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Where I Cling
©Peter Landsberger, 2008
In 1910-1912 Truckee, California, the high Sierra railroad town, a narrative sets forth how Mary, caught between two pretty, lively sisters and a cute younger brother, comes of age. Along with adventures and conflicts among the siblings, the larger picture of the historic and economic changes in California at the turn of the century are illustrated, as well as the trouble between adults, who do selfish things and make poor decisions.
How those decisions affect Mary’s adult life are depicted in her reflections during the twentieth century until she leaves the world in 2003 at 105.
Here are the first two short chapters, introducing the adult Mary and then the family’s Truckee life, both comic and dramatic.
OCTOBER 1985
Colfax, California
Evening
Fall had come. The air was chilly. Dusty yellow-brown leaves dropped from the black oak onto the flat leaf-strewn ground just before the hill plunged to a narrow creek behind Dorothy’s little house outside of Colfax. I leaned over the porch railing and looked up, studying the foothills of the Sierra, scraggly Digger pine interspersed among the oak trees. Then higher up, Ponderosa pine and Douglas fir. I raised my eyes to take in the first range of mountains, the forest so thick with Jeffrey pine and white fir that I couldn’t see the road climbing up toward Donner Summit and over to Truckee, no matter how well I knew the way, just a narrow split in the green-black spiky silhouette of the top ridge in the twilight.
Squinting through my glasses high into the clear early evening sky above the summit, I watched stars blink on one by one. It was quiet. Not a chipmunk ruffling the leaves, not a jay squabbling with its competitor.
“I wish Raleigh hadn’t been fooling around with those wild boys when the hotel caught on fire. Of course, it’s easy to say now. But he wouldn’t have fallen on his wrist and twisted it so bad,” I said, looking over at Tiny.
Up here the cool fall scent of pines reminded me of the old days. I turned and leaned back, my elbows resting on the railing of the verandah. I pulled the heavy sweater tighter over my shoulders and took another sip from the tumbler of sloe gin and ice. Never whiskey, not after all the heartache it caused in my family. And no cocktails anymore. I was too old for them.
I watched Tiny, head down, stir with a swizzle stick.
She nodded, sipped her gimlet, and said, “I don’t know, Mary. So long ago.”
I thought she must’ve been tired from cleaning up this place. Maybe she was my sister, but she never was as strong as I was even if she was a tomboy when we were little. And I was eighty-seven. Tiny was eighty-five. It’s a job, closing a house. Besides she was still upset about Dorothy up and dying. I would never have guessed the youngest, not even born until we moved to Sacramento for good, would die before us. After we tried to take care of her most of our lives even after we gave up on Alta. Now they were all gone.
But my mind wandered. I was thinking about Raleigh
“It’s like the weather on that October afternoon at the train station,” I said. “Hard to think it was, what, over seventy years ago. That man, Mr. Hoy, who looked like the devil, didn’t he, would never have noticed us at the train station except for Raleigh. Tripping and falling on the same wrist, still swollen from the accident at the fire.”
I couldn’t help it. Just like Mama, I made a “tsk” with my tongue against my teeth.
“He screamed so loud….Poor Raleigh,” I said.
Tiny sighed and said, “Mmm, don’t you think, Mary, Mr. Hoy knew we’d been up there on the hill when he saw our faces? Scared out of our wits?”
“Probably. I know he couldn’t have heard us when we started running back down the hill. The air was full of that man’s sobbing. That’s all I could hear,” I said, shaking my head. “It seems crazy we had the idea to go up there.”
Tiny, head bent forward, looked down at her hands in her lap. She smoothed one hand with the other and twisted her ring. Not a word came from her lips.
Finally, I said, “That was the last bad thing for Mama. I saw it in her eyes. After that I think she gave in to us.”
Tiny nodded and said, “It did turn into a bad thing. And all because we wanted to see those Indian pictures scratched in the rock, remember? It seemed like it would be fun.”
I did remember and a picture of the town high in the mountains on the other side of the summit filled my head.
Tiny tapped her fingers on the arm of the chair and said, “There was a lot to see in Truckee, if you knew about it. Plenty to entertain us, anyway.”
