Crown of Dust (5 page)

He pauses and Alex fills the space with a nod. “This all you need? 'Cause I'm not usually open but two days a week, the other being day before last.”

Alex nods.

“Fine. Now, gotta ask for cash I'm afraid. Credit comes with a strike you understand. Only reasonable.”

It rains for three days, and for three days Alex sits on the staircase staring down into the saloon as if watching a Christmas pantomime. She has no part in it. She is above, looking down, finding it difficult to remain aloof and indignant with solitude's cold hands curling around her, making the walls feel very close and the people below very far away. No one seems to see her there. No one says her name.

Rain, as it falls outside, traps old air in the saloon. She thinks, every breath I take is someone else's breath discarded. I am eating other people's air. She thinks, this should make me full and larger than I am. She thinks, if I stay in this place, I will eat enough man breath to become a man, and I will play cards and drink whiskey and they will never find me. She thinks, it would take two of Gran and two of me to equal one of Emaline, standing there with Jed behind the bar, now mending a sock, now bringing bread from the oven, everywhere at once, and occasionally she heads upstairs with a slack-jawed miner with money in hand. Alex moves over to let them pass.

She thinks, the smell of whiskey is sweeter than wine; but she's only tasted wine, and then only sips. Nearly a week on her feet, nearly a week of constant movement and now no place to go but her thoughts. She tried to escape to the creek that first rainy day, stood cold and wet on the edge with her claim stakes and shovel as a liquid train of water crashed downstream, covering claims, filling coyote holes and toppling the windlasses into the gutted sink of soil.

Jed said, “You don't play games with a river in heat—if you was thinking 'bout working today.” He shouted this over the water and over the rain, and she watched and shivered while he dipped a water bucket, holding on as the current gripped and yanked.

Now the road is a river, or many tiny rivers all running toward the creek, a thousand strands of motion, and Alex trapped inside on the stairwell thinking about the four gold coins left in her money pouch, how rich she'd felt with six coins.

Limpy is telling the same story he'd told two days ago, but with a few details added for variety. Three whores instead of the two, and he changed the place from Grass Valley to Nevada City. No one seems to notice or care, and Emaline just nods her appreciation. The jealousy takes Alex by surprise.

She thinks, if I were a man I would be loud like Limpy, and tell stories and everyone would laugh; or I would be very quiet like David, with everyone listening real hard those times I did speak.

She notices the way David moves from his stool to the bar and back again, filling space, not taking it like Limpy. His legs bow outward a bit and he walks on the outside of his feet. He looks it next to Limpy, but David is not a small man. He's at least six feet tall with broad shoulders that angle from his neck. His drooping mustache calls attention to a small lipless mouth and cleft chin. His hands are always folded or at his side, different hands altogether than the ones straining white against the handle of his pick a few days ago. “Stay out of his way next time,” he'd said, and now she sits alone on the stairwell, out of everyone's way. She thinks, I would become a man who fills space and I would not be afraid to leave this step. And sometimes, when she loses focus, loses herself in the yellow smoke of the room, her thoughts turn into memories.

The hemlock grove and apple trees of the Hollinger orchards back home. She's climbing as high as the apple branches will bear with Peter on the ground looking up. “Not so high,” he says. And Gran poking a knobby knuckle through a tear in Alex's petticoat. “Natural,” Gran says, shaking her head. “Natural inclinations.” Klein heaves the accordion into another song, and a lanky miner with the ears of a much larger man stands near the bar to sing a sad song about lovers and loss. As his voice trails off from a soft, flat tenor to a forced vibrato, the room is silent.

“Uplifting as always, Mordicai,” says Limpy. A clap of thunder takes his voice and the day outside flashes bright, and dulls as quickly. “Who's next then? Bible verses allowed, but not recommended till twilight, ballads are capital and stories divine.”

The one called Harry folds a hand of cards, pushes his stool back, and sweeps down in a dramatic bow all but lost on his audience. He's a stocky man, with thick coarse hair and fleshy cheeks. She's never seen him without Fred, the gaunt-faced fellow to his right. Captain Fred. Captain Fred Henderson, if the cavalry cap he wears is his own. She's heard stories of cavalrymen, and Fred looks anything but broad chested and daring.

