Breath and Bones

by Susann Cokal

  Dixie decided to indulge her customer. “Whatever it’s called, it’s sure pretty, isn’t it?”

  So, clad in the scantiest of costumes, with the customary girdles of mist, the proud warrior women of Norse legend had gone the way of the Muses. The colors were pleasant and the likenesses good, though even less detailed than in Amy Oggle’s painting; the carefully arranged Valkyries-for-hire fawned over their faceless hero and wove a web of silken hair about him—golden, ebony, brown, and brilliant red. In the lower right-hand corner, nearly lost against the hero’s silver shield, stood the peaked castle made of the letters A and C.

  Famke felt tears springing to her eyes.

  Dixie sized Famke up. “You need a drink, my friend. What’ll you have?”

  Famke hesitated. “Whiskey.” It was the only drink, other than beer, whose name she knew in English. “How long have you had that picture?” she asked in her deepest voice.

  Dixie did not hear her, for at that moment, the doorknocker sounded. The professor at the piano said, “Company, ladies,” and played even louder.

  A second blonde went to answer the door. Sweet Myrt, still hanging on Famke’s arm, spoke up again: “You talk like him.”

  “Who?” Famke asked.

  “The man that painted us.” Myrtle combed her bright yellow locks with her fingers and fluffed up the fringe in front. “He had that way of sounding a word. Are you from England, too?”

  The remaining girls, now perched on chair arms all around the room, looked at Famke with renewed interest.

  “I’ll be switched!” Mrs. Holler said. “Could you be his brother?” She took Famke’s chin in her hand and turned her head sideways, looking for resemblance, until Famke grew nervous and jerked away.

  It appeared she’d given a decisive nod. The girls squealed in delight.

  “Albert’s brother!” Myrtle was so excited that she tore an artificial tress accidentally free of its pins and had to hide it behind a sofa cushion.

  “Do you paint?”

  “What’s your name?”

  The new customer entered then, and he thought the question was aimed at him. “Bill,” he said, looking around with the authority of a man who knew just what to expect from a place like this. He was the one-legged man from the general store and had obviously been lured here, as Famke was, by the tale of the marvelous painting. Leaning on a crutch, the empty trouser leg pinned up by his belt, he, too, stood looking at the Valkyries a long moment, comparing their faces with the faces in the room.

  The girls paid him scarce attention, fascinated instead with the man they thought was the painter’s brother.

  “What’s your name?” repeated a girl who looked like she might have a bit of savage blood in her.

  Famke gave the first that came to mind, a name suggested by what she thought was her special familiarity with Albert’s history: “Dante.”

  “Don Tay?”

  She spelled it aloud: “D-a-n-t-e. Dante.”

  “Dante!” They all repeated it at once, savoring the exotic taste of it.

  At the sound of her voice, the new customer looked over and lifted his chin in recognition. While she nodded back, blushing unaccountably, the girls avoided meeting Bill’s eyes. A Dante was much more fascinating than a Bill.

  “I must find my brother,” Famke said desperately to them, her head down. “Do you have any—do you know where he has gone?”

  Before anyone could answer, Dixie Holler snapped her fingers. “Ladies,” she warned, and that was enough. They lined up in front of Bill, dutifully displaying their figures in the tight colorful frocks, inviting him to choose.

  In the commotion, Famke touched the canvas. Dry. She sank down on the couch, feeling her lungs constrict.

  Bill took a girl with pale brown hair—bottom left corner in The Hero’s Repose—and despite her lingering look back at Famke they disappeared down the hallway. An IF AT FIRST YOU DON’T SUCCEED sign hung over the inner door, too.

  As soon as Bill was gone, the other girls began to chatter. Apparently they had liked Albert very much, for they were eager to make friends with Dante. They began by telling him their names, none of which Famke could make out in the din, and they plied her—Dante—with questions about the accomplished brother, for all the world as if they’d forgotten the reason Dante gave for coming here.

