Gilded Mountain, page 40
* * *
Night in that cell was dark as the inside of a dog. At about four in the morning, we were awakened by spears of lantern light in our eyes. Deputy Pfister had arrived with his fellow partygoers, Sheriff Smiley and Bull Baxter.
“Get up.” Pfister unlocked our cage and pulled us out of the squalid bunks.
Mrs. Hurley croaked in hysterics, “Don’t take ’em to the gallows! Free the ladies!”
“Oh, they’re free,” said Baxter. “Free to take the morning train.”
We were marched along Marble Road. Beams of lantern light cast our distorted shadows on the snowbanks like phantoms walking alongside.
“Where are you taking us?” K.T. demanded to know. “On what authority? What law did we break? Do you have a warrant? A writ of habeas corpus?”
“You want Latin?” Smiley said. “We’ll give you a postmortem.”
“You’ve broken the law, Mr. Smiley,” K.T. said.
“Military necessity recognizes no laws,” Smiley declared.
Smiley and I each have excuses for our different crimes, I thought, knowing my own Robin Hood motive was superior. What military necessity required the jailing of a feverish woman and an office assistant? I was on the side of the underdonkey, whereas Smiley was a bootlicker out for himself.
“Miss Redmond needs a doctor,” I said.
“What is this, a gabble of geese?” he said, cupping his ear. “Do you hear honking and squawking, Marshal Pfister?”
“I do, Sheriff,” he said. “Like a hen party.”
They laughed heartily and pushed us at gunpoint onto the 5:35 a.m. train. “The conductor has orders,” Smiley said, “not to let you ladies off till Denver.”
“Where we’ll meet my lawyer,” K.T. told him. “His name is Crump. Do you know he famously has six fingers? The extra one is the long finger of the law. Six-finger Crump will point that one right at you, Mr. Smiley, and the rest of your hired mongrels.” With that, we departed the storybook town in the clouds and did not look back.
* * *
The train was stuck three days, caught in slides at Grubstake Pass, stopped in the cold. Despite the word grub, we had nothing to eat but dry crackers. K.T. slumped with her burning head against me. We slept in our seats.
At Denver, a hackney cab brought us to the home of K.T.’s sister, Daisy Thomas, a motherly widow who put K.T. on the parlor sofa to convalesce. I was given a pallet on the floor of a room with her daughter, Jenny, a freckled girl of ten with sparse eyelashes and rust-colored hair. I climbed under the blankets and did not wake for fourteen hours. When the sun rose, I looked out across Denver city. In the far distance was the sharp ridge of the mountains, where I did not intend ever to return.
PART SIX The Princess of Thieves
I shall plunge boldly into Colorado.
Is common humanity lacking in this region of hard greed?
Can it not be bought by dollars here, like every other commodity, votes included?
—Isabella Bird, A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains, 1873
Chapter Forty
THE SPRING SMELLED OF MELTED snow, green shoots. The birds sang prin-temps, prin-temps. K.T. grew well and downright cheerful, thanks to the doting of her sister and the entertainments of her niece. I washed and cooked and tutored Jenny on her Latin verbs: Dico, Dicere, Dixi, Dictus. I wrote a letter to Maman: “The newspaper in Moonstone has closed its doors.” I explained nothing, only informed them of my new arrangements: “Miss Redmond’s nephew, Robert, is at university, and I’ve been given his room. In exchange, I tutor the little girl and help as housekeeper.” I sent her twenty dollars and tried not to think about the pilfered Padgett money in the bank. It was not mine to spend. In my own pockets, only a hundred dollars was left. Another two hundred was abandoned back in Moonstone, stuck in the pages of novels—or stolen by Pinks.
It was not safe for us to return. K.T.’s possessions and mine could not be retrieved until a judge ruled on her petition to reclaim them. Dottie Weeks wrote to say the Record had a padlock on the door. “Your kitty cat Bill came mewing around the bakery,” said her letter, “and now catches mice in our kitchen.”
“Watch out,” K.T. wrote back. “Colonel Bowles will accuse you of harboring a Bolshevik cat.”
