by Mary Volmer
Alex hangs David’s jacket by the door, shaking the sleeve in introduction. “Hello,” she says several times, trying out different tones of voice. “Hi. Hello. My name is Alex. Alexander. Alexandra. Rebecca. My name is Rebecca. David, Jamie, Sam, Henry. My name …” She catches her breath, surprised by a sudden wave of desolation. “My name is Alexandra,” she whispers, and again, louder: “Alexandra.”
* * *
The doctor has already come and gone by the time Alex steps through the door of her room. Apart from the purple knot on his temple, Limpy looks none the worse for wear. A smile lifts his face. His feet extend off the thin mattress of Alex’s bed, and a straw-colored corn advertises his left big toe. David, however, with dark, half-moon circles beneath his eyes, his hair a matted tangle, his cleft chin invaded by two-day stubble, slumps upon the stool as if he lacks a backbone.
“Alex my boy, my hero!” Limpy booms. “Good thing Emaline been feeding you right. Might still be sucking soil.”
“You all right?” Alex asks David.
“Shit, nice to see you too. Just trying to give my thanks, boy.” Limpy sits up and the bedframe groans. His feet disappear beneath Alex’s short blanket. “Takes more than a mountain to send Samson Limpkin to the great down under. I ever tell you about the time—”
“You feel good enough to be telling tales, you should be getting your own breakfast,” Emaline says from the hall. “Morning, Alex. Trust you got more sleep than the rest of us.” She hands David a cup of coffee and eggs to Limpy. “Damn, but it’s dark in here.” She looks across the room to where the window should be, adjusts the lamp and opens the door wide. The brighter light of the hallway squeezes around her wide body. Outside a wagon rumbles by, a horse shakes its halter and a man’s voice yells a greeting. The rooster still has not tired of his own voice.
“Lost another two chickens last night,” Emaline says. “Taking ’em off somewhere to kill ’em. No blood, few feathers.”
“Raccoon?” suggests Limpy.
“Or human. That buncha Orientals in the clearing across the creek. I’ve seen them sorts eat chicken feet raw.” She dismisses the worry with a wave of her hand. “You want breakfast, it’s still hot,” she says to Alex and disappears down the hall, leaving a column of light in her place.
David arches and yawns.
“Is he okay?” Alex asks Limpy this time.
“David and I were just discussing business. The future. Wondered what you thought.”
The future. Motherlode the city. Streets and side streets radiating off Victor Lane. Refreshing thoughts. For months the present has been all her mind could handle. She wonders about this, listens to the empty ring of her own speculations, has trouble locating herself in this future place.
“What I’m, what we’re thinking is, expand. Too much work for three people. With more help we could move more ore a day, wash more gold and be safer doing it. Keep it small, just Harry, Fred—maybe Jed, if he’s interested. A regular core-pore-a-tion, what I’m thinking. Small, though, like David says. All equal shares but you, ’course, finding the vein, you keep the big chunks. Bound to be more of them the deeper we go.”
David sits up in his chair, attentive for the first time. “You don’t really believe that, Alex? Do you? That there’s likely to be nuggets of that size just lying around, waiting for you to find them?” He looks at Limpy with a strange tired grin on his face. “He really believes that?”
She looks to Limpy for reassurance.
“Now, Dave,” he says, but David leans back in his chair as if evading Limpy’s words. He speaks up at the ceiling.
“This isn’t acting like any lode I’ve ever seen. What gold we’ve found has been random. Scattered. I’m just not sure. No, no,” he says, shaking his head. He sits upright. “No, it’s not stable. We haven’t even hit bedrock yet.”
“Details, details, you understand.” Limpy waves dismissively. “Was his idea in the first place, about the extra help. Just likes to be disagreeable. So, what you think, Alex? ’Cause you got the final word, being the finder. Wouldn’t want to step on your toes none by telling you how foolish it’d be to continue as we were. Could use the extra muscle.
“Now, don’t be all offended. No offense meant. You’re young yet,” Limpy says. “Who’s to say there aren’t a bushel of nuggets even bigger than the one you found, just a pick-swing away. Who’s to say—well, he said himself, it wasn’t acting like any lode he’s seen. We just gotta use what we got. I’m thinking of you. Your best interest.”
