The Bride’s House Read online

  Mrs. Travers sat down on Nealie’s bed, a cot really, neatly made up with a faded quilt. “He did, did he? I’m not surprised. What did you tell him?”

  “I didn’t. I don’t care to marry him, so I didn’t say yes. But I didn’t say no, either. I’m not for hurting a person’s feelings.” Nealie sat down next to Mrs. Travers, tugging at the boot, until it slipped over her foot. She tightened the laces.

  “It’s you I worry about getting hurt. Will Spaulding is as handsome as a foot racer, but don’t waste your time thinking he’s the marrying kind. You might lose out on Mr. Dumas.”

  “I guess I can take care of myself,” Nealie said.

  “Can you?”

  Nealie didn’t look at the older woman but, instead, reached for the second boot, annoyed, yanking it on. Then she laughed. “Except for almost getting my purse stole the day I got here. But I’m not taking my purse today.”

  When Nealie returned to the porch, Will held out his arm to her, and Nealie took it, glancing behind her to see if Mrs. Travers noticed. The woman did. She stood in the doorway and waved, because skeptical as she was, she obviously found the man likable and knew that Nealie cared to be with him. More than that, perhaps, she loved Nealie and wanted the girl to have a little pleasure before the cares of life in a mining town wore her down. The girl had only recently discovered happiness and did not know it would not last forever.

  “Where would you have us go?” Will asked. “We’ll walk anywhere you like.”

  “The depot. I like the depot,” Nealie said. “It’s so busy, and I always wonder where all those folks are going to or where they came from.”

  “Then that’s where we’ll go. Everybody there will envy me for being with such a pretty girl.” Will put his hand over hers and squeezed.

  Nealie was not used to such compliments and, instead of replying, she broke away, embarrassed, and took long steps down the board sidewalk. After a block or so, she turned and saw that Will lagged behind, so she slowed and matched her stride to his. A train whistle split the air just as they reached the station, and Nealie was delighted that they had arrived in time to watch the train stop. “Look at all those people,” Nealie said, as the two of them stood outside the depot and watched the passengers climb down from the cars, some standing on the platform looking around. “Why’s so many coming here?”

  “I’ll bet every one of them is here to seek his fortune. How many do you think will be lucky?”

  “I was lucky. I met Mrs. Travers right here at this depot. A man tried to steal my money, and she caught him. I’d have been in a pickle if she hadn’t. And then she offered me a job. Oh, I was lucky, all right.”

  Will turned to look at her. “I thought Mrs.Travers was some sort of relative or a family friend.”

  “I never met her in my life before I came here. Don’t you remember? I told you I ran off. I didn’t know until I bought my ticket that I was going to Georgetown.”

  “I’d supposed you’d meant your folks had let you go adventuring. I’ve known plenty of fellows who did that, but never a girl. And to do it on your own! I’d say you have your share of pluck.”

  Nealie didn’t know what “pluck” meant—nor “adventuring,” for that matter—but she liked the sound of the word. “I do,” she said.

  They watched as the passengers scurried around the platform, a few hailing hacks or climbing aboard the omnibus, but most of them picking up their bags and boxes and walking down the main street. When only a few remained, Will took Nealie’s arm and asked where she wanted to go next.

  “Up in the trees,” Nealie said. “I’ve never gone in the mountains, because there’s always been snow on the ground. But now it’s mostly gone. Let’s go up high and see if we can get above the smelter smoke.” Because Georgetown was in a valley, the smoke from the smelters hung over the town on days when the wind was still, giving the mountain town a brooding, industrial feeling. Will glanced at Nealie’s boots and long skirt, and the girl added, “I’m a good walker.”

  So they followed a street to the edge of Georgetown and took a path that led them up the mountainside. The trail was littered with pine needles and covered with snow in spots, and they had to climb over rocks that had tumbled onto the path during the winter. But none of that deterred Nealie. “I never saw mountains before I came here. At home, we had hills, and there were bluffs by the Mississippi River. The Mississippi, it’s as lazy as a fish worm. But here, the rivers aren’t so big—they’re not rivers but creeks, I’d call them—but they rush by you like a runaway wagon. I’d hate to get in their way. If you’d fall into Clear Creek, you’d get carried a hundred miles.”

