Lilac Mines

by Cheryl Klein

  Calla says she’s just about to make lemonade, and would Lilac like to join her? Lilac thinks that if lemonade were a person, it would be Calla. They’re about to go inside the house when they hear the clatter of hooves and the slap of reins. Moon Avenue is a quiet street at the edge of town, so it’s worth sticking around to see who might be coming down the street. The hooves belong to mules, a gray one and a chocolate-colored one. They pull a dead, spotted mule who doesn’t make any noise at all on a buckboard behind them. The afternoon holds its breath as death intersects the meeting of two young living girls.

  “Do you think they know?” Calla asks in a hushed voice. “When the mules go down in the mines, do you think they know that there’s no way all of them can survive down there?”

  The team passes by them with a gust of hot animal air. Lilac has seen plenty of mules. She has seen the black substance that lurks in the creases of her father’s skin, no matter how hard he scrubbed during his Saturday night bath. But there is something about this dead mule. Its eyes are open, its big head facing them. It stares at Lilac and Calla from beneath long, girlish lashes. Daring them. The other two just trudge along, because what is there to do but trudge along?

  Lilac grabs Calla’s hand. It is soft and cold. Calla squeezes Lilac’s palm: I know.

  Until this summer, Lilac has never noticed how new East Beedleborough is. It’s not so different from the other towns she’s lived in—Reno and Angels Camp—just higher in the mountains and more hastily erected. Wherever she’s lived, she’s always been sure that real life takes place elsewhere. Lady So-and-So in her discarded history book might get beheaded, but she would never have to pull apart a chicken and a rooster who were noisily ensuring that there would be spots of blood in her fried eggs.

  But this summer East Beedleborough sweats possibility from every pore. Maybe it’s because Calla works at the newspaper, and Lilac is suddenly privy to all the curious things happening around town. Lilac watches her set the individual letters backward in thin metal trays. THGIF ENIM NI DERUJNI NAM, LLAH NOSKRALC TA WOHS NOIHSAF ’SEIDAL, ENIAM EHT SEGNEVA TLEVESOOR. And the editorial headlines, written by Barrett Lyman under a variety of pseudonyms and meant to stir up just enough controversy: ?YRUTNEC TXEN EHT FO LATEM SUOICERP EHT REVLIS SI, ?NIS FO NED RO NUF SSELMRAH: RETAEHT DRIB REVLIS. Barrett, a red-faced man whose nervous energy makes Lilac want to curl up and take a nap, hovers because he doesn’t want Calla to mess up. Lilac hovers because she likes watching Calla’s long fingers spell out their secret language.

  The town at this moment is a rattlesnake, shaking its tail as it gets ready to shed its skin. Anyone who doesn’t heed its warning will be bitten or left behind as the snake slithers into the 20th century. The whole town quivers: hammers pound new buildings into being. Pickaxes carve out the inside of the mountain. Trees fall. Hooves tap out an irregular rhythm.

  As soon as school ends—for good, since Lilac is 16 now—she spends every free moment with Calla at the newspaper office. Lilac watches the younger Hogans—Eva, Robert and Meggie—while Calla sails smoothly through her typesetting, pausing only to rub her sinewy forearms. Calla’s stepmother appreciates the break, and Calla works diligently and flawlessly despite Lilac’s presence, so no one complains except Barrett Lyman, who frequently hints that proper young ladies don’t hang on someone else’s family like a mosquito on a mule.

  “Are you calling the Hogans mules?” Lilac says sweetly, in front of Calla’s father, who is Barrett’s boss.

  Calla usually finishes making tomorrow’s news by the late afternoon. There is a two-hour gap before she has to begin helping her stepmother with dinner, and she and Lilac like to see how far they can travel during this golden-pink time. To the school, the Silver Bird Theater, the church. They walk farther each day, pushing against the sinking sun that marks Calla’s curfew. One day they make it all the way to the edge of town. They stop and stare at each other, then begin to laugh.

  “We don’t have to stop here,” Lilac says. There are just a few miners’ shacks among the sugar pines and tough shrubs. They are all empty—the miners spend their whole lives in the dark, and most of them don’t have families.

