HANNAH’S MIRACLES
By
D.L. Chance
Gold in California!
Silver in Nevada! Gold in Montana and Idaho! Silver in Arizona and New Mexico
and Utah! Gold and silver in Colorado
– lots of it. They’re taking it out by the ton. Why, in the Pikes
Peak country alone they’re drinking from the streams and picking
riches from their teeth!
Let’s go! Let’s get up to the Victor
diggings. Let’s stake out a claim in Anaconda. Let’s catch a ride to Cripple
Creek, and do it now!
But it wasn’t easy. It was hard. When
determined, hard-natured men moved into hard country and faced hard winters to
scratch a hard living by hardrock mining, they sometimes brought along their
equally hard-natured women.
But more often than not, they made
do with the life-hardened women already there; the women who were always there,
no matter where the gold strike happened.
Cripple Creek
was booming in 1895. Squatting just inside the cone of the huge extinct volcano
forming the western-facing secret side of Pikes Peak, the wealthy mining town
boasted every luxury of life teams of sweaty horses could drag over the
mountains from Denver, seventy-five miles to the northwest as the wind blows or
a good hundred or more miles off as the rutted wagon trails lay.
Claim speculators, mineral brokers,
equipment salesmen, second-hand equipment salesmen, undertakers, gamblers, lawyers
and every other kind of criminal, crook and conman afoot prowled the town’s muddy
streets every day the dawn broke over the Peak, while a growing army of miners,
teamsters, shopkeepers, blacksmiths and dreamers of all the other trades necessary
to support such a thriving mining district held onto their wallets and hoped
the next big-money deal would be the score that led them back to a gentler
climate somewhere at a lower altitude. To a place where the beds were clean, the
whisky was not watered down, and lovers were willing for reasons other than the
asking price.
Women coming to such a place wanted
the same things as the men. But, while men just might see their golden dreams
realized no matter how impossible the dreams might seem, for the women it would
take a miracle.
And sometimes, those miracles happened.
High up near the top of the Cripple
Creek tenderloin, among the filthy mine tailings and soot-belching mills where
three shifts of double-jackers, powderhands and muckmen plodded past their
doors in a never ending stream of grimy humanity, those brave and often aging
courtesans preferring to go it alone without the protection of regular pimps, parlor
houses and madams arranged their own little district into orderly rows simply
called The Line.
There, a prostitute known only by
the name of Hannah shared a neat three-room crib with a longtime friend and
business partner known only by the name of Little Sweet Pea.
Through at least a dozen of the
biggest mining booms to hit the west, and numerous smaller ones – they’d long
ago lost count – Hannah and Little Sweet Pea had survived an endless succession
of tent cities, roadside hovels, dancehalls, barrooms and street corners by the
time the unusually harsh winter of 1895 settled so early and heavily on the always
frosty shoulders of the Pikes Peak region.
The first deep snows blowing in
during the middle weeks of September that year would have buried a less robust
mining camp. But Cripple Creekers just shrugged into an extra set of longjohns,
hitched up their britches, buttoned up their coats, and went on gouging wealth
from the generous hillsides. Like everyone else, Hannah and Little Sweet Pea
made do the best they knew how.
They’d already learned life’s harder
lessons as those lessons applied to them.
Little Sweet Pea was a
southern-born mulatto who never knew exactly which field buck sharecropping for
the nearby plantation cuckolded the man she grew up calling Daddy. He must have
been no more than a quadroon himself though, to account for her mild but distinctively
African features – looks that made her so different from the other eight
children born in her own wretched family’s crumbling sharecropper shack.
But she did know that by the time
she turned fourteen, the men who came around bearing the gifts she could keep
if only she’d please them in very private and often very demeaning ways were paying
her shiftless father far more for her attentions than she was getting from
them. Or him. As she continued to develop into a stunning high-yellow goldmine
for her trashy old daddy, and the only hard-cash income for eleven hungry
mouths, she began to wonder why she shouldn’t just keep all the gold for
herself.
One night, promising to give herself
wholly to a wealthy local banker with illegal tastes in intimate man/woman relations
if only he’d take her into town, she slipped out of the tumbledown house. She
robbed the banker and left him chained naked in his office; knowing he’d never
admit to attempting unspeakable sexual acts with, or being robbed by, what was
essentially a little girl. Especially one with black blood running in her veins.
