“No!” Sary clawed to right herself.
“No Grimm’s fanciful tales then,” Julian warned.
“I’ll tell. I promise! I’ll show you.” Ratchet upended her as Julian looked at her with curiosity. “What in pluperfect Hades you diggin’ for? China? No gold down there.”
She grimaced and dropped an egg-sized nugget from her fist, toeing it under pine needles as they dragged her off.
****
Sary guzzled cold acorn coffee straight from the pot, scanning the untouched graves.
Julian tossed her half a hard biscuit and jerked her around to face him and his cold mucous-gray eyes. “Time!”
Sary gobbled the food and spoke meekly enough through a full mouth. “Brother was hot as coals ’fore he went, Mister Delacorte. Seb went awful hard.” She averted her eyes again. “Cankers. Bloody flux. Raving one minute, sweating and shivering the next, and when the deliriums took leave, Seb had these big bruises like silver eagles all over—”
Julian screwed his face. “Jules!”
“Wouldn’t recollect him if he were standing on my toe. You asked where Brother was. That I can swear to.”
She tugged a speechless Delacorte to the gravesites and urged shyly, “Dig him up if you like.”
Julian stared at her, apoplectic, but Sary hung on while Ratchet choked with laughter.
“He’d be honored.” Her words were earnest. “Truly. Brother didn’t have any mourners.”
Julian backed in frantic haste, swiping his hands on his fine coat, twisting his mouth.
“Get off me! Jules wouldn’t have congress with the likes of you. Filth! Diseased filth! Look at you! My Jules? Hankering after you? I must have been mad!”
“No. I am,” Sary breathed.
As they mounted, Ratchet eyed Sary’s stomach. She tucked her shawl closer. As they rode out, Ratchet threw Sary another glance.
“Gettin’ fat.”
Julian looked at him and then at Sary, puzzled. “Don’t see how. Let her rot.”
She waited until their horses had thudded off, gobbled moldy wet cornbread, and then paced, head down, weary, back to the mine.
There she knelt, tossed in a rock that splashed far below, and waited.
****
The pick bit deep and stuck. Sary wrenched it out. Hack, thud, scrape—screee, skittering on the rock face, the sound muffled, yet her ears would ring long after she finally ascended to sun or moonlight. The impact jarred her whole body. The handle slid and blisters hardened to pads of callous. Sary sagged over the pickaxe to stare into the gloaming beyond the circle of oil lamp—she used fat from the occasional rabbit now. With a grunt she heaved the pick out to raise it again—a machine, halting, rusty, but still an unfeeling machine numbed to chill and gloom as she worked up a clammy sweat. At times she awoke where she fell, disoriented, the lamp out.
If she weren’t still young, she would never have been able to endure, certainly not with the burden of her ever-growing tummy. She scarcely thought on it. Her gowns became filthy rags soaked with minerals and earth and dried so many times they were armor and insulation, until at last she donned some of Seb’s old trousers, scarce snapping about her middle. Her hair was colorless, dry and thick with grit. But at least the mine held no terrors now, as a steady dribble of gold chunks and flakes littered the earth. The pick slipped on a down-stroke from her numbed fingers, dropping with a ringing clang. She stepped back a pace and again hefted it.
Periodically she stooped to sweep up the bronze pebbles, filling empty flour sacks, finding it more difficult as the days and weeks went by for, despite her privation, her belly kept growing. She feared her time would come soon.
One hand on her back, Sary dragged sacks to the shaft. For a while she affixed them to her waist to haul them up the ladder with her, until her waist grew too big. Then, experimenting with the mine’s rusted pulleys, she hauled the ore in buckets to the surface, climbing the ladder after it in slow stages.
At times, she slept on the ground, where she would be wakened by Ned, with his foraging for acorns at dawn, to start all over. She didn’t know what to do with the ore, or what her plans were, yet was terrified Delacorte would bring back vengeful townspeople.
There was no telling when or if the men would return.
****
On a rare night of rest, Sary scribbled in her Bible by the thin comfort of a fire that lent her pinched face a peach glow of health, muttering as she wrote, chewing her pencil.
“Don’t know why I stay.” She pressed the stub. “Harder each day. Into the Devil’s bargain, Lord, I’ve inherited Brother’s disease of greed and want.”
