Gilded Mountain, page 4
We listened to her whispers behind the door and watched Henry pitch pebbles to Nipper, who tried to catch them in his baby paws.
“You want a ball glove for that brother of yours.”
“He’d kill for one,” I said.
“And what about you?” Lonahan tilted his head to the side like a curious crow, to examine me. “What would you kill for, Sylvie Pelletier?”
“Murder is a mortal sin,” I said, smiling.
“Tell that to the boss class.” Tendrils of smoke came from his mouth, and I breathed it in with his words like a new kind of oxygen.
“What’s sister want, then, eh? A sweet for the sweet. Whattya say?”
“Want costs money,” I said. “Many plural monies.”
“Plenty of that right here. Trouble is, how to get our hands on it?”
“Beg, borrow, or steal.” I shrugged.
“Steal?”
“Not—I shouldn’t have said that.”
“Speaking is the start of doing, ain’t it?” Lonahan said, and winked. “Not that you’d steal.” Was that the moment when the idea planted itself in my mind? He drew on his cigarette so the tip flared red. The sun was a matching circle of fire, the sky mottled with flaming clouds, purpled shadows. “Beauty is free, anyway, in these mountains.”
“Free beauty,” I said. “Could we eat it for dinner?”
He laughed and smoked and assessed me as if deciding. “Help me out here, Sylvie Pelletier. Problem is, how to get a letter to Moonstone? If I put my correspondence in the mailbox here, there’s a danger it won’t get delivered.”
“Danger?” He made risk sound attractive. The cigarette hung off his lip, and I suppressed an urge to reach over and take it, to smoke it myself.
“Certain mail to certain people goes missing sometimes from Quarrytown,” Lonahan explained, mysterious. “I’d deliver it myself, but I wore out my welcome in Moonstone. Some magoof with a badge told me to get lost. Company calls me an outside agitator, which is their most polite term for a union rep. Going to town to drop a letter is a danger.”
“I’d carry it for you,” I said, intrigued. “On the way to school in the morning.”
“Then you’d be a heroine,” said George Lonahan.
“Or would I be an outside agitator?”
He laughed. “No, you’d be on the inside, of course.” George handed me an envelope from his pocket. “Take this to the editor at the newspaper. The Moonstone Record.”
I accepted it as if it were a solemn mission.
“One a these days we’ll go to Paris for an adventure, whattya say? You ’n’ me,” George said. “When the workers of the world are free, eh?” He made it sound like a joke, but it was a struggle for the ages.
“Ha-ha-ha, sure,” I said.
When my father came outside, Lonahan stood and clapped him on the shoulder. “Your girl here,” he said, “bright as a new penny. I was just telling her: Strike while the weather’s hot, as we say in the union halls. Summer’s the time. Starve their profits.”
“Starve ourselves, more like,” said Papa. “Won’t call it for summer. It’s paying season.”
“Jacques,” Maman called from inside, “tell that man les socialistes n’sont pas bienvenus icitte.”
Not welcome, she said. My mother had a terror of socialistes. She called them godless radicals, infidels. According to the church, a socialist was a kind of demon. I perused George Lonahan with new interest, to see if he had horns. The envelope burned like a hot coal in my pocket.
“Cherie’s got the Red fear in her,” Papa apologized.
“Whether you call us socialists, Reds, dogs, whether you’re with us or not, Jocko, the slaves of the caves will free themselves.” Lonahan exhaled smoke.
“We are not slaves,” said Papa.
“You think?” Lonahan went whistling on his way, but halfway down the road, he turned and bowed to me like a chevalier of old, as if he knew I was sorry to see him go, and he was sorry too. I wanted to tell him my father was right: Slavery was abolished after the Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Perhaps the socialistes of New Jersey had not learned this fact in American history class, as I had, earning an A-plus.
The truth is that in those days I knew almost nothing about the past. I was preoccupied with the present, this new world, where a duke’s son worked in his necktie, a château towered above the trees, and a scar-faced radical smoked on our step. He trusted me to deliver a message, so I fancied myself a heroine.