“A poem …” Harry says in the voice of someone used to being heard above a crowd. Around him card games and conversations continue, some in strange languages Alex couldn't understand even if no other sound competed. “… by Harold Daniel Reynolds.”

“The third!” says Limpy.

“Why not? The third!”

Old Bob Blue got his heart broke in two

When a lady, the love of his life,

Ran off with a stranger in snake-skin boots

And a gift for throwing the dice …

And the rhythm of the poem, the way one line ends in expectation of the next, bring the walls of the inn even closer around her. The second ceiling of smoke and ash rises and falls with his voice, until the laughter and words are magnified, mixed and unintelligible.

Harry finishes his poem with a flourish and bows again, his balding head pointing to the floor. Alex claps with the rest. Emaline's eyes scrunch at the sides, her mouth open, her big teeth crooked yellow. Women shouldn't laugh with their mouths wide open, Alex thinks, but wants more than anything to feel that good, to be included. Outside, the rain continues. On the ridge the wind moans through the cedars and into the valley, and Alex feels the cold through her flannel. She thinks, I will grow a skin thick enough to fight the cold, tough enough to join the men below. But for three days she stays alone on the stairwell.

“What do you think?” David asks, surveying his claim.

Limpy jabs his shovel into the mud, folds his arms over his great chest. A wash of silt covers the rocker and the fungus-eaten bottom is now a gaping hole. The hopper and apron lie twenty feet away, wedged between a granite boulder and a wall of shale.

It would feel so good to rage, David thinks, to punish some tangible and contained foe. But the weather is neither tangible nor contained. Its neck cannot be snapped on a gallows rope, or safely imprisoned behind stone and mortar. A Cornishman knows that the weather will always be at large. And here in California there are no giants of legend to blame for it, no magic.

“What do you think?” David asks again.

Limpy shoves his hat back and scratches his receding hair. A half dozen miners packed and left this morning, looking for richer claims upriver, east to Nevada, or north to Vancouver Island. Long-legged Mordicai had been among them.

“Been hearing things about the Fraser River,” he told David. “I aim to get there
before
the rush this time.” He glanced back once at Bobcat Creek, tipped his hat to Emaline, and strode stork-like out of town.

David bends down and picks up a broken riffle bar. He will not write home about this. He hasn't written in months and won't until he has the gold to prove himself a success, to prove his father wrong.
It's a metal like any other.
He's been away two years now. Two years with nothing to show, and he won't return until he can buy himself a farm in a quiet, out of the way valley and raise the wheat that refused to grow in that salty Land's End air, that rocky Penzance soil. A heretical ambition for a fourth-generation miner whose family had always dug for their dinner.

“I think … I think I'd like to try a sluice this time,” Limpy says.

David nods and hurls the splintered wood into the creek.

Alex has fleas. They invaded two nights ago when the rains began, emerging from the cloth tick of her bedclothes and taking happy bites ever since.

She slaps and misses a black speck, gone before she's even sure it was there. The sun's white light is tearing a hole through the cloud cover. She slogs through the red mud, sucking in the fresh air as if she's been underwater. The creek crashes by.

That morning, several miners had left town. They blamed Motherlode for their bad luck.

“Luck don't have a location,” Emaline told Mordicai, the lanky man who sang the sad songs.

“Gold does,” he said, and tipped his hat goodbye.

Alex had followed him out the door of the inn to the porch. She stood out of the way, but close enough to be noticed if Emaline wanted, close enough, she thought, to warrant some acknowledgement. “Got to build luck around you,” is what Emaline said, more to the chickens clamoring about than to Alex, even as the heat of the woman's body reached out to brush away some of Alex's coldness. Alex waited. Her eyes wandered from Emaline's wide posterior to the reed-thin man disappearing around the row of manzanita. She even scuffed her feet as a chicken might scratch for a worm, but Emaline had nothing to say to her. Alex could stay. Alex could go.

