Thousand Pieces of Gold

by Ruthanne Lum McCunn

  The door to the kitchen swung open, and frosty, late October cold sliced through the warm, nutty smells of corn bread and baking pie. Shepp strode in, a long, narrow plank beneath his left arm. Shultz and Holmes shuffled in behind him, a raw pine coffin awkward between them. Pete shut the door.

  They paused a moment, and through the beating of her knife, Polly heard Shultz and Holmes murmur condolences. She wanted to thank them, to tell them she appreciated their coming down from War Eagle to help, but the lump in her throat refused speech. Instead she merely nodded and increased the frenzied rhythm of knife against board.

  The men climbed the stairs. The clump of their boots and the sharp slap of board and coffin against stair treads and walls reverberated through the kitchen. Above, the floorboards creaked, then were silent. The men had reached the bed. The bed where Charlie lay cold and dead. Straining, Polly heard muffled directions. A sudden, concerted heaving. The dull thud of human flesh against wood. Hammer blows.

  Stop, she wanted to call. Charlie can’t breathe. He won’t be able to breathe. But that was foolish. As foolish as thinking she could block out the reality of Charlie’s death by pulverizing chicken into inedible mush.

  With a single sweep of her knife, Polly scooped the meat and vegetables into a bowl, added a buttery flour paste, seasonings, lemon, a dash of wine. Her hands moved mechanically, molding the mixture into large balls, rolling the balls in cracker crumbs, dropping them into boiling lard. The grease sizzled, splattered against her hands, stinging. But she felt only the painful scraping and bumping of coffin against stairwell walls, the sudden pause at the turn, suppressed curses.

  And then the men were in the kitchen beside her, their breathing heavy, like Charlie’s. No, not Charlie. Never again Charlie.

  Polly set the croquettes in the warming oven and pulled on coat, gloves, hat. She opened the door and followed the men and Charlie out across the yard, around the house, and behind the root cellar to the grave, an open wound in the hard earth beneath the pines.

  Feeling as dry and brittle as the dead leaves scattered in the dirt, she stood at the foot of the grave, longing for the comforting fragrance of incense to smother the smell of raw pine and freshly dug earth. The shrieks and wails of mourners so she would not hear the slither of coffin grazing rope, the sudden banging of wood against rocky outcrops, the soft roll and thud of Charlie within.

  Pete cleared his throat. “The Lord giveth, the Lord taketh away, blessed be the name of the Lord.”

  He hurled a thick clod of soil into the narrow rectangular hole. “From earth to earth, dust to dust, ashes to ashes.” He crossed himself.

  The men reached for their shovels. Rock and dirt fell on wood, the sound heavy, final. A mist of dust rose around Polly, thickening, like the haze of fine soot that had coated her as she sifted through the charred remnants of her life with Charlie.

  There was the elk antler which had hung over the door of Charlie’s saloon. The range with the high warming oven and reservoir which she had bought when she first started her boarding house. The bed she and Charlie had shared for almost fifty years. The bowl that had been Teddy’s. Charlie’s fiddle. The coffee pot kept ready for passing prospectors, friends. All burned, melted, and twisted into shapeless, broken bits of rubbish which crumbled beneath her shovel like so much dust.

  Suddenly, through the mist of dust and years, she saw her father crumbling the brick from the kang, mixing it with sooty scrapings, ashes, ground bone, and gristle, shoveling the lot into the narrow hole that had been their fertilizer pit.

  She darted to the edge of the half-filled grave. “Stop.”

  Taken by surprise, all four men stopped their shoveling.

  “What is it?” Shepp asked.

  Polly thrust her gloved hands into her pockets to hide their trembling. “You tired. Walk all the way to War Eagle for Shultz and Holmes,” she told him.

  “I’m fine.”

  “Shultz and Holmes have a long way back.”

  “It’s all right. We’re almost done,” Holmes said.

  “You’re hungry, must eat first. Go eat the dinner I make.”

  “She’s right,” Pete agreed. “You three go ahead. I’ll finish.”

  Polly seized his shovel. “No, I finish.”

  “You can’t do it alone,” Pete protested.

  “I plow. I dig the garden. I can bury my man.”

  Shultz and Holmes looked from Shepp to Pete, questioning.

