Year ago I worked with a woman who's great, great, etc. etc. grandfather was the honky-tonk piano player in Silverton, Colorado. This is what I imagined his story might be, enjoy!
“The Invisible Man”
He could feel the heat and the damp on his skin, and could almost taste the green, and he was positive he could smell it. This was a good smell, one that reminded him of those days when as a young boy he would fish along the creek running behind the little shack the boss let his folks use in return for their labor in his fields. This was a summer smell that made the old man feel that time was standing still. He lifted a trembling hand to half heartedly swat at the small insects buzzing around his face as he watched the water move slowly past the overgrown bank, creating quiet whirlpools , catching leaves and twigs that fell off of overhanging branches. He watched intently as they twirled round and round only to finally break apart and continue their slow journey to a small waterfall and then into the faster moving river below. He knew that eventually those very same leaves and twigs would find their way under the log bridge he had helped build in the early years of the bustling town of Leadville.
The old man sat quietly on the mossy bank, leaning gingerly against a rotting stump, feeling every one of his eighty years, he felt his eyelids droop as head nodded forward, it was one of those summer days when napping seemed to be almost as important as watching his bobber in the water. He figured it didn’t really matter if any of the fish would take his line he’d been here a thousand times and was sure he had at least a few hundred more visits to this special spot left in him. The fish and he had a pact, they would provide a meal when needed and their home would provide a place for him to ponder the world around him, and today he had lots of pondering to do. He often talked out loud to the fish, and he swore he could almost hear their answers. Of course he’d never tell a soul that he thought the fish answered him, but then there was no one left in his life to tell.
His wife of sixty years had passed on five years earlier, he still missed her terribly, and wished every day that she were still here beside him. She was laid to rest at the edge of the pretty little cemetery up behind the small church where he played wonderful hymns every Sunday.
The boy wasn’t here any longer either, he had moved away to the big city looking for a better life, not that he blamed him; this town hadn’t anything to offer his son.
He guessed he could always tell someone at the church what he had heard the night before, but it wasn’t something he wanted to burden anyone with, and he wasn’t sure anyone could do anything anyhow, besides it might be dangerous for him to reveal what he knew. Even if he told the preacher man he didn’t think he would have any power to thwart those two no-goods and the plan he’d heard them hatching last night.
He chuckled quietly to himself as he thought of what those same men would think if they heard him talking to the fish. Of course, if they knew what he was telling the fish today there would be Hell to pay. But Lordy, even those fish couldn’t come up with a solution for him.
The old man had left his cozy cabin the night before and walked the rutted dirt trail that meandered almost three miles into the bustling mining town. He walked slower these days, bent over, steps faltering slightly as he turned into town, but somehow he always managed to make it to the wooden building with the fancy hand painted sign that would sway back and forth above the swinging wooden doors when the wind blew. The ‘Silver Lode Saloon’ was set off the main street, just around the corner from the new Opera House. He had made this same trip many times over the past years and was amazed at the changes that had taken place in the town during that time. This place had gone from a sleepy mountain village to become a rowdy boom-town almost overnight when gold was discovered back in 1859. Thousands of men poured into the area, working the mines day and night, taking breaks at the end of the week to come into town and spend their newly acquired wealth in one of the many saloons that had sprung up over night inside canvas buildings, their false wooden fronts, trying, but failing, to look like some fancy big city saloon.
Only a year and a half after the gold was discovered it started to play out and the town started to die, nothing had been left but mountains of black slag leaving an ugly blight on the once beautiful mountainsides. These mountains of sludge were left over from when the miners separated out the gold they found in their sluice boxes and gold pans. After the gold petered out the mines were abandoned or sold for little or nothing and most sat empty for years, leaving only a bleak landscape surrounding the once pretty village.
Some twenty years later, new miners arrived and realizing that the “black slag mountains” that had been left abandoned were actually loaded with silver ore. They quickly bought up the few mines that remained and claimed those that were abandoned, and a new boom era had started. The silver boom was to be the making of this town and a steady growth started to take place, making the town even richer than the gold had those many years earlier.