  “Do you like it here, then?”

  “Better than anyplace I’ve ever been.” Nealie thought that over. “I guess I haven’t been about much, but I bet Colorado beats anywhere you can name. The air doesn’t hold you down, and up here on the mountain, above the smoke, you can see all the way to tomorrow.”

  “And back to yesterday, too,” Will said, taking the girl’s hand and helping her over a fallen log.

  “I don’t care so much about yesterday.”

  Now that they were almost to the top of the mountain, they encountered old snowdrifts that were crusted over and covered with the footprints of wild animals. “Mountain sheep,” Will guessed, then pointed at a different set of footprints. “That might be a cougar.”

  Nealie glanced over her shoulder to ask what a cougar was, and as she did, she stepped on a rock that was slick with mud and tumbled onto the ground.

  “Are you hurt?” Will asked, helping Nealie to sit on a rocky outcropping.

  “No, not even a little, but my coat is done for,” she said, swiping her hand down the garment, which was covered with mud.

  “Let it dry, and it will brush off.” Will sat down beside the girl, and the two looked out beyond the mountains. They had climbed farther than Nealie had thought and could see all the way down the valley, dotted with mines that were marked by yellow tailings spills, and smelter stacks sending curlicues of smoke that the wind scattered.

  “I hope never to live in another place but this.” Nealie raised her face to the sky, because the air was clear and warm. “We’re close enough to touch the sun,” she said.

  “Maybe you’ll live in that bride’s house someday.” Will plucked a wildflower that had pushed its way through the snow and put the stem through the buttonhole of Nealie’s coat. “When the snow’s gone for good, we’ll hunt for mushrooms. They ought to grow around here.”

  “I never ate a mushroom, but I’d be glad for one right now. We ought to have brought our dinner with us.”

  “Climbing builds an appetite, all right.” Will stood suddenly. “Come with me. I know where we can get a bite to eat.” He helped Nealie off the rocks, and she followed him down the trail to a cutoff that led to a short street in Georgetown with no more than two or three houses on it, one of them deserted, an old coat hanging in the doorway in place of a door. The street had no sidewalk, and Will walked carefully through the dirt, slick with rain from the morning, telling Nealie to step in his footprints. He stopped in front of a tiny unpainted house set so far back on the property that she almost failed to see it. “This is my cottage. I have some cheese and crackers and tinned meat. Nothing fancy, but it will do if you’re hungry enough,” he said. He stood aside and bowed, as Nealie turned in at the gate. “You don’t mind, do you? You can trust me. But if you’d rather, I’ll take you home.”

  “I don’t mind,” Nealie said. She’d read in a Peterson’s Magazine story about a young girl going to a boy’s room and being disgraced and wondered if visiting a man’s house was the proper thing to do. She wouldn’t have gone to Charlie’s cabin unless they’d been engaged—which meant she’d never go there. But Will was different. He was proper and wouldn’t ask her to do a thing that was wrong.

  The one-room cottage was tidy, but sparsely furnished, with only an iron bed and a table and a wooden stool. Boxes were nailed to the wall t
o serve as cupboards. There were a trunk and hooks where Will hung his work clothes. A lap writing desk stood on the table, next to a whiskey bottle that held dried grasses. A half-finished letter rested on the desk’s slanted surface, and Will put it inside the desk, along with a pen and bottle of ink. “I can make us tea,” he said, adding kindling to the banked fire in the stove. He dipped water from a bucket and poured it into the kettle, setting it on the stove. Then he removed food from metal boxes with tight-fitting lids and rummaged through the cupboards, looking at the tins. “I guess all I’ve got is oysters. No sardines.”

  “I don’t prefer oysters,” Nealie told him. “I surely do not.”

  “Oh, these aren’t fresh ones. They’re smoked. They won’t come back up on you. I’ll open the tin, and you’ll try one, won’t you? You said you had pluck.”

  Nealie nodded, although she didn’t know that pluck meant eating oysters.

