LOOK: FROM THE SIZE of the holes you can guess at the size of the bullets. These tiny ones, .22’s. These, this cluster here, .30–30’s maybe. Over here… this bunch in the floor. Eleven .44 magnums I think. Maybe a .45 automatic. Maybe whoever… maybe who made these holes in the floor was shooting at something, a rattlesnake. We have a lot of rattlesnakes. They come in here to get out of the sun.
All these holes scattered in the walls are from hunters. They come by looking for coyotes and rabbits and shoot at this because it’s the only thing around. You’d never be able to tell what kind of bullets those holes are from, only if the shots came from inside or outside. That’s a shotgun blast.
In the back here where the kitchen was… here… was this stove. Porcelain-faced, enameled handles, nickel-plated molding. You can see what it was like. You can make out down here where someone’s taken the name plate: see where the light affected the color of the metal over a period of years? Look at the way the oven door is caved in, like an old mouth. Shotgun did that. Four or five blasts with a shotgun. Look at this where they took the nickel-plated supports for the bread warmer, just hammered them off. Not even a wrench or a screwdriver. Well—maybe someone came by and scared them off.
This open space here is where the rear doors used to be, double doors of oak. I remember there were big brown knots in there, chocolate-colored and bigger than your fists. The brass plate where the latch slid across and the brass throw bolts for the second door both ran with the grain of the wood. (Don’t step in that dog mess there.) They brought those doors over from the valley in 1921. Connie Whalen’s father who owned the mines bought them.
These places were where the casement windows were. We’d open them in the hot weather and the front doors to get cross ventilation. There were fourteen panes of glass to each one. That was one of my jobs, to clean them. There’s part of one of the window lattices out there in the rabbit brush.
This back room was for storage and where Miss Lamse kept some of her things. There was a day bed here and a little teak table over there that Miss Lamse brought back from San Francisco one summer. This plaster wall was put in after the building was built—you can see it’s not as carefully done—look there where someone’s pulled the plaster away how the lath has been set crooked. They did that when I was in the fourth grade on account of a fire regulation or something.
There was a door here of course. It had a steel handle that heated up in the afternoon because of the way the sun was on it coming through the windows. I can remember it that well. So much grease on these hinges they didn’t make a sound; but the back doors squeaked. You know—here, look at this: even the window latches are gone. I knew they broke the glass and tore out the framing (you can see where they started a fire in the corner over there with some of the framing) but here somebody has gone to the trouble to take out the latches. Well, maybe they’re worth something now. The windows were put in in 1922, the same year they put the building up. It all dates from 1922 except the plaster wall. (Look here at how hard this piece of hot dog is.)
I remember one morning Miss Lamse was having us clean up before we went home for Christmas. We were working on the desks (they used to be here, in rows, bolted to the floor); we were oiling the wood and the boys were scrubbing the floor—it was a hardwood floor, maybe maple, not this, this was the underfloor. Wait, here’s a piece of the old floor. I don’t know. Maybe it was maple. Well: we were oiling the desks and the boys were doing the floor to look nice for Christmas, and my best friend, Janet Ribbe, was doing the front windows, four to a side, when we heard Billy Wald screaming in the back room. Someone had hung up five dead rats on a string in the closet back there and spilled the guts out all over the floor. I think Tom Woodson did it but we never knew because Billy left school after that. He was smaller than the other boys, with anemia or something. I always worried about him. Janet Ribbe got sick to her stomach and went home. The boys cleaned it up and threw it all in the bushes. It was about two years later that Billy’s father got drunk and shot him.
There were double doors here at the front too. Oak, like the others, and just as shiny, but the throw bolts and the handle were steel, not brass.
I remember the last time I was here when it was nice was when I graduated. Michael Peake and I were both graduated at the same time and went over to Cooley to the high school. That left nineteen here that year. The classes got smaller and smaller and about ten years later, oh, I don’t know, maybe twelve, was the last class. By then the cinnabar was gone and the mine was shut down. Most of the people moved out to Cooley or over to Pilot Rock to work in the cement factory.
From then on the building was empty. Mr. Boeken, the county school superintendent, came and got the bell. He was going to give it to a school back east but I think he finally sold it to a museum. One night about seven years ago somebody threw a rope around the little cupola where the bell used to be and pulled it off with a pickup truck or something. By then people had been coming here for years, kids throwing rocks, out-of-state tourists. I don’t know where the desks went. Or the books. Miss Lamse had about seventy-five books on a shelf at the back of the room that she left there when she died. There was a stove heater in the main room that’s gone. I hope somebody used that maple from the floor. Mr. Whalen brought those boards two hundred miles on the train.
When the sun comes around this afternoon it will be an awful smell in here.
I come over sometimes and try and clean it out, burn up the garbage. I don’t know what for. The last time I came over was about five years ago. The trouble with it, right from the beginning, was that it was too far away. The men put it up halfway between the town and the mines, thirty-one miles each way. They sank a well over there where that twisted thing is coming up out of the ground. But nothing ever grew up here, even when we planted. (Look there, down on the desert, at the size of that twister.) In this dry air it’ll be a long time before it falls down. They’ll have to push it over with a truck or something before they get rid of it.