NANCY ETCHEMENDY

DOUBLE SILVER TRUTH

Truth Sandresen and I grew up together here in Pactolus, which is, by itself,
enough to explain why I wonder what might make a person's soul linger after
death. Things happen in this town that can;t be explained.

You probably have not heard of Pactolus unless you've studied Ovid, or have
traveled the Interstate into the Nevada desert and then turned south, miles from
the roads most travelers use. King Midas bathed in the River Pactolus to take
away the golden touch, and its sands were said to glitter with gold ever after.
Some say hopeful prospectors named our town. Others claim it was Mormons who
looked down on the valley from the eastern peaks and imagined a place as rich
and fertile as the banks of that legendary river.

My parents and my sister Maidie and I, Gwyn Penhallegan, lived on the south
side, in a house built of round stones from the Compton River, which cuts the
town in two. Within a few doors of us Basque innkeepers made their homes, as did
the newspaper editor, the family who ran the mercantile, Cornish miners like my
father, and even an elderly Paiute woman who went by the unlikely name of Wuzzy
Stovepipe.

I once asked Truth why the seven Sandresens lived in our neighborhood and not
across the river where most of the other Mormons lived, since they were Latter
Day Saints. She said she didn't know for sure, since they don't always tell the
kids about these things. But she was pretty sure it had something to do with her
mother seeing spirits and speaking to them. All the Mormons seemed to believe in
spirits and ghosts; I loved that about them because I wanted to believe in
ghosts, too. But Truth said the trick was in knowing whether her mother's
visions were faith-affirming experiences, or tools of Satan, and the bishop and
some of the other Brethren leaned toward tools of Satan. She wouldn't tell me
more about it, no matter how often I asked, though I never forgot what she said.

As children, Truth and I spent a lot of our spare time with each other. We
raised young animals together for the 4-H, learned to sew on Mrs. Sandresen's
old Singer, and on days when the snow-filled wind from Mizpah howled across the
fiats, my mother taught us secret methods for making perfect gravy and apple
pie.

In the cool of spring or autumn afternoons, we often rode double on my horse,
Rojo. Our favorite destination was the Toquimas, the range of hills that lay
just west and north of town like a litter of calico cats the color of minerals.
Abandoned mine shafts riddled them. Our parents had forbidden us to go there,
which made them all the more enticing. We haunted the weathered ruins of the
Double Silver whenever we dared, for that old mine held a peculiar fascination.
The shack that housed the headframe still stood, and it was filled with oddities
-- broken machinery, antique bottles, rusted carbide lamps and miners' hats.
Moreover, twenty-seven miners had died there in an underground fire. The
crumbling entry shaft was so deep that a rock dropped down it made no sound at
all. But sometimes we thought we heard the ghostly cries of dead, burned miners
floating up from its black maw, and we shivered and our mouths went dry as sand

We also loved to climb the pale, puffy tufa formations on the road to Niminaa
Lake. We would sit at the top and survey the land, fingers poised like scepters.
There we talked about horses and mean teachers and the ribbons at Oxoby's store.
Truth had dark, straight hair, while mine was gold and curly. Her eyes were
hazel; mine were gray. She had a sprinkling of freckles across her satiny
cheeks, while mine were naturally rosy. We were two royal beauties, all the more
so because we did not know and did not care.

By the time we were fifteen, our tufa conversations had turned to boys and
clothes and true love. That autumn, Mitch Hackbarth moved to town.

I saw him first on a blazing Indian summer afternoon, down on Center Street
where I had gone after school to buy pencils and binder paper and a package of
buttons for my mother. I stepped out of Oxoby's and mounted Rojo. Glossy red and
nearly seventeen hands high, Rojo was a powerful and impressive animal, though
moody. I had left him tied to a hitching post between parked cars; he didn't
like it, and let me know by tossing his head and prancing. I had just leaned
down to whisper in his ear and stroke his neck when the Hackbarths' pickup
rattled past.

Mitch sat on the wheel-well in back, elbows resting on his thighs. He looked at
me, astride my juggernaut gelding, and smiled and touched the brim of his hat. A
kind of shock went through me, a buzz like electricity that shot from the base
of my throat to the soles of my feet and left me warm and breathless.

His hair was dark, his eyes blue as a desert lake. He had his shirt sleeves
rolled up, and I could see the colors of tattoos on his forearms. His body
tapered down from big shoulders to a slender waist, and his hands looked strong
and easy. Later, my mother would accuse me of thinking with my womanhood instead
of my brain, and she was right.

The next day, I saw him at school. Compton Unified High had maybe two hundred
students altogether, drawing not only from Pactolus but from all the ranches and
mining camps in the vicinity. I was a sophomore, and Mitch had enrolled as a
senior, so we had no classes together. But he found Truth and me in the hallway
as we put our books away before lunch.

He took his hat off and flashed me the same delectable smile I had seen the day
before. His hair was the color of bittersweet chocolate, and curly. Close up, I
could see his tattoos more clearly, and they were like none I had ever imagined.
On his right arm, a wild mustang reared from wrist to elbow; on his left swirled
a fiery rope. He smelled like leather and alfalfa hay. I felt nailed to the
floor.

He nodded at Truth, and I watched for a panicky instant as something passed
between them, hard to describe and ever so brief, a keen attention that made me
wonder which of us he had come looking for. Then it was over and his blue gaze
focused on me again.

"Excuse me. I saw you downtown yesterday," he said. "That's quite a horse you've
got. I just thought, well, I wondered if...could we eat lunch together today?"

I felt light enough to float off the floor.

"Oh!" I croaked. "I mean, yes, I'd like that, to eat with you I mean. I usually
eat with Truth and some of my other friends, but maybe..." And here I elbowed
Truth none too gently.

