Gilded Mountain, page 18
* * *
Her familiar smirk was a fond welcome when I came in the door. “Pelletier! Wasn’t sure you’d show, now you’re pals with the nobility.”
“They’re not actual nobles. Duke is only a nickname.”
“Won’t say I told you so. Did you bring me anything? Rumor? Scandal?”
“I was a secretary,” I said, “not a spy.”
“But you spied anyway.” She grinned. “Who wouldn’t?” She drummed her fingers on the table. “Well?”
In defiance of my pledge to keep the Padgetts’ secrets, I produced the secretary notebook from my rucksack, my first small act of spite.
“You wrote it down!” K.T. crowed. “Oh, God bless you, child.”
I flipped the pages to determine what to surrender, what I could trade for a job, and there was the letter to Mrs. Randolph Sherry.
“Padgett Company has a contract pending,” I said, “worth a hundred thousand dollars, for a monument in Washington, D.C.”
She whistled. “Holy smokes. A monument to what?”
“To the soldiers of the Confederacy,” I said.
She reared back in disbelief. “A monument to treasonous traitors, you mean.”
“And to the loyal slaves.”
“The loyal slaves? Well, tie me to a pig, honey, if they find even one such person. A hundred thousand dollars’ worth of stone, you say? It’s my kind of story, all right.”
That story. The monument. It was not done with me yet.
Her offer was for two dollars a week, and I was grateful. Eager for the money and the work itself, a printer’s devil again.
K.T. stared into the middle distance, shaking her head. “The loyal slaves. For Chrissake. What a crock of horse manure.” She sat down to type, speaking aloud: “ ‘Dear Mrs. Randolph Sherry, I would be grateful for an opportunity to correspond with you about your plans…’ ” For a few days she went around singing in a sarcastic twang, “ ‘Oh, I wish I was in the land of cotton, old times there are not forgotten! Look away, look away, look away, Dixieland…’ ”
Dixieland might look away, but Miss Redmond? “Never,” she said.
I resolved to be more like her, as it was clear I’d failed as a butterfly.
* * *
The air grew chilly with autumn. The aspens turned, brilliant slashes of yellow on the mountainsides. Their leaves shimmered in the wind with a sound like water rushing. In the gusts they rattled, shattering into bright smithereens, showers of gold coins streaming through the blue and marvelous air. I rode the new tram downhill in the cool mornings with my brother and the few Quarrytown schoolchildren. We sat on the back of the stone car, resting our backs against the marble that our fathers had hewed out of the mountain. It was my job to watch the little ones, to be sure they did not fall off. Henry liked to stand with Tom Potts, the wigglesticker, watching the connection to the overhead wires. Healy, the motorman, let him blow the whistle at Hairpin Point.
On the morning of September 30, we took the early train: just pure luck we did not take the following one. K.T. asked me to write up the tragedy for the Record.
FATAL SMASH ON TROLLEY
Four persons met death as the result of an accident on the new line:
Patrick Healy, motorman; Robert Lytle, brakeman; Atansio Negrete, a Mexican; and Mary Tonko, a Polish girl, age 8, were killed when Healy lost control of a heavily loaded train near the mill yards. Doubtless the brakes failed and the train attained a frightful speed. Just before the bridge, the runaway cars left the track and smashed to splinters. Tom Potts leapt to safety.
Rush Lytle, sixteen-year-old son of the brakeman who was killed, was working on the riverbank when the cars hit the cliff, and he ran in time to hold his father in his arms. The boy said his father spoke and gave him word to carry to Mrs. Lytle before the end came.
Pat McCann, a young man employed on the track, saw one of Healy’s hands sticking out from beneath a block of marble and took hold of it. He said the hand grasped his firmly but then relaxed, and McCann knew it was over for poor Healy. The coroner was notified so that an inquisition might be held. The Company will bear the expense of assisting the families with burial costs.
In Quarrytown, Mrs. Tonko had slammed the door in my face, refusing to speak to me; I could not blame her. I did talk to McCann, the horrified track worker, and to poor Rush Lytle, whose father was killed. Atansio Negrete had no family in town to interview. I wrote out the copy from my notes and could not help weeping as I typed. No one could remain unaffected by such events. After that, I passed the site of the accident and crossed myself in remembrance of the dead.