  While Will puttered about, Nealie looked around the cabin. She liked the wallpaper, a pattern of red roses on brown vines. It had been glued to cheesecloth that was tacked onto the board walls, and it sagged in the corners, but it was elegant. She admired the leather-bound books stacked on the table and the silver frame containing a picture of a man and woman. “Your folks?” she asked. Will nodded, and she asked again, “Is there any more of you at home?”

  “You mean brothers and sisters? I have one sister. She’s a little older than you.”

  “Is that her?” Nealie nodded at another framed photograph, this one of a dark-haired girl dressed in furs, who looked a little like Will.

  He nodded.

  “Do you like your folks?”

  “Of course.” Will looked up at Nealie. “Don’t you like yours? Is that why you left home?”

  Nealie did not want to talk about her parents, could not stand for Will to know how she’d been shamed by her father, so she said, “Ma’s passed, and my pa is disagreeable.”

  Will didn’t pursue the conversation. He poured hot water into a china teapot, then indicated a spread of cheese, crackers, dried apples, and smoked oysters that he’d placed on the table. “It’s not the Hotel de Paris or even Mrs. Travers’s boardinghouse, but I think we’re hungry enough to do it justice.”

  “Why, it’s a fine supper,” Nealie said. She placed a handful of crackers and slices of cheese on a tin plate, then looked skeptically at an open tin. “I guess I’ll try just one,” she said, using her fingernail to snag an oyster. “At least these are little bitty fellows.” She watched as Will filled his plate, then used a fork he’d set on the table to pick out a half-dozen oysters.

  “What do you think?” he asked, after Nealie swallowed the oyster.

  “It’s real tasty,” she said, surprised. Using the fork, she speared two more. She seated herself on the stool, while Will sat down on the bed. After they had eaten, Will went to the stove and poured tea into tin cups, handing one to Nealie. She held the cup between her hands, for despite the fire Will had built, she was cold. Her coat had been set near the stove so that the heat could dry the mud on it. The house was set back under thick evergreens, and she wondered if the sun ever reached the place, even on the first day of summer. “It’s quiet here,” she observed, although she didn’t care much for quiet. She had been lonely her whole life and liked the bustle of the station and Alpine Street, where the stores and the hotel and the opera house were located.

  “I like solitude. I can feel the stillness here. That’s why I rented this house, although there were nicer ones available. I guess I like Colorado as much as you do, but it’s the quiet I like, the way you can think without having somebody bother you all the time. This house is a good place to work,” he said, indicating a wooden box behind the desk that was stuffed with rolled-up maps and diagrams.

  “Is that what you do here?”

  “Mostly. I want to learn all I can about mining. My grandfather thinks now that I should go back to school to get an advanced degree, but I believe I can learn more here, working in the Sharon. I didn’t at first, but I do now. Besides, I like it underground.”

  “I sure would like to see it,” Nealie said.

  “You’d like to go underground?”

  “Of course I would.”

  Will looked surprised. “That’s a funny thing for a girl to say. Most women would object to the dirt and the muck and the cramped space. Your coat would get awfully dirty there.”

  “Then I’ll just have to brush it again.” She paused a minute. “It makes no sense living in a mining town and not knowing what a mine is. Don’t you see?”

  “A lady who wants to go underground. You’re a contradiction,” Will said.

  “Thank you.” Nealie didn’t understand the word “contradiction” but thought Will was complimenting her again. She asked boldly, “Will you take me sometime?”

  Will was amused. “I might just do that.” He got up and refilled their tin cups. Then he went to the desk and opened the lid. “Close your eyes.”

  “What?” Nealie asked.

  “Close your eyes. I have something for you.”

  “How come I have to close my eyes?”

  “You know, you always have to close your eyes for a surprise.”

  “Oh.” Nealie didn’t know that. She squinted her eyes shut.

  Will stood behind her and tied something around her neck. “You can open them,” he said. Nealie touched her neck, confused, and Will told her to look in the mirror hanging by the door.

  Nealie stood up and went to the glass. “Oh my. I never saw a thing so fine,” she said, admiring herself. “It’s a brooch with a lady on it.”

  “A cameo. I saw you admiring it in a store window after the drilling contest, and I thought you might like to have it.”

  “You bought it for me?”

  “I didn’t steal it.”

