Mother Lode (2 page)

God, had she told him about
that?
He wiped the perspiration with his
sleeve. “Yes, sir.”

“Why did you move back?”

“My sister— needed me. She’s only four.”

Jorie watched the sheriff snap the rubber
band on his wrist. “What did you do last night?”

“We played Flinch.”

“Who did?”

“My mother and I, after Eliza went to
bed.”

“Did you have any arguments?”

“No, sir.”

“After the game, what happened?”

“My mother turned in.”

“And you?”

“I took a walk down by the lake.”

“What for?”

“I just wanted to think.”

“What about?”

Jorie turned toward the window, listening to
the scraping sound the frozen birch tree branches made as they
clawed the window pane.

“I can’t remember.”

“Where’s your sister now?”

“Oh, my God!”

He hadn’t thought about Eliza since he’d left
home with his mother.

“She’s with the neighbors. I’m supposed to
pick her up at suppertime.”

“Why wasn’t she included on this outing?”

“She was playing with her friend. Mother said
to leave her there ‘til we got home.”

Jorie’s eye caught the grandfather clock. The
movement and sound of the chair, he noticed, was almost, but not
quite synchronized with the pendulum. If he could just get them
together, or stay with the pendulum.

“Can you do something, Mr. Foster? Send some
men to find her?”

“In this blizzard? It would take hours to get
up there, and even with lanterns, finding her in the dark when
you’re not even sure where you left her—” The sheriff paused. “I’m
sorry, son. We’ll send a search party out in the morning.”

There was something ominously final about
that statement. If she wasn’t dead already, there was no way she
could survive the night, with temperatures plummeting below
freezing.

Pictures started playing in Jorie’s head in
jerky slow motion, like the ones in the penny arcade. He and his
mother were walking through the woods and the snow was coming down
in huge unstoppable flakes. It rose to their knees, then up to
their necks. They tried to swim through it, but soon it was burying
them both in its cold, merciless, resolve. They lay clutching each
other beneath it, looking up through the small air space their
breath had reclaimed from the snow.

No, no! It wasn’t like that, he knew it
wasn’t.

At the same time his body was acting up. A
tightening feeling in his throat spiraled down to his belly, turned
around and spiraled back up, bringing the contents with it.

He dashed for the front door.

When he returned, he lay on the floor in a
crumpled heap of sobbing flesh. Long tortured wails broke their dam
and poured forth, wave after wave of unarticulated grief.

He felt something laid over him, maybe the
afghan. The only sound that reached his ears was the steady tock of
the pendulum. He deliberately focused on its comforting
predictability.

Finally, he heard the sheriff say something
about his sister.

“What are you going to do about Eliza?”

He blew his nose. “I have to get her.”

“Will she be in school tomorrow?”

He shook his head. “She’s only four.” He
pulled himself together and got off the floor.

“You’d better make arrangements for her then.
Be here by ten. Let’s hope the road crew has rolled the road by
then. You’ll show us where to look.”

“Yes, sir.”

Jorie’s stomach turned. He knew it was
perfectly reasonable for the sheriff to ask him to help in the
search, but he hadn’t anticipated it.

The thought of coming upon his mother’s stiff
body brought up more waves of nausea.

Earl Foster drank his third cup of coffee
while he waited for the men he’d rounded up to search for
Catherine’s body. Kurt Wheeler was coming with his sleigh, and two
others would join them. He hadn’t slept well last night, couldn’t
get over what had happened to his old friend. He'd known the
Catherine since schooldays up in Red Jacket, when this Scottish
lass had captured his heart.

Then in Hancock he’d become poker buddies
with her husband, Thomas, the engineer for the Portage mine.
Catherine had married a widower more than twice her age with two
grown sons and a younger one who’d only lived with them a few
years. He wasn’t sure why, but when the boy was about twelve, he’d
been sent away.

He remembered how awkward it had been at
first to go to the big house on the hill and encounter the girl
he’d longed to make his own. As the years passed he became more
comfortable with Catherine; when there was an opportunity to talk,
it was usually about Jorie. He had watched the boy grow up in that
house. On poker nights he remembered the kid asking him riddles
until his pa shooed him away.

