Page 12 of Ellen Found
I admire Sergeant Dan Reeves. He’s careful with his men, and he is fair, if firm. He is a peerless horseman, something I am not. He’s equally adept on skis. We trust his judgment. Lately, though, I wish he could find another diversion besides Ellen Found. How is it that Ellen grows more lovely by the day? For a man of at least a little experience with women, I know nothing.
CHRISTMAS CAME, AND for the first time in Ellen’s life it meant something besides serving clam chowder—Mr. Linson’s one concession to the holiday—to sad-eyed men who had nowhere else to go except the Mercury Street Café .
She wouldn’t have told anyone about that, but for some reason, Sergeant Reeves had instituted a nightly walk among the geysers of the upper basin that fronted the inn. It usually began with a view of Old Faithful from the newly completed second-floor porch, with its overhang of roof that kept off the snow.
Provided the weather cooperated, she bundled up in her shabby coat. It didn’t look so bad in the dark. Sergeant Reeves—Dan—knew where to walk safely among the geysers and hot pots, and he kept a firm hand on her arm.
He wasn’t a talkative man during the day—what she saw of him and his patrol—but the dark made him voluble. He told her about growing up on a farm in Connecticut, a state so far away that she could barely imagine it. “I wanted something more adventurous, and I joined the army,” he said. He had more recently finished a tour of duty in the Philippines, and she learned about the insurrectionist Moros, humidity that did wretched things to wounds, and jungle fevers.
“Do I talk too much?” he asked one night.
She assured him he did not. “No. All I ever knew before Yellowstone was Butte, Montana,” she said. “I hope you’ve never been there.”
He laughed at that. Nights like this, she found it easy not to think of Butte. Plato was seldom far from her thoughts, but they had mellowed, as Charles Penrose had earlier suggested that they would. “I won’t say grief vanishes, but it changes, or so I have discovered,” was all Charles said about the matter. She knew he meant more than he could express, and she honored that.
“We won’t forget Christmas,” Mrs. Quincy said one morning. She said it with considerable finality. “I will requisition a suitable tree. Shouldn’t be hard to find one.”
It wasn’t. Ellen asked Dan Reeves to locate a tree, but not a big one. By the week after Thanksgiving, there it was, modestly resting under the porte cochère . Decorations proved to be no problem either, and they came from a surprising source: One-Eyed Wilson, a.k.a. Mr. Fred Wilson. “I’ve been collecting them for years,” he told Mrs. Quincy. “Never had a tree before, but I’ve been hopeful.” And that was all he said as he gave Mrs. Quincy his carefully wrapped box .
Presents. Ellen had eight dollars left from her life savings, but she knew there was money percolating now in a Bozeman bank, thanks to her thirty dollars a month. She knew what to get Gwen, who confided in her one morning as they diced potatoes that her papa wrote in a journal every night before he slept. “I wish I had a journal,” she said. “Think what I could write, now that I can write a little.”
A search for paper in a room containing items stashed for the inn turned up ledgers and a massive book likely intended for the front desk and registration of visitors, come summer. I daren’t use that , Ellen told herself and continued her search.
She found plain sheets of thick paper between bed linens, for some reason. Twenty sheets easily folded into forty. She knew Mr. Wilson had thick black thread because he had used it on her shoulder. “I’ll do it for Gwen,” he said.
She debated whether the paper was useful to the inn, finally assuaging her conscience by leaving a dollar and a note among the sheets. The journal became a thing of beauty, carefully stitched down the middle by Mr. Wilson, with Gwen’s name in elaborate script, Ellen’s contribution.
Mrs. Quincy became a fellow conspirator. “If I had yarn, I would knit mittens for Dan and Charles,” Ellen told her boss over breadmaking. The next morning, hanging on her doorknob was a man’s sweater with a note attached. Unravel this , she read. Should be enough for mittens .
Did she even dare ask Mrs. Quincy if this belonged to her late husband? She dared, or almost did. Her “Is this ...” was enough for a nod. “I shouldn’t,” Ellen said and tried to hand it back. Mrs. Quincy pressed it into Ellen’s hands. “I have his letters and a stickpin,” she said. “Put it to good use.”
What about Mrs. Quincy? She could tell the constant racket of saws and hammers in the hotel, plus the power drills, taxed the woman. There were long evenings when the cook stood at the large window in the lobby, staring at the deepening snow beyond the overhang of the porch. Ellen consulted with Mr. Wilson, who spent more and more of his time in the kitchen “helping out,” as he put it or “mooching for cookies,” as Mrs. Quincy said. No matter. The cook never seemed inclined to shoo him away.
“She needs something to cheer her up,” Ellen told him.
Mr. Wilson gave the matter some thought. A week before Christmas, when she was knitting mittens in her room at a furious pace, he knocked, identified himself, stuck his arm in, and held out a carved wren no taller than three inches. “I made this,” he told her when she opened the door wider, sounding shy and proud at the same time, not like an older gent of some years and one eye, gone in a mysterious time and place.
“Beautiful.” Ellen touched the upturned tail. “Maybe she’ll think spring is coming.”
“My mother did, when I carved my first wren for her.”