"Uh," she said, as if coming up from far underwater. "I'll see you after school,
Gwyn." She hurried away, but not without a backward glance, returned by a
strange, small smile from Mitch. It bothered me at the time, like a tiny ragged
edge on a fingernail, but after a while it wore down and I forgot about it. Who
wouldn't give Mitch a backward glance.?

I took him out to the south side, where we found a bench beneath the
butter-yellow leaves of a cottonwood. I had a brown bag lunch. His was packed in
a wicker box, which seemed larger inside than out. From it he produced two roast
beef sandwiches, pickles, three hard-boiled eggs, a thick slice of cake and a
quart of milk. He ate it all. I noted with sly satisfaction that the cake was
chocolate, a food forbidden to Mormons, which meant he wasn't one of them, or
was at most jack-Mormon, and therefore, possibly, was off-limits to Truth and a
good many of the other girls.

At first we talked about Rojo. Mitch had only glimpsed him, yet he described the
horse as if he'd hand-raised him. He accurately guessed Rojo's age, his
temperament, his appetites. I told him a little about myself, embarrassed. Born
in Pactolus, lived all my life in Pactolus, probably destined to die in
Pactolus. I had traveled to Mizpah a dozen times, and once to the city of
Bishop. But everything else I knew was limited to what could be learned between
the Desatoyas and the Toquimas, which didn't seem like much at the time.

Mitch came from Reno. His father was a pit boss at Harrah's Casino, a place so
legendary that even I had heard of it. He was the oldest of four children, and
his mother had left home when he was eight, simply disappeared one night,
leaving a note his father had flushed down the toilet without showing it to
Mitch. The Pactolus Hackbarths were his aunt and uncle. He was here, he said,
because they needed a ranch hand and because his father had made him come. He
had gotten into some trouble back home, he admitted, staring off across the
schoolyard to the river.

"What kind of trouble?" I asked.

"Drinking fighting things like that. I got in with a rough crowd. But that's
Reno for you," he said, looking back at me with the smile again. His teeth were
wide and beautiful, though I noticed for the first time that one of the front
ones was chipped.

He took a toothpick out of his pocket and stuck it in his mouth. The way he
worked it with his tongue gave me pleasant shivers in places that surprised me.

"You think you'll stay in Pactolus?" I asked, realizing in the middle of the
question that anyone could guess why I was interested in knowing. "I mean, you
know..." My cheeks turned hot, and I fumbled for a way to cover my mistake.
"Pactolus is probably pretty boring compared to Reno."

Noticing my discomfort, he turned and looked at the river. As if speaking to
himself he said, "Don't know. I had to promise to graduate high school if I came
out here, and it was either come out here or do time for the county. So I'm here
for a year anyway." He turned toward me again, and clapped his hat onto his head
as the bell rang for the end of lunch. "Then I'd like to try my hand with the
rodeo."

We walked back to the building together, and as we went inside he touched his
hat brim as he had the day before and said, "Nice to meet you. Is it all right
if I call you sometime?"

"Sure," I said.

And that was how it began.

Mitch had flowers shipped from a Mizpah hothouse for my birthday in October. He
bought me lace handkerchiefs and a Paiute bracelet made of silver. He took me to
movies at the Majestic, and he always brought me home on time. I never had to
fend him off; if anything, it was the other way around. Mostly we rode our
horses together. I showed him every boulder and ruin and bend in the river that
meant anything to me. I took him to the Double Silver, and we threw rocks down
the shaft. A couple of times, we shared a shot of whisky.

Sometimes we climbed the tufa formations and sat together in a blanket, talking,
talking, as autumn made its way toward winter and the magpies left for warmer
climates. He told me about the lights of Reno, and how they lit up Virginia
Street like a rainbow on the darkest night. He said there was a moving, lighted
mural of the whole frontier on the front of one casino, and he used to dream of
being the prospector in that picture, who led his horse to a stream, and bent
down to put his pan in a brook and came up with gold nuggets the size of his
fist. I told him my dream, too, one I'd kept secret from everyone except Truth:
that someday I would leave Pactolus, and find a place where there were more
important things for a woman than perfect gravy and apple pie.

After a time, my father shouted that he wanted no daughter of his seen in public
with a tattooed delinquent whose main ambition in life was to ride the rodeo. He
should have remembered that the Penhallegans are fond of rebellion. In my family
there stand breast-to-back fifteen generations of Cornish miners, taciturn, sure
of themselves as mules, and often on strike. As far as I know, it is impossible
to force a Penhallegan to do anything; we have to be led around to propositions
as if we were skittish livestock.

Dad might as well have thrown me into Mitch's arms and given us his blessing. By
Thanksgiving, it took all the energy we had to keep from tearing our clothes off
every time we got near each other. I was still a virgin, but only barely, and I
straggled fiercely with myself.

It was nice, in those days long ago, to feel justified in hesitating. At the
same time, it was horrible to know that I might be considered damaged goods
forever if I gave in to my desires -- might even be consigning myself to
spinsterhood, a much greater onus then than now. I worried about half a dozen
possibilities. Would Mitch still respect me? Would word get around somehow and
my reputation be ruined? Most unthinkable of all, might there be a baby? For I
was not sure, not sure at all, that Mitch would give up the rodeo to marry me.
And there I would be with his child, trapped in Pactolus forever.

One afternoon, I talked to Truth about it, though we had grown apart a little.
Mitch was busy helping his uncle put out winter feed for the cattle. I had to
call Truth ahead of time, because she had her own boyfriend, someone she'd met
at church, and she was often busy, too. We took Rojo to the Double Silver,
because we needed a place where we could really be alone, and that was
impossible in our small houses with children stacked two or three to a room and
inquisitive ears at all the keyholes.

