Though these tunnels were much, much deeper. She wondered if the city was somehow steam-heated, and if the steam smelled like metal, and if the metal smelled like blood from all the men who’d died and never been brought back. There were no trees, and there was barely any grass. This was the place that had made most of Walton’s fortune, where his two real patents for hoist parts had panned out (as it were), but most of his time here had been spent fine-tuning his magnometer, an invention to warn the world of earthquakes. Butte was only a hundred miles from Yellowstone Park, where the earth shuddered every day, but the magnometer had failed. It hadn’t been able to foresee any of the Yellowstone vibrations, or even distinguish them from dynamite blasts in the mines.
The dining car was mostly empty; next to her, Carrie was halfway through another letter to Alfred. The cardplayers and the red beards had left in Anaconda, and no new passengers wandered on: however grim Butte looked, no one seemed to want to leave it. The man with the missing fingers was out on the platform, trick bowler firmly on his head, taking in the raggedy view of the hill. He paced with more energy than he’d shown on the train; she watched his breath turn white and followed his view and realized that one of the dozen plumes rising from the hillside was black, not white, smoke rather than steam. A boy carrying a hot box sold him a meat pie. When he bit in, there was another explosion of steam, a miniature replica of the background fumaroles.
“Might be a terrible thing,” said the disaster-loving conductor, looking at the plume. “Of course, you don’t need a fire to kill people down there. Those hoists go down, rocks go down. And gas. You know, they look alive when they pull them out after that kind of accident. Pink-skinned.”
Carrie looked up, annoyed by the piping, asinine voice. Both the sisters Remfrey, one-time daughters of a one-time mining engineer, pursed their pretty lips at the idiot civilian.
???
Gas victims didn’t stay pink for long. The first time that Dulcy and Carrie had been on a real trip with their father, in 1892, they’d visited the copper mines of Keweenaw Peninsula of Michigan, where many of Walton’s new hoist mechanisms had also been installed, and where he was testing another warning device, a machine for the detection of dangerous gasses. They took trains and ferries west from the huge depot at Buffalo. The trip had been wildly exciting, and Walton had been patient and wonderful. Philomela had been dead for two months, and he let his daughters wear her flamboyant, too-large hats.
But after a week of Calumet and Hecla dinners, ice skating, and drilling contests—wiry violent men with picks, sparks flying—an explosion occurred without Walton’s warning device chiming, crippling one of Walton’s unstoppable hoists. An hour later three crimson-skinned blond men lay in the snow, looking like photo negatives. Carrie and Dulcy darted around, trying to escape weeping housewives, while Walton bellowed at the engine crew. Any ground that wasn’t covered by snow glittered with shards of quartz and feldspar, and Dulcy worried that the dead men would be cut open unless someone put a blanket underneath them.
On the way back to Westfield, Walton had been in a suspended state, rage as a kind of jelly holding his mind in one piece. This time they rode the northern route and took a suite in the St. James Hotel in Montreal. Walton bought them books and games, and told them to order anything they wanted from the kitchen, and to go anywhere they wanted within the walls of the hotel. He disappeared for the next five days, then bundled them home without explanation. For a long time Dulcy assumed that this was when he’d made himself sick, but she later understood that Walton had earned his syphilis in Paris just after Carrie was born. He’d given the disease to Philomela, and to the twins, and it had killed them all.
???
East of Butte, another rockslide, another “short delay.” Dulcy tried to enjoy the battened-down chaos as the galley staff served courses at an angle. From the uphill side of the table, she watched the liquor in the last of the Seattle oysters dribble toward Carrie, a wine sauce oozing away from a partridge in viscous waves. Carrie kept down a cheese soufflé and veal. Dulcy didn’t joke about this new fondness for chewing up baby animals. In the far corner, the handsome, blank-faced blond man still stared into space.
“Does Alfred read?” she asked Carrie.
“Of course he reads,” said Carrie. “I can’t claim it’s any good—it’s all adventure stuff—but I believe he’s still recovering from college.”
Dulcy, who hadn’t gotten to go, disliked Alfred for complaining. Sadness percolated into pettiness, on its way to a truly evil mood: there were so many ways to make Carrie not miss her. She signaled the porter. “You’re a lush,” said Carrie.
“You’re a brat,” said Dulcy. “Let’s not be hard on each other.”
They simmered, they were sorry, they loved each other. Their lives had been filled with passing tiffs, and this too would pass if it were given time. An hour later, after the train finally began to creep uphill again, she told Carrie she felt ill. “If you think you’ll give me something, warn me now,” said Carrie. “This is the first day I haven’t been sick in weeks.”
“So many people left the train,” said Dulcy. “I should see if another cabin is available. We need to think of your health now.”
There were four open cabins, and only one party boarding before morning. Carrie blew a kiss good night and floated off to her private kingdom just as the train began to roll again. No backward glance, no instinct for the moment. It should have been a relief, but Dulcy had trouble grinding her way through a conversation with the porter: she requested a bottle of mineral water and some shortbread, declined turn—down service or tea. She didn’t want to be bothered at all, even for breakfast. The porter, worried that she’d mess up her cabin in some horrific fashion, returned with towels and a bowl and a little sign for the door: Quiet is Appreciated .
When Dulcy was finally alone, she locked the door and curled on the lower bunk and wept: shuddering, galvanic sobs. She felt like her brain was being exposed to the air; she wondered if the pillow would still be wet when they looked for her in the morning.