  “Please, I want to be alone.”

  The men left reluctantly. She waited until they filed past the corner of the root cellar and out of sight. Then, leaning her whole weight against the shovel she held, she gave in to exhaustion and grief.

  Late afternoon shadows stained the pines ink green. The canyon walls, imprisoning as the walls of Charlie’s grave, closed in on Polly, suffocating, refusing comfort, their dark pockets somber echoes of the frozen emptiness that held her fast.

  She heard footsteps crunch against gravel, shovels scraping into earth, realized Shepp and Pete had come to finish filling Charlie’s grave. She wanted to help. To make Charlie safe from scavenging coyotes. But she was too tired. And so she remained standing, stock still, like the long-legged wading birds with webbed feet and slender bills that she and Charlie watched in winter.

  Sometimes singly, sometimes in pairs, they stood absolutely motionless on the rocks at the edge of the Salmon, waiting to regain their strength. She had seen a full day pass, even two, before a bird took wing again. But always, no matter how tired and faltering their first nervous flutters, the birds pressed inexorably back into flight.

  Clumsily, she pressed cold, cramped muscles into motion, and above the noise of scraping shovels and falling earth, she said, “Tomorrow I go Warrens.”

  THIRTY-FOUR

  The children, their coats, hats, scarves, and stockings streaks of color against the mourning white of winter, ripped through the gash in the timber on their homemade skis, some tumbling, others expert, their laughter shrill, their wind-whipped faces flushed with fierce, energetic delight. A bundle of fur, wool, and two long, slender pieces of planed wood rolled into the soft drift of snow near Polly. She heard muffled sobs.

  “You okay?” Polly called.

  The shapeless bundle shaking off loose snow laughed. “Sure.”

  “Who cry?” Polly asked, puzzled.

  The bundle cocked her head. “Sound’s coming from the back of the school house so it’s probably Gay Carrey. She’s always hiding behind the wood pile to cry.”

  Her walk rolling and awkward, Polly stumbled across the gray brown snow trampled hard by dozens of booted feet to the narrow path cleared between the school house and the woodpile stacked high as the roof. In the shadows, a girl, no more than five or six, crouched on a fallen log, tears streaming down chapped cheeks.

  Above her, a boy only a few years older, hovered, pleading. “It’s no use crying. You know you can’t go home.”

  Polly rummaged in her coat pocket. Out came handkerchief, fish hook, candies. “You the Carrey children from South Fork?”

  The boy, eyeing the candies in Polly’s gloved hand, nodded.

  His cheeks, red and bulging as though he had swallowed two apples, and his big eyes, transparent with desire, made Polly smile. “Then you are Johnny,” she said, extending her hand.

  He took a candy. “Thanks. Who’re you?”

  His question, innocent and ordinary, hurt Polly deeper than she would have guessed possible. There was a time when there would have been no need for questions, when every child knew her just as she had known them, their birthdays, their likes and dislikes. But after almost thirty years absence, only a few were faintly recognizable as children of the children she had nursed and loved. More were as unfamiliar as Warrens itself, with the hundreds of Chinese who had placered Warrens Meadow gone, the meadow carved into craters by steam-powered shovels, and the buildings in the camp all new since the fire in 1903.

  She popped a candy into Gay’s mouth.
Too startled to object, the child sucked noisily, her sobs diminishing. Polly squatted on the log beside her. She wiped Gay’s eyes and nose, straightened the knitted stocking cap.

  “My name is Polly,” she told Johnny. “One time five years ago, you play the fiddle with my husband, Charlie Bemis, in his dance hall. I not there, but he tell me about it. He say you play real good.”

  Anxious to waylay questions about Charlie, she rushed on. “This your first winter in school?”

  “Not mine, Gay’s. She’s homesick.”

  Fresh tears spilled down Gay’s cheeks. She smeared them with the back of her mittened hands. “I am not, I just hate her!” she declared vehemently.

  “Who?”

  The boy pointed to the teacher who had come out to the yard. Tall, rawboned, and sternly gaunt, she rang the bell, signaling the end of noon recess. “I board with Francis’s mother, Mrs. Rodin, the lady that runs the big hotel,” Johnny explained. “But Gay boards with the teacher. She’s horrible. Can’t boil water and says we get on her nerves. Poor Gay has to sleep in her bed, and she has garlic breath and snores and takes up all the room!”

