Earth Colors Read online

  I got up from the computer and crossed the room to the windows. The Oquirrhs were now brilliant white in the full strength of morning. Romantic Realism; this I understood. This was the Code of the West.

  But Remington had been a man’s man in the closing days of the Old West, and I was a woman in the new West, hitting bottom while standing in for a man who had died too soon. I made a rotten daddy: I was more of a deadbeat than a breadwinner. In the movies, I’d be the aging spinster stuck in some dusty Western town who had discovered too late that all she wanted was to be someone’s mother. I needed what Remington had had, a true love who waited patiently at home while I traveled to seek inspiration. Instead, I was in love with a man who did the adventuring while I stayed behind with no home and with growing impatience. Not for the first time, I railed against the ambiguities of being born female.

  The sharp line of the Oquirrhs swam in my vision. I wanted adventure, I wanted professional satisfaction, I wanted marriage, and I wanted motherhood. And I wanted to stay home and out of trouble, I wanted to be looked after, I wanted to quit hiding in a failed relationship, and I wanted to stake my own mother out over an anthill and dribble syrup over her traitorous, ranch-selling hide.

  I blinked, and the scene outside my window was momentarily sharp and clear.

  In that instant, Fritz Calder jogged by. He glanced toward the window where I was standing and waved, and when I waved back, he stopped, jogged in place, and made a gesture designed to get me to open the window. When I did so, he said, “I’m still going to Baltimore next Monday. Have you changed your mind?”

  I smiled wanly and shook my head. “Too much to do,” I answered.

  “Okay, then, will you water my houseplants?”

  “Sure.”

  “Thanks.” He paused a moment. “Are you sure you won’t come? Life is short, Em.”

  “I’m sure,” I said, absurdly complimented that he had remembered my name.

  He gave me an ironic smile, and said, “Okay, but you can still change your mind. It’s the final frontier, y’know.” Then he threw his body out of neutral and back into forward gear and disappeared down the sidewalk.

  Smiling at his jest, I fought my way back across the room and into the book, thinking, Another adventure lost because life’s just too unromantically real.

  I began to skim forward in Hassrick’s narrative of Remington’s life, looking for additional significant facts to decant into my computer.

  Remington enjoyed great success as an illustrator, but his longing for recognition as a “painter’s painter” pressed him to stretch his skills. As a member of the American Impressionist movement, he finally did succeed, enjoying many shows at Knoedler’s. Then late in 1909, at the age of forty-eight, Remington developed appendicitis, underwent surgery, and abruptly died.

  Forty-eight. I was now a scant decade short of that mark, and I had little to show for my life but a handful of obscure mentions in the case files of a scattering of jurisdictions, a tattered bachelor’s in geology, a few friends I found it hard to be close with, fond memories of a girlhood on the prairies of eastern Wyoming, and a painful love for a baby who was not my own. That baby now slept peacefully, cuddled against the warm body of her mother. She was over her colic. She no longer needed to be walked in the night, nor did Faye seem to need me to take her very often during the day. I briefly considered finding ways I could contract appendicitis myself, but Remington had died unintentionally, and at the center of the creative force, at the top of his form. I was in a slump, no place to quit. Such an ignominious death would hardly have people writing books about me.

  So, how are you going to make something of your life? I asked myself. Do you think it’s easy to go out on top? Remington traveled west many times to collect inspiration, and wrestled with his muse. His success was hard-won!

  I decided in that moment that it was time that I took charge of my life and started to make something of it; became proactive rather than always just reacting to the next emergency. And if going west worked for Remington, perhaps going east would work for me. Fritz Calder was going to Baltimore in a few days, and Baltimore was not far from Washington, D.C., the home of the FBI labs and half a dozen world-class museums I was sure would be chockablock with specialists who could tell me all about artists’ pigments. Why talk on the phone when I could visit the specialists in person?

