Foxfire

by Anya Seton

Hugh had flung out of the hospital bearing a gun and a small volume of Schopenhauer whose pessimistic philosophy pleased him. Hugh ignored both hunting seasons and licenses, but as there was no big game down in these arid mountains anyway, nobody ever questioned him, and when the mood was on him he shot indiscriminately at birds, rabbits, snakes or squirrels, or, indeed, anything that moved. This, too, gave him pleasure. One more symptom of my degeneration no doubt, he thought at Amanda, as he passed the Dartlands’ cottage and saw her golden head inside near the window. He saw another head, too, unmistakable because of its bird’s nest of coiled brown hair, surmounted by a round blue hat.

  So the Mablett’s calling on the bride already, he thought with malicious amusement. Hope that fool girl can keep from making trouble for Dart. Dart’s the only decent guy in this dump.

  He strode on up the mine road, flattening himself against the cliffside as one of the ore trucks came grinding down in low. It was filled with concentrates from the mill, destined for the big smelter twenty-five miles south at Hayden.

  But with the price of copper shot to hell at six cents a pound, it was not the concentrates which kept the Shamrock Mine fighting for its precarious existence. It was the slender vein of gold-bearing ore, and it was also the Boston stockholders and their dogged and glittering hopes for better production soon. God, if only the price of gold would go up, thought Hugh, or if those rock-hounds up on the hill could only find something really good in their mole tunnels, the blasted old Shamrock might get into the black for a change, might even put a little paint on the hospital, let alone raise my salary a nickel a month. He gave an exasperated sigh and whipped his gun through a clump of cholla cactus, morosely watching the vicious little spined segments break off and roll over the road.

  “You shouldn’t do that, Doctor—” cried a wheezy and reproachful voice. “Susan gets them in her paws.”

  Hugh turned to see Old Larky dismounting from his burro and shooing his dog, an obese spaniel, away from the scattered cholla. “Sorry,” said Hugh. “How come you’re down from the mountains so soon? You found your lost mine or something?” He surveyed the old prospector with amusement. Like many another of his kind throughout the West, Old Larky lived alone some place in the mountains near a spring; he appeared once a month for supplies in Lodestone, and departed again with his two burros and his dog after a visit to the post office where he invariably received a letter from England. Old Larky was a British remittance man and only Hugh, who had saved his eyesight after a virulent dose of wood alcohol, knew that the usual romantic speculations in this case were true. Larky was the younger son of an earl.

  He had shown Hugh a picture of the magnificent Warwickshire castle where he had been born, but his true name or the particular misbehavior which had caused his exile forty years ago Hugh did not know.

  Old Larky had blue eyes rimmed with white around the irises which appeared to swim in a viscous red fluid, but through them he surveyed Hugh with dignity. “No, I have not found my lost mine yet, but I have no doubt I shall eventually. I came down early because Susan there will soon be whelping.”

  “You don’t say so,” said Hugh eyeing the dog with distaste. “She find a lustful coyote up there?”

  “Indian hound,” said Old Larky sadly. “There’s some Mescaleros camping not far from my cabin. I think some of the bucks are working in the mine. Those damned Apaches—I tried to shoot that hound dog but he was too quick for me.”

  “Too bad—” said Hugh and turned to go.

  “No, Doctor, wait—” Old Larky seized Hugh by the arm, exhibiting a row of white china teeth in a smile as anxious as the swimming eyes. “Susan, she’s a bit old for a first litter, I’ve always been so careful of her, I thought perhaps you’d just...”

  “Oh, my God. No!” shouted Hugh. “At dog obstetrics I draw the line.”

  Old Larky’s lips trembled. “Doctor, I beg of you—look, I’ll pay you well. Look—look at this.” He fumbled in his saddle bag and held out on his shaking palm a round gold coin.

  “Gold—?” murmured Hugh startled. For a second it seemed as though there were a spot of seductive, infinitely beckoning light floating on the seamed old hand. “Where’d you get this?” he said angrily. “You didn’t offer to pay me when I pulled you through that bout with the melted Sternos.”

  “It’s a gold sovereign,” said Old Larky. “The only one I have. I brought it from England. You pull Susan through and you shall have it.”

  “I don’t want it.” Hugh thrust his jaw out, he turned his back on Old Larky.

