Mason Valley Southbound

Fiction Friday

Most of us have forgotten the great changes that came about after the telegraph lines came to Mason. Wagons piled with wooden poles rolled down from Carson City and the Western Union men went about stringing up wires. We hung streamers and banners along the roads from Mason Street all the way to the river. Mrs. Sheeran planted red, white, and blue petunias in her flower boxes and for the duration it was like one long Independence Day parade.

A new post office was built nearby the telegraph house, all white and blue with spindly tresses like a ladder back chair. It was furnished with gleaming windows and a young, bright-eyed clerk from Yerington. The day the post office opened, this young clerk was nearly scared out of her skin by Allen Breck, the town’s old cooper who did not favor the telegraph’s presence in Mason. He charged in like a cat left inside a black iron box in the sun, calling her every name and swearing fit to make the river boil. The sheriff came along fast and took him away, but Breck did not stop there.

Each town hall meeting was a chance for him to voice his unrest. He was a Catholic and he thought that the telegraph line was the work of Satan. For some weeks he was allowed to speak, and when he fell ill in the autumn, other folks became upset, too. They said that the wires buzzed unnaturally and flashed at night like hellfire or the aurora borealis. Lots of new people came to Mason from California with the expansion and they had seen it before with the moonlight towers in San Jose. People get upset with change, that’s all. With change you either fear it or you tolerate it.

But fear settled in anyway because of Allen Breck’s beleaguered crowing. People hear something enough, they start believing it.

The year after that, which was 1884, the town began to grow. It crept slowly along the foot of Black Mountain, which was the reason the lines came through the town. Easier to cut south from Carson City than to traverse the mountains from the California side.

Telegraph chatter became a sensation for us in Mason. Snippets were published every week in the Mason Valley Newspaper, messages that came through the operators or rumors overheard at the saloon next door. Even the telegraph apologists gossiped. We had salesmen pass through from every direction, which was certainly a new experience. We enjoyed them, those big catalogues as thick as your finger. Ordered from ‘em, thumbed through ‘em, and when the new ones came, the old ones made their way to the outhouse or found use as doorstops.

In July of 1884 a man from Arizona came to town in a motorized carriage that he’d built for racing. His name was H. C. Vallee and the first thing he saw coming into Mason was old man Breck standing in an onion field shouting about the telegraph. He was still riled up even after he’d tried to chop one of the poles down with a double bit axe and all the vinegar he could muster.

Vallee had no history of eccentricity, but he immediately took Breck for some sort of visionary. After a few days staying at his farmhouse, Vallee talked the man up so much that Breck put every cent he had toward running for mayor. He stood in the back of Vallee’s racing car and made speeches, or rather he had one speech that he repeated over and over. Whether they found a bunch of like-minded individuals or paid them was unclear, but on Saturdays there were big groups in front of the telegraph office with boater hats and loud slogans. We didn’t care for them, but we kept our comments civil.

By August the town of Mason had had just about enough of Breck. He was a paranoid drunk who had no business being mayor, let alone harassing the whole town. The sound of the motor carriage going to and fro along the road was a nuisance and the groups picketing outside the telegraph house were flatly unwelcome. Several farmers and six men from the telegraph house marched to Breck’s home one evening to rap on the door and strike some fear into him. Thinking the matter was settled, their anger grew when they saw Breck and Vallee at it again the next morning. They feared that Breck had a fighting chance for mayor with all of Mason’s new residents. These new folks were convinced by the showmanship, bribery, and simply because Vallee and Breck broke up the routine. This did not sit well with the old residents. To them, Mayor Lawrence was the proper man for the job — he had been for well over a decade straight— and they accepted the telegraph because it opened Mason to the world. Dispense with those two constants and you might as well rip up the railroad tracks and get to finding cave to live in.

An election was to be held the first day of September, but in the final week of August, another group of locals banded together to pay Breck a visit. He was in front of the telegraph house preaching from the back of Vallee’s racing car. He was wearing a new gray flannel suit and his money was going to his campaign instead of liquor — he was truly more composed and coherent than he’d been in years. He had become an imposing figure, which threatened the men all the more. The sheriff defused the standoff, but a few days later, the same standoff repeated itself, only the group was larger. These were Mason men: laborers, farmers and sons of farmers with simple dreams like owning a tractor or finding a wife. They were simple in their thinking, and in the fervor and echo of a crowd, they chased Breck to his house with stones and broom handles.

The sheriff was in Yerington at the time and not even the neighbors could keep the men from pounding on the door through the night and breaking most of the windows. Vallee vanished that evening like a moth when the candle’s snuffed, never to return to Mason Valley.

By dawn the men had left Breck alone. He was sleepless from the harassment but undaunted. It was September first, he was wearing his gray flannel suit, and he intended to win the mayoral election.

However, one of the young sons of the Mason men, Arthur Waits, did not leave with the others. He remained hidden behind a hedge, and when Breck left his home, Waits attacked. He pulled Breck off into the woods nearby the baptist church and killed him with a shotgun. Waits then walked to the saloon and sat down for a drink at fifteen past eight o’clock in the morning. He was tried and subsequently imprisoned for life in Nevada State Prison.

The tremendous shock and shame of the event quelled our wild blood and choked off conversation for a long while after. It knocked the breath out of us.

There is a marker in the woods where Breck was found in his blood-stained suit. Mayor Lawrence’s wife still places flowers there every Sunday after church. Vallee, too, left ruts where he had driven: debates over the telegraph still bubble up every now and again. Two decades after the fact, the notion of automobile racing can still be seen pinned above every impressionable farm boy’s bed in the form of pictures from magazines and mail-order catalogues. Forgetting, that slow and lazy process that seems to take longer the smaller the town, has mostly eaten both men up.

The telegraph poles remain because it is the way of modern life and Mason, Nevada is set on moving forward whatever the cost. Of the many potential lessons to be learned from Breck’s death, the one we got was possibly the wrong one. But this was the ideal distilled into the reckless youth, all us boys who could easily have been Arthur Waits, too proud to know our moral limits. Over the course of years as men we have honed it keen as dogma.

Change is a becoming. It is not a question of tolerance or fear. No matter how it shapes us or lives inside our every moment, we forget the past and move forward.