Next Christmas in Girouette
Michael and Dylan Welch
Copyright © 2011 by Michael Welch and Dylan Welch.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental. All rights reserved. No part of this publication can be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, without permission in writing from the author or publisher.
Smashwords Edition: 2011
Table of Contents
Prologue—A Brief History of Ghost Towns
For Katrin, who believes in such things!
Next Christmas in Girouette
A Brief History of Ghost Towns
Beginning with the discovery of gold at Sutter’s Mill, California in 1849, new towns sprang up overnight in the American West wherever gold, silver or copper was found. Later, when the mineral deposits gave out, many of these boom towns quickly became ghost towns.
Today, throughout the West, one can find remnants of these communities—weathered old mining offices, hotels, saloons, churches, schoolhouses, windmills and wagons—often just over the horizon and beyond the view of people speeding by on interstate highways. In a very few cases, some elderly “diehards” have remained behind in these towns, still trying to eke out a living by whatever means they can.
This is a story—a Christmas story—of one such town, Girouette (juh-ret’), Montana, and the people as well as the ghosts who live there to this day.
Captain Quinn’s house on Main Street in Girouette
Chapter One
Autry, the Old Man and the Wolves
Autry Quinn, a tall, serious boy in a green sweater and blue blazer, leaned against the window of the drafty, weather-beaten old house and looked out. There was nothing much to see, except that it was beginning to snow.
“Great,” he murmured looking up and down the empty street. “Trapped in a ghost town. On Thanksgiving. Just great.”
The house was one of the few inhabitable buildings still standing in the little town of Girouette, Montana. If it were not for the boy in the window and the new rental car parked behind the house, one might have thought the town was completely deserted.
Autry was speaking into a cell phone tucked under his chin. He jammed his hands into his trousers. “I’ll never make it out of here in time,” he whispered. He was talking to a friend back home in San Francisco. He was whispering because he did not want to wake his grandfather who was sleeping in a threadbare recliner on the other side of the parlor. The old man had made it clear he did not like being disturbed. Autry’s father, who was preparing for a big trial on a portable computer in the next room, had also said he did not want to be bothered.
Their so-called vacation had already been officially declared a nightmare by Autry and Oxana, his sister. They had not expected to enjoy themselves, but they had not thought they would be miserable either.
In San Francisco, they would have eaten a wonderful Thanksgiving dinner prepared by their mother and then gone off to play video games with their friends. This year their mother, a Russian émigré, was visiting her parents in Moscow. The kids had flown from California to Montana to be with their father’s father, whom everyone called The Captain. The Captain was not going to be around much longer according to their dad, so it was the least they could do.
This was the first time they had visited the town where their father had grown up and their grandfather still lived. They had no idea when they arrived the night before that Girouette was virtually a ghost town. Then they woke up and ventured outside. The town looked like an abandoned movie set. Tiny, lonely and isolated, it was dwarfed by the Rocky Mountains, which loomed dark and fearsome in the west.
Autry was 13 and Oxana was 11. They were old enough to understand that occasionally one has to do things for other people, as their father would say. After some deliberation, they had agreed to spend Thanksgiving with The Captain in the old mining town, but this was the last place on earth they really wanted to be.
“Seriously,” Autry said, still whispering into the phone, “this place is lame. The buildings are all run down. The wind is blowing a hundred miles an hour. The roads are covered with ice. It’s starting to snow. I know we’re going to get stuck here. And they don’t have television. Can you believe that?”
Autry’s friend had invited him to go skiing at Lake Tahoe. The plan was to leave San Francisco immediately after Autry returned on Sunday and drive up into the mountains at night when there was no traffic. They would arrive at the friend’s cabin around 2:00 A.M., sleep for a few hours, then get up at dawn and hit the slopes. The snow was perfect, his friend reported. Fresh, deep and powdery. Never mind if they missed a few classes. His friend’s dad was a big donor to the school. No one would complain.
As he listened, Autry continued to stare out the window of his grandfather’s house. The snow was swirling furiously up and down the street now. Across the way, the loose siding on an old stable made the structure shimmer and dance in the wind. All of the buildings in Girouette were sad and fragile looking. The town—what was left of it—depressed Autry. At any moment, it seemed to him, Girouette might give up the ghost and blow away.
The inside of The Captain’s house offered little comfort from the growing storm. It was cold and oddly designed with too many small rooms and not enough large ones. In the beginning, a hundred years ago, it was supposed to have been a library. That was back when there were big plans for all the buildings in Girouette. As a result, it did not feel like a home. It felt like a random collection of rooms held together by four rickety walls and a creaking tin roof. Worst of all, it smelled like the cigars The Captain smoked. Autry wrinkled his nose in disgust.
Over by the fireplace, The Captain squirmed in his chair. He was a fierce-looking man, even when asleep. He wore faded camouflage hunting pants and a black military sweater with patches on the elbows. His gray hair, cut flat across the top, bristled like the fur on an angry animal. Suddenly, The Captain began barking orders in his sleep. “Reform,” he shouted. “Fall back and reform!” Then he resumed his mournful snoring.
Autry glanced at his grandfather warily. “Hold on,” he said quietly to his friend. He put down his phone and pulled on a brightly-colored parka over his blazer. No matter how many layers of clothing he wore, he could not get warm in The Captain’s house. As he zipped up the parka, something outside caught his eye. Trudging down the middle of the street into the wind was a sad, solitary figure—an old man in a red wool jacket with a dirty fleece color and cuffs and a long white beard blown back over his shoulder. The man, who carried a plastic garbage bag in one hand and a walking stick in the other, struggled to keep his balance. A pack of dogs followed him. The dogs were huge and wild looking. “You’re not going to believe this,” Autry shuddered into the phone. “There’s an old man walking down the street followed by a pack of wolves.”
One of the wolves suddenly broke rank and ran toward Autry. It stood on its hind legs with its front paws against the window. Its eyes were bright and menacing. Its teeth were long and pointed, like icicles.