  “Oh, I didn’t mean … it’s just, nobody ever bought me anything before. I guess it’s the prettiest thing I ever saw. It’s something the lady in the bride’s house would wear.” She looked alarmed. “You didn’t rob yourself to do it, did you?”

  “Of course not. It’s just a trinket.”

  “It’s not. It’s real gold.”

  “Not quite, but it is pretty on you.” Will came close to admire the cameo. Then quickly, he leaned down and kissed Nealie on the lips.

  “Mr. Spaulding!” Nealie said, stepping back and touching her lips with her fingers. “Aren’t you supposed to ask first?” A girl in a story in Peterson’s Magazine had said that, and Nealie had liked the words.

  “I’ve wanted to do that since the first time I saw you in the mercantile. Forgive me.”

  “That’s all right. I liked it. You can do it again, if you want to.”

  “I liked it, too.” Will grinned at Nealie as he put his hands on her shoulders. “You are an odd girl, all right.” He kissed her a second time, and she kissed him back.

  CHAPTER 4

  THEN BEGAN THE HAPPIEST TIME in Nealie’s short life, days so fine she thought she walked on the wind. She spent every Sunday with Will, at least, every Sunday he wasn’t working, because despite his grandfather’s ownership of the Rose of Sharon, Will took shifts that required him to work nights and Sundays, just like any other engineer. The Sundays that Will was occupied, Nellie went with Charlie, because she was mindful of what Mrs. Travers had said about jealousy. Besides, going around with Charlie was more fun than sitting in the boardinghouse, stitching Mrs. Travers’s endless quilt pieces together. Nealie had never been a hand for sewing.

  The two men were as different as red and blue. Will brought presents—a packet of peppermints, a box of cheese, a tin of crackers. But Charlie worked around the boardinghouse, chopping kindling, repairing the porch, painting the woodshed and the privy. Once, Nealie and Charlie hung shutters on the house as a surprise for Mrs. Travers. The woman had wished for just such shutters, so Charlie made them, painted them green, and kept them at his cabin until the day when Mrs. Travers took the train to Denver to shop. The shutte
rs were in place when she returned, and Nealie was as excited as Charlie to see the older woman’s joy.

  “It was Miss Nealie’s idea,” Charlie said.

  It really wasn’t. “It was Charlie’s,” Nealie admitted. “He’s the one got the shutters and put them up.”

  “We put them up,” Charlie said, smiling at Nealie, but she didn’t respond. He had not asked again if Nealie would marry him, but the girl knew he had not given up.

  So did Mrs. Travers, who told Nealie, “Charlie’s a sticker. I guess you’d have to beat him with piece of cordwood to keep him from coming around.”

  Nealie didn’t mind being with Charlie, although he could be glum at times. He’d stare at her, his eyes dark, and he wouldn’t turn away when she caught him at it. He liked to act superior, telling her what to do. Once when the day was hot and she was sitting outside with her skirt up to her knees and her legs stretched out, Charlie came up on the porch and told her it was not right, her sitting with her legs showing, and she’d had to pull down her hot skirts. “You ought not to do it. You ought not at all. You got to be a lady, Miss Nealie.”

  Will wasn’t so critical. He liked everything Nealie did and told her he’d never met a girl who pleased him so much. They ate supper at the Hotel de Paris and took long walks around Georgetown, up one street and down another, always ending up at the bride’s house to see its progress. Sometimes, they went up close so that Will could examine the workmanship on the outside, study the framing and the stone foundation or run his hands over the trim, which had been cut by a jigsaw into fanciful shapes, like wooden lace. “It’s a sturdy house,” he said, looking up at the big gable in front that was decorated with carved trim. They walked around the house and admired the tall windows whose decorative tops seemed like eyebrows. The tower soared into the sky, and Nealie guessed that at night, you could see heaven from it.

  Once, as they climbed the stairs to the front porch to see the door, which was made of heavy wood that was painted with circles and swirls to look like bird’s-eye maple, they found the house open, and they crept inside. Will called, but no one answered, so they entered. Nealie stopped in the foyer, her mouth open, as she stared at the staircase, its banister a dark streak of polished wood that followed the graceful lines of the steps. “You could follow it to the stars,” she said.