She thinks about the way Emaline laughed with her mouth wide open, how Limpy's stories grew larger and longer with every whiskey, how David held his cards to his chest as if they were sacred things, and how Preacher sat with his Bible and mumbled to himself, slipping drinks when he thought no one was looking. Alex was always looking, so that at night, warm in her little room, hugged by darkness, she could recreate those images and suffocate other pictures that crept into her dreams. Her mind had a skin too, and she could already feel it thickening. Stay a few more days, she thinks. Just a few more days and then I'll go.

She picks her way up the narrow trail, past the wreckage of abandoned claims, over fallen trees and branches. Mud and gravel have slid from the ravine, forming a tongue of earth that sticks like a wedge from the wall of her clearing. Scrub jays and robins streak down to snap up earthworms wriggling in the red clay. Slivers of pastel grass poke through like fingers to the sun. One of the granite boulders protecting the cove has washed yards downstream and her quiet pool is now a mass of charging water. All remnants of the carcass have been washed away. She takes a wooden stake from her pack. She pounds it in at the water's edge. She hefts her pick to her shoulder, looking for a spot to place the next stake, and allows her mind to travel back to another spring day, or one of many that featured her and Peter climbing trees in the Hollinger orchard. Back then the whole of her life took place tomorrow.

“I want to be a soldier,” Peter told her as he pulled himself up into the apple tree.

“So?” said Alex, straddling a branch, enjoying the friction between her legs. “Be a soldier.”

“Pa says I'm meant to be a pastor.”

It must have been spring. The wind was colder than the air and the smell of mountain laurel and apple blossom made her eyes water. She wiped her nose and rubbed the snot across Peter's leg.

“Stop.” He punched her in the arm and fought to stay balanced. She'd begun to enjoy teasing him like this. She didn't know why.

Alex dropped to the ground, scanned the rows of apple trees for Farmer Hollinger, who hated children in his orchard even more than birds. “My Pa was a soldier,” she said, and Peter swung upside down by his legs. His hair fell on end and she could see up his nostrils. “My Pa's dead.”

Peter knew both of these facts, but she often dangled the death of her parents above him like a prize gem, though she never understood his fascination.

“You can be anything,” Peter said once in explanation. “Anything you want to be.” They both knew it wasn't true.

She swings the pick, ducks as metal rebounds off rock. Chunks of granite and shale cascade around her. She swings again.

She used to lie in bed wondering what it would be like to be Peter. What would it be like to call someone mother and someone father, to wake each morning to organ music and hymns, for as a small child this was how Alex imagined Peter starting every day. Alex held no such illusions now.

Down comes a satisfying clump of red clay and a chunk of granite, speckled black like dirty rock salt. Again and again she swings, finding a haunting satisfaction in the crumbling mountainside, as if she were tearing away pieces of herself with the chunks of rock and sand, as if digging far enough would bring her face to face with … Who? What? She doesn't know any more. Perhaps digging is enough; to make a small indention in an unknown mountain. She digs until her breath comes hard, and her shoulders and back burn. She sucks in cold damp air, rubbing rough stones back and forth in her hands. Drops them. Olive-colored plants with velvet lobes nearly a foot long grow out from the hillside. Root stems, some thick as a man's arm, course the wall as if holding it together or clawing to get out. And there, wedged in the crook of a wooden elbow where bits of rock and dirt have gathered, is an egg-sized stone. Lusterless yellow and much heavier than it looks, she thinks, rolling it back and forth in the palm of her hand.

“Alex?”

A shadow drapes itself across her. She whips around, but it's only David, squinting up at the crater, down at her hand. He'd come up so silent.

“What is it you have there?”

David steps closer. Alex backs away a bit, opens her mouth to answer, then looks down at the rock in her hand. She holds the solid mass out to David.

“Gold?”

4

Of course, as soon as she says the word
gold
she begins to doubt, and while David does not deny her statement, he does not confirm it either. He drops to his knees and bows his head as if in prayer, rubbing ore between his fingers. He touches his fingers to his tongue, and his eyes grow round. His eyes track the angle of the ravine from base to skyline.

