Silver

by Graham Masterton

  ‘Oh, Henry, punish me!’ she cried out, her eyes squeezed tight shut. ‘Hurt me, Henry, it was all my fault!’

  At that moment, Henry almost lost any desire at all; or any feeling. He could feel himself dying away inside her. But she lifted her buttocks from the floor, and pushed herself up at him, and he began to rise again, gradually, enough to keep her heaving and thumping and panting on the tiles.

  He felt the tug of an unwanted climax, and drew himself back. Three or four white drops fell against pink stretched skin. Augusta realized that he was finished, and lay back shuddering, and then started to sob, humiliated by her own catastrophic desires.

  Henry loomed over her and kissed her cold sweaty forehead. ‘Get up now,’ he said, taking her hand. But she snatched it away, and hid her face, and stayed where she was, on the floor.

  ‘All right,’ he said, awkwardly getting up. ‘I’ll go to bed without you.’

  He took one of the lamps upstairs. The bedroom looked familiar but smelled cold: a bedroom meant for two in which only one person had been sleeping. Over the bed was a coloured lithograph of Jesus surrounded by children; the imaginary children that Augusta had never been able to conceive. Henry tiredly unbuttoned his waistcoat and loosened the cuffs of his shirt. He hummed to himself the spiritual which William’s black stable-boy Edwin had been singing as he had driven him down to the Denver depot,

  ‘Lord, can’t you hear me weeping

  I’m crying out to You.’

  He washed his face in the basin beside the bed; then shook himself into his nightshirt, and climbed between the sheets. As he did so, something cold and hard rolled across the bed from Augusta’s side, and lodged against his hip. He picked it up, and saw that it was Augusta’s glass pastry-pin, the decorative one which he had given to her three years ago, and which at the time had been filled with spices. He clasped it in the palm of his hand, and turned it this way and that, and realized with increasing pity what Augusta had been using it for. She hadn’t expected him home today, and so she had left it in the bed, ready for tonight.

  He felt suddenly sad, and very sorry for her; and he hated himself for what he had done to her.

  He was still awake when she came to bed, and lay down next to him, tense and still, scarcely breathing. But after a while, guessing that he was only pretending to sleep, she said, ‘You can’t imagine what it was like thinking that you’d gone for ever.’

  ‘Augusta—’ he said, and reached out to hold her shoulder, but she slapped him away.

  ‘You have hurt me so much,’ she said, and the resentment in her voice burned into his consciousness like a branding-iron into a steer. ‘You really have hurt me so very much.’

  He slept. It was still dark when he woke up again, and Augusta was crying. He tried to kiss her, but her face was salty and wet with tears, and she pushed him away. He lay next to her, resenting her, feeling sorry for her, hating her, pitying her, liking her, remembering all of the summers they had spent together and all of the Thanksgiving dinners, all of the days and all of the weeks, spilling off the calendar in an endless torrent of numbers. And was this all that it could lead to? Lying side by side in a narrow bed in Leadville, listening to her sobbing, not knowing what he could do to help her, not even knowing what he could do to hurt her?

  Augusta was one of the most complicated and interesting women he had ever met, but the tragedy of Augusta was that she was too plain for him to want to know anything about how interesting she was, nor anything about her complexities. She wanted him to love her, but he couldn’t.

  In the morning, when she woke, she looked across with unfocused eyes and saw the glass pastry-pin, on Henry’s bedside bureau, where he had left it. She said nothing, but after that day it disappeared, and Henry never saw it again. He guessed that Augusta had smashed it, and thrown the pieces away. He never mentioned it.

  The morning was golden as they breakfasted in the kitchen on coffee and shirred eggs with crumbs. They said very little: only the brief, light, informative conversation of people who have decided to live with each other without loving each other. ‘Dan Maskell’s coming in later, with some of that cheese of his.’ ‘Oh, could you make sure that butter’s still fresh?’ ‘Did you see Dick McCloskey when you were in Denver?’

  Both of them knew that no intimacies would ever be spoken between them again; not that many ever had been; and that in every respect except that they were still living together, their marriage was over.

  Henry finished his eggs and said, ‘I think I’ll take a ride up to the mine, see what Rische and Hook have got to say for themselves.’