Autry jumped back from the window. After he caught his breath, he heard a loud groan. At first he thought it was the wolf growling or The Captain grumbling in his sleep. Then, out of the corner of his eye, he saw his father stagger into the parlor and drop onto the sofa as if he had been shot. Autry thought his dad was kidding at first, until he remembered his father never kidded about anything. Stunned, he walked over to the couch. His dad mumbled something. Autry leaned closer and asked him to repeat it. It took several seconds for Autry to understand his father had just told him to call 9-1-1.
“Autry? Are you there? What’s going on?” His friend was still on the phone.
“Later!” Autry said and clapped the cell phone shut. He opened it again immediately and dialed 9-1-1.
“Hello,” a pleasant-sounding woman said at once. “Is this an emergency?”
“My dad’s hurt. Really hurt.” Autry tried to think of what else to tell the woman.
“Where abouts are ya, dear?” she asked.
Autry looked out the window. “We’re across the street from an old stable.”
“’There’s a lot of stables in Montana,” the woman said patiently. “What town are ya in, d’ya know?”
Across the street, Autry saw the fading sign: ‘Girouette Livery & Stable.’ His voice, which has recently become much deeper, broke when he said “Girouette.”
There was a pause at the other end of the line. “Juh-rette, ya say?” The operator repeated the name as if she were thumbing through a directory. It was clear she had never heard of the town. “Juh-rette?….”
Autry shoved the phone in his pocket and ran across the room to his grandfather. “Grandpa,” he said. Nothing happened. “Captain!” he shouted. “Wake up! Dad’s hurt!”
The Captain struggled to open his eyes. His expression was resentful. He retrieved his glasses from the table next to his chair. With a grunt, he pulled on a lever at the side of his chair, thrust the recliner into an upright position and got to his feet. Although he was 75 years old, he stood ramrod straight and moved quickly. He crossed to the sofa and looked down wordlessly at Autry’s father. His expression conveyed disapproval more than sympathy. “Stroke,” he said under his breath. He narrowed his eyes, then turned on his heel and walked to an old rotary telephone hanging in the hallway between the parlor and the kitchen.
“I’m bored,” Oxana announced, squeezing between her grandfather and the gun cabinet behind him. She waltzed into the room wearing a bright red embroidered dress trimmed with white lace. She had been working on a jigsaw puzzle by herself in the kitchen and had not sensed that anything was wrong. “Autry, did you bring any video games? I have completely run out of anything constructive to do. I didn’t bring my homework, and I….”
“Yer dad’s taken sick,” The Captain said sharply. “I’m callin’ the ’mergency squad.”
Oxana, speechless, walked over to sofa and knelt down on the woven rag carpet next to her dad. She reached out and took his hand. He squeezed her hand and tried to smile, but it looked like only one side of his face was working. He was smiling on one side and frowning on the other. She patted his arm. “Are you okay?” she asked. The corners of her mouth began to wobble.
Her father tried to respond—he squinted as if he were looking for the answer to her question on the ceiling—but he could not manage to say anything. Instead, he just kept on squeezing her hand.
Autry got a little pillow from the other end of the sofa to put beneath his father’s head. The pillow had a Santa Claus embroidered on it. Several Christmases ago, his mother had purchased the pillow in New York City and sent it to Grandma Claire. “Don’t open ’til Christmas!” his mother had written on a card still pinned to the pillow. Grandma Claire died unexpectedly before she could open the gift.
“Here’s Grandma’s pillow,” Autry said, lifting his father’s head very carefully while Oxana slid the pillow underneath. “The Captain’s calling 9-1-1. It won’t be long.” Autry tried to remain calm while, in the background, he could hear The Captain tersely giving orders over the telephone.
“That wus my grandson that called… Listen ta what I’m tellin’ ya… He didn’ know any better… The boy’s father hadda stroke… What?!… Well, that don’ matter now, does it?… Send a squad over here!… ASAP!”
“Was it something you ate?” Oxana asked softly. Her father looked frightened, and that was the most troubling thing Oxana could possibly imagine.
Autry knelt by Oxana. “The Captain says it’s a stroke. That’s something that happens in your brain.” Secretly Autry, too, wondered if this could have resulted from the awful Thanksgiving dinner they had eaten earlier in the day. The turkey they had brought from San Francisco had been filled with an oyster stuffing only their father seemed to enjoy. Just thinking about it made Autry’s stomach churn.
The ambulance arrived in less than 30 minutes with its lights flashing and its siren wailing. Autry ran and opened the front door for the uniformed young man and woman who rushed into The Captain’s house. Before he closed the door, he looked up and down the street. Even with all the commotion, no one had come outside to see what was going on. The old man and the wolves were gone. Girouette really was a ghost town.
The man and the woman had “EMT” stenciled on the back of their uniforms. “Emergency medical technicians,” Autry explained to Oxana.
Oxana knew that what EMT meant, of course, but she liked the tender way Autry had spoken to her.
The woman talked quietly to the kids’ dad as she pulled on latex gloves. “Looks like ya mighta had yerself a stroke, sir.”
The Captain nodded his head authoritatively. “I thought as much,” he said.
“Don’ worry,” the woman said. “We’ll have ya ta the hospital in Kalispell ’fore ya know it. They’ll fix ya right up.”
The woman—Jane, according to her nametag—was very pretty. While her partner took over with Autry and Oxana’s father, she spoke to the kids. “This ain’ all that unusual. The holidays kin be purty stressful. If yer dad did have a stroke, an’if we git him ta the hospital in time, he’ll be fine. Where you guys from, anyways?” She could see by Autry’s expensive jacket and Oxana’s embroidered dress the kids were from somewhere other than Montana.
“We’re from San Francisco,” Autry and Oxana said in unison.
Jane smiled. “Wow. No kiddin’. I’d love ta visit Frisco someday.”