* * *
One afternoon in early October I missed the last car up and set out to hike home. Snow was already a cap of white on the far peak of Mount Sopris. Any day storms would bury this road under my pinching boots. At Hairpin Point I rested, to look down over the town. The turrets of Elkhorne speared up above the skeleton trees. No smoke came from the chimneys. The Diamond River gleamed in a silvery thread, carving past the slope of lawn and the flat stone where Jasper Padgett had kissed me under the summer moon. The sight of these places hurt me. I was ruined now, by pineapple and electricity, champagne in flutes, the drunken swoon by the river. Wherefore gird up the loins of your mind. Be sober and hope for the grace that is to be brought unto you. Such Bible advice was useless. I could hardly sleep for the turmoil of my rumination and heat. No letter, no sign, no trace in the quilted pattern of mountains in the endless distance. Jasper Padgett had not said goodbye. In my notebook I wrote him letters I didn’t send. I would not be that pitiful jilted woman. It seemed pointless to write to a college man far away at a mythical university, far above my station, remote as le pays de Cockaigne, where rivers ran with wine and buttered larks fell from the sky at supper into a pie.
The conifers creaked in the cold wind. A dervish of marble dust whirled in an eddy of brown leaves. My guts twisted with longing, not for buttered larks or riches but for a name I would not say aloud.
* * *
“Did you bring the milk?” Maman said when I came in the door.
“Sorry, desolée, Maman. I forgot.”
“You forget your own self,” she said. “What is wrong with you?”
“Nothing. I am tired from work.”
“Work.” She snorted to show she doubted that what I did all day at a newspaper counted as labor, while she boiled the clothes and hung them in the wind, piled stones around the outside walls of the cabin, an extra layer against winter, as high as she could reach. She hauled coal and water strong as an ox. She shaved Papa’s chin and trimmed his hair, cooked beans and mended britches. She chased Nipper when he tried to follow Henry to school. All day long the little boy wrestled her for his freedom. And I did the same. Her eyes were swagged in dark half-moons, her hair unraveled and curled in the steam of her boiling pots. The air was thick with cabbagey odors and the threat of snow.
“Rest, Maman.”
“We rest when we die, eh?” She brandished her darning needle at me. “Idle hands are the Devil’s tools.”
My hands were not idle, but the Devil would soon find other tools to fix me. I did my chores in Quarrytown and rode the tram to the newspaper, where I did the printing and mailing, keeping my eyes peeled, as K.T. advised. I walked the delivery route bundled against the winds of October, greeting our customers: “Hello, Mrs. Weeks.” “Here’s your paper, Mr. Koble.” “Good morning, Colonel.” I was cheerful, handing the news around, unaware that a certain story on page one was a flame. The match lit by me.
THE MOONSTONE CITY RECORD
“LOVED BY SOME, CURSED BY OTHERS, READ BY EVERYONE.”
PADGETT COMPANY WINS LUCRATIVE CONTRACT $100,000 WORTH OF STONE FOR CONFEDERATE MONUMENT IN NATION’S CAPITOL TO HONOR DIXIE SOLDIERS, AND SLAVES “WHO REMAINED LOYAL” OUT OF “LOVE FOR THEIR MASTERS”
_______________________
Mrs. Randolph Sherry, president of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, awarded the commission. In a statement to the Record she wrote: “Many is the slave who longs for those happy, carefree years to return. This monument will recall for them their service to a great cause.” The Baltimore News-American has suggested a more fitting tribute: “Why not a statue depicting a Negro family, with the inscription, ‘In Grateful Memory & Sincere Apology to the Ones We Never Paid a Cent of Wages to During a Lifetime of Service Building Our Nation.’ ”
I thought of Easter and what she’d have to say about the “loyal slave” idea, if she’d even discuss it. Probably she’d slam pots and save her thoughts for when she was away from us white people. The article continued.
BONUS REWARD:
The Moonstone City Record offers a $100 PRIZE to anyone who can produce a former slave willing to testify to those alleged “happy & carefree days” that the Confederate Daughters seek to immortalize by whitewashing truth.
Colonel Bowles charged into the newsroom, mustache twitching. “Redmond!”