Paris, he’d said. Would I ever see it? Already I’d seen the Eighth Wonder. There were seven more. All I needed was money, the price of a ticket. How was I to get it?
* * *
Before school the next morning, I found myself checking the notices in the window of the Moonstone City Record: All Printing Jobs Accepted, Inquire Within. Perhaps I would inquire for employment, though it was not likely that a newspaper would hire a girl. Perhaps I could sweep and tidy for a few nickels.
“Hello?” I called inside. Only an orange cat appeared, mewing. I left George Lonahan’s risky envelope on the typewriter there. What was in it? What did an agitator have to say to a newspaper?
* * *
At school, Miss Gage had an announcement: “An essay contest!” she said, sparkling enthusiasm. “The prize is a dollar. The winning essay will be published in the newspaper.”
What Makes the U.S.A. a Great Nation? was the prompt on the blackboard.
“You must use an example from our own local experience,” the teacher said. The judges were Miss Gage herself and K. T. Redmond, editor of the Moonstone City Record. Likely due to the influence of the Bolshevik pirate George Lonahan, I chose "Freedom" for my topic and wrote with a fierce intention to win. I wanted that dollar.
For “local experience,” I remembered the poor mules chained in a string and the pleading eyes of the donkey tortured by schoolboys, and got carried away writing a plea for fair treatment of these animals, “who have been domesticated to serve man and cannot survive free like wild creatures do…”
Freedom is our strength but comes with responsibility, went my thinking; it had to be tended and fed, or some such lofty idealism in a schoolgirl’s musing.
* * *
“Is this a joke?” was Miss Gage’s comment. “The assignment was to write about what makes our nation exceptional. Not to write about donkeys.”
My second attempt was a patriot’s cheer about the engraved words on the Liberty Bell: Proclaim Liberty throughout all the land unto all the inhabitants thereof. The U.S. was great, I wrote, because we had fought a despotic king. We had democracy—Moonstone town had its own election upcoming! And thanks to our revolution, we did not suffer taxation without representation. (Or so I believed then.)
My new essay was a success. “Much better!” Miss Gage wrote in flowery script. She did not suggest I expand on the idea that Liberty belonged to “all the inhabitants,” not just some. We were not taught to question ideals engraved in cast iron. My writing on the greatness of the U.S.A. earned an A-plus. So had I qualified as a real American at last?
* * *
June 6, 1907. Prize Day. I would be awarded a diploma that morning, my seventeenth birthday. We students lined up spit-shined, and marched to the village square, a patch of dirt with benches arranged around a platform swagged with bunting. Miss Gage perched there, a bright bird in yellow amid the dark-suited town officials arrayed like a murder of crows.
The speaker was Colonel Frederick Bowles, a vested man with a brush-broom mustache. He started in with his important talking, while the students pronounced his name in sniggering whispers. Bowels, Mr. Irritable Bowels. He was called Colonel, though he had never been a soldier or commander of a military unit. He owned the only motorcar in town, famously hauled uphill in parts and reassembled.
“Students, parents, teachers, friends!” His voice rang in the valley. “Tomorrow’s leaders are sitting here among us.”
Next to me, tomorrow’s leader Carlton Pfister scratched the wooden bench with a jagged point of rock, carving an obscene word.
“Don’t,” I whispered. “You’ll get in trouble.”
Carlton gave me a malevolent smile and raked the stone along my wrist so it bled. I let out a cry of pain.
“Shh,” scolded Millie Havilland, a giant white hairbow on her head.
“… and so, for her strong argument about American liberty,” said the Colonel, “the essay prize goes to Miss Sylvie Pelletier.”
People clapped and craned to look as I went blinking to the platform. Miss Gage beamed. Colonel Bowles presented me a large envelope, smiling with kind wrinkles at the corners of his eyes, while I stood like a mutton absorbing the wonder of it. A dollar just for writing a page. Here was the president of the company congratulating me.
“Thank you for the honor,” I told him. “I’m very grateful.”
“That’s the spirit we like to hear from our young people! Gratitude!” Bowles shook my hand, the smell of mothballs wafting off his summer suit. The applause petered out, but while it lasted, I savored it like a sweet and floated down the steps.