  “Where’s your house?” Calla asks. “Is it nearby?”

  “Further up the mountain,” says Lilac.

  “We ought to go there. I’d like to see it.”

  “There’s nothing to see,” Lilac says, not for the first time. Calla lives in light: in a whitewashed house with a yard perfumed by jasmine, on a street that the city promises will be lit by real gas lamps within a year. Lilac likes leaving her small, dark house to visit Calla there.

  “Does it look like this?” Calla points to the nearest shack. It is built of plain brown boards, with two droopy-eyed windows looking out over a small porch. A second room has been tacked on the back, so maybe this particular miner does have a family.

  “Actually,” Lilac admits, “it looks almost exactly like this.” The curtains in the window are made of mattress ticking, just like the ones Lilac sewed for the house she shares with her father. There is a pile of silvery tin cans at the side of the house, a shiny inside-out mountain. This, too, matches the Ambrose residence.

  “It’s odd, don’t you think?” says Lilac. “Almost as if there’s only so many ways of being in this world. Some nights I go to bed, listen to the coyotes yap at the moon, and I feel so lonely. But probably two houses away is some other girl thinking the same thing.”

  “Or at least a couple of miles away,” says Calla with her half-smile.

  The sun turns the forest into a checkerboard of light and shadow at this time of day. Calla is sliced into pieces by the shadow-branches of a young black oak: a hollow cheek, a sliver of eyelet, a curve of bustled breast. Lilac wants to gather up all the pieces in her skirt and carry them inside the house. “Cal?”

  “What is it.?”

  “Let’s go inside.”

  “But why? It’s not our house.”

  Lilac can’t say why. To determine whether she has a double? To see if Calla will hold up in such a scruffy structure or crumble to gold dust? To escape the ticking sun? “Come on, let’s just pretend it’s our house… please? It’s so hot out here.”

  To Lilac’s surprise, Calla follows her in. The house is not the same as the Ambroses’ on the inside, but it belongs to the same set of circumstances. There is a metal-framed bed, sagging in the middle, a table spotted with wax, newspaper wedged between the boards. Nevertheless, it is someone else’s bed and wax and newspaper, and being here is exhilarating.

  “I remember this day—a big typo on the opinion page,” Calla says, examining a corner of insulation. “I was so embarrassed, but I guess it doesn’t matter much now.”

  “You could read this whole place,” Lilac marvels. “You could write this whole place.”

  And so Calla gives Lilac a tour of the cracks. She runs her inky-clean fingers over the newsprint, spotting bits of words that lead to stories. “JAM,” she says, poking at a bit of paper next to the stovepipe. “Now that could be about the log jam at the mill last fall, or it could be about Mrs. Burke’s prize-winning blackberry jam.”

  When they have read every non-obscured word in the house, they flop onto the bed, exhausted. The springs squeak beneath them.

  “Sounds like my parents’ bed,” Calla laughs. “My room is just on the other side of theirs. Isn’t that dreadful? Believe me, it’s no surprise at all that they have three children together.”

  “Do you think you’ll do that someday? With your husband?” Lilac asks.

  Calla sits up onto her elbow. “Well, of course, I suppose. I mean you have to, if you want children. That’s how the world regenerates itself. Oh goodness—I didn’t tell you something you didn’t know yet, did I? I forget that you’re younger than me sometimes—”

  “No,” Lilac assures her. “It just seems… unpleasant. And I hate doing things I don’t like. I mean, I don’t even like cleaning the chicken coop. I can’t imagine…” Except, for
the first time, Lilac can imagine. Lying here with Calla, looking up at the place where her thin neck meets her ample chest, the things adults do late at night seem as interesting as sneaking around someone else’s house.

  She puts her hand on Calla’s face. Calla’s mouth forms a Valentine-pink O. She puts her lips on Calla’s lips. Difference and sameness are slippery things. Calla is her double and her opposite. She too wears a corset and cotton petticoats and a picture of her mother in a locket (though Lilac has just a snip of red fabric in her own necklace). It’s not like kissing a boy, all angles and stubble, and then having to pinch his sensitive parts with the hand he is not pressing against the splintery siding of the schoolhouse.