It felt good to have Truth behind me in the saddle again, familiar and
unconfusing. The wind blew cold, and sparse bits of dry snow swirled around us.
By the time we reached the mine, my fingers were raw and stinging on the reins.
I tethered Rolo as far out of the wind as I could in the lee of a rusted skip, a
big cart that had once been used for hauling ore. He neighed and stamped his
feet, incensed at this insult. He wanted to be home in his warm barn.

We ducked into the shelter of the mine shack, and huddled together on a rickety
bench as far as possible from the broken window. It was still very cold. I had
packed a Thermos bottle of hot cider and some slices of pumpkin bread which we
spread out between us, our noses red and running. In the pocket of my sheepskin,
I had hidden a pint bottle of brandy. I took it out, unscrewed the top and held
it over the steaming mouth of the Thermos.

I looked over at Truth, smiled, and raised my eyebrows rather than ask the
question straight out.

Truth looked genuinely horrified. "Gwyn, what're you doing? Where did you get
that?"

"I found it in Dad's liquor cabinet. It's been there for years. He won't miss
it."

"But we can't! We're not old enough. And I...you know I'm not supposed to."

Which was true. Drinking alcohol was one of the most sinful things a Mormon
could do, and I was well aware of it.

"Oh, come on. Nobody will ever find out. I won't put much in, just enough to
warm us up and get us talking. Haven't you ever wondered how it tastes?"

Truth shrugged and looked away, but the trace of a smile glimmered on her face.
She gave me a sidelong glance. "We shouldn't do it."

How wonderful it was to know someone as well as I knew Truth Sandresen, to know
by all the little signs and subtleties what she must be thinking, and what would
come next. "You're probably right. I won't do it if you don't want me to," I
said, and I reached into my pocket to get the cap, knowing already that I
wouldn't need it.

Truth put her hand on mine to stop me, as expected. "All right," she said. "But
just a little."

So I spiked our cider with brandy, more than a little it's true, but not, I
thought, enough to make us drunk by a long shot. However much it was, it surely
warmed us, and it did what I hoped most. It made it easy for me to talk about a
thing I was not proud of. I told Truth the whole story, how Mitch had set me
afire since the first moment I'd seen him, how I'd dreamed night after night of
what it would be like to have him inside me until finally I could think of
nothing else.

"Have you talked about getting married?" asked Truth.

"No," I replied.

"Well, maybe you ought to."

Here, in a few concise words, Truth had gotten to the raw heart of the matter.
Which was that every time I imagined being married to Mitch Hackbarth, the
dreams turned to nightmares. He had no plans beyond riding the rodeo, and I had
seen enough rodeo wives to know I didn't want to sit home wondering whether he'd
broken his neck. He hated his mother for abandoning him, and his father for
letting her go. He regularly drank too much, and had gained a reputation in town
for fist-fighting and who knew what else. Did I want him enough to wed myself to
that forever?

I began to cry. "I don't know if he loves me. He's never said so, anyway. I
don't know whether I do either. I don't know how love feels. What if we're
really in love, but we just let it slip away? How do people ever know for sure?"

Truth looked down at her boots and was silent for a moment, her face still and
terrible with some feeling that I, for once, could not immediately decipher. "I
think if you have to ask those questions, then it's not love, it's just the
other thing, the wanting."

She looked back up at me and in an instant I thought I had solved the puzzle of
her feelings, from the sound of her voice and the way she held her hands
tenderly around the heat of her cider cup.

I blinked and stared. Then, with great hubris, I said, "You're in love with
somebody, aren't you?"

She nodded. She should have been happy, laughing. But instead something like
pain or sorrow seemed to run all through her. It frightened me, because for the
first time I had come up against something about her that I didn't understand.

"Is it Michael?" I asked, flailing for a solution. Michael was the boy she'd
been seeing from church, and the only candidate as far as I knew.

"No, it isn't."

"Who then?"

"I can't tell."

I laid my hand on her arm and squeezed. "You can't even tell me?"

A tear crept down from the corner of her eye. She didn't cry often. And she
said, "Especially I can't tell you."

It was one of those killer revelations that hits you as if you've walked into a
wall you didn't know was there. She loved Mitch Hackbarth.

Now I remembered half a dozen little things -- odd pieces of conversation, and
looks exchanged between the two of them. The faded memory of that first day in
the hallway at school surfaced. I doubted they had actually done anything yet.
Mitch was so busy with me that he never had time. And they had probably both
been holding back for my sake. But when you looked for it, there it was, a force
between the two of them, plain and undeniable. I felt suddenly reduced to the
status of a blind, ignorant obstacle.

A terrible din began, inside my head perhaps, though at the time I thought it
must be the ghosts of all those dead, maimed miners howling with devilish glee
at my misfortune. The mine shack and the rotting head frame rolled giddily from
side to side. I stood up and went for the door, suddenly sick to my stomach.

"Gwynny! Come back," Truth called.

Rojo stood beside the ore skip where I had tethered him. I loosened the halter
lead with clumsy fingers, got my boot into the near stirrup on the second try. I
realized too late that I had put more brandy in the cider than I thought, and
that Rojo was in one of his moods, having no doubt brooded all that while over
the distant warm barn, and how poorly treated he was, tied up in the chilly wind
with no grass or water. I was halfway into the saddle when he threw me off with
a single thrust of his huge hindquarters, and I landed messily on the skip.

I screamed a long time, as much in fear as in pain. My right femur was broken,
and the bloody jagged bone stuck out through my Levi's in a way I would not have
thought possible.

