Eden Mine

by S. M. Hulse

  I hear footsteps on the porch as I finish writing. One knock, not loud, then Hawkins’s voice. “It’s me, Jo.” He sounds like he isn’t sure I’ll answer.

  “Just me,” he says, when I open the door. I move aside to let him in, see the glint of metal and glass beyond the row of aspens beside the road. “Quite a crowd out there,” Hawkins tells me. “Reporters, mostly. I gave ’em all a stern talking-to about trespassing.” He’d have tapped his star at the beginning, tipped his hat at the end. “FBI’s got a car by the gate, too.” It isn’t a surprise—Devin told me the night before—but it’s hard to get used to the idea. “There’ll be more of them, you know. You won’t see ’em, but they’ll be watching the house.”

  I close the door. Hawkins is in uniform today, unflattering khaki head to toe. He’s lost weight the last year or so, and it’s aged him. “That’s a warning for Samuel,” I say. “Not me.”

  Hawkins looks like he means to say something but keeps it to himself. He goes to the couch and perches stiffly on the arm, rests a manila envelope on one knee. I follow him into the living room, park my chair near the hearth. “You here as a sheriff or a friend?”

  Hawkins sighs, runs a hand over his face. He had a mustache for years but shaved it last fall when he realized it was graying faster than the hair on his head. He used to smooth it down when he was thinking and hasn’t shed the gesture as easily as the mustache. “I don’t know, Jo. Both, I guess. I wanted to make sure you were okay.”

  All he’s ever wanted to do.

  “I’m fine.” Hawkins narrows his eyes but seems willing to accept the lie. “What about you?” I nod to where one hand is pressed against the small of his back.

  “It’s nothing,” he says, taking his hand away. A couple years ago a drunk in a pickup slammed into Hawkins’s truck while he was working a traffic stop. The accident left him with back trouble, but he rarely mentions it in front of me.

  “Here.” I hand him the statement. Hawkins takes a pair of reading glasses from his shirt pocket, skims the words.

  “You didn’t call a lawyer.”

  “Read it for me. Sheriffs do that kind of thing.”

  He folds the paper and puts it in his pocket.

  “One more thing.” I rock my chair forward a few inches, back. Stop. It’s a nervous habit, and Hawkins knows it. “I don’t want to talk to that FBI agent anymore. Devin.”

  Hawkins crosses his arms. “I get that it ain’t a pleasant thing, Jo, but under the circumstances—”

  “I’ll talk to you. You can talk to him.”

  He sighs again, a short huff with more than a hint of a scoff in it. “This might surprise you, but the FBI don’t exactly hold the office of the Sheriff of Prospect County, Montana, in terribly high esteem. No one’s got the first idea where your brother is”—he pauses, ever so briefly—“so at the moment, you’re about the best lead they’ve got. They’re gonna want their own man on this.”

  “Tell them I don’t recognize their authority. Tell them I consider myself a sovereign citizen of these United States and I acknowledge no higher office of law enforcement than the local sheriff.” The words come easily. There are more I can say if these don’t work; I can rattle off the right terminology to claim allegiance to any of the half dozen or so extremist ideologies Samuel has cycled through over the years. Despite how much I hated hearing the words from his lips, saying them now makes me feel closer to him.

  Hawkins closes his eyes for a long moment, opens them slowly, like a man fighting off a headache. “You ain’t ever held to any of that bullshit, Jo, and you know it.”

  “They don’t.” I thought carefully about this last night. Devin is dangerous. Smart. More skillful at reading me than I am at reading him. Hawkins knows me better, of course, which might be dangerous in its own way, but I have no secrets from him. Samuel has no secrets from him. Almost none. “Those FBI folks are gonna read whatever file they’ve put together on Samuel, and once they have, they won’t have a bit of trouble believing his sister subscribes to all the same crazy nonsense.”

  “I ain’t lying to the FBI, Jo. Not even for you.”

  “Then just tell them the best chance they’ve got of getting anything useful out of me is by letting me talk to you, not them. Because that’s plain truth.” If Hawkins calls me on that, it’s over. This is borrowed bravado, my best impression of what I think Samuel would do in my place.