  The yard filled with chatter, laughter, the clatter of skis, the stamping and scraping of boots. As the teacher shouted at the stragglers, Polly felt the child tremble beside her, saw the lips quiver, threatening the fragile dam of tears.

  She pinched the child’s cheek tenderly. “The teacher frighten you?”

  Johnny took Gay’s mittened hands and pulled. “Come on, we’d better go or there’ll be trouble.”

  Gay slid off the log reluctantly. Eyes riveted on Polly, she trailed behind her brother, her little legs in their high buckled overshoes making two steps for his every one. Polly started after them. But before she reached the schoolhouse door, the teacher slammed it.

  Walking back to the one-room cabin Pete had rented for her, Polly wondered if her own loneliness for Charlie and their life together in the canyon was clouding her judgment, making her see an urgency in the child that did not exist.

  Ever since the school in Warrens had been built, families in outlying ranches who wanted educations for their children had boarded them out for the school year. The separations were hard on parents and children, but unavoidable, and Gay, like her brother, would adjust if only she did not have to live with that grim-faced tartar.

  The thought brought Polly to a halt. Why did Gay have to stay with the teacher when she could come live with her? Of course, they would have to share the one bed in the cabin, but she was much smaller than the teacher. And, Polly chuckled softly, she was sure she didn’t have garlic breath. Or snore.

  Gay’s tears vanished once she moved in with Polly. At noon recess and after school, she and Johnny joined the other children skiing down the mountain slope, playing dare base and pullaway, and in the late afternoons and early evenings before Johnny went back to Mrs. Rodin’s hotel and Gay slept, Polly’s cabin filled with laughter, the warm buttery fragrance of popping corn, the sweet stickiness of taffy pulls.

  With the children, Polly found even the most ordinary tasks took on new color and life. They dyed eggs with onion and walnut shells and cut cookies in the shapes of animals and clouds. While Polly dressed a hen for supper, Johnny blew up the cleaned-out chicken crop, tossing it like a balloon. And when Polly made bread, Gay, her face and long-sleeved gingham apron streaked with flour, stood on a chair, neighing, while her hands, pretend horses, plunged into dough, then pawed their way back up the steep sides of the bowl and down again.

  Often, Johnny would make the mile walk to Slaughter Creek to borrow a fiddle from the Adams children. Then, face fixed in serious concentration, he would tuck the fiddle under his chin and, as bow flew across fiddle turning out merry tunes, Polly would find herself back in time with Charlie.

  The days, golden as sunbeams, slid into weeks and months, and winter gave way to spring. Long underwear, leggings, thick-ribbed stockings, flannel petticoats and heavy wool dresses peeled off layer by layer, and they gave up indoor baking, story telling, singing, and stereoscope views for kite flying, fishing, and picnics. Soon, spotted trout, too tiny to eat, swam in jars on window ledges spilling over with cans of sprouting seeds and bouquets of wild flowers gathered on long rambles. And soon, all too soon, school would be over, and Gay and Johnny going home.

  Polly’s fingers lightly brushed the child sleeping beside her. If her days and nights after Charlie’s death had been long and dark before Gay came to brighten them, how would she bear them when Gay left?

  Abruptly, she rose and padded across the cabin to the stove, opened the damper and draft, and shook the grate. The coals flashed sparks which, shiny as false gold, crumbled into ash. Like her few fleeting months with the child, Polly thought as she built a new fire.

  For a long time, she stood, staring into the bright new flames, holding her hands out to them, warming. Then she turned, lit the lamp, and carried it over to the dresser. The old Bull Durham tin she took from beneath the fabric scraps in the bottom drawer was cold to the touch. She held it lightly, reluctant to open it, knowing she must. Finally, she pried it open.

  The lingering, bittersweet fragrance of Charlie’s favorite tobacco assailed Polly’s nostrils. She inhaled hungrily, but the scent was too thin and too soon gone to satisfy. Feeling cheated, she took out the papers she had stuffed inside after Charlie died. Brittle with age and too much folding, they crackled as she spread them out. Her wedding certificate. Her certificate of residence. The mining claim for the ranch. The papers for which Charlie had been willing to give up his life. The papers she would gladly surrender to bring him back.

