by Cheryl Klein
The library is in the brown, treeless part of town, just above East Main Street. It’s a prefab structure that looks elegant compared to the exhausted trailers and shacks fanning out behind it. The yards here are marked by sun-cracked Big Wheels, fence posts adorned with inverted purple bottles, dishwashers put out to pasture. When you’re poor you live in the open, a life exposed.
A library window poster promises, “Reading answers all your questions!” Below the slogan, children clutch books, looking satisfied. But when she tries the door, it’s locked. As far as she can tell, the hours aren’t posted anywhere. She sits down on the top step. It’s too hot to begin the walk back right away. She was excited that the library was so close, but Lilac Mines miles are longer than regular miles. Sweat drips between her smallish boobs, the bandage makes her hotter. For the first time since she cut her hair, she wishes it were long enough to put in a ponytail—the inch that rests on her neck is far too much. The dust has turned her black toenail polish to gray.
“It’s not open Wednesdays.”
Felix’s muscles tense, ready to run. Some redneck from one of the trailers will slaughter her for trespassing on this forsaken land. She looks up. A man with a ruddy, stubbly face shadowed by a blue baseball cap peers down from the back of a tall, muscular mule. The mule pulls a handmade metal cart with a bumper sticker: I brake for mules.
She exhales slowly. “I couldn’t find any hours posted.”
The man shrugs. “Gary Schipp, the guy who runs it, pretty much keeps the hours he feels like. But he never feels like coming on Wednesdays, seems like.”
“What kind of library doesn’t have regular hours?”
“This kind,” says the man.
Felix hasn’t been to a public library since high school. She went to the university library in college and now she frequents bookstores because she likes to drink coffee while she reads. Now that she’s made the effort, she believes the library should be open.
“Nice mule,” Felix says. “What’s his name?”
“Lilac,” says the man. He removes his hat and wipes his forehead with the back of his hand. “Kind of a long story. When I got him, I didn’t know nothing about mules. I was apprenticing with this old welder—that’s what I do for a living, since raising mules don’t pay much. I was apprenticing with this old guy, a Clamper, and he was just brimming with trivia about this town. The lost girl and the silver and all that. Most of it didn’t interest me much, but I’ve always had a soft spot for animals and when he said that they used to lose a mule a day—or even two—in the mines, well, that really struck me. Said it took two more mules to pull the body out of the mine shaft, this 1200-pound animal dragged down the mountain by its own kin, like some kinda mule funeral procession. The thought of it just disturbed me, I guess, and I found myself wanting to do right by mules.” He looks up. “You look like a city girl… I must be boring you.”
“No, not at all. I mean, I am—I’m from L.A.—but I’m not bored.”
Lilac waves his ears and flutters his silver-brown lips. He appears a tad bored, but in an understanding way, as if humoring senile grandparents.
“Yeah? You don’t say! I grew up in Hollywood.” The man looks like he was swaddled in horse blankets as a baby. Felix cannot picture him in Hollywood. “Never did anything but get in trouble there, though. It’s not for me.”
“I’m not sure it’s for me either,” Felix says. “So. the mules?”
“Right, the mules. Well, Lilac here was my first, this little runty baby, and I didn’t know nothing about them then, like I said. I thought it would be cute to name her Lilac, like a whatchamacallit, an homage. I thought all mules were girls, like calico cats, so I didn’t even think to ask about the sex. But the name had stuck by the time I found out he was a boy, and I couldn’t bring myself to change it to Lyle or nothing. It’s wild, though—’stead of thinking of my mule as a girl, I started to think of that little girl that got lost as a boy. Like Lilac was a boy’s name. And when I picture her wandering around all lonely down there, I picture her as this tomboyish kinda girl.”
Lilac shakes his head. The man adds, “I’m Ernie Janss, by the way.”
“Felix. Ketay. I’ve got a boy’s name, so, well…it’s really spooky, the whole Lilac Ambrose thing.” Spooky is not the right word for the alchemy of loss and fever and mystery in Felix’s stomach.
