Crown of Dust (3 page)

“No,” she says. “Better to deal with demons in sleep.”

She closes the door and follows Jed back to her room.

2

Alex wakes to an empty cocoon of darkness, oblivious to all but the steady thump of her heart, the coarse wool blanket twining around her legs, hot breath against the skin of her arm. Last night she'd smelled bourbon, woke herself screaming. But for a moment she lingers in the pleasant fog of half sleep. For a moment there is no morning, no dreaming, no smell but the musk of her own sweat. There is only her pulse pounding at her temple, only the sheet beneath her head, and now unmistakably, unforgivably, the need to pee. She stands too fast, steadies herself against the wall. Her hair sticks out at all angles, perpendicular to her head, and she smashes the duster hat over the mess, stumbles to where she remembers the door to be and flings it open to the shock of sunlight.

Emaline's voice meets her at the stairwell.

“You heard me, John. You want, I'll yell in your good ear and pull your left right off your head, I will, preacher or no.”

Her wide frame is bent at the waist over Preacher, spread-eagled in the middle of the doorway. She holds a whiskey jug by its eyelet and Preacher's red eyes follow its bobbing movement. He mumbles a response and she raises the jug high above her head.

“I don't care what the Lord tells you to do,” says Emaline. “You get drunk on my whiskey, you pay for it.”

Every bone, every muscle of Alex's body is stiff. She tiptoes down the stairs, bent like an old woman, clutching her pack to her chest to quiet the metallic jangle of the gold pan against the canteen. She pulls her hat low over her eyes, but this does nothing to prevent the last step from moaning beneath her.

“Well,” says Emaline, “if it ain't our newest prospector.”

With her hands on her hips, Emaline is as wide as the doorway.

“You missed breakfast,” she says, and moves aside. Alex squeezes past her, steps over Preacher and out the door.

The outhouse squats forty yards beyond the inn. Alex crouches over the wooden hole, careful not to wiggle and get splinters. She holds her breath against the smell. Flies knock themselves against the walls. A wasp makes circles near the ceiling as though anchored with a string and Alex watches, glorying in that blessed release when a branch snaps. Her bladder freezes. A shadow blocks the slices of sunlight piercing the open spaces in the plank walls. Something slides beneath the door. A newspaper? No, a magazine:
Godey's Lady's Book
, the same Gran read, sometimes aloud in her high north-eastern rasp, pointing out details of different fashions and pooh-poohing the poems. “All trying to be clever. Just say what needs said,” she'd say. Or, if she really liked a poem, “Bunch of foolish fancy, that one.”

All but two of the newsprint pages have been torn out. On the cover a woman with hollow eyes smiles primly. She wears a dark gown embroidered with gray flowers. The sleeves are long, ballooning slightly at the wrists, and the corseted waist tapers to a triangle, cutting the woman into two halves. The skirt billows like a napkin doily, the layers of petticoats beneath forming a womb-like vase of fabric, accentuating the very region they profess to protect.

“Hogwash,” Gran would say. “One for her hips, one for her husband and one for the Holy Ghost. If a woman can't keep her peace with three petticoats, she won't do with ten.”

She looked at Alex when she said this, as though imparting some great knowledge. Alex could only nod, never quite sure what “keeping the peace” entailed; she suspected it had something to do with walking slowly and with “proper reservation.” Gran wasn't one to be questioned or contradicted, especially on her topic of expertise: women. She spoke in a removed manner of confident authority, as though age had absolved her of the vices of womanhood, leaving her only with the burden of virtue to pass on to her granddaughter, who, even as a young girl, especially as a young girl, found sitting still and walking slowly the most difficult virtues to master.

From Gran, Alex had learned the true nature of women—deceitful, manipulative, full of the sin of Eve—and she'd wondered more than once what kind of woman her mother had been, wondered if she too had been stricken with a wandering soul. Gran spoke little of Alex's mother, obviously did not think her worthy of her youngest son, Charles. Alex knew her only as the gold-etched daguerreotype by her bed.

Her mother's lips, thin and straight. Her mother's eyes, looking out but seeing nothing. Her body, a thin, flat frame.