“You could stay with us,” Oxana offered, immediately imagining an older sister who rode around in ambulances and helicopters all day. “We have a guest room that’s right next to my room.”
The Captain put his big hand on Oxana’s shoulder, looked down at her sternly and put a finger to his lips.
With little trouble, the EMTs rolled the kids’ dad onto a gurney, maneuvered him out the narrow doorway and loaded him into the ambulance. It troubled Autry and Oxana to see their father wheeled around as if he were a piece of furniture. The Captain, on the other hand, seemed completely unmoved.
“Git yer coat,” The Captain commanded Oxana. She suspected he was not yet sure of her name.
Autry and Oxana knew their father and grandfather did not get along very well, still The Captain’s indifference was unsettling to them. They desperately wished their mother were there with them, but she was thousands of miles away, in Russia of all places.
In the ambulance, Captain Quinn rode stiffly in front with the young man, whose name was Red, while the kids sat in back with their dad and Jane.
“Lucky thing you wus close,” The Captain told the young man at last. “I don’ know how the kids an’ I woulda got ’im inta my truck.”
“You wus lucky all right.” The driver had taken off his cap. His hair was flaming red. “We wus headin’ back ta the firehouse in East Glacier when I picked up yer call. My father grew up in Girouette, so I knew right where ta come. Ever’ minute counts these days… after a feller’s hadda stroke.”
The Captain looked over at the speedometer. They were doing 70 miles an hour. If it were not snowing, they would have been doing 100. There was no speed limit on the back roads of Montana. He remembered wistfully when there were few cars in the area. When horses were much more common. The good old days. Long ago and far away. He had little use for modern day contrivances. Everything seemed useless since his wife passed away. He studied the driver’s face. “Say, are you Rusty Red Doyle’s boy by any stretch?”
“Rusty Red Doyle, Junior—big as life an’ twice as handsome,” the young man said without taking his eyes off the road.
“Where’s yer dad now?” The Captain remembered teaching the driver’s father, Rusty Red Doyle, Sr., then a teenager, to break wild mustangs one summer many years earlier. The older Doyle had grown up in Girouette. Like every other young person there he had moved away the first chance he got.
The driver took a deep breath. “Dad died ’bout 10 years ago, ’round this time of the year.”
“Oh,” The Captain said. He took off his wire-rimmed glasses and ran his fingers through his short-cropped hair. “I see,” he replied disapprovingly. He was not surprised. He remembered the older Doyle had a drinking problem.
In the back of the ambulance, Autry and Oxana were buckled into jump seats. Jane rode in between Oxana and her father, holding Oxana’s hand and studying a small monitor above the gurney. Oxana’s cheeks were wet with tears, but her eyes were steady and strong as she watched her father blink and lick his lips. Autry did not want to look at his father. He did not want to risk letting Jane or Oxana see him cry.
Only a few minutes earlier Autry had been angry at his father for bringing him to Girouette and making it impossible to return home in time for the skiing trip. Now he was angry at himself for being so selfish. All he wanted was for his father to get better.
Sitting at the rear of the ambulance was like riding in the last car of a rollercoaster, except this was no fun at all. When the vehicle slipped sideways on the ice, Autry felt as if he were going to fly off the road. When it flew over the railroad tracks outside of town, he felt like he would go right through the roof.
There were two small windows in the back doors of the ambulance. Autry stared out through the windows an effort to settle his stomach. It was snowing harder now. He could see the flakes whirling wildly in the wake of the speeding ambulance. The effect was hypnotic. He tried to imagine one of those little snow globes with Girouette sitting in the middle of it, but when the ambulance leapt over a bump the image went careening out of his mind.
Autry thought then of the old man he had seen stumbling down the street into the teeth of the wind. He thought of the wolves. And he thought of the lost and lonely little town with its bullet-riddled sign proclaiming, “Girouette—POP. 6.” He sighed and shivered miserably. If this was what Thanksgiving was like here, he certainly would not want to be around for Christmas in Girouette.
The bridge leading to Beau’s cabin behind Imo’s Cafe
Chapter Two
Oxana and the Unfinished Puzzle
Captain Quinn awoke well before dawn as he always did. He pulled on an old military sweater and coveralls over his long johns, performed a few push-ups beside his bed to get his blood flowing, brushed his flattop in the mirror over his bureau and walked out of his bedroom carrying a candle. The Captain was nothing if not frugal and never wanted to use more electricity than necessary. The previous night he had ridden home from the hospital in Kalispell in the back of the ambulance with Oxana and Autry. After telling the kids they would be living with him for a while, he began to lay down the law about how things worked in Girouette.
“Our water comes outta the cistern,” he explained sternly. “The cistern’s a big underground tank containin’ rainwater that runs offa the roof. The water’s gotta last from one spring ta the next, so ya can’t be takin’ a bath ever night or flushin’ the toilet unless ya need to.” When Autry balked at the arrangement, The Captain said, “Jist be glad we got an indoor toilet. When I wus yer age, our toilet wus an outhouse full of spiders in the summer an’ rats in the winter.” The Captain smiled to himself now as he remembered the look on his grandson’s face. The boy would soon get with the program. The Captain would see to that.
Still holding the candle, The Captain went down into the basement and stoked the fire in the coal furnace. He sat down on a stool next to the ancient stove and warmed himself, imagining he were sitting next to a roaring campfire. The walls were lined with dusty glass jars of canned vegetables, which his wife had put up years earlier. He knew he should throw out the potatoes, tomatoes and succotash, but he did not have the heart. Slowly, he climbed the creaking stairs and walked toward the kitchen where he intended to fix a pot of coffee. He was startled to see someone had turned on the kitchen light. His granddaughter was sitting at the table working on her jigsaw puzzle.
“Good morning,” Oxana said without looking up.
