Thursday, February 22, 2007

Golden Wheat/Black Coal Chapter 10

“The mare’s teats are waxy. She’s going to deliver the colt soon. We need to find shelter.” Cate knew they were on the right road to Mort Lethe’s coal mine, but they would have to take time for the horse. Toby agreed. Thunderclouds were building along the horizon but so far there was no sign of anything but rolling prairie with ridges in the distance.

Toby tried to remember what the old Mandans had said. If they were right and he had understood properly, they were about to come to a deep valley with trees, a valley so deep that the trees wouldn’t show until they stood on the rim. And they did. The valley was hardly a mile across and edged by steep sandstone cliffs, but when they followed along the bluff a bit, a game path led down to the cottonwoods where a stream wandered through the flood plain. The grass here was good and the water straight off the mountains. The mare stopped often and looked far away, unseeing but feeling. She carried a light pack and sometimes put her nose around to touch it, smell it.

Toby scouted ahead a bit and then returned. “Cave. Not deep, but better than being under trees when lightning is striking." The sky was dark now, partly because it was late in the day and partly because of the low purple clouds. Lightning glimmered and grumbled from behind the clouds as night truly unfolded.

The cave floor was covered with dry leaves from past winds. With her packs unloaded and after a roll in the leaves, the mare circled. Putting her nose low, she snuffled and blew, stirring the leaves up. Then, satisfied, she lay down. Toby and Cate sat on the two packs with their backs against the wall. There could be no fire because of the dry leaves, but lightning began to flash glimpses of the mare’s heaving sides and they could hear her groan with contractions. Then she stood and swayed for a bit, as though she might leave, but finally settled and stretched out again. The smell of internal fluids filled the small space.

Crossroads worked hard for a short time, then the two midwives could sense that the foal was emerging and then heard it slip out onto the rustling leaves. A brilliant light flash showed that it was wrapped in membrane and Cate leaned forward to clear its head so it could breathe. A flutter of snuffling and blowing and then a small new rhythm of breath pulsed in the dark. When the light popped again, eye gleams showed in the slick wet foal’s face. Cate and Toby laughed and leaned their shoulders together.

Crossroads stood in a moment or two, shook herself, and went to work cleaning the birth sac off the foal with her tongue and teeth, diligently massaging and consuming the membranes and traces of blood. Her whuffling and nickering were counterpointed with the squealing high-pitched noises of the foal, still experimenting with the stuff called “air.” Pretty soon the slurp of removing wet birth sac was replaced by steady rhythmic licking as Crossroads dried and massaged the tender new hide of her baby.

Thunder and lightning ripped and raged, but in the cave it was calm. After a while they heard Crossroads strain a bit and the plop of the afterbirth hitting the leaves. She turned and chewed it up. By this time the foal was trying to sort through its many legs and leverage them into some kind of system. Cate wished she could see it, so intense and comical. It was up, then crashed into the leaves, then up again, crashed again, and finally stayed up. They knew it was stretching its neck and running its nose along Crossroad’s belly, feeling for the warm hairless skin around her udder. Finally came the sucking and smacking they had been waiting for. They couldn’t help laughing.


Demeter had found a hut among the scattering along the final approach to Mort Lethe’s huge pile of a house high on a ridge. She quietly established herself as a laundrywoman and in a week or so was asked to wash the clothes and bedding from the big house. The woman’s clothing was almost entirely nightgowns with a scattering of chemises, petticoats and long black stockings. Pers’ smell was on them, mixed with something else unfamiliar to her mother, but still confirming that she was there.

The man’s laundry was white shirts, often pleated in the front and with French cuffs. She washed them with violence, wringing hard as though he were still in them. Mostly they smelled of tobacco, expensive cherry-scented stuff. And rose petals, unlikely enough, like a funeral parlor. She boiled them in her outdoor copper tubs set up over wood fires, but the smell clung.

Her source of water was a stream that came down the way past the little cluster of dwellings along the road, and then continued into the small town where the coal miners lived and the mine officials had their business offices. The stream originated in a grove of evergreens higher up the mountainside where a spring yielded icy clear water all year long. When Cate and Toby arrived with the two horses, they slipped into the quiet soughing of the grove and set up a camp in a patch of aspen on the south side near grazing that was out of sight of the big house.

Fearing that Cate’s red flag of hair would alert Mort, Toby was the one to slip down to contact Demeter and confer about what to do next. They agreed that they would need contact with the larger world as well as somehow finding out the layout of the stone house. Demeter took clean laundry up, being careful to keep her sunbonnet on and tipped forward, but she was told to leave it in the kitchen hallway. There was no reason to go deeper into the house and the danger of recognition would be great anyway if Lethe went past at close quarters.

Cate found the answer to contact with Demeter’s sons. Crossroad’s packs had been full of grain and the strange shape on top had held a distilling coil and kettle. She knew that moonshine was as good as money in a mining town -- maybe better in this town, because Lethe tried to keep the town dry. Miners who wanted to drink had to go clear down to the valley. It wasn’t that Lethe begrudged them their drunkenness -- but it made them poor workers and raised the chances of them making expensive mistakes. By the time they climbed back up to the mine head, they were mostly sober unless they brought bottles along, which they did.

Cate put a bottle -- she had harvested a good crop of them from the town dump -- into her apron, drew her shawl up over her head and around her face, and went to investigate the town. She soon found the old Irish telegrapher, whose throat was oh-so-dry, and offered him a bit of refreshment and sympathy. In no time they were remembering the “auld country” and even crooning lullabies together.

Toby, being Indian, faded into the crowd of Indians, Mexicans, Celestials and other dark heads and faces who moved through the population and its dwellings, doing the harder, more dangerous work. Boldly he went to the big house and applied for odd jobs, hoping to get inside. Almost at once he was lucky. The housekeeper wanted him to replenish all the coal fires through the house. Packing the heavy scuttle along the hallways, Toby soon understood the layout, but when he came to Pers’ bedroom and knocked, a Mexican woman took the coal in and shut the door, opening again in a moment to hand out the empty scuttle.

Late in the afternoon he knocked at a last heavy door and heard a rich male voice bid him to enter. It was Mort Lethe’s study, his inner sanctum, dark with burgundy velvet drapes and black horsehair-upholstered chairs. Mort didn’t even look up as Toby tumbled the coal into the box.

That night by the campfire in the aspen grove, he shook as he told the two women about it and drew out the plan of the house. Listening to Crossroads steadily cropping grass nearby and watching the foal lying flat near the fire, he gradually calmed. Wind sang in the higher evergreens.

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