Behind the Masks

by Susan Patron

  Suddenly I knew something that I hadn’t known I’d known. I turned to Eleanor, who was listening to Papa. “You?” I whispered. She nodded imperceptibly, then leaned close and spoke in my ear.

  “I took it from my father’s desk and gave it to Miss Williams, who gave it to your father. Untie my ribbon, will you?” Freed from her mask, she wore an expression of both anguish and hope on her face. “Even though my own father is involved with them, I hate the 601 vigilantes, Angie. They’re like mean, greedy little boys allowed to run wild.”

  Papa turned his back on the sheriff and spoke again to the ball chairman. Mr. McPhee had a large head with a fat, round face resting on a tough, wiry body, like a half man, half baby. “Now, Mr. McPhee, I understand you know everything that happens in this town, often before it happens. Perhaps you would like to tell us who was responsible for the Johl robbery.”

  Everyone knows Mr. McPhee is one of the largest shareholders in the Standard Mine, and the richest man in Bodie. I guess he was not used to taking suggestions from others. “That had nothing to do with the 601. It was just a robbery and no one is going to believe that woman can identify masked bandits. Give me the list, Reddy,” he ordered.

  “Who are you trying to protect, McPhee? Yourself?” When Mr. McPhee only glared through narrowed eyes, Papa slapped the envelope against his leg. “Here’s our offer: This unopened envelope will be locked in the Wells Fargo safe. It will remain unopened until there is another incident of vigilantism—until the 601 try again to take the law into their own hands. In exchange, Wells Fargo agent Mr. Antoine Duval wants the names of the three men who robbed the Johls and your assurance that their money will be returned.”

  Mr. McPhee laughed. “Well, let Mr. Antoine Duval find out who they are for himself.”

  The devil who still held the tiny derringer said, “I already have. We know who they are, and we have abundant evidence, including Mrs. Johl’s observations about the hole she shot with this derringer in the hat of one, the bite marks her dog left in the boot of another, and her own ring on the finger of the third.” A roar of comments spread through the room and then everyone quieted when Antoine continued.

  “You are right that the robbers are not directly connected with the vigilantes. They will be tried in a court of law. But the deal Mr. Reddy is representing will allow the good people of Bodie to see tonight the corruption that’s going on, and a big part of that, McPhee, is your tolerance of it.”

  Mr. McPhee examined the jeweled collar of his cane. I saw his jaw clench and unclench. “No deal,” he said to Antoine.

  A tiny, tidy, graying woman rushed to his side. It was Mrs. McPhee, still clutching the Best Costume blue ribbon. She looked irritable, as if someone had wiped his dirty hands on her best tablecloth. She said, “Oh, Herbert, do as they say. Everyone knows Con Williams was involved, and for Heaven’s sake he’s wearing the stolen emerald ring on his pinky right now!”

  People standing near Con Williams moved away as Antoine covered him with the derringer. The sheriff cursed from his place on the floor. But it was the voice of Miss Williams that rang out as she once again advanced on her brother reprovingly. “Stop trying to get it off!” she said. “It’s quite obviously too tight!” Con rammed his hand into his pocket and pulled his hat down low over his eyes. Many of us laughed at his discomfort, for we knew his sister was a force to be reckoned with.

  Mrs. McPhee was not finished with her husband. “Now will you kindly promise that the Johls’ money will be returned and give Mr. Duval and Mr. Reddy the names of the other two highwaymen so we can get back to our ball?”

  Much more slowly, Mr. McPhee turned his imposing eyes to his wife. I had seen him castigate men who got in his way on the street, flailing at them with his cane. He was rumored to be an excellent shot with either rifle or revolver. But now he seemed like a boy caught stealing marbles—yet not quite ready to fess up.

  “First give Mrs. Johl her ribbon,” he said to Mrs. McPhee. “She deserves it.”

  “Oh, all right!” Mrs. McPhee huffed.

  She marched over to Mrs. Johl, who said, “Hello, Mrs. McPhee. It’s nice to meet you … finally.” For a few moments nothing happened, and I think Ellie and I were holding our breath.

  Mrs. McPhee looked alert and a little surprised. Then she reached up and pinned the ribbon on Mrs. Johl’s dress. “Herbert is right,” she said. “You deserve this. And the next time you and your husband visit Bodie, you must come to tea.”