  “It’ll buy a lot of Payson Dew, Doctor Slater—” said Old Larky softly. “You like Payson Dew.”

  Hugh turned back, he looked at the pleading bleary old face, he looked at the pregnant bitch with her mournful swimming eyes like her master’s—and he burst into a sharp laugh. “Okay, I like to deliver dogs so I can get money to get drunk so I like to deliver dogs.”

  The old man nodded and climbed on his burro with Susan in his arms. “We’ll go to the hospital when the time comes. Thank you, Doctor Slater.” He lifted his lumpy old Stetson, clucked to the burro, and they ambled down the road toward town.

  Private room for Susan, said Hugh to himself as he walked on, and it’s not, Mrs. Dartland, that I have a heart of gold melting over the pathetic old prospector and his whoring little dog, I assure you, it’s just plain gold. He walked on glumly, staring down at the rough road until he reached the original Lodestone, the ghost town abandoned when the Boston company bought the old mine fifteen years ago and had optimistically founded a new town site with more room for expansion, and nearer the Gila River from which much of the water must be pumped.

  The ghost town presented the appearance of romantic desolation peculiar to all ruins. There were piles of rubble, a few backless façades, two or three crumbling skeletons of large houses, and an enormous painted wooden sign flanked by giant saguaros fallen against a flight of wooden steps which led into midair. The sign said “Opera House” in dim red and gold letters, and a small lizard lay basking on the letter “H.” In the vanished opera house behind this sign, Lotta Crabtree and Adelina Patti had performed, and here Mrs. Minnie Maddern Fiske had played to one of the most enthusiastic audiences of her entire career, for during its brief glory in the eighties and nineties, Lodestone had rivaled Tombstone and even Leadville as a boom town.

  Hugh was not interested in the ghost town, crumbling under the silent sun, and he skirted all the rock and adobe foundations where rattlers loved to lurk, but he paused by a large mesquite to look up a trail between fallen timbers, a trail which had, over thirty years ago, been a broad avenue flanked by stunted ever-ailing palm trees. A hundred yards up the mountainside on a platform hewed out of the rock behind, there stood the Cunningham mansion.

  Nobody had ever viewed this mansion without a shock of disbelief, thus fulfilling the desire of Red Bill Cunningham when he built it in 1888 for his bride. Red Bill’s exploits had always aroused disbelief. Bill Cunningham had been a flaming red giant of an Irishman, and he had brawled and roistered his way as a boomer, or tramp miner, through most of the western mining camps until the day when the luck which never deserted him had made him lose his way in the Dripping Spring Mountains of Arizona’s Gila County. This was in 1882 when he was forty, and he had just spent a few weeks working as a mucker in the Old Dominion Mine at Globe. Globe, however, had begun to quieten from its first wild boom days and Red Bill, powered by a recurrent urge to move on, was attracted by reports of Tombstone which was still enjoying a turbulence which appealed to him.

  One morning at dawn he set out on horseback, south over Pioneer Pass, and far too drunk to be worried by the threat of wandering Apaches. In fact, he saw no hostiles, but by nightfall he was drunker yet and had lost the trail some miles back. He cursed, took a final swig, tumbled off the horse and fell asleep where he lay between a stunted mesquite and a large Bisnaga cactus.

  The pitiless September sun finally awoke him at noon the next day. He sat u
p and groaned and looked for the horse, and also the water canteen which was tied to the saddle. The horse was not in sight and Red Bill staggered to his feet and tried to produce a whistle with his thickened tongue and cracked lips. He saw that he was in very rough mountain country. The pinkish diorite rocks huddled thickly around him, above loomed the glaring white of limestone cliffs. He was standing on a slope in a broad gully near the top of a dull reddish mountain. No use investigating the bottom of the gully, it’d be dry. There'd been no rain for weeks. He tried to whistle again, and the sound was like a mouse’s squeak against the thunderous silence. He sat down on a rock and the sun blazed down on his fiery hair. Holy Mother, he thought, this is a tight one. No horse, no water, and he couldn’t even get direction from the sun straight overhead. He licked his lips and pulled out his rosary, mumbling the familiar words. After a minute he shifted the wooden beads to one hand and fumbled in his breast pocket to bring out a small tin locket. Inside the locket there was a dried shamrock, given to him by his mother in Cobh the day before he stowed away on the brig bound for America. The locket slipped from his enormous fingers and fell between two rocks. He picked up one of the rocks to release his locket, and paused, startled by the weight. He bounced the rock in his hand, his aching eyes focusing on it gradually. “Holy Mother of God—” he whispered. “I’m dreaming for sure.” He picked at the rock with his finger nail and a minute gleaming fleck came off on his dirty nail.

