Weird West Tales No. 1: The Silverton Tommyknockers

The Silverton Tommyknockers
by Morgan James

It was a grand Victorian house on the corner of 13th and Blair - two stories with a turret and a modest gazebo of the same yellow clapboard. The house was nestled amidst the fledgling peach orchard my father had planted at the rear of the property. The trees were covered in frost, as is almost always the case in the chilly spring mornings of the high mountains of Colorado.

All of Silverton, it seems, was on our doorstep. My father, Simon James, stood proudly at the front door, welcoming a never-ending stream of visitors and well-wishers. He puffed out his long mustache, dressed in his finest dark green vest and jacket. I can almost hear his guffaws - blown with a gusto that told everyone that he was a man of means – someone to be reckoned with in the world.

I can remember my mother, even now, through the lens of childhood - standing beside him, slightly behind as always, the sleeves of her dress making that soft whooshing sound that still hearkens to my senses the smell of lavender and the warmth of her embrace. Her smile, slightly crooked, and her hair pulled into a tight bun – she pointed visitors to a table spread with pies and scones, of jams and jellies and exotic marmalades.

As most adult parties do, at least in the eyes of a precocious ten year old boy, the affair did not hold my attention past getting some sweets and a peek at Sarah Smyth the grocer’s daughter and the object of my current boyhood obsession. It was during one of those long extended viewings through the cherry wood spindles of the winding staircase my father imported from New York – and a perfect vantage point for looking down onto parlor couches unobserved, I might add – when my reverie was broken by my father calling my name.

Flushed with the possibility of being caught spying from above, I was surprised to see my father holding out a bright, shiny silver dollar. “Your weekly allowance, my son – it is Saturday after all.” I beamed with pride as Sarah whispered to her older sister how rich I must be. Only in the cold light of later years did I realize that the show of wealth was more for my father’s pride than my own.

Eventually bored, I wandered into the most wonderful room in our house – a two-story library filled with books, an open ledge encircling the room providing access to the upper bookcases. I scrambled up to my lofted sanctuary on a wonderfully clever rolling ladder. There, perched high in a secluded alcove with the last of the day’s light filtering through the leaded glass windows, I read – this evening, it was a description of Mr. Morse’s wonderful telegraph code and how pilots would use the signals to report on troop movements in the war effort. I imagined myself tapping out the location of enemy cannons and strongholds...

I awoke to the sweet smell of cigar smoke, the faint tinkling of ice as it bobbed in seas of whiskey occasionally meeting the edges of my father’s crystal glasses, and the sounds of a poker game. Circling in my perch, now hidden in the darkness of night, I was a cat – a small black-haired boy with green eyes – watching with rapt fascination the forbidden practices of manhood.

It wasn’t the money or the liquor or the smoking that drew my attention, however. It was the cards - a village of 54 people, each with their own personality and story to tell. The Ace of Spades was Old Man Jones, mean and vicious just looking to pick a fight in his ever-drunken stupor. And there was Sarah Smythe, my Queen of Diamonds…

Fascinated, I watched, slowly learning the game – triplets beat pairs, flushes beat straights – the hierarchy of the village was etched into my brain.

It was well around midnight; outside the library, the house cloaked itself in silence and darkness.

The last game of draw was over, the cards revealed. The rotund man named Jenkins was raking in the last hand, his faced flushed with alcohol and exertion.

“It’s time for the mine tour, Mr. James.”

My father nodded slowly.

“You promised to show us the vein.”

“Yes, yes,” was his reply. “Of course, now that our competitors are long to bed.” A conspiratorial chuckle followed.

Six sets of eyes shot upward, as my foot slipped from my precarious perch. Hands went to holsters, but guns were never drawn. Discovered, my father, half amused and more than half annoyed ordered me to come down and go to bed straight away.

“I want to go to the mine too,” I remember begging.

After a short pleading, I was again ordered to bed. This time the chuckles were at my own expense. Hotly, I turned to Mr. Jenkins.

“I bet I can beat the two pair you won the last hand with using only the five remaining cards in the deck.” My stance was challenging, my voice firm. Mr. Jenkins stared me down, his beady eyes and sweaty forehead glistening in the lamp light.

He glanced towards my father, who shrugged deferentially.

“What can you wager, young man?”

I pulled the shining new silver dollar out of my pocket, placing it on the edge of the table.

“A straight-up wager, then?” Mr. Jenkins asked.

