  “And when no one much was around to see” – she put a hand on his arm and gazed out at the valley with him – “I’d put on men’s pants to ride it.”

  He turned at last to look at her. “You know, I believe you would.”

  What am I getting Brandy into this time?

  Brandy’s been gone three years and probably never even heard of this man. When are you going to stop pretending?

  “You sure seem taken with the top of my head.”

  Shay hadn’t realized she’d been staring at it. “It’s your hair.”

  She stood on tiptoe to touch it and found her waist encircled. His mustache was soft and silky on her face.

  “And all this time I thought you were going to turn me down.” His body shuddered.

  “What is it about men that makes it feel so good to be held against
one?”

  “Damned if I know.” His arms tightened.

  Being Brandy had been lonely. Tears squeezed beneath her closed eyelids. “I’ve felt so lost.”

  “Brandy, you’re beginning to come alive again, aren’t you?”

  She cupped her hand around the back of his neck and pulled his head down to meet her lips, the ache in Brandy’s body hard and insistent.

  “Are you always going to be so proper and polite, Hutch? And say, ‘yes, ma’am’ and –”

  “No.”

  “Is there anyone here but us?”

  “No.”

  “Do you think women should enjoy making love?” She kissed his throat.

  “You sure are full of questions.”

  He’s even older than Lawrence Welk. But then so am I now. And he’d unfastened all those infuriating hooks and eyes down the back of her dress already.

  “You won’t have to visit May Bell during business hours anymore.” She sank beneath him on the soft cushions of the couch. “Will you?”

  “Don’t appear so.”

  Slow, lingering caresses told her he didn’t have Corbin’s hang-up about good women and bad women. “Now,” she murmured astonishingly soon.

  “Now you’ll have to marry me,” he answered, and entered Brandy’s body.

  “You can’t compromise a widow, can you?”

  “I can try.”

  Brandy may have been missing a tooth, but everything else was in working order.

  “Hutch?”

  “Wish you wouldn’t talk so much.”

  “Someday we’re going to have twin sons and a daughter.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  INTERIM

  When Brandy married Hutch Maddon, Thora K. refused to move to the ranch. And as Brandy didn’t ask after the wedding mirror, the Cornish woman stored it out in the cave with the sausages and piles of potatoes.

  The next year they hanged Tom Horn in Cheyenne, Wyoming, for the murder of a young boy. The Maddon twins celebrated with a three-day drunk. What they didn’t know was that Tom’s brother, Charley, brought the body to Boulder and had it buried quietly in Columbia Cemetery.

  In 1907 a militant group led by Sophie McCabe, among others, succeeded in electing its reform candidates to office and their first act was to clean up Water Street. The prostitutes were forced to move out into the community.

  Mr. McLeod’s plans for a dam and reservoir on Sulfide Flats did not materialize. But when the Central Colorado Power Company bought Barker Meadows and began the construction of a dam, Thora K. gathered her belongings and joined Brandy at the Bar Double M Ranch. The mirror remained behind, still wrapped in its decaying quilt and standing in the cave.

  Thora K. found she could stomach Hutch Maddon after all, perhaps because after eight years of marriage he was still so good to his wife. His brother, Lon, was another matter.

  The year after Barker Dam was completed Brandy announced she was pregnant and would give birth to twin boys. Doc Seaton was most anxious about her and Thora K. knew as did everyone else that twins happen only every other generation. But true to her word and right on schedule, Brandy presented the world with another set of Maddon twins. As if one set wasn’t enough. Thora K. reminded herself that Brandy was a witch and not like other women.

  Brandy named her sons Remy and Dan and then asked Thora K. mystically, “Which came first, the chicken or the egg? Did I name them that because I already knew their names, or would I have anyway?”

  Eastern steel companies demanded more and more tungsten as an alloy for hardening their products, and when Europe began to arm for war, Tim Pemberthy expanded his operations at the Brandy Wine, working crews in shifts. The black metal was important in the making of high-powered guns and high-speed tools.

  Two new mills were built to help process the ore, one of them just below the dam. The town of Tungsten grew up around it, just as Brandy had said it would.

  Brandy irritated everyone by showing no enthusiasm for the war effort and by referring to it as World War I, as if there would be more.

  Nederland was in the midst of the tungsten boom. Wagons, coaches, and even Stanley Steamers streamed up the canyon. Hopeful prospectors slept in tents and on the floors of the pool halls.

  The saloons had become pool halls serving soft drinks for spiking and offering billiards and card games because the reform groups had pushed prohibition through the Colorado legislature four years before the national government would act in like manner. This suited Lon Maddon, who’d never reconciled himself to ranch work. Though the Bar Double M was still his home betweentimes, he set himself up in the profitable business of supplying Nederland with booze run down from Cheyenne. This infuriated Thora K. but each time she reported him to local authorities Lon paid off in John Barleycorn and never spent so much as a night behind bars.