The Captain was not accustomed to having anyone underfoot. He liked living in the house by himself, coming and going as he pleased. He also enjoyed having the town to himself, so he could enjoy his memories of the way things used to be without anyone interrupting him. He had been explaining this to his son, Oxana and Autry’s father, just the day before.
Now here was this lost little girl, bundled up in a quilt, sitting at his kitchen table piecing together an old puzzle. She could have gotten up, as a sign of respect. She might have given him a hug. But she did not. She was like a stranger to him.
“Mornin’,” he said reluctantly. There was not anything particularly good about it as far as he was concerned.
While The Captain loaded his ancient coffee maker, Oxana told him how she normally fell asleep listening to music on her computer and how she enjoyed sitting in a hot bath when she woke up. Since both of those comforts were unavailable in Girouette, she was making the best of the situation. At least, she concluded, she might be able to enjoy a cup of coffee in the morning without walking down to The Java Joint in San Francisco to get it. “That smells good,” she said, as the coffee began to percolate.
The Captain turned and glared at his granddaughter. “Does yer dad let ya drink coffee?”
“No, he doesn’t,” she said without looking up, “but Mom does. As long as I put one-percent milk in it. We’re not allowed to use cream. Too fattening. And no sugar, of course.”
“’Course,” said The Captain glumly, as he poured the fourth heaping tablespoon of sugar into his mug along with a generous amount of cream and waited for his coffee to brew. When he sat down at the table to drink his coffee, Oxana stared at it so longingly he finally offered her a sip and then a cup of her own with cream and sugar.
“Yum,” she said. “This tastes like café au lait.”
The Captain frowned. “What’s that?”
Oxana looked at The Captain slyly. “Café au lait. That’s what Mom and I drink.”
The Captain frowned again. “Ya don’ say.” He studied the picture on the box of the jigsaw puzzle. It showed a little town, not unlike Girouette, nuzzling up against the mountains somewhere in the American West. “I don’ know where this puzzle come from,” he said. “I guess Claire musta found it somewheres.” He stood up and walked around to Oxana’s side of the table to see what she had accomplished.
The Captain followed Oxana’s progress—without offering assistance—for the next 30 minutes. Then he lit a cigar. Oxana coughed and waved her hand in front of her face. Eventually, The Captain took the hint and retreated to the parlor to smoke.
With the help of grim determination and a second cup of coffee, Oxana was half finished with the puzzle when Autry finally got up.
“’Bout time,” The Captain said returning to the kitchen. He was desperately eager to get on with his day. He had been tempted to go into the boy’s bedroom and yank the sheet out from under him.
Autry, who was notoriously grumpy in the morning, slumped into one of the kitchen chairs and coughed noisily. After a while he sniffed the air, made a face and said, “What’s that smell?”
Oxana paused and sniffed the cold air. This was not the pungent smell of The Captain’s cigar. It was something worse. “Oops,” she said. As The Captain and Autry watched, she went over to the corner of the kitchen and dragged a black garbage bag out of the shadows. “I didn’t know what to do with the turkey carcass yesterday,” she confessed.
“Didya think it wus gonna walk out ta the garbage can by itself?” The Captain said stepping forward. “I’ll put it out back fer Beau.”
“It’s that awful stuffing,” Autry said. “That’s what smells so bad.”
Oxana gave the knotted bag to The Captain. “Is Beau a dog?” she asked.
The Captain picked up the bag and pushed open the back door. “Beau’s an old man that lives the other side of the river an’ keeps a lotta dogs.” He stepped outside. A blast of cold air invaded the kitchen.
Autry shivered, leaned over toward Oxana and whispered. “I think I saw that old man yesterday. He has a pack of wolves that follow him around.”
The Captain came back into the kitchen and stomped his feet on a worn doormat. “The snow hasn’t started ta stick yet, but the wind’s colder’n blue blazes. Good thing I cut plenty of firewood this fall.” He sat back down at the table. “That’s another thing. We gotta go easy on the fuel. The wood an’ coal I got stored out back won’ last more’n a week, if we keep the house this hot all the time.”
Autry looked at The Captain in amazement.
Oxana thought about how cold she had been during the night. When she woke up, she thought her nose was frostbitten. When she got out of bed, put on all the clothes she had and walked to the kitchen, she could see her breath.
“What’s for breakfast?” Autry asked.
“I could fix pancakes,” Oxana said brightly. She was always the person who stepped in and offered to help when things were going badly.
The Captain pulled something out of his pocket, flipped it open and held it at arm’s length while he studied it.
Autry leaned forward with interest. “Is that a cell phone?”
“It’s my pocket watch,” The Captain said. He handed it to Autry for inspection.
It was a battered old stem-winding watch. Autry, who had only heard about watches like this, snapped it shut and studied the inscription on the cover. “Sergeant Virgil Quinn,” he read. “Sem-per… fi-del-es.”
“Like ‘Adeste fideles,’ in ‘Come All Ye Faithful’,” Oxana said.
“‘Semper fidelis’ means ‘always faithful’,” said The Captain. “That’s the motto of the Marine Corps. My men gave me that watch when I brought ’em home from the war in Korea.”
Autry seemed dubious. “I thought you were a Captain.”
The Captain stuck out his chin. “I made Captain later in the National Guard, but that wus a long time ago. Most of my men’re gone now.” He cleared his throat. “Never mind fixin’ breakfast here. Let’s go ta Imo’s.”
Oxana stood up and looked down at the puzzle, pleased with her progress. “What’s Imo’s?” She imagined a restaurant out on the freeway, which was only 15 minutes away. Although she enjoyed her own cooking, she much preferred professional pancakes when they were available.
The Captain stowed his watch in his vest pocket. “Imo’s is right here in Girouette. Just acrost the street.”
Oxana and Autry could not hide their disbelief. There could not possibly be a restaurant in Girouette. When they stepped out of The Captain’s house, they were astonished to see several pickup trucks parked down the street by the old Girouette Hotel.