“Colonel?” She came from behind the press, arms folded across her chest.
“You want a reward?” he said. “I’ll give you a reward, you bet I will.”
“Excellence is its own reward,” she said with her provoker’s smile. “The Record is proof. Our circulation’s doubled. There’s my reward.”
The Colonel spat: “If. You. Don’t. Have. Anything. Nice! To Say! Say nothing!”
“Nothing,” she said, full of sass. I loved it. Perhaps I could cultivate my own sass.
Bowles pointed a trembling finger. “Listen, Redmond, our company is engaged in an honorable enterprise, and we are doing our goddamnedest to make a go of it in extraordinarily difficult conditions. This company has accomplished astonishing feats. A heroic effort! You, madam, have no idea of the skills and courage required to get tons of stone down from these mountains. Fourteen feet of snow on the road. Slides. Freezing temperatures. Why are you such a knocker? Why can’t you stand with us and contribute to the people of Moonstone, to Colorado, and to this nation, by supporting our efforts?”
“Our job here is not as a sales booster,” she said. “This is a journal of record.”
“You’d do well to bite your tongue, woman. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.” He took himself out the door.
My employer poured a capful of whiskey into her coffee. “If it’s only children and fools who tell the truth,” she said, “then count me a fool.” She toasted me with her mug and settled down to report what she called “all the new news.”
* * *
Not a week later, what was indeed new news, was the Moonstone Booster, a rival newspaper. On the morning of October 15, K.T. came from Dottie Weeks’s bakery, waving it like an enemy flag in her furious fist.
“This!” she cried, and thrust it at me, “is a declaration of war.”
ANNOUNCING THE BOOSTER MOONSTONE’S NEW JOURNAL OF RECORD TO CHEER THE EFFORTS OF OUR MAGNIFICENT CITIZENS AND APPLAUD OUR HARDWORKING EMPLOYEES & EXPERT CRAFTSMEN
“The Phelps boy was delivering it all over town this morning,” she said. “Go out and see what you can see.”
On Padgett Street, a storefront window boasted a gilt-painted sign: The Moonstone Booster. A crowd stood around a table outside, where Colonel Bowles himself was serving free hot cider and corn muffins. A bow-tied young man in tweeds handed out copies of the new paper.
Bowles called me over. “Young lady, meet Frank Goodell, editor and chief correspondent. He has just joined the Booster after graduation from Princeton University, where he was editor of the Princetonian.”
“Hello,” said Frank, with the cheerful face of a choirboy. “And you are?”
“Sylvie Pelletier.” I shook his hand. His bow tie was striped and his hair was slick with tonic. He had on city shoes, very shiny. Not for long, I thought.
“Sylvie has been working for that Red rag, the competition,” said Bowles. “But perhaps she’s come to her senses? Are you here for a job?”
“No, sir, I was just curious.”
“I could use a gal assistant,” Goodell said. “The Company has been most generous with the funding. Cider?”
“Thank you, I’m late for an appointment.” I put two muffins in my pocket.
“Let me know when you change your mind,” said the Colonel. “I predict you’ll see the light.”
What I saw was that the Booster was full of glad tidings: The mill is operating at full capacity! The Company has secured a contract for the American Bible Society building in New York! The Masonic Lodge hosted a successful raffle! The children of the Moonstone Elementary School held a spelling bee! Mr. Phelps went hunting for bear and came back with a beard! Ha! Ha! Ha! And then this:
PUBLISHER’S NOTE, FROM COLONEL FREDERICK D. BOWLES:
The Booster expects, before it has become very ancient, to uncover a few knockers, for what town is without them? Like death and taxes, the knocker cannot be avoided. But they can be placed in such a hopeless minority that they cannot profitably open their yawp. The boosters are in the vast majority here. More power to them!
“It’s a Company paper,” K.T. said. “You won’t find any real news in it, only the Panglossian ramblings of Padgett stooges.” She crumbled the newsprint and fed it to the fire. “Outrageous claptrap.”
This local outrage, however, was soon buried by a nationwide catastrophe that hit us in the little town same as if an avalanche had cracked off a cornice to bury the inhabitants.