  ‘You won’t be too long? It’s been hard enough this past week, not having you here. I need you to bring up some barrels.’

  ‘I won’t be long. What is it, a twenty-minute ride?’

  He saddled up Belinda, and rode up the steep-sided valley where the hamlet of California Gulch now lay mostly abandoned, its houses deserted, its boardwalks stripped for mining-props. The warm morning wind blew dust from the crest of the gulch, and the pines nodded all around him like curtseying girls.

  When he reached the crest of the Little Pittsburgh mine, he saw a large oddly-shaped tent pitched there, and a fire, and sitting in front of the fire, brewing up coffee, August Rische and George Hook, as shabby and as eccentric-looking as ever. August Rische stood up as Henry approached, and waved, even though Henry was only a few yards away. George Hook took not the slightest notice of either of them, but continued to drink his coffee and turn his flapjacks in a little blackened pan. A little distance off, their dog yapped, and then sneezed.

  ‘I see your dog’s still sick,’ said Henry, climbing down from Belinda’s saddle.

  ‘Oh, he’s not sick, Mr Roberts,’ said August Rische, holding Belinda’s bridle. ‘He sneezes when the flowers are coming out, that is all.’

  ‘How are things?’ asked Henry. ‘Where have you fellows been digging?’

  George Hook looked up now, his mouth full of flapjack, and acknowledged Henry with a nod of his head. August Rische said, ‘We are trying to dig close to the original mining place, first of all. But we are finding always that the effort of penetrating the rock is too great for what equipments it is we are having. Well, picks and shovels; no compressed-air drill; and always very hot, too, in the sunshine.’

  Henry said, ‘Whiskey doesn’t help, either.’

  August Rische scratched at his thick wiry beard, and ducked his head forward a little, as if to indicate that he wouldn’t entirely agree with that; but then he wouldn’t entirely disagree with it, either. ‘As it was happening, we are choosing to dig ourselves under the overshadowing place, close to the butte.’

  He led Henry across the sloping ground to a small, untidy diggings, where a bucket and a winch had been set up, and a covering of sacking had been thrown over the excavated soil. Henry peered down into the excavation, and it was dark and smelled of urine. He presumed that neither Rische nor Hook could usually be bothered to haul themselves thirty feet to the surface when they wanted to relieve themselves.

  ‘Well?’ he asked, testily.

  ‘Ah, well!’ smiled August Rische. ‘First of all we are digging with no success, which for us is the usual way; so, we are not despondent. But then we strike this.’ He drew aside the sacking, and underneath it was a mound of black sand and black rock. He scooped his hand into the dirt, and held it up beneath Henry’s nose, and his face suddenly broadened into a grin.

  ‘Carbonate of lead,’ he said. ‘Just the same like Mr Stevens was finding, only finer.’

  Henry knelt down and sifted some of the black sand and pebbles between his fingers. ‘Have you had this assayed?’ he asked, and his voice sounded as if it belonged to someone else.

  August Rische kept on grinning, and nodded. ‘Not here, though. George is taking some to Aurora, so that nobody here is knowing.’

  ‘Do you have the report?’ asked Henry.

  Without a word, August Rische reached into the back pocket of his b
ritches, and handed over a crumpled assay, creased and re-creased and stained with coffee. Henry read it, and in spite of himself, his hand was shaking. The assay was signed by A. Rosenblum, of Aurora, Colorado, and it certified that out of a ton of ore of 2,000 lbs, 2,325 ounces were silver, worth $2,999.00 at coin value.

  ‘We are lucky, you see,’ said August Rische, taking off his cap, and smoothing his bald head with his fingertips. ‘If we are not digging in the shades here, beneath the butte, we are not discovering the top of this silver. It is a pipe downwards, straight down into the ground, only a few yards in wideness; and if we are digging there, or there, or anywhere else, we are missing it.’

  ‘How deep do you think this pipe runs?’ asked Henry.

  August Rische held out his hand; and, rather confused, Henry took it. ‘Mr Roberts,’ he said, ‘we are all very expensive men.’

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘This pipe of silver is downwards, well, who can tell? But hundreds of feet. We are so expensive, Mr Roberts. It is diamonds and fur coats now.’