Rojo had bolted and was halfway down the hillside galloping for home by the time
Truth reached my side. She took one look at me and ran as fast as she could
toward the Blue Bottle Mine, a mile away, where my father was the foreman. They
took me down to town in a Jeep, with Dad's wallet stuck between my teeth to keep
me from biting my tongue. Doctor Hinkelman gave me morphine and they strapped me
to a board and drove me to Mizpah, where it took six hours of surgery to put me
back together again.

I lay in the hospital bed in that unfamiliar town for days with nothing to
distract me from my own thoughts and discomforts. I was encased in a body cast
that started at my waist and extended to my toes on the right and my knee on the
left. There was an oblong hole on my right thigh so the wound where the bone had
come through could get air and heal faster. Sometimes it hurt like hell in that
spot, and I wished I could see what it looked like, but they kept the hole
covered with gauge.

The cast was white; the sheets were white; the walls were white; even the view
from my window was white, for the snow that began on the day of my accident had
become a blizzard. Against this background of bleak perfection, I replayed what
had happened over and over in my head, wondering what I could have done to
change the outcome. I could have left the brandy out of the cider. I could have
brought a nosebag of oats for Rojo. I could have talked to Truth in one of the
booths at Robfree's Drugstore over sodas. But all paths led to the same
conclusion: that although I might have spared myself a broken bone, I could not
have changed the thing that mattered most. Mitch Hackbarth and Truth were in
love.

The snow had stopped all travel on the road home. My mother and Maidie and all
my friends were stranded in Pactolus, waiting for a break in the weather. Worse
yet, my father was stranded in Mizpah. He was angry at me not only for
frequenting the hazardous environs of the Double Silver, which he had
specifically forbidden, but also for public drunkenness, behavior which he
regarded as stupid and embarrassing beyond words. To his credit, he tried to put
that anger aside, and to offer me the comfort I so patently needed. I could tell
he felt awkward about it. Comfort had always been my mother's domain. He held my
hand in his own, roughened and twisted by miner's work. Once when I was crying,
he softly recited an old nursery rhyme, which he later said he'd told me many
times when I was a baby. I didn't remember it really, except in a vague and
soothing way. "Lavender's blue, dilly dilly. Lavender's green. When I am King,
dilly dilly, you shall be Queen."

But it was never very long before the snowy window had him grouchy and wishing
he were home. Once he brought me books from the library, a thing both touching
and unexpected. Though he could read quite well, he considered books unmanly,
and I knew it had cost him considerable pride to be seen carrying a stack of
them around Mizpah. He didn't know what to choose so the librarian chose for
him, an armload of romances I couldn't bear to look at. I was at a loss to
explain this, and so I hurt his feelings once again though I never wanted to.

On the eighth day, the storm was gone and the roads clear. Dad went home and
fetched Mom and Maidie. The back of our pick-up truck was laden with get-well
cards, including one from Truth, cookies, homemade soup, and clean underwear,
not that I needed the latter, since there was no chance of getting them on over
my cast. Also on that day, an arrangement of flowers came from Mitch with a card
that said, "To my little rodeo rider, get well quick. I'll be down to see you
just as soon as I can get away." It was signed with X's and O's.

All of which brightened my outlook a good deal. I began to think maybe I had
imagined some of what went on the day of the accident. Truth had never actually
said she loved Mitch. I was full of brandy and not thinking straight. Maybe I
had jumped to an outrageous conclusion. Judging from the card and flowers, Mitch
felt as affectionate toward me as ever, and the greetings from Truth, though
brief, seemed warm and genuine. I started one of the library romances, and my
appetite returned. But at the end of three weeks, I still had not had a visit
from either Mitch or Truth, though a couple of my other friends had managed to
come. And I began to feel hurt and scared about it again.

On Christmas Eve morning, the doctor came in with a funny little saw and cut the
cast off my waist, so that only a long sheath of plaster remained from hip to
toe on my right leg. He uncovered the hole on my thigh, revealing an eight-inch
black gash from which he removed stitches that would have looked just fight on
Frankenstein's monster. The sight of it made me sick, and I was glad when he put
the gauze back again. The nurse helped me don my long-abandoned underwear. I
could get up and walk around on crutches, and I could go home.

Everyone had done their best to make my homecoming special. Maidie braided red
and green ribbons into Rojo's mane. Dad had cut a huge pinon pine, and Mom
decorated it with all our old family ornaments. The steamy fragrance of
Christmas cookies floated in the air, and a log fire sparkled in the hearth. The
little river-stone house had never felt cozier or more inviting. And I had never
felt more miserable.

Friends and well-wishers came and went all afternoon. But not Truth, and not
Mitch. Mrs. Sandresen dropped by with a child in one arm and a plate of divinity
in the other just before supper. Flour dusted her hair, and she smelled like
cinnamon; her cheeks were rosy and I knew by looking at her that a hundred
holiday tasks remained for her to finish -- turkey to clean and stuff, perhaps
pies or her famous pecan breakfast rolls to bake, certainly presents to wrap.
She wouldn't go to bed till late, and still she made time to visit.

I smiled and accepted her good wishes and a kiss on the cheek.

"Where's Truth?" I asked. "It's been so long since I've seen her."

"Well, Gwynny..." she began. Her voice seemed to fail her, and she looked out
the window, at what I do not know -- the snowy hills, the snowy road, anything
but the face of Gwyn Penhallegan. Finally, brushing a floury sleeve across her
forehead, she looked back at me. She had eyes dark as obsidian and hair the same
strong coffee color as Truth's. She was black Irish, Truth had told me once,
combined some generations back with a hint of Cherokee. When she really looked
at you, the effect was powerful. Now those eyes, intense as a night sky,
shimmered with tears held in check.

My mother and Maidie lurked by the dining room table, straining their ears.