* * *
The Financial Panic of 1907 began on October 22 with a failed swindle to corner the copper market. In under three hours, $8 million was withdrawn from the Knickerbocker Trust, Fifth Avenue, New York. The news came over the telegraph, where K.T. stood reading grim headlines. She got on the phone, scribbled on scraps, typed madly:
The sidewalks of Wall Street were crowded with weeping ladies and grim-faced gentlemen snaking in lines around tall buildings, calling for their money. J. P. Morgan and his top-hatted secret cell of plutocrats are holed up day and night, trying to rescue the bankers and head off a market failure and an avalanche of woe.
Copper. Jace had ranted about it. The dinner-party talk, the taste of the future. My spiteful heart harbored a penny-size wish that the Padgetts would lose their fortune. Serve them right. The telegraph was full of dire occurrences, but I relished the thought of such ruin. When a girl is spurned, the loss of $8 million may appear as divine justice. I had no idea yet what tactics a millionaire might employ to get his money back, how he would take the bread from our mouths, cash from our bones and blood.
RUN ON BANKS AS STOCKS CRASH.
RICH MAN PUTS BULLET IN HIS HEART.
STOCK EXCHANGE CLOSED DOWN.
J. PIERPONT MORGAN PLANS TO HALT PANIC.
ROCKEFELLER PLEDGES HALF HIS WEALTH.
It was exciting to set the pages as K.T. tore them out of the typewriter. When Henry came to the office after school to collect me, I told him, “Go ahead. I’ll leave in an hour.” But it grew dark, and we were not finished running copies off the press.
“You won’t go back up slope tonight,” K.T. said. “Stay here. I’ll telephone the quarry line to get a message home. Wouldn’t want to alarm anyone.”
But: PANIC! was her headline, in twenty-four-point type.
We worked well past midnight. I slept two hours on a pallet, then ran around town to deliver the news ahead of the Booster. That cheerful paper printed only a small paragraph: “Stocks Take a Tumble.” HALLOWEEN PARTY SET FOR MASONIC LODGE was the Booster’s headline.
For most of the one thousand souls in our little hamlet, that first week of financial collapse proceeded as serene as the newly frozen surface of Marvelous Lake. The October snow fell and fell again so the sun sparked off every crystal stick and branch. It was impossible to believe trouble was real or could affect us in the midst of such dazzlement. The Ladies’ Auxiliary sold raffle tickets to raise funds for a new gymnasium. The schoolchildren carved jack-o’-lanterns and drew pictures of ghosts and witches. The quarryhogs—“our heroes!”—wrote the Booster—met the deadline for the Michigan statehouse contract. My father worked double shifts in the white cave, and the new tramcars brought giant stone sugar lumps down to the mill easy as dreaming. I rode home on the last run with Henry after he was done with school, our breath frosty in the darkening afternoon. My brother and his buddies had made a bobsled run, having convinced the women of Schoolhouse Road to dump dishwater along the east side, so it would freeze and slick the course with ice.
“A bobsled is a practice coffin,” Maman said, and prayed to avoid disaster while she chinked the cabin with the newsprint I brought home, filling the cracks with words: Collateral. Liquidation. Collapse. The house and our fates were sealed by these things.
She was more worried about cold than collateral, distressed by my father’s secret meetings with his fellow quarryman Dan Kerrigan, their loud disdain for crétin Juno Tarbusch. More than once Tarbusch docked my father for some invented infraction: “One minute late? Docked. Two extra minutes for lunch ‘hour’? Docked.”
“You promised,” Maman said. “You sign the contract never to join the union.”
“That was a yellow-dog bargain,” my father scoffed. “Disregards the law to turn us into minions of the boss. It permits him to arrest us for organizing even a card game.”
“But you have signed it, non? Then you and Kerrigan try to make the union! Why? They will kick you off the town again.”
Out of town. I didn’t correct her. Sometimes I dreamed that if we were evicted, we could go somewhere without winter. Cold had seeped into my mother’s bones and turned her gray with worry. If we stayed in Quarrytown, I would grow haggard as she was, as Papa. He was the color of dust and frost, working in the cavern, stone tonnage dangling over Satan’s icy staircase. When I brought him his dinner, Maman did not have the energy to warn me of the dangers. She only wanted him to have a hot baked potato in his pocket to keep his hands warm. When the potato grew cold, he ate it.
