Mail Order at Silver Dollar Crossing

Two brothers were waiting at the Silver Dollar Crossing Train Depot for a three o’clock mail order arrival from Denver.  Brothers Isaiah and Hamilton Jessup had come all the way out to the desolate boom-town of Silver Dollar Crossing in August 1866 after being discharged from the Army of the Potomac after serving for eighteen months in some of the biggest engagements of the War Between the States.  They were also twin brothers now aged twenty two and filled with hope and promise of striking it rich at a new silver mine just north of the town proper.   Isaiah was sitting on a crate, leaning back on his bony elbows with a straw hat pulled down over his eyes.  His long lanky body was covered by a pair of ill-fitting overalls and flannel shirt appearing very much like a true squatter.  He and his brother Ham, as he called him, were proud owners of some very arid acres near Hanscom Mesa where they had begun digging for silver and had no success so far.  

Using Ham’s building skills, the brothers constructed a house near the mine with a wood stove and a bear claw metal bathtub in a separate room.  There were two bedrooms cordoned off by a wall that only extended six feet high, not entirely to the roof that gabled at ten feet.  There were two windows to let in the sunlight which was a constant companion out here near Round Mountain where other squatters had made their claims in hopes of striking it rich in silver.   

When they had returned to their home in Middlebury, Vermont, Hamilton was missing an eye from a sniper’s bullet at St. Petersburg, VA in December 1864 when he popped his head up out of the trench to find a suitable place to take a leak since the floorboards of the dug in trench was underwater from the snow and thawing that was taking place in the earthen works causing an outbreak of what would be later known as trench foot.  Isaiah had fared better than his brother and returned intact to the arms of their mother Sarah Jessup. Their father’s reaction was not as emotional as he felt in keeping with the stoic New England Yankee social much more appropriate for a man of his stature and so he extended his hand to both of his sons who were still in uniform after being given their discharge and final pay from the Army of the Potomac Fourth Corps which was a mixture of men from all across the northern states.  

It only took two months for both the boys to become bored and despondent as they accompanied their mother to the Presbyterian Church in Middlebury where the minister talked of the glorious victory of President Lincoln’s war only to receive the news a week later the president had been assassinated by a disgruntled southern gentleman while attending a play at Ford’s Theater with his wife. 

Hurst newspapers spoke of the riches awaiting men of adventure in the west.

“Ain’t we men of adventure?” Ham said as they sat on the front porch of their parent’s home.

“Sure is.” Isaiah answered with a quick shake of his head.  Fact was neither of the boys carried much weight on them after marching over half of Virginia chasing the Silver Fox through Cold Springs where both of the witnessed carnage so great that neither of them could comprehend it as they kept pressing forward into the sound of the Confederate guns.  

Ham used to be handsome before he had his eye shot out at St. Petersburg just before Christmas.  He spent hours on the surgeon’s table as they tried to put his shattered cheekbone back together as the morphine effects wore off a while before the surgeon had finished.  He remembered screaming, but the nurse, a burly Irishman, gave him some fine Irish whiskey which helped him endure the procedure.  When the bandages came off, his face looked as is someone had tried to erase half of it.  He still had his one good eye that sparkled crystal blue, but the other half was mangled and scarred.  Isaiah was blessed with rugged good looks and a smile that could warm the coldest of hearts. 

“We should go.” Isaiah agreed and so they both bought a ticket to Hansom Mesa just a few miles from Round Mountain, a community that was forming with all these men of adventure coming to Nevada to make their claims.  Only problem was there were no roads or any of the amenities of civilization they had become used to.  Out here the color of green was rare and trees were nowhere to be seen.  Slowly over the year the brothers lived there near their mine, the roads appeared along with clapboard shacks not unlike the one Ham and Isaiah had built.  Water was still a problem, but they managed to dig a well to groundwater and installing a pump that needed a lot of priming before water would come gushing out of the spout, but even with that the dry season which seemed to last an eternity would make priming such an exhausting chore.  

Both of them sat on the benches at the train station at Round Mountain dressed in their Sunday finery, Isaiah with his mutton chops trimmed neatly and his bola tie hanging down from the clasp in at the next against a starched white shirt. His trousers were affixed to his suspenders beneath his jacket even though the temperature was over one hundred and twenty in the sunlight. In the shade where he and his brother were seated, it was only about one hundred and his starched white shirt was now damp with his sweat.  

Hamilton did the best he could.  He did not dress as eloquently as his brother since he did not consider himself a dandy especially with the gaping scar on the right side of his face.  He kept himself clean shaven since part of his face no longer could no longer grow facial hair.  Still his hair was combed back and his left eye was wide open and eager for the train to pull in in less than an hour.  On this train, their mail order would arrive and he was eager for delivery.  He wore a bowler hat atop his curly light brown locks that seemed more like an afterthought more than an accessory.  