  “I need to find Albert,” Famke broke in at last, though she felt a strange reluctance to say the name out loud again. She was aware of being somewhat rude. “You know more about him now than I do. Where is he?”

  Mrs. Holler said shrewdly, “Doesn’t know you’re coming, does he?”

  “I believe he never got my letters.” This much was true, as she had never written any.

  “Well, my boy, your brother ain’t in Leadville anymore. Said he was moving on to Denver. Were I you, I’d look for him down Holladay Street.”

  Famke nodded dispiritedly. It seemed she had stepped backward, not forward, in her search; she looked again at the Valkyries and sighed. “After Denver? Did he say where he would go then?”

  The madam shrugged, and all the girls appeared to wait for her answer. Myrtle surreptitiously reattached her lost curl. “You might try the towns north of there,” said Dixie. “Maybe Box Elder. Or south—Greenland, Monument, Pueblo.”

  While Famke digested those names, Myrtle presented herself in Famke’s line of vision again, her hair now intact but slightly askew. “Would you like to see my room?” she asked, with a note of wistfulness beneath the brass.

  Dixie Holler licked her lips and made ready to name a price.

  Famke was spared the possible embarrassment of a reply: The door-knocker sounded again, so hard and rapid that everyone startled. It kept going for nearly a minute while the professor stopped playing and the girls turned white.

  “Any of you in trouble with the law?” asked Mrs. Holler.

  No one bothered to reply, and the knocking continued. It seemed likely that some very bad news had arrived.

  “Lazy Izzy, you go,” said Mrs. Holler, but nobody wanted to wait; if one girl was going, all would go, and the professor with them. They all forgot about Dante for a moment and trooped into the foyer, some of them holding hands.

  Famke lingered behind. She knew this would be a good opportunity to make her exit, but she wanted a few moments alone with the painting. She stood and examined it again, marveling that Albert had allowed himself to finish and frame what to her was so obviously an inferior example of his work. These Valkyries were pretty enough, it was true, and their colors were vivid and clear, but where were the finer points that had distinguished Nimue? The delicate tracery of her veins, the fine shadows of her garments; the details, the grace.

  Grace. She thought of her silver tinderbox and patted herself to make sure it was still there in the yellow pocket inside her pants. Looking up at the picture, she wondered if there had ever really been a time when women wore helmets with horns, particularly with so little on their actual bodies. Somehow it was easier to believe in the absolutely naked world of the three entwined Graces.

  Dixie Holler alone had not answered the strange knock; she leaned in the doorway, watching Famke like a stout but agile cat, always with a view to the kill. She scratched with one finger among the carroty curls that—Famke looked again to be sure—were brown and gray in the painting. “Now, sir, if you don’t like Sweet Myrtle, we have many beauti—”

  She would never complete that sentence. Suddenly, at the back of the building, there was a tremendous explosion. A lamp fell from a table, a shepherdess from a carved shelf, and then the shelf itself. Both Dixie and Famke were knocked down. The Hero’s Repose dropped from the wall onto the sofa and bounced face down to the floor.

  There was a moment of strange, false silence, not really silent at all. Famke’s ears rang. At the front of the house, the girls wailed and wept—Valkyries sorrowful rather than celebratory. Bill’s voice came from somewhere farther off, cursing a blue streak. Plaster rained over everything. />
  When the world seemed settled again, Famke slowly picked herself up. She felt dazed, unsure what had just happened, and her lungs rasped on the dry dust. Dixie Holler half-sat on the floor, hacking, the plaster giving her the lips and cheeks of a corpse. She waved Famke away.

  With nothing else really to do here, Famke pushed down the foyer and through the girls who were toppled willy-nilly over the front steps and down into the street. Still confused, she stood looking up at the sky, at the haze of dust collecting beneath the stars, while women and men in various stages of deshabille poured out of the boardinghouses around her and someone, far away, set to a piercing howl. She stood in the way of a swarm of boys, and they skirled around her, bumping and shouting until they’d spun her dizzy and breathless once more.

  Now there were running bodies everywhere, and voices, snatches of conversation.

