Read Online The Threshold by Marlys Millhiser - Free Book Online

grueling seven-day weeks when he returned. Single miners often returned to the boardinghouse in the same amount of time with a month’s pay gone. At three dollars a day they out-earned most laboring men. But as a popular saying went, “The miner mines the mines and the ‘line’ mines the miner.”
    Most miners’ wives had an ongoing fantasy of reforming their men to more righteous ways, and rarely did a woman marry a man she didn’t plan to change. Luella was no exception. Men in mining camps dreamed their own fantasies. It was only a matter of time before they stumbled across their strike. This would happen, of course, on one of the few days they could afford to devote to prospecting.
    “Well, if they don’t pay in coin, they pay in other ways then, do they not?” John reached to lift a large chunk of rock from the pocket of his coat and laid it on the table. A milk-white rock on the top and one side with specks of silver and specks of gold glinting back at the electrical light bulb. “What is this white stuff here, lad?”
    “Quartz,” Bram answered.
    “And the little speckles of silver and gold?”
    “Mica and pyrite.”
    “And this here, Bram?” He turned the rock over. Luella and Bram hissed in on their breaths. Callie thought the other side was prettier. This one was almost solid with a dull and dirty yellow. “What would you call it, now?”
    “That’s highgrade, Pa.” Bram looked confused. “You’re highgrading.”
    “How do you steal from a thief? Tell me that.” John O’Connell’s hair had grown ever thinner and farther back on the top of his head. He ran his hand over it now, as they had seen him do so often when agitated. “Paying in scrip is thievery. And taking it all back in rent and at the company commissary is slavery.”
    Luella stared hard at Callie and Bram. “You’re not ever to breathe a word of this to anyone.”
    Callie knew of two other such rocks hidden under the house. She’d helped bury them. Those two were a secret among herself, her father, and Charles. “Taking me a little walk down to Ophir tonight,” John said. “Be back tomorrow with some real money.”
    When he’d left, Luella sighed and stretched her back up and then her shoulders. “Callie, you’ll have to do the dishes alone. And, Bram, don’t look at me that way. John O’Connell is an honest man who can be pushed too far. Did you know that when he was working the Molly Deal the owners in Boston closed the mine owing the men three months’ pay? How do you think we survived that?”
    “If you’d let me work like I should, there’d be two earning a wage and he wouldn’t have to steal.” Bram’s voice seldom broke now. It was taking on a low rumble.
    “You’re not happy at school, are you, Bram? I’d think with such a pretty young teacher you’d—”
    “You’ve already taught me more than she can. And she’s not a good woman. Not like you.”
    “Miss Heisinger? She’s hardly more than a girl. What do you mean by ‘not good’?”
    “She’s different. She looks at me … different.”
    “I like her,” Callie said, pouring boiling water from the teakettle onto soap shavings in the dishpan. “Just because she’s pretty doesn’t mean she’s bad.” She dipped cold water from the five-gallon oil can into the hot water and stirred with her finger until the water turned milky-colored. “Everybody looks at you, Bram, because you’re too big to not see.” She turned to find Bram’s color rising and her mother studying them both.
    “Too big not to be seen,” Luella corrected distantly, as if she were concentrating on something else.
    “I never lied to you, Ma’am,” he whispered. “You know that.”
    “I do know that.” Luella stood behind him and put a hand on each shoulder. “And I couldn’t love you more if you’d been born to us. I don’t know how I’d have lived through the loss of the first two, if we hadn’t had you with us. I will think on this, Bram, I promise.