by M Dressler
I turn back once to look at the schoolhouse. Its tall frosted windows are blank. They glint like empty mirrors. I know better. I’ve seen you, I think, nodding. I’ll be back.
He leads the way down the hill. “It really is a view from up here, isn’t it, Rose? You get the best sense of the layout of the valley.” He breathes in, a deep, happy suck. “I always like to imagine how it looked when we were a camp. All the miners’ tents and cabins, and the wooden buildings all new. Of course, that part of our history died out and we went into a terrible slump for a long time, until the 1970s, when the gold rush became interesting to people again. Then things picked up. Sometimes you have to go through a low period”—he looks at me confidingly—“to lead you to a better place. But I guess I’m not telling you anything you don’t already know.”
“I’d say I learn more every minute I’m here, Mr. Dubois.”
He smiles and adds, encouraged, “The prospectors even had a saying for it: ‘Sweet are the uses of adversity.’”
Spoken like a man who never drowned.
“I’m from the city,” he says all at once, as though remembering it. “After I got out of the marines I worked as a trucker. I had the same route, year after year, from Oakland to Tahoe and back. Day in, day out. Five hours up, five hours down. Delivering toilet supplies to the hotels and casinos. ‘Sweet are the uses of adversity’? It was killing me, honestly. Nobody tells you how some work, it takes every last bit of joy out of you until you end up feeling like . . . like nothing. Like there’s no meaning to you, like you’re just some insignificant metal ball being rolled back and forth on a board someone else is tipping. I hope you don’t know and will never know what that feels like, young as you are.” He stares straight ahead of him, pained.
“I’m sorry,” I say, and mean it. Sometimes being dead makes me short-tempered, I know.
“Thanks.” He scratches under his cap again. “But then it got worse. My wife, she died of cancer. And”—he clears his throat, looking down toward the lit square—“and, and I just, I couldn’t take it, you know. One day it got so bad I drove off my route, I don’t know what I thought I was going to do, I think maybe I was just going to crash all the toilet paper into a lake and drown myself . . . And then, lo and behold, I see this sign, for a place called White Bar. I can’t explain it. I just knew I had to come here. The words sounded so high, so clean. And I pulled in, and it was like, I don’t know, like this storybook America. You know, the Old Wild West, like it used to be? Where in other places, you can’t even see it anymore, because it’s either gone or else it’s like some theme park with casinos and fast food. Here, you look out, and most of the old buildings are still the way they were. I came back as soon as I could, without my truck, and everyone here was so warm and welcoming, and they heard my story, and it turned out the couple who owned the General Store were retiring and moving to Palm Springs, so I took a chance, I emptied everything out of my retirement savings and I moved to the Bar and I never looked back. And you must be thinking, why is he telling me all this? It’s because there’s meaning here. There’s purpose. I don’t know if anyone’s talked to you about that yet, if you’ve felt it yet. But there’s something unique here. And the longer you’re here, the more you realize it.”
He stops now that we’ve reached the edge of the square and looks at me as though he very much wants to help. “When something is beautiful”—his skin flushes again—“it’s worth protecting. And you don’t even have to have big bucks to make your stake here, Rose. We need all kinds of help to make the Bar a go. You’ve met Bill? He’s a cook, he works for the mayor. He’s a great guy. Other folks have businesses, or work for people who do. It’s such a peaceful way of life. And the longer you’re here, the more you become a part of it. I guess that’s how it is in other places, too, but in the Bar, it really feels like something. We feel like we’re all in something together. Committed to keeping this little slice of heaven going. I guess I’m just trying to tell you it’s a good place adversity has brought you to, just like me.”
“And do you tell everyone this, Mr. Dubois?”
What I mean is: does the Bar always shoe strangers, unasked?
“Call me Harry, please. Oops! Sorry. My phone is buzzing.”
He taps his device. He reads it. His steaming breath hitches.