  And yet, Calla is so different from her. Her strong, clean ink smell. Her softness pressing against the armor of her undergarments.

  “Lilac,” Calla whispers, and Lilac envisions her name on a shred of newspaper: “LILAC.” Now, this could be a story about the flower show at Clarkson Hall… or it could be the story of how two girls invented an entirely new kind of love in a place where new things were happening all the time.

  Calla sits up, then stands. In a dazed voice, she says, “I’m famished. I’m dying for some bread and jam. Do you want to see if we can find some?”

  They run. In order to get to the empty shacks and kiss and play house before dark, they have to run from the newspaper office to the edge of town. They walk down the most crowded streets to avoid attention, but it barely seems like they need to. East Beedleborough is full of people doing crazy things: miners drinking in the streets, mail-order brides looking for East Coast delicacies in the most general of general stores, Indians dressed like white men, men dancing with ore-crushing machines that could become bone-crushing machines in one careless moment.

  Having a nibble of bread and a nibble of each other’s earlobes in some miner’s sleepy cabin doesn’t seem like such a strange way to pass an afternoon. They rotate houses, each becoming an island of what-could-be. They never eat more than could be reasonably attributed to mice. They always smooth the bed covers after rumpling them.

  “We’re like Goldilocks, Cal,” Lilac says over strips of salted pork in a shack with an uneven floor.

  “But it all seems just right,” Calla puzzles. “And I think there’s something more grown up about our particular fairytale. I think we’re more like Snow White and Rose Red.”

  “Which one am I?” Lilac asks. She wriggles her hand between Calla’s petticoat and bloomers, searching for the warm bulge of her belly. Lilac is a miner, just like her father, searching for silver in the dark.

  “Oh, you’re Snow White,” says Calla. “You’re the one people remember.”

  One day, a big bear comes home. Or maybe it’s the woodsman, depending which fairytale they’re in. They are lying on a twin bed with oily sheets, their stocking feet on the pillow and their heads dangling over the foot of the bed, Calla’s loose blonde hair swaying next to Lilac’s brown braid, tied with the rosebud ribbon Calla gave her.

  They see the man’s face upside down first. It is as red as Barrett Lyman’s, with two large dark nostrils steaming like a bear’s would. Lilac feels the blood rush to her head as she sits up, hoping that things will be different when she rights herself. But no, the face is still there and still angry.

  The miner coughs as he yells at them. Lilac’s head throbs. It’s like he’s yelling at them through a pillow. He wants to know what the hell they’re doing here, don’t they know what private property is? Don’t they know he could get in trouble if two young ladies were seen leaving his cabin? This has never occurred to Lilac. She and Calla sputter apologies. Lilac tries to shrink to her most childlike. She sews a story about Calla not feeling well; she needed a place to lie down. The miner pushes them out with big cattle-prod hands, coughing the whole time.

  The look on his face stays with Lilac. He was coming off his own day, coming home sick maybe, living his own story. And Lilac and Calla weren’t supposed to be a part of it. They were not on an island, splashing in sea foam. Whatever they were doing, it was not meant to be done in this place.

  The miner keeps their secret, whatever part of it he knows. At least, neither Harry Ambrose nor Danis or Olive Hogan says anything to the girls, but it grows harder to pretend. The heat weighs Calla down, and she staggers under her layers of clammy clothing. She trails behind Lilac, who wears nothing between her brown gingham dress and thin bloomers. She figures no one can call her on this impropriety, since noticing it would be an impropriety on the caller’s part. This is one of the benefits of not having a mother.

  Now they walk through the woods, picking flowers and kissing in the low branches of trees. But Calla is slow to start and quick to stop. In mid-August, Barrett recruits her to help him with a two-part story on The Life Of An Indian In Calaveras County, so two afternoons each week, Lilac loses Calla to an old Washoe man who tells dubious stories about the cowboy-and-Indian days. Barrett wants to sell the story to a popular East Coast magazine.

  Lilac begins to send Calla postcards. She mails them from the post office, to the post office. It is perhaps a bit melodramatic, but she wants to make a point about how faraway Calla is, typesetting in the next room. She inscribes the postcards with plans ranging from tame (berry-picking) to outrageous (mountain lion hunting). She wants all their plans to be true, and writing them down feels like tossing a coin into a well, wishing and staring into the mossy void.