  I got up and tugged on some shoes and headed out the front door, hurried down the sidewalk, and knocked on Fritz’s door.

  He answered barefoot, stripped down to a T-shirt and shorts, a towel around his neck. Smiling like he already knew the answer, he asked, “What can I do for you this lovely morning?”

  “I’ve changed my mind. Take me with you to Baltimore, Fritz,” I said. “You’re right. Life is short, and it’s time for my next adventure.”

  13

  Vermillion is red mercuric sulfide. It is found in nature as cinnabar, which is the principle ore of the metal mercury, and as such is highly toxic.

  —from the notebooks of Fred Petridge

  AS JENNIFER NEUMANN WALKED UP THE EMPTY GRADE THAT LED to the west portal of the Big Savage railroad tunnel, she opened the throat of her denim jacket and patted its heavily studded collar into place. It was a fine spring day, and she was enjoying the tight green buds that were starting to appear on the trees lining the right-of-way through the Allegheny Mountains. The Big Savage Tunnel was a wonderful challenge, part of Pennsylvania’s Rails-to-Trails project, which sought to increase hiking and biking recreation while preserving the transit heritage that was such a key part of the state’s history. Many miles of disused railroad grades had been salvaged for use by hikers and bikers, just the kind of people she wanted to keep happy and entertained: Well-educated people were often interested in fitness, and it was well-educated people who wanted to invest their charity dollars in the cause of preserving heritage. The 3,295-foot-long Big Savage Tunnel was the engineering masterpiece of the Connellsville extension of the Western Maryland Railway, a whole system of viaducts and tunnels that had been a marvel of engineering for that time.

  Pennsylvania Geologic Survey geologist Fred Petridge walked alongside her. “It’s a joy to help bring this tunnel back into use,” she told him.

  He smiled wryly. “I know you’re a heritage buff, Jenny,” he said in his soft Southern lilt, “but do you know how many men died digging this thing? Is that part of the package that inspires you?”

  “It’s sad that the toll was so heavy. But I like to think of it in terms of effort, not loss.”

  Fred shook his head and smiled. “You sure have your way of looking at things. Sometimes the dead were interred in concrete culverts and underpasses along the construction sites. They were paid eighty cents a day. At the height of construction, they had twenty-seven hundred men here, working thirty shovels, three hundred donkeys, and forty-one narrow-gauge locomotives. Construction of the west end of the tunnel was hindered by quicksand. There was a sinkhole in the Loyalhanna limestone, and—”

  “That’s why I love it when you come along, Fred. You tell me the geology connected to these sites.”

  “Flattery will get you lots of places, Jenny. But this site is all about geology. Or to take it back another notch, it’s all thermodynamics. Think on it: The exchange of heat from the center of the earth to its crust sets up convective flow in the mantle. As the motion of the mantle pushes on the crust, it breaks up into sections and slides around with the flow. Of course, an alternate model says that the crust is pulled around by sinking slabs, not pushed, but—”

  Jenny smiled. “You were telling me about the Alleghenies.”

  Fred nodded. “Part of that motion has opened and closed the Atlantic Ocean more than once, and every time it slams shut, it wrinkles up the crust and forms us some mountains. Voilà, Allegheny Mountains. Also, during one of the open phases, there was ocean here, and the Loyalhanna limestone was deposited.”

  “And I didn’t even have to go to college to learn all
that,” Jenny said. Fred waved an arm at the mountain that rose in front of them. “This tunnel also cuts through the eastern divide. All streams east of here flow into the Atlantic; everything west, the Gulf of Mexico.”

  “And we’re within a stone’s throw of the Mason-Dixon Line,” Jenny added. “That’s why we get along, Fred. We’re both interested in history, it’s just that you add a few zeros to the time numbers.”

  “More than a few, Jenny. You’re dealing with hundreds of years. I’m talking about hundreds of millions.”