"Do you understand what's happened?" Mrs. Sandresen asked at last. I suppose I
looked confused, because she went on. "It's her father, not me so much." She
glanced away again, this time at her hands, lying folded in her lap. "He's
angry. This drinking the two of you did at the old mine. Well, that's just part
of it." She stood suddenly and buttoned her coat as the crux of the matter came
out in a rush. "There's this business about the boy, too, not even a member of
the church. He thinks she only got to know the fellow because of you. I don't
agree with it, but Truth's father is a stubborn man and he has forbidden her to
see you."

How did my face look then? I'll never know. But whatever she saw there made Mrs.
Sandresen smooth my hair and whisper sorry just before she gave my parents a
small, embarrassed wave and hurried out the door.

I lay there in a daze. It had never occurred to me that perhaps I had gotten
Truth into trouble with my antics. I thought of her bursting into the office at
the Blue Bottle, hysterical and with liquor on her breath, and I realized for
the first time just how bad it must have looked. A lot of Mormons worked at the
mine. The gossip mills would have ground that up in great haste and spit it out
right on the Sandresens' doorstep. Then there was the part about "the boy, not
even a member of the church," for whose presence Truth's father blamed me. It
had to be Mitch.

My father stood frozen, staring after Mrs. Sandresen. I could see the beginnings
of red temper creeping up beyond his shirt collar, but it hadn't quite hit yet.

My mother clasped her hands and looked at me as if she might burst into tears.
"Gwynny?" she said. "Is there...can I..."

It came to me that they were angry and afraid because someone had hurt me. They
cared about me in a thousand ways, in blankets tucked around my chin at night,
in new shoes bought instead of curtains, in forgiving my mistakes at the expense
of their own pride. They cared about me a hundred times more than Mitch
Hackbarth ever had, and more, it seemed to me, than Truth's father cared about
her. If I gave in to my misery, I would ruin a day they had worked hard to make
special. Whatever terrible things 1 had done, I could do this one thing to
redeem myself. For the sake of my family, I could refuse to cry.

My voice shook, and I couldn't manage a smile, but I stayed dry-eyed. "I'm okay,
Morn," I said.

The illumination of her face was my reward. "That's my girl."

As my mother kissed my forehead and tucked our plaid carriage rug around my
legs, my father announced gruffly that he'd better go out and get some wood.
"Damn that Sandresen," I heard him mutter as he slammed the back door.

Maidie, setting the table, said, "That's the stupidest thing I've ever heard
of."

The air was cleared, and for the first time we could talk about: all that had
happened in our usual argumentative and vigorous family way. I didn't actually
cry until late that night as Maidie and I lay in the dark little room we shared.

"Gwyn?" she said across the emptiness between our beds. "I saw Mitch and Truth
together yesterday, riding his horse."

"You did!" "Yeah."

"Where were they?"

"Headed up toward the hills. I dunno. Maybe they were going to the Double
Silver."

"Maybe," I said. Then I hid my head in my pillow, and with that little impetus
of privacy the tears came pouring. There was no reason to stop them anymore.

I got my cast off in the middle of January. The winter passed and the
cat-colored hills grew a faint overcoat of grayish green. I began to ride Rojo
again, which was a considerable help to me, for I still limped and needed a cane
when walking.

By Easter, I had made a certain peace with myself about Truth and Mitch. I had
to, for they had become a recognized couple at school. It would have made me
crazy to enter the halls of Compton High each day if I hadn't managed at least a
measure of forgiveness. Maybe "forgiveness" does not accurately describe the
state at which I arrived. Some part of me felt relieved, for in spite of the
fact that they walked arm-in-arm and spent long moments gazing at each other in
adoring silence, they looked tormented.

That made it easier for me to remember my own hesitation about Mitch. He had
told me more than once that he thought there was something wrong with him --
something that would make his mother ditch him and run. He often arrived at
school hung over. Sometimes he was covered with bruises from a reckless
encounter with a half-broken horse or a fellow drunk. It was general knowledge
in Pactolus that Truth's father hated him, which probably just confirmed his
doubts about himself. Maybe Mitch was ashamed of the way he had treated me, too,
because every time he saw me he pretended that he hadn't.

In spite of all that had happened, or maybe because of it, I could not stop
thinking of Truth as my best friend. I felt as if I had swallowed a rock every
time I glimpsed her weary face, her eyes dull with the burden of her father's
anger and the frightening prospect of her own future. She was trapped, for there
is no denying true love, even if it is clearly a harbinger of terrible events to
come.

The month of May arrived, and as usual, it distracted and soothed me away from
all else, for May is a magical time in Pactolus. The world tilts just so, winter
loses its hold, and summer arrives. It happens suddenly. The first half of May
is often cool, even frosty. Then one morning you wake up, and the air brims over
with quail and magpie song. Yellow rabbitbrush illuminates the hills, and sun
pours down from heaven like the gold of old Midas himself. People roll up their
sleeves and kick off their shoes. The air smells wet and fertile. The lilacs and
the forsythia bloom, and even the orneriest miners wear bright sprigs of it in
their hatbands. Men, women, and children pick up hammers, pack lunches, and
spend a Saturday on Center Street repairing the wooden sidewalks. Oxoby's
Mercantile supplies the nails and Robfree's donates bottomless buckets of
lemonade. It made me throw my cane away and almost forget the bitter winter and
all that had come with it.

Mitch was due to graduate with the rest of the seniors at the end of the month.
I suppose, somewhere under the dizzy joy of the season, part of me realized that
the clock was ticking for Truth. Mitch was only obliged to stay in Pactolus till
he'd finished school, so something big had to happen. Either he would make good
on his plans for the rodeo, or he would stay and thereby make a commitment to
Truth.

