American Copper Read online

  American Copper

  Shann Ray

  Unbridled Books

  This is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places and incidents are either the

  product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance

  to actual persons living or dead, business establishments, events,

  or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Unbridled Books

  Copyright © 2015 by Shann Ray

  All rights reserved. This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form

  without permission.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Ray, Shann.

  American copper / Shann Ray.

  pages ; cm

  ISBN 978-1-60953-121-8

  I. Title.

  PS3618.A9828A84 2015

  813'.6--dc23

  2015011741

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  Book Design by SH • CV

  First Printing

  for Jennifer

  I am afraid to own a Body—

  I am afraid to own a Soul—

  Emily Dickinson

  I.

  The train moves west, tight-bound in an upward arc along the sidewall of tremendous mountains, the movement of metal and muscle working above the tree line, chugging out black smoke. Smoke, black first against the grayish rock, the granite face of the mountain, then higher and farther back black into the keen blue of sky without clouds.

  {Evelynne Lowry, 1907}

  1.

  Daily, men descended into the earth, going where no man belonged, taking more than men deserved, their faces wracked with indifference, their hands dirtied with soot from the depths of the mountain.

  Aboveground, the last lights of evening shimmered before darkness fell.

  She held her father’s hand as they walked in the upper meadow beyond the ranch house, the place from which she saw sky and moon and stars, and below her far off in the top floor, the flicker of lantern glow from her father’s window. Five years old and slight, face chalk white framed by dark auburn hair, her eyes were the green of glacial pools, slate green and gray, the iris encircled in black. Her fingers were cold. Full of fright her father called her. Afraid of people mainly, he thought, and specifically men.

  In the meadow when he pointed, her eyes followed his arm to the sky. “Cygnus the Swan. Vega. Altair. Albireo. The Summer Triangle. Daughter, do you see?” She saw stars more white than silver in the outer dark. She made out the triangle and, within the triangle, lights cold and still as if held in place like a basket of bright stones.

  “Tomorrow night, you recite for my guests,” he said. “Don’t disappoint me.” In his voice a hint of the old immigrant accent.

  She was the child of her father. “Yes, Papa,” she said. As he drew her close and touched her face a night bird called from the forest.

  The next morning he took her with him along the shallow cut banks of the river. The sun low on its rise to the zenith, he went to one knee, hushing her as he held her shoulders and pointed a few feet ahead. “Lycaena phlaeas americana,” he said.

  Flickering like minuscule fires, light-winged butterflies mingled among the timothy over the water. “What do the words mean?” she asked.

  More harshly than he intended, he said, “Quiet.”

  The sun shimmered, aslant at the river’s bend.

  “American Copper,” he whispered.

  Larksong. The percussion of a mountain jay.

  When he touched her hair there was a tenderness he knew to be the God in him. He cherished her. She let her head meet his hand.

  The butterfly brood vivid below them.

  “Even now,” he said under his breath, “copper in the air.”

  Her hair too has copper, he thought, the sun on the curve behind her ear, the glint of her hair nearly bronze among the sheen of black. She is so like her mother. He let his thoughts linger.

  “Is there more, Papa?” she inquired.

  “Yes, Evelynne,” he said. She bore her mother’s name. “Butterflies of the Lycaenids, or gossamer-winged family,” he continued softly, “of the race L. phlaeas americana, binomial name Lycaena phlaeas derived from the Greek phlego, ‘to burn up.’ Named by Carl Linnaeus of Sweden in 1761. Of the kingdom Animalia, phylum Anthropoda, class Insecta, order Lepidoptera. In Montana not simply the Small Copper or the Common Copper but the American Copper butterfly.”

  She smiled openly, pressing her torso back into his chest. She placed her hands over his. Exhaling, he took in the river and its environs.

  “They are so shiny, Papa,” she said, “like candles with black fringe and black spots.”