  One day Calla crosses into the post office, as Lilac is handing Mr. Crabb a card recalling that fabulous day they caught the stagecoach robber. In addition to fabricating plans for the two of them, she has also started to recall events of the past. The summer is pressing to a close. The heat makes her short of breath. She feels as if she only has a few weeks to create a lifetime.

  “Lilac,” says Calla with a delicate nod, “I believe we have plans to pick strawberries today, am I right?”

  Barrett pops his ugly red head into the post office. An ink pen perches above his ear, and Lilac imagines the sharp end poking him in the eye. “It’s not strawberry season,” he says.

  “Barrett, I believe this concerns Lilac and myself,” Calla says with uncharacteristic firmness.

  Lilac and Calla walk quickly and silently to the edge of town. Calla’s skirts and bosom bounce around her straight spine, like kids circling a maypole. Lilac is almost as tall as Calla, but her legs are shorter, and she walks with a step-step-skip. When they reach the wooded outskirts, they are both panting and drenched in sweat.

  “I’m so glad you came out with me today,” Lilac says. She doesn’t like the hard, worried look on Calla’s face, but she’s sure she can will it away.

  “Lilac—”

  “Wouldn’t it be wonderful if there were strawberries in the mountains? Your cheeks are so pink right now, they make me think of strawberries… “

  “Barrett wants to marry me.” Something about the way she says it makes Lilac’s stomach boil. As if the whole future hinges on what Barrett wants to do, and Calla is just recounting the events objectively, like a good reporter. “We were watching the little Washoe children play, and I said weren’t they precious—somehow someone else’s rowdy kids are more interesting than your own excitable brothers and sisters—and the next thing I know Barrett’s talking about having children, the two of us.” She blushes beneath her already-red cheeks. “I can’t say I didn’t see it coming. Some things are just… inevitable.”

  “Cal! That’s not true. What about free will?”

  “I said yes,” Calla says softly. Her eyes are on the ground, which is crosshatched with pine needles.

  “Don’t say it like you’re embarrassed,” Lilac replies. She has already embarrassed herself for love. Mr. Crabb thinks she’s crazy. Her father thinks she’s lost and wild. She has no future to speak of, having long ago played mean tricks on the only boy who ever showed an interest in her. But at least it was for love.

  “Lilac, you know I love you.” Her voice is so low it mig
ht just be a rustle in the trees. Calla’s brown eyes are a question mark.

  “Do you know what having a husband means?” Lilac demands. “It means he owns your time, you can’t even read a book or pick your nose, or…”

  “Lilac!”

  “All you can do is raise his kids and cook his supper.” She hasn’t spent much time around anyone who is married, but she knows they function as a unit. The man with his important business and gaping needs, the woman with her busy hands. Lilac hates work and can’t imagine doing it for an entire family, even if she could find one that would have her.

  “They’ll be my children, too,” Calla says.

  This causes Lilac to burst into tears. Calla is already embroidering the future, the one without Lilac in it.

  “And you won’t have any time to go for walks with me,” Lilac finishes, her mouth full of salt. This she knows: what she and Calla do, whatever it is exactly, is off the map of what young women in East Beedleborough are supposed to do with their time. It is stolen, hidden, it is an underground river that doesn’t feed into any lake or ocean. At least not for thousands of miles.

  “Please don’t cry,” Calla begs. “You’ll always be my best friend.”

  “No,” Lilac says. She feels her bones shrink inside her, becoming as small and dense as diamonds. “I won’t. It’s all or nothing, Cal.”

  “What does that mean?” Calla wrings Lilac’s braid in her hands. Lilac whips it away. “Sneaking around other people’s houses with you till we’re old and gray? Not living in a nice house with Barrett, who is smart and lets me help with his stories? And if I look at things the other way around, well, it’s just as complicated.”

  “You could be a school teacher,” Lilac pleads. “You’re smart enough. I could disguise myself as a boy and work in the mines. No one would know, it’s so dark down there. I know, I went with my father once.”