She bent low, gouging the paper. “Like descending into Hell. I keep going down that mine like a fever. My blood tastes of metal.”
Sary stared at demons in the light. “Lord help me…” She took a sip of whiskey, sloshing the jug to judge the remains, then corked it and stroked her tummy.
“And there’s this baby, this—God-blasted child! Will I love it? Please, Lord, help me not hate and despise it.”
****
Night-horses thudded across plains in her sleep—descending the mine, over and over. At bottom, Julian holds a beam spike, beckoning. She runs on legs that melt, into Julian raising the spike…
****
Sary awoke groggy the next dawn, raising her head from a rock pillow, arching her back. Tucking her shawl around her, she scratched together a fire, profligately tossing on it a largish log she’d saved back, and set crushed acorn to boil. She started, at a loss, as rocks gouged the earth by her fire pit. The very sky seemed to pelt stones of all sizes. Missiles thudded all about her, pocking the ground like hard rain while, on the knoll, town kids were yelling unseen, Ellie and young Cora Doheny and a lanky fourteen-year-old among them, lobbing pinecones and stones.
“Yah! Over here!”
The fourteen-year-old cupped his hands and shouted down. “Pa sez you’re unhinged as a broke gate!”
Another boy. “Chase us! Bet you can’t catch me-ee!”
Then five-year-old Cora piped, “Yer a fief, ana fat wady!” And tossed a small cone.
Sary’s eyes grew huge, ignoring them as children of all ages spilled over the knoll, scooping barbed pine cones big as their heads, lobbing them as their legs blurred faster with momentum.
One of the children gnawed on what looked like—bread!
She clambered to meet them. “Fly on home now. Your mas wouldn’t like you bein’ here!”
They stopped, and some shrieked and scattered. She must look like a scarifying witch formed of mud. One dropped his bread, and Sary snatched it from the dirt. The bread had a round of sausage sticking to it. Smoothing her belly, Sary’s crooked grin dissolved as she relished the spicy goodness, the peppery bite—the grease! “Fly away on home now, babies,” she mumbled.
Yet the sustenance also gave new sight. She eyed the campsite as they saw it. The sad torn tarpaulin and heaped stone around her shelter, empty bags and battered tins. Long ago she had burnt the wagon for warmth.
She indeed must look like a witch, in a witch’s lair, a witch who needed to conjure food fast.
****
Brushed and cleaned up the best she could, Sary rode through Big Bear on her thin horse, ramrod straight, bundled in her thickest shawl, looking neither right nor left, yet seeing everything.
Folks peered through windows, traveling one to the next.
She slanted a look at Handi’s—a twitch of curtain…
****
The proprietor looked up, grin still in place at the bell, drooping like his mustache as he assessed Sary.
“No more free grub, hear?” He jerked a look to Delacorte’s saloon. “Told you—your kind ain’t welcome.”
“But I have—”
“Don’t care none, do I—you could have a pocketfula gold, and I said—”
“No.” Sary tried a shaky laugh. “No gold.” And, as she retreated, her gaze leaped unwilling over sorghum, salt pork, pickl
es, crackers.
She walked on stiff legs to Doheny’s Mercantile, next to Delacorte’s Saloon, and showed something to Aaron.
He shook his head—No. Grace almost took the small cameo wrapped in a scrap, while Ellie and Cora stood mute.
“Anything?” Sary fixed them with her eyes.
The Dohenys stood, arms crossed. Aaron flicked concerned glances at the door.
Once outside, Sary gazed with longing at McAdam’s Hostelry. Between drapes, Handi squinted at the hazy figure. She knew who it was, all right, and felt a tiny warmth that quickly hardened to lead where her heart was. She couldn’t make out details, but the gal looked rough. Well, she’d warned her, hadn’t she? She wasn’t sure she would take her on now. She dropped the drapes.
Behind Sary, bare feet swiftly pattered the muddy planks as Pearl ran up, sobbing. She walloped Sary in the face and dashed off.
Sary, stunned, wiped her cheek with Jules’s monogrammed handkerchief, then tucked it back at her waist—and didn’t notice that the handkerchief dropped into the muck.