“It’s a message. From Martha.” He blinks down. “Something’s happened in the museum.” He wheels to face in the direction of the jail, and slips a little on the ice.
He’s surprised when I steady him with a gloved hand. But I don’t like to see anyone fall.
“We have to go,” he says. “Quick.”
Behind the iron door, Martha, pale-faced, is sitting on the floor. Ruth Huellet’s head rests on her lap, her soft cheeks stiff, her hair finely threaded with blood. Her blue eyes stare wide.
“Jesus.” Harold drops to his knees. “Ruth! Ruthie! What’s happened to her?”
“I don’t know,” Martha bends over her, rocking.
I know, I think. I know that look.
I’m brushed to one side as others come hurrying in—Bill, and others unknown to me.
“Came as fast as I could,” Bill pants. “Have you called the ambulance from Dutch Gap?”
The mayor’s voice is tear-filled as she holds Ruth’s round head. “They’re on their way. Thirty minutes they said. That was ten minutes ago. The roads are bad.”
“But what happened?”
“I was calling Ruthie to check on Ro—” Martha glances up at me, then away again. “I called and she didn’t answer, and I called again and again, and you know she always answers. I knew something had to be wrong.”
“Is she breathing?” a woman hovering nearby calls out, afraid.
“Yes. There’s that.”
A man cries, “I wonder if it’s a stroke! It could be a stroke!”
Mary Berringer comes next through the door, her elderly, white face puckered. John Berringer comes behind her. The small museum is filling now with people, pressed against the cases. I move deeper into the back, toward the old jail cell, a good place to call out from, without being noticed, “She needs a blanket!”
There is such a coldness, I know, as you draw near death. You feel it, your soul struggling to keep hold of the stiff glove of your hand.
Bill pulls an old saddle blanket from the pile beside him and tucks it carefully around Ruth’s sides.
“Listen to me,” he whispers to her, “you’re going to be all right, Ruthie.”
“Maybe she fell.” Harold Dubois crouches and whispers, too. “There’s blood on the back of her head. She could have fallen, hurt herself. Or maybe the stroke came, and she fell. I don’t know, I don’t know.”
If I were close, I’d say to Ruth Huellet, Hold fast, hold fast, now. Hold on to living, as long as you can, for death will tug hard at your feet. Fight. Try.
“Where’s the goddamn ambulance?” a man shouts. “It should be here by now!”
I watch them all, the tense citizens of White Bar. They’re afraid, clutching each other in their coats and mufflers. All around them, the museum’s cases and pictures glisten like a hall of twisted mirrors. In the glare, I see what the others don’t. In the corner, by the case with the Indian arrowheads inside it, a box has tumbled to the floor, with papers spilling out of it. Just above it, on the edge of the glass, is a dark streak of blood.
“The ambulance! Listen! It’s coming!”
Martha holds Ruth tighter and says, “You’re going to be all right, Ruthie, you hear me?” She turns to the men. “Now. You. Bill. Harry. You listen to me. I’ll be the one to follow Ruth. I’ll take my truck. You all watch over the hotel, please, and . . . our guest. All right, they’re here. Make room, get out of the way, they’re coming.”
The men in hooded jackets arrive, carrying with them a bright orange gurney. They set its shell on the crowded floor and tell everyone to please step back, go outside. All hasten out into the dusk but for Martha, who keeps close, and Bill
, who’s backed into the jail cell with me.
He looks as if he needs some comfort. I remember how he stared at me, that first day, so hopefully in the café. With his lonely eyes.
“It’ll be all right, Bill,” I say, though I can’t say it’s true.
“She’s breathing, right? She’s not paralyzed that way. She’s going to be all right.”
She might be. Then again, you might fight as hard as you can, kicking against the waves, and still be dragged down to the bottom.
“Bill,” I say to be kind—for what else is there to do? Pain is the same, pain is all the same, in every place and time—“Why don’t you tell Ruth’s friends you’re going to the café to make some coffee for them? That could be a good thing.”
“I could do that!”