Awaiting me was a hatless woman in a plain burgundy dress. Her face had a veneer of freckles, a snub nose, sparse eyelashes.
“Congratulations, Miss Pelletier. I’m K. T. Redmond, of the Moonstone City Record.”
This was Redmond? She could not be the real editor, I thought. Editors were men in eyeshades, not freckled ladies with scraps of ginger hair escaping their pins.
I shook her hand, dismayed to see that Carlton Pfister’s scratch on my arm had left red streaks on the prize envelope.
“You’re bleeding,” she said, and gave me her handkerchief. She did not say she was an agent of disaster or of my transformation. She did not reveal herself to be a provocateur, a windbag or witch, or even a “knocker,” as she was later accused.
Her lace handkerchief was quickly stained. “I’m sorry—I’ll wash it.”
“Keep it. And come to the newspaper on Monday to print your essay.”
“Yes, ma’am.” I tucked it in my sleeve and hoped to get the bloodstains off before they dried. I’d keep it with the other one. JCP.
* * *
At home, my mother ran her thumb over the golden seal of my diploma and took the silver dollar I’d won to put in a coffee tin for my savings.
“Pis ben,” she said, hiding her pleasure. “Don’t let your ankles swell.”
“It’s head, Maman. Don’t let your head swell.”
“We say ankles,” she said, uncorrected. “On dit là des chevilles qui enflent. Finish your chores.”
* * *
Monday morning I walked to town in a thin June drizzle. My coat was sopped, but my hopes were dry, my head swelled with the new resolve of a winner, to ask for a job at the newspaper. The fact that the editor was not a man seemed a point in my favor. If a woman could be an editor, why couldn’t I—with my prize certificate—be an employee? Ask. I muttered my intention all the way down the slope.
At the Record, rivulets of rain ran down the glass. Through the blurred pane, I peered into the wide-open room, where I saw Miss Redmond standing behind a cart-size machine. She plucked a sheet of paper and fed it to the mechanical creature. With the pumping motion of her foot, she turned the gears. She saw me spying and beckoned. Inside was the smell of ink and the machine’s loud clanking.
“Miss Pelletier,” she called over the din. “Observe, please.”
She wore an inky canvas apron. Her jaw showed a slight bulldog underbite. When she was sure of my attention, she released a handle on the press and pumped her foot on the treadle. The machine opened and shut its jaws while she placed blank sheets of newsprint and removed the printed ones in a regular rhythm.
“I read your two essays,” she said. “Which convinced me we might get along.”
“My two essays ma’am?” Had there been a mistake?
“I asked your teacher for the whole rotten bunch. There were two by you.”
“Miss Gage liked the one about the Liberty Bell.”
“Well, I didn’t,” said the editor, “and I told her so. The one about the donkeys is superior. We’ll print that one.”
“I thought the one about the Liberty Bell—”
“The Liberty Bell is cracked,” said Miss Redmond. “Did you know? Why not ask the question: Is freedom all it’s cracked up to be?” She laughed while I stood stumped. “Never mind. You did well with the donkeys.”
“Miss Gage did not think so.”
“Miss Gage is a nincompoop,” she said.
I clapped my hand over my mouth to keep from laughing and screwed up my nerve. “Miss Redmond, I’d be glad to do odd jobs for you here at the paper. If you need a hand, if I wouldn’t be in the way—sweeping.”
“Sweeping?” She peered over her spectacles for a long judgmental minute and humphed. “If you’ll learn to operate this press, I could pay you something.”
“I’ll learn,” I said.
Miss Redmond looked skeptical, as if I were, probably, also a nincompoop. “I’ll give you a trial. If the verdict is in your favor, two dollars a week.”
Two dollars. It was a fortune.
* * *
Miss Redmond showed me how to work the press, how to ink the platens, screw down the type. She was all business. “You’ll do the local deliveries on Fridays,” she said. “And there’s eighty out-of-town subscriptions to mail. Any questions?”
“No, ma’am.” My first error.