Although the sun was shining brightly, the weather was bitterly cold and a fine snow covered the tracks of the children and The Captain before they got to the hotel.
“The Farmer’s Almanac perdicted a hard winter,” The Captain said. “This is the start of it, I s’pose.”
In the window of the café, next door to the hotel, there was a sign with a crowing rooster and the words, “Imo’s Home Cookin’.” Inside, the kids and their grandfather were greeted by the tinny sound of western Christmas music playing on an old jukebox and voices rising over the song. A dozen men, most of whom wore cowboy hats, greeted The Captain and motioned him over to their long table, but he waved them off and took a small table by the window. “We’re better off over here,” he told the kids. “Them fellas talk purty rough sometimes.”
Imo Apple, the restaurant’s owner, immediately came over to The Captain’s table. She wore a red bow in her gray hair and a sweatshirt with a picture of a cowboy on it. “Good mornin’, Capt’n,” she said with a pretty smile. She curtsied for the kids. “It’s nice ta see some young faces in this ol’ place.”
“This here’s Imogene Apple,” The Captain said formally, introducing her to the kids. After Imo left with their order, he explained the history of the café to the kids. “Imo’s grandparents owned the hotel when it wus a goin’ concern,” he said, “back in the 1920s. In the 1950s, the copper mine shut down an’ Girouette began to lose its young people. There wusn’ any jobs fer ’em. Imo’s parents tried ta keep the hotel goin’, but they ran outta visitors. People from all over still come ta the café though, ’cause the food’s so cheap an’ ’cause Imo’s sich a… character.”
The smoke from a big stone fireplace and a pot-bellied stove made the kids’ eyes burn at first. Somehow though, after the arrival of their breakfast—flapjacks smothered in huckleberries—they no longer minded the smoke. When the other patrons began to leave, Imo came over and sat down next to The Captain.
“Mind if I park it here fer a minute an’ drink my prune juice?” she asked in a husky, breathless voice.
“Suit yerself,” said The Captain. “I’m goin’ out front fer a smoke.” Pulling on his heavy wool jacket, The Captain went outside to enjoy his second cigar of the day. A few of the other men, who had paused to light cigarettes, gathered around him as if they were waiting to receive their marching orders.
“I heard about yer dad,” Imo said to the kids. “It’s hard ta ’magine him havin’ a stroke. ’Course, it’s hard ta ’magine him bein’ a big city lawyer, too. That’s enough ta send ya to an early grave right there.” She paused to take a sip of prune juice and looked out the window at The Captain. “Lookit ’at fella. Ain’ he somethin’? I set my cap fer him after yer grandmother died, but he wouldn’ gimme the time of day. He could use a little softenin’ up, don’ ya think? It’s ’bout time he stopped thinkin’ he wus still in the Marines an’ started showin’ some everday gentleness.”
Imo told the kids about the old days in Girouette, when there were horses tied up at the hitching rail out front and square dances in the middle of Main Street on Saturday night. Then The Captain walked back into the café, his cheeks red from the cold, and returned to his chair next to Imo.
“I jist arranged fer a couple of them fellas ta take the rental car back ta Kalispell,” The Captain said. “That’s one thing off the list.”
Imo looked at The Captain and tried to read the expression on his weathered face. “So, how’s yer son doin’? He gonna be all right?”
The Captain looked at his roughened palms, as if he were studying what to say, and came up empty-handed.
“He’ll be all right,” Oxana said firmly. “The nurse said we were lucky to get him to the hospital so fast. They have a new drug they gave him.” She paused. “He was even able to talk to me before we left.”
Autry looked up from his pancakes, obviously jealous. “No way.”
The Captain was incredulous. “How wus he able ta do that?”
“He whispered to me,” she said, “just before I left the room.”
“Well, what did he say?” Autry demanded.
“He told me not to be afraid.” Oxana’s mouth began to tremble at the edges. Always a sure sign she was ready to cry. She hated that.
“He’s gonna be okay,” Imo said. “He’s Captain Quinn’s son.” She leaned back in her chair. “Say, what’re you kids up to this afternoon? Maybe I could show ya ’round the old hotel. People came from miles around ta tour the place an’ stay overnight last Halloween. They say it’s haunted, ya know.” She winked at Oxana and drained the rest of her prune juice.
The Captain frowned at Imo. “Yer bound an’ determined ta turn this place into a tourist trap, ain’ ya?”
Oxana did not want to spend the afternoon with Imo, and she knew Autry did not want to either. The old lady, who was not much taller than Oxana, had a strange, conspiratorial way about her. There was something alarming and yet innocent in her eyes. She seemed to look right through people. Plus there was the thing about the prune juice. It smelled like the cocktail Oxana’s mother sometimes made for her father when he got home from an especially hard day in court. Nevertheless, a tour of the haunted hotel had a certain appeal.
“Sounds like a plan,” The Captain said. “I gotta run over ta Kalispell with some things fer the kids’ dad. I’ll leave the house unlocked for ’em.”
Oxana looked at The Captain in disbelief. “Can’t we go with you, Grandpa?”
“The doctor said not ta bring you kids fer a while,” he said. “Yer dad’s gonna need a little rest. It wouldn’ do fer him ta be worryin’ about you two.”
Imo patted The Captain’s arm. “You run on over ta Kalispell an’ take care of yer son,” she said. “I’ll entertain the kids after the lunch crowd leaves.”
Oxana and Autry smiled wanly at Imo and left the café dreading their next encounter with her. Around 1:30 P.M., as they watched The Captain drive off, they debated what to do about Imo.
“There’s something strange about her, if you ask me,” Oxana said. “I think she’s scary.” Oxana looked across the street at Imo’s Café. It was lunchtime now, and there were more pickup trucks parked in front of the restaurant. The rest of the town seemed completely empty.
“She’s okay,” Autry said. “Let’s go down to the river.”
“Grandpa told us not to go anywhere except the café,” Oxana protested.