The men in jackets have bound Ruth’s head with a tight strap and buckled more across her body. They lift and carry her out now through the iron door. The mayor follows close behind. Bill goes along with her, saying, “I’m going to get everyone to the café, Martha. We have coffee and rolls, and we’ll all wait together there.”
“Do that. And I’ll call with news as soon as I know.”
When he turns, I’ve already flown up into the rafters and into a dark cobwebbed eave. To wait and watch and learn more. Because I know that look on Ruth Huellet’s disappearing face. I know what felled her.
She saw a ghost.
9
When I was a little girl, I was afraid of the dead. Not only of the ghosts that hid under my bed; I heard the howls in the waves at night. My father tried to tell me, Emma Rose, those aren’t the cries of the dead. Those are only the ships creaking at anchor beyond the shoals. Or the creatures of the deep breaching and calling to each other in their own language. It might be the straining of the horns at the lighthouse.
He said all this to comfort me. And I listened. And believed not a word. For I knew with a child’s certainty there were movements that circled and watched me. Sometimes they crawled into the bed of my ear, sometimes only tugged at the blanket of air above me. I was afraid, because I knew some souls could sometimes slip that blanket, and appear.
It’s only when you become what you fear that you hover in the rafters and understand how hard it is to balance between light and dark.
“Rose?”
Bill has come back into the jailhouse looking for me. He searches every corner. All the others have gone out under the square’s hooded lamps.
He turns this way and that, but doesn’t think to look up to where I hide. Why should he?
Harold hurries in. “Bill. The ambulance and Martha are gone. What are you doing?”
“I was just looking for Rose. I thought she was in here.”
“She’s probably gone back to the hotel.”
“I just hope all this hasn’t put her off.”
“She seems steady enough. A good girl, in a pinch.”
“But tonight wasn’t pretty, Harry.”
“No, it wasn’t.”
“Shouldn’t we go and look for her?”
“No.” The old marine shakes his knit cap underneath me. “We don’t want to hound her. Let’s give her some space. We need to take a breath, all of us, and focus on Ruthie, first. Come on, old friend.” He squeezes Bill’s shoulder. “You said you were going to open up the café. And we need to phone anyone who hasn’t heard yet what’s happened.”
“Harry,” Bill asks as they go, “did you see poor Ruth’s eyes?”
“Pitiful. I know.”
“She won’t die, though.”
“That’s right. We won’t let her. Besides, there’re so few of us left. She’ll know to fight and pull through, you watch. Let’s go take care of the others.”
They turn off the lights. The museum falls dim, but not dark. I uncurl these feet from the beam and let them hang down, like a child’s. I’m perched just above the spot of drying blood on the glass case filled with Indian arrowheads. Below me lies the tumbled box with papers spilling out of it. Every time someone leaves the Bar, Ruth had said, they dump all their old stuff on me. I leap down and bend over it.
She would have been holding this in her hands, I imagine, when something frightened her to the bone.
I sit on the floor, feeling the hardness of it. In the gloomy light, there’s a note spilled out of the box, handwritten.
Ruthie,
I guess you’ve heard by now we’re shutting down the photo shop. We’re putting it on the market in the spring. We just want a different life now, is all. Here’s something for you before we go. We were getting things ready ahead of the sale and pulled up a rotted floorboard and found all these underneath. Must be from the original place, when it was the undertaker’s. You’ll see it’s important. Part of the history and the duty. The Bar will want to know and have it. We’ll be off. Take care of yourself. We’ll miss you. We keep the faith. Always.
No signature—as if the writer and Ruth knew each other well, so none was needed. Underneath the note, a collection of spotted yellow sheets, thinner, older. The first sheet, in a faded brown hand, reads:
Wood planks, forty
Nails, two hundred
Ten yards velvet
Spirits of alcohol
Ten yards black ribbon
Oil of lavender
Pomade, two tins
Tortoiseshell brush and comb
Needles and thread
Signed in receipt, D. L. Kiersten
I know such a list. It’s everything you’d need to bury a body. Below this, another sheet, of the same age and in the same hand:
Attached a letter found among the possessions of and in the hand belonging to Landon Albert Longhurst, the deceased. Likely meant to be posted in the last year but never was. No address to post to deceased’s family. Keep for reference.
