BURYING ZIMMERMAN (The River Trilogy, book 2)

by Edward A. Stabler

  At the bottom of the shaft, I inhabited a small world that smelled like mud and decay. The bucket held only a soup of wet leaves and an old tin cup. When I ran my hands over the dirt walls of the mine shaft, I concluded that I couldn't climb out – the walls were vertical. One side of the shaft had been dug out at the bottom, and a low opening extended horizontally in that direction, into cool and utter darkness.

  I learned later that this extension was a "drift" in search of a pay streak. A gold vein could lie along the ancient streambed, which might have been above and uncorrelated to the current creek. So these placer mines were dug down to bedrock and then drifted for twenty-some feet. Beyond that distance it was too much work to haul the dirt back to the shaft and lift it out with a windlass. Instead the miners would move up or down the hillside, dig another hole to bedrock, and drift again.

  The miners who dug this hole had found nothing and moved on, replacing the windlass with the worthless plank, pulling up the ladder, and not bothering to haul out all of the gold-poor dirt. I don't know why they left the bucket and the rope.

  Kneeling below ground at eight years old, I didn't realize I was in a placer mine, and I thought the horizontal tunnel might be the way out. Maybe it led to stairs, or even a door. I could tell from exploring its aperture with my hands that it was framed by logs. I reached an arm into the tunnel, then crawled forward on my hands and knees.

  Because I couldn't see, I stopped every few feet to feel for the walls and ceiling. For someone my size, the tunnel was spacious enough. I had to fully extend an arm and lean to reach the walls on either side. And I had almost enough room overhead to stand up. Rough-hewn wooden posts and crossbeams supported the dirt roof every few feet. About ten feet in, I nudged a post in the center of the tunnel and crawled around it. I hit a shallow puddle and considered turning back.

  Then I sensed a presence in front of me – the dirt wall at the end of the tunnel. I reached to touch it, finding no magic stairway or door. I prodded the dirt in several places to make sure. Near the floor I found a pile of stones and dirt. I swept my hand rightward and shrieked as I touched dead fur and something that felt like a face. Heart racing, I no longer wanted to explore an unfathomable darkness on my hands and knees. I wanted to see the sky again, immediately. I sprung into a crouch and started shuffling back the way I'd come.

  But I'd forgotten about the central post, and slammed directly into it. I fell backward into the puddle and my eyes blinked away tears. Before I could gather myself, I heard a thump followed by a crack, and then a thudding and filling sound and the smell of fresh dirt. The tunnel roof was caving in!

  Hyperventilating, I flipped onto my hands and knees and clawed at the space in front of me. My knee bumped one end of the fallen post. The rest of it was buried in the slope of dirt before me. My hands groped madly in search of an opening. Along the left wall I found a channel, then squeezed through and crawled as fast as I could back toward the shaft. When I emerged from the tunnel, I got to my feet and gulped stale air with my hands on my knees. Centering myself at the base of the shaft, I looked up toward the daylight and began to yell.

  ***

  Drew, as it turned out, had made the reasonable assumption that I'd found a frog to catch or some colorful stones to collect on the bend above our fishing hole. When he realized I'd been gone a while, he walked up the bank and around the curve to look for me. I didn't appear, so he started calling my name. He pushed further upstream before realizing I might have wandered back along the route we'd taken. Maybe I'd slipped past him unnoticed. So he'd backtracked down past the fishing hole and gone a few bends beyond. Then he remembered my reticence about the copperhead and decided I was still somewhere upstream. He reversed course again and started to sweat.

  ***

  I don't know how long I stood at the bottom of the shaft, looking up and yelling "Drew!" and "Help!" every few seconds. Long enough for my muddy feet and hands to chill on a warm June day. And long enough that my throat began to burn from exertion. With no reference points except the distant tree-tops, I lost my sense of time. And when tilting my head finally made my neck sore and I had to look down and rest with my eyes tearing up, I thought I heard a voice. I held my breath and listened hard. Nothing for a few seconds, and then a drawn-out call.

  "Hello-o-o!"

  I replied with a piercing "Help!" then held my breath again and stared skyward.