“I’ve heard people say they found bones up in the mine. Just here and there. I don’t know about that—this place was fulla hippies in the ’60s and ’70s, and I figure that if there was anything to be found, they made off with it a long time ago. Probably left a lot of crap, too. Probably had barbeques and sing-alongs and whatnot up there.
“Nice meeting you, Felix,” says Ernie, touching his baseball cap. “If you ever want to take a ride on a mule, I’m at all the fairs. Me and my daughter’ll be at the Lilac Mines Festival come spring. You enjoy your stay.”
“Thanks.”
Lilac and Ernie make a wide turn and crunch up the gravel road, the cart clattering behind them, toward a cluster of trailers.
She returns to the library Thursday afternoon; this time she called ahead. An old woman sits at a center library table with a stack of large-print mystery novels. When she finds a couple she likes, she checks them out and waves good-bye to the librarian, leaving Felix alone with Gary Schipp. She feels highly conspicuous, her Doc Marten Mary-Janes squeaking loudly as she crosses the floor. Everything here is on a small scale: the low ceiling, the narrow stacks, the miniature-golf pencils held by a juice glass.
In the back corner, there’s a computer. A sign next to the monitor says, “Internet access: Visit the circulation desk to put your name on the waiting list.” Felix looks around the empty library. Gary Schipp, a 50ish man in librarianesque half-glasses and a loud, not-so-librarianesque Hawaiian shirt, hunches over a book. He has not acknowledged her presence.
She clenches her fists. She’s checked her email once since arriving, at a café in town. But it’s been over a week. What if Eva was staying in some shady hostel in a former eastern bloc country, cut off from the Internet? Maybe she’s only recently made it to a developed city and has finally emailed her remorseful thoughts to Felix. Maybe she’s wondering, at this very minute, whether Felix will forgive her and take her back.
A few feet away, the computer stares blankly at Felix.
She takes what her Rock-Hard Abs ’n’ Enlightenment DVD would call a cleansing breath and turns her back to the computer. She tries to imagine herself as one of those kick-’im-to-the-curb girls on Rikki Lake. You are not even worth booting up for, Eva, she tries to think.
She walks over to the circulation desk and clears her throat. Gary Schipp lowers his glasses.
“Do you have, like, a local history section?” Felix asks.
Gary Schipp sighs. “You don’t know how to use a card catalog, do you?” His voice indicates he’s resigned to this fact. He gestures to an ancient set of cherry-colored drawers.
“No one does these days,” he continues. He is losing his hair an atypical way. A ring of gray-blond wisps remains, making him look like a monk with bangs. “Part of it, of course, is that there’s no money to overhaul the old system, but I have to admit, I like the old girl. All those delicate drawers and the typed cards. Each one is a little gem, don’t you think?”
“Like how sometimes an artist’s sketches are more interesting than the final painting or sculpture or whatever?” Felix considers.
“Exactly like that,” Gary agrees. “Now, you’re looking for local history? It’s in the third aisle, see where the Sweet Valley High display is? In back of that.”
Felix seats herself behind a cardboard cutout of the Wakefield twins and begins scanning the shelves. There are lots of books on the Gold Rush. Hikes to take in Gold Rush country. Maps to ghost towns in California and Nevada. Mechanical histories of the mining industry. Felix grew up in a world of soft, Spanish-derived names: Hermosa Beach, Rancho Palos Verdes, Santa Monica; she
and Eva had their first date at a vegetarian co-op café called Luna Tierra Sol. Now she encounters harsh tumbleweed names, mineral-sounding names: Chemung, Chloride City, Rhyolite, Leadfield, Salt Springs, Calsun. Places that promise a hard life.
The books favor Wild West tales and well-preserved towns. If a sometime boomtown is now a few crumbling foundations, it doesn’t seem to matter what happened there. The books conflate history and tourism. Most have exactly one paragraph about Lilac Mines: girl got lost, town got its name. Make sure to visit the old soda fountain and see the Gold Rush Melodrama at the old theater.
One book stands out, perhaps because it does so little to announce itself. It has a thin, taped spine with no title. When Felix dislodges it from the others, she sees that it’s staple-bound. The cover is hand-lettered: A Brief History of Lilac Mines by Lucas Twentyman. Felix smiles. The title sounds like that Stephen Hawking book her dad read, A Brief History of Time. She likes to think that the town’s history might be as objective and as profound as the laws of physics. But the book—which appears to be self-published—was copyrighted in 1974, so Lucas Twentyman pre-dates Stephen Hawking.