****
She would have had to be a seer to conjecture that Little May—a chunky Spanish girl and one of Handi’s soiled doves, plucked it up from the mud a few seconds later and hence set a wind in motion that would blow Sary’s life awry sharper than could any cutting mountain gale.
Chapter 20
Grace, her daughters Ellie and Cora, and three other women glanced up as Sary rode out, head held high. They smiled knowingly, silver needles flashing over a quilting frame. Grace could scarcely wait for the right moment to drop her account on their ears of how bedraggled the uppity flatlander had looked earlier and how hiz honor Delacorte warned Aaron not to have no truck with her. Why, she didn’t rightly ken.
A sweet-faced old woman with her nose bent to the quilt squinted, murmuring, “Hear poor mite’s crazy as a bedbug.”
A woman with eyes like a bird, stabbed her needle in pecky stitches. “Wicked! I say! I heered she runs buck-naked in the snow.”
The pretty young matron, whose parlor it was, smiled gently at Ellie. “Must get awfully cold then.” Ellie giggled, and then Grace nailed the group with eyes hard and shiny as her thimble. “Heard she slept with her brother.”
“Grace!” The young matron nodded to the children.
“Not deef! Unnatural congress with her brother!”
The old woman muttered, “A closed mouth maketh a wise heart…Gracie.”
“You can well scoff. But it ain’t natural…”
Then Cora piped up in a yelp, “She’s real fat!”
The women dropped their needles. The sweet old woman asked, “Little Cora? How do you know these things?”
Ellie butted in, pooching her flat tummy out, mimicking pregnancy. “We go spy on her!”
Little Cora shrilled, “An’ she jumps in the water wiv-out any clothes on, an she talks to the ay-er.”
The bright-eyed woman stabbed her with shiny needle eyes. “What else did you see, Cora?”
Cora hung her head.
Grace prodded her daughter. “Don’t stop now, Cory Anne!”
Ellie pinched her sister and took up the tale. “She goes down that mine-hole you tole us to stay way from, Mama!”
The women looked at each other.
Ellie continued, “And she got a whole sack a gold!”
The women abandoned needles in the quilt and looked out for a sighting of Sary, spinning back to Ellie with avid eyes.
****
Lamps were lit in Doheny’s Mercantile as townsfolk, panners, ranchers, and shop owners trickled in with food and jars of whiskey and beer. Someone messed with a harmonium, until a rancher rapped a jelly jar filled with spoons, braying, “Shush down now—ain’t a cotillion.”
The ginger-bearded ironmonger barked, “If her brother stumbled onta somethin’ big, why’re we sittin’ here beatin’ a cold anvil?”
Grace shrilled, “The Lucky’s ours more’n anyone’s.”
Ginger-beard contributed, “Ain’t seen the plowboy.”
And a bright-eyed woman drew the conclusion, “Murdered him! What kind of sister’d do that for Satan’s lucre?”
“Don’t like the way she dresses—or don’t dress—around my boy.” The bright-eyed woman harrumphed at her lanky fourteen-year-old.
Ginger-beard grumbled, “Why ya think he goes up there?”
The bright-eyed woman snapped a cookie, breaking it. “How we gonna do the serpent in? Hang her? We gonna hang her? Let dogs lap her blood like Jezebel—or Mess-a-lina!”
Grace nodded, thunking Aaron sharply on the arm.
Men sighed, embarrassed, and spoke low, while women set out food and avidly listened.
****
Sary knelt awkwardly by the creek, dippering ice water even though blessed summer approached. She’d boil some bones, again mixed with spring greens and acorns beat to mush. It numbed hunger somewhat. She snapped her head at a distant but approaching commotion, like the feral woodland creature she had become, alert, on guard.
“Not town kids again. But”—she smiled—“they’ll have food! Pockets stuffed with maybe nuts and raisins and apples…”
Sary crouched, bewildered.
In place of youngsters, she eyes a mob rushing down, spilling through her camp—a ginger-bearded man picked up a burning stick and fired her poor lean-to, and ordinary women ventured behind the men to stroll like inspectors though her camp, her home, making faces and soon cavorting about the fire.