  First one backlit head broke into the frame, then a second. All I noticed was that one of my discoverers was wearing a cap and the other wasn't. Both were shading their eyes to see better into the darkness.

  "What are you doing down there, buddy?" The cap-less face leaned further into the frame. Its voice seemed young but strong, and more rural than the ones I knew. Before I could answer, the other face spoke with a girl's voice.

  "Did you fall in? Are you hurt?"

  I answered yes and no, and that I couldn't get out. They asked me my name and where I came from, and I told them I was from Seven Locks, and that I'd been fishing with my brother before venturing off on my own. I heard them exchange a few words that I couldn't make out.

  "Is that a rope down there?" the man asked me loudly. He lifted his eyes to look around, then focused back on me. "We ain't got no windlass or ladder up here to get you out."

  I grabbed the broken plank with the rope wrapped around it and held it up to show them.

  "Go on and unwind that rope. Count every loop out loud."

  I counted from one to eight out loud.

  "Now find the other end. Pull it toward you hand over hand, and count each pull out loud."

  I pulled until I'd counted to ten and reached the bucket.

  "OK, good," the man said. He exchanged a few more words with his partner, then turned back to me. "You said you brother was fishing near here, right? I'm going to find him, and Jessie will stay here with you. Don't worry, Owen – we'll get you out." And then both faces were gone.

  My faith and self-confidence were badly frayed, and seconds after the faces disappeared I let out another cry for help. But Jessie reappeared immediately to assure me she hadn't left. And because her position had shifted a little, her face was better lit.

  "When I was little," she said, trying to cheer me up, "our dog Coots fell in an old dry well. He was gone for days before a neighbor heard him barking. But we got him out and he was good as new." She shaded her eyes to peer into the mine and I noticed a couple of curls had escaped from under her flat cap. "After that, Coots decided there was no use running off anymore. I don't think he ever missed another dinner!" She smiled at the recollection, but I was stuck on "gone for days."

  Jessie engaged me enough to keep my mind off my cold extremities, drenched legs and torso, and aching shoulder. Left alone, I might have curled up with my knees against my chest at the bottom of the shaft and sobbed. Instead I felt more hopeful by the time I heard an indistinct male voice. Jessie turned away to answer, and then there were three faces peering down at me, and I recognized Drew.

  "Owen, you little rat! What happened?" I started to explain that I'd been following a deer, but I could tell that he was listening to something the other man was saying. I saw him nod, then retreat out of the frame. Within seconds he was back, extending his fishing rod over the shaft.

  "OK, Alphonse. Henry here has got this all figured out. I'm going to drop my line down to you, and you're going to hook it onto the free end of the rope. Not the end with the bucket. Can you do that, Owen?" I nodded and he spooled out the line. "Careful with that hook!"

  When the hook reached the mud near my feet, I impaled the free end of the rope and Drew reeled it straight up. The rod and faces disappeared, and then Drew was climbing down toward me, holding the taut rope and leaning back with his feet braced against the shaft wall. He stepped down onto the mud floor and knelt to look at me.

  "I'm sorry I lost track of you, Owen." Now my chin fell and I couldn't hold back the tears. Drew put his hand on my ribs as I choked back sobs. "It's OK, pal
. You're a brave guy. Now let's get you out of here."

  He untied the rope from the bucket, curled several snug wraps around my chest below my armpits, then knotted it against my breast-bone as I wiped my eyes. Instructing me to keep both hands tight on the rope near the knot, he lifted me up until I was standing on his shoulders. Then he called out, and I began to rise in a stop-and-go rhythm. Henry and Jessie were pulling me out.

  When I reached the lip, the world opened onto a bright June day, and I had to squint at first. "Well done, Owen!" Jessie said as she pulled me away from the shaft and Henry held the rope, feet braced on the base of the mound. He got up grinning and I got my first clear view of him. About Drew's age, with an open and lightly freckled face, blue eyes, dirty blond hair. But when he untied the knot on my chest, it was his calloused, dust-colored hands that impressed me the most. Especially the left one, where his ring-finger was missing beyond the middle knuckle.