Do we all have secret lives? Ellen asked herself, humbled by this one-eyed man who had stitched her back together.
She returned to her room and came back with two dollars. He shook his head. “Between you and me, missy, I wanted to give Vera something. You can give it to her. Maybe tell her I made it, if you want to. ”
Vera, is it? Ellen thought, delighted. “I can do that,” she told him. Vera.
Ellen’s gift to everyone was a cake on Christmas Eve, but not just any cake. This one was four layers of chocolate goodness, chocolate because Gwen confided that her father loved chocolate. All Ellen had was cocoa, also “liberated” from pantry supplies clearly labeled Not for use before summer . She put another of her vanishing dollars by the cocoa tin and a note.
In a democratic vein, as in, “All in favor say aye,” everyone agreed that the big dinner would be Christmas Eve, whereupon there would be silence and sleeping in on Christmas Day, which Mr. Child, via telegram, had declared would be a day off with pay. “Leftovers will be generous,” Mrs. Quincy assured them. “Ellen and I deserve a day off, too.”
The banging and drilling and sawing continued through the afternoon as Ellen and Mrs. Quincy cooked, ably assisted by Gwen, who confided to Ellen that she had a tidy stack of one-dollar bills, her salary for helping. “I wish I could spend them somewhere,” she told Ellen after her nap. “I wanted to get Papa a new cravat. He’s not very stylish,” she added, which made Ellen laugh.
“It’ll keep, my dear. Here’s a sheet of paper. Draw him what you want to give him.”
Gwen flashed her a smile, reminding Ellen how much she looked like her father, who, for some reason, wasn’t smiling so much. Maybe Christmas did that to some people. Mrs. Quincy continued to gaze out the window and rub her arms. As for her, Ellen could barely contain herself. Christmas in the Copper King house just meant more work. In the Mercury Street Café, it meant sad people with nowhere to go. This was better.
At six o’clock, all drills and sawing stopped. Someone lit two hearths of the massive fireplace this time, which made Gwen clap her hands. Ellen watched her from the dining room as she sat in one of the new wicker chairs, her feet not touching the floor, chairs intended for grown-up summer visitors. Gwen’s fear of the lobby had vanished, but then Gwen had not felt the claw on her shoulder. Thank goodness for that , Ellen thought.
Probably against orders—but who was there to object?—Ellen and Mrs. Quincy dug around in the kitchen crates and favored the crew with Blue Willow dishes this time. “No one will know,” her boss said. She put her hands on her hips. “Besides, they’re just rough men.”
Ellen smiled to herself, amused that Mrs. Quincy still thought of herself as a woman hardened through tough times. She had seen the way she tucked Gwen in for a nap when Ellen was too busy, or the extra cookies that came Mr. Wilson’s way. Are we all changing? she asked herself.
Mr. Reamer didn’t always join them for dinner, but this was different. There were no railroad financiers to impress on Christmas Eve, only the men and two women and a girl doing the work that would turn this hulk of a building into a magical place. In his quiet way, he stood and tapped on his glass when the wondrous dinner of elk and turkey and mounds of mashed potatoes and chocolate cake was a pleasant memory.
“Thank you for what you are doing,” he said simply. “We would probably all rather be somewhere else this holiday, raising a toast with loved ones, but here we are.”
Ellen looked around, amazed at the lump in her throat. There was nowhere she would rather be than right here, right now. She glanced at Charles, who was looking at her, and then down at his daughter. There sat Sergeant Reeves with his men. She blushed when he winked.
“I wish you a Merry Christmas, gentlemen,” Mr. Reamer continued. He nodded to Ellen, Mrs. Quincy, and Gwen. “And the ladies, of course.” He chuckled. “I know it’s hard to contemplate right now in this stage of construction, but someday millions of people will pass through these doors. We will be remembered in the wood, the stone, our electric candlesticks”—everyone laughed—“and our rustic hospitality. To quote the inimitable Tiny Tim, ‘God bless us, everyone!’”
Everyone applauded. Charles Penrose raised his hand and gave a nod in the architect’s direction. “Sir, we have an early Christmas present for you.”
He motioned to the architect, then picked up Gwen and carried her at the head of his crew into the lobby. Several of the men carrying lanterns led the way. They stopped in front of one of the guest rooms, one with an iron “1” on the door, part of the pile of numbers Mr. Colfitt had sent ahead. He opened the door and gestured.
“Here you are, Mr. Reamer, a portion of the magic. We wanted to complete one room.”
“Oh my,” Ellen whispered as she took in the iron bedstead and the mattress, two chairs with cushions, a rustic bureau, and a washstand with a cream-colored pitcher and bowl. The curtains at the window, with its many small panes, looked suspiciously like a gathered sheet. Underfoot was a rag rug.
“Just one hundred and thirty-nine rooms to go!” Mr. Wilson said to laughter.
Gradually, the men moved away, chatting in small groups, heading toward their own rustic boardinghouse, destined to be torn down when the project ended, and they moved on to other jobs.
Mr. Reamer cleaned his glasses thoughtfully, carefully, as he did everything. “Thank you for this Christmas surprise, Charles,” he said. “It means more than I can say. Bless you all, and good night.”