Crown of Dust

by Mary Volmer

  John Thomas left the arena and began trudging back toward Main Street, the sounds of protest following him. The fight had been too quick, the outcome fixed. He heard the blows of fists against flesh. Gunshots shattered the air. But John Thomas had no energy to complain. He glimpsed McLantry, who stood with an arm around a euphoric gentleman weighed down by gold. Tricked again. McLantry had known John Thomas wouldn’t trust him. No one trusted McLantry.

  The smell of fresh rolls competed with a bouquet of new lumber, damp ash, and sweating horseflesh as John Thomas neared Main Street. Luck? For him there was no such thing, only bad luck. That grizzly had just waited till the bull knocked its damned self silly, then finished it off. Lucky?

  He kicked a stone up the street, resenting the good-natured bustle, hating the newly painted shopfronts. He edged by ladies in stiff, starched dresses, men in pressed trousers, and knew what they saw when they looked at him. They saw his threadbare canvas pants, his stained flannel shirt with two missing buttons, his big toe protruding from his left boot. A cursed man. A failure. He continued past Mill Street and Marshall’s Grocery Store, came to an abrupt stop in front of a poster on the wall of O’Dunkel’s Saloon.

  John Thomas straightened and, for a moment, forgot to breathe. He counted the zeros printed below the familiar face and smiled. His lucky day.

  14

  Emaline is used to feeling clever in the morning, after that first cup of coffee has seeped into her veins, before the day’s plans transform themselves into the day’s duties. But lately her morning moods have been spoiled by strategically placed biblical verses on scraps of yellow newsprint. Jeremiah 5:3 on the lid of the flower barrel: They have made their faces harder than rock; they have refused to repent. Matthew 11:20 next to the water bucket: He denounced the cities, because they did not repent. And just yesterday, Jude 7 beneath her bedroom door: As Sodom and Gomorrah and the cities around them indulged in gross immorality they are exhibited as an example in undergoing the punishment of eternal fire.

  If they were so goddamned worried about her eternal soul, you’d think they’d just say so in person. Treat her like the great unwashed, unworthy of a word, unless it be one of condemnation, and then only written on paper, as easy to burn as to read. She doesn’t know why, but she’s kept every scrap, noticing the differences in the slant of the lettering. One, a billowing, effusive hand with a fondness for large pregnant O’s; another thick and slanted with letters nearly too pinched for Emaline’s eyes; and the third, a careful, blocky style, utterly without personality.

  Emaline stuffs the scraps in her apron pocket. She wraps her shawl around her, though she isn’t cold. Flipping an untidy ringlet behind her ear, she walks out to inspect the damage in the chicken coop. A lone bird strides cautiously around the pen, scratching through the feathers which are all that remain of its fellow inmates. It cocks its head sideways in the jerky, graceless manner of chickens. Emaline sprinkles some oats.

  “You’re it, huh?” She scans the coop. No bones, no blood, just feathers, and not a sound the night before. Neat. Very neat. She leans over the rail, lays her chin on her hands. Crows hop among the feathers. A squirrel darts along the coop roof, vanishes over the edge. She can hear the town waking behind her, the buzz of human voices, the first clatter of carpentry. The chapel is nearly complete, though the steeple still leans a little to the left, and likely always will; brass-plated mirrors and porcelain washbasins grace every bedroom of the Victoria, and new four-legged chairs and upholstered settees with fancy armrests curling down like snail shells now adorn the saloon. But beyond these refinements, beyond the boundaries of the walls she built, the town is growing like a teenage boy. Growing too quickly—sprouting roads and buildings—out of her control. Jed is off at the mine most days now, and comes home tired. When they do talk, he can speak of little but gold, net yield, per-ton percentages. She’s not sure how much longer she can manage alone, fixing the meals, cleaning the bedrooms, stocking the saloon … And those women, swanning around Motherlode like a fleet of holy human barges, dispensing disapproval like manure on a bramble garden—who else but they would be placing Bible verses under Emaline’s nose?