  ***

  As we walked down the hill toward our fishing hole, Henry and Jessie conversed with Drew, who led me by the hand. My relief at being out of the mine had ebbed into a frazzled numbness that left me barely able to put one mud-drenched foot in front of another. But even if I hadn't been too exhausted to interpret the scene, I would have been too young. Instead it took years of thinking back on that day's events for me to get a better perspective.

  Henry and Jessie had been panning for gold a bit upstream from where I'd encountered the deer. When they'd heard Drew calling my name and drawing closer, they'd packed their gear into a canvas bag and slipped into the woods, not wanting to be seen working a stretch of creek where they'd successfully panned out colors and flakes. They'd retreated up the other end of the mine trail, but it wasn't until the rushing sound of the creek diminished that they heard my cries for help. When they found me and I told them I had been fishing with Drew, they already had a good sense of where he was.

  I don't know if the connection between Drew and Jessie started even before Drew climbed down to help me, or whether it began on the walk down to Rock Run, in the charged atmosphere of a successful rescue. But even though I was dead on my feet, I couldn't help but notice how Jessie pulled off her cap to shake free her auburn hair. And how she turned back more than once to smile at Drew while answering a question or echoing a thought. She had darting green eyes that reminded me of fireflies.

  Leading us down the path, Henry had less to say than Jessie. We got to the fishing hole and Drew pointed out the undercut bank, but Henry spat and said we'd have had better luck at Cabin John Creek, which was practically in our backyard. As Drew explained that we'd fished every hole in that creek already, Henry ran his hand with the severed finger through his hair and squinted at Jessie, whose attention was focused on Drew. Henry shifted his eyes to Drew and then back to Jessie, but she didn't seem to notice.

  Like Drew, Gig Garrett was nineteen years old in 1893, and Jessie was his girl. Gig and Henry had grown up in the same household and could have been fraternal twins. But Henry must have long since realized that his adopted brother was a quicksilver version of himself, and that Gig's impulsive spirit and dissembling charm made him more interesting in Jessie's eyes. When Henry squinted at whatever circuit was arcing between Jessie and Drew on that June afternoon, could he have sensed that it would be enough to inflame our lives?

  Chapter 3

  Fifteen months after she helped rescue me from the mine, Jessie Delaney was found dead in the wooded creek below the aqueduct bridge at Widewater. We learned later that her windpipe had been crushed, but the coroner declared her injuries "consistent with a fall from the bridge." Jessie was the first and only real love of Drew's life, and after she died I often caught him staring absently into space. He still called me Alphonse, but the pranks and tickling ended.

  The police came to talk to him, and it must have been Drew who steered them to Jessie's parents in Williamsport. And to the Zimmerman family, also in Williamsport, and their son Henry and adopted son Gilbert "Gig" Garrett. Garrett had been seeing Jessie until she took a job at Anglers Inn to be near Drew in Cabin John. And Garrett disappeared right after Jessie's death, finally surfacing eighteen months later in Alaska, at a gold-mining camp on the Yukon River.

  I never saw Gig Garrett alive. I was nine years old in 1894 when he fled after strangling Jessie, and eight years later I met his charred corpse in the smoking ruin of his cabin. But Jessie told Drew a few stories about Garrett that she'd heard while growing up, like how the Zimmermans adopted him and how he got his nickname. So what I know about Garrett I heard from Drew – mostly in the days before they killed each other in 1902.

  Gilbert Garrett was born in 1874 in Georgetown. That made him Drew's age, but unlike Drew he had parents who didn't amount to much. His father would travel around the area with a painting crew, but he didn't always come home between one job and another, and sometimes he came home broke, having spent his earnings at the nearest tavern.

  And then before Gilbert turned four, his father vanished – disappeared from the river span of Chain Bridge while he and his crew were working. It was getting late on a winter afternoon and the painters were squaring away the work site, when something must have spooked a horse on the bridge. Whatever it was made the horse try to reverse direction and sent the empty caisson it was pulling swerving across the bridge. The painting crew scattered, reassembling once the driver got his horse settled and caisson straightened out.