  “In truth, what I should really like,” Lottie Johl said, “is to come back and serve on the Committee of Arrangements for the Fourth of July Ball and Parade next year.”

  “Done,” said Mrs. McPhee, and nodded to her husband.

  “The highwaymen were Kelley and Kirgan,” said Mr. McPhee, and nodded to Antoine.

  “Done,” said Antoine, and nodded to the Horribles on either side of the sheriff and the constable.

  “Done,” shouted those men, and they restrained the two officers of the law who had, along with Con Williams, robbed the Johls.

  The banjo player strummed a chord. The fiddler lifted his bow. A newly masked devil was suddenly standing by my side. “Will the brightest moon that ever shone in Bodie favor me with a dance?” he asked.

  “Done,” I said to Antoine Duval.

  Later

  The grand ball ended at dawn. The morning-shift miners, deep inside our mountain digging gold from its veins, never discovered the gold spilled on its crest by the rising sun. “How fleeting,” I said to Ellie with a great sigh as we walked home, “are the most dazzling of riches.”

  Eleanor, mask and purse dangling from one hand, glowed with an inner light. We both had sore feet, dark smudges beneath our eyes, and a thrilling desire, already, for the next ball—though it would not be for months.

  After the sheriff and constable and Con Williams were taken away—Papa gracefully declined each one’s request to serve as his lawyer—a quick election for a provisional sheriff was held. Mr. Ward was elected and he mournfully accepted with the stipulation that someone look after his shop during his absences. Hank Babcockry volunteered for this job and was signed on. Teamster Zachariah Gibson and carpenter Silus Smith, both boarders at Mrs. O’Toole’s, were appointed as temporary deputies.

  My parents had walked home at around midnight but they’d allowed me to stay until the end. Antoine Duval was escorting the three of us—Eleanor, her mother, and me—to our homes. Along Main Street, a light shone in the rear of Ward’s Furniture and Undertaking. “Let’s go ’round to the back,” Ellie said. “I think I know who’s there.”

  Mrs. Tucker was indignant. “Eleanor! I won’t hear of it! That is where Mr. Ward does his embalming and keeps his caskets.”

  “Dear Mother,” Eleanor said, “come with me for a moment. There is something we need to see.” She linked arms with her mother and gave me a pleading look until I took Mrs. Tucker’s other arm. I said, “Mrs. Tucker, I believe Mr. Ward is a great friend—of Bodie and of us. I think he has been watching over us and protecting us. He will not mind if we go inside, I am certain.”

  She became resigned and gave no further protest, but I myself was secretly reluctant to revisit the musty, strong-smelling little room yet again. But Eleanor’s insistence on taking us there inspired my tired feet.

  Mr. Ward was standing in the alley by his back door. “Ah,” he said, “how unusual, yet fortuitous. He, that is, Mr. Tucker, has been searching for something, muttering and crying. Muttering, yes, and crying. Quite in a bad state, Mr. Tucker. Won’t you go in?”

  “I’ll be waiting for you here,” Antoine said to me in a low tone. He and Mr. Ward began discussing the events of the evening, leaning against the back alley wall as we went inside.

  Mr. Tucker was sitting on the sawdust-covered floor, motionless in the half-light, as if he’d lost his way and was trying to get his bearings. When he saw us he began scooting backward toward the curtain that led to the front room. I stayed by the door.

&nbs
p; “Wait, Father!” Ellie said. “I have something you lost! It was sent by someone you loved, when you still knew how to love.”

  Mr. Tucker had aged as if the long night were ten thousand nights, turning him into a very old man. He fixed vacant eyes on Eleanor’s purse as she opened it. When she laid a pair of tiny red shoes and a small red cape on the floor beside him, he began to tremble violently. He wrapped his arms around his knees and rocked himself side to side. “No, no, no, please, no,” he pleaded.

  “Explain what happened, Father,” Eleanor said quietly. “Tell us now.”

  Mrs. Tucker pushed past me to stand with Ellie, their arms around each other’s waists. She had not worn a mask to the ball, but her face was now like a frozen mask. She gazed at the clothes and her expression grew puzzled, then comprehending, then stricken. She cried, “Oh, my God! Dear God!”