  It was thus, from a piece of high-grade float, that Red Bill Cunningham located the Shamrock Mine, and his luck and native shrewdness thereafter overcame all difficulties. As he feverishly piled up a cairn to mark his claim he noticed the Bisnaga beside which he had slept. A two fold savior, this barrel cactus, to all those lost in the desert wilderness, and now that his wits had cleared he made use of it. Bisnagas always leaned roughly south, so his best chance of hitting the stage road again would be over there to the west. And the Bisnaga pulp provided water. He hacked the top off with his hunting knife and macerated the green fibers with a mesquite stick until they yielded a quart of watery fluid, which he sucked up feverishly.

  Red Bill never found his horse but, unlike many other discoverers of fortuitous minerals, he found his mine again two months later, made good his claim and, for sixteen years of the Shamrock’s first productivity before the original vein pinched out, he amassed a fortune. And all of it flowed from his free-spending hands as fast as it came in. Ninety thousand dollars of it went to build the mansion at which Hugh was gazing. Every foot of the materials which composed its thirty rooms had been dragged in by mule from somewhere else. The pines which formed the main wood of the structure came from no further than the forests near Flagstaff, but the mahogany bannisters and the oak parquet floor in the ballroom, the silver hardware and bathroom fixtures, the crystal chandeliers, the rosewood furniture, Turkey rugs and glass for the windows and conservatory had traveled from San Francisco, New York, and even Paris.

  Crazy-looking monstrosity, thought Hugh still staring fascinated at the weird ruin of an Irish immigrant’s dream of magnificence in the Arizona desert. Pigsty Gothic, with imitation turrets from which the gingerbread fretwork dangled in broken strips. The leaded green and red windows were starred from the impact of long-forgotten stones, when there were any panes left at all—most of the windows were boarded up. In all that vast and mouldering mansion there was no sign of life. And yet, there was life in there, in the two corner rooms to the west where purple velvet portieres covered the windows. Here Calise Cunningham, Red Bill’s widow, lived alone, as she had for thirty-three years. Alone—except for a ghost.

  She’s nutty as a fruitcake, Hugh thought, half resentful of the impression she had made on him, the one time he had seen her. She had been Calise de Barnay, a French Creole singer from New Orleans, an orphan of good family and high intelligence who had, nevertheless, run away from the aristocratic Louisiana convent where she had been reared to plunge herself into the turbulence of the West. Her true musicianship and rich lyric voice caused no great interest in the mining camps, but her extreme youth and dark beauty got her a job with the troupe. And then Red Bill Cunningham fell violently in love with her on the first night of her appearance in Lodestone.

  She had been seventeen and he forty-six, and in view of that disparity, and also of subsequent happenings, it would seem unlikely that Calise had reciprocated the huge bellowing Irishman’s passion. She had certainly married him, though, and a few old-timers could still remember glimpses of her galloping through town on an Arab gelding, and dressed in the maroon velvet riding habit Red Bill had had made for her in Denver.

  Yet not five people in the new Lodestone had even seen her. Once a week the scared little Pottner boy hauled his delivery wagon up to one of the mansion’s dilapidated side porches, unloaded a standing order of provisions, and picked up five silver dollars which were laid on the step for him, before scampering pell-mell off to safety. The great silent house was well known to be haunted.

  Mrs. Cunningham wished no company, though she made an exception of Dartland apparently, and it was because of Dart that Hugh had once visited her. Dart had met her by chance wandering alone at dawn in the mountains one morning, and they had talked a little. That was when Dart had first come to Lodestone and had as yet found no place to stay except the mine boardinghouse. Calise had offered him the use of one of her myriad empty rooms, and shown him a side door he might use. She had also made it clear that he must confine himself to the part of the house she indicated, nor ever disturb her privacy. This suited Dart admirably and he had lived there some weeks, oblivious to the curiosity of the Lodestone matrons.