And the lad had worked for him a couple
summers back, gardening. Nice boy. Bright, too.

The last time he’d seen Catherine she was as
attractive as ever. Who’d have thought she’d end up this way, dead
at thirty-six?

He couldn’t help wondering if it was really
an accident. No, it couldn’t possibly have been otherwise. Still,
there were nagging thoughts. There had been serious trouble between
the boy and his mother. Catherine had come to him about that, even
shown him a bruise on her arm.

“Do you want me to bring him in,
Catherine?”

“No. But I want it put down, for the record,”
she’d said.

And he’d been called to the house once to
witness a locked door Jorie had busted down, before he ran off.
She’d asked him to wait for Jorie to return, because she was
afraid.

“Promise to protect me, Earl,” she’d
beseeched. “With Thomas gone, I feel so vulnerable.”

Whether it was his sense of duty or her
imploring green eyes which still mesmerized him, he didn’t know.
“I’ll do what I can.”

“He’s turned so
violent
.”

But this was the same boy
who’d nursed an injured wolf back to health when he was twelve. The
same young man whose essays and poetry had occasionally graced the
pages of
The Copper Country Evening
News.

He slipped a rubber band over his hand. He
did some of his best thinking when he snapped it against his
wrist.

Jorie and the men arrived more or less on
time, and started off in the sleigh. There’d been about a thirteen
inch fall, all told. The road workers with their huge rollers and
teams of draft horses had not yet compacted the snow on the road
leading north. The men in the sleigh found it slow going.

No one else was about, and only the plodding
sound of the horses’ hooves and their occasional snorts broke the
stillness. At least it had stopped snowing; in fact, the sun was
out today.

Jorie thought the whole landscape had taken
on an ethereal look, as unreal as the previous day’s events.
Streams had been silenced overnight. Circling wind eddies had made
whimsical sculptures of snow banks. Branches heavy with pristine
snow caught the sunlight, transforming them into dazzling
crystalline figures.

He'd awakened this morning with Eliza jumping
on his bed. "Isn't it grand, Jorie, staying all night at
Henna's?"

It had taken him a moment to realize where he
was and why. Then as yesterday invaded with the full force of
another tempest an unvoiced groan descended from his mind to his
bowels. He'd brought Eliza to the house of their former housekeeper
and nanny the night before. There was nowhere else he would leave
her.

He’d had to tell Helena what had
happened.

“Oh, Jorie, no! Herself
couldn’t survive the night in such—” After a pause she asked,
“Sweet muther of Christ, is she. . .
dead
, then?”

He felt the tears sting his eyes. He could
only look away.

“Faith and begorrah, how could the likes of
this have happened?” She crossed herself, and then saw the look on
his face. “Oh, forgive me, lad, I should’na said nothing ‘bout
it.”

“Can you keep Eliza for awhile?”

“It’s blessed, I’d be.”

Jorie was brought back by the sheriff’s
question.

“Which road was it you turned off on?”

“Tamarack.”

He glanced at the other men. No one was
talking much. Only Kurt spoke, and mostly to his horses,
encouraging them to forge through the snow.

“Getyup, Bess. Getyup, Tess. There you go
now. It’s not a Sunday outing we’re after. Could you make it a bit
faster, so’s we could get there before the sun sets?”

They turned down Tamarack Road, and Earl
Foster was quick to ask, “Where to now, Jorie?”

“We turned in at the old lumbering road.”

“Which one?”

“About forty rods on.”

There were no wagon tracks to show the way,
no sign of human life in the eerie white silence. The only thing he
could hear was the pounding of his own heart.

The lumbering road could not be seen, but
they turned in where the trees had been felled.

“Where did you stop the buggy, son?” the
sheriff wanted to know.

Jorie shook his head. “I don’t know for sure.
It doesn’t look like we were ever here.”

“Don’t look like nobody was ever here,” Kurt
agreed.

The occasional absence of trees suggested
various trails, leading off in different directions.