“David?” says Alex, but he's up now and striding out of the clearing. He looks back once, a gesture she receives as an invitation to follow.

Men attach, like links in a chain, as they weave down the trail. The only sound is the sucking of boots in the mud; even the birds are silent, watching this strange migration. The afternoon sun, magnified and reflected through drops of water beading from tree leaves and rooftops, creates a million shimmering lights dripping to the ground. Alex jogs to keep up with David and ahead of those boots behind her. She's surprised to find a small knot of men already waiting outside the general store.

“What in the Sam Hill is going on? Back in ten minutes, you said. What is everyone …?”

Limpy pushes his way through the men. He wipes snot off his nose and mustache with the back of his hand and spits a mass of yellow to the ground at Alex's feet.

“David?” he says.

The crowd contracts, tightening around her like the constricting segments of an earthworm, becoming one animal with eighty eyes. She's afraid to look and find a fist full of mud. The gold she's seen came in flakes of color, or minted coins with heads and letters stamped like epitaphs, or gleaming nuggets filling the pages of the steamship fliers and travel bills. This had been a lump of jagged edges, just the size of her palm, a heavy lusterless stone like any of the hundreds she'd thrown as a child. She looks to David for reassurance, but David's teeth clamp over his lower lip. His arms are crossed before him.

“Best just to relax,” says Micah, even as the vein of his empty socket strains through the skin. He swipes his hands down his apron. “Can't tell by looking.”

“Hell, I know gold when I see it,” says Limpy. “When I see it, Alex …” A murmur of agreement ripples through the crowd. She steps back and up the first step of the general store, and every head follows.

“Now, shit, son, shit. Think this is funny? Think gold is funny business?” says Micah.

“Could be all you got is pyrite, make fools of us all,” says Harry.

“Wouldn't want that, would you, Alex?” says Limpy, his heavy hand on her shoulder. “To make fools of us?”

“Best just to relax,” Micah says again.

She opens her fingers, slow for the stiffness, expecting something larger, more substantial to match the way she suddenly feels.

Emaline has a drawer full of men's clothing, shirts mainly, for it's easier to walk out of a room without your shirt than your trousers. She has moth-eaten flannels with frayed collars and missing and mismatched buttons; silky-white dress shirts with embroidered initials, looking very official and somewhat smug next to blue muslin and tough, weathered buckskin. There are ruffled sleeves and holes in seams and stains in unusual places. Orphans all, which might explain why she can't bear to throw them out, or even give them away. Lord knows, only a fool keeps more than she needs, but she smiles now as she digs through the musty pile of cloth, looking for one article in particular. Her ears prick and tingle at the sound of gunshots fired skyward. The echo rebounds back and forth between the ravine walls with the sharp unnerving staccato of firecrackers. Somebody gonna be bitten by one angry mosquito if they're not careful, and she's in no mood to be plucking bullets from a miner's ass. She closes the drawer with her hip and holds up a blue calico shirt, remembering the bucktoothed young man she'd taken it from.

He was just off the boat from Italy or Chile or some such place and had tried to slip away without paying. “Everyone pays,” she told him, catching him by the scruff of the neck, “even if it is with the shirt off your back.”

She'd laughed as the scrawny little bloke hightailed it down the hall, his backbone sawing holes through his skin. But as the evening wore on and the night howled cold and angry off the bay, she found herself clutching the shirt. Three days later, when the city of San Francisco was coated in a thin sheen of white, Emaline huddled warm by the fire as her stomach churned ice cubes, and resolved that, from now on, she would demand payment first. Of course, there was no way to tell if one of the fifty frozen bodies found the next morning was her Italian, but she'd kept the shirt just the same, carrying it to Sacramento, and now to Motherlode.

She spreads it on her bed, running her hands over the wrinkles. She'd washed it twice, but never managed to get rid of the smell of him. Cloves, was it? He had been chewing on cloves, and his black hair had streaks of brown that matched his eyes. He should be, he would be, too big for the shirt now, with broad shoulders and muscles filling in the wiry sinew of his arms. She shook her head and blew a curl from her face. It will be a relief to get rid of the thing, a redemption of sorts—the only motive she considers as she knocks on Alex's door. She flings it open to the sickly glow of the candle, half expecting, hoping in fact, to find him in all his newborn glory, skinny as the Italian.