Instead, Gran related her own family history as a moral tale. She told of her husband Nicolas, who insisted on fighting and, by Gran's telling, insisted on dying, in the Battle of New Orleans. Nicolas left her with three sons and no income, apart from her father's dairy farm, and the boys grew fast and foreign to her, each one following their father's reckless lead into military life, and eventually military death. Charles left behind baby Alex and a consumptive wife fated to live but three months longer than her husband. Alex had always understood that her existence was in itself a “burden endured”—had heard it put just this way by Minister Bosworth who, on occasion, was called upon to confirm Gran's low estimate of female virtue.

“A girl, from the time she is born, is at battle with her natural inclinations,” the minister confirmed one day at tea while Peter, his son, made faces at Alex through the living-room window.

Alex had fidgeted in her chair, scowling at Peter and staring past him into the fall day. The leaves were just turning rose-brown. The apples were ripe.

“She must, growing and through adulthood, quell the evil spirit within her and, by her submissiveness, gain eternal redemption.”

Gran's head was bowed when the minister said this, and did not see Alex stick out her tongue at Peter.

Alex looks up from the picture, suddenly aware that the shadow is still there. Gran fades into the nitric fumes of the outhouse.

“It's not for reading,” Emaline barks, “and you're welcome.” Then the shadow is gone.

Alex wads the front cover of the magazine, scrunching the dress, smashing the woman into a mass of crinkled paper. She wipes with the soft inside pages and drops them down the hole. But even as she makes her way along the road to the creek, the model's hollow eyes take the form of the rough-cut windows of canvas shacks, giving her the disconcerting sensation that the town itself is somehow following her, closer and closer toward the sputtering edge of the creek until the town too is swallowed by the sound of rushing water. She turns to face the silence behind her.

The windows of the frame and canvas cabins are not eyes. The splintered gray walls are not inching closer. The clouds gathering on the lip of the ravine look as if they are brushing the feathered heads of cedars, but the ravine walls are not collapsing around her. The brown-butted chickens, worrying their way up the road, scratching for worms and other treasures, ignore her completely. It's only the Victoria Inn, with its ornamental balcony, splintered balusters and peeling whitewash, that reminds her of an old woman's crumbling face.

At the creek the tops of men's heads bob from holes in the ground. They gather beside long wooden sluices, washing soil down hollow slat-lined boxes. Most work silently, adjusting to each other's tempo, and the few that stop to watch as she passes make no effort to speak. Better to keep her feet ahead of her thoughts. Better to fill her senses with California, once a word light with hope. She keeps step with the thump of an axe, pulls her hat to the very bridge of her nose, tries to ignore the blisters pinching the skin of her heel. Biting air fills her lungs. Her aching legs begin to warm and loosen.

Further upstream, the path narrows. Her eyes begin to wander. The overcast sky allows the ravine above the thinnest of shadows, while brambles and thickets form dark impenetrable outgrowths of branches and leaves. Fallen limbs, black with mold, litter the trail. Mushrooms grow from the fermenting dead leaves, and the crevices of lichen-covered rocks. The clank of metal on rock becomes distant. Men's voices are all but swallowed by the rush of water, the squawk of scrub jays. She pauses for breath at a flat outcropping.

She likes the way the valley opens here, offering a shelf of gravel and sand that gives way to a carpet of grass and clover running to the ravine wall. The clearing is buttressed on either side by a twisted thicket of red brush bursting with pale, coin-sized leaves. Black-skinned scrub oaks reach arthritically outward, and above, on the ridge, fir trees stand rigid.

At the creek, a row of rounded boulders protects a calm enclave of frigid water. She skims her hands across the slippery green skin growing on a rock. She rummages in her pack for the gold pan, past the tin cup, the canteen, the money pouch. How heavy these few belongings had felt, how light she feels now, alone here by the creek. She scoops up a brimming pan of sand and water, remembering the old prospector on the outskirts of Rough and Ready.

F
ROM
$10
TO
RICHES, his sign had read, and beneath it a stack of gold pans rose one on top of the other like tortoise shells. She'd choked down a bite of the old man's barley bread. “The first fortune is always the hardest, wettest, coldest, meanest son-a-bitch you ever chase,” he said. His voice was a gravel rasp, high pitched, and in this way reassuring to Alex. Already her shaking hands had stilled some. “They don't tell you that in those shipping fliers, do they? They don't need to. Gold! That's all they need, save the ink and paper. A man's not bound to read between the lines with a word like that to tempt him.”