  During the boom May Bell made a small fortune even with the influx of younger competition. And Thora K. rented out the cabin to miners for a hefty rent because of the scarcity of beds.

  Samuel Williams returned, a bare hulk of himself, only to succumb to influenza when the great epidemic that swept the nation caught on out of all proportion in Nederland. The Antlers Hotel was turned into an emergency hospital with sickbeds filling even its spacious porch. In Boulder, Elton McCabe died of the disease, leaving Sophie alone in the Gingerbread House. Out at the Bar Double M, Shay and Thora K. nursed the seven-year-old twins, Hutch, and three hired hands through it before falling ill themselves. One of the ranch hands died.

  Nederland lost fifty-seven people to the epidemic, most of them young adults and children. The community had not yet recovered when the bottom fell out of the tungsten market with the end of the war and the finding of cheaper sources of the ore abroad. Nederland went back to sleep.

  The Brandy Wine was boarded up.

  The wedding mirror slumbered on in its cave in the hillside.

  And one day when Dan and Remy were cleaned up for a visit to their Grandma Sophie and the Gingerbread House, Thora K. gave them each a loving pat and some cookies for the trip. Although they had the gold-flecked Maddon eyes, their hair was dark and thick like Brandy’s.

  She and Brandy stood on the porch to wave good-bye as they rode off on the buckboard beside their Uncle Lon.

  “Ahhh, them do be proper strappin’ boys now. ’Ee edden never going to want ter walk through that uld looking glass and leave ’em?”

  “No, it’s too late … Hutch, the valley, you, the boys … I barely knew them as uncles. When I was a child they lived in California. So I can love them as sons …” Brandy leaned against the porch railing, looking a little pale. “But, Thora K., what will I do when Rachael’s born?”

  Part II

  Rachael

  1

  Rachael Maddon scuffed the toes of her shoes in the dust. Sun warmed her shoulders but breeze cooled the backs of her knees, drying that sticky feeling from sitting at her desk.

  She waved at old Doc Seaton, who watched her at his window.

  Behind her the laughter and shouts of other children coming down the hill from the schoolhouse …

  Rachael broke into a run to stay ahead of them, knowing without turning that there’d be groups of girls and groups of boys. But she walked alone.

  “Hello there, little Rachael, and how are you today?” Mrs. Binder stood at the clothesline behind her house.

  “Fine, thank you.” Rachael didn’t feel little. It was embarrassing to be taller than anyone else in the second grade.

  “And how do you like your new teacher?” Mrs. Binder hobbled to the gate. The Binders didn’t have a fence, just a gate and a birdbath.

  “I like her just fine,” Rachael mumbled, because she was lying. Miss Hapscot was small and dainty as ladies were supposed to be, as Rachael could tell already she’d never be.

  “And how is everything out at the Bar Double M these days?” Mrs. Binder’s ancient nose wiggled like a rabbit’s in a lettuce patch. But this nose was after news – it real
ly said to Rachael: “Is your mother as crazy as ever? And are you going to be crazy too?”

  “Just fine, Mrs. Binder.” Rachael hurried on, knowing she was being rude. But the voices behind her were catching up and she didn’t want to talk about her mother to Mrs. Binder any more than to her schoolmates.

  To the other children, Rachael’s mother was either crazy or a witch. And her name was Brandy and Brandy was alcohol and alcohol was against the law. Even without hearing the familiar taunts except in her head, she had that bitey feeling behind her nose.

  Rachael’d reached the bottom of the hill when she heard the scuffle of another shoe behind her. She turned to see the new boy Miss Hapscot had introduced to the school that morning. His elbows were big and bony below his sleeves and his pants were almost short enough to be knee pants.

  Rachael ducked into the general store and soon forgot all about him. She surveyed the array of candies behind their glass panes.

  “Coming in to spend your allowance on sweets again, are you now Rachael Maddon?” Mr. Binder looked even older than his wife but the smile in his eyes was young. “And what will your mother say to that, huh?”

  Rachael grinned, aware of the juices squirting around in her mouth waiting for the candy, and of the assorted gaps where her new teeth had not yet come in. “We wouldn’t have to tell her, would we, Mr. Binder?”

  “You might not because you’ll get the candy, but what’s in it for me?”

  “I could owe you another kiss.”

  “Let’s see here,” he said in his slurry way and took a notebook from a shelf behind the counter. “Better look in my ledger … why, Rachael, you already owe me twenty-seven kisses. That’d make it twenty-eight. Kind of young to be so deep in debt, don’t you think?” But he reached into the case and drew out a roll of paper her impatient finger pointed to. Across the paper marched even rows of chocolate dots.

  She paid for the candy and on her way to the door said what she always did at this point, “I’ll pay off those kisses as soon as all your new teeth come in, Mr. Binder.”