Crown of Dust

by Mary Volmer

  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. Bac
k 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 gl
ow 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.