“How do I look?” He asked fanning himself with part of a newspaper. 

“Very dapper.”  Isaiah gave him a half smile as answered.

“Creating the right impression is important.” He sat back.

“So I’ve been told, so I’ve been told.” Isaiah chuckled and took a piece of the paper and fanned himself.

“Train’ll be right on time.” The station master walked out of the depot smoking a cigar. “Just got the wire from Salt Lake City a few minutes ago. She’ll make a stop in Wendover and then chug across that vast nothingness.  Should have pulled out of Wendover an hour ago.”  He flicked his ash onto the tracks in front of the platform, “You boys veterans?”

“Yup.” Isaiah answered. “Cold Springs and then onto Petersburg.  My brother lost an eye in Petersburg.” 

“Don’t say.” He puffed on his cigar and returned inside.

“I wish ya wouldn’t keep talking about my eye like that.” Ham snapped.

“What do you want folks to think?” Isaiah shook his head.

“Not that.  Nothing.  Let them think what they want.” Ham was very self conscious about his eye and he hated when little children would stare at him like he was some sort of circus freak.  Every morning he’d look in the mirror and see that monster staring back at him with one eye, a cyclops like in that Greek thing he read about in school.  If he kept his head turned just so, people were liable not to even notice the scars. 

“You are a hero.” Isaiah sat back, but could not seem to find a cool spot on the platform as late afternoon crept up on the boards of the platform, heating them up in the brutal sun.  

“I ain’t no hero.” Ham threw out his arms. 

Isaiah remembered when the bullet hit him, the awful sound like a stick hitting a rotten melon.  The sound of his brother crying out as he fell to the muddy floor of the trench.  Landing and pissing his pants, Isaiah pulled him from the muddy floor and put him over his shoulder.  Ham was going into shock which wasn’t the worst place he could go at this moment, Isaiah figured as he ran in the muck toward the surgeon’s station a few yards away.  He could hear the crack of the rifles as a few of the sentries fired back at the snipers just about a hundred yards away in the foggy misty morning.  

The surgeon was standing outside the encasement where three wounded men lay on cots breathing their last as the surgeon smoked a hand rolled cigarette.  His face was caked in blood, his beard was about three days of growth, and his dark eyes peered out of thick wire glasses.

“Yeah.” He growled.

“My brother’s hit.” Isaiah exclaimed.

“Bring him in.” The tired man thumbed as he tossed his cigarette into a mud puddle. 

One of the men laying on a cot began to scream.

“Don’t pay him no mind.  He’s having delusions.  Happens just before they pass.” The surgeon explained then he turned and spoke over his shoulder, “McLain, c’mon got a new one.” 

A fat man whose uniform did not fit him properly shook off his sleep and stood up without a word as Isaiah lay his brother on a vacant cot.  Half of his face was covered with blood, but at least he was still breathing as McLain pulled a sterile sheet up to Ham’s chin.  As soon as the surgeon began to probe the open wound, Ham began to scream, a scream rising up from the deepest part of his mortal soul.  Isaiah left the encasement, because he could not bear to hear his brother scream.  

Hamilton was taken to a hospital in Baltimore where thousands of other soldiers were convalescing many missing limbs from the action.  There was a pretty nurse he used to tell Isaiah all about, saying she was an angel sent by heaven.  She was not repulsed by his scars and told him that he was one fine looking man.  

Two years later, Hamilton’s face was as good as it would ever be and there were no nurses here to tell him how handsome he was.  

“Can’t wait.” Isaiah stomped at the edge of the platform. 

“It won’t be long now, will it.” Hamilton remarked with a smile or his version of his half smile that was left to him by the surgeon.  When he was recovering, the skinny man in the blood stained lab coat, cleaning his glasses on his coat with a cigarette hanging carelessly out of the corner of his mouth, told him, “Your face was repaired as best we could considering what that musket ball did to your face.  It makes me ill to think of how much damage these things can do to human tissue.  It really brings my doubt about God forth.” His ash trickled down his chin, “Your face will not be what it was, but you are alive for whatever reason it was meant to be.” 

Standing next to his brother, his toes at the edge of the boards, staring down the empty tracks, he thought that his salvation, his change of luck, his mail order would be on the train that was racing across the empty spaces of the Great Basin. The whole thing was contractual and legally binding.  There would be no empty promises or handshakes without meaning.  No this would be what he had been waiting for over a long, long time.  He talked about it, dreamed about it, planned on it, made this the centerpiece of his life.

