Crown of Dust

by Mary Volmer

  Living so close to the ocean, seeing the ships appear and disappear on the horizon as he trudged to the mine each day, well, of course he’d heard stories. Violent bloody initiations into sea life or dramas of capture and punishment, designed to shock the sons of miners, to keep them away from the ocean and under the ground where they belonged. But the stories had never had this effect on him. These sailors were friends. He’d seen them talking on deck, slapping each other on the back as lads do. Even now, there was no anger in their dance. It was a satisfied grunting duet. David shuffled back the way he’d come. He told no one. He pretended to sleep on the hard wood of his bunk until morning, afraid to dream. He’s dreaming now, his body rising and falling with the waves.

  “David?”

  Limpy, naked to the waist, sits on the side of the bed. His eyes are coal indentions in the dim light. It cannot be past midnight. Limpy’s breath and voice are thick with whiskey.

  “Hope I didn’t tear you away from a good one,” he says, shoving David in the shoulder. David doesn’t answer.

  “Golden Boy, what I tell you? Ha! Sho’ ’nough pay dirt. How many ounces a’ color you think we washed today? Twenty, thirty dollars’ worth, I’m thinking. And washing with pans? With a sluice we’d make five, six times that, easy. Easy,” he says, spreading his foul breath over the bed.

  “Go get some sleep, Limp.”

  “There it were …” Limpy sits back on his haunches and the bed groans relief. His head tilts back to the canvas roof and a toothy grin shows white. “There it were, sitting there in the ravine all along, winking at us. Was I not the one what told you? I told you I got me a feeling about that boy.” He clears his throat, spits on the floor, sings, “I got me a feeling …”

  David rolls away to face the wall. “Go on, Limpy!”

  “All right. Hell, sleep, sleep,” says Limpy, crawling on hands and knees across the room to his bed, humming the same tuneless jig. The humming turns to silence, the silence to snoring. David takes himself in hand.

  7

  Through the kitchen door, Emaline watches the sun set on cotton clouds, purple-white against a pink sky. Can almost hear the grass growing, she thinks, and she does hear the blended orchestra of insects swarming the puddle of water outside the door. With the number of new faces in town it seems as if twenty-eight days have passed instead of four since gold was found. It seems to her that the poppies should be blooming, but time always did have a funny way in California. Hatches miners like insects. Bends a young man’s back and gnaws at his knees, doing ten years of damage in a sliver of the time. She can hear them now, trooping up from the creek. Her boys, hungry, smelly. Still she languishes a moment more.

  The saloon door opens. Familiar footsteps pause in the kitchen doorway.

  “Been meaning to talk to you,” says Jed, his voice soft but firm.

  “No one stopping you,” she says, but doesn’t turn to face him. She has been avoiding him with busyness, baking twice as much bread, boiling four times as much coffee and using her cycle as an excuse at night, which she never does. Her cycles were short and violent, and Jed knew the moon wasn’t right for them. He is a patient man, but also a persistent one, and that hangdog look of his is dragging her down.

  “Since Hudson come, I been thinking.”

  “You been thinking what?” she says, fumbling in the potato sack.

  She refuses to worry, resents the energy it consumes while contributing nothing, not a damn thing, to the things that need getting done. She chooses six good-sized potatoes, thumps them one by one on the tabletop.

  “Hudson just here to piss on what was never his territory,” she says, pointing with her rag. “Wonder who he paid to make him a lawman? Just a feckless shit, more guts in a chicken—and when that chicken came strutting out, tilting its head like it saw Hudson for the worm he was? Ha! I coulda kissed the damn thing.” She scrubs a potato. Dried mud flakes on the tabletop. “Fugitive slave, my ass,” she says and sweeps the dirt into a pile. “Those politicians making laws in little rooms way off in Washington, expecting people a continent away to follow? We all seen what a mess those laws are making of Kansas, sending neighbors to killing one another over slaves only the richest white folk own anyway. Drawing lines on a map and expecting folks to mind them. Laws like that are only enforced when they suit the purposes of men like Jackson Hudson. What quarrels there have been here, I have dispensed with, quick and fair, and a man can leave if he don’t like it.”