One of the miners who had come into town from St. Luis in 1880 was James Joseph Brown, J.J. as he was known. Brown, along with his wife Molly, a feisty woman, who worked right beside her husband in the mine, quickly became one of the richest couples in not only the state of Colorado, but in the Country. The Browns and another miner Horace Tabor along with his second wife, quickly became the reigning royalty of the region,
The town the old man lived outside of now boasted a number of newer wooden buildings including a general store, a haberdashery, the church, a one-room schoolhouse, three saloons, and of course the pride and joy of everyone in town, the new opera house that Tabor had built for his new wife, Baby Doe, so she could perform the latest operas of the day.
Instead of a town consisting only of thousands of grisly miners and the businessmen who sold those miners the goods and services they needed, and a few “ladies of the night” the town was now growing with a steady stream of actual families, wives and children moved into the area while their husbands went about the business of silver-mining. These family women always went out of their way to avoid the “sinful” saloons and colorful “ladies of the night” by carefully lifting their long woolen skirts up above high topped boots that covered their ankles, then stepping gingerly onto the narrow wooden planks that had been placed across the muddy streets.
The large room that the old man now turned into smelled of old beer that had soaked into it’s pine plank floors, and of stale cigar smoke that caused a constant grey haze in the room.
Shuffling over those scarred wooden planks the old man made his way to the far corner of the large room where he sat down on a familiar oaken stool, a stool someone had brought with them from their home back east. The stool would spin up or down depending on the height the old man wanted it to be. He found lately he had to change the height slightly as he seemed be getting shorter. There was an indentation in the seat that had formed itself smoothly to his body over the years.
Slowly he lowered himself onto his wooden “throne” as he thought of it, scooting forward until he was comfortable with the distance between the ivory keys and his dark hands. He kept his long fingers limber by years of playing rousing tunes like “Ta Ra Ra Boom Dee Ay” on this same upright piano. The sound that came out was tinny, it had been years since the bar owner had paid someone to come to town to tune it, but the old man could still coax a sweet song out of it. Sitting down, he said a quiet prayer as he did every evening, giving thanks for having this steady employment. He felt he made up for working here on this out-of-tune honky-tonk piano by playing the beautifully tuned piano at the little church on the hill every Sunday.
His parents had been given a used piano when their son was young and his mother had soon taught him to play the beautiful tunes that seemed to flow from his fingers.
Every Sunday he found himself setting in a different sort of corner than the one he was in now, and over the years, he found he and his family were not just welcomed for his talents, but they were honestly welcomed as members of the congregation, and in the community. Molly and JJ Brown particularly had taken the old man under their wings.
Some of the men in the church who proclaimed to be holy on Sunday were the very same men who proved they weren’t so very holy on Friday and Saturday nights. The only time the old man mentioned this was to the fish, so their secret was safe, so far. But after what he had heard the night before the old man was in a quandary about what he should do, and how he should handle what he had heard.
He had played the tinny piano at the Silver Lode for so many years that the men who came into the saloon didn’t even notice him there any more, he might as well not even exist. The only time someone did notice him was when one of the drunks decided he was fair game to harass and then the bartender always stepped in and protected him from those encounters, after all what would the Silver Lode be without their honky-tonk piano player.
This particular night the smoke was thicker than usual and the noise level made playing on the out of tune piano a chore instead of the pleasure it usually was.
The assayer had left town on the well-armed stage for Denver hours earlier with his strongbox filled with pouches of the silver that the miners had pulled out of the mines and the slag hills surrounding Leadville. With money burning holes in the pockets of their canvas work pants the miners were anxious to take advantage of all that the Silver Lode had to offer. In turn, the Silver Lode was all to eager to take advantage of the miners and relieve them of the gold and silver coins they now possessed.