  Henry looked down at the smelly hole in the ground, and then at August Rische, and then across the shoulder of rock at George Hook, who was calmly eating his flapjacks by the fire, and tearing off pieces to feed to their dog. George Hook nodded again, and abruptly broke into a smile. ‘Not bad, huh?’ he called, in a thick, Teutonic accent, the very first time that Henry had ever heard him speak.

  ‘Are you kidding?’ said Henry. And then he gripped August Rische by the arms, and laughed at him, ‘You bastard! You lazy bastard! You wouldn’t dig in the sun, would you? Too much whiskey, too much like hard work! And you’ve found it! You lazy, incredible bastard!’

  He dug into the ore again, bare-handed. ‘Silver, damn it!’ he whooped. ‘Silver! Look at this, you bastards, it’s silver!’ And then he tossed it into the air, rocks and sand, so that it scattered all around him, because Alby Monihan’s mine had at last paid off, and at last he had achieved the revenge he had always wanted against those Southern bullies who had beaten him in New York, and taken all his money. And at last he had won against Augusta; and at last he was rich.

  ‘Silver!’ he shouted at August Rische, and August Rische chuckled and skipped around the camp-fire, and George Hook began to whistle, and clap, and even the dog began to dance.

  ‘Silver! You bastards! It’s silver!’

  He shook their hands again and again; and then he mounted Belinda, and made his way back down the gulch to Leadville, stunned, delighted; and the whole world seemed different as he rode; as though the clock-hands that had been stuck for so long inside his brain had ticked forward at last, only a second, but a second that was sufficient to take him from hardscrabble to riches; from tedious day-to-day worrying to tremendous wealth.

  He stabled Belinda and walked into the store just as Augusta was weighing out sugar for Mrs Pomfrey, the stout old widow who had lost her husband Stanley in a shooting incident last May, at the Mosquito Saloon, five miners dead, nine injured, eleven mirrors broken, six bottles of whiskey spilled. And he took hold of Mrs Pomfrey and whirled her around, a carousel in black, and said, ‘How are you, Mrs Pomfrey? Still cheerful?’

  ‘Still in mourning, Mr Roberts,’ said Mrs Pomfrey, brushing the fringes of her black headscarf, and frowning at him in disapproval, all chins and eyebrows.

  ‘Augusta,’ called Henry, ‘Mrs Pomfrey can take her groceries for free. In fact, everything can go for free for the rest of the day, to anybody.’

  Augusta stared at him; her face long and big and disapproving. ‘What’s happened, Henry? Henry, are you drunk?’

  ‘No,’ said Henry. ‘No; Augusta, not drunk. Better than drunk. Better than drunk!’

  A whiskery old prospector who had been sitting in the corner of the store trying on boots cracked in, ‘Better than drunk? What the fuck could be better than drunk?’

  ‘Henry, you’re being ridiculous again,’ said Augusta, clutching her arms together and turning around and around like a clockwork figure of a woman without a key.

  ‘Augusta!’ he shouted, quite loudly; and then far more softly, and more persuasively, ‘Augusta.’

  She stared at him through her tiny spectacles. ‘Henry, what’s happened?’

  ‘You know what’s happened. You knew before.’

  ‘It’s those two sourdoughs, isn’t it? They’ve found something.’

  Henry smiled and nodded, and took off his hat.

  ‘It’s those two sourdoughs. You’re absolutely right. They’ve struck the top of a pipe of silver which reaches so far down into the ground that they can’t even guess where it’s going to end; even if it ends at all.’

  He couldn’t read what was in her face. She stood where she was, her hands by her sides, as if he had hit her with a sledgehammer, and she was about to fall. But something more had come down on top of her, with Rische and Hook’s discovery of silver. Her life, and all her hopes of keeping Henry; no matter what the terms were.

  She said, ‘That’s marvellous.’ But her face was as white as paper.

  ‘Augusta,’ he said, and he came around the counter and took hold of both of her hands. ‘Augusta, whatever misunderstandings or arguments we’ve had; however unhappy things have been; let’s forget them now. Let’s at least be the best of friends.’

  ‘Is it really silver?’ she asked him.