  Unwanted tears blurred the papers, the child on the bed. Polly rubbed her eyes, impatient. After Gay went home, she would go to Grangeville to visit Bertha and get fitted for new spectacles.

  THIRTY-FIVE

  In the far corner of Bertha Long’s kitchen, Polly, the parrot, strutted across its cage, jumped onto its perch, ruffled its brilliant green and gold feathers, and pecked at its empty dish, demanding, “Polly wants breakfast. What does Polly want for breakfast? Polly wants something for breakfast!”

  Polly, slicing cherries at the work table between the stove and sink, shook her knife at the bird. “Polly be quiet or Polly be breakfast!” she warned.

  Bertha laughed. “Do you remember when Brown complained about your coffee and you jumped out from behind the stove, waving your cleaver, and shouting, ‘Who not like my coffee?’”

  Chuckling, Polly stirred the chopped cherries into the bowl of cookie batter. “Brown tell me my coffee is too strong. Your husband say it’s too weak. After I shake my knife, they both say my coffee is the best!”

  “Having you here is like having the old times back,” Bertha said, still laughing. She pulled a handkerchief from her pocket and dried her eyes. “I can almost believe my John and your Charlie aren’t dead, and that I’m not a fat old woman with stiff rheumatic knees.”

  “I’m glad I come. Grangeville have so many old friends and at the same time so many new things I never see or try before.”

  “What have you enjoyed the best?”

  “Let’s see,” Polly said, dropping teaspoons of batter onto a cookie tray.

  There was the excitement of her ride in the stage, one of the new wagons that needed neither horse nor mule to pull. The warm welcome of old friends. The unexpected kindness and curiosity of strangers like Mr. Shaffley, the editor from the Idaho Free Press who had come to interview her at Jennie Holmes’ house; the school teacher who had brought his daughter to see her; the little girl, Verna, who had walked all the way across town just to take her photograph and ask a few questions. And of course, there were the fine shops where generous friends reawakened her vanity by buying her new clothes. The new gold-rimmed spectacles that made the hills and wheat fields look freshly washed and her friends and herself twice as old. The trips to the nickleodeon and, even better, the moving pictures.

  “Mary Pickford,” she decided, scraping the last of the batt
er from around the bowl. “We go see ‘The Love Light’ again, okay?”

  “I thought you found ‘The Love Light’ embarrassing,” Bertha teased.

  “Never mind, I cover my face with my hands and only look through my fingers.”

  Bertha, shaking seed into the bird dish, began to laugh, scattering the seed over the linoleum floor. The bird flapped its wings furiously. “Polly’s breakfast,” it squawked. “Where’s Polly’s breakfast?”

  Polly swept the seed up and poured it into the bird’s dish. “There, you silly old bird.”

  “You mean you’d rather see ‘The Love Light’ than go on a train ride?” Bertha said.

  Polly’s eyes widened. “Train? Here? Charlie say we never see the railroad.”

  “Not in the Salmon Canyon maybe, but we’ve had the railroad here for years.”

  Polly whipped off her apron. “Then what we wait for? Let’s go.”

  When the trainmen heard that Polly had never seen a locomotive or cars before, they lifted her into the engine cab and opened the firebox. The blast of hot air sprayed soot all over her starched white dress, but she was too excited to care. As long as she had been in America, she had heard of the iron road. Charlie had told her that there were tracks laid all across the continent, and she knew many of the Chinese in Warrens had helped build it. Now that she was finally going to ride in one, she wanted to see everything. The great solitary reflecting lamps in front above the cow guards, the seething, roaring furnace that fed the engines, the baggage cars loaded with produce and grain, the smoking cars, sleeping cars, even the tiny, cramped lavatories.

  A bell tolled. With a shriek of the train whistle, the metal wheels ground against the tracks, and she and Bertha were flung against the prickly green plush seats. Trees, mountains, wheat fields, horses, and wagons flew past in a blur.

  “Now you’ve done everything,” Bertha shouted above the rhythmic clickety-clack of wheels.

  “Oh no,” Polly shouted back. “I only just begin. After I go back to Warrens, my old boarder, Jay Czizek, and his wife take me to Boise.”