The next morning’s sunrise found
her awake, alert and taking personal inventory on a train farther away from
home than she had ever been in her short life. She’d cried for awhile in the
darkness, weeping bitterly over her loss of childhood, modesty, virtue and,
even as bad as it was, the only life she had ever known.
But with the sun came the life-changing realization that she owned
herself fully now – her mind and her hopes along with her body – and the hard determination
that she would survive in the world, no matter what the uncaring world may come
up with to defeat her. In that cold, gray light of dawn, she wiped her eyes for
the last time and made the resolute, unshakable decision to never, ever, let
herself cry again.
She left the name she was born with
in the dead past, along with those who birthed her.
A portly old Louisiana
judge later took to calling her Little Sweet Pea during the year he allowed her
to “work off” a petty theft charge in the luxurious New
Orleans apartment he kept secret from his wife,
children, grandchildren, and at least one other mistress. She liked the name so
much that she kept it, along with the detestable fat bastard’s massive gold
watch and chain, when she boarded a northbound riverboat at the invitation of a
scheming first mate who mistook an innocent-sounding alias and an even more
innocent-looking face for genuine innocence.
A couple years later, she met
Hannah in an upscale St. Louis
brothel.
At nineteen, Hannah was new to the
prostitutes’ trade when the little dab of hard cash she’d been able to steal
from her wealthy family’s Boston home ran out on the west bank of the
Mississippi River.
Because Hannah bore them a grandson
without the blessed sanction of a showy church marriage – an unforgivable
offense in that time, place and social standing – the stern old Yankee
patricians who somehow became intimate with each other long enough to produce
her turned her out penniless to starve or freeze; they didn’t care which after
she firmly refused to quietly enter a French convent in disgrace.
But they did keep the boy. They hid
his parentage as deeply and securely as they’d buried the shame-laden secret of
their Black Irish lineage, and explained away his presence to friends and
acquaintances as the orphan child of recently departed relatives. This was
mostly the truth given the circumstances they’d forced onto Hannah and the young
maritime officer she’d intended to marry before his whaling ship was last
glimpsed going down during a vicious winter squall off Nova Scotia.
Little Sweet Pea had once promised
herself she’d never get close to another human being again. But when Hannah showed
up at the bordello hungry, exhausted and desperate, Little Sweet Pea realized
she still retained more human compassion than she would have previously bet
good money on.
Ordinarily, Hannah’s generous mane
of dark chestnut curls, delicate alabaster skin and shocking blue eyes, along
with a petite, compact body and a gracefully genteel manner, would have made
her Little Sweet Pea’s business rival and instant enemy. But Little Sweet Pea was
also smart enough to recognize Hannah’s potential value as an ally in the callous
industry of selling carefully measured rations of feminine virtue to strangers.
Soon, to her surprise, she soon knew
Hannah’s value as a genuine friend, too.
Though Little Sweet Pea was a
journeyman in the flesh trade, having served out her apprenticeship as a child,
Hannah was never able to distance herself – her mind and spirit – from her body
in the act of earning her living. With Little Sweet Pea’s guidance, Hannah learned
to please the nameless, faceless, soulless men who drifted unremembered through
her life. In return, Hannah taught Little Sweet Pea how to read books and
figure numbers, along with the refined, ladylike attributes of a woman born to
high social standing. Little Sweet Pea admired Hannah’s quiet grace and
gentility, and always worked to nurture it in her own character. Hannah admired
her friend’s remarkable inner strength, but simply could not duplicate it, and
tears came easily to her.
Especially after she took sick that
bad winter of 1895.
“He’d be ten now,” Hannah would
often say, as the snow piled ever higher on the uncaring mountainside. “Ten
years old, and I wouldn’t know him if I saw him on the street.”
“Now Hannah,” Little Sweet Pea
would reply, like she had so many times before, “you’ll see him again just as
soon as we can get you enough money to go back home for a spell.”