I nodded and we sipped our drinks. The last rays of the sun already below the horizon in the west left thin streaks of purple clouds. The sky over the mountains dimmed to black and I didn’t need my glasses to see Venus and the Big Dipper.
Sitting down and swirling my glass, it was as if the old town might reveal itself in the liquor. I was so happy to see our roof the time we waited on the Truckee train station platform after we came back from the first trip to Sacramento. I was just twelve then. I was sure it was the tip of the steep gable of our house, clapboard like every other building, slapped together and weathered. After all the winter snow and ice, I was glad to see the muddy street drying out, ready to turn into summer dust. I was happy to see the buildings I knew on Front Street, especially Mr. Faye’s Last Chance saloon, Mr. Titus’ grocery, Mrs. Goode’s stationery store, then the school and the Methodist church clustered down by our street.
The hills surrounding the town were bare, most pines long since logged. It wasn’t romantic like the villages I read about in books. Weeds all along the railroad tracks, paint peeling from wood buildings, even the big houses for the rich people weren’t beautiful Victorian dwellings like we’d seen in Sacramento. And there was hardly a flower or fancy bush by any front porch. Still I remember hoping that the next day we’d traipse down to the Truckee River and over to the far meadows that led into the woods.
What a raucous town during those days, especially at night. 1910. 1911. What would anyone expect with loggers, miners, and railroad men wandering around the streets? I know Mama despaired of that fat constable, Mr. O’Brien. With his bushy mustache and bushy head of reddish hair getting grayer every day, she was right when she said the gun fights and robberies kept him and his deputy huffing and puffing from one end of town to the other. Of course, we were privy to a lot of stories from the constable’s wife after we went to live on Harrigan’s Hill and became neighbors.
Alta was thirteen when we came back from Sacramento. It was just like her to laugh, dragging me to look at those dumb robbers at the jail. Who knows why they stole horses from the livery stable? The place where Papa rented a room for awhile after the fire. Another one of her attempts to show me what she said life was really like.
Was it Mrs. O’Brien who told us about the miners who sneaked into the cellar of the Whitney Hotel and stole whiskey and cigars from Mrs. Tucker? And how she didn’t rest until those men were found in Reno? Well, why not? She was one of the most out-spoken about a woman’s rights. She led the suffrage campaign of 1911. A big issue in a small town. Of course, she used her new telephone and called all the hotels and stores in Reno and told them to watch for her liquor. And telegraphed an exact list of what was stolen. That’s how she got most of it back. What a woman.
“I think I’m falling asleep,” said Tiny, tapping me on the arm, calling me back from my evening dreams.
She placed her hands on the arm rests and lifted herself up. She took a step, testing her legs, and gathered her glass and the napkins. She let the door slam as she went in to find something for supper.
She’d always let the door slam, I thought, my mind roaming from Colfax, to Sacramento and back, up far into the mountains. Who else? Let’s see, there were the rich people we knew in town. At least we four kids thought they were rich. Respectable and church-going, they ran their businesses, and made money off of the loggers and miners and every other drifter who stepped off the train. And that’s why we lived there, wasn’t it, Papa being a train brakeman?
But we knew, we knew, we were the poor people who slogged through the snowy, muddy roads, and the dusty, sweaty summer days doing the town’s labor, cooking for boarders, washing the laundry, digging the wells and filling the privies, burning the garbage, building the winter toboggan run and the ice palace for the tourists, rebuilding when fires roared through and destroyed entire rows of shops. Still we younger ones had our little advantages fooling around at the edge of the icy cold river, twirling in the meadows to see the mountains on all sides of us, hiding out in the woods, poking our noses in and out of the back streets of town.
The only people we didn’t know were the Paiute and Washo, except for Minna who was Mama’s friend and a nurse, lucky for us. The other Indian families kept to themselves on the other side of the river or farther away on the Reno side of the mountains.
“Tiny, remember when you found out in school that Truckee is the Paiute word for ‘all right’?” I called. “Even if it was hard for Mama in that town, it was all right for us, wasn’t it? You, me, Raleigh, Alta. Of course, we didn’t know better, did we, until everything began to go to pieces after we became horse owners.”