  Jenny truly did enjoy Fred’s company. He was a nice sort, amiable and intelligent, and good in the out-of-doors. Too bad he wore a ring on the third finger of his left hand. She loved the causes she supported, truly she did, but every once in a while it did occur to her that it would be nice to have a man to come home to, and eventually a couple of kids. And a dog, she thought. A big, shaggy sheepdog would be very, very nice. Jenny twitched—a quick, sharp motion of her head and neck—an unconscious motion meant to shake loose the temptation of thinking about such elusive gratifications.

  “Are you okay?” asked Fred.

  Jenny flushed slightly, embarrassed to be caught showing her thoughts in public. “Just fine!” she answered, a bit too brightly. “I was just thinking about something, is all.”

  “What?”

  She pointed up at the sky. A flock of geese were passing in classic V formation. “Know why one side of the V is longer than the other?”

  “No,” said Fred. “Why?”

  “More geese.”

  Fred laughed appreciatively, then said, “But you were looking at your feet when you twitched. Come on, Jenny, what’s up?”

  As Jenny flipped through her mental files, seeking an excuse for her preoccupation, the Krehbeil farm situation hit her psychic windscreen like a fat June bug. “Well, you know I’m also working on the farmlands preservation in Lancaster County,” she said.

  “You have quite a reputation as a go-getter, Jenny, mixed up in all sorts of conservation projects. It doesn’t surprise me in the least that you’d be involved with that one, too.”

  Jenny smiled. “I suppose. Well, you know how it goes: The farmers aren’t making that much, and they get offered all that money by the developers to sell out.”

  “You’re preaching to the choir,” said Fred, encouraging her story.

  “Well, as you probably know, then, there are two formal entities in Lancaster County that are trying to save open spaces, as well as the farming lifestyle, by purchasing the development easements from the farmers. But the county is short of funds, and can only purchase the best, most-threatened farms each year, and the private organization doesn’t pay as much. In fact, they rely on the farmer being rich enough to donate the easements. And they deal mostly with the Mennonite and Amish farms. So what happens when you have a farmer who’s down on his luck, the farm’s soils aren’t the very finest limestone-based soils, and he isn’t in good standing with one of the churches?”

  “I can see where that might get complicated,” said Fred.

  “I’ve been trying to help several farms. One in particular seems to be going to hell in a handbasket. One of the owners is dead and the other looks like she’s about to join him. That would leave it to four grown offspring, and that’s a problem.”

  “One or more will want their cash value out of the place.”

  “That’s what I’m afraid of.”

  “Perhaps this family believes in primogeniture.”

  “Ah, yes: leaving everything to the eldest.”

  “It works for the British. They tend to be royalists, so they like the firstborn-takes-all system. But over here in Yankeeland, we like to split things even Steven. We’re egalitarian, or so we kid ourselves. Things get messy very easily, because no two siblings have the same ideas about a piece of property, and it’s amazing how quickly they’ll get to fighting over a little bit of turf.”

  Jenny gave Fred a sideways look. “I didn’t know you were a royalist, Fred.”

  “I’m not. Far be it.”

  “But it sounds like you know a lot about this kind of issue.”

  Fred gave an ironic grin and stared off into the trees. “Too much. I’m a third son, myself. Anyway, there are ways of doping this kind of problem out.”

  “Such as?”

  “Well, where there’s one piece of land in a family, there often can be two or three. If they aren’t Amish or Mennonite they’re probably not really making a living at farming anymore anyway, so why not carve up the farm? Or one can take cash and another takes furniture and the third takes land. Or take all but one of the offspring out and shoot them; that would help the overpopulation problem in the bargain. Or just take the brawling brats to a mediator. Or leave the lot to the Wednesday Afternoon Literary Society.”

  “The what?”

  “Oh, it’s a drinking organization my grandmother belonged to in Wisconsin.”

  “I like your first idea best. But how can I find out if the Krehbeils own other parcels?”

