“Have you participated in any of these crimes, Goldie?” he asked seriously.
“No. Most of the time, I didn’t know any of the specifics. But I knew who he was. What he did. And he sometimes told me things. Y’know, after like: ‘Hi, honey, how was your day?’ So, you could say I-I enabled him.”
They started walking again in silence while she looked around, still hearing the doves coo.
“It’s funny,” she finally offered, “all the things you tell yourself to justify the decisions you make. Like, we grew up in a crime-ridden neighborhood, so we really didn’t have a choice about our lifestyle. Or all the people he either killed or had killed were scumbuckets anyway. I mean,Ididn’t make ‘em criminals, right? Or, sometimes, I thought, maybe I could steer him away from the family. Go legitimate… have a house in the suburbs… kids.”
“So—what’s happened to make you re-examine this relationship?” Father asked.
“He threw me over for another woman,” she replied, her green eyes a little moist with embarrassment. “I-I wasn’t educated enough… classy enough. So, that’s part of it, but not all of it. Bein’ here… meetin’ the people I’ve met… th-there’s another way to go, y’know? Another way to live. I’ve seen that in the time I’ve been here.”
The priest thought for a moment, then looked at her with kind eyes. “You’ve associated with gangsters. Jesus associated with adulterers, prostitutes, thieves, and tax collectors. He said: ‘I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners.’ Could be, Goldie, he’s calling on you now.”
“Yeah—well—it’s a pretty damn weird call,” she said, referring to the time travel which she’d purposely omitted, fearing Father would think her a lunatic.
They rounded the bend in the road, then they both suddenly stopped.
“Whoa!” Goldie exclaimed.
What lay ahead of them was a three-acre section of forest that had been cleared some seventy years earlier. Replacing the wilderness were old buildings with pieces of abandoned mining equipment like wheelbarrows and tipped-over push carts. The closest structure to them was a two-story house with faded white paint and a partially open front door. It had a single-story wing on each side, but the roof on one of the wings to the right had collapsed. Despite decades of neglect, it still made a statement of prominence. A hundred or so yards beyond the house and to the left was an unpainted wooden building with a faded sign over the door that read “Office.” Twenty yards to the right of the office was a section of railroad track with a long wooden ramp that went up to a height of nine feet, then abruptly stopped at a gate directly above the track. Looking left again, and some thirty yards from the office, was the chiseled-out large mouth of a mine that went into the side of a mountain. The opening was approximately ten-by-ten feet, and it had a smaller set of tracks coming out of it for push carts that carried ore. It was sealed up with wooden boards and old railroad ties that had been stacked and nailed together. On them, in newer red paint, were the words: “Danger! Do Not Enter!” On either side of the mine entrance were thin but tall buildings with open doorways, no doors, and rusting machinery inside. Any windows that may have once held glass no longer did, and even though the acreage had been cleared away, a few trees had sprouted up here and there over the years. Goldie and Father surveyed this ghostly scene and half expected John Wayne to ride out of the woods at any moment and use one of the two old hand pumps to fill his canteen.
“Pretty amazin’, huh?” she asked.
“I knew an old mine was up here,” Father said, “but I had no idea the size of the operation.”
“Let’s put my sins on hold for a minute, eh, Father?” Goldie suggested. “Get a nice shot of the mine entrance, will ya?”
“Uh, sure,” he agreed, opening his camera.
He walked toward the sealed-off entrance and looked around for a good angle. “I wonder how all this worked?”
“The director of operations lived in the big house we passed,” she replied. “The office, over there, was where the men checked in and out in the morning and evening, and maybe a doctor had a room there too in case of an accident.” She pointed to the mine entrance. “There were usually two sets of tunnels in the mines. One larger series of tunnels was where the men extracted the silver, then there was a smaller, interconnecting series of tunnels, also called spurs, with tracks laid for the ore carts.” She turned and pointed to the long ramp that ended above the railroad tracks. “Once the carts were full of ore, they were either hand-pushed or, more likely, pulled by horses or mules up that ramp, then the carts were emptied into hopper railroad cars. The railroad track connects somewhere with a line that goes out of the mountains and into Denver.”
“How do you know all this?” he asked.
“Read about it at the library. Not this particular camp, but the bigger operations sorta ran the same.”
Father Fitz found the angle he wanted, then clicked off a picture. As he was turning the film knob on the camera for the next shot, he looked at the two thin buildings on either side of the mine entrance. Both were about twenty feet high.
“And those?”
“Probably one building pumped fresh air into the mines, and the other provided power for any machinery like drills or even a shaft elevator. The machinery was most likely steam-powered.”
“Mayor Banyan told me the mine stopped producing in the early 1880s,” Father recalled. “But in its heyday, Sparkledove had over four thousand people, almost exclusively because of mining.”
“Yeah, I read that, too,” she said, going through the open doorway of the building on the right-hand side of the mine.
“Uh—I don’t think going in there is a good idea,” the priest warned, deciding to remain outside. “It could fall down on your head.”
“This buildin’ has been standin’ for decades, Father,” she replied. “I don’t think the walls are gonna collapse at this particular moment.”
She saw the large, rusted boiler of a steam engine, an iron wheel that once drove a large piston, and some old exhaust piping that ran from the engine up through a hole in the roof. “Yeah,” she called to her companion. “There’s an old steam engine in here.”
“Fine. C’mon out now,” he urged.
As Goldie scanned the roof, something suddenly caught her eye. Over in the corner, there was a second newer exhaust pipe. Her eyes followed it down behind what was left of the original engine to a smaller tarp-covered piece of machinery over in a shadowed corner of the building.
“Hey, Father,” she called. “I found somethin’.”