He emptied his pipe on the stump next to him and pointed up at her with a finger more bone than skin.

“I see myself in you, is what I'm saying, and I'm telling you it's not as easy as they make it sound, finding gold, getting rich. Nothing is, is it? A man can lose himself in the search—forget anything else ever mattered to him but gold, forget who he was and what he valued 'fore he came. It's a danger, like scurvy—sneak up and take your teeth 'fore you know it.”

He bared a set of blackened incisors, yellow at their roots, but Alex's eyes lingered on the gold pans, and the word
gold
rested there on her shoulder as if it meant to follow her wherever she was going. She found herself reaching for her money pouch, giving the man a coin from her precious stash, though she knew better by now than to put faith in words, even those as shiny as gold. A crooked grin tugged his whiskers as he tucked the coin into his boot.

“What you do is, you find a likely spot, one that smells rich, like a rusted wheel axle. Hunch down, like this—” He eased off his stool and bent down to demonstrate, his knees jutting on either side of his shoulders. He mimicked scooping up a pan of soil and water. “Then you just rotate it round in a little circle. All in the wrist, see—” His hands were small and slender with brown sunspots dotting the backs like islands. The crease lines in his hands were mirrored in his face, and a thin white beard was the only trace of hair on his head. He moved the pan in circles. “The lighter stuff, sand and such—worthless. That'll slough off first, so what's left at the bottom, see, is the black sand, the heavy stuff. And the gold.” When he stood, the man's back remained curved like the keel of a boat, and he had to crane his neck to look directly at Alex. “'Course, most nowadays is using the rocker and long tom, if they don't want to go down a hole, but thems require at least three to work right. Not long ago, miner by hisself only needed his pan. I know, I was here in '47 taking gold 'fore anyone know'd the name Cal-i-for-ni-a.”

She takes a deep breath. The smell is organic, cedar bark, fermenting mud and mushrooms. No rust. She rotates her wrists clockwise. Small flecks of white, black, gold and gray swirl in suspension, spilling over the edge of the pan, staining her crotch and the front of her flannel. She sucks in her breath at the chill, dusts off the sand and silt, and bends down again, allowing her knees to jut on either side of her as the old man had done. She scoops less sand this time, less water.

She sets the pan like a boat on the water and watches it float downstream, catches it before it's swept away. She gives the pan a spin, it twirls like a top, throwing flashes of sunlight into her eyes. She scoops another bit of water and sand, this time angling the pan away. She works slowly, biting the end of her tongue, losing herself in the water and silt. Her forearms burn and she uses the pain to keep her mind from wandering back into memory. The manzanita rustles behind her.

She turns to face the teardrop ears of a doe frozen mid-step. Its tail twitches; its ears rotate, listening. Its pregnant belly is stretched taut. Liquid eyes fix beyond Alex, beyond the end of the clearing. Alex turns to look and the deer, even with her big belly, springs forward in two arching leaps before again halting, motionless.

Alex's ears twitch. Her heart begins to thud. She follows the direction of the doe's gaze to find herself in line with the muzzle of a rifle.

All she can see now is the gun, the tip round and glinting silver, and she thinks, how quickly, how effortlessly they found me, before I even knew where I was going. She rises to her feet and the doe braces to run, every muscle and ligament tense. The gunshot shatters the stillness; the metal whizzes like a breath past her ear. She hears metal strike flesh and flesh thump to the ground, and only now does Alex begin to shake, the instinct to run so strong she is paralyzed.

John Thomas leaps from the manzanita grove. “I got 'em, Jed,” he yells, eyeballing Alex.

“You get 'em?” says Jed, crashing through the brush behind John Thomas.

“I said I got 'em.”

The two men crouch over the body as it slides into death. Its eyes stare, too pained for fright, and Alex can't help but look down where the bullet has pierced the belly. The taut skin has split around the wound and a small, hoofed leg twitches through the hole.

“Cut the throat,” says Jed.

“Be dead in a minute.”