  Dart had come to Hugh’s office one Sunday morning and asked him to walk back to the mansion.

  “I’m afraid Mrs. Cunningham’s sick,” Dart had said. “I heard crying and moaning from her wing last night, and she hasn’t been out in days. I want you to look at her, if she’ll let us in.”

  Eventually the two men had climbed the twelve broken steps to the great front door and pulled the giant silver knocker shaped like a shamrock. Red Bill had never forgotten the symbol of his luck.

  They waited a long time and pulled the knocker again before they heard soft footsteps inside, and Dart called out, “Mrs. Cunningham, it’s Jonathan Dartland—please open the door.”

  A bolt slid back and the door swung slowly inwards. The woman who stood in its shadow was tall and slender, dressed as nearly as Hugh could make out in a froth of cream lace and scarlet ribbons. Her shoulders and arms were bare and he had the impression of jewels on her wrist and bosom.

  Dart said quickly, “Please forgive me for bothering you, but last night—I thought I heard—I thought you were sick.”

  She moved a little from the shadow though she still held the doorknob in her hand. Hugh stared with astonishment. Her hair, which must still be very long and thick, was crystal-white like the chandelier in the dim hallway behind her. It was coiled high on her small head in the fashion of the nineties. Her cheeks were touched with delicate rouge and above them her large dark eyes surveyed Dart with a remote sadness. She ignored Hugh. She was fifty-nine, but her olive skin, at least in the dim light, showed few lines. She gave no impression of false youth and the elaborate negligee, the rouge and the perfume which floated from her laces were not incongruous, for there was a regal quality in her carriage and a fatefulness.

  “You promised never to intrude,” she said to Dart, and her low voice with its French intonation seemed to issue from far behind her pale lips.

  “I know, ma’am,” said Dart with a confused earnestness which surprised Hugh who had never seen Dart anything but self-possessed. “I’m sorry, but if you were sick here alone ... I brought the doctor.”

  “Yes ... well...” she said gravely. “I am not sick. It is only that Raoul is coming again tonight. Ça recommence toujours, la tragedie. C’est la punition que je dois subir.” Her lids lowered over the brilliant eyes, she began to shut the door. “Go away, please,” she
said. “You can do nothing.” The door clicked into place, and they heard the bolt drawn.

  Both men silently descended the steps, and then Hugh burst out with a laugh. “My God, Dart—I thought you said she always wore black!”

  “She has when I’ve seen her before.”

  “And who the hell is Raoul?”

  They had picked their way down the trail between the vanished avenue of palms and reached the fallen opera-house sign before Dart answered. “Raoul is her dead lover, I believe. Old Blevins, the hoistman, was here when it happened and he insisted on telling me the story once.”

  “Well, tell me, then,” said Hugh.

  Dart frowned, but after a moment he said, “There’s not much to it. Raoul came from New Orleans as she did, and was her lover. Her husband came home unexpectedly one day and found them together in one of the bedrooms up there.” He gestured towards the house. “He murdered Raoul and had some sort of a stroke himself and died pretty soon, but she’s stayed there ever since.”

  “And what’s she all dressed up for now?”

  “I gather that the tragedy is re-enacted at certain times. She’s dressed as she was on that night.”

  Hugh nodded. “Completely bats. She’s a psychopath.”

  “Maybe, in a way. But usually she seems strangely happy. She has a piano in her rooms and she sings and plays a great deal. Good stuff, Scarlatti, Bach, Mozart. And she reads a lot.”

  “Reads what, for the love of Mike? Ghost stories?”

  “No. She never invited me into her suite but once, and the books I saw then were mostly religious and philosophical. She’s a sort of mystic, I think, she lives for the spirit. I don’t know—” He added half to himself, “Maybe she really sees things other people can’t.”

  “Holy smoke!” cried Hugh. “You don’t think she entertains her dead lover, I hope!”

  Dart had stopped then and looked down at Hugh, his gray eyes had hardened and were devoid of the ironic affection they usually held for his friend. Then he shrugged. “It would be a most terrible punishment,” he said. He sketched a salute and walked rapidly up the deserted street to the mine road.