* * *
Bolshevism was as far from my mind as Moonstone itself, lost in the clouds as I was in the comfort and carpeting of the Thomas house. I’d planned to be Princess of Thieves, hiding in the forest of anonymity, but spring passed and I took no action; only brooded, reading by the parlor window.
“Why don’t you go to college?” K.T. suggested one morning in May. I feared what she really wanted to say was: Why don’t you move out?
I had never thought of college. College was for men, or women like K.T., who was educated at Oberlin and knew the history of Europe, the periodic table of elements, and Greek philosophy. She had read Spinoza and Descartes. How would a person like me afford the fees? The pilfered money of “Angela Silvestri” was tempting. I supposed I could go to the Padgetts and claim inheritance rights by revealing myself as Mrs. JCP. But there was no proof. Was there? I would check again.
In my small pile of possessions was Finances, the ledger of my late husband-for-a-day. I had not read it over since the morning that parcel arrived. The words in it were tentacles that would reach from the pages to sink me down in seas of grief and guilt for what I’d stolen and who I’d married for only a blink of time.
By the window I sat in the throes, a miserable singular with the plural construction. George. He was a throe if ever there was one. At last I opened the cover of Jasper’s diary and ran my fingers over the words. Dearest Sylvie, my heart. They traveled up through the skin and bones of my hand and made me watery with sadness. As I turned a page, out fell scraps of paper. Those tickets and receipts, including one I hadn’t noticed before, a flimsy folded slip. This was a jeweler’s claim check for a “diamond ring, to be resized.” The shop was Capital Gems, with an address six stops down the trolley line.
* * *
That afternoon I rode the city tram into town, along cobbled rivers of streets, rivulets of people, every contraption of wagon and cart crowding along. Each turn revealed some marvelous new sight: a movie theater, the gates of a brick mansion, a university, a fruit stand of bright lemons. Rocky Mountain Dirigibles advertised balloon rides, and I wished for one, to soar over the fantastical city itself. Every block advertised, Western boots, Stetson hats! We Buy Gold! Silver! All Precious Stones! The Diamond Spurs Book Shoppe was the size of a barn. I stared at a meat market where pig heads and whole beef carcasses hung on racks outside. A man in a bloodied apron trundled a wheelbarrow of offal past pedestrians in city fashions. Every corner presented a drama of tableuax vivants. My head swiveled, ogling; the city had me enchanted.
I disembarked into a crowd of strangers who surely recognized me as a mountain roughneck. I dodged and squinted at street signs and asked directions till a lady pointed the way to Capital Gems. The window displayed jewels on black velvet, pearls and diamond pendants dangling. On a white mannequin arm, a bracelet of rubies like drops of blood. I stood by the glass and gazed through my own reflection, so the gemstones seemed to float on my transparent face. The proprietor greeted me with a loupe at his eye.
“I’m here to pick up a ring.” I fished the receipt from my purse. “My husband left it.” It felt false to say husband, as if I’d no claim to the word.
He took the paper to a back room and returned with a small flannel pouch, spilling the ring from it onto a tray. “May I?” He took up my left hand and fit it easily on the fourth finger. “Perfect.”
“What do I owe you?”
He examined the receipt. “Nothing. It’s paid in advance.”
“Thank you, sir.” In disbelief, I left the shop, then stopped frozen on the sidewalk.
When I was a child, mon père taught us geology, that diamonds were made from coal—carbon compressed for eons under heavy rock. My brother and I put lumps of black anthracite beneath the heaviest boulders we could lift, not realizing it would take a million years to become a jewel. We thought we’d return someday to collect brilliants.
What I wanted now was plain, not brilliant. My heart’s desire was to possess whatever could not be stolen or killed or buried. If not love, then what? A way to keep myself. The ring was just a relic, a memento mori. Proof of my marriage. Wearing it made me realize I wanted nothing further to do with the Padgetts, with their power to trap me the same as a tonnage of stone. It would do no good to confront the Duke with this diamond evidence.
“I’m sorry, Jace,” I said aloud, and went back inside Capital Gems to ask the proprietor: “If I sold this ring, how much would it be worth?”