“Learn to ask, or you’ll never make a newshound.”
“Yes, ma’am.” Did I want to be a newshound? The idea had not occurred to me as among the possibilities, which seemed limited to nun, wife, spinster. Now it seemed a pretty good bargain to get paid just for writing addresses on labels for the Record’s subscribers in Washington, Chicago, New York. I rolled the papers and stuck down the labels and pictured readers in their starched collars, reading about our town.
THE MOONSTONE CITY RECORD
LIKED BY MANY, CUSSED BY SOME, READ BY EVERYBODY
Tom Pringle and Lee Bedford engaged in a disgraceful row. Bedford shot and perhaps fatally wounded Pringle who clings to life at the clinic. Bedford is in the town jail.
_______________________
A recently acquired and valuable property, heretofore undeveloped, is the manganese mine in Grand County Tuah. The Padgett Fuel and Stone Company has erected a small tipple.
_______________________
Will any brother or sister editors of the Western Slope, knowing of a nice healthy cat, please express it to my friend “Cap” Daily of the Aspen Times. Cats having litters of kittens preferred.
_______________________
The unwatering of the Black Queen mine is proceeding slowly. Just what is to be done after the unwatering is not announced.
Who was the Black Queen? What was a tipple if not a drink of liquor? Why did Bedford shoot Pringle? Had my employer received the letter I’d delivered from the socialist Lonahan? I still wondered what it said, but didn’t ask, for fear she’d think me affiliated with agitators.
I should not have worried.
* * *
One evening I was so engrossed in my typing practice that I missed the last lorry ride and had to hike. At home, Henry sat on the steps with Nipper. The look on his face stopped me short. “Something happened,” he said. “An accident.”
“Is it Papa?” A cold claw of fear clutched me.
“Pete Conboy,” Henry said. “They were lifting a block and the jack snapped, and—kerplow!” He smacked his hands together with a hard crack. “It fell on his leg.”
“He’s dead?”
“Naw, just hurt bad. They had to pry it off him. Blood all over. Hawky took him to the doctor over in Rabbit Town. They’re gonna cut it off. The whole leg.”
We could hear our mother fretting indoors. “Every day I fear, Jacques, you are next!”
“Cherie,” Papa said, “I’m fine.”
We stayed outside and watched Nipper stack rocks in a tower. “How do they cut a leg off?” my brother wondered. “With a saw?”
I shuddered and brought the baby inside to report about my job at the newspaper. The promise of cash money put a smile on my mother’s face, but the idea of her daughter working! in town! had only added fears to her collection: that I’d come under the influence of Methodists. Drunks or wild animals would attack me on the quarry road. Attention, she warned: A mountain lion had been seen prowling the boardinghouse ridge. Mrs. Quirk had tripped over loose scree and broken her wrist. A man had leered at Mrs. Bruner by the water pipe.
“Remember your prayers,” she said, and the next morning, sent me off with hers.
* * *
It was enough to remember all the keys of the typewriter and how to work the handpress. By five o’clock on Friday, my head was full of lessons and news, light with hunger. Again I’d missed the last ride uphill and now faced the climb back to Quarrytown, only raisins in my pocket, beasts and leering roustabouts on the prowl.
“Knock off now,” said Miss R. “We’ll go to dinner over at the Larkspur.”
“Oh, no thank you,” I said. (It cost fifty cents a plate.) “I can’t, I couldn’t—”
“Stop hawing and get your jacket. My treat. I’ll send you home in the tally-ho wagon.”
Maman would be frantic and fingering her beads, but guilt and explanations fit into a pocket for later. I could not turn down a restaurant dinner. We went out into the June evening, the air silky and crisp. Two girls in gingham rolled a hoop along the street. A dog chased them, barking. Dottie Weeks came out of her bakery next to the Record office to sweep the sidewalk planks and waved at K.T. “Hello, Trina!” A pair of kerchiefed women passed us chattering in Italian, carrying sacks of flour, their arms muscular and sunburnt as mine. In my dusty school dress, I’d be an eyesore at the Larkspur Hotel, a two-story affair with a wraparound porch.