Alex wants to believe that it is possible for Limpy—or anybody, for that matter—to act in her best interest. But she knows Limpy well enough now to understand that he’ll say whatever he has to say to get his way. Progress is only measured in profit. And David? He folds his arms before him, looks at the wall as if there were a window there. He hasn’t actually discounted Limpy’s plan. Last night he’d said there was gold in the mountain. Last night, in the glow of that lamp, there’d been no doubt in his voice.
“You don’t think we should do it then, get help?” she asks, and his head jerks up as if surprised she’s asked him. His hand tugs at the twin tails of his mustache.
“I didn’t say that,” he says after a time.
“What are you saying?” she asks. He sucks in his lower lip, spits it out again. “David?”
“I … we,” he says, and looks away from her. “We can’t go on as we were.”
“HA! You stubborn son-of-a-bitch, couldn’t just agree with me!” says Limpy, ignored by both Alex and David.
“Take us two weeks, by ourselves, just to dig back through the fall to where we were,” says David. “And then we don’t know if we’d find enough to make the labor worth it.”
“And with more help?” she asks.
“Maybe.”
“Maybe what?”
“Maybe we find a rich vein in the granite, maybe the gold is scattered throughout the topsoil, maybe we find nothing, maybe it caves in again …”
Maybe was better than quitting entirely, disbanding, moving on, the unsaid alternative dragging David’s face to a frown. Beneath the growing pessimism of each of these statements, Alex is listening for and hears hope—the chance to continue the life that gold made possible, a life that depends upon the men in this little room, on Emaline, and the Victoria, on digging away in the gutted clearing. Cleaving any part would feel like an amputation. It had never been those nuggets Limpy promised that kept her digging in the first place.
“Maybe’s good,” she says. “Maybe is worth a try.”
“Attaboy, Alex,” says Limpy. “Spoken like a true Californian. New England Mine Corporation, we’ll call her.”
“No,” says Alex, growing weary of Limpy’s presumptions. David’s eyebrows rise and Limpy gathers himself to speak.
“No,” she says again, before he has the chance. “Victoria—I’ll call it the Victoria Mine Corporation. Klein will make me a sign.”
Alex finds Klein in the blacksmith shop with Mexican Jack. The door is open. Hot air billows through with every puff of the bellows and her eyes water in the dry heat.
“What she want now?” says Klein, his German accent relaxed and difficult to decipher.
Alex steps over the threshold into the room, shakes her head to show she hadn’t heard. Frightening ornaments litter the walls: iron clasps and hay hooks, bridle bits, chain links, tools of various sizes. A wheel axle lies broken in three parts against the wall and the dirt floor is gouged in places where steel has fallen. Apart from the open door, the red glow of the forge offers the only light in the room.
“Want, want—what does she want?” Klein says, his hands making circular movements with his words. When she doesn’t answer quickly enough, he resumes his conversation with Mexican Jack, who studies his coals as if he could tell temperature by color alone.
Jack’s bare arms are already streaked black and sweat beads along his forehead and collarbone. She’s never said his name aloud; his eyes, beneath tho
se thick black brows, seem, if not threatening, then at least intimidating. She’s heard that his real name is Antonio and that he’s from Valparaiso, but no one calls him anything but Mexican Jack and when she sees him on the street, this is the name that comes to her. The two men speak in a garbled mix of English, German and Spanish. She can’t follow, but Mexican Jack finds something funny, roars with easy laughter. Klein stares straight ahead at the flame.
“I want—I need a sign,” says Alex, and Mexican Jack’s laughter flutters.
“You want a sign, you ask your ancestors. Ask their bones, you want a sign,” he says, crossing himself once, twice and winking at Klein.
Alex recoils at the presence of Gran in the hot breath of coals, pushes the sensation aside. “A wooden sign. I’ll pay you now,” she says, and this gains Klein’s attention.
Mexican Jack’s laughter follows her out the door with a blast of heat, and the pride she thought she’d feel in the transaction is lost.