Fist fights broke out earlier than usual, men fighting over cards, over the flowery women they were anxious to visit in the upstairs rooms, even over what tunes they wanted the Honky-tonk player to play. The old man took it all in stride, ducking a couple of times when bodies came crashing down on the floor just behind his stool, even lifting his left arm to repel a ragged work boot thrown at someone in the card game at the table to the right of his space, while still creating a catchy tune with his right hand.
To the left of the piano was the doorway leading to the private games, the big money games the men who owned the large mines up in the mountains played in. The door was covered with a heavy red curtain and usually a big man in a bowler hat guarded the entrance, tonight the big man was nowhere to be seen.
Every time someone pushed the drape aside to walk into the back room the smothering smell of dust and smoke rose from the red velvet and would tickle the old mans nose and throat.
The night before, while playing one of the quieter tunes the old man had heard two muffled voices arguing behind the curtain. One of the voices was raspy just like one of the regular gamblers who usually frequented the Rose Garter Saloon around the corner, but had come to the Silver Lode for a particularly high stakes game of cards. As the argument grew more heated the old man could hear raspy voice mention Baby Doe’s name, along with an angry retort from the other deep voiced man, to “keep it down”, “we’ll keep her til we get what we want from that Kabob Tabor, I don’t care if we have to bury her a hundred feet under in one of those stinkin mines.”
In spite of Horace Tabor’s tarnished reputation in Leadville, having been ostracized since divorcing his first wife and marrying Baby Doe, the wealthy miner had always had a kind word for the old man, so when Tabor’s new wife’s name caught his attention the honky tonk player realized something horrible had happened.
“How can I find out where they’ve put Doe”, thought the old man, “without tipping them off that I know what’s going on?” The old man continued playing the notes to “She’s Only a Bird in a Gilded Cage” as he fretted about a plan to find Tabor’s wild young wife. “She could be in any one of hundreds of mines in the area,” he thought, reaching up and wiping the sweat that was collecting on his worried brow.
A DAY AT THE OFFICE
I could hear a sound coming from deep within the building, boom, baboom. At first it sounded like I would imagine my heart would sound after a hard jog around a track for a mile or two, but I knew this wasn’t my heart, after all I was setting quietly in my office, at my desk, in the building where I had worked for the past four years.
I looked out my third floor window to see if it could possibly be thunder, but, even as I turned I knew that thunder was rare in Southern California, besides the sky was its usual pristine blue, or it would have been pristine if the smog hadn’t been hanging over the mountains.
Baboom, boom, boom, the sound was coming steadily up the stairwell from the lower floors of the building, gradually snaking its way up toward my office.
Boom, another one!! I could tell the noise was getting closer and closer to where I was sitting, I could now make out loud yelling voices, and odd rattling sounds, It wasn’t an earthquake, at least I didn’t think it was, even though I could almost imagine the floors shaking every time I heard another baboom.
Now I heard what sounded like a thousand feet jumping and stomping in wild rhythm on the rose colored tiles in the hallway just outside the office door.
As I stood and prepared to dive under my desk for protection from whatever was now lurking outside in the hallway the door suddenly flew open, slamming against the inside wall. With a loud yell a wild eyed man, his dark face painted with intricate white designs, his body dressed in a long mustard colored robe with a leopard’s skin draped over one shoulder burst screaming into my office. Grabbing me by the arm he dragged me out into the hall to stand behind my co-workers who had also been pulled from their offices.
My heart was pounding as I leaned down, took off my high-heeled shoes and threw them back into my office at his hollered instruction. There, standing in my stocking feet I raised my arms up over my head.
I looked at the faces around me and suddenly grinned and yelled out gleefully as I continued down the hall with this entourage of strange people, stopping only to collect other workers and students along the way.
We were all now officially a part of the Cal Art’s African Dance Ensemble. The colorfully dressed men and women from the Ensemble carried drums, symbols and gourds that rattled. They had decided that today was the perfect day for a festival and there could never be a better time than now for a parade. Of course to have a parade you needed dancers and people, so you just went down the halls, closed all the offices and created your own parade, after all everyone should be included when it was time for a wonderful festival.