Alex sits fully clothed on the bed. He wrenches himself upright. The boy is skittish, Emaline thinks, but as she becomes accustomed to the dark, her gaze falls upon a solid lump nestled like an egg on the blanket. The Victoria hatches before her, shedding its rough skin and primitive décor for a dreamed-of elegance. She'll have the downstairs floors redone in smooth milled redwood, stained dark brown to hide whiskey spills; replace the make-do bar with a hard oak one, with shelves beneath to keep the good stuff and new shelves on the wall to hold the cheap. She'll build a proper kitchen, add a cellar and a dining room with a long maple table. A wonder of woodwork. Oak for the doors, sweet cedar for the chairs, ash for the two upholstered settees that will sit by the new stone fireplace. Plush carpeting. Green with red roses and dyed canvas tapestries to cover the plain wooden walls. Glass for all the windows, a mahogany nightstand with a finished ceramic washbasin in every room. A new bed for herself, four-poster, with sheets of pure silk and—Alex snatches the golden lump from the bed and holds it to his chest.

Emaline's mouth closes with a pop and curls to a frown. Might as well just accuse her of thievery. She crumples the calico shirt in a ball and crosses her arms before her chest.

“Now, if it were me,” she says, her voice cooler than she intended, “I'd wrap it up as good as I could and leave the damn thing here, hidden under the bed, wherever. Unless it's worth your life protecting.”

His eyes grow to wide, moon-like disks, but she doesn't care if she scares him. It's dangerous holding things of value too close to you. And grown men have been killed for smaller hunks of metal. She shivers at this, and squints down at the clear complexion, the hairless lips, the slender shoulders of Alex, feeling suddenly protective of the thankless little snot.

“I brought this. For you,” she adds, taking the calico from beneath her arm. She holds it before her as though judging fit. “The one you got's a bit rank, you don't mind me saying.”

Alex says nothing, but ventures cautiously forward, his feet very light on the floor. It strikes her just how small he seems now with his shoulders hunched, his arms tucked in as though his guts would otherwise spill out. He'd waltzed into town today like the crown prince himself, a trail of men following after him, practically falling at his feet. But she can't recall anything about his expression. Her attention, as now, was fixated on the gold. The devil himself might as well have been carrying it. She lays the shirt flat upon the bed and smoothes the sleeves over the chest.

“Try it. Bound to fit you,” she says, and waits. His eyes flit from her to the shirt, as if either will bite him. Emaline shakes her head, waves away her disbelief, and turns to leave in one motion. She's got better things to do than wait for a thank—“Emaline?”

Emaline turns round. “Thank you?”

She closes the door behind her, ignoring the heavy lump in her gut. He was forgettable before, without the gold. Safer for it.

Downstairs she finds David leaning against the wall on a stool and staring out at the foolery in the road. He's lit the lamps and the fishy smell of the oil permeates the room. On the far wall, across from the kitchen, the portrait of Queen Victoria gazes out across the saloon, her complexion all the more pale in the yellow light. “Damn fools,” says Emaline, and the third leg of David's stool thumps to the ground. “Don't want to join them?”

“No, thank you,” he says. Emaline pauses, holding the kitchen door half open, looking back up the stairs.

“David?” she says. “Do me a favor?”

As she expects, he nods a quick agreement. She points to Alex's room above them. “Watch out for him for me.” She doesn't expect the ashen look that falls across his face. He sits up straight. “Yes?” Emaline asks. Before he can answer, the door of the saloon slams open and Limpy ducks beneath the doorframe holding two bottles by their glass necks.

“Rum!” says Limpy, an exclamation and a statement. Behind him, the street is a flurry of movement. The shadows of evening spread like fingers through town.

“Thank you, David,” Emaline says, and pushes through to the kitchen, leaving him with his mouth open.

Limpy met Alex at the stairwell, called her the Golden Boy, bought her a drink and whiskey isn't nearly as sweet as she'd imagined.