Shopkeepers are sweeping the wooden sidewalks free of dust. Some smile, most ignore her. Even though the sound of building overwhelms all others, in her head Mexican Jack’s laughter continues, and David’s words come back: I’m staying for the gold, for Limpy, understand? She understands this now, and has no trouble understanding his tone this morning. You don’t really believe that, Alex? That there’s likely to be nuggets of that size just lying around, waiting for you to find them? It was the way he said “Alex,” the way he said “you,” the obvious pleasure he took in her gullibility that clutters her thoughts with indignation. The Victoria Mine Co., she’d told Klein, spelling each word in careful block lettering so there would be no mistake. It is my claim, after all, David. My name on some paper stating my rights. She walks past Sander’s dry goods, and Heinrich’s shoe store, past the musk of the cigar shop. It occurs to her that she’s never actually seen any such paper. “Limpy took care of it for you,”—that’s what Micah had said. And it was Limpy who’d gone to file in Nevada City …
Mrs. Dourity emerges from her husband’s office, before the last thought gains purchase.
Alex pulls up short, squeezes into the crack between two shops. It’s possible she hasn’t been seen.
Mrs. Dourity peeks around the corner. “There you are,” she says. If her hat would fit into the space between the buildings, Alex is sure she’d have the Golden Boy by the scruff.
“Come on out here.”
Alex shakes her head no.
“I just want to talk, to give you something for that woman.”
Alex doesn’t budge.
Mrs. Dourity shuffles her bundles, holds out a leaflet. “We have met, and we have decided that we would like to cordially invite that woman to refrain from the selling of liquor and other … well, other improprieties.”
Alex grins at the suggestion. “We?” she says.
“The local Ladies Temperance League.”
Alex accepts a flier, hand-copied in a looping formal script, as refined as the most artful stitch sampler. Four names grace the bottom border.
“It says—”
“I can read,” says Alex.
“Well, good. Then you can read this to—”
“She can read too.”
This information seems to take Mrs. Dourity by surprise. Her shoulders fall with her breath as if she’s made a decision.
“There is something else.” She stares down her nose at Alex. “You do know my daughter, Lou Anne?” Her tone is not at all ironic. “Well, you can understand why I worry. I simply couldn’t approve of a … of a man whose morals were governed by little more than his basic … urges.”
“Approve of a what?” Alex asks, intrigued now.
“Why, a suitor, of course.”
Alex’s disbelief chokes her to coughing but Mrs. Dourity continues.
“My daughter can be quite … forward. She is young and full of lively mischief, but she is nearing fourteen now, and I was married well before my sixteenth birthday.”
“Mrs. Dourity—”
“And my husband, Mason, he agrees that a boy your age—an orphan? Bless. An orphan with enough gumption and good grace to make his way in a mining town is the kind of man who will one day lead. And—let me finish—we, my husband, I mean, is prepared to offer you a place, an apprenticeship, reading law. You can read—that will make it easier. Naturally, you will come and live with us when the house is done.”
Alex is amazed by the ease with which the woman has constructed this future. There it is, laid out in words as if written on the flier in her hand.
“My husband will be a man of some importance.”
Alex hears resolve in this statement, a resolve she hasn’t observed in the person of Mason Dourity. The man seemed to wear his title before him like a shield to hide behind. Before dusting sawdust off the porch, before checking the reliability of the roof, or the constitution of his desk chair, he held his placard to the wall in various locations about his new office, admiring the importance the bronze lent his name and title. MASON DOURITY, ATTORNEY-AT-LAW. He placed it finally just outside the front door, so that people passing by on their way to the shoe shop, or from Sander’s dry goods, could admire it as well. This was a running joke among the miners, who made a point of rubbing their grubby hands on the thing when they passed on their way home from the mines. But seeing her own name there in her imagination: Alex Ford, Attorney-at-Law? No. Golden Boy, Alex. No. Alexandra. No. Not any more.
Mrs. Dourity’s pensive face, the hope in her voice, gives Alex a chill.
“And you’ll come to chapel with us tomorrow, the second service?”
“Good day, Mrs. Dourity,” Alex says, tipping her hat as gentlemen do, and pushes past into the road.
