Smith's Monthly #31

by Smith, Dean Wesley

  They are my parents. They used to live in this home.

  They are still here, in bed upstairs, two skeletons covered with the dust of years. The real dust outside caught them while they slept, as it did most of this city. They died not knowing that death was floating down on them.

  I consider them lucky. But it is still hard standing at the foot of that bed, looking at their skeletons. I have done so a hundred times and will probably do so another hundred.

  My mother, Mrs. Richard Gilet, Dot to her friends, was still a slim woman at fifty when she died. Her arm was draped across my father’s chest. I find that to be a sign that they were happy the night they died. Richard Gilet, Rich to his friends, was sleeping on his back, one arm raised over his head above the pillow. The bone of that arm holds what is left of his hair in place. What is left of Mother’s dark brown hair has dropped in a bunch around the top of her pillow. The sheets and quilt were pulled up to mid chest level and their remains make very little dent under the quilt.

  I am glad I did not come in here until many years after the dust. I do not think I could have stood in this room, imagining that I could smell them rotting in the summer heat through my protective suit. I am glad that the air has already taken their eyes and their skin and left the bones and hair. It is better that way.

  With them as only skeletons I can still sometimes retrieve the memories of bouncing on the bed to wake them on Christmas morning. I can still remember them that morning; sleepy, smiling, the smell of them filling the room. Sometimes the memory is so strong I want to jump on the bed again to wake them.

  But I do not. I need the reality of them sleeping here after death much more than I need the quick release of jumping on the bed and messing up their last scene.

  At least so far. But at times that urge to jump into bed with them is very strong. Someday I may fail to resist it.

  I am now older than my father was. I find life interesting that with the dust and everything since the dust, I am still here. I really don’t understand what brings me to this room time after time. I have yet to visit my own room, just down the hall. I loved my own room. It was always a safe place for me.

  Yet I always just visit here, in my parents’ bedroom, always careful to remain in my own footprints and not move fast enough to mess anything up.

  It seems odd that I have access to this small city, this frozen museum of a life twenty years past. This is a city of death. In my lifetime, and for many lifetimes to follow, no human or animal will be able to live here or walk here unprotected. But since I am the one who told the world, who gave the history of it all, who knows the most about what happened, the government sees fit to let me in.

  I suppose they understand that someday I will open the protective suit and stay with my parents. But that is never talked about and for the moment they are happy to let me in and have me report back on what little I see. I am one of the very few crazy enough to even want to be here.

  Yet because of my father and his father, I know what happened to this small city. And I know I feel responsible. Somehow I should have tried to stop them. I knew we didn’t know enough. I knew we should have reported our findings to the government and gotten help. But I was still fairly young and just out of graduate school and my voice and my worries were not enough to stop them. My father and the others had been so sure of themselves. So sure they understood. So sure that the understanding would take them places they never imagined.

  I looked at the skeletons of my sleeping parents. Maybe this trip down the street was the right time to open up my protective suit and join them.

  I stood there in the same exact spot where I always stood, staring at their last embrace.

  Not yet. Maybe next time.

  TWO

  Boise, Idaho

  March 14, 1913

  Idaho Governor Frank Stunenburg dropped down out of the passenger seat of the Model T. He stood thin and tall, almost too tall for a westerner. He had sharp, dark eyes and a smile that disarmed even his most staunch detractors. He brushed the dust off his well-worn suit and turned back to retrieve a package from beside the seat that contained material his wife had asked him to pick up. “Thanks, John,” he yelled to the Attorney General over the loud sputtering of the engine. “Going to have to get me one of these since they built the Governor’s mansion way out here.”

  “That you are, Frank.” John waved and swung the Model T around and started it bumping down the dirt road back toward the center of town. The Governor watched, thinking that sometimes he wished things weren’t moving so fast. He enjoyed horses and always had. Riding in those automobiles was hard on the kidneys. But technology was moving fast. Too fast. And when the world heard about the discovery under that mountain outside of Moscow, it would move even faster.

  He shook his head. He still wasn’t going to believe what they had told him until he got up there and took a look for himself.

  He sighed. It had been a hard day all the way around. Actually a hard month, with the union mining problems up North. He wished like hell they could have just included that part of the state in the Montana territory. But they hadn’t. Back East it had all been political compromise with no attention to how difficult it was to move from the southern part of Idaho to the northern.

  So as Governor he was stuck with the unions and the problems and all the killing going on in a place that took five days during the summer to get to and was impossible to travel to in the winter. Somehow the killing and the union had to be stopped. But no one seemed to know just how to do it. He had come down hard anti-union and that stance had divided the legislature in Boise. A fist-fight had even broken out yesterday on the House floor.

  He could hardly wait to see what the legislators would do with the Moscow discovery.