I stood and picked up my glass. How old was I? Twenty-five when I bought my own Model T after counting each penny until I’d saved enough. That’s when I remembered our horse, Molly. One of the few happy surprises in those two years when, surely, we grew up.
The cold evening breeze was rising. Slipping my arms into the sweater sleeves, I stepped forward to the kitchen door. I jiggled the old, glass knob. I let go and listened to my thoughts. A story about another family, it seemed, though I’d witnessed most of it and by now I hope I understood the why and where for.
My hand shook, but I tightened my grip, turned and pulled the door open.
THE EDWARDS ACQUIRE A HORSE
Summer 1909
Church Street, Truckee
This was no day to wander around town, raggle-taggle, getting into mischief, as often happened after finishing their chores at home. Mama had seen a car at Mr. Faye’s Last Chance Saloon. So the four Edwards children marched themselves to Front Street that Saturday in late August 1909 to scrutinize his Model T Ford, the first automobile purchased in Truckee.
“I saw a bigger car in the spring,” said Raleigh, rubbing his stubby eight-year-old hand over the headlights. “ ’Member when those rich people came up here to go fishing at the reservoir? I think their car had room for six and windows on the sides and the cover folded back like this one. ‘Member, Tiny?”
He turned to his sister, just one year older, who dressed like him in dirty overalls and flannel shirt. She had curly dark red hair, almost auburn, while his was still reddish-blond. She nodded, then climbed onto the running board to peer inside, feel the stained wood steering wheel, touch the black leather seat covers, and inspect her cute tomboy self in the mirror.
Alta, twelve, the oldest and prettiest sister, with thick, curly, black hair and violet-blue eyes strolled around the car with her arms folded, examining the wheels. Then she slid her hands over the shiny gray paint on the fenders and pulled on the door handle to the back seat as if she were deciding whether to purchase it herself.
But Mary, eleven, the plain middle sister, stood in front of the car, observing her brother and sisters while they put their hands all over the car’s fixtures and argued about how to drive it. Though she had never been this close to a car in her life, she didn’t want to touch someone else’s property.
Just as Mary, irresistibly tempted, moved closer and peeked inside at all the levers and pedals, Mrs. Faye charged down the last step of the stairs that led to the offices above the saloon. She took two steps across the porch, grabbed Tiny, pulled her off the running board, and dropped her in front of Alta.
“Hey! Leave her alone!” hollered Alta, balling up her fist.
Alta lowered her hand when Mrs. Faye looked up. The children saw tears running down the woman’s face, all blotchy and puffy, while strands of auburn hair flew out of her hair pins.
Mrs. Faye, with not the slightest attention to Alta’s threats, shook her own fists and yelled over the children’s heads, “I can drive this car! I will drive it! You can’t stop me! There’s no law against me driving it!”
The children turned to see Mr. Faye standing on the last step of the staircase, a flush rising from his chin up over his nose. At that moment, he didn’t look like the suave fellow from the Eastern saloon-keeping family he assumed in front of townspeople. His eyes opened wide and his lips closed tight. His hands rose up to his waist and spread out, palms up as if appealing to her good judgment. The two adults and the audience of four stood posed like statues by the car.
Finally, Mr. Faye opened his mouth to plead, “Grace, please don’t be angry. I’ll take you anywhere or the boy can drive you. It doesn’t look right.”
They turned back to watch Mrs. Faye’s lip tremble. She, related to the railroad Crockers, always calm and clever when they had seen her, cried out, “I don’t want a chauffeur. And I don’t care what those old ladies think, sneering at us about everything, especially when we pass out suffrage flyers. I won’t let them decide what I can do—and you can’t either.”
Mr. Faye walked over and put his arm carefully around her shoulder. He began to whisper in her ear, but she pulled back, and the children heard him say, “Maybe we can go out along the road to Colfax and I’ll let you try then. Please, Grace.”
Then Mr. Faye looked up, his face flushing again. Mary realized that the four children had seen the entire spectacle and he knew it. He knew them too. Their mother had been the midwife for his children. He winked and smiled.
“Well, married people don’t always agree about everything, do they, Mary?” he said.
Mary, solemn, shook her head slowly.