He held the band to the light, turned it around under his magnifier. He appraised me anew, and I saw him calculate my reasons: Destitute? Divorced? A thief? “Two hundred dollars,” he said. “It’s about three carats.”
“If it were for sale, would you buy it?”
“I might.” He shrugged. “Is it?”
“Three hundred,” I said, bold as brass.
He gave me cash, and with it my independence.
Back on the trolley, I got off in front of the Diamond Spurs Book Shoppe. Inside, I inquired about employment. The proprietor was in need of a shopgirl for fifty cents a day. Within the week, I’d moved to a rented room at Mrs. DeRosa’s Boardinghouse for Women. Mrs. DeRosa played the piano in the parlor and liked to sing “Greensleeves” in a sorry mew. “Alas, my love.” Love, alas, was in thin supply, as oxygen is at high altitude, but I would have to learn to carry on without it, same as my lungs had learned to breathe in the air of the Gilded Range.
* * *
K. T. Redmond filed a lawsuit against various parties in Moonstone town for the recovery of her possessions and damages to her livelihood. Four months after our forced eviction, in July 1909, I traveled with her to Gunnison for the trial. The lawyer Crump called for witnesses from the fateful meeting at Moonstone’s Masonic Hall. He also wanted to know about our arrest, our jailing and deportation. In addition to K.T.’s testimony, the judge heard from Dottie Weeks and Hal Brinckerhoff. Then I was led to the witness stand and made to swear on a Bible.
Mr. Crump asked me to present my notebook and read from it aloud. “ ‘Mr. Bowles then said… Mr. Baxter said…’ ” It was a long recitation, and as I talked, my palms grew damp, the notebook trembling in my hand. I made the mistake of looking up to see Florrie Phelps at the front of the courtroom, despising me, her mouth pressed to a thin pink worm. I faltered and stopped.
“Go on,” said the lawyer.
I was overcome, swallowing. I would be sick.
“Courage, sweetheart,” Dottie whispered from the gallery.
The gavel banged, and I found the gumption to resume in a voice that gathered force as I continued recounting the events, naming each one of the townspeople: “ ‘Mr. Baxter presented the resolutions. Mrs. Phelps passed them out. Mr. Pfister took the ledger from me by force. Mr. Smiley took us to the jail.’ ”
I had to live it all over again till I was told to step down.
“What about what you wrote?” hissed Florrie Phelps, livid as I passed her.
Colonel Bowles and others offered an indignant defense, citing the Record’s slanderous articles. But the judge refused to show the jury any issue of our paper, not even the articles about the avalanche that wrecked the mill.
“You may not like said articles,” the judge said. “You may not like their author or the editor. But these reports are not relevant to the actions under discussion.”
The actions under discussion were: our eviction and arrest, the wrecking of the office, the loss of property. The taking of the law into the hands of vigilantes.
* * *
After only a day’s deliberation, the jury awarded K. T. Redmond a settlement of $10,345 in damages, most to be paid by the Moonstone Marble Company. Seven other defendants—those who’d called for K.T.’s banishment—were also liable, including Colonel Frederick D. Bowles, Mr. Koble of the Mercantile, and Deputy Carlton Pfister. Each was fined and found guilty of malice.
“Malice!” K.T. practically skipped from the courthouse, leading me to a corner tavern to celebrate. “If charges of skulduggery and craven greed were available, that Company of bandits would be guilty of those too.”
And murder, I did not say, by negligence. My father’s ghost smiled at me, winked.
K.T. lifted her fizzing glass: “To Sylvie Pelletier, a printer’s devil. And to your article about the Avalanche of Destiny.”
“Sorry, I didn’t mean to cause trouble—” I said.
“Good Lord, stop apologizing! If the Equitable Surety Company ever collects those payments—which I don’t count on—I’ll pay your lost wages.”
Thus I learned that while silence, perhaps, is golden, speaking up is silver. Sometimes it is even if it gets you thrown in jail. As it turned out, most of the judgment money was never recovered, and I never asked for back pay. K.T. had already given me an education and a calling. Because of her, I tried all my life not to be a nincompoop. To think for myself.