  Frank looked up at the not completely finished mansion and the young trees that surrounded it. It felt good to be home, even though they had only lived here a short time. Someday he knew the new mansion would be a place where Idaho governors would be proud to live. But it too had caused a huge amount of resentment between the people in the north and the government in Boise in the south. Northerners were still fuming over the theft of the state seal from the northern city of Lewiston and the government’s move to Boise. It had been a midnight raid and a three day non-stop ride over twenty years ago. But it wasn’t anywhere near forgotten.

  Between the Moscow discovery, the seat of government and the union problems in the northern mines, he would be lucky to keep the young state in one piece over the next few years.

  A new white fence ran across the front of the mansion and down the left side. A stream and a grove of maple trees bordered the right side. It was a beautiful setting above the growing main city. The government planners had been right to build it here. He was proud to be its first resident.

  Frank hefted the package and started for the front gate. For the last month the gate had stood wide open, held that way by a large rock. But now it was closed. Frank thought nothing of it.

  He switched his wife’s package to his left hand, flipped the latch up on the gate, and pulled.

  The explosion sent most of the Governor of Idaho flying back into the middle of the road and left a crater the size of a house in front of the new governor’s mansion.

  THREE

  North of Moscow, Idaho

  October 6, 1999

  “Your grandfather’s notes say it is about here,” my dad said as he pushed aside underbrush and climbed over a small ridge of rock. I looked up at the red back of dad’s hunting jacket as he picked his way up through the pine trees and underbrush. I couldn’t believe I was with him on this crazy treasure hunt. We were a good half mile up the mountain above Grandpa’s house and I was beginning to think we were going to be lost. Or worse, shot by a stupid deer hunter who thought our crashing through the brush was a reason to shoot.

  It was bad enough that my crazy grandfather had died, especially right in the middle of my senior football season and the roughest semest
er I had signed up for in four years. But now dad was acting like a strange kid since he found Grandpa’s journal.

  Three hours ago Dad had been up in the attic cleaning out and sorting Grandpa’s things. When he came down he looked as if he had seen a ghost. Mom asked him if he was all right and he handed her a yellow paper and then a journal that had Gold Mine written on the outside in gold pen. He said it was Grandpa’s handwriting.

  “Take a look at this,” Dad said, and sat down at the kitchen table where Grandpa used to sit and smoke. The house still held the thick, rich smell of his pipe smoke, but with the windows open and the cool fall air from the surrounding forest coming in, the place was almost bearable.

  I crowded in behind Mom and we both read. The first entry in the journal said that Grandpa and Grandma had moved to Moscow from Boise back in 1914 to find a lost gold mine.

  Dad flipped quickly ahead in the journal. Grandpa and Grandma had lived in Moscow and a large number of the entries for the next year tell about Grandpa’s search for the mine. In May of 1915 his journal says he found the abandoned mine on the back side of Moscow Mountain. But the mouth of the mine had caved in and he would need money and time to dig it out. He was going to very quietly check around town to see if anyone had a claim filed. For some reason that entry seemed almost paranoid.

  The next entry in the journal a week later was about how much trouble he would have getting a claim to the land because the previous owner had disappeared years before under very strange circumstances.

  Next entry was very short. “May have mentioned the mine to the wrong person.”

  There was another short entry a month later about meeting a man named Carl and the other members of the Wheelbarrow Association. The entry said they were the ones who had collapsed the entrance to the old mine, called the Lost Wheelbarrow Mine. Grandpa said in the entry that he had dinner with the men of the association and there was no way they were going to allow him to open the mine back up.

  He feared for his and Grandma’s life, since it was obvious these men would do anything to keep the mine closed. And had numbers of times before.

  The last entry was a month later. All it said was, “They took me inside the mine. Now I understand. Joined the Association. Youngest member. Let us hope I will be the last.”

  Then in a different color ink Grandpa had scratched, “I was right about the Governor.”

  There was nothing else in the journal except a deed showing that Grandpa owned a huge chunk of the back side of Moscow Mountain and a map drawn years later after Grandmother had died in 1965. Grandpa had built a house on the back side of Moscow Mountain the next year. The map gave exact directions to the mine from the house. The location on the map of the mine was inside the land that Grandpa owned and the deed gave clear ownership of the Lost Wheelbarrow Mine to Grandpa. And now Dad. Grandpa had scratched on the side of the deed, “No gold left.”

  By the time Mom and I finished reading, Dad could hardly contain himself. He had never heard Grandpa talk at all about the mine or why Grandpa and Grandma had moved to Moscow or why Grandpa had moved to the back of Moscow Mountain. It just hadn’t occurred to Dad to ask. In fact Dad had no idea that Grandpa had owned so much forest land.

  Dad wanted to go see if we could find the mine and Mom wanted nothing to do with it. So Mom decided to keep cleaning while Dad and I went up the mountain looking for the old mine sight. It was a wild goose chase, as far as I was concerned, but Mom wouldn’t let Dad go alone because he had had heart pains last year. I was elected.

  Dad scrambled over the top of a slight ridge and disappeared through some underbrush. A moment later I heard him say, “Got it.” Then, as if I hadn’t been right behind him the entire time he yelled “Gary, it’s over here.”

