for the doorknob.
He stopped. He walked back to the piano. His weak heart pounding, he leaned down and kissed Lana on the cheek.
She stopped playing and bowed her head. They both trembled.
“I apologize,” Bart said. “It’s just that . . .”
He hurried outside and shut the door.
Lana took a deep breath, then looked out the window, up to the second floor of the hotel across the street, at the woman sitting in the bay window.
You could hear the noise from the dance hall down the street, where most of the town had gathered for Christmas Eve. She started “Silent Night” on the discordant keys.
Joss took a candle out from under the bar, went over to the stove, opened it, and held the wick to a flame. She set the burning candle in the windowsill behind the bar, stood there watching torrents of snow fall through the darkness, wondering if they could see her signal in the blizzard.
EIGHT
S
tephen Cole buttoned his black frock coat and stepped onto the musicians’ platform, tall, pale, thin to the brink of fragility. His brown hair, parted down the middle, fell in greasy strings to his shoulders, and the only facial hair he could grow was a lean mustache more befitting a teenager than a twenty-seven-year-old man. It wasn’t the snipe- gutted appearance people noticed, however, but his large eyes—brown, gentle, occasionally radiant.
“Let us pray,” he said. “Dear Lord. Redeemer. Maker of all that is good. We thank You for the bounty of that which we are about to eat, for the hands that prepared it, for the generous Mr. Packer, who allowed his boardinghouse cooks to make this feast for the town. We thank You for Your perfect and loving Son, Jesus Christ, Who You sent to save this despicable world. Let us remember the Child born in a manger as we celebrate His birth this night and on the morrow.
“Finally, dear Lord, I ask that You pour out Your protection upon Abandon. Protect us from the cold and snow, the deadly slides, the beasts of the mountains, the heathens, and, above all, from the wickedness in our own hearts. Kyrie eleison. Amen.” As Stephen stepped down from the stage, the fiddlers took up their instruments and plucked at the strings, turning the tiny hardwood pegs.
Two years ago, this hurdy-gurdy would have been lined with whores of every make and model in threadbare peignoirs, bright stockings, some only children, others topless, a handful naked entirely, all painted up like lewd clowns, and the miners staggering drunk through the horde of dancers, the room redolent of a foul ambrosia— whiskey, sweat, and tobacco smoke com-mingling.
But the mine had pinched out, the revelers departed, though their nights in the dance hall stood memorialized in the bullet-holed walls, stains of vomit, tobacco juice, and blood on the floorboards.
This night, half a dozen tables had been arranged in the center of the room, decorated with ribbon, spruce saplings cut from the hillsides above town, and a whole multitude of candles.
Ezekiel and Gloria Curtice sat at the end of the table nearest the sheet-iron stove, a silence descending as the residents of Abandon filled their plates from the pans of corn bread, vegetables, fried potatoes, sop, and whole roasts. The hanging lamps did little to illumine the hall, the faces an indistinct canvas for shadow and candlelight. Gloria sat across from Harriet McCabe, watching the little girl devour her supper, dripping sauce on her white pinafore.
“Are you ready for Santa Claus?” Gloria said. “I hear he’s on his way to Abandon this hour.” Harriet glanced at her mother, as if to confirm the validity of the claim. Tears slid down Bessie McCabe’s face. “Bessie?” Gloria whispered. “What is it? Are you poorly?”
Barely twenty, Bessie’s pink cotton work dress was her best, stained and torn across the front from countless trips to the woodpile, hardly warm enough for a Rocky Mountain winter. Bessie had come from Tennessee ten months ago to join her husband, found him quite changed from the fifteen-year-old boy she’d married. She carried the dull burn of poverty in her eyes, and the stress of living this high in the dead of winter, with a man losing his mind, was causing her straw-colored hair to fall out in clumps.
“It’s Billy,” Bessie whispered, covering her mouth with her hand to mask rotten teeth.
Gloria reached across the table and held Bessie’s hand. “Where is he?”
“Where you reckon?” Bessie’s voice broke on the last word.
“With Mr. Wallace?”
“Sometimes, I suspect they go to the cribs.”
“Mr. McCabe loves you,” Gloria said, then felt a pinch under the table.
She turned and met her husband’s disapproving eyes.
“So, Mrs. McCabe,” Ezekiel said, “how’s Mr. McCabe finding his job at the mine?”
“Still just a mucker, but him and Mr. Wallace been dirt washin on Billy’s day off. Lookin for someone to grubstake ’em.”
“Well, here’s hoping he sees some color in his pan.” He raised his glass of water, and when he’d taken a sip, turned his attention to the little girl. As he quizzed Harriet on her studies, Gloria nibbled on a piece of corn bread and stole glances at her husband. She was still wildly in love with him, this solid, gorgeous man with a thick mustache, long sideburns, and the most ardent eyes she’d ever seen, especially when in a state of passion—anger or otherwise—as if there were lava at his core. She’d convinced him to wear his four-button sack coat for the occasion, an outfit he despised, and which, in his words, made him look like “a feathered-out got-damn banker.”
At length, Gloria’s attention drifted away from their table, and she picked out pieces of other conversations about towns that were booming, towns that were busting. As she eavesdropped, she noticed the table closest to the musicians’ platform. Ten people occupied one side, but at the far end, a woman ate by herself, completely ignored. She estimated the woman to be in her mid-forties, and even from across the room, Gloria could tell that