  Fred cocked his head in surprise. “You don’t know how to go online and run the county GIS system?”

  Jenny pursed her lips. “That sounds like computer talk.”

  “‘GIS’ stands for Geographic Information System. It’s one of the things that computers are truly good for. The idea is that huge amounts of data are stored in layers, like transparent maps, and you can look at any number of layers at a time, all superimposed and at the same scale. That way you can cross-correlate say, geology and landownership at a glance.”

  They had arrived at the portal of the tunnel, a concrete arch surrounded by a jutting rock face. Colleagues were already there, hardhats on, working on maintenance projects.

  “There’s my baby,” said Fred. “Nothing I like better than a combination of my two favorite passions: geology and railroads. Mm-hm.”

  “Do you understand what caused the cave-in?” asked Jenny.

  “You mean back when the tunnel was originally built?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, there are two limestone units in the rock sequence that makes up the rocks the tunnel was driven through, the Loyalhanna and Deer Valley limestones. They’re about forty to fifty feet thick,” he explained. “The rock formations were tipped up on edge by the forces that formed these mountains.” He made a big gesture like he was compressing an accordion. “As you know, limestone dissolves easily in waters that percolate down through it; the groundwater comes down through the fractures in the rock, dissolving calcite along the way, so the cracks become caverns over thousands or millions of years.” He had begun to use his hands to express the third and fourth dimensions of what he was saying. “So, it’s speculated that one of these caverns had filled with water and silt and other materials, and when the tunnelers hit the pocket, it emptied catastrophically, killing a bunch of them.”

  “And a lot of other workers who came in after that,” said Jenny.

  Fred shrugged, the embarrassed tacit apology of the twenty-first–century man observing the sacrifices of those who built his conveniences at the expense of their lives. “I know. It’s alarming how many people died building this tunnel. A hundred, or even two. No one kept good records. Nowadays, we shut down a public-works project if even one person dies, and we mire it in expensive investigations.” He winked at Jenny. “Making it too expensive for projects you oppose to go forward.”

  Jenny tipped her head to one side and gave a prim smile. “I have been known to bring a lawsuit here and there.”

  “God bless the POSH Foundation.”

  Jenny winced. “I just hate it when people call it that.”

  “Then change the name,” Fred kidded. “Or I’m gonna continue to josh you about naming it POSH.” He turned back to the tunnel. “Anyway, it’s a sign of our changing times—our greater state of civilization, if you will—that we now care so much for our workers that we do better by them than just carting their corpses up the mountain and pitching them into the hole
that was formed when the tunnel collapsed on them.”

  Jenny wrinkled up her nose. “I know. That’s the sad part of this project. Those poor men dug their own graves.”

  “Yeah.”

  The idea of graves brought the Krehbeil family back to mind. Father Krehbeil was dead, and now Mother was sick. Jenny wondered if they would be buried together out at the edge of one of their fields. The idea was so romantic that it sent surges of passion through her body. “I’ve seen the old limestone grave-markers out on the farmlands,” she said.

  Fred gave Jenny a sly look. “Yes, and those gravestones have a way of falling down, and too often get leaned up against a tree, and then the tree dies and falls down as time passes, and eventually no one knows where the old bones of Great-Granddad and Great-Grandmom are any more.”

  “They are united with their heritage,” she said.

  “Right. I wonder how many developers have kicked up an ancestor or two in the process of digging basements for all those McMansions. You ought to look into that, Jenny. That would be even better than chaining yourself to a tree or something to prevent grounds-breaking. Just go out there and watch through your binoculars and wait for a thigh bone to come cartwheeling out of the backhoe’s bucket.”

  “Fred, you are a kidder …” Jenny said, but already she was envisioning herself lying patiently in a portable blind, waiting for the developer with his chrome-plated shovel to come out for the grounds-breaking ceremony. “But you were also mentioning this GIF thing.”

  “GIS.”