Frowning again for a moment, he said, “Listen, since you all’re too young to have a car, how’d you like to have a horse? I won’t need old Molly anymore. She’s out there in the field below McGlashan’s house. If your mother says yes and if you can catch Molly, you can keep her.”
Mary looked around at the other three. Of all the children she loved animals the best. She cuddled every dog and cat that wandered near the boarding house where they lived. A horse was more than she could imagine. Even Alta, eyes round and lips curved up, seemed astonished by their luck. Tiny raised her eyebrows and grinned. Raleigh slapped his knee the way he had seen grown-up men do and yelled, “Let’s go!” They raced to get the bridle from the saloon shed and then took off up Front Street toward Church Street and their house.
The late summer air was hot and the sun was shining straight down overhead. Dust from the road kicked up and settled on the hairs on their arms. Sweat glistened at each child’s hairline. Raleigh, robust but small, lagged behind and the three girls stopped to let him catch up. All had their opinions about their good fortune, and because Mama had always insisted that each child be allowed to put in his or her two cents, Alta began.
“Mr. Faye’s letting us have that horse so we won’t tell everyone about the fight he was having,” she said, flicking away a fly that was settling onto the sweat inside her elbow.
Raleigh straggled up and bent over, hands on his knees to catch his breath. Muddy lines streaked his sweaty neck where dust had collected.
“And Raleigh, don’t think you’re going to be first to ride all the time. I’m the oldest and I’ll decide,” added Alta.
“I hope Mama lets us keep Molly,” said Tiny. “And I don’t care if Mr. Faye’s getting us not to tell. When I get bigger, no one’s going to boss me around either.”
Mary said, “When I grow up, I’m going to buy my own car. Then no one can tell me what to do with it.”
They all turned to look at her.
“Go on,” Raleigh said, “That’s a fine idea.”
Mary added, “And how about we tell Mama she can ride Molly when she has to go out to a farm to help with a baby. She’d like that.”
She lifted her arms, placed her hands under the long, blond, pretty hair framing her plain face, and flipped it away from her neck to cool off.
They scuffed along the street, more and more delighted that they had shown up at the right moment. Mary thought about feeding bits of apple to the horse and whispering to it, much less riding it. She, who was the most wary of all new things, especially something that as Mama would say “showed up out of the blue,” did what she had been warned against time and time again. She threw caution to the winds, feeling certain that Mama could be persuaded.
They reached the white clapboard two-story building where Mama kept ten boarders in addition to the family and climbed the porch steps, but Mama didn’t appear. They flung the door open, clattered through the long, dark hall past the parlor and the sitting room used as bedrooms, peeped into the dining room, and finally barged into the large kitchen. Mama was looking out the back screen door across the field toward the woods. She turned as they jostled through the door and stood in a clump. She rubbed her stomach, just starting to protrude from another pregnancy.
“There you are. I was beginning to wonder,” said Mama, looking them over. “What’s in your hand, Tiny?”
“This?” Tiny asked, holding up the bridle.
“Where’d you get that?”
Alta stepped forward and said, “Now, Mama, Mr. Faye said we could have old Molly. You know that Model T Ford he bought? We walked by to look and he said we could go get Molly if you said yes.”
“We can have fun, and it just eats the grass, Mama,” added Raleigh.
Mama looked again at each child, and they all returned the look, only innocence on their faces as far as Mary could tell. She was certainly trying to look earnest and eager when Mama turned to her.
“Mama, Mr. Faye said he didn’t need Molly anymore and you can ride the horse to go help when someone is having a baby,” said Mary.
Mama stood silent for a minute, then picked up a paring knife, ready to peel a potato.
Pointing the knife at them as if it was her forefinger, she said, “I suppose I can go talk to Mr. Faye tomorrow. So no harm in trying to catch Molly.”
Mama aimed the knife straight at Mary and said, “I don’t want you to get too attached if you have to take her back.”
She knew that Mama’s words didn’t refer to little pets like chipmunks or mice or lizards, but the kind that required lots of food. Mary thought about the last time she wanted to keep a large mutt and how Mama had said to stop the crocodile tears and contrary desires. It was enough trouble taking care of four, soon five, children and ten boarders without adding dogs. Yet alone horses, Mary said to herself.