  “I don’t like this,” Hawkins says at last.

  “You think I do?” I hear my voice crack on the last word. I grip the handrims of my chair hard, stare at the rug on the floor in front of me. It’d be easier to move around the room without the rug, but there’s still the ghost of a stain on the hardwood. “I wish with all I’ve got that Samuel didn’t do what you tell me he did. I’m still hoping you’re wrong. But I don’t want this getting worse than it already is. I’ve spent years listening to Samuel’s diatribes; I probably know more about Ruby Ridge and Waco than half those FBI folks. And I don’t want that for Samuel, Hawkins. Whatever he did or didn’t do, I don’t want it to end like that. But if I’m going to talk to anyone about this, I need it to be someone who knows more about Samuel than what you say he did yesterday.”

  I’m surprised by my own speechmaking, and I think Hawkins is, too—both of us are used to Samuel being the one prone to oratory—but I see the words working on him, and at last he sighs. “I’ll tell them,” he allows. “But I can’t promise they’ll listen.”

  I nod.

  Hawkins stands, presses his hands against his lower back. He walks toward the door, stops just before he gets there. “You ought to see this,” he says quietly, and lays the manila envelope on the table beside the door before he leaves.

  I ignore it at first. Go into the bathroom, put up my hair in a braided bun for work. Clean the kitchen counters. Wash the dishes, which is usually Samuel’s job.

  I can’t do this forever. Refuse knowledge. Embrace ignorance. But each piece of truth that settles in my soul brings searing understanding with it. He is probably not in Wyoming. The glass shattered inward. Her name is Emily. It doesn’t, I hope, make me a monster for waiting until each piece of information starts to become a familiar sort of pain before seeking out the next.

  So I fold laundry. Put away the brushes I left scattered in my studio yesterday. And finally, after sitting a few feet away and staring at it for several long minutes, I open the envelope.

  A single photograph inside, printed on cheap copy paper in grainy gray scale. There’s a time-and-date stamp in the corner indicating the still is from 10:00 Sunday; the image isn’t as blurry as I imagined it would be. I don’t recognize the truck. Samuel’s is an extended-cab Ford, the front bumper tied on with baling twine; this one is smaller and older. For a moment I feel elated—It isn’t his truck—and then my eye goes to the figure in the bed, bending over a small suitcase. He wears a baseball cap and sunglasses, and I’ve never seen that sweatshirt before, but the hard jawline, oh, that I do know, and the strong build, and the slight hollow in his left cheek where he’s missing two teeth.

  Despite what I told Hawkins, when I rose this morning I thought I’d accepted it: Samuel set off the bomb. But I must have doubted, must have been more loyal to my brother than even I knew, because when I look at the photograph, I feel the breath go out of my lungs and stay gone. For several seconds I do not move, do not breathe, do not think. And then I inhale, and the air comes rushing back to me, and with it a certainty so heavy I don’t know how I’ll bear it another moment, let alone minutes, hours, days, weeks. A lifetime.

  Samuel. Yes, it is Samuel. It’s Samuel.

  It’s him.

  * * *

  I steer my car down the long driveway, slowly enough the grind of gravel beneath my tires sounds like a series of distinct cracks and crunches. As I approach the highway, the glints of metal and glass I’ve seen through the trees reveal themselves to be a dozen vehicles butted up against one another on the grassy verge. Most are ordinary cars, b
ut several are news vans with microwave antennas resting coiled atop their roofs like sleeping serpents. I’ve already been spotted, and people crowd together on the far side of the gate, some wielding cameras and microphones.

  I set my jaw. Wouldn’t be so bad if I could just step out of my car, open the gate, and be back in the car in a matter of seconds. I’m quick with the transfers into and out of my wheelchair, but it will never be as fast as simply standing, and I hate the thought of being a spectacle for the cameras. Just as I put my car in park, I see a khaki uniform wading through the tide of people. Carson, the deputy from Split Creek. He meets my eyes briefly, hauls open the gate, waves the reporters back. I nod to him as I drive past, then turn onto the highway and set my eyes toward town.