  She puffs a curl from her face. Above, wispy clouds manage a few formless shadows. The chicken gives a cautious squawk, looks none too grieved about the disappearance of its comrades. It turns its back and reveals a plucked red backside, as if to say, “I didn’t kill ’em, but I ain’t sad they’re gone.”

  “Didn’t feel like squawking last night, did you?” says Emaline, eyeing the bird suspiciously. Not that it would have mattered. Emaline knows exactly what happened to her chickens, but isn’t about to tell that to the bird. Fresh eggs. Such a sacrifice, but a worthy one. “Wouldn’t have done much good anyway, huh? Might have woken up Mr. Reporter—Mr. Jamesesess and all his questions with him,” Emaline says, though the chicken’s attention is on its meal. “Hey!” she says, and whistles as though calling a dog. “Guess I won’t miss that rooster none. You won’t be doing any crowing, will yah? No. A whistling girl and crowing hen, Mama would say. ‘A whistling girl and a crowing hen always come to some bad end.’ Smart woman.” She purses her lips and whistles a nonsense tune to herself. “Mr. James …” she says, pointing her finger at the bird, but doesn’t finish her sentence.

  Jed is none of Mr. James’s damned business. And as for Alex … Well, she doesn’t know what to think about Alex. Boy Bandit? She wanted to believe it. It would give Alex a solid identity, a past defined by actions. As it is, he’s just the Golden Boy, the town luck, a mascot of sorts. Be more comfortable knowing exactly who he is and where he got the bruises he walked into town with, even if he is a criminal. The word sounded so much bigger than Alex. Criminal. If it hadn’t been for those bruises and the way he shrank inside himself when she saw them, she might have asked … No. A man’s past is his own damn business. He’d tell her when he was ready, just like everyone else. She takes a breath, chews her lower lip. She pulls another crumpled paper, a letter, from her apron pocket. She brings the page inches from her nose and squints her eyes to slits.

  My Dearest Emaline,

  Because your last correspondence was no doubt lost, I will assume that you are healthy and receive this letter in good spirits. A rush of events marks the time since my last letter.

  Your cousin Elma is now the mother of three, having brought a healthy little girl into the world not two weeks ago. She has her father’s dark hair and her mother’s dimples, and our prayers have seen her through a worri-some spell of fever. Elma’s husband Daniel was elected to the county seat again, but professes no desire to stand for the Senate. So refreshing to find a man in this day and age with humble, reasonable ambitions. Rafe Gentry spent four nights in jail, fighting again, and Renton’s fishpond had to be drained and dredged, but the cholera is better than it was. Only three deaths in the last three months. I do hope the orphanage is running smoothly. After trying for so long for a baby of your own, the Lord has blessed you with a house full of needy children. I have always said to trust the Lord. The Lord has a plan for each of us. You know we were far from pleased to learn that you would not be returning to us after Harold’s death. But your mother died a happy woman, knowing that you had answered God’s call to other ends. I regret that there is no money to send in support. Bless those dear children, and know our hearts and prayers are with them, and you. With Love,

  Aunt Florence

  Flo has no idea to whom she is writing any more. The Emaline she knew is buried with her husband somewhere between Utah and the Missouri River; a single unmarked wooden cross the only evidence of death.

  So rarely, now, does she think of Harold as more than a mound of earth, but this letter has resurrected his belly laugh, the smell of his pipe, his boxy, chinless face. He was a forty-six-year-old widower when he asked her, an old maid of thirty, to marry him. She’d loved Harold for his kindness and familiarity, for his work-hardened hands and weepy eyes, for the silly stories he told to neighborhood childre
n every Sunday after church. She loved him for the poetry he read her aloud each night; sometimes his own, often the words of William Wordsworth. Now, only one line remains: “a slumber did my spirit seal”—his voice sweeping through her memory like a breeze, for it’s not the words so much as the resonate warmth of his voice and the rhythm that lingers. Lord knew he wanted children of his own to inherit the wheelwright shop and listen to his stories. Watching wagon after wagon of young families rumble West, Emaline had wondered if it was something in the Missouri soil that kept her barren. Watching that endless train of migrants, she’d felt a presence clawing her belly for release. She liked to think that it was another life, a separate life, a child doing the clawing. She didn’t try to contain her enthusiasm when Harold suggested they, too, should venture West.