While the children ate bologna and bread, Mama continued making dinner preparations for the boarders. She moved back and forth from the large table in the center, mainly used for food preparation, but with one end kept free for eating, to the metal sink that had a pump handle which raised water from the well. The stove, fed with wood, had four burners and a spacious oven so it was easy to cook large pots of soup or stew and bake cakes at the same time.
Mama put the potatoes on to boil. Then she pulled out the pickle jar from the large pantry between the small room not rented at the moment and the back door. She gave each child a pickle, sat down, and remarked that Molly reminded her of a “when I was little” story. Everyone smiled. Mary pulled her stool up closer and set her elbows on the table and hands on her cheeks. Besides animals, she loved stories, and Mama was a great storyteller.
“We lived on a farm, you know, although my father was a veterinarian rather than a farmer. We had three or four horses as I recall and at that time all four of us older children had to take care of them and the cows and chickens and pigs. The little ones helped my mother in the garden and played. Sometimes on a summer afternoon if we had finished everything we would ride the old horses bareback around the yard. I mean no blanket or anything. I was very small, like you, Tiny, and I remember my older brothers, Lauf and Frank, hoisting me up onto the horse’s back and I would just hold his mane while the horse walked around. One of my brothers held onto the bridle and rope. I loved those afternoons.”
“That’s what we’re going to do,” said Mary.
Mama nodded and took a bite of the pickle.
“One morning Lauf and Frank were harnessing a team of horses, getting ready for spring planting. One of the horses became excited and bolted, catching Lauf’s right hand in the hitch. Frank helped get Lauf’s hand out, cutting the straps with his knife, but when they rushed into the house, blood dripping all over, my father saw that Lauf’s right thumb and two fingers were crushed. My father had to cut off the first joint of Lauf’s thumb, and the first two bones of his forefinger and middle finger with the veterinarian’s surgical tools. Then he stitched everything up. He was always our favorite brother and Margaret and I cried as loud as Lauf.”
“Oh, Mama,” said Mary.
“It seemed a long time before we rode the horses again. But, finally, we did. So you must be careful with that horse.”
“I would’ve cried too,” said Raleigh. And then, “How come Lauf’s never been here? I want to ask him how he holds things.”
Mama said, “He was here once before any of you were born. When your father and I had just moved to Truckee. He lived near Aunt Margaret in Reno for awhile at that time.”
“When’s Papa coming home?” asked Alta.
Mary, Tiny, and Raleigh all turned to Mama. Papa had been gone for a long time.
“Soon. Another week maybe. A lot of men’ve been sick this summer, ague, typhoid, consumption, and so the healthy ones have to stay on.”
“Hmm.” said Mary. “There’re a lot of trains in California. Can’t they hire some more workers?”
“You’d have to ask Mrs. Faye’s cousin. He’s still a big railroad man,” said Mama.
---
Catching Molly was no trick at all thought Mary. Tiny went first and they took turns riding on her back with no blanket or saddle all afternoon in Mr. McGlashan’s field. Molly was really a wagon horse that pulled the shay the Faye family used. But she didn’t seem to mind when Mary climbed onto her broad brown back and clutched Molly’s sides with her knees. She leaned forward and held onto Molly’s dark mane as much as the rope attached to the bridle. Molly walked around the fenced-in field time after time. While they gave her a piece of apple, she’d look at them with an all-knowing peace in her eyes. At least, that’s how Mary remembered her and she was the one who thought she loved Molly best of all.
When the angle of shade from the trees told them it was late and time to go home, they walked Molly half-way across town to live behind their boarding house on Church Street, grazing in the small, narrow field that separated their home from the second growth woods. When the weather changed and was too cold, Molly stayed in the shed where she wandered in and out to the field as she pleased. Mary never found out whether Mama really went to see Mr. Faye.
©Claire J. Noonan, 2008
Claire J. Noonan, an elementary teacher for thirty-five years in large urban schools, has expertise in bilingual education, English Language Development, and the reading/language arts curriculum. She has been a teacher-consultant for the Bay Area Writing Project since 1985 and was Assistant Director of the San Jose Area Writing Project from 1987-92. Retired, now she writes.
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