Then in a different, steeply slanted hand.
September 5, 1852
Sierra Nevada, California
Dearest Sister,
It’s been many months since I last wrote, I know. Be assured I’m alive and well, and convey the news to Mother and Father. I’m happy to inform you all of my situation here. I’ve been for some months now the owner of a modestly paying claim in a place called Eno. I’ve recovered from the hardships of my first efforts at mining, and have settled for the moment in one of the more northerly camps. Much has changed in the two years since we last saw each other. Father’s penchant for calling me ungrateful notwithstanding, I can say I’m truly thankful I came West. You will know better than anyone it would never have suited me to take over his school—not with the Rush on and all its chances for success and adventure. You would be amazed by this place, Beth. It’s half wild and half civilized, hotels being thrown up overnight along with billiard halls and prospectors’ shanties (including my own) and even a few genteel, two-story manses that wouldn’t seem out of place in the most staid town in Connecticut. Men from all corners of the world are here, tramping in the mud, from Boston lawyers and English mill hands to French and Spanish farmers and shopkeepers; all of us picking and blasting and swearing at rock, chasing the thinnest vein. Lately there are also a few families that have come to town which might add something in the way of better manners. We have a canvas church now, a stone jail, and a schoolhouse being cobbled together in a meadow. As it happens, it is regarding the latter improvement that I write, for it seems after much correspondence and waiting, a schoolmistress hired by mail has failed to arrive, and since there has been no sign of her, though half a dozen pupils are waiting, and with my claim of late paying only fitfully, I went and made myself known to the informal leaders of the camp, a pair of Wisconsin physicians (brothers), offering myself for the position. I must have performed my mental gymnastics well enough because I am now appointed the first schoolmaster of Eno, which means a regular salary, lodgings attached to the post office, and the task of doing something with the backward children of the town. I am writing to convey my address to you, which I’ll append below, and also, please request Fathe
r to send my books to me forthwith so that I may no no no no no no NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO
The strange, lanky ink turns wild, blotched, flinging across the sheet.
NO and a thousand more times NO. I’ll never send a word of this goddamned letter. I’ll never come a-pleading to that man, writing him by hiding behind Beth. Let him think I’ve died. I’ll answer his cruelty with . . . nothing. I’ve crossed an entire continent with the nothing he gave me; let him see how he likes the taste of it. I’ll say nothing about crossing mountains and desert, the thrill and the thirst, the exhaustion, then the dysentery, the graves of the dead lining the trail, the first joyful glimpse of California, the mad-eyed men already there, the busy whores, the rush of finding my first nugget, the despair as the vein played out, the toughening of the body, the hardening of the soul. Because if this isn’t going to be a letter, but a confession, well, then let it be an honest one, at least, some scribble that records: I escaped from a man who beat me into submission all my life, or who tried to. But whose are the stronger fists now? Let that be a lesson to the students I’ll soon have. A lesson to all!
The maddened scribble had been ended, in some former time, with a gash of ink.
I fold the sheets back into the shoebox. I close it, carefully.
Philip Pratt says names call out ghosts.
Landon Albert Longhurst, I think, but don’t say.
Someone might be watching.
I stand, slowly, where Ruth Huellet must have stood before she was cut down. She must have been reading, just here, and perhaps read the letter aloud, not knowing that she might be recalling a ghost’s life and hatreds to him, and calling it down on her own head.
I don’t ask the air: Are you still here?
Better to act as though I’m sober and sad.
I nod toward the letter, as though I understand it. Then I leave it where I found it, turning away, as if sadly, taking a book from the museum’s shelves and clasping it to me, as though for comfort.