  After leaving behind Missouri’s wooded rolling hills and crossing horizon after horizon of prairie, endless as the early summer days, after braving rivers that snaked and meandered to parched earth and others that burst with the violent thrust of flash floods, she felt this presence growing stronger, slowly defining itself like the Rockies in the distance, punching granite fists into the sky. Even as Harold weakened, this other presence grew. If it was not a baby, it was … it was something, somebody she already loved. She loved Harold still for giving it to her.

  Flo would not accept the woman Emaline has become. She, too, would be leaving scraps of paper to save Emaline’s soul, would accuse her of having lost her faith. Emaline shakes her head, drops more grain for the chicken. Faith is one foot in front of the other, even if you suspect you might be going the wrong direction. Faith is letting a small lie alleviate the stress of a thousand unaccepted explanations. She wrinkles her nose, scrunches the letter into a tiny ball and lets it drop, inviting the Rhode Island Red to investigate. The chicken pecks tentatively, punching holes through the paper. A smile breaks the frown lines of Emaline’s face. She bends for the letter, puts her finger through the hole in the middle and begins to tear, littering the coop with slivers of false expectations. She bites her lip, refuses the tears in her eyes, and tips her head back, breathing in deeply as if to suck the moisture back into memory. The chicken circles the strange paper worms, looking for something more substantial. Emaline pulls all three scraps of newsprint from her pocket. Jeremiah 5:3 is shredded and strewn, then Matthew, then Jude. The Rhode Island Red scratches and pecks the holy men like so many worms in the mud, bobbing its head for more. Forgiveness was never so simple.

  “Nearly ate you,” Emaline tells the bird. “Dumplings.” A sound catches her ear. She turns to find a girl, almost a woman, peering around the side of the Victoria.

  “Lou Anne, is it?” Emaline asks. The girl nods her head and pops her mouth shut. “Come on, then. I won’t bite yah.”

  The girl bites her lip and ventures forward, tentatively, on her toes. She looks Emaline up and down with unveiled curiosity. They stand side by side, the girl’s head barely reaching Emaline’s shoulder. The sun has risen to nine o’clock and the clouds have evaporated to blue. Jays scream from a tree branch.

  “You always talk to chickens?” the girl asks.

  “Yep. You?”

  The girl blushes, bites her lip again and opens her hand to reveal a wrinkled scrap of newsprint. She takes the paper between thumb and forefinger. Her nails are chewed to bloody nubs. She rips the paper in half, in half again, and throws the pieces to the wind. Emaline stares straight ahead, making an effort not to smile.

  “Might just go to hell for that,” she says, and feels the girl tense at her side, taking small careful breaths. A corset, Emaline thinks. Probably her first whalebone.

  The girl holds her head high. Her dress is storm gray with a long skirt, impenetrable for its layers of petticoats. Her back is painfully rigid, her body yet to resign itself to the restraints of style. Her shoes are scuffed along the tops and covered in a thin film of river mud, and her braids are tight, woven around her head like a beaver trap. Pretty, but not happy about the sacrifice. A smile creeps across Emaline’s face in spite of herself. She nudges Lou Anne with her elbow, allowing the smile to evolve to a chuckle, a chuckle to a laugh. On the second nudge Lou Anne sputters, slaps her hand over her laughter. Tears streak her eyes.

  “I think you look very nice,” says Emaline, serious now, and Lou Anne looks up, her scrubbed face glowing. “A real lady.”

  They watch scraps of paper do pirouettes on the wind. “You want to come in?” She motions toward the Victoria.

  Oh yes, please, reads the girl’s face. But she doesn’t speak.

  “Thought you was one to talk.” The girl lowers her eyes, kicks at the dirt. “Won’t tell your mamma.” At the mention of her mother, Lou Anne balks.

  “I have to go,” she says, turning and rushing away as fast as the corset will allow, leaving Emaline standing alone with the Rhode Island Red.