Hannah usually just smiled,
understanding her friend was trying to help – though both knew such a thing as
going back home would never happen. Little Sweet Pea had been a strong shoulder
to lean on for a long time, and Hannah was grateful; more grateful than Little
Sweet Pea would ever fully realize. But, rubbing absently at the hard knot
growing larger all the time just above her navel, Hannah couldn’t help crying
herself to sleep more and more often after the last dirty miner paid up and departed
in the wee hours.
As the gloomy winter days pressed
relentlessly in, and the gnawing pain in her abdomen fanned itself into a
constant burning agony, Hannah found herself crying almost all the time; disgusted
with herself for showing the one weakness Little Sweet Pea detested above all
other human frailties. Still, she didn’t want to let on just how severe the
pain had become. Hannah knew apologies for her unusual behavior were useless, but
she couldn’t stop herself from offering them.
Little Sweet Pea typically brushed
aside Hannah’s concerns with her usual good cheer.
“C’mon, girl,” Little Sweet Pea
said one day, taking both of Hannah’s hands into hers and grinning like an
excited child, “it’s just this nasty old weather getting you down so! You know
your own self that Christmas is coming. There ain’t a soul anywhere don’t like
Christmastime.”
Hannah nodded and forced a smile
past her tears. “You’re absolutely right,” she chimed brightly, hiding a sudden
twinge of belly pain from her only friend in the world. “Christmas was made for
miracles, and I sure could use a couple of them about now.”
“There you go!” Little Sweet Pea’s smile
became strained as she noted the stress lines on Hannah’s face, and the way the
younger woman constantly clenched her fists over her stomach. “Two miracles it
is!” she exclaimed. “And besides, this is just a little winter weather we’re
having. We’ve seen lots of these cold winters, and summer always comes ’round
afterwards no matter how cold they get.”
“You’re right.” Hannah drew a deep
breath. “It’s just the winter.”
The days dragged on toward
Christmas. Hannah became so sick she could no longer help keep the fire going,
or help with any of the other chores necessary to keep the drafty shack clean
and livable; and presentable to the continuous string of tired miners who came
knocking on the door every night. Little Sweet Pea tended the cleaning and kept
food on the table while Hannah spent more and more time in her room. Taking
over the extra work didn’t bother Little Sweet Pea because Hannah had done the
same thing over the years when the situation was reversed and Little Sweet Pea
was the one too sick to do anything but stay in bed.
But when Hannah started talking,
and usually rambling on endlessly, about her son, Little Sweet Pea began to
suspect that something was seriously wrong this time. Hannah was not the
strongest-willed woman ever to take up the prostitutes’ occupation, but she’d
never been one to just give up before. Hannah was a survivor, not a quitter.
Before long, Hannah was too weak to
even feed herself. Little Sweet Pea often sat beside Hannah’s bed, spooning sips
from a warm bowl of thin soup and listening patiently while Hannah talked
wistfully of old times, of shared experiences, of pleasant memories.
Of her child.
“If I could just see him one more time,
I could go to my grave in peace,” Hannah said one evening, as Little Sweet Pea
dabbed rouge on prematurely aging cheeks and readied herself for another night’s
business. “Oh, I know it’s a miracle. But surely I can have just this one? I’ve
never asked for a miracle before, so I must be due.”
“I promise you you are,” Little
Sweet Pea said, wriggling into the cheap but gaudy dress that was so easy to
slip out of when the time came. “You most surely are. But don’t you be talking so
about graves and such, Hannah! You’ll get over this little bout of …whatever is
ailing you soon, and be ready to go see your boy come summertime.”
“You think so?”
“I already guaranteed you two
miracles, didn’t I?”
Hannah forced a slight smile. “Yes,”
she said, “you did. And I’m going to hold you to them.” She gazed thoughtfully
at her friend for a long moment. “You’re so strong,” she finally said. “How do
you do it? You never whimper, never complain. Never let the world make you cry.”
“Honey, that’d take a sure-nuff miracle.”
“I know. And I’m grateful.” Hannah
chuckled weakly. “In fact, I’m so grateful that I’m going to give you back one
of those miracles you promised to me. It’s the least I can do.”
“It’ll be my pleasure to take it,
then.” Little Sweet Pea met Hannah’s smile with one of her own. Then it slipped
slightly. “But you gotta try not to cry out so much tonight,” she said, hating
herself and the entire situation for the need to point it out. “It runs the
trade off to hear it when they knows you ain’t in here with no man.”
