Laying the Music to Rest

by Smith, Dean Wesley

  “And the creek there has a little color in it,” Fred said. “I show the guests how to work a pan. They get a kick out of it.”

  “You’re kidding,” I said, glancing back at where I had washed my face.

  “Don’t let Fred get you going,” Constance said. “There’s very little gold left in that stream. And besides, the water will freeze your hands blue after only one try.”

  “Not if you do it right,” Fred said. “Trust me, there’s gold in there. I don’t have the source spotted yet. It’s somewhere above here, but I haven’t had the time to go searching, what with building the lodge and everything. Bet you haven’t dipped a pan in years. You want to give it a go?”

  “Next time,” I said, more interested than I let show. I sat on a cut-off stump and watched as Constance expertly built us a quick snack.

  “You know,” I said, finally breaking the unspoken rule that we wouldn’t talk about the ghost or the dive until later. “What I would really like to know is more about this old town. What are we going to find down there? You got any idea?”

  Fred shook his head. “Not much, I’m afraid. They didn’t believe in securing buildings to foundations in the old mining towns. And since all the buildings were made of logs, everything floated, broke apart, and jammed into where the stream topped over the slide. There’s a huge logjam there. The water is as cold as that stream and with the long, frozen winters, I doubt if there will be much down there but old foundations and a lot of junk.

  “So what’s the point? Won’t the old site be covered with two or three feet of silt?”

  Fred shrugged. “Most of the town site is in about seventy to eighty feet of water. There’s going to be some silt, but not as much as you might guess. The lake is relatively near the top of this valley and the stream doesn’t have much time to pick up the mud and sediment that would fill in the lake. What sand and stuff the stream does pick up is dropped near the upper end. There’s a pretty good sandbar built up there over the years. It has some color in it too.”

  “So how big was this town?”

  “During the peak mining seasons,” Constance said, “over five thousand people. The last few years before the flood, the gold boom had started to die off and on the day the slide buried the town, there were less than seven hundred living there. Of course, that was in the spring and the summer influx of miners hadn’t yet returned.”

  Fred shook his head and the hammock with him. “That town was an amazing place. It was famous for its saloons, wild summer nights, and pianos.”

  “Pianos?” I asked. “Why would a town be famous for its pianos?”

  “Because there were seven of them in town,” Fred said. “All in the main saloons.”

  “So?” I couldn’t figure out why pianos in a 1909 town were such a big deal. I always figured there were a lot of them around.

  “You just came down the main trail,” Fred said, gesturing at the hill above us. “That trail hasn’t changed much in seventy years. Can you imagine getting a piano down that?”

  “You’re kidding?”

  “Nope,” Constance said. “There are two other trails in the area. Both worse. One comes in over the summit up Mule Creek. That’s where the Dewey Mine was. The other comes up Monumental Creek from the River of No Return area of the Salmon. There was never a wagon in Roosevelt that wasn’t built there. Yet somehow they had seven pianos.”

  “Amazing,” I said, glancing up at the tall mountains that towered above us like huge walls.

  “Sure is, isn’t it?” Fred said. “And the music’s pretty amazing, too.”

  The voice in the back of my head screamed at me not to ask. But I was already into this mess past the point of turning back, so I did anyway. “Music?”

  “Damn it, Fred,” Constance said. “Give him time to get used to the ghost before springing anything else on him.”

  “It’s part of the ghost,” Fred said.

  “There’s more than the ghost?” I asked. I didn’t like the sound of that.

  “We’re not sure the music is caused by the ghost,” Constance said.

  “I think it is,” Fred said. “Makes lots of sense.”

  “Would someone please tell me about this music?”

  Fred looked at Constance and then smiled. Constance shook her head in disgust and went back to working at the food. “Every so often,” Fred said, “usually in the evenings, someone starts playing a piano.”

  “And I assume you’re going to tell me you don’t have one and neither do the neighbors.” This entire thing was starting to stretch even my belief in Fred. They had to be suckering me into some big joke that they’d spring when we got to the lodge. Angie was probably involved in it too, and they would be laughing at me for months.

  “That’s right,” Fred said with the straightest face I had ever seen. He had a good poker face. But after all the years, I knew when he was wearing it. This time he was being dead serious. And he looked embarrassed about it.

  I turned to Constance. “Is he kidding?”

  She shook her head no. I could see in her eyes she too was telling the truth.

  I just sat there. A ghost that roamed around a lake. And someone playing piano music in the middle of the Idaho wilderness. It was all too much. If it hadn’t been Fred and Constance I wouldn’t have listened to it for a moment.

  Constance handed Fred, then me, a cup of coffee. The smell was like a comforting hand that said I hadn’t yet left the world of reality. Coffee was civilization and civilization was still here, at least for the time being.

  “Why don’t you tell him about the legend?” Constance said.

  “There’s a legend, too?” I asked. “No, don’t tell me. Big Foot drops by every twenty years and he’s due this week. Right?”

  Fred laughed. “Believe it or not, there really is a legend about the music. Constance found it down at the historical society after our first visit up here. It’s in some book—”

  “Legends of the Frontier,” Constance said, “by Nelson. A great book.”