This time of year, my family spent most evenings together on the porch. Morn and
Dad would wander out to the swing after supper, and when Maidie and I had
finished washing the dishes, we usually joined them. We often found Mom sipping
a glass of iced tea, and Dad sucking on his pipe. Sometimes Maidie would get out
her guitar and softly sing ballads or bits of the Gilbert and Sullivan songs Dad
was so fond of. The warmth of the desert day lingered as frogs and crickets
joined Maidie. And the air floated like lavender silk, the smells of lilacs and
tobacco mingling with sagebrush.

One such evening in the third week of May, the sound of a quarrel came from the
Sandresens' house. The Sandresens didn't live next to us, but across the street
and down a door. It was not the kind of polite disagreement you might overhear
while walking past an open window. It was a great deal louder than that. The
voice, as full of rage as any I have ever heard, belonged to Truth's father.

"You're no better than a common whore, a common whore, my own daughter! You
belong out on the Mizpah road in the whore house," was the indictment that split
the warm, dry night.

Someone responded in a voice no less furious, but smaller and unintelligible
from our distance.

"How could you do such a thing to me? A God-fearing man! I've raised you right,
did everything, everything for you. And now you do this!"

And the reply, "Daddy...not fair..."

"Get out of this house! Get out!" Mr. Sandresen's voice seemed barely human. It
was an animal roar of rage.

"....please, Daddy..." The small voice belonged to Truth.

Than a long, horrible howl, "Get out!"

This was swiftly followed by a smack, a thud, and a yelp of pain.

It was rage and indignation of a different order than Mr. Sandresen's that
brought me to my feet then. No one had the right to treat another person that
way, especially if the person were Truth.

I pounded raggedly down the steps and into the street. I couldn't walk without
limping yet, and could only run with painful awkwardness. I heard the determined
thump of my father's boots behind me. "Gwynny, don't hurt your leg," he called.

Other neighbors had come from their porches to stand on the sidewalk in front of
Sandresens'. I wove and darted among them. By this time, I had it in mind to
hurl myself through the screen door if need be to keep the bastard from hitting
Truth again. But I didn't have to, because at that point she stumbled out onto
the lawn with her hands over her face. I could not tell whether she hid tears
alone or blood as well.

We hugged each other there in the sweet-smelling night. "Oh, Gwyn, he hit me,"
she sobbed.

"I know," I said, guiding her down into the street. "Come on. You can come to my
house."

"I'm ashamed."

"We can go in the barn. Nobody'll bother us. Come on." I led her away, trying to
stay in the shadows as far as possible from the neighbors who stood in small
fidgety knots and whispered as we passed.

Whenever I went inside the barn, I remembered anew why Rojo loved it so. It had
a close, comforting feel to it. Fragrant hay, oats, Hooflex, and saddle soap
abided there, and the smell of the horse himself. The barn was safe, and the
body sensed it. No better place was ever made for healing a wounded spirit.

Truth and I sat in the dark on a bale of hay, looking out through the big doors
at the extravagant spangles of the desert sky. She wouldn't let me turn the
light on, but she did tell me her eye was swollen and she thought her nose was
bleeding. I found a cloth and wet it at the spigot by the trough, and after a
time my mother knocked and discreetly handed me a towel with ice wrapped in it.

I got Truth to the point where she could laugh a little about looking like a
prize fighter. It wasn't hard, because I think she wanted to laugh, needed to
somehow. And for a while we talked all around what was really on our minds.
There was a certain relief and joy in just being together after all those months
of enforced separation, no matter what the circumstances.

Finally I asked her what had happened.

"He wanted to know if I'd been sleeping with Mitch." She shivered as she said
this. "I've never lied to him. I told the truth, and so..." She began to cry
again. "So he hit me."

"It was a stupid thing to do," I said.

"Everybody thinks it was a stupid thing to do," Truth replied. "I'm just what my
father said. It's true. I'm a no-good whore."

It took me a second or two to figure out what was going on. She thought I had
accused her of stupidity for sleeping with Mitch.

I confess that I had a moment's trouble sorting out my own reaction, because in
fact it felt good to hear her admit she'd been wrong to take Mitch from me. Then
the facts of the matter sobered me, and I realized I wouldn't trade places with
her for anything. Mitch and trouble were a package deal.

I took her by the shoulders. "You don't understand!" I said. "I meant hitting
you was a stupid thing for your dad to do. Stop thinking that way! You're not
the only girl who's ever been entranced by Mitch, you know. Believe me, if it
weren't for what happened at the Double Silver last fall, I'd be the one sitting
here with a bloody nose and a crazy father. Sleeping with Mitch is no stupider
than a flash flood. It's just nature. Some things you can't do anything about."

There it was. I had finally forgiven her through and through, and I knew my
reasons were good. There, but for the grace of Truth herself, went I. She had
dropped the ice towel in her lap, and feeling protective, I stuck it back in her
hand and pressed it to her face. "Come on. Better keep that eye cold," I said.

Instead she turned and hugged me hard. "I am stupid," she murmured. "I'm
pregnant."

There were no legal abortions to be had anywhere north of Mexico in those days.
If we had lived in Reno or Las Vegas, Truth might have had a chance of arranging
one anyway. But not in Pactolus; not even in Mizpah, or so we thought. It wasn't
until years later that I found out Wuzzy Stovepipe had provided this service for
the town's women as far back as anyone could remember. If we had walked to the
end of our own street, the old Paiute could have solved Truth's problem. But
this we didn't know. I'm not sure Truth would have gone through with it anyway.
I think she was already as much in love with the baby as she was with Mitch.

We stayed up half the night trying to figure out what to do. It was one of those
situations where every road seems to lead up a sheer cliff. There were no good
or easy answers. Long after midnight, I tried to convince Truth that a bed on
our couch was the best temporary medicine. But she was too embarrassed to risk
being seen. So we burrowed into a pile of straw there in the barn and fell
asleep.