  He chuckled while she grew silent. A single butterfly moved toward her as if climbing poorly made stairs. The creature came close before lighting on her forearm. Evelynne’s body seemed to unfold outward. The wings closed and hinged open again. Her hair felt touched with electricity.

  “Still,” he whispered, but he needn’t have, he thought.

  Her fortitude, he knew, was like the mountain.

  2 .

  Slender as a sapling, she stood that night on a black hickory table in the great room. Her father was a man hard as granite with other men, a man of fist, commerce, and copper. Josef, he called himself. Others called him the Baron. Josef Lowry had more money than the Montana State Treasury. Born in America but Czech by blood, he had changed his surname, Vavrik, to the English equivalent, Lowry, and made men suffer. He was unfriendly with Washington but respected. His men dug copper from the ground. He sent it by train to the centers of industry.

  I move this country, he thought.

  He smiled for her. For her brother too, but Tomás was in town with the tutor Josef retained to prepare him for Harvard, where he would make his father proud.

  Tonight the dignitaries of Montana gathered with their wives in the great room, wide-eyed. The men endured with slick hair, part lines clean and straight, faces shaven, black or brown full beaver felt hats in hand, derbies and straights, tapers and cowboy hats. The women wore gloves and fine dresses, beads like gemstones set in silk at shoulder or hip. People milled beneath the electric burn of a Bohemian crystal chandelier shipped from Prague, a many-armed work of art—high, wide, full of light, the room lit to every corner. Alder, pine, and maple at floor and ceiling. Great ponderosa logs stripped of their bark for walls. The tart smell of fresh wood. Throughout, deer and antelope antlers were set in European mounts, clean skull with darkened horns, the death’s-heads like silent touchstones of days he’d ridden out at dawn, returning with the animal lain across the rump of his horse. A comfort to him. A sense of solace. He watched the women, their flowing curls and well-shaped gowns a reminder of the wife he’d lost. His face started to crack, but he steeled himself before he called to his daughter in a loud voice.

  “Evelynne, child of my heart.”

  She smiled. Blushed.

  Too meek, he thought. He went to her at the table and stood before her, holding her hand. He beamed at the people and they applauded even before she began. If only his father were here, he thought, a man he imagined dead of poverty or anguish. They hadn’t spoken since St. Louis. He’d hold his father’s head in his low convalescent bed, mine worker, railroad hand, track layer, fighter crushed by rock. In Josef’s waking dream the old man rose and stood tall, smiling like Josef had never seen. The Governor and his lieutenants, the head of the railway and his henchmen, they were all here now in the public dining room with their women to listen to Josef’s daughter because Josef wanted them to be here and because they knew he was richer and more powerful than the lot of them.

  Dark wine in tall glasses. Prime cuts of Montana beefsteak. Tumblers of cognac. Thick cigars. The air perfumed by feminine skin, they dined like royalty as they held their women. The men guffawed and bragged as they tried to pump themselves up in the face of their host’s wealth, his mountain castle so unlike the paper shacks and hillside dugouts he’d known as a boy. Tonight, he thought, his princess was like a small queen, with her crushed-velvet dress and white lace collar, white silk gloves, and her mother’s pearl necklace, the gift of oysters of the Orient tripled around her delicate neck. His face wanted to break again. His wife should be here.

  He set his voice like a rail before him.

  “I present to you the Queen of Montana!”

  He flourished his hand as everyone applauded, hooted, hollered.

  Evelynne’s face flushed.

  Josef made eye contact, nodded, the aftertaste of buttered steak in his mouth. She lifted her eyes, then proceeded to recite without error ten Shakespearean sonnets, each made with fourteen knotted lines filled with tongue twists and turns, three quatrains and a couplet, one hundred forty lines in all. She delivered with gusto and fire: “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? Thou art more lovely and more temperate, … And summer’s lease hath all too short a date, Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines.” She raised her hands in a V. “Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising, haply I think on thee, and then my state, like to the lark at break of day arising from sullen earth, sings hymns at heaven’s gate.” The women and the men stood, their eyes alive to her performance. “Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks, but bears it out even to the edge of doom.” She punched a fist to her chest. They gasped. A few men chortled uncomfortably but were hushed by those near. “My love is as a fever, longing still for that which longer nurseth the disease, feeding on that which doth preserve the ill, th’ uncertain sickl
y appetite to please. … For I have sworn thee fair, and thought thee bright, who art as black as hell, as dark as night.”