“The river is right behind the café,” said Autry. “I just want to see if it’s frozen over.”
Wearing their ski parkas, coveralls and fleece-lined boots, the kids walked across the street, around the old livery stable and corral, and down to the Three Medicine River. The River was wide—much wider than Girouette’s Main Street. Sun-bleached tree trunks on the banks suggested to Oxana that it often flooded. High above it hung an old wooden footbridge suspended from rusty steel cables. Platforms on either side lifted the bridge 10 feet over the water—to keep it passable during floods, Oxana presumed. The bridge looked rickety and unused.
Oxana and Autry jumped down from the steep bank to the edge of the gravel riverbed several feet below. The water was moving fast, but ice was starting to form in the eddies. Although the weather was very cold, it seemed unlikely to Oxana the entire river could ever freeze over.
Autry threw some large stones into the river, all the while studying the footbridge. “I’m going to check out that bridge,” he said suddenly.
Oxana’s eyes narrowed. “If you do, I’ll tell Grandpa.” She hated to use that threat, but she did not want Autry going up on the bridge.
As they were facing off over whether or not Autry would go up on the footbridge, the kids realized they were not alone. Above their heads on the riverbank, they saw eight broad-shouldered wolves staring down at them and listening intently with their ears turned forward.
Autry leapt backward, almost falling into the water. Oxana reached out and caught him by the wrist. She pulled him back from the river’s edge and held onto his arm for dear life. Before either of them could decide on a course of action, they heard a shrill whistle and the wolves disappeared.
The kids ran to a cut in the bank and peered over the top. Behind the café, they saw the ragged old man Autry had seen the day before, just before their father had his stroke.
“That’s the man I was telling you about,” Autry whispered. He grabbed Oxana’s hand. “The old man with the wolves. That’s Beau.”
As they watched, the tattered old man foraged through a small dumpster behind the café and tossed several handfuls of scraps to the wolves, which ate the offerings eagerly. Then he turned and began walking slowly toward the river and the footbridge. Over his shoulder, he carried a black plastic garbage bag, possibly the one The Captain had left outside that morning. Autry gripped Oxana’s hand firmly and pulled her down beneath an overhang in the bank. After a minute, the kids saw the cables on the footbridge grow taut and begin to shake.
Very deliberately, the old man climbed the steps and walked out onto the shaking footbridge, the wolves following reluctantly behind him. Oxana let out a gasp. The bridge looked as dangerous as a tightrope to her. With his walking stick stuck through his belt and the garbage bag tied around his arm, the old man held onto the cables with his bare hands and stepped out onto the bridge.
The bridge tilted violently to one side and the other as he began to cross it. Every step he took looked like it would be his last as he struggled to keep his balance on the icy boards. In the middle of the bridge, he turned and looked back toward the overhang where Oxana and Autry were hidden. His stare was so blank, the kids wondered if he were blind. At this point, several of the wolves lost their balance and plunged into the water. They swam to the opposite bank as fast as they could and shook themselves wildly. If the old man had fallen in, he would surely have died in the icy torrent. When he finally made it to the other side, he slowly climbed the steep hill to a cabin, which was built into the side of the earth. After all of the wolves had assembled beside him, he opened the door and disappeared inside with them.
Immediately, the kids climbed the riverbank and ran back around the corral to the café. The trucks were gone now. Autry tried the door to the café but found it was locked. He had to pound on the door with his fist before Imo appeared from the rear of the restaurant and slowly made her way to the front door. Along the way, she paused and put an empty glass down on a nearby table.
“C’mon in,” she said in her strange little voice. “I jist need ta getta sweater. Then we’ll go next door.”
The kids were eager to share what they had just seen with Imo, but she disappeared into the kitchen and was gone for several minutes. When she returned, she was wearing a well worn pullover and talking a mile a minute about the cowboy who had proposed to her at lunch and the grizzly bear that was believed to be hibernating in the old copper mine. Oxana and Autry knew Imo had been drinking her special prune juice mixture and decided to wait until later to ask her about the old man, Beau, and the wolves.
Still talking nonstop, Imo searched through a big ring of keys until she found the one that unlocked a door hidden behind a fake palm tree near the fireplace. The door opened into a closet next to the fireplace in the old Girouette Hotel. “Here ya go!” she said.
Oxana and Autry were impressed by the size of the lobby. A bar adorned with a mottled old mirror ran along the back wall and tall windows lined the front. There were a number of six-sided tables—where the cowboys used to play poker, Imo explained—and at the far end of the room between the bar and the huge fireplace there was a grand stairway. The lobby was cold, but the light from the windows made it seem warm.
Imo walked over to where the tables stood and pointed to a brass pot sitting on the floor. “Ya know what that is?” she asked the kids.
Oxana and Autry stared at the pot. There were several others sitting on the floor underneath the tables. Neither of the kids cared to speculate on what the pots had been used for.
“That’s a spittoon,” Imo said. “When the cowboys wus playin’ cards, they’d spit their tobacca juice in there. That wus one of my least favorite jobs as a little girl, I’ll tell ya, emptyin’ them spittoons. The only thing worse would be emptyin’ the chamber pots. Chamber pots wus what people did their other business in at night when it wus too cold ta go outside.”
Oxana made a face.
“C’mon,” Imo said. “I’ll show ya upstairs.”
The rooms were very dusty and some of the furniture was overturned, but the hotel seemed in good condition. It looked as if everything had been frozen in time many years earlier.
“Can we go up to the roof?” Autry asked. He had noticed a little, open cupola on the roof at the front of the hotel.
“Not this time,” Imo said. “My heart cain’t take the altitude up there. Maybe you kin go up there with The Captain sometime.” She escorted the kids back down the steps, pausing to tell the stories behind a bullet hole in the banister, a cowboy’s name carved in a windowsill and a coffin under the stairway.