In a private celebration of victory, I sent another “tax payment” from the Silvestri account to the UMW Strike Fund and mailed several hundred dollars to support the striking shirtwaist makers in New York. I went to the Ladies’ Auxiliary meetings, and took notes, and saved some of my bookstore wages for college.
Chapter Forty-One
K.T. WAITED TILL SHE THOUGHT Moonstone’s anger had cooled with the weather. In September 1909, she wrote to her friend Hal Brinckerhoff to see if it was safe for us to retrieve our things. “Still not advisable,” he wrote back. “They’ll string you up from a lifting jack.” He volunteered to bring our possessions to Denver. K.T. invited me to join them for dinner. How strange it was to see a face from Moonstone in the Thomas parlor, piled as it was with K.T.’s boxes, my Thessaloniki trunk among them.
Hal was eager to show us photographs he’d taken with K.T.’s camera. “I found it in the wreckage,” he said. “Sorry to say, Trina, your place is looted.” We leaned over Hal’s photographs of the Record office ransacked, the clock shattered by a bullet, the composing table flipped on its side, papers helter-skelter. “Found a family of squirrels living upstairs when Dottie and I packed your rooms.”
“Don’t know what I’d’ve done without you and Dottie.” K.T. was giddy to see Hal, grilling him about the gossip.
“You and Sylvie had better not set foot in Moonstone again,” he said. “Certain folks are on the hook to pay fines, and they curse you every day. They take it as gospel that they had nothing more to do with driving you out of town than they had to do with driving Adam and Eve out of the Garden of Eden.”
“They all signed that petition!” K.T. said.
“What choice did they have?” Hal said. “Bowles’s men told everybody, ‘If you’re a friend of the Company, we want you to sign.’ ”
“Why are they angry at us?” I asked. “Why not blame the Company? Or Padgett?”
“Duke’s done with Moonstone,” Hal said. “Hasn’t been at the castle for a year.”
“Not since his son died.” K.T. glanced at me.
I looked away, lost again thinking of Jace, his violent death, the revenge I’d taken. I did not feel guilty, only feared getting caught. Perhaps it was assumed that the money missing from the vault was due to poor accounting. A rounding error.
“Bowles promised that the Company would cover all expenses of the settlement,” Hal said. “But not one of the liable parties has seen that money.”
Money was on my mind as we ate our boiled beef. Was the rest of mine in the trunk? I was impatient to get home and see. At last, after a game of cribbage, K.T. yawned, then Hal.
“G’night, Pelletier,” said K.T., and went upstairs to read Little Women aloud to niece Jenny. Hal insisted on getting me a cab home. We loaded my trunk in the back.
At Mrs. DeRosa’s, when I lifted the lid, the smell of Moonstone wafted up. Inside were old mothbitten woolens, a pair of pretty good Arctics, the Countess’s green silk dress, a navy-blue skirt with mud on the hem, all of my notebooks, and, grâce à Dieu, Bleak House and Heart of Darkness. When I flipped the pages, money fell out like plums off a tree. I closed my eyes and wrote a silent letter on the insides of the lids, as if the dead could read. Thank you, Jace. Now I would go to college.
* * *
I had come to love the money in my pockets, the plumping balance in my personal account, thanks to the sale of a wedding ring and one Knox left from Jace. Having my own money made it easier for me to be generous with the Robin Hood funds of Angela Sylvestri. I sent two hundred dollars to the striking women of Chicago’s Amalgamated Clothing Workers, another hundred for relief to the miners striking Duke Padgett’s coal operation in Ruby.
My small acts of charity had me always thinking of Jace, who’d promised to help the families on Dogtooth Flats but had not lived to keep his word. I believed he would approve of me. It was power, to hand that money out, and I relished it, as I relished adding my wages to a nest egg of my own.
At the bookstore six days a week, I made change at the register and impaled the receipts on a spike. I fed Falstaff, the store cat, and answered the telephone: “Diamond Spurs Books! May I help you?” I unpacked boxes and deposited my paychecks. Our best customer was K. T. Redmond, who came in weekly and walked out with armloads of novels for her niece: The Wizard of Oz, Five Children and It. She took me to dinner and detailed her various plans: to open a newspaper in Pueblo or Leadville. She speculated aloud, “You could be a columnist.”