Soon we had the “Conga” line to beat all “Conga” lines going, at least a hundred people snaking down the halls and out onto the grassy quad. The fencers from the Acting Department put down their epees and came in full fencing regalia, there were dancers in tutus and tights, painters dressed, as artists have dressed for centuries, in their dark, torn, paint covered shirts, trying their hardest to look poor and homeless. Professors dancing alongside secretaries, even some outside visitors were now all a part of the whole, one large dancing mass, twirling, turning, stomping, dipping, shouting, laughing, following the drummers and the other African musicians who led this wave of humanity.
Here beside me were members of the Sequoia String Quartet from the music department, looking so unlike their usually stoic selves when they performed Bach or Vivaldi, actors from the theater department, some in Shakespearian costume, custodians, musicians from the Asian Gavalon band, all dancing as one.
As I danced along with this river of humanity on this wonderful day I was reminded that this is the way we should all live our lives. Every now and then, taking our shoes off, throwing our arms in the air, shouting gleefully, and dancing through the hallways of our worlds collecting everyone we come in contact with, and never forgetting it’s festival time!!!
GUNA
The slender woman lifted her arm to push errant strands of graying blonde hair away from a forehead that was just starting to show signs of her age. The warm breeze that had dislodged her hair was like a gentle caress against her face, reminding her of the day years before when she had been on this same expanse. With a slightly trembling hand she opened her palm to shield her vision against the shimmering glare of dappled green water and stared onto miles of open sea.
If anyone had been looking at the woman as she sat on the wooden bench looking east across the sandy beach, they would have exclaimed that the sea’s color was almost the exact same vivid green as her eyes, but as the woman was alone she didn’t even notice the comparison, her mind was in another place and time, a time fifty-five years earlier when she had last gazed at this very same ocean.
The salty smells were the same but that was where today and yesterday parted, the Atlantic she remembered from so long ago had been slate gray, with gigantic foaming waves spitting their white tops against the prow of the large ship as it pushed its way, rolling and bucking, across the sea lanes that would eventually spill her family out into a place called Ellis Island, a place where they looked forward to a new chance at life, a life different than the one they had lived in Estonia. The early years had been ones of comfort, her father an engineer, had held an esteemed position in the government but the war had changed all of that when suddenly a dream of a safer life in a country that wasn’t torn apart by guns and bombs was the direction that her parents wanted for their children.
Europe was still in turmoil after the war, food was scarce and many immigrants from Estonia were making their way, just as her family was, out of their poverty stricken Country to a new life in the United States.
“What are you doing girl, you don’t belong here, get back below deck or I’ll throw you overboard,” exclaimed the young cook’s mate as he prepared to throw the barrels of food slop left over from the dinner served in the first class dining room overboard.
Dinner hour was over for those wealthy travelers who now danced in the ship’s main ballroom. Many of the men strolled along the upper decks smoking after dinner cigars, dressed in tuxedos and tugging on the starched white collars choking their necks, their modern wives holding onto their elbows to keep from lurching into the rails, smoking their own smelly cigarettes. Their long gowns looked much to fragile to withstand the wind that whipped them around the slender legs that moved quickly to keep up with the longer legs of their husbands. The cook’s mate didn’t approve of these wealthy American women smoking but he certainly wasn’t going to be the one to condemn them, after all they had paid full fare for this trip. On the other hand, the little beggar he had just sent scampering back below deck was a part of the smelly, dirty mass of humanity who had paid almost nothing to sail across in steerage. “It was going to take forever to get rid of the stench down there he thought as he screwed his face up in disgust.”
“Dad, can’t we do something? It was horrible, that little girl was just trying to get some food out of the garbage cans, she was shivering and wet and didn’t even have shoes on her feet.” “I’ve got to do something, that little girl looked like she was starving.”