I remember every single thing about the next day, and I suppose I always will.
It's like a wicked little jewel, perfect even after all these years, every edge
still hard and sharp enough to draw blood.

I awoke at dawn, eyes gritty from the straw. There wasn't a cloud in the whole
violet sky. A band of beautiful peach-colored light brightened the eastern
horizon. A meadowlark sang lustily in a field somewhere nearby. Truth was gone.

It was a school day, and I wasn't sure what to do. I went for a walk down by the
Sandresens' house, but no lights appeared in the windows, and everything was
still. So I went back home, took a bath, and got dressed for school. I remember
each little detail. I wore a blue denim skirt and a white blouse with blue
piping and pearl buttons. My mother fixed scrambled eggs and raisin muffins for
breakfast. I had to tell her and Dad and Maidie all about the previous night. I
made up a bunch of lies. I said I thought Truth had gone home and maybe things
would be all right. I didn't say anything at all about her being pregnant. All
the while, my stomach twisted like a snake caught under a boot heel.

Truth didn't show up for our first period English class, but a big black crow
did, and he sat boldly on the windowsill for five minutes before the boys shooed
him away. Something about that crow made my heart do sick little flips. His eyes
were hard and golden, and he looked like a messenger from hell. I started to
cry, and Katherine Hutchins had to escort me to the nurse's office.

At lunch time, having convinced the nurse I was just suffering from lack of
sleep, I searched for Truth. Nobody had seen either her or Mitch. ! was frantic
by then. I considered phoning Truth's mother from the pay booth on the corner by
the poplar windbreak, but decided against it, afraid that if Truth weren't there
my call would just get her into further trouble.

After lunch, I slept through algebra and got two demerits for it from Mr.
Gardella. It seemed as if the school day would last forever, but it did
eventually end. By three o'clock, the temperature hung at 95. Pactolus was a
child's paint box of wilted colors. Everywhere spring blossoms struggled against
the sudden summery heat and confused trees sprang into full leaf. I lugged an
armload of books down Center Street, across the bridge toward home. I had just
passed Esubio's, from the dark interior of which came the jingle of slot
machines and the cool tinkle of ice in drinks, when Maidie came running up.

Excitement made her even more breathless than she would otherwise have been.
"They've found Mitch's horse, all saddled up and running loose. Nobody knows
where he is, or Truth either. They're organizing a search at the city hall. They
think the horse might have thrown them, out in the brush somewhere."

"Where did they find the horse?"

"In the hills west of town is all I know," said Maidie.

West of town rose the cat-colored Toquimas, and the wobbly headframe of the
Double Silver. I thought I knew where to look first. "Damn it, Maidie! Why
didn't you bring Rojo?"

"Don't blame me! Dad's got him, out with the other searchers."

Maidie took half my books and we ran for home. Though my bad leg slowed me to a
walk long before we got there, my mind raced like a rabbit. What were the
chances of two people getting thrown from a horse and both of them ending up
hurt too much to go for help? Slim, in my experience. And in any case, what
would either Mitch or Truth be doing at the Double Silver in the middle of a
school day? Something about the "thrown by a horse" theory didn't add up. With
every step, I got more shivery inside.

There was nothing to do but wait, so Mom and Maidie and I did just that. I
changed into jeans on the off chance that I might have to ride somewhere fast. I
shelled peas for Mom. And all over the house, clocks ticked. At 6:30, we sat
down to supper without Dad. I could tell from the condition of Mom's forehead
that she was both worried and annoyed, but she did what she could to hide it.
The meatloaf was probably pretty good, but it tasted like sand to me and I had a
hard time choking it down. Before I had gotten halfway through my slice, we
heard a ruckus outside.

Mrs. Sandresen was staggering down the street, bawling and screaming. She had
hold of her hair with both hands and was yanking on it as she walked. Mr.
Sandresen scrambled backward in front of her, his arms out, pleading with her.
"Stop it, Caroline, for God's sake! Please!"

Maybe Mrs. Sandresen's body was there, but her mind was somewhere else, in a
place so far away that she neither saw nor heard her husband. She kept saying
over and over, "Truthy's dead. She came to me. She's dead, and in pain."

My mother ran down the steps to see what she could do. I heard her ask Mr.
Sandresen, "Has there been word from the searchers?"

He shook his head in a bewildered way and held himself stiff with fear.

Mom went straight up to Mrs. Sandresen and hugged her. After a moment's confused
struggle, Truth's mother returned the hug. There they stood, two middle-aged
ladies, one sobbing as if every breath hurt and the other comforting her as she
would a child. "Hush now, Caroline. There's no reason to think that. I'm sure
Truth's fine. They'll find her. You'll see."

"No," sobbed Mrs. Sandresen. "You don't understand. She's dead. I saw her. She
told me herself."

Which didn't make one hell of a lot of sense till I remembered the old question
I used to ask Truth. "Why don't you live across the river?" And the mysterious
answer: "It has to do with my mother seeing spirits and speaking to them."

As I watched the scene in the street, the rational part of me thought, Poor
woman, she's always been a little crazy, and this has pushed her over the edge.
The not-so-rational part made me run to the barn in tears. Because it knew, in
some way that had nothing to do with reasons, that Truth's mother might well be
right.

If you've never lived in the desert, it's hard to believe how fast the
temperature can drop once the sun has been gone awhile. Dad came home late,
hungry and chilled, to find me on the porch wrapped up in a blanket.

"Did you find them? Did you search the Double Silver?" I asked.

"Sorry, Gwyn. We looked everywhere. There's just no sign of them. We called the
search off." He sat on the steps and tugged at his boots. When he finished, he
came over and squeezed my shoulders. "You should be in bed now. Come on. They'll
probably find 'era in some wedding chapel in Reno."