  Josef was seen mouthing the words. He thought of his father’s thick accent. The King’s English was the English his children knew. Shakespeare the pinnacle.

  When she finished, the people roared their approval. Josef lifted Evelynne from the table and set her on the hardwood floor. She looked at the bodies flowing toward her. She turned to her father and tucked herself to his pant legs, but he bellowed with laughter. She pinched his leg before she ran wildly from the room, his voice booming behind her.

  “Well done, Evelynne! Well done!” and quieter, “Come back, child.”

  But she stayed away.

  When the people left he watched from the door as they walked across the wood of the veranda before receding into the darkness. They made their way mostly to carriages and one or two automobiles. He looked up once and saw the encompassing sky, numberless with stars. But he turned his face down before the beauty could unravel him. Back inside, he found her trembling beneath her bed. He pulled her out by her heel. Holding her to his chest, he lay down with her on the small bed. Touched the palm of his hand, chill, to her warm face. “Kuráž,” he whispered over her. “Courage,” and soon she slept.

  Josef’s father had been little respected. Josef and his brother, Leopold, the first generation born in this country, his father had raised them Czech while paying for some small English education. What he knew they’d need for this land. By trade a laborer, he was despised by many. In St. Louis, the last civilized place before the great expanse, he’d taught both sons to give no quarter.

  Josef wiped his eyes with the heel of his hand, rose and went to his liquor cabinet and tipped back whiskey until his chest was hot.

  He strode through the house, a hunger in him to break the world.

  There had been a wildness to his coming west, but now he was numb. He missed his wife terribly. Her worry drove her, her fear of wilderness and wild things, bear, badger, wolf, even Indians. He’d taken her to powwows so she’d see how being subjugated had largely taken their will. The Blackfeet, big and fearsome during the Indian Wars, quiet now in the high northwest corner of Montana on the windswept steppe below the great mountains. The Crow in the far southeast, enemies of the Cheyenne whose lands abutted theirs but lay still farther east and whose society of leadership involved a council of forty-four chiefs Josef thought to be a modern miracle. Four above forty. He’d kept a Cheyenne hand once who’d spoken of the council. Paid the Indian even less than he paid the Chinese, though the hand was uncanny with horses.

  Too many voices, Josef thought. Yet they abide, even thrive.

  The hand had said the chiefs served not themselves but the people. As for himself, Josef couldn’t countenance subservience.

  In America, there was resource and power, power underground and power over, the will to extract metal from rock, to separate flesh from bone. He would be positioned above other men. He would exhaust the storehouses of God. He’d be a king in this land, he told himself. He felt sorry for himself. He didn’t want to drink, but he propped himself on his elbow, drinking bourbon from the bottle until he heard the glass butt of it thud on the floor below him. He fell asleep in a stupor, his head tilted over the side of the bed.

  In the morning he approached the mirror in his bathroom. His eyes were red and blown out. He struck himself flat-handed in the face. He struck himself again, watching the pink of his skin bloom and spread. His look began to darken. His pupils turned to points of black lead among fields of water. He slapped himself in the face for near a quarter hour. By the end of it his hair was wrung out over his forehead, and his neck glistened with sweat. He needed more wealth, he thought.

  He washed his face in the hand basin before he dressed and went out into the great room.

  3.