  I love my car. Samuel surprised me with it for my high school graduation, the hand controls already installed. A practical gift—his long shifts at the sawmill make it tough for him to ferry me around—but I’ve always loved driving, sometimes go all the way to Elk Fork or Kalispell or into Idaho, just to enjoy the mountains and the sky and the speed. I’m sure all Samuel sees is a waste of gas, but he never tells me not to go. I think about turning around now and heading north, or east, or west, driving till dark or later. Driving toward wherever Samuel might be. And where is that? It’s just one more question in a sea of others: What did he think a bomb would accomplish? Did he consider what it might do to others? To me?

  I continue south toward town, pass a handful of other properties like ours, wide fields and aging farmhouses. Horses graze in one pasture, a handful of cattle in another. Deer gather at the edges of the fields. On the side of one barn, the words WE SUPPORT NORTH LODE MINING CO. are just visible, two and a half decades of Montana winters having faded the letters till they almost match the equally weathered wood. Six properties on the east side of the highway between my home and the town limits. Six other properties the government could have decided to build a road through.

  The sun is directly overhead now, and the valley will stay light late into the afternoon. The mountains on the east side of the valley are the high ones, the rich ones. The reason Prospect exists. They contain silver, or did once, and their surfaces are covered in tall, spindly pine and dark, rusty rock that turns the color of old blood when it rains. They keep the town in shadow until almost noon, and in winter their peaks vanish into the low blanket of cloud for weeks on end. They have names of their own, those mountains, but I almost always hear them referred to by the names of the mines that bore into their hearts: Eden. Gethsemane. The last ore was extracted more than twenty years ago; after the Gethsemane collapse in 1994 the company made a few gestures toward reopening the mines, but the mountains were mostly depleted, and now all they’re good for is bearing the burden of a road no one here wants.

  There are mountains on the west side of the valley, too, but this close to town they’re just foothills, overlapping mounds of earth clothed in prairie grass that is a fleeting green today but will soon fade to a dull, dry brown. Steeper than they look—I climbed them often as a kid—but dwarfed by the higher peaks behind them, by the Cabinet and Purcell Mountains beyond. North, in Canada, are the most striking mountains of all, jagged rows of them, their color like gray mixed with cobalt, all tipped with white.

  The speed limit drops to twenty-five at the town limits, and I slow as I approach the WELCOME TO PROSPECT sign; it’s pocked with bullet dents and boasts a population of 649, which I consider exceedingly optimistic. I pass the old Gas-N-Go with its bright, remodeled facade that seems out of place among the brick and timber of the rest of the town. Next comes the school—only the elementary building still occupied, the high school students bused to Split Creek now—and then the post office, City Hall, the first of three bars, a pair of churches, four empty storefronts, Prospect Drug, and a coffee shop that doubles as the offices of the formerly-weekly-now-biweekly Miner. At the heart of town are the Gethsemane Mine Memorial and the patch of grass beside it that passes as a city park, the cemetery and funeral home beyond. When I was a kid, there was also a general store, a doctor’s office, and a small but grand single-screen movie theater called the Orpheus, but the town has withered since the mines closed. Even with many storefronts vacant or boarded up, the center of town feels cramped, narrow two-story brick buildings pressed together, private homes stacked almost atop one another up the slopes to the west, defunct mining buildings and smelters and other rusting structures clustered at the base of the mountains to the east. Things ease to the south, with the relatively newer buildings claiming patches of lawn around their perimeters: the library, the dollar store, the second gas station.

  I shouldn’t like Prospect. Even in its youth it wouldn’t have been an attractive town, and its crowded, jumbled layout speaks of necessity and thrift rather than planning or care. A few years after the mines closed, the city council hired a consultant who suggested making the town a tourist destination for gardeners and flower enthusiasts, but the project was called off halfway through—the soil was so contaminated by lead and other mining offal that officials had to plead with people not to plant petunias in their own yards—and the only remnants of that hopeful time are a single aluminum sculpture of a daisy next to City Hall and a Silver Gardens City mural on the side of Prospect Drug that fades a little more each year. Then there was chatter about an Indian casino going up outside town—I practiced dealing cards at the kitchen table—but the casino never materialized, the chatter fell away, and with it the remnants of faith that something would come along eventually. Jobs left. People left. Prospect stayed, diminished. The new bypass road, once built, might finish it off entirely.

