Ondrej Vinich could just as well have lived out his days prospecting for gold and silver in the Sawatch, but this was the dream of a bachelor and the life of men in Leadville who were intimate with prostitutes and the ground. He had a wife and a child now, and they needed to eat, so his brother-in-law, a too-cautious man suspicious of any and all dealings that came out of Leadville, secured for him a position in the smelter and a vacated flat above a tack shop. Weighing what precious metal of ambition he had left against the rising sands of disappointment, Ondrej Vinich and his wife packed a trunk and came down out of the mountains, and John Hudak never let them forget who had delivered them from what he called a filthy town of gambling Protestants.
This Sunday she feels strong throughout the morning and the service, until after the meal of dumplings and a chicken boiled in carrots and parsnips, when the nowfamiliar wave of fatigue overtakes her. So, she is given a reprieve from the dishes at her sister-in-law’s and sent to lie down in a small room built like a porch off the back of the flat.
But she doesn’t sleep, only lies listening to the women banter in their slangy ari• and the dull clack of ceramic china as they dry and stack plates. Occasionally, like a breeze rising and falling at unexpected intervals through an open window, the laughter of children playing rises from the street, along with the metronomic clop of a horse on which rides some stranger inattentive to the Sabbath. Who could afford a horse on this side of town? she wonders. Or even want to ride it here for leisure on a Sunday?
Sunday is the only day the air isn’t ashy and sulfurous, and on this day the weather remains pristine, even in the afternoon, when cloud cover often crests the mountains and sweeps down toward the plains. She stands, moves the child carefully as he dozes from his basket to a sling she wears across her chest, and steps out into the kitchen to say that she is going for a walk.
Tobias, the youngest Hudak boy, hears this as an invitation for the family in its entirety to go out, and he tugs at his mother’s dress.
Matka, pod’me!
But his mother tells him that they can’t go because there is work still to do, and it is Auntie Liz who wants to go with baby Jozef so that the two can get some air.
If he’s underfoot, she says to Anna, I don’t mind taking him with me.
Oh, Lizzie, he’s always underfoot, Anna says, wiping her hands on her apron. She is pregnant, too, now, and near term, and bears her condition heavily not just at the hips but in her face and eyes with a visible disquiet. Go by yourself before it gets too late.
Tobias insists. Prosím, Matka. Pod’me, he pleads.
Anna wonders why the pull is so strong. If she hasn’t paid him enough attention in the last several months? Or if it’s her sister-in-law to whom her son is attracted, which is likely, she thinks as she considers the young woman before her as though for the first time, a face that shows no lines yet of age, a voice that speaks in notes of affection, which grace her infant son continuously and without conscious effort, and the angelic quality of possessing strength beneath a slight beauty, so that she seems to become a different woman altogether whenever she so much as turns her head or changes position.
At the table, the men talk and drink as though in another room, and Ondrej Vinich, who is indifferent to their company, rises and excuses himself. He hears the conversation between his wife and sister, sees them through the open curtain, and for a moment wonders who the beautiful woman with the sleeping child is. The distance between them pains him, and he regrets his harsh tone that morning and other mornings, so that he feels for an instant the desire to forgo his trip to Leadville and to walk with his wife for the few hours of quiet she seeks, but the thought dissipates. He says good day to the men and leaves the women and children to themselves.
Anna kneels down and says to her son, Toby, stay here with Mama and we’ll have a treat of poppyseed and milk. You and me.
But Tobias begins to cry, and Lizzie, who understands why a woman should be so protective of her son, says, Let him come.
So her sister-in-law consents and Tobias dances a clumsy reel while his mother steadies him for his hat, points him in the direction of the door out of which his aunt has just walked, and stares after him as he bounds down the wooden steps.
Don’t be long, she says to Lizzie, who is waiting in the street. I worry about him, you know. That boy has thumbs on his feet. And Lizzie promises that she’ll keep him within arm’s reach.
The streets and alleys of this shantytown neighborhood she knows well and has walked them for church, visits, meals, but as she moves past the farthest house she has been to in over a year, sees the smelter dumps huffing even while idle on a Sunday, and presses on in the direction of the river beyond a block of warehouses, she feels awake to the landscape so close and new to her, even in its filth and disarray. It could be close to Hell itself (as some have said) and she would still feel as though she’d been released into a garden. She looks down into the wrap that’s carrying her son, and he’s awake now, lips pursed and silent, his eyes azure beads gazing upward, a body content with her constant rhythmic movement.
L’úbim t’a, she says, and hugs him closer.
They come to the tracks before the bridge and Tobias hopscotches along the ties, but she knows — or thinks — there is only one train due on a Sunday afternoon and that won’t be for a while, so she leaves him to his game, which he plays without any grace, says that his mother was right, and laughs when he teeters off a rail and tumbles onto the ground.
Som v poriadku, he says, smiling and dusting himself off. Then they come to the trestle at the river’s edge.
For the first few minutes, they are both hypnotized by the water. He is thrilled at the height, the roar of the strong course below, the distance he has been allowed to venture from home. She is drawn to the rise of the bridge from the river, too, and lets herself hang between the two emotions of daring and fear, then feels against her face the cool, moving air rising from the surface of the muddied water that has come this far south and east out of the mountains. Tobias points to a group of boys swimming in a back pool on the banks below, where the water’s slowed and deep, and she clasps her forehead and mock gasps in a mime of disbelief that they should brave the cold. He pretends to shiver and can’t control himself for laughing, until she moves out farther onto the bridge and motions for him to follow, and they make their way in the stop and start of looking down and moving along, as though explorers more enraptured than careful, until they find themselves in the middle of the trestle and Lizzie signals to her nephew that it’s time they went back.
Before the eastbound passenger train number two approaches the river trestle near the smelter dumps in Pueblo, it has to negotiate a bend, so that when the engineer is in full sight of the bridge, the fireman is still in the blind of the curve as he stokes the engine for the run. To anyone standing on the bridge, the train is almost invisible until it has come around that turn and opened up to its full thirty miles an hour.
Lizzie sees the train as the engine makes the bridge, wonders how it could be. How could it be early? How could it be so quiet? Nearly silent, as though a moving picture.
But she sees then the whistle steam and hears its high note break through the sound of rushing water. And beyond the gray coal smoke the train spews, the sharp stretch of track that disappears back into the bending river, and (her eyes lifting) the farther horizon that the Sangre de Cristos frame majestically, she notices that the sun hasn’t far to go before it begins setting. She wonders again to herself, How can it be time? She is more bewildered than frantic, and yet she knows, too, that she has moved slowly all day, as she has done every day since winter and so has learned to misjudge time.