  Evelynne had called her brother Babo since she first spoke. To her, Tomás was joy, protection, and peace. Even when the house seemed to collapse under her father’s drunkenness, the sorrow took a different shape because of Tomás. Always at night, a silence fell. The lights darkened, then the oil lamps went out. Then came the startle of something heavy thrown to the floor, the sound of breaking glass and Josef’s boot steps in the halls, a maniacal cadence over which he shouted invectives that as a child made her flee to the standing closet, a large black oak wardrobe with thick doors she’d enter and quickly close. As she crouched inside, her body shook and she cried. When the doors opened she feared her father’s ruined face. But most often it was Tomás who came to her. He was already a man then, more slender than his father, taller, wider in the chest, but he’d crawl into the wardrobe and tuck her head into the crook of his neck and rest his hands on her arms until she calmed. He held her and spoke words that made her heart hurt, “You are beloved in this house, Eve. Don’t worry. He misses our mother. All will be well.”

  But the memory of her father killing the Chinese stable boy Liu over a single horsing incident infected her mind. Her brother’s presence had a curative effect. Like her, he had seen their father’s outburst. She wondered where he placed the knowledge. In the morning, he’d walk into her room playing light harmonica. Old hillbilly songs on the mouth organ … “Who’s Gonna Shoe Your Pretty Little Feet,” and “Cacklin’ Hen Blues.” A quickstep on “Huskin’ Bee.” The southern wail for “Chased Old Satan Through the Door.” “Keep on!” she’d tell him, clapping, and he’d start in again.

  It was also in those early years that Evelynne witnessed her father severely harm Tomás on three occasions. Just after Christmas of Tomás’s thirteenth year he suffered two broken ribs when Josef hit him in the side with the butt of an axe. She let out a scream, but Tomás didn’t utter a sound. Later the same year, when Josef bent his son’s hand backward in a burst of anger at the kitchen table, breaking his wrist, Tomás yelled as he fell to the floor. He clutched his hand to his chest and sobbed. She went to him, even tried to kiss his face, but he wouldn’t be comforted. Not two years later Tomás sustained a broken leg when his father caught him sleeping in the field and ran him over with a loaded oxcart. The family doctor repaired the young man each time as if a day’s work was nothing but violence.

  Yet the spirit of Tomás remained to Evelynne indomitable. She found him in the trees sometimes, singing deep, abiding songs. He makes music, she told herself. He is a singer.

  At the ranch, to teach her to ride, he secured from her father her first real horse, a chestnut filly she named Chloe, honey-sweet and fast in the leg, raised from a foal. The riding too was a blessing to her. He helped her train the horse and taught her horsemanship, taking her with him until she understood. “Watch the eyes and ears, the tail,” he said. “Recognize the posture first, Eve. Is the horse calm or afraid? Is the outline of the horse relaxed or high and arched, showing alarm? When you gain his trust, you can settle even a spooked horse. The ears point in the direction of the horse’s attention. Both ears forward is elegant, but when riding, the horse needs to have at least one ear on you. If a horse pins her ears back she’s angry or afraid. If she moves them back and forth, she’s confused or uncertain. When the ears go flat a kick is coming.”

  He put his hand on Chloe’s forehead. “Watch her when we teach her anything new. Her mouth is tight. Then when she gets it, her mouth relaxes and she chews. When she wants to bite, she opens her mouth and bares her teeth. When she just barely opens her mouth and cranes her neck, she likes the groom you’re giving. This means you’ve got her just right.”

  Evelynne grew up in his stride. She saw that he handled men and horses with dignity. She hoped to emulate him. Certainly he and their father shared a bitter disregard for one another’s ways, but Tomás did not buck his father, choosing rather the road of obedience under the browbeating and hard labor it was to be Josef Lowry’s son. Even Tomás’s deference Evelynne recognized as an attempt to shield her from their father. For her part, she thought Tomás would be better off trying to break their father’s will, not bow to it, but it wasn’t her place to say. Besides, the men of her father’s operation flocked to Tomás. They worked like madmen under his direction. Regardless, Tomás was evidence to her: God made brothers for their sisters, to walk together in this life.