  “Yeah,” Fred said. “It is. The one about the music is called The Legend of Lake Roosevelt. I got a copy of it here somewhere. It’ll be just as easy if I read it to you.” Fred climbed out of the hammock and rummaged in one of the saddlebags they’d brought over to the clearing. After a short moment, he pulled a few folded sheets of paper out and opened them up. He didn’t get back into the hammock, but instead sat in it like a chair and rocked as he studied the paper in his hands.

  He took a sip on his coffee, then looked up. “You ready?”

  I shrugged. “Couldn’t be any wilder than some of the things I’ve heard so far.”

  He laughed. “True. Here goes: ‘To hear the pianos of Roosevelt, the listener must follow instructions.’”

  “A legend with instructions?” I tried not to snicker. “What do you have to do, climb the third tree from the lake and put your ear to the trunk?”

  “You really don’t have to do anything,” Constance said. “You can hear the music all over the valley.”

  She said it so matter-of-factly, it made me shudder. I suddenly had a great desire to stand and move back out into the warm sun of the meadow and let the heat on my shoulders remind me I really hadn’t gone crazy. But I sipped my coffee instead as Fred started reading again.

  “The listener is to make camp at the upper end of the lake where Monumental Creek has laid a fine carpet of sand and rock, overgrown in places with light brush. The valley walls on both sides will be steep, climbing almost vertically for thousands of feet. The slope to the left as you face the lake will be tree-covered and thick with brush.”

  “That’s where the lodge and cabins are,” Constance said. “About three hundred feet above the water. Had to clear a massive amount of scrub.”

  “She’s not kidding there,” Fred said, holding up his hand. “Remember those thick callouses we used to show you every fall?”

  I nodded.

  “Bush and logs,” he said. Then he we
nt back to reading.

  “The slope to the right, the West, will be mostly free of tall pine. Instead it will be covered with large rockslides and cliff faces.”

  “Is that where the slide came from?” I asked.

  Constance shook her head. “Nope. It was on that side of the canyon all right. But the slide was completely mud and whatever else it picked up along the way. The slide came down Mule Creek which drains into Monumental right below the town. A lot of the mining was up Mule Creek, so that’s why they built the town where they did. Besides that, it was the widest place in miles.”

  “You know,” Fred said, “there’s still two cases of dynamite unexploded under that slide? They tried to blow it to stop the slide, but it didn’t go off.”

  “You mean they had time to fight it?”

  Fred nodded. “Lots of time. The accounts of what happened that night say the slide was moving about as fast as a man could walk. It started three miles up Mule Creek, right below the Dewey Mine.”

  I just shook my head. “Could the dynamite still be dangerous?”

  “I doubt it,” Fred said. “Would take something pretty strong to set it off, even if it was still any good after eighty years in the ground.”

  “Amazing,” I said, again.

  Fred nodded and went back to reading the legend.

  “The sand flat above the lake will be marked with stone fireplace rings, black pimples against the white sand. The listener should choose to camp to the right of the trail that leads to the lake from Monumental Summit and at the nearest fireplace ring to the lake and the rock slope.”

  “A few people still camp there every summer,” Constance said. “But they rarely stay for longer than a night. The place spooks them.”

  “I can understand that,” I said. “It spooks me and I haven’t even seen it yet.”

  “The listener should have dinner early. Then, as the light slowly drains from the sky between the towering ridges the listener should let the crackling of the camp’s fire die down.”

  Fred looked quickly up as Constance set his lunch beside him on a stump.

  “The listener should then beware. His ears will pick out other sounds from the forest twilight. Birds fluttering in the branches. Fish jumping after one last insect. Maybe even the sound of a chipmunk clattering up among the rocks. The listener must try to push those sounds into the background.”

  As Fred read, I found myself becoming aware of all the sounds around us. The fire’s soft cracking as it licked the bottom of the large water pot Constance had sitting across two rocks. The slight breeze clipping the tops of the trees with a light brushing sound. The clear, but distant background bubbling of the creek as it tumbled over rocks on its way toward the submerged town. And every so often, the cawing of a distant hawk cut through the clear air of the valley and echoed off the mountain walls.

  “The listener must now try to focus his attention completely on the cold water of the lake. He must try to imagine the old Main Street spread out at his feet. He must see the miners as they celebrated the end of the day and their success or failure in the saloons that framed the street like nails in a coffin lid. Then, and only then, will the listener hear the music of Lake Roosevelt.”

  Fred looked up at me with a raised-eyebrow sort of look.

  “Some crazy legend.” I took another sip of coffee. Damn, it was getting cold in this shady little nook. The sunlight that filled the meadow looked like water to a thirsty man. I took a big gulp of the hot coffee and let the heat work its way toward my stomach. Fred and his damn ghost stories. If this was all a joke, I was going to kill him.

  “There’s still more to it,” Fred said as Constance handed me a plate filled with corn, potato chips, and a great-smelling hamburger.

  Constance filled her plate while Fred and I took big bites of our hamburgers. Then Fred went back to reading from the papers in his lap.