“I’ll try,” Hannah said. “And
tomorrow night, I’ll handle the business while you rest up.”
“Sounds good to me.” It had been
awhile since Hannah could stand the weight of a customer on her unnaturally
swollen belly – Hannah could just barely stand the weight of the two blankets
and three quilts it took to keep her warm enough in the constantly chilly
hovel. But Little Sweet Pea also knew the offer was made from love more than
any real possibility of it happening. “You got yourself a deal.”
Throughout the Cripple Creek Mining
District, gaudy Christmas decorations went up in all the storefronts, and even
gaudier decorations appeared on the fancy houses of those lucky enough to have
cashed in on the gold boom.
The Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks, the Independent Order of
Odd Fellows, the Ancient Order of The Knights of the Mystic
Circle, on and on, all the fraternal lodge dances
and dinners celebrating the season were always packed. The high society crowd
attended Christmas balls at the finest hotels while the common miners and
workingmen enjoyed even better times at raucous dancehall blowouts.
Day or night, brass bands would
gather spontaneously on street corners and play loudly to thunderous applause,
and none of the appreciative audiences seemed to notice how badly out of tune
the finicky metal instruments were in the biting cold wind.
But Hannah saw none of it. Her
pain-wracked body seemed to shrink in on itself as the days slowly counted down
toward Christmas. Leaving the bed for even a moment’s respite from the endless
monotony of constant suffering became almost impossible for her.
Sweet Pea made a point of getting a
daily paper and sitting beside Hannah’s bed to read about goings on around town.
Some of the stories were tragic. Fragile
human bodies were hopelessly outclassed in the frequent run-ins with heavy
machinery in constant motion, and sudden and gruesome death in the mines and
mills was an almost daily event on the winter-whipped backside of Pikes
Peak.
Some stories were funny. Teams of miners
armed with mucking scoops hiked to the cemetery at the top of Mt.
Pisgah, where they shucked their
clothing and, using the big shovels as sleds, raced naked through the deep snow
down the grade and into the outskirts of town. The winner was awarded five free
visits to Madame Pearl DeVere’s Homestead parlor house.
“I hope that uppity old cow loses a
fortune on him,” Little Sweet Pea snorted. “That old bag!”
“Now Madame Pearl does good work
and you know it,” Hannah pointed out, chuckling in spite of the pain. “Giving
money to widows and orphans, and all.”
“Yeah, but that’s money she made
from their own menfolk before they died.” Little Sweet Pea snorted contemptuously.
“And you know as well as I do how she overcharged them to get it!”
That was true, Hannah reckoned. She
asked what else was in the paper.
Little Sweet Pea laughed and went
on reading. Every day, she tried to find something else in the paper to laugh
about.
The churches, as much in a lively
spirit of competition as goodwill, sent groups of carolers into the streets.
Sometimes the competition got out of hand. After one particularly violent physical
confrontation between a pair of boisterous protestant choirs at the corner of
Masonic Avenue and Second Street, the town marshal, an old cowboy, was called
on to divide the city into territories, and issue strict warnings for the
various church singers to keep off the other church’s range. That’s why groups
of carolers began venturing further and further into the tenderloin and
eventually ended up serenading along The Line.
Lying in her bed, barely able to
move, Hannah could only listen to the clear young voices through the thin walls.
But she heard them, and it was enough. She remembered the sound, and joyously
sang the dear old songs in her mind long after the carolers would move on.
Like he might be doing, wherever he
was.
“P-Pea,” Hannah said one day,
interrupting her friend’s reading in mid-sentence, “I’m so sorry I’ve let you
down. I’ve been a burden to you for so long. I want you to know that I’ll appreciate
that forever. I—”
Her mouth jerked into a grimace. The
torture in her abdomen suddenly seemed to explode throughout her already
pain-wracked body. She screamed weakly, clawing at the misshapen, swollen torment
her midsection had abruptly become.
“I-I can’t bear it,” she gasped.
Little Sweet Pea shot to her feet
and threw the newspaper aside.
“What can I do?”
Hannah could only struggle for air.
“Hannah, what can I do?”