  That's when one of the men realized Garrett's father was gone. When the crew was finally sure he wasn't on the bridge, they climbed down to the water, but that stretch below Little Falls has deadly currents and the river was running high and cold. Fishermen found the body three days later, down near Fletcher's boathouse.

  After his father died, Gilbert and his sister went to live with their father's mother in Georgetown, because their own mother wasn't up to the task of raising them. She eventually ran off to Pittsburgh with a worker on the painting crew who already had children and didn't want two more. But once Gilbert got to be eleven or twelve, Grandma Garrett couldn't stop him from hanging around the Georgetown streets and wharves.

  When the canal boats reached Georgetown, they'd usually lie at the wharf for a day or two waiting their turn to unload coal. Kids who were boating with their father or parents would go swimming or visit the candy stores on M Street, and the adults would start preparing the boat for the week-long run back to Cumberland. That meant provisions would be brought on board and sometimes lie unattended on deck while other tasks were handled.

  Gilbert learned how to exploit these opportunities. Moving quickly but never hurrying, he would carry off a sack of potatoes or a few loaves of bread, while looking like a kid who absolutely knew his way around and belonged on that boat. That's what he was doing when he was caught in the act by Captain Oliver Zimmerman in the summer of 1887 at age thirteen.

  Henry was on the canal that summer, and he watched his father walk up behind the retreating boy and clasp both of Gilbert's suspender straps in one large fist.

  "Where are you taking that watermelon, son?" Captain Zimmerman was a barrel-chested man with a full beard. He released Gilbert's suspenders and spun him around by the shoulder. Without a trace of apprehension, Gilbert looked up at Captain Z and then down at the melon in his hands. He'd been watching for a week or so, and he knew that the watermelons were delivered to the tied-up boats around two o'clock. When no one was on board, the watermelon man would leave a melon on deck, then swing by an hour or two later to collect payment from boats that wanted them, or retrieve melons from boats that didn't.

  "I was just borrowing it," Gilbert said. "Going to bring it back in a few minutes, with another one."

  Captain Zimmerman squinted. "How was you fixing to do that?"

  Gilbert explained that he'd made a bet with a boy he'd met on a boat at the other end of the dock, who'd boasted that his daddy had just bought the biggest melon of the day. Gilbert had scoffed and said he'd be back in a few minutes with a melon that he
reckoned was bigger – and then whoever was right could keep both

  So, Gilbert explained, he'd been on his way to win a free melon, half of which he intended to leave for the Zimmermans.

  "And how was you going to pay for our melon," Captain Zimmerman said, "supposing that other boy is right?"

  "He won't be," Gilbert said ominously. "That'd cost him more than a melon."

  Captain Zimmerman stared at the scrawny, slate-eyed boy holding the watermelon, and maybe he saw a stray version of Henry. He asked Gilbert his name and then told him that he expected him back within fifteen minutes, and that he better not be empty-handed. Gilbert marched down the dock with the melon, passed a supply shed, and turned out of sight. If he'd looked back, he might have noticed Henry following discreetly at a distance.

  When Henry saw Gilbert carry the melon into what looked like a tavern down the block, he headed back to the boat and told his father that Gilbert's story must have been a lie, and that he had stolen their melon.

  "I reckon he'll pay for it," Captain Zimmerman said. "One way or another."

  Two days later the Zimmermans had unloaded their coal and were getting ready for the run back to Cumberland. The watermelon man was back, and Captain Zimmerman told Henry to keep an eye out for Gilbert, who might be traveling in his wake. Henry stalked the melon cart from behind, and sure enough, there was Gilbert, stepping onto an empty deck and then disembarking moments later with a melon in his arms.

  Following instructions, Henry circled to alert the vendor, who parked his cart and slipped back to apprehend the melon thief and steer him to the Zimmermans' boat. Forty-eight hours after their last encounter, Gilbert faced Captain Zimmerman as if he was returning within his allotted fifteen minutes.

  "This man says I'm stealing your watermelon, but I told him you said it was OK!"

  Captain Zimmerman took the melon from Gilbert and paid the vendor for it. "Where do you live, son? I'd like a word with your parents."