  Mr. Tucker’s face seemed to crumple. “You had almost died, my Ida,” he said in a pleading tone. “Fifteen years ago, it was, we had that little place in Aurora. The midwife saved your life, and new baby Eleanor’s, too.” He glanced toward Ellie, but quickly looked away as if seeing her blinded him. He turned his piteous eyes back to his wife. “But she had another birthing to attend. She gave our girl Hope a corn-husk dolly and then she left. When you and the infant finally slept, I packed my hunting gear—it was rabbits I wanted. They were for you, Ida, to bring some home for supper. Little Hope wanted to go with me—it was spring, you remember, Ida, and the winter had been almighty hard, and she’d been cooped up so long. So I dressed her …” He broke off, heaving a great sob that made me bow my head in pity.

  I had no idea what he had done, but I did know he had suffered from it horribly.

  “I dressed her and wrapped her in that red cape, so if there were other hunters they wouldn’t mistake her for a little animal. That was right, wasn’t it, Ida? I slipped her feet into her … her red shoes; fastened each button.” He wiped his nose and eyes on his sleeve, and seemed unaware that he continued to cry. I felt my heart pounding as I listened. No other sound interrupted as Mr. Tucker continued from his position on the floor. The bald spot on the top of his head seemed like a raw pink wound.

  “I carried Hope and my gear to a little melting-snow stream in that canyon beyond the house, and when she squirmed, I let her down so gentle, and showed her to be quiet, and she understood, Ida. She knew not to scare the rabbits; she was real smart for such a tiny one, only six months over a year in age.”

  Mr. Tucker looked into a distance only he could see, his eyes glazed and his voice trancelike. “You have to look for shapes, not color or movement. Rabbits knew I was there. They made themselves invisible, freezing in place the way they do, looking at you with only one of their eyes so they blend into the ground and the rocks and shadows. You have to know how to search for them, search for the round shape of the haunch, the long up-down line of their ears.

  “Hope didn’t pay attention; she wanted to gather up sticks for her new dolly, I guess, making little piles of them, so I walked on farther into the canyon, knew I’d find rabbits there like I’d done before.

  “And, Ida, I swear, I was thinking of you, and how glad you’d be when I came home with fresh meat, and then I spotted them. A good distance apart so it wouldn’t be easy, but I believed I could do it. They were foraging and they knew I was there. I had to wait, that’s all, that’s what every hunter knows: You have to be patient. Once they moved closer together I might could kill them both.

  “I waited, waited, thought about the supper we’d have that night, waited. Didn’t even bother with the cramps in my legs, didn’t move, hardly breathed, and finally they each took little hops closer together, just like I wanted. I squeezed off a shot and then another, but only winged the second rabbit.

  “’Course I followed its bloody trail; you can’t leave an animal to die like that. I wanted that meat for us, Ida. And the fur skins, I was thinking we could trade or sell ’em—we needed money and goods. That’s why I did it, Ida, for you. Later there was money, more and more of it, but back then … I killed the second rabbit and bagged them and I was proud and wanted to show you right away—thinking how pleased you’d be. I was planning how I’d skin them first, then bring them to you in your stew pot.

  “Maybe even stop first at Old Man Reid’s, get him to lend us some salt pork and onions in exchange for a rabbit pie later. You know, I thought you could stuff and roast one of them and stew the other for rabbit pies. I could almost taste your pies.”

  Mr. Tucker was silent then for some time. He continued to weep. Then he tried to look again into Ellie’s eyes but I saw him flinch—he couldn’t do it. He gazed down at his own shaking hands and continued. “I was nearly home; close enough to see you through the window, holding the newborn and watching, and then your face changed, Ida, and you looked as if God himself had thumped you. That’s when I come to realize I’d made it all the way back without Hope.

  “I couldn’t tell you.” He shook his head from side to side. “I had to make a different story than what happened. I had to. I says to you, ‘Ida, what is the matter? What is so wrong?’ You come out and peered all around me and you says, ‘Hope! Where is she? You were gone so long and I woke and could not find her!’

  “So I look at you and I know you’ll kill me if I tell the truth, I know sure as God that you’ll kill me. So I says, ‘You let her wander off? Ida, what have you done?’ Then I say, ‘No, you stay here. I’ll find Hope. But,’ I says—and may God forgive me, Ida—I says to you, ‘remember that you are the mother.’”