Tears welled up in the young women’s eyes as she related what she had seen from the upper decks that evening when she had slipped out after dinner to get fresh air and watch the wild water careening past the ship.
The young woman speaking so passionately was returning to her parent’s home in New York City after a family celebration trip to Europe. She had just graduated from College and looked forward to using the teaching credentials she had obtained after her upcoming marriage to her college sweetheart. This was to be a last trip with her parents while she was still living in their home as a single woman.
“Shhhh, don’t be afraid, I won’t hurt you, and I certainly won’t let that seaman know that you’re here, “ the young woman whispered as she knelt down on the wet deck so she could be face to face with the shivering child and on eye level. She had waited patiently for two cold, damp nights after in an alcove on the lower deck, sneaking out of the dining room when no one was watching her. This was where she had seen the young girl previously and her wait paid off this time. Here was the girl once again, shivering and more ragged looking up close that the woman had realized, blond hair tangled and wind blown, hands and feet chapped and red from the cold.
“My name is Evangeline Morris, I’m going to become a teacher, what’s your name?” “Oh, I bet you don’t speak English do you, that’s okay, I just want you to give you some food and a cloak to keep you warm.” She said as she removed a blue cape from her own shoulders and gently draped it over the child’s slender body. Reaching into a large leather purse hanging from her arm she handed the small child a cloth bag filled with bread, cheese and fruit pilfered from the overflowing bounty of the Captain’s table where she and her parents were guests every night at dinner.
Evangeline had tried to talk to the Captain the night before at dinner about the people who were traveling in the bowels of the ship, but the Captain only changed the subject after asking if they were bothering her. If that had been the case he would, after all, take immediate action and reprimand those people, but since she was just curious she shouldn’t worry her “pretty little head about such slovenly human specimens.”
The next night, Evangeline waited again in the alcove for the young girl. This time she had another cloth bag full of food, but in it she had included a pair of cotton socks for the child’s feet, and even a blanket that she took off of the bed in her stateroom.
Out of the mist that shrouded the deck this night Evangeline could see two small figures coming tentatively toward her. The two children were holding hands and watching fearfully over their shoulders for any crewmen who might be in the area as they snuck into the alcove.
“I am Guna, said the little girl in faltering English, my brother is Ivan,” she said, as she pointed to the little boy holding tightly to her hand. The boy seemed to be about five years younger than Guna with the same blonde hair.
“You have the most beautiful and unusual green eyes Guna, Evangeline replied, I’m so glad to meet you both,” she smiled as she knelt again to look into their eager faces.
“I wish I could do more for you, but unfortunately we’re landing in a couple of days and I probably won’t see you again.” “I just pray you will both be safe in your new Country, I know I’ll never forget you.”
As Guna sat on the bench her memories then took her forward to the years following their landing at Ellis Island and on to Colorado. Her father had moved his family to Grand Junction those many years before. Prior to immigrating her father had had a degree in electrical engineering in Estonia, but in the United States he could only find work as a custodian. After a number of years he had eventually been put in charge of all of the custodial staff for the Grand Junction School District. Colorado was where he and his wife had raised their small family, living comfortably in a small house giving their family the life that would have been impossible in Estonia. Guna and Ivan had gone to school just like all of the other American children living around them, in fact the whole family had become U.S. Citizens only five years after immigrating to the United States, something her father and mother had been extremely proud of.
“Guna, come on, I’ve been looking for you everywhere, we have to get ready to head over to the conference,” her husband of forty years said as he hugged the woman who was the love of his life. “I still need to shower, besides it looks like you’re getting sun burned, you may want to put some lotion on before you change your clothes.”
Shaking her head as if in a dream, Guna closed her ocean green eyes, acutely aware that the past was just that, the past, and that the hunger and cold that she and her family had felt on those five days aboard the Ocean Liner fifty-five years before were just memories.