The book is missing many of the trappings of regular history books. There’s no index, no “about the author,” no intriguing blurb on the back cover. Felix pries open the stiff cover and starts with the foreword.
Dearest Readers,
I write this as our town is in danger of, once again, succumbing to the whitewashing sands of time, of becoming a ghost town for the second time in its unlikely history. This, dear readers, is precisely why I write: to preserve, to fight the Powers That Be. Let little Lilac tell her story, from the earliest settlers to the tragic fate of Miss Lilac Ambrose to the noble folk that manned the sawmill in the industrious nineteen-forties.
The ’60s-revolutionary-meets-doddering-historian tone calms down after the first few pages. Without an index, Felix flips. She is hungry for something, and she can’t devour the pages fast enough. She learns that Lilac Mines gets up to 15 feet of snow in the winter. That the remaining trees are sugar pines. That, before the town was East Beedleborough, it was Ragtown. When travelers made it over a particularly difficult pass in the Sierras, they washed out their clothes and spread them out to dry wherever they could. Only rags remained, spider-webbed over the sagebrush like a warning. Finally she finds Lilac.
Little is known about Harold Ambrose or his daughter, Young Lilac. As he was a working man (though, as foreman, he did better than some), it is not surprising that his name fails to appear in society registers or, in fact, much of anywhere besides mining documents and a grocery tab before he made unwanted headlines after Lilac died (presumably). Ambrose left his native Milwaukee in the mid-eighteen-eighties, when Lilac was a baby. Although newspaper accounts would later list her mother as “deceased,” there are no records of a female Ambrose being born in Milwaukee in eighteen-eighty-four. There is, however, record of a Lilac Zaide, born to a “Gertie” Zaide in April of that year. The father is listed as “unknown.” This leads us to conclude that Lilac was either an illegitimate child or not born in Milwaukee after all. I was hoping to travel to Milwaukee to investigate this matter in person, but I am of limited means at the moment.
Well, at least he’s honest, Felix thinks. Lucas Twentyman wins when it comes to Lilac Ambrose minutiae—her hair was “said to be a golden-brown shade;” her father was promoted to foreman just a month before the accident; an elaborate funeral was held, as if an abundance of flowers could compensate for the lack of a body. For the first time since arriving in Lilac Mines, she feels like she might have a place here. As she reads, she is at Lilac’s funeral, inhaling the soapy sweet smell of lilies and throwing herself on the empty coffin, her broken body embracing Lilac’s missing one.
At the same time, the gaps and question marks send chills down her gauze-wrapped spine. The story is the same as in other books. The holes are the same. The book includes the same group photo of the angsty miners that was in the visitors’ center. The caption says, “Miners circa 1898. Silicosis, a lung disease, was a common ailment.” No names. She’s angry and intrigued.
She tucks Twentyman’s book and the one that had the best photographs under her arm and returns to the circulation desk.
“What about local newspapers?” Felix asks. A Brief History has grainy reproductions of the more sordid headlines from the East Beedleborough Examiner.
“We’ve got the Lilac Mines Chronicle going back to 1983, but if you want anything older than that, you’ll have to go to the main branch in Columbia. They’ve got some originals and some issues on microfiche,” Gary says. He stamps the cards in her books. “Luke Twentyman, eh? This one hasn’t been checked out in quite a while. He’s sort of a local eccentric,” Gary explains.
“You mean he’s crazy or something?” Felix wants the book to be true. She wants books to be true.
“No, no—at least not by small town standards,” Gary smiles. “You know how we are out here.”
“Mm.” Twentyman—when she hears it aloud, she remembers: This is her new boss’s last name. There can’t be too many Twentymans in town.
“Anything else?”
Felix means to say no, but she hears herself say, “Can I use the Internet?”