Finally, before returning to the café, Imo walked over to a plaque that had been hung on the wall just inside the front door. She pulled her sweater down over the palm of her hand and wiped away the dust. “Site of Christmas Eve Mystery—December 1940.”
“What happened on Christmas Eve in 1940?” Oxana asked.
Imo smiled and turned back toward the café. “That’s a story fer another time. I’m runnin’ outa gas. I will tell ya one thing though.”
“What?” said Autry, suddenly interested.
Imo opened the door to the café and ushered the kids back into it. “Everbody that’s still livin’ in Girouette, includin’ The Captain, wus here in the hotel that Christmas Eve and witnessed the mystery. An’ everbody here that night still has one thing in common.”
“What?” asked Oxana breathlessly.
“What?” asked Autry impatiently.
Imo paused for effect, smiled and then became very serious. “We all believe in Santy Claus!”
“You’re kidding,” said Autry.
“That’s our little secret,” Imo said. “Sure as God made little green apples, we all believe in Santy Claus. Now you two run along. I gotta git my beauty rest.”
The kids zipped up their parkas and stepped out onto the boardwalk in front of the café. The door rattled shut behind them and Imo was gone.
Autry laughed. “They all believe in Santa Claus? That’s crazy. Nobody believes in Santa Claus. At least nobody I know.” He walked out into the middle of the street and stared up at the old brick building with “Girouette Dispatch” painted on the door. The wind was blowing harder now, refusing to allow the snow to settle on the ground.
“I still believe,” Oxana said, so quietly Autry could not quite hear her.
Autry turned and looked back. “What did you say?”
Oxana looked down the empty street, which lay in shadow now, and sighed. “Oh, nothing.”
Oh, little town of Girouette—nestled in the foothills
Chapter Three
Looking Back Through the Pages of Time
Autry studied the buildings. There were clean white curtains in the upstairs windows of the Dispatch Building, otherwise the brick structure looked ancient and desolate. Next to it stood a wooden building with the letters “IOOF” faintly visible across the top. “Eye-oof,” Autry said. “I wonder what ‘eye-oof’ means?” Suddenly he felt very lonely. Even though Oxana was standing there next him. He wanted to be back in San Francisco, hanging out with his friends, getting ready for Christmas, going to school, even doing his homework. Anything would be better than this.
“Let’s go back to The Captain’s house,” Oxana said, “and work on the jigsaw puzzle.”
“Boring,” Autry grumbled.
“Let’s go play with Dad’s computer then,” Oxana suggested. As she spoke, she noticed one of the curtains in the Dispatch Building had been pulled aside and someone was looking down at them.
“The laptop isn’t working,” Autry said. “My cell phone isn’t working either. Nothing works in this town.” The kids and their father had not planned on being in Girouette longer than their batteries would last.
“Do you see what I see?” Oxana asked. The late afternoon sun was reflecting off the second-story window in the Dispatch Building where a person stood watching them.
Autry shaded his eyes and squinted. “Yeh. There’s someone looking at us and….”
“And what?” Oxana asked.
“And he’s motioning for us to come up.”
The kids walked reluctantly the rest of the way across the street. They could see now that an elderly man stood in the window. His wave was so mechanical he looked like a mannequin in a theme park. They were still gaping at the upstairs window when the front door to the Dispatch Building was suddenly thrust open. Autry and Oxana, startled, simultaneously cried out “Shutka!”—the Russian curse word their mother had taught them.
A demure lady, roughly Imo’s age, stepped out and surveyed the street. “Come on in! It’s too cold for man or beast out here.”
The inside of the bottom floor of the Dispatch Building was cold and cavernous, much like the old hotel. At the front of the building, there were little offices enclosed in dusty glass. At the back of the building was an enormous piece of machinery. It was made out of black metal, it was very heavy looking, it had wheels and levers sticking out in all directions, and it had an elevated platform that ran alongside of it.
“Is that a printing press?” Autry asked, without bothering to introduce himself.
“It is,” the lady said, pulling a pretty cardigan sweater tight around her shoulders. “It’s a Heidleberg. Still in working order as far as we know.”
Uninvited, as if in a spell, Autry walked back to where the printing press stood and climbed onto the platform. The thought of printing something on this enormous machine—as opposed to the little printer that sat next to his computer in his bedroom at home—was mind boggling to him. The smell of the press, a mixture of oil and ink, was intoxicating.
“Look here,” the lady said to Oxana. She walked over to one of the tall wooden cabinets that stood near the printing press and pulled out a shallow drawer. The drawer, which was divided into little squares, was full of tiny metal letters and numbers. “That’s how you printed a newspaper in the old days,” she said laughing. “You had to line up every letter by hand and lay out the whole thing in a galley tray. It took hours to set one page in a galley tray. Writing was the easy part. Setting the type was the hard part. And Lord help you, if you dropped one of those trays.”
The lady went on happily as if she had known the kids all their lives. “A young compositor dropped a galley tray one day and the type went flying in every direction. Mr. deSpain, my husband, went upstairs, laid down on his bed and wouldn’t come down the rest of the day. I was left down here to comfort the boy who dropped the tray. The boy was so shaken, I was afraid he was going to go throw himself into the river.”
Autry was transfixed. He stared at the press and tried to imagine what it would have been like to be a printer’s helper at the Dispatch in the old days.
“All right now. Enough about this old press. My name is Joe deSpain—that’s Joe for Josephine—and my husband, Edgar, is upstairs. He doesn’t like to go up and down more than he has to. We’ve been waiting for you.”
Though she was old, Joe seemed to float up the stairway to the second floor of the Dispatch Building. The kids had to run to keep up with her. At the top of the stairs, a kindly looking man wearing a neat wool suit stood waiting for them. “Here they are, dear,” Joe said. “Here’s Hansel and Gretel.” She laughed merrily.
“Edgar deSpain the Third,” the man said jovially. “Editor and Chief, retired, Girouette Dispatch. Welcome to the back pages of history!” He bowed slightly to Oxana, then smoothed out his wispy white mustache, turned to Autry and shook his hand.