  Jed shifts his weight. He’s letting her thoughts play their course, always so damn polite. She closes the back door, steps across to the table. She picks up the paring knife and a potato—just holds them.

  “Do you think I should go?” he asks.

  “I’m not going anywhere,” she says.

  “That’s not what I asked.”

  “It’s not?”

  “Emaline …”

  She shakes her head.

  “I was just thinking,” he says.

  She puts the knife down, places the potato next to it. She pushes past him into the main building, pauses a moment as the heat of him touches her, closes her eyes to the scent of him. That she has no purpose being in the saloon doesn’t strike her until eight or so faces look her direction. From behind, she can feel the weight of Jed’s eyes upon her. She looks down the line of men. Alex looks up, then away.

  The first evening all week he’s graced them with his presence instead of crawling up to bed without even eating. Never yet thanked her for washing his flannel or for cleaning the vomit from the floor of his room.

  “Alex,” says Emaline, and his head jerks up in that shocked way of his. She searches for something else to say, angry at Jed for making her this way, at herself for letting him.

  “Know what to do with a broom?” she says and holds open the kitchen door. She needs him to do this for her, to put a body between her and Jed’s words.

  “Boy been working a mine all the long day and you telling him to sweep?” Limpy says. He stretches his arms behind him and winks at Alex.

  “Right, then you can do it. You, David?”

  The wrong thing to say. Their eyes move as one to Jed, still standing beyond the door and she can hear their thoughts. Woman’s work, man’s work, slave’s work. It’s all work. Think they’re the only ones working all day? Think she lazes, sitting on her fist and leaning back on her thumb? She’s about to tell them this, tell it good, when Alex stands up.

  “It’s all right,” he says, “I don’t mind sweeping.”

  “You don’t mind sweeping? Blisters the size of sixpence on his hands and he don’t mind sweeping!” Limpy says.

  “Remind him of that when his pick stops swinging tomorrow,” says David, his tone much sharper than Limpy’s playful banter.

  “What else you going to do there, Emaline? Sweeping, huh! Go on then.” He catches Alex with a boot in the ass as he passes.

  In the kitchen, Jed is scrutinizing the floor for evidence of filth. He won’t find any. She’d swept up just minutes before he arrived. Alex stands with the broom in his hands, looking from Emaline to Jed to the floor. Jed’s nostrils flare. He picks up a handful of potato dirt, as though he plans to give Alex a mess worth sweeping. But his shoulders fall, his face changes. His fingers loosen and brown sifts to the tabletop. He leaves a trail of dust as he walks out the back door.

  He’ll be back. He’ll be back tonight at her door and she’ll let him in. She nods, trying to reassure herself. Alex peeks out beneath his duster hat.

  “Right—blisters,” says Emaline. “Let me see.”

  She grabs his hands before he can pull away, feels the shiver that flutters through his body. Such cold hands. Small. She’s never been close enough to see how small. His palms are raw and red, except in those places where blisters fill dead skin with clear fluid. A dark shadow peeks just below the cuff of his sleeve. She pushes the cuff up, finds an oblong bruise, brown and fading, but roughly the size of a fist. A frightening blankness clouds his eyes. F
or a moment she thinks he’s stopped breathing.

  She pulls his cuff back down and rubs her fingers softly over the blisters. “Some beauties,” she says, not sure what else to say. “Nothing much you can do for them really. Just wait till they harden up and become part of you for good.”

  He nods, and she’s relieved he responded. When he pulls away, she lets him go.

  “Probably need more of a sweep tomorrow,” she says, taking the broom. “Thank you, though.”

  He opens his mouth, shuts it. His hands fidget. She waits, not sure she wants to know what he’s going to say.

  “Go on then,” she says. She leans her weight against the broom and watches him go.