  Alex finds Emaline in the kitchen punching down the sourdough. Sweat rolls from her forehead into the bowl as she kneads and her face, below her right eye, is streaked with flour. Alex takes a breath of yeasty air, ignoring her lingering stomachache. She hasn’t felt quite right in days. A large fly bobs heavily in the air before her. She brushes both away: the fly and the notion that she ever knew what it was to feel “quite right” in the first place.

  “Throw some wood in the stove, if you’re just standing,” says Emaline, and Alex obeys. Emaline claps a cloud of flour from her hands and sneezes into her dress sleeve. Alex loiters by the stove, awkward without something to lean on, puts her hands in her pockets, pulls them out again, wishing she’d thought to pick up the broom. Emaline goes back to her bread, molding the dough into two oval loaves. Alex turns to leave, turns back, not sure if silence is worse than the words she has ready. Emaline scoops up the loaves, shoves them into the oven, closes the door with a clang. Her fists rest on her hips.

  “For heaven’s sake, Alex—what?”

  But the words Alex was planning evaporate. Emaline shakes her head, takes a dozen potatoes from the barrel and begins to peel. She ignores Alex effortlessly.

  No one in town has said a word, other than good morning, to Alex’s face. But sometimes you just know what people are saying without having to hear it. She should have forced herself to stay still last night, to blend into the background of the Victoria or flee outright, leaving her pack upstairs, the gold in the mine, abandoning everyone to their own conclusions. She would have been miles away by morning—miles away with no food, no gold, no plan, nowhere to go. The thought alone had exhausted her. Instead, she had found herself snuggling down into the folds of David’s bed and closing her eyes. She was tired. She is tired of running.

  “Do you think I’m the Boy Bandit?”

  Emaline doesn’t respond. Alex wonders whether Emaline heard her, wonders if she actually spoke the words aloud. “A stagecoach robber …” she continues, just as Emaline turns, the knife in her right hand, a potato the other.

  She points with the knife. “Fill the pot,” she says.

  Alex’s mouth opens and closes. She skims a pair of moths from the water bucket, one long dead and sinking, the other still fluttering. The dead moth sticks to her fingers, leaving a gray film of dust behind, while the living moth quivers on the ground, flutters and rests, flutters and rests. Alex places her foot over the struggling creature, changes her mind, leaves it to survive or die, and fills the cast-iron pot.

  “On the stove,” Emaline commands, again pointing with the knife. Alex bends her knees, lifts the pot and sloshes water onto the floor. She looks around for a towel, but finds none. She’d been so eloquent in her head this morning, had Emaline convinced that the Golden Boy was no danger, that he should stay. Alex wants to stay, is happy to pretend this town, these people are all she’s ever known, happy to live hidden within this body of new muscle, behind this crooked nose, guarding her secret forever in the pouch between her legs. But Emaline makes it so hard, consuming every ounce of confidence in a room until there is simply none left to go aro
und. Alex wipes water and moth dust on her pants and knows she’ll do whatever Emaline says.

  “I’ll leave,” says Alex and wraps her arms around her stomach. “If you want, I’ll go.”

  Emaline continues to work. Alex fidgets, tickled by the silence.

  “You’re not this Boy Bandit?” says Emaline finally.

  Alex doesn’t answer quickly enough. “No,” she says.

  “If you’re not guilty, no reason to go. And if you was … If you are this Boy Bandit,” she says, putting great emphasis on the word boy, “might not have a reason to go, either. Might be, here is as good as any place to be.”

  Her tone is morose, without the force and conviction Alex is used to. Emaline rests her hands on the counter. Her head falls forward. A potato peel drops to the floor. She ignores it. She has deflated before Alex, her wide shoulders caving in upon themselves. Tears suddenly dampen Alex’s eyes. She hears the front door of the inn open. Male voices are muffled by the yards of decorative fabric tacked over the saloon walls. The velvet settees, the cedar chairs, the dark wood tables, suddenly seem out of place next to the makeup-caked complexion of Queen Victoria hanging on the saloon wall; artificial next to this coarse, imposing woman who, until now, Alex had only ever dared to respect and to fear.