I tried to take cheer from this thought, but I couldn't. As I sat there
listening to the frogs and crickets, I heard coyotes yipping and howling in the
distance, and it gave me the shakes. After a while, I did go to bed. But I never
managed to fall asleep. At least, I don't think I did, and I don't think what
happened toward dawn was a dream.

I had given up on sleeping, and wandered out to the porch again. Even a
beautiful night can be a terrible time. The moon was nearly full, hanging high
and bright. Nevertheless, there were so many stars that it looked as if Earth
had suddenly gone to heaven. The ground still held enough spring moisture to
produce a little dew, and it made everything smell clean-- the sagebrush, the
lilacs, even the dirt. There were no human noises anywhere. I could even hear
the river tumbling along its path a long ways away.

My leg ached in the old broken spot, and I stood up and turned around to ease
it. I sat down and got comfortable again, and when I looked up Truth and Mitch
were climbing the steps. I threw the blanket off and leaped out of the porch
swing.

"Truth! God, I've been so worried. Where were you all this time?" I ran up and
hugged her.

Only I didn't really; I couldn't.

I have thought about this often in all the years gone by. I have worried it as a
dog does a bone. Was it a dream, or did it really happen ? There are points in
favor of both possibilities. Like the rest of that day, it is still as vivid as
ever in my mind. I ran to Truth and I tried to hug her. I felt only a faint
heat, a little pull that made the hair on my arms stand up. Though I knew she
was there, I went right through her. I drew back and squinted. Moonlight flooded
the porch, but every shadow was deep and black. Mitch took his hat off, scooped
the hair back from his forehead, and put the hat on again. His familiar scent of
alfalfa and leather mingled with the other smells of the beautiful night. He put
his arm around Truth, and she put hers around him. It came to me that I could
see the stars through them, twinkling fiercely. The shock of it swarmed up my
spine like red ants.

"We need your help, Gwyn," said Truth. There were no echoes, no wavering moans,
nothing like you read in scary books. It was just Truth's voice, the same as
ever. I could even hear her breathing.

"Anything," I said. "Anything at all."

"We're down in the Double Silver," said Mitch.

I couldn't move. I could barely swallow. This was the thing I had feared all
day, and now Mitch had given it voice. "I don't want this to be happening," I
said.

Truth held her hand out toward me. "I'm sorry, Gwynny."

I couldn't speak. My throat felt like a stick of hot wood.

"We had to do it," said Mitch. "Don't you see,.' There was no other way we could
be together."

I thought Mitch was right at the time, because in a way I was just like him. I
was young. Given a choice between their dying and their living together, even a
stubborn fool like Truth's father would have softened as surely as hardpan in
rain. But none of us had been alive long enough to know that.

They looked so sad as they stood there on the porch with their arms entwined.
Was this how they had stood in the moment before they stepped over the dark
threshold of the Double Silver shaft?

I scrubbed at my eyes, but the tears came anyway. I could barely see. "I already
tried to help!" I cried. "And look what happened. I can't seem to do anything
except make things worse!"

Mitch's blue lake eyes fixed on mine and he said, "It wasn't your fault, Gwyn.
You were the best friend we had. Will you remember that?"

"I don't know. I'll try," I said, half angry at him for even suggesting that I
could assuage myself of responsibility for the part I played in their deaths.
But I did remember. It wasn't until a long time later that I realized what a
gift those words of Mitch's were.

It might have been my imagination, but I thought he and Truth smiled gently
then, as if a certain dread had lifted from them. "Would you tell my mother to
remember it, too?" said Truth.

I blinked and they were gone, even more suddenly than they had arrived. The
porch was empty except for the light of the moon and the lingering smells of
leather and alfalfa.

They didn't ask to be buried, but neither Truth's mother nor I could rest until
that piece of business was finished. And what a business it was. We had no
evidence at all that Truth and Mitch had fallen down the Double Silver. We could
offer no scuff marks or suicide notes, no incriminating scraps of cloth, no
testimony from individuals who had seen them in the area. If there were ever
footprints, they must have been obliterated by the first group of searchers. As
might be expected, nobody volunteered to be lowered down a crumbling
nine-hundred-foot hole in the ground where twenty-seven men had once died.
Everyone wanted good reasons, and our reasons were too easily written off as the
product of hysterical grief.

In the end, it was my father who came to the rescue. After a week of finding me
sleepless on the porch at dawn, he gathered a group of other miners from the
Blue Bottle and they rigged up a winch with a man-skip on a cable. Dad climbed
in with a big battery-powered lamp and they lowered him down that gaping black
throat while he softly hummed a tune from H.M.S. Pinafore.

He did indeed find Truth and Mitch. They had fallen together, and lay as if
sleeping with their arms around each other, very much as I had seen them in the
moonlight. They lie beside each other still, in the Pactolus cemetery on a
little rise above town.

I left Pactolus for a time when I got old enough, though I returned tot good
some years ago. I married a boy from Elko, and we bought a ranch here, on the
road to Niminaa Lake. The pull of this town is strong almost beyond reason.

I got to see firsthand that moving, lighted mural in Reno Mitch told me about --
the one with the jubilant settlers and the miners whose pans held huge nuggets
of gold. It surprised me to find that it looked very much like a picture of
Pactolus. I have children of my own now, and it scares me to remember what
happened to Truth and Mitch. There's always that fear that such a thing might
befall a child of mine, in spite of all my love, and all my best efforts.

Now and then on a moonlit night in May, I step onto our porch, wondering if I'll
find them climbing the steps. There are times when I want to hear Mitch say once
more, "It wasn't your fault, Gwyn. Will you remember that?" and to see him and
Truth smiling as I promise that I will remember.

There are times when I very much need to believe in ghosts.