  “Dynamite—”

  “—mines—”

  “—Pittsburgh—”

  “—Matchless—”

  “—Blaze!”

  It seemed that, behind the row of fancy-houses, a fire had started. There was another explosion, or perhaps just a loud crash, and the first flames showed above the roofline. A fire wagon jolted by, the horses’ eyes showing the whites. The crowd drew Famke along toward it. When she rounded the corner she found that the house directly behind Dixie’s was on fire—that might explain the knock on the door . . . She tried to turn back away from the flames, but the press of bodies made it impossible. And then she saw that the flames were licking not just at Dixie’s place but also at Famke’s own hotel, at the very wall behind which she’d secreted her female clothes.

  With the crowd stopped dead around her, Famke stood in the street, mouth open to smoke and astonishment. She was utterly terrified. For nearly an hour she watched as flames writhed toward the sky like worms that would gobble the stars, and ashes flew from them like moths; the fire-men’s feeble hoses could do nothing against them.

  Ashes of wood, of paper, of cloth. The homespun skirt from Myrtice, the nice blouse she’d bought in Copenhagen, the petticoat on which she’d essayed her first artwork—the yellow shawl . . . All Famke’s feminine belongings, everything that made her Ursula Summerfield Goodhouse. She owned nothing in the world now but what she carried in her pockets. Famke wiped her nose on her sleeve and realized that she had become, to all intents and purposes, a man. A man with no reason to stay in Leadville any longer, with every reason to flee it.

  She fought her way through the watchers and headed for the train depot. Others would be fleeing here soon; she had to arrive first. Heedless of the pain in her lungs and the dizziness in her head, she consulted the chalked schedule and saw a train was due in under half an hour—“Fare for one,” she gasped out at the ticket window.

  “Denver or Climax?”

  She remembered the list of towns Amy Oggle had mentioned. “Boulder.”

  “You’ll have to round the mountain and pass through Denver.” The agent, chafing at having to remain at his post while others investigated the events downtown, pushed a scrap of beige cardboard under the grille. “Two dollars and twenty.”

  It seemed like little enough. Famke leaned against the counter, searching her jacket pocket for the handkerchief that held what was left of the thirty dollars she’d brought with her. It was not there.

  Trembling, her left hand dove into the other pocket and explored it thoroughly before Famke faced the ugly fact: Her money, like her clothing, was gone.

  “Fanden!” Too late she realized what had happened: The boys who swarmed around her in the street had found out where she kept her money and, when an opportunity arose, took it from her. Probably the one who’d begged a penny of her when she arrived had done the scouting. As she groped further in her jacket, she realized the thief had even taken Myrtice’s spectacles.

  “If you pay no money, you get no fare,” the agent snapped. He pulled back the cardboard stub and retreated from the window.

  Chapter 26

  An untraveled man’s idea of a mountain is of a tremendous, heaven-kissing surge of rock, earth and snow, rolling up at once from the dull plain like a tenth wave of a breaker, and fairly taking your breath away. But a mountain range grows upon you gradually.

  BENJ. F. TAYLOR,

  BETWEEN THE GATES

  Viggo never tired of looking at these American hills, blazing yellow now on this October afternoon. In Denmark, it was said that if a man stood on a beer crate he could see from one end of the country to the other; but here, it seemed, there were more mountains than towns, each one as magnificent as the picture on the jigsaw puzzle he’d played with at Immaculate Heart.

  Mæka: After swooping from New York to Chicago, through the Midwest and over the vast stretches of Nebraska and Wyoming, the continent to him now was like a giant puzzle of cities, plains, and forests, cut into pieces by rivers and streams that grew rarer with each mile traveled west. The most splendid pieces were the mountains, whether craggy and brown or still lush with lingering leaves and flowers. Viggo looked toward them now as the farmer’s wagon jolted slowly away from the big, quiet metropolis of Salt Lake and toward the little town called Prophet, where the Mormon officials had told him he might find his fellow-orphan. He watched the mountains turn bloody red, reflecting the sunset, as he climbed down in front of Brother Nathan Fitzhenry’s house and memorized directions for the Goodhouse place.

