The Devil in Silver

“Once Lucretia asked me why I didn’t just let her die. Can you imagine it? She was fourteen years old. ‘Why don’t you just let me die?’ I told her that my life without her wasn’t worth living. As long as she lives, I live. Those words are written on every good mother’s heart.”

She pressed her forehead to the side of her daughter’s face. “As long as you live, I live,” she whispered to Loochie.

The brother had watched all this quietly. Now Louis sat up in his chair and grinned at Pepper. His face looked tight, faintly gray, like he felt sick. Do you know that this grown man, twenty-nine years old, was jealous? Not in a way he could name, or explain, but it was real. So Louis wanted to change the atmosphere. Otherwise he imagined his sister and mother doing a lot more hugging and loving while he sat there poking at a carton of steamed vegetables.

“My sister tells me that you all think there’s a monster in the hospital,” Louis said.

“The Devil,” Loochie said, pulling her arm away from her mother’s hand. “That’s what I said. And I told Mom.”

But Louis didn’t look at his sister. He kept his gaze trained on Pepper.

“You believe that?” Louis asked.

Loochie’s mother lost her pensive air and looked at her son with a frown. “All right,” she said. “Don’t start something.”

“I’m asking the man a question,” Louis said.

Pepper assessed this guy. He was short-ish and fat-ish and wore thick glasses in stylish frames. His hairline was receding and he already had a fair amount of ear hair. And yet this guy was obviously so pleased with himself. Pepper always marveled at this kind of man. Who calculated his value based on some mystery math. Simple addition would assess this man a dud but Louis was using calculus plus.

Loochie’s mother picked up a card from the game deck and waved it over the purple crystal ball twice. An electric whoosh played, a sound like water crashing on rocks or a hundred plates smashing against a floor.

A moment later Raven Symoné’s voice played loudly.

“I don’t think so, girlfriend!” Raven shouted.

Mom was trying to distract the table from the line of conversation, but it wasn’t enough to stop her bullheaded boy.

“Come on,” Louis pressed. “Do you believe that, too?”

“There’s something going on behind that silver door,” Pepper said.

“Yeah,” Loochie said, looking at Pepper with mild disgust because he wouldn’t just come out and say its name. “The Devil.”

Now Louis slumped back in his chair, his mouth hanging open slightly. He looked incredulous.

“What do you know about the history of silver mining in this country?” Louis asked.

Aha. Now Pepper understood the source of this man’s massive overconfidence. He thought he was brilliant. Pepper remembered a quote he’d read once, it was attributed to James Hetfield, the lead singer of Metallica. Hetfield was asked the difference between himself and Sting. (Why that comparison? Who can say?) Hetfield said the difference between him and Sting was that he read a lot of books, too, but he didn’t need you to know that. Now, whatever Louis might say next, Pepper couldn’t help but hear dreadful late-era Sting music being strummed (on a fucking lute, no doubt) in the distance.

“Silver mining in the United States didn’t start, like hard-core, until the mid-1850s,” Louis said. “And only really got big when the Comstock Lode was discovered in 1859 in California.”

“Okay,” Pepper said. He kind of hoped that was it.

“My brother thinks he should have been a scientist,” Loochie said.

Louis grinned. “Everyone at my job does call me the Professor.”

“Not behind your back,” Loochie said.

Their mother waved another card over the purple crystal ball. It was her only defense, really, when her grown-ass children reverted like this. Would it work?

“Not gonna happen!” Raven Symoné shouted.

“I’m a manager at Hertz at JFK Airport,” Louis explained. “And when I have downtime I read. Unlike everybody else there.”

That lute playing got a little louder.

“Anyway,” Louis continued, “the silver deposits found at the Comstock Lode only caused people to go digging around for it everywhere. Silver mines popped up in Nevada, Colorado, Idaho, Montana. People thought they were going to find more and more silver, so whole towns were built to accommodate them. And not some little wooden shacks. Luxury homes and fine businesses. People were sure the good times would only get better.”

“But they didn’t,” Pepper offered, trying to beat him to the point.

Louis grabbed his mother’s hand and pulled it away from the purple crystal ball when she moved toward it with a card for the third time.

“No, you’re right,” Louis agreed. “It didn’t. Lots of people went bust. But I’m really trying to tell you about what happened to the miners during the silver rush.

“It was bad work. Dangerous. Like any mining. But silver also lets out fumes when it’s mined. Even Pliny the Elder wrote about how harmful the fumes were, especially to animals. You know Pliny the Elder?”