  Her first morning at the mine had passed in complete and utter exhaustion. Each bone and muscle, only thinly connected to the fog of Alex’s head, chanted its own special tune of protest. Her nose felt the size of her head, her head the size of her entire body. A throbbing ache began at her tail-bone and stretched over both shoulders like the straps of a heavy pack. For the next three days, as her head shrank in size and the cartilage of her nose began its crooked realignment, this heavy pack of fatigue remained with her and sent her straight from the mine through the yellow light of the saloon to the darkness of her room each night. Any thoughts she had of quitting, taking what gold she’d found and moving on, were extinguished by the safety of that room and by an unexpected pride that greeted her with the sun each morning. She would not give the regulars at the saloon, who watched delighted as she crawled up to bed, the satisfaction of watching her quit.

  Now, a week and some days have passed since she became the Golden Boy, and her legs are lighter than they have been. Her shoulders are sore along their ridges, but her back is loose. Her eyes wander over the blood red face of the ravine as she follows close behind David and Limpy down the trail leading back to town.

  New claims pock the mountainside and miners hunch over their sluice boxes, picking out the larger flakes of color by hand from the wooden slats before collecting the finer grains of pay dirt in a bucket to be washed with a gold pan. Today she spilled only one pan down her trousers and David barely raised an eyebrow in response. It’s rare for him to miss a chance to criticize.

  “Widen your stance,” he lectures. “Bend at your knees—more. Keep your hands a shoulder-width apart on the shaft—a shoulder-width, wider. Use your legs and back next time, not just your arms. Are you aiming, or just swinging?”

  All of this to swing a pick at a mountain she hadn’t struggled so much to hit when she’d found the gold. David seems intent on forgetting this and she hasn’t yet found the nerve to remind him. Even when his back is turned, it feels as though his eyes are on her, looking for the chance to quibble. She had loaded too much raw ore into the sluice box so that pay dirt washed away with the slag, and then after the river water had rinsed the slag away down the creek, she’d failed to wash each black grain of pay dirt from the sluice slats into the washing bucket. “Each grain is money down the creek when you’re careless,” he told her as Limpy stood in the shade of the ravine, picking his teeth with an oak twig. A scrub jay squawked from the manzanita bushes. She stood impassive to both voices, staring just past him as she used to do with Gran.

  The trail curves sharply to the right, around a towering pine. She steps high over the root stems radiating from the trunk. How easily David’s legs carry him next to Limpy’s graceless clomping. She moves her arms swiftly front to back like David and mimics his stride. His voice comes in chunks of words between the sounds of night birds. He’s speaking of the mine, already making plans for the next day when this one is only just ended. His hands are animated in a way they never are when he speaks to her, in a way she’s never seen in the saloon. She adjusts the nugget between her legs. The trail widens to Victor Lane.

  At least two more canvas shacks have sprung up since this morning, quick as new mushrooms, and the road is littered with discarded canvas sacks, broken pick handles, a pair of mud-crusted socks. Long underwear hangs from a clothesline stretched between tent stakes.

  The speed with which men have come to Motherlode surprises her a bit less than the state in which they are willing to live. Four, sometimes five, at a time sleep in bunks, one on top of the other like sailors, and every room in the Victoria Inn is full. At night now the walls of the inn reverberate with the sound of men snoring, retching, coughing. They do nothing quietly, it seems to Alex, as if they were afraid of the invisibility she sought through silence.

  Yesterday at this time a crowd was gathered in a circle before the Victoria. Their cheers and shouts reached her ears long before the sound of fists on flesh, and before she got close enough to see the two men tangled at its center, Emaline stepped from the Victoria, shotgun in hand. Alex couldn’t hear what she yelled over the ruckus, but everyone heard the shotgun boom, and all heads turned in the shocked silence that followed.

  “You going to kill each other, you do it somewhere else,” Emaline said, and as if this were an invitation the stockiest of the two fighters stepped forward. A bruise bloomed on his cheek, and blood colored his teeth red. He pointed at his long-legged adversary.

  “From the digger pine to the bend in the creek, I said. Wrote it and filed it myself, and this, this—sonbitch jumped my claim.”

  “Weren’t no digger pine on the land I’m mining,” said Long Legs, holding his left shoulder.