  “You might stay the night in town,” Brother Fitzhenry said, scratching his beard. “They’ve had some trouble out at Goodhouse’s lately.”

  Viggo’s brow furrowed. If such were the case, it was imperative that he go there immediately, tonight: Famke might need him. He had a clear picture of her now, with long wet red hair and a terrified expression, just like the ship’s figurehead in that painting in New York. He would reach her before the waves swallowed her up.

  “Thank you,” he said to Brother Fitzhenry. “I will walk.”

  En, to, én, to, Viggo recited to himself as he marched, soldierlike. The sun finished sinking and the hills turned black; it was a long hour before the moon rose high enough to light his way, and then the coyotes began to howl. Their howling grew louder as he took the turn for Goodhouse’s farm, and louder still as an odd-shaped muddy house came into view, its yellow lamplight illuminating a farmyard containing a half-built hut and a large square barn. Viggo heard horses and cows bellowing inside the barn and chickens squawking in their coop; every animal on the place was disturbed and protesting. It was small wonder, then, that no one answered his first knock. He had to knock twice more before a short, skinny boy opened the door and stared up at him with dark adult eyes.

  “What do you want?” the child demanded rudely.

  Viggo smiled and extended his hand for the shaking. The boy seemed fascinated with the knotty scars over it, and he poked the back of the hand as if to make sure it was real.

  “Heber the Younger!” a woman’s sharp voice cried out in irritation. “You close that door now—I can’t stand that howling another minute!”

  “It’s a stranger, Ma!” the boy shouted back, and that brought the woman at a run, shoe heels clicking against the floorboards.

  “Who are you?” she asked, almost as rude as her son had been. Viggo noted a distinct family congruence, though the woman’s face had settled into hard lines.

  “My name is Viggo,” he said in his best American. “I have come for Ursula Marie. For Famke.”

  Sariah Goodhouse folded her arms. “You aren’t another correspondent, are you? We’ve had enough of them, coming down from Salt Lake in their green suits and side whiskers, claiming she left them messages in their hotels . . . not that we’d disbelieve that for a minute . . .”

  “Our Mother sent me,” Viggo said, as clearly as he knew how.

  “Ursula’s mother!”

  “She told us she was an orphan,” the little boy said on a note of triumph.

  “Gud, nej, jeg mener—er, our mother the nun. From the orphan home.”
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  Sariah pulled him inside amid a torrent of language—exclaiming over his resemblance to Famke, introducing herself and her children, seating him at the long family dining table and offering him a lukewarm and distinctly unpleasant brew she called “tea.” It was clear she now assumed Viggo must be Famke’s relation, but he did not disabuse her of that idea even though he knew the two of them were in no way alike. He did everything as she guided him, meanwhile looking eagerly around at the bare white walls, the old oak sideboard with its stacks of chipped dishes, the lone photograph of too many people crowded into one frame.

  The room filled up fast with an abundance of children who looked like clumsy copies of their mother. Where was the fire-haired sorceress? “Is Famke well?” he asked. But no one seemed to hear.

  The last arrival was dramatic: A stocky blond woman, bearing the same facial traits as all the others under a blanket of extra flesh, staggered in from somewhere upstairs. She was led by a little girl and held a handkerchief to a green mouth. “So you are Ursula’s brother!” She gasped, falling into a chair. “I am Myrtice Goodhouse Black, a widow.”

  Viggo noticed a newish gold band on the woman’s left ring finger. That she was pregnant, though not swollen yet, he could see just as easily; he wondered if she might like some of the camphor in his bag to offset her nausea, but he could think of no way to offer it without broaching what ladies thought to be a delicate topic.

  “But where is Famke—Ursula?” he asked, when he felt it was polite to do so.

  Myrtice Goodhouse Black mopped at her forehead. “You aren’t the only one who wants the answer to that question. Why, right this very minute, Brother G—”

  Mrs. Goodhouse silenced her with a look.