“There is redemption, Alex, in the loving hands of God. You won’t forget the flier, now?”
First meeting of the Temperance League of Motherlode, California. Sunday, May 25th following the service of the 1st Congregational Church. Reverend Erkstine presiding.
“That woman,” says Emaline, “has some elevated opinion of herself.”
She hands the flier back to Alex, and it’s hard to say whether Emaline or the pot boiling on the stove is more agitated.
“Now, Emaline,” says Jed, his hands palms down as if to placate.
“‘Now, Emaline?’” she says. “That woman is after more than liquor, and you and me, and Alex. We all know it. Alex, what else did she say?”
Alex feels her cheeks flush. Alex Ford, she thinks, Attorney-at-Law.
“Emaline,” says Jed, his brow furrowed, his tone meant to temper, “I just don’t think this is something you should work yourself up over.”
“Work myself up? As if I just like to get worked up when there’s enough goddamn work to do without getting worked up!”
Jed holds his ground, crossing his arms before him, but Alex backs away. There is a frantic tone to Emaline’s voice she’s not used to.
“They take the word sin,” says Emaline, “and they stamp it on anything they don’t understand.”
“‘They,’ Emaline?”
“They, Jed. Those women. They come here after we cut and carve a little place for ourselves and they want to call us barbaric just so they don’t feel so bad about taking our place and making it their own. Taking, Jed.”
“I hardly think they—”
“You know what they want to call my town? Hartford. Hartford! Just want to recreate what they left back East, so they don’t have to change themselves. There’s a reason I came West, Jed. There’s a reason you ain’t slaving back in Mississippi. You want to go back to that place? You want them to bring that place to you? Women can’t own their own land, or the clothes on their backs, but they can make others feel bad about it. Try. At least I own what I sell. And to hell with voting. This isn’t about voting, or being heard. This is about being allowed to live without a lace collar around your neck, or a chain.”
Jed’s jaw is clenched. He eases his shoulders down, takes a breath. “You make it
sound like all women. You a woman, Emaline.”
“Yeah,” she nods. “But not the same one I was.”
He lays a hand on her shoulder and her head turns to meet his fingers. Their breathing links in the same rhythm. Alex turns her back, not willing to see what she’s seeing. She thumps the broom against the wall and hears Jed’s boots scuff the floor. When she turns around, both Jed and Emaline are looking at her with something close to worry.
“I’ll get the water then?” says Jed.
“Hold on. Alex?” Alex looks up then away. Emaline pauses, chews on her sentence, spits out another. “Did she say anything else?” asks Emaline.
“She wants me to go to church with them tomorrow, the second service.”
“She does, does she? And what did you say?”
“I didn’t say anything.”
Emaline shakes her head, wipes flour on her apron. She returns to the wild mint on the table, chops viciously. Alex puts the broom aside, looks up when the blade stops thumping the tabletop. A smile stretches across Emaline’s face and Alex mirrors Jed’s worried frown. “You’re going,” says Emaline, pointing with the knife.
“I’m what?” says Alex.
“You’re going.” Emaline walks over, smiles up at Jed. “We’re all going. I could use some extra preaching this Sunday.”
The second service always begins a half hour after the first, giving the members of each congregation ample time to avoid each other. Alex waits in the shade of the leaning steeple. She makes no effort to reconstruct Preacher John’s sermon into a defined message. She appreciates the random leaps his preaching takes, as if the Holy Spirit were bouncing freely off the walls of his mind. But her purpose now distracts her. She resents this feeling of vulnerability, this exposure, but you don’t say no to Emaline.
Across the road the doors of the Victoria are closed and the mood about town is subdued, reverent, in a way Sundays never used to be in Motherlode. The second-service parishioners don’t seem to notice this. They trickle up the road in their Sunday best. Mrs. Dourity, Mrs. Waller and her sister Rose wear dresses buttoned to the neck. Mrs. Erkstine has seen fit to add a lace collar, like the one worn by Lou Anne, who skips along ahead. Extra petticoats billow beneath her skirts even in this heat. She spots Alex, and rushes back to her father’s side.