“Where ya hidin’, Sary?” they hailed. “Wouldn’t show my face, neither!”
Bitter at their antics, she nevertheless grinned. She needed to blend in with her drabness, let them think she wasn’t there. Let them have their fun. Nothing worth saving. The gold’s well hidden.
Her smile froze as a fat woman yanked Sary’s wedding dress from her little humpback trunk with the roses painted inside and pawed deeper like a dog, tossing what looked like rags into the dirt.
Then Grace pointed at the fat woman and pelted over, screeching, “She’s found gold!”
The mob, frustrated and eager for mischief, shoved the fat woman aside, upending Sary’s trunk of its poor keepsakes, tossing it aside. Then she watched them circle, agitated, through the pines, guns thrust out as they edged closer to the graves. The women still clawed over her wedding dress, even while the fat woman tried to struggle it over her bosom, ripping off bits of the lace Sary had tatted herself.
Sary jerked around at a cracking sound.
The panner, the man she and Sebastian had come across that first day so long ago, had just smashed their chute against a tree. She jerked back at the sound of gunfire and Ned screaming, and watched, stunned, as another brave townsman target-practiced on Ned the mule. She had never heard a mule scream before. Ned was down. Sary shut her ears and eyes as she groped for Seb’s shotgun. She opened them to see the man with ginger hair walk over, shove the shooter aside, and put a bullet though poor Ned’s brain.
Ginger-beard turned wild-eyed as buckshot zinged the rocks in a fuselage out of nowhere, spitting granite left and right. More pellets gouged the earth, this time around his feet.
“Who’s there?” He hopped aside awkwardly, flattening, looking everywhere. “Hell’s fire! Why didn’t we hog-tie her first?”
“Did you see her? Didn’t know the bitch had Custer’s army, did we?” the panner snarled. He backed to a horse, eyeballing the firs. Women shrieked and scattered, red-faced and cursing in their fashion, as Sary jacked and aimed. Buckshot now peppered around Grace’s toes. She shrieked and ran for Aaron. Aaron tugged a furious, beet-red Grace, speechless for once, off out of range, where Grace tossed him aside and shook her fist at the trees. “Can’t hide it forever, Swinford! We’ll find it! You got gold, and we’ll ferret it out, last thing we do! Thief! Harlot! Hear me?” she screeched, “That gold’s ours!”
“Gracie! Come. You’ll get shot. Sweetheart.” Aaron looked hopeful, but then the bright-eyed woman yelled, exasperated, at the men,
“Jaspers! Come back here!”
When they kept saddling up and galloping out, she too shouted back at Sary, “Don’t sleep, whore a Babylon! Dogs will lick your spilled blood!”
Ginger-Beard dragged her off. “Save it till Sunday, Martha.”
The fat woman tried to stuff all the things back into the trunk and carry it under her arm, but then she dropped it and fled with the rest.
****
Sary wandered aimlessly about the desecrated camp. Her wedding dress was lost forever. Her fate seemed to be one of listening to fading hoof beats. Sary backed, tumbling over a stump, as a brown bear reared, stretching wide jaws filled with yellowed, curved tusks dripping saliva. It gave a garbled roar, affixing her with small brown eyes, then shuffled, pigeon-toed and snuffling through its nose, to drag off Ned.
Later, Sary studied Ned’s carcass. The bear was gorged and no doubt, she hoped, sleeping. She had no more shells in her pocket or she would have killed it for food. Eat or be eaten. She squatted with a cleaver, hacking Ned’s meat from bone. Gagging, Sary tore strings of raw meat off with her teeth. She rested, trying to keep the rubbery, gamey stuff down, and finally tossed the gnawed bones into a stew pot, numbly watching it foam and boil. Late snowflakes melted on the surface. She shivered and waited for the bones to soften.
****
Handi nibbled fruitcake and poked about her foggy kitchen, stoking the cherry-bright stove hotter still. Laundry steamed on lines crisscrossing the room—chemises, underpants, petticoats, and pillowslips. Behind her, the Indian hag tossed herbs into washtubs fronting the stove.
Handi’s mostly naked gaggle of girls were in high good humor this night as they lined up, naked to the waist, for the hag’s clinical inspection, pantaloons down, petticoats hiked.
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