  His voice broke and for a while he sobbed uncontrollably, rocking himself.

  In a cold, commanding voice, Eleanor said, “Finish the story, Father.”

  He nodded. After a moment he said, “I threw the rabbits on the step. My blood was cold in my veins, Ida, but I had to do it. I said, ‘You must take better care of the children. I cannot provide food and shelter and protection and be the nursemaid.’ You see, Ida, I had to show I was the man of the family. You see, don’t you? You had to understand it wasn’t my fault what happened.”

  He took a deep, shuddering breath. “I went back, calling and calling, but she didn’t answer. I found her facedown in a puddle. I gathered her little wet body to me and held her and held her, and I swear if I could have brought her back to life by giving my own I would of done it, Ida. I’d lost one daughter and gained another on the same day, and I … I made you believe that you were the cause of both, the birth and the death. I had to hide the red clothes, to make it like she wandered off on her own when you wasn’t looking—she was too young to have dressed herself. I thought what I did was God’s will, Ida.”

  Mrs. Tucker stood quietly staring down at her husband. Her face was expressionless but her eyes, the same beautiful blue as Eleanor’s, seemed as if they could pierce him.

  “Go on, Father,” Eleanor said. “Tell us what you did next.”

  He took something from his pocket and shot a glance at me by the door. His eyes were like dark stones. I was surprised he even realized I was in the room. “Make her leave,” Mr. Tucker said, trying for command in his voice, trying for his usual authority.

  But Eleanor was, now, the stronger of them. “No,” she said. We all waited. He shook his hand, making a clicking sound that filled the room. Finally he continued.

  “All I knew was I had to hide the cape and the shoes. Had to do it. Then I saw two hunters comin’ upstream. They hadn’t seen me. I couldn’t let them find out what I was doing. So then I knew I’d have to scare them away. If I didn’t, everything would go wrong, see?

  “I aimed and hit one of ’em in the arm. The other starts shouting for me to throw down the gun but I don’t because I still have to make them leave. But that second fella he sees me and shoots and I feel a sting like a bee at the side of my ear and I know the next shot he won’t miss, so I throw in my gun and clamber away from Hope and the clothes. Got my hands in the air, say it’s an accident. The man I shot is bleeding bad so we
make a tourniquet and carry him over to town. He’s big, and if I hadn’t a helped he’d a died one way or the other.

  “Then I went back for Hope. Was afraid to bury the clothes, afraid they’d turn up; knew it was a bad plan. So I kept them in my kit and later hid them in a trunk. That’s all, Ida. We buried Hope the next day in the Aurora cemetery. You see, I did what I had to do. Didn’t have a choice.”

  It was quiet in the embalming room, except for the clicking. He opened his hand, palm flat, and we all looked down at the gold dice, shining in the gloom.

  Ellie said, “But Hope thinks you did have a choice, Father. Isn’t that right?”

  He rolled the dice between his palms. “I gambled and lost,” he said. With great force he threw the dice into a dark corner. He reached toward one small shoe, then withdrew his hand quickly, as if his fingertips had been burned. “Hope keeps coming back, Ellie, haunting me. She … wants me. I can’t bear up under it any longer. I’m going mad. I’ve gone mad. Please make her leave me alone, now I’ve confessed. Make her go away, Ida! Please!” I believe that Eleanor became a woman that night, in the sense of having grown to a maturity of mind and feelings, of crossing some bridge only to discover that evil and deception exist at the other side, even in the heart of one you love. She learned that her father had caused a death and blamed it on his blameless wife; she learned how he’d taken my father’s arm. And so she was forced to see the true depths of his weak and tortured soul. She blazed with twisted twin flames of fury and of pity.

  Her mother remained silent and seemed unhearing. Finally Ellie spoke. “You will purchase this coffin from Mr. Ward,” she said, choosing the smallest of the boxes in a stack behind her father. She opened the lid; it was just large enough. With great care and tenderness, she laid the cape and shoes inside.

  “It is over now, Father,” she said, and closed the lid. She handed it to him. “Hope wants you to go to Aurora and bury this alongside her body. May God have mercy on you.”