  He nodded, smiling at her, trying to get her to smile, too. ‘A rich lode of carbonate of lead, the same kind of ore that Will Stevens dug up. And it was a miracle they found it. It’s—what—only about as wide as this floor and it’s right under the shadow of the butte. But they dug there because the sun was too hot.’

  ‘We’re rich, then,’ she said.

  ‘Not just rich, Augusta. Very rich. Rolling rich! That whole lode belongs to us.’

  Augusta said, ‘I think I’m going to have to sit down for a moment.’

  He brought her a chair, and she sat down with her hands in her lap, staring at nothing at all. The sun came in through the window of the store and illuminated the candy counter, neatly arranged with Augusta’s special fondants and penuches, and the shining glass covers over the cheeses.

  ‘I have some pies in the oven,’ she said, suddenly, and started to get up. But Henry took hold of her shoulders, and pressed her to sit down again.

  ‘Let them burn. They don’t matter any more. None of this matters any more. You’re a wealthy lady now.’

  ‘But I can’t just leave them.’

  ‘You can. And not just the pies, either. Everything. The sweeping, the cleaning, the stocktaking, the candy-making. We don’t have to be storekeepers any more, Augusta. It’s over; the work is over.’

  ‘No, no,’ she said, ‘I can’t let them burn. I have customers who buy them every day. I can’t be selfish.’

  He tried to seize her arm, but she twisted away from him and went hurrying through to the kitchen, where he could hear her clattering with her baking-sheets and banging the stove door. He remained where he was, in the centre of the store, and while she fussed around with her pies, he looked slowly around him at all the shelves of canned food, at all the neatly-wound ropes, at all the stoves and jars and bars of soap, at all the bottles of vinegar and patent hair-restorers. He had put up all of the shelves himself; and helped to construct most of the counters. What he saw around him was his life’s work, crowded and meagre. And now he would never have to touch a single jar or bottle or can again; never have to slice another joint of bacon; never have to heave drums of kerosene in from the yard; or bring in wood at five o’clock on a freezing winter morning to help Augusta light up the stove.

  ‘Chance,’ he whispered to himself. And then he turned, and in turning, caught sight of himself in a looking-glass advertising Blanke’s Mojav Coffee; a heavy-set, handsome man with a distinctive moustache, dressed in a clean-cut white collar and dark brown velvet necktie, and a worn but well-tailored coat of sandy-coloured corduroy. It surprised him, in a way, that the man he could see in the looking-glass wa
s him. He looked younger than he felt: more humorous, less marked by his years as a storekeeper, and by his marriage to Augusta. He smiled to himself, and said, ‘Chance,’ a second time.

  He walked through the corridor, and into the kitchen. Augusta was trying to scrape a burned pie-crust off the edge of the baking-sheet, and crying.

  ‘They’re all spoiled,’ she said, and her voice was a honk of pure misery. ‘They’re all spoiled. Everything’s spoiled.’

  He stood behind her and clasped his arms around her waist. ‘Augusta, you don’t have to worry any more. Throw them away. Throw the whole darned tin away.’

  ‘Oh, yes? And what if this precious lode of silver only goes down two or three feet, and then gives out? Then what? Should I search in the trash for my thrown-away tin? And what about my thrown-away life?’

  ‘Augusta, is there a single silver mine around here that hasn’t produced a fortune? They’ve already dug ten feet into it, in any case, and the ore is the same quality through and through.’

  ‘Henry,’ said Augusta, ‘we may be rich, but we should never forget our beginnings, nor what we have always been to each other. The smell of wealth always draws the devil, Henry; you know that. Both you and I have seen what kind of men come here to Leadville, to seek their fortunes; and both you and I have seen what happens to those who have struck gold, or silver: This mine is a curse, Henry; it has always been a curse, ever since you first took that deed-of-claim. It had lain in that drawer for all of our years together like an evil talisman, and blighted everything that we have done together. Henry, I beg you to close the mine at once. Give Rische and Hook whatever you can, and tell them to go on their way. Please, Henry, before it destroys us completely!’

  ‘Now then,’ said Henry, ‘what’s this? I’ve never seen anybody so upset by the thought of riches. I’ll do no such thing. In fact, I’m going right across to Lenont’s, to order up a crusher and an amalgamating plant; and all the tools and winding-gear we’re going to need. And I’m going to have to take on some extra men, too, right away.’