One of the mine company doctors – a
sad-faced little man with too strong a taste for whisky to get a better job
somewhere else – was a regular customer. When Little Sweet Pea fully explained
Hannah’s symptoms to him a couple of weeks before, he’d suggested regular
dosing with laudanum because he knew Hannah stood no chance of surviving, even
though he couldn’t bring himself to say so to Little Sweet Pea.
But Hannah had steadfastly refused
to take the vile brew. She’d watched many other working women fade away into
insane nothingness because of the strong opium-based elixir, and she didn’t want
to become one with them. Still, Little Sweet Pea kept a small brown bottle of
it out of sight near the bed just in case it was needed.
Now, she snatched up the medicine
and deftly plucked out the cork, intending to pour most of it down Hannah’s
throat whether the other woman objected or not.
But as Little Sweet Pea watched,
the agony on Hannah’s face eased a little before the bottle was halfway to her
fever-ravaged lips. Then Hannah turned ashen and gray, and her sunken eyes
rolled back in her papery eyelids.
“H-Hannah?”
No answer.
“Hannah!”
Torn between the desire to run for
help and the need to stay close in case her oldest friend came around and
needed her, Little Sweet Pea clutched the laudanum bottle tightly and held her
breath. She stared intently into the other woman’s face, once so beautiful but
now agony-ravaged almost beyond recognition, and silently willed Hannah to stay
alive for just a while longer. She reached out to touch Hannah’s disheveled
hair, stroking it gently while keeping her eyes on the eyelids of the other
woman.
A freezing finger of bitter cold
wind blew through an unseen crack in the flimsy walls to swirl briefly, cloyingly,
at Little Sweet Pea’s cheek before settling where her hand rested on Hannah’s
scalp.
“No you don’t!” Little Sweet Pea
shouted, fanning her hand to chase away the frigid draft and coax warmer air
onto her friend’s pallid face. “You’re not going to take her that easy!”
Breathing heavy, the chill gone, she
became perfectly still and just watched. Oblivious of the passage of time,
everything in her being fixed intently on Hannah.
Finally, she thought she heard a
slight moan.
Did Hannah’s lips move?
“Hannah?”
Did her eyes twitch the least
little bit?
“Hannah, did you—”
“P-Pea?”
“Oh, Honey, I thought you was
gone.” Little Sweet Pea dropped the bottle and held one of Hannah’s bony hands.
“I thought you left me, girl.”
“It’s just a little pain,” Hannah
whispered, trying to smile and failing. “It’ll go away.”
“Why, sure it will,” Little Sweet Pea
lied. “Having that old pain go away is just one of those miracles you got
coming.”
“Now we’ve got a miracle apiece
coming,” Hannah murmured, her eyelids becoming heavy as sleep began to cloud
her mind. “But only one. And I don’t intend to waste mine on a little pain.”
Thinking she’d gladly give Hannah
her own lifelong share of miracles if only Hannah would get better, Little
Sweet Pea sat at the bedside for a long time before answering the first knock
of the evening.
Finally, Christmas came.
Little Sweet Pea was out arranging a
trade for a load of coal when Hannah’s first miracle arrived at the flimsy
whore shack in the heart of the Cripple Creek red light district. But when she
returned, with a satisfied businessman’s promise that enough coal would be
delivered before dark to get them through at least a week, Little Sweet Pea
found Hannah unusually quiet in her bed.
“Hannah?”
Her friend didn’t answer. Didn’t
even move. This time, there was no doubt.
Little Sweet Pea lowered her head.
“Oh, Hannah.”
A relaxed angelic smile was on
Hannah’s lifeless face, and lying on her chest was a hastily opened envelope
and a photograph of a bright-eyed little boy who looked just like the vivacious
young Hannah that Little Sweet Pea had come to know so long ago. On the floor where
it came to rest after falling from death-stiffened fingers was what looked like
a hand-drawn Christmas card.
Little Sweet Pea picked up the card
and read it through, then she read it again.
And again.
With the second of Hannah’s
miracles flowing freely from Little Sweet Pea’s eyes and down her cheeks, she
couldn’t stop reading the words scrawled on the card in a child’s exuberant
hand.
“Merry Christmas to you, Mother.
P.S. I love you.”
Little Sweet Pea cried and cried,
while outside the blizzard howled indifferently on.
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