Isaiah knew his brother could not live in Middlebury anymore. Mothers constantly telling their children not to stare, woman peering at him with pity in their eyes or facial expressions (or both) as they passed him by in the street, seeing one or no legged men sitting on the curb, dressed in ragged blue uniforms with unkempt beard or hair, tin cup in their hands filled with coins, turn and look up at him with full recognition of what happened to him.  He did not need to wear the uniform, they knew, it was obvious.

Out here, folks did not care or did not show it.  Many had come to put distance between themselves and the war where the smoke and healing was still taking place.  Some of the blue-bellies had come into the defeated southern towns and began looting and raping, because that’s what is done to the vanquished by the victors.  Joe Pendleton, the station security, was missing three fingers on one hand where he had set off a fuse on the cannon he was in charge of and instead the barrel exploded decapitating the man standing next to him, so Joe figured he was lucky to come out of it with missing fingers. 

There was the sharp sound of a train whistle in the distance.  Sometimes on a clear day, you could see almost a hundred miles down the tracks in this flat land.  Ham grabbed Isaiah’s hand, “It won’t be long now, brother.” 

“No it won’t.” He smiled as it felt good to feel his brother’s hand in his.  When he walked in after the surgery, he reached down and grabbed Ham’s hand, but he yanked it back and refused to talk to his brother. 

“I can’t wait.” Ham had not been this jubilant in quite a while. “I don’t think I can sit down.” 

For the three months since they had come to their claim near Hanscom Mesa, both of them had lived in the darkness of their mine.  They had put up a wooden frame to brace the rocks, hopefully preventing a cave in and they had used some dynamite to clear the bedrock that presented quite a stubborn barrier.  Even at this, the charges of explosives could set Ham off where he’d spend hours just wandering around having one of his episodes.  Some of the old hands practiced fracking where they would use water pressure to move rock, but since water was scarce on the claim, Isaiah decided they’d better do it the old fashion way.  Ham was getting better with his episodes, but it was still very concerning to watch.  

“Here it comes.  Right on time.” Ham said excitedly.

“Sure as shooting.” Isaiah clasped his arm around his brother’s thick shoulders.  The sound of the brakes, steel on steel, the cloud of steam filling the air, the groaning of something that had been in motion and was now coming to a rest.  

“Where do you think it is?” Ham asked his head on a swivel.  

“Be patient.  All in good time.” Isaiah instructed his eager brother.  

“What if it’s not on the train?” Ham was beginning to have one of his episodes.  This was the part the surgeon could not fix, the part where emotion became like electricity and difficult to control.

“Are you Isaiah Jessup?” A woman asked him.  She was wearing a brown walking dress with white gloves and a fashionable hat with sheer lace hanging in her face.  Her smile warmed his heart as he returned her smile. Her green eyes and auburn hair tucked up underneath his hat was the first thing of fine classical beauty he had seen since coming to this remote part of the world.

“I am.” He nodded.

“My name is Harriett McKinney and I have a contract.” She tilted her head.

“Very good, Miss McKinney.” He took her arm like a gentleman and then saw Ham standing there with a woman dressed like in the same style as Harriett.

So gently, she took her hand and put it on his face.  He closed his eye and leaned down so she could continue. He did not know what to make of this at first, but judging from his brother’s reaction, he was relishing the tenderness of her touch on his marred skin and she smiled as her fingers explored his entire face.

“Hamilton Jessup, I am so honored to be your bride.” She said looking up at him.

“And Mildred Pierce, I have been waiting for you all my life.” He said as his hands were now exploring her powdered smooth face and tears were flowing from his left eye.

“We shall have Reverend Yates perform the weddings when we get home.” Isaiah explained as he led Harriet to their wagon with his brother and bride to be in tow. 

Isaiah had it all arranged.  Reverend Yates would arrive at about sunset, there would be a small double wedding of the two brothers and their mail order brides followed by a feast put together by Mrs. Pearson, their neighbor and her husband. 

It had been almost six months since Isaiah saw the advertisement for mail order brides and while Ham expressed a lot of doubt, it looked as if this was the best thing that ever happened to him as Mildred had already found a comfortable place for her head in the crook of his shoulder.  

“Welcome ladies to Silver Dollar Crossing.  It’s kind of primitive, but I’m sure you will find it accommodating.” Isaiah said as he helped both Sarah and Mildred into the small carriage. 

“Quite charming.” Sarah put her head against his shoulder as he whisked the reins to get the two horses to move.  Jerking ahead the brothers with their new mail order brides began the hour trek up to Hanscom Mesa where their lives would be changed forever.