“Drink it down, son,” says Limpy, leaning with his back to the bar. The taste lingers in her mouth like the fuzz of a peach. She squirms on her stool and readjusts the nugget where it hangs hidden in the pouch between her thighs.

Klein muscles the accordion to life and a man in the corner stands on his stool singing, “Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming …” in a wavering Scottish brogue. It takes a rag to his face to sit him down, but the song has caught here and there, and while none of the singers agree on a verse, all come together in time for the truth to go marching on.

“Whiskey,” Limpy says, “is not meant for sipping, am I right? Micah? Show the boy how it's done.”

Micah tips his head back, barely swallowing. He orders two more drinks, offers one to Alex. She shakes her head. “No, Micah. Thank you.”

“Do well to accept gifts given you.” He sets the cup down anyway. “Remember that.”

“Women and whiskey, son, rarely come free,” says Limpy.

“Not that I blame you,” says Micah, “what with this rotgut-mule-piss whiskey Jed's been serving. Jed? Jed, a cup of your best for the boy. New England rum.”

“And don't tell us you ain't got any,” says Limpy. “Carried two bottles in myself this very afternoon. Got the good stuff in your own glass—that's what I thought.”

Jed is wiping a clean spot on the bar, but his eyes follow Emaline as she circles the room, talking, laughing, gathering cups as she goes. If Emaline feels eyes, she ignores them.

Alex adjusts herself. She takes another sip of the whiskey in her hand and finds it empty. The rum smells of sugar beets, but she doesn't trust the sweetness until she tastes it, soft on her tongue, slipping down her throat so easy.

“Good, huh? What I tell you? New England rum,” says Micah, separating
Eng
and
land
. “You're welcome.” He winks his eye and she watches him totter back to his poker game.

She'd practiced walking about her room, adjusting the knot around her waist to still the anchor-like swing. But as she watches the Scotsman approach the bar, she wonders if her nugget hangs a bit too low. She couldn't leave it in the room, didn't quite trust the heavy look in Emaline's eye at the suggestion. Nor was Alex ready to part with the flannel, her adopted skin.

She ducks low over her drink, now, every time the woman passes.

The tobacco smoke rises layer upon layer to the ceiling and the room feels smaller, more cluttered even than it looked from the stairwell, as if each clump of bodies sections off its own living, breathing room. Man breath, she thinks. Men springing from rocks. What would Gran think of that? Men from rocks. She takes a sip. Water from wine. Her head feels very large. She pulls away from the hand tugging at her flannel. New. She feels new. The Golden Boy Alex. She turns to find Preacher John pointing at his Bible as if trying to spear the words with his fingernail.

“You read?”

Alex nods her head yes and Preacher says, “'Course not, no,” and begins pointing out every word as he reads, tugging on Alex's arm now and then to regain her attention.

“Whoever sows sp-spar-sparingly,” Preacher reads, “will also reap sparingly, and whoever sows gener-ous generous-ly will also reap generously. God loves a cheerful giver.”

Preacher nods furiously and Alex finds her head bobbing right along. “A cheerful giver,” Preacher says again as Limpy leans over.

“Now, Preacher, you're not bothering the boy, are you?” He takes the empty cup from Alex's hand and gives her another rum. “Me and Alex have business, you understand. Business.”

“Business,” says Alex, and
s
's tickle her tongue. “Generosity and righteousness,” Preacher says, still tugging on Alex's sleeve. Limpy pulls her away. He drapes his great arm like a yoke across her shoulder.

“Generosity. All well and good,” he says. “But men like us have to look out for our own interests, Alex. Drink up now, attaboy. Been thinking real hard 'bout you, son, all night, real hard. Always had a good feeling 'bout-chah. It's a gift. Always could tell an honest man by lookin', and I liked the look of you. From day one, boy, ask anyone, ask David. ‘Got luck riding with him,' I tells him. David's got skill, but you need both.”

“I say I was feeling lucky tonight?” yells Micah, and a groan sounds from the men at his table, David, John Thomas, Harry and Fred among them.