“No,” was my response. “My dollar against a trip with you tonight to the mines.”

Mr. Jenkins smiled. My father glanced nervously around at the other men.

“Fine. I’ll take your dollar just as I took theirs,” Mr. Jenkins said, his stubby arm sweeping in front of him. “But, tell me, young Mr. James, what do you think those last five cards in the deck are?”

“Then we have a bet.”

“We do.”

“The last five cards are my father, my mother and the Johnson triplets…” The questioning look on Mr. Jenkin’s face showed no signs of fear. “I mean the king of hearts, the queen of hearts, and three sixes.”

I don’t remember trembling as Mr. Jenkins reached out and spread the last five cards onto the table. I do remember the look on his face when the cards were revealed – the king of hearts, the queen of hearts and three sixes.

I didn’t leap into the air – no laughing, no hollering. I reached out and took my silver dollar from the table’s edge, putting it back into my pocket.

After all the games of poker that I have played in my life, all the silver taken from friends and enemies alike, I still remember the warmth of that first hand, the astonished look in Mr. Jenkin’s eyes, the trickle of sweat that dropped from his nose onto the dark wood of the table as he straightened himself up and laughed to his comrades.

Thinking back on that evening and my ride in the back of the wagon to the mine – bundled against the cold which could never penetrate my happy warmth - it strikes me as odd that it was these five men, all strangers to me, that my father decided to take down to the vein.

I can remember the rattle of the massive iron lock as father bent crookedly over the task of opening it with the oversized black key. The glow of the lanterns casts shadows of the men, long and menacing along the dirt-packed ground outside the mine entrance.

Inside, the mine felt warm and calm. The clicking of the carts as they moved down the tracks was mesmerizing. It was a slow descent, as each lamp along the tunnel needed lighting, and soon I found myself drifting into a fuzzy sleep.

It was somewhere in that grayness that I heard the tapping. Only a whisper at first.

Scrape. Tap. Scrape.

I shook my head, awake now. The men were talking in hushed tones ahead of me.

Tap. Tap.

“I hear someone,” I blurted, regretting instantly the words that cast me back into the role of a frightened child.

“Nonsense,” my father’s voice came back – a disembodied reply from the shadows further down the shaft.

Quietly, I sat.

Tap. Scrape. Tap. Tap.

“Maybe he is hearing the ghosts of Marconi – didn’t you say he and his men died in a collapse on the next claim over.”

“A terrible accident,” my father mumbled, his voice muffled in the darkness.

Tap. Scrape. Tap. Tap.

Think of something else, I whispered to myself. Suddenly, I was back in the library reading. I was warm, full and flushed with the excitement of seeing Sarah.

Tap.

“Lucky for you Marconi didn’t discover the vein. You’ll be a rich man while the worms are feasting on his corpse.” The voice was that of Mr. Jenkins.

“A terrible accident,” my father repeated.

Our carts slowly moved downward.

Tap. Scrape. Tap.

“Have you ever heard of Tommyknockers, Morgan?” a deep voice boomed back to me. “They are the souls of dead miners, trapped under the ground, doomed to spend their days seeking passage to the world above.”

“Stop it, William. Don’t try to scare the boy any more than he already is,” was my father’s reproachful response.

I closed my eyes, concentrating harder on the book that I was reading just a few hours ago.

Scrape. Tap. Scrape.

According to Mr. Morse, that was the letter K.

Tap. Tap.

An I.

“I heard you bought Marconi’s claim for a song, James,” Mr. Jenkins queried.

“The accident wiped out his family, so it seemed good business to snatch it up,” my father responded. “Terrible accident.”

Tap. Scrape. Tap. Tap.

An L?

Tap. Scrape. Tap. Tap.

Another L.

As we reached the vein, there was a hush. The men quickly surrounded the black stripe running along the rubble-strewn wall.

“As big as a fist. You’re a lucky man, Simon James.”

Tap.

E

“You going to join us, Morgan?” my father asked.

I sat petrified there in the cold iron cart. I couldn’t move. I couldn’t speak. The warmth of the evening was gone, replaced with cold dread.

“Ah, the boy’s probably asleep.”

But I wasn’t asleep. I was waiting for the final letter, the last note in the terrifying tune that the tommyknockers were playing for me.”

Tap. Scrape. Tap.

R

K-I-L-L-E-R

I closed my eyes even tighter, balling up into the blankets in the cart. Somewhere in the darkness I heard my father repeating those haunting words, “a terrible accident”.