  “Well, no shit! But there’s a stump, right? Cut my tree, jumped my claim, is what he did. I filed the papers official in Nevada City this last Sunday. The big fella was there. He saw.”

  Limpy stepped forward, nodded but made no effort to hide the grin on his face. “Saw him when I filed our claim,” he said. “But I didn’t read it for no tree.”

  Emaline cradled the gun before her. She squinted from one bloody face to the other and a murmur was the loudest sound from the miners watching.

  “You cut his tree?” she asked Long Legs.

  “I cut a tree—”

  “You cut his tree?” The man didn’t answer but rubbed his toe into the dirt, chewing on his lower lip as though he’d have liked to cry. Alex was struck by how young he looked, how fine and soft his beard. No older than Peter before he rushed away to the seminary.

  Emaline thumped the barrel of her gun down on the porch. “Right, then. You find your own claim or find a way to work this one together. Otherwise, I got whiskey to sell and nobody drinking it.”

  Today, there is no crowd and Emaline stands on the porch of the Victoria, the chickens a flurry of feathers beneath. She scatters oats, clucks and coos at the birds, speaking as if their clucks and chuckles were replies. “Hello, ladies,” she says. “How was our day today?” And then, stomping and shooing away a crow, “Git now, git, you old nasty thing!”

  David and Limpy disappear together into their cabin. From here, thirty yards away, Emaline could be any number of women, and for a moment she is the woman in the daguerreotype by Alex’s bed in Pennsylvania. From this distance, her lips are thin and straight and the dust-brown hair swirling about her head is a deep charcoal-brown, just a shade lighter than Alex’s own. Emaline steps off the porch and around the side of the inn, the chickens still pecking at the ground behind her. Alex follows, intending to watch from afar, as she’s done the last several days. Watch and listen without knowing why.

  Rivers of rainwater on Victor Lane have dried to muddy ruts and crags. She stays to the opposite side of the street where the shadows are longer, and then to the cedars beyond the Victoria. She watches through the open door of the kitchen, listens to the clang of pots and pans. The faint melody of a song wafts out with the smell of rising sourdough. Alex creeps closer than she has before, crouches low beside the woodpile, and the song reveals itself as a made-up tune, a personal melody that makes Alex want to hum along.

  Gran would sometimes hum in the kitchen, usually while peeling potatoes or apples, or some other task that required more patience than focus. It was a pleasant sound of absent contentment,
weak but clear, and without the strain that Sunday service seemed to demand. Gran’s voice, so gravel thin in speaking, strained for volume in church, wobbling up and crashing into the careful harmonies of Peter’s mother, who sat to Alex’s right, as if only by being heard by all would Gran be heard by God. Her kitchen-humming lacked urgency, and listening to the soft waft of that voice, Alex could almost envision the young woman invited to sing at weddings and funerals all over the county.

  The humming stops. Emaline’s dark shape fills the doorway and Alex tumbles back over a stick of firewood and lands with little grace on her rump.

  “Well,” says Emaline, a smile in her voice. “If it ain’t the Golden Boy.”

  Alex is suddenly very sorry for being sick on Emaline’s dress, regrets nothing more at this moment than that dress. Emaline turns back to her stove and, though this is not exactly an invitation, Alex picks up the kindling, follows her through the open door. Heat touches her face. She’s struck with an overwhelming sense of familiarity. There the stove, throwing raw heat into the room, there the washtub and the plank table dominating the floor space. Pots and pans hang from hooks like an iron fringe along one wall. Dry twists of herbs, wild rosemary, thyme and mint, are strung from threads in the window. Alex knows this place, or a version of it, knows the feel of bread dough, the smell of pie baking in the oven. She knows the singular satisfaction of sweeping a floor, the simple consolation of ordering the daily disorder of breakfast, lunch and dinner.

  Emaline’s rump bounces as she pulls the bread from the oven.

  “You still here?” she says, and sets the steaming loaf on its side to cool. She tucks a curl behind her ear, wipes her hands on her apron. “Of course you are. Turn your head—the other way. Yeah, well,” she says and touches the bridge of her own nose, “no sense being too pretty. And the … the blisters?”