  I ducked under brush and around a large pine and came out into a slight clearing about fifty yards wide. It looked as if someone had kept the trees and brush cut back. Across the clearing in front of me the mountain side went up sharply and there was a rock outcropping to the right. Even with the growth of brush under the outcropping I could see where a long time before there had been a cut into the side of the hill. Dad was standing in front of the cut, looking through the brush.

  I moved up beside him. “Any opening?” I asked.

  Dad shook his head. “Doesn’t look like it.” He broke back some limbs and climbed around where the opening should have been. After a minute he said, “No luck.”

  He backed out into the clearing and stood looking around. “Your grandfather must have kept this area cut back for some reason. It looks as if there are the remains of a road coming in here.” I looked to the right where he had pointed. It still took me a moment to see the faint possibility of a road cut into the hillside, now overgrown with sixty-year-old trees.

  Granted, it was fascinating thinking that way back in the past someone had dug a mine here. It was sort of thrilling to think there was some mystery about it that Grandpa had kept to himself. But mostly right then I was worried about passing a City Planning test tomorrow morning and then making it through football practice at three. I had already missed three practices because of Grandpa’s death.

  “Dad. Mind if we head back now?”

  He stood for a moment, hands on hips, staring at the cut in the mountain, nodding. “No problem,” he said. “But guess where I’m going to spend next summer?”

  “Water-skiing behind our new boat?”

  He laughed. “Well, just maybe. We might buy one. Right after I open up this old mine.”

  He started off down the hill before I even had a chance to groan. I knew for a fact I was going to get stuck helping him.

  FOUR

  Moscow, Idaho

  October 17, 1999

  Actually it was while I was standing under a hot shower trying to clear some of the aches from grueling football practice that I figured out how to get into Grandpa’s old mine. Grandpa himself had told us in his journal, but we just hadn’t seen it.

  Since we had found the journal Dad had become a different man. He was pricing equipment for digging and making all sorts of plans to get inside that mountain. He and I had been back up there twice and his excitement was starting to be catching. I found myself daydreaming about it in class and now standing in the shower after practice I figured out that there had to be another way in.

  I got dressed as quick as I could and headed for the university library. After a full hour I had discovered a huge number of books on gold mines and mining. But nothing I could use right off. So I did the next most logical thing. I headed over to the College of Mines. It was supposed to be the best in the country, so it seemed realistic that someone there would be able to answer my question.

  And I was right. A mining grad student named Carol occupied the giant wooden front desk in the college office. She stood, on a good day, five foot even, and had big brown eyes and a smile that made me stammer. The desk dwarfed her, yet somehow she held her own against it.

  She listened patiently to my request and then took me to a huge book of diagrams about how most gold mines were dug in the northwest, depending on location and ground formation.

  I told her what the area around Grandpa’s mine looked like, approximately when it was dug and told her it was in this area. She showed me how those mines would have been dug, made me copies of diagrams, and then asked if there was anything else she could help me with.

  “Actually, there is,” I said. “I was wondering if it was normal, and how, and maybe why, someone would open a second entrance to a mine.”

  “Sure. They did it like this,” she said and flipped to a section farther back in the same volume. It took her a moment to find what she was looking for, then pointed it out to me. “Almost always they went sideways along the same line and started a new shaft. Usually the second shaft would angle in to help cut down distance to the surface after a main shaft had followed a vein too far underground.”

  I stared at the illustration. It seemed so simple in drawings, but I knew w
hat that hillside looked like, covered in thick trees and brush. This was not going to be as easy as it sounded.

  “Of course,” Carol said, “if the original shaft went down or up following the vein, then they would start the second shaft to attempt to match the rise or fall.”

  I sighed. “What you are telling me is if there is a second shaft it could be anywhere in a radius of 500 feet around the first shaft.”

  Again she laughed. I was starting to enjoy that sound even though she was mostly laughing at my problem. “Actually it could be a lot farther than five hundred feet. Some of the old gold mines in this area went on for thousands of feet underground.”

  “Great. Just great. You want to spend some time with me Saturday hiking in the mountains looking for a mine?” I actually meant the question almost jokingly.

  “I’d love to,” she said, “on one condition.”

  “What’s that?”

  “You tell me your name.”

  I did and we also agreed to have dinner Friday evening. I left thanking Grandpa and his stupid mine. The week was looking up.

  FIVE

  Moscow, Idaho

  October 21, 2035

  This would be my last trip into the dead city. It seemed sort of obvious that I should make this trip on the anniversary of the date Carol and I found the second entrance to the mine.

  I plan on leaving the government van just inside the edge of what is not so laughingly called the Dead Zone and walk the rest of the way. I should be able to cover my tracks enough that it will never occur to anyone to trace me to my parents’ old home. Besides, as long as they get the van back, no one is going to waste much time on an old man like me. Not after all these years.