  And yet it is my home. I’ve experienced enough heartbreak here I could feel justified hating the place, but I don’t. In some ways it might be easier for me to love Prospect than it is for Samuel, because I don’t remember what it was like before the mines closed. On the other hand, perhaps that’s what makes him so fiercely loyal to the place; every change is one more loss, one more thing relegated to memory. In any case, Samuel and I share a devotion to this valley. It cradles the bones of those we’ve lost, and stands in their stead; they lived here as we do, walked where we walk, saw what we see. It’s the kind of love for a place only an orphan might understand. However damaged it might be, however poisoned, however marred, it’s not just our home; it’s what remains of our family. If I believe Samuel did what he did—and I must, I do—then I also recognize this is at least part of why. This place is ours. It is not for others to take.

  I drive past the SEE YOU SOON! sign at the town’s southern limits, then pull a hard U-turn. The car that’s been tailing me since it pulled onto the highway outside my gates blows past, and the one behind it has to wait for oncoming traffic before following me.

  I’ve worked at Fuel Stop part-time since my last year of high school. Gregory One Bear, the owner, had the misfortune to open the gas station six months before the Gethsemane disaster and two years before the mines closed for good. I doubt Prospect ever really needed two gas stations, but it certainly doesn’t now. One Bear tries to carve out a place for Fuel Stop in the town’s economy: in addition to the usual convenience store staples of Fritos, M&M’s, and Bud Light, half the store is devoted to souvenirs aimed at the occasional tourists from Idaho or Canada who pass through Prospect on their way to Glacier or Yellowstone. Most days the tourists fail to materialize.

  One Bear is behind the register when I go inside. “Jo—” he starts, but I interrupt.

  “Might be a couple guys coming in behind me.” I head quickly for the back room. It’s generally a dismal place—gray folding table, windowless walls, OSHA posters, a couple lockers that don’t latch—but today it feels like a refuge. I shove the bag on the back of my wheelchair into one of the lockers, check that my name tag is pinned straight on my red polo.

  A copy of the Elk Fork Chronicle lies scattered across the table, the main section facedown, a used-car-lot ad covering the back page. I tell myself not to look, flip the pape
r over anyway. I skim the lead story. It’s mostly about the explosion and the resulting damage, nothing I haven’t already learned from the radio. Only a single paragraph about Samuel, and just one line that mentions me:… a resident of Prospect in northwest Montana, where he lives with his sister. There’s one photo, Samuel’s mouth lifted into that rare ghost of a smile I so often try—and fail—to draw out of him. He is twenty-nine but looks a decade older. Short brown hair, a shade darker than my own, and our mother’s gray eyes. Skin that is tanned and taut and stretched too tightly over the bones beneath. The photo has been cropped closely around Samuel’s face, but there’s a small slash of yellow in the corner. My sleeve. My arm around his shoulders. We went to Glacier late last summer, drove the Going-to-the-Sun Road the final weekend it was open. We stopped at the Trail of the Cedars, asked a tourist to take the picture.

  I leave the paper, go out onto the floor. I spot the reporters in the parking lot, one staring at his phone, the other smoking a cigarette. One Bear must have exercised his “right to refuse service to anyone.” He’s still behind the counter, pen in hand, occasionally marking a sheaf of papers beside the register. He doesn’t look at me, and I’m glad.

  The souvenirs and gifts are crowded onto shelves in the back of the store: mugs and shot glasses printed with Montana; teddy bears dressed as cowboys; coin banks shaped like elk; beaded moccasins bearing Made in China tags; T-shirts screen-printed with romanticized images of grizzlies and wolves; huckleberry-flavored everything. The store even offers a small selection of my paintings; they line one wall above a display of stuffed mountain goats.