Finally, the name “Eva London” lights up her inbox as if accompanied by a small red flag icon. Nervously, Felix clicks and reads:
hi everyone,
berlin is amazing. a welcome change from prague, which was beautiful, of course, but so touristy already. if i’d been born even five years earlier, i know i would’ve been chillin’ with all the other ex-pats, but c’est la vie.
but berlin—this is a real city. this morning we went to the jewish museum—so powerful—and took a walk by the spree river, which is overrun with these adorable little black ducks. haus am checkpoint charlie was pretty cheesy (lots of berlin wall for sale), but it was cool seeing the funky cars people built to sneak across the border. they managed to smuggle someone in an isetta! it’s amazing what people will do to get to a safe place.
an interesting fact about the city: a huge percentage of the “historic” buildings here are actually replicas. the originals were badly damaged in the war, and afterward, the re-builders just made a giant photocopy. maybe the citizens felt better surrounded by history, or what looked like history. between the dreary communist apartments in east berlin and the new “old” buildings in west berlin and the club we went to last night (abandoned storefront-turned-pool hall), it’s a totally schizo city. i love it.
everything’s covered in graffiti, even the graveyards.
next stop: munich.
till then,
e
Felix gulps. Apparently, Eva has forgotten to take Felix out of her address book; now she’s just one of “everyone.” The two vague “we’s” in the email dance and gloat. For the first time since the break-up, Felix seethes. How dare Eva relegate her to travelogue reader. She deserves a personalized story, a real explanation, a confession: Kate snores. I miss you. How dare she think that Felix will be content with the official story.
She looks at the books in her bag. More official stories getting her nowhere. She needs to rake her fingers along the floor of the mineshaft until Lilac’s ghost asks, What’s all that noise?
SQUATTERS
Al: Lilac Mines, 1965
On the ride to Beedleborough, Jody and Imogen debate who should get the clerk’s attention, and who should avoid it.
“We want to get in and out of the store fast, right?” says Imogen. “And if I’m the one asking for help, I’m going to be waiting behind every white person who walks in there.”
“But at least you look normal,” says Jody, steering the Edsel down a street bigger than Calla Boulevard but smaller than most of the avenues in downtown Fresno. From the back seat, Anna Lisa watches taverns and barber shops roll by. Her palms are sweaty. “When people see you, they think, ’There’s a Negro’—it makes sense, even if they don’t like it. They don’
t think, ’What is that freak of nature?’ ”
Imogen pets the blonde fuzz on the back of Jody’s neck. “You’re not a freak, you’re my handsome butch.”
“I’m just telling it like it is. And put your hand down. Someone’s gonna see.”
They have chosen a department store in Beedleborough as their destination because Lilac Mines is too small to shop for menswear in. People talk. A boy that Edith dated when she was dating boys works at the one apparel shop in Lilac Mines. He threatened to hurt Shallan, Edith’s butch, if Edith or her friends came in there again.
In the end, they decide Imogen will take the lead. Jody and Anna Lisa hang back by the ties and socks, as if working their way up from accessories to meatier items: shirts, suits. The men’s section is paneled with dark wood and smells like shoe polish.
“Go talk to him,” Jody says, gesturing with her chin to one of the clerks. “He looks like family.”
Imogen shakes her head. “Naw, he’s a bigot.”
“How do you know?”
“I can tell, okay?”
Imogen waits while another clerk helps a thick-waisted man select a belt. Then she approaches.
“Excuse me, I’m looking for some nice shirts for my husband’s birthday.”
While the thin-lipped clerk talks to Imogen, Jody and Al load their arms with clothes and sneak off to the fitting room. Al’s heart feels as if it might burst out of the first cotton shirt she tries on.
A few minutes later, there’s a soft knock on the dressing room door. Al freezes. “Imogen,” Jody mouths, and opens the door.
“Smooth.” Imogen nods approvingly, and slips inside. The three of them are inches apart.
“We gotta get Sylvie to cut your hair, though,” says Jody, keeping her voice low. “That’ll be the finishing touch.”
Al sees herself in their faces, but she turns toward the mirror behind her to check if it’s true. The crisp white shirt makes her shoulders look square. The black slacks are sleek and formal. They make Al think of dance floors. Her shoulder-length brown hair crouches in a low ponytail at the back of her neck.