  “If the listener hears the music, he must understand the reason is a simple one. The town submerged before him prided itself on one aspect more than even the gold it fought out of the hills and streams. Its pianos.”

  Fred glanced up at me, then over at Constance. Then he continued.

  “Seven pianos, one for each of the famous saloons along Main Street. Every night, the seven battling pianos filled the narrow valley with sound, pouring from their gun-barrel saloon doors. And for years, the pines took every song and held it in their sap and their needles. The rocks let the notes seep into their cracks and crevices like water, then trapped them. The great mountains, Thunder to the west, Monumental to the east, took the music and laid a net of echoes between them until the songs supported themselves in the night without touching the stars.

  “The listener must be alert, for the concert only lasts a short time. The mountains and the rocks and the trees are jealous of their songs. Also, the listener should not be surprised if all but one of the pianos drops out of the musical war. The listener who hears this should consider himself treated to a special concert, for the remaining piano’s music will be clear and crisp, as if the listener were standing right outside the saloon door. The playing will be fine, practiced. But the song will feel sad and somehow lost. The listener should look around as the dim night shadows of the pines will seem to sway to the melody of the solo.

  “And, if the listener still has the courage at this point to not throw an extra log on the fire and start whistling his own tune, he just might recognize the song.”

  Fred stopped reading and folded the paper.

  “You might get to hear the music tonight,” Constance said.

  “Lovely,” I said. “Just lovely. And we’re going to make a dive down into that lake?”

  Fred nodded. “Crazy, huh?”

  I nodded and took a bite of my hamburger. Crazy didn’t even begin to describe what we were going to do.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Monumental Lodge

  June 26, 1990

  “ALMOST THERE,” FRED said over his shoulder as we rounded a curve and started to climb. “You’ll be able to see the lake in another hundred yards or so.”

  I nodded and tried to adjust my position in the saddle for the thousandth time in the last four miles. There wasn’t a spot left on my ass that wasn’t sore or bruised. Four o’clock in the morning had been a long time ago.

  The sun had dropped below the edge of the high mountains and over the last few hours the line between bright light and dark shadows had worked its way up the steep slopes like the waterline in a filling bathtub, leaving the tops of the mountains tinted pink. The moment the direct sunlight had left the valley floor, the air had turned a crisp, biting cold. Three miles back I had put on both my sweater and light jacket, and if the ride went on much farther, I was going to ask Fred to stop so that I could dig out my ski parka.

  The main trail branched to the left and climbed hard up the left side of the valley away from the streambed we had been following. Fred took the high road and after a short distance pointed down. Through a gap in the trees I could see a small section of the lake and the part of the sandbar the legend had talked about. In the shadow-filled light, the water looked black, as if the valley was filled from side to side with a pool of ink. Every so often a ripple spread out on the glass surface as an insect or fish broke the calm.

  At first nothing about the small lake seemed unusual as I studied it through the branches of the trees. No ghost walked its banks. No music stirred from its black depths. It seemed like any of the hundreds of other small mountain lakes I had seen over the years.

  Almost. The more I studied it, the more the lake felt different. Colder. Alien.

  I pulled my jacket tight in front and tried not to shiver. The thought of diving into those black waters seemed ludicrous. Granted, Fred and I had pulled a lot of crazy stunts over the years. And by and large got away with them. But somewhere, sometime, there was going to be one we couldn’t do.

  Up ahead, Fred turned left off the main trail, kicking his horse to move straight up
the steep slope. The two packhorses he was leading scrambled to follow.

  Through the trees farther down the main trail I could see a two-story log structure built into the side of the steep hill. Two large windows on the main floor stood guard over a wide clearing and the black lake. Both windows gave off a yellow glow that lit the deck railing around the front of the building. Smoke curled from the top of a rough stone chimney on the near end, giving me a sense of warmth that cut through the chill.

  At the same spot, I turned to follow Fred. As firmly as I could, I coaxed my horse up the steep slope, at any moment fearing that either a cinch would come loose and I would slide right off the back to be trampled by the packhorse, or that my horse would just tip over from being on too steep a slope and smash down on top of me. I’d seen that happen in a dozen old movies and it always made me flinch.

  Miraculously neither happened and I made it up to the log stable behind the main building, breathing hard, but still seated on all the spots the saddle had rubbed raw.

  Fred dismounted and tied his horse to a long bar outside the back door of the lodge. I nudged my horse into place beside Fred’s packhorses and then did my best to dismount without kicking anyone or anything.

  I’d thought I was sore while sitting. Getting down, I felt so stiff it was a wonder I could move at all. My legs felt weak, almost as if my weight was too much for them. I leaned against the horse and took turns shifting from one foot to the other to give each a fair shot at recovery.

  “Here we are,” Fred said. “That wasn’t so bad, now was it?”

  Constance moved her horse into place beside my packhorse and slowly dismounted, obviously feeling some of the same aches that I did.

  “Ask me in the morning,” I said. “Assuming that I live that long.” I rubbed the back of my legs and then my shoulders. My body was so full of kinks I didn’t know where to rub first. My face felt like it had two inches of dust on it and if I smiled too hard, it would all cake right off, taking the first four layers of skin with it.