The door to the upstairs parlor was open, and the kids could see a fire burning brightly inside. Just maybe, they thought, there was one place in Girouette that was warm.
Instead of going directly to the parlor, however, Mr. deSpain took Autry by the elbow. “Here,” he said softly, “I want to show you the fruits of my labor.” He opened the door on a large room that was full of bookshelves. There were scores of large hardbound volumes of the Girouette Dispatch along with stacks of newspapers bound with twine. “These volumes represent nearly 100 years of American history,” he said proudly, “as it was seen through the eyes of the Dispatch. Or at least through the eyes of Edgar deSpain One, Two and Three.”
Mr. deSpain flipped on a light switch and disappeared down one of the aisles of shelves. “Autry,” he called out, “would you come here and give me a hand, please?”
Autry glanced at Oxana. How did Edgar deSpain the Third know his name? He shrugged and followed the old man into the rows of bookshelves.
“Here,” Mr. deSpain called from the end of an aisle, “climb up on this.” He motioned to a small stepladder that stood in the middle of the aisle.
Autry climbed to the top of the ladder.
“Find the volume titled ‘November-December 1940’ and hand it down to me.”
Autry pulled out a heavy leather-bound volume and handed it carefully to Mr. deSpain.
“Let’s see what happened on this day in Girouette all those years ago,” the man said.
The deSpain’s parlor was as warm as the fire had advertised it would be and, unlike The Captain’s house, sweet smelling and inviting. The walls were covered with green wallpaper that looked like faded velvet, and the last of the winter sunlight poured in through the tall windows. There was a gold-colored wing chair next to the fire, with an old, fringed floor lamp standing behind it and two foot stools in front.
Edgar deSpain the Third sat down in the chair, smoothed back his long white hair and motioned for the kids to sit on the stools.
When the kids had taken their seats, Joe deSpain offered them each a large cookie. “Imo’s cowgirl cookies. People come from miles away to get these. There’s milk in the pitcher here,” she said, “if you’re thirsty.” She put a plate with extra cookies on the sideboard and took her place in a chair on the other side of the fireplace.
“As you can see,” Edgar said pointing to the cover of the book he held in his lap, “the year was 1940—a lifetime ago.”
Edgar had a very pleasant way of unfolding a story that was clear from the moment he began to tell it. He was old by the sound of his voice but young by the light in his eyes.
Autry looked across Edgar’s lap at Oxana. Although he normally did not worry about Oxana, he was happy to see her smiling. He knew she was thinking, just as he was, about the plaque in the hotel. About Girouette’s Christmas Eve mystery.
Edgar opened the book and found what he was looking for in the middle of it. “Friday, November 29, 1940,” he studied the front page of that day’s newspaper. “It was the day after Thanksgiving….” He adjusted his glasses, licked his thumb and turned to the back of that edition. As he settled back to read, Joe spoke up.
“Edgar and I were about your age then,” she explained. “We both grew up here. Except for a short period of time when we went away to college, we’ve spent our entire lives here.”
“Where did you go to college?” Oxana asked.
“We both went to college down in your area,” Edgar said. “I went to Stanford and Joe went to University of California at Berkeley. Every year when Stanford plays Cal in football, I put on red, she puts on blue, and we don’t speak to each other the whole day long.”
Joe closed her eyes. “Fight for California,” she sang in a wobbly voice, “for California through and through!”
Not to be outdone, Edgar sang, “With might and main, we sing this refrain, forever Stanford red!!”
Joe sighed and rolled back her eyes. “Go ahead and read your story, Edgar,” she said settling in her chair.
“Old rivalries never die,” Edgar said smiling. Then he explained what he was about to read. “In the 1930s and 40s, all the kids that lived around here listened to a local radio show on Station KMTN called ‘Rocky Mountain Santa.’ It was hosted by a fellow named Montana Mike. We would run home from school everyday between Thanksgiving and Christmas, curl up in front of the radio and listen to one of his stories.”
“He was sponsored by Sodbuster Cereal,” Joe said. “We still had that same cereal until a few years ago.”
“That sounds kind of familiar,” Oxana said. “Doesn’t it, Autry?”
Autry was standing now, looking over Edgar’s shoulder, transfixed by a drawing of a Santa Claus wearing cowboy boots and a Stetson hat above a story that covered the entire back page of the Dispatch, except for a Sodbuster Cereal advertisement. “Yes,” Autry said quietly, with no idea what Oxana had just asked him.
“My dad, Edgar the Second, who was editor at the time, would listen to the radio with me after the paper had been printed,” Edgar said. “The moment Rocky Mountain Santa was over he would sit down and transcribe the story, as best he could remember it, and print it the next day in the newspaper so everyone could enjoy it. Here’s the story from the day after Thanksgiving in 1940.” As Edgar began to read, he transformed his voice into what Montana Mike might have sounded like all those years ago.
“From Santa’s Rocky Mountain Headquarters on Going-to-the-Sun Road, Glacier National Park, Montana, U.S.A….” Edgar read. “Well, we had ourselves a mite of trouble here in the Rockies yesterday. Santa was stretched out on the old sofa in his office over the reindeer shed getting ready for a nap when Mr. McNish, the elf wrangler, ran into the room. McNish was fit to be tied. ‘There’s a dang grizzly in the train yard!’ he cried. “He’s tearin’ up the place an’ scarin’ the elves somethin’ awful.’ Now, as you kids all know, Santa’s Rocky Mountain Headquarters is divided up into a series of caves that go way down into the heart of the mountain, and every cave is a warehouse for a different kind of toy. Most of the toys are made in Santa’s main factory at the North Pole and shipped down to Montana for assembly and testing. Then they are delivered to boys and girls in the northwest U.S. and Canada on Christmas Eve. The cave we call The Train Yard—the biggest cave of all—is where all the toy trains are assembled.”