“Are you sure this is the right lumbering
road?” Earl asked.

“No. But I think it is.”

“Did you pass any others before the one you
turned off on?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Well, let’s get started.”

Earl jumped out of the sleigh, and the others
followed.

“Mr. Foster, from wherever I was, I know we
started off to the left from the road.”

“All right, then,” said Earl, “let’s all
start off this way. You said the trail split?”

“A number of times.”

The four of them worked their way through the
snow. Only Kurt and Earl had brought snowshoes, although the brush
was so overgrown, they found them cumbersome to use.

“You didn’t leave any breadcrumbs, Hansel?”
Kurt asked.

Jorie looked away. “No, sir.” |

They came to a split where there were two
trails.

“You and Kurt go that way. We’ll carry on
here.”

Jorie followed Earl down the trace. The
reprimand of two squirrels disturbed the stillness. Other denizens
of the forest peered above their warrens of safety, as the
intruders tromped through their habitat.

How different it all looked today. Bright
sunshine made the woods appear welcoming, friendly. Chunks of snow
fell from the branches of hemlock, as the wind stirred the
trees.

Somehow, just maybe she’d managed to survive.
It was too soon to give up hope. Perhaps she’d found some sort of
shelter, or some kindly soul had found her. He looked for recent
footprints, sniffed for chimney smoke. Once, in the distance, he
heard the sound of branches breaking underfoot.

“Mother!” he called out.

Earl turned to look at him, but said nothing.
The second time Jorie called out the sheriff put a hand on his
sleeve. “It’s a doe, son. Just a deer.”

Nothing looked familiar to Jorie, not the
hill they climbed or the split of paths. They turned back,
regrouped with the others, and set off in different directions.

“Give a whistle if you find . . . anything,”
Earl called after them.

They didn’t, and finally gave up on their
search for the day, as the spare sun waned. The sheriff decided
he’d need more men for the search.

On the way home, Earl said, “You sure you
don’t know the man’s name that helped you? What’d he look
like?”

“He was big. Cornish accent.”

“Cornish. With all the transplanted miners
from Cornwall, that narrows it down as much as saying a man you met
in France was French.”

They rode in silence the rest of the way,
until Earl dropped Jorie off. “You’ll have to help us until we find
your ma. Be here at nine tomorrow.”

“Yes, sir.”

Cora didn’t allow any form of alcoholic
beverage in the house, and Earl seldom desired it, but after a
miserable day searching for the body of his old friend, he decided
he was entitled to some refreshment. Besides, he couldn’t sit
still.

He headed across Franklin and down to Tezcuco
Street. This pulsing hub of Hancock sloped steeply down to the long
and narrow Portage Lake, leading to the shipping and railway
companies spawned by the mining business. The larger bulk of the
lake lay to the east before it joined Lake Superior. Here, between
Hancock and her sister city Houghton, it ran as narrow as a river.
Ships plying the Great Lakes would bring in supplies and leave with
copper and iron ore along shipping routes from Detroit, Chicago or
Duluth.

Along Tezcuco Street a
myriad of saloons staked their claims amidst the finest hotel, the
busiest Chinese laundries, public bathhouses, banks and
barbershops. On this and nearby streets there were saloons for the
Irish, the German, the
Cousin Jacks
from Cornwall, the Croatians and almost every
nationality in the world.

He passed lampposts bearing the ordinances
he’d posted, prohibiting disorderly persons, drunkards, fortune
tellers, vagrants, prostitutes. Puppet shows, wire-rope dancing or
other idle acts and feats were also forbidden. Already weather-worn
by the storm, they needed replacing. The sheriff considered most of
these laws a load of bollix, but he didn’t write them— only tried
to enforce them. It wasn’t easy keeping the lid on a mining town.
Too many folks in these parts thought they were north of the law,
and said as much.

As usual, the blast of the six o’clock
quitting whistles at the Keweenaw and Portage Mines signaled the
saloon keepers to ready-up for the onslaught of thirsty customers.
The pubs were the second shift for the miners and they took it as
seriously as the first.