As she and her husband walked into the hotel conference room the orchestra was playing music from the late forties and early fifties, music that kept reminding Guna of the memories that seeing the Atlantic Ocean for the first time since her family had immigrated from Estonia had revived in her mind. She would have to shake this reverie because her dear husband was about the step on stage as the keynote speaker for this event.
As the clapping subsided and Guna’s husband stepped off of the stage to take a seat next to her Guna felt a bump against the chair she was seated in. Turning around she found herself looking into a face covered in wrinkles, but with eyes that were still lively and twinkling.
“Do you remember someone giving you cheese and bread?” said the woman who looked older than time. “Your name is Guna, isn’t it, I still remember your beautiful eyes?” “I’m Evangeline, do you remember me?”
With tears in her eyes Guna looked into the face of the woman who had kept her family alive aboard the Ocean Liner those many years before. “Yes, I could never forget you. “
As sixty-five year old Guna knelt in reverence in front of the elderly woman in the wheelchair so she could be at eye level with her she related her family’s story. She told Evangeline, who was now the 85 year old matriarch of her own family, that her younger brother Ivan had graduated from Princeton University with a law degree, and that she herself had gone on to become a teacher, just like the beautiful angel who had befriended them those many years ago in the middle to the wild Atlantic Ocean.
SUNSHINE IN THE REAR VIEW MIRROR
By: N. Boat
As I look up into the sky today it looks much like the slate boards that I once washed with water and a sponge after the school day ended and my students left to return to their parent’s homes, the rosy cheeked boys anxious to once again go out into the streets to play, as boys do all over the world.
This dark sky that I look up into now pushes down into the pavement, and in turn the pavement reflects the metal color back up, creating the dour prison that surrounds me and the vehicle that I drive for miles around this city day after day, week after week, a prison that matches my mood today exactly.
The school room that I now see through my minds eye no longer exists, it was destroyed, my Mother says; the school shattered just as my brother lays shattered in the medical ward in the hills outside of the war ravaged city of Beruit where he and I were raised.
Feelings of helplessness overwhelm me, “Mother, I cry, I want to hold you in my arms again and alleviate your fears, brother I want to make you whole again, give you your sight back, let you walk in the clean air once again as we did as children.” Unfortunately, the only thing I can hold in my hands this day is this hard steering wheel and the only thing I can alleviate is some of the hunger you feel with money sent home every month.
Those strangers who set in my backseat day after day look at me with angry eyes when they read the letters that make up my name. They then turn their heads and pretend I do not exist in their life. If I do not exist, then my world, my mother, my brother, also do not exist. For those strangers this world, the world that I know so well, is only real to them on the ten o’clock news, which they can turn off with a flick of a switch. Wouldn’t the world be a wonderful place if we could just turn off the wars, the conflicts, and the hatreds with a flick of that same switch?
A car door slams and the vision of my war-ravished city vanishes from my mind, and in a flash the gray prison returns to engulf me as I steel myself for the hatred and anger that I suspect I will see setting behind me.
I look into my rear view mirror expecting once again to see the hardened faces, eyes that turn away, lips tightened into a grim line, instead I am blinded by a light as bright as sunshine, eyes that smile at me, a soft voice that asks questions of my family, “where are you from, is your family there, are they okay, are they safe? I have a family also, children, a husband, brothers and sisters, people I love too.” A face filled with concern, and something else, a look that I can’t quite read.
I tell this face of sunshine “you know, in my Country a Muslim man and a Christian woman could not have this conversation.” As I look into the mirror once again I see a look on her face that tells me that what we are talking about, this dialog, is much too important not to continue in spite of our differences. This may just be the most important conversation either of us will have in a long time, maybe in our lifetime.
As our discussion continues, even as the meter runs, gentle questions are still asked, questions from the heart.
Finally the door opens and sunshine exits my taxicab. As I start to pull away from the curb there is a tap on the window. “Just one more thing, this ray of sunshine says, I will pray for you, your family, your country, and for the end to this war.”
Sunshine was shining in my rearview mirror today, and the world is a better place for it.
