by Mary Volmer
“We come for him, Emaline,” says John Thomas. Emaline tilts her head to the side, folds her arms in front of her. A smirk spreads across Hudson’s face. “You might as well stand aside, ’cause … we’ve come for him.”
“You come for who?” Emaline says.
“You know who,” says Hudson. “Dangerous criminal in your midst. A fugitive. Show her, John.”
John Thomas pulls a paper from his shirt and a sly grin reveals dimples beneath the thick blond beard. When she first met him, he’d barely had enough facial hair to cover a flea’s ass, and Hudson … Hudson was a bear-faced mountain man, and no better behaved for his pampered upbringing. Seeing the two of them now reminds her of men who put on masks for follies—except she finds neither one funny.
“Told you to get rid of him, told you nothing good would come,” says Hudson, and he lowers his voice, making the crowd lean in to hear. “I told you I’d give you everything—”
“Dangerous?” she says, shaking her head, acknowledging only what she chooses. She hadn’t wanted the everything Hudson had offered. She’d never loved him. He was lonely, and he was rich, and she was only doing her job. Yet he had been so sure of her answer. So sure that he went down on his knees in that crowded Sacramento saloon. He’d humiliated himself. She simply said no. And when he didn’t accept that, Jed had told him no with his fists.
“Chicken thieves is what I got,” she says.
Harry laughs, slaps Chang’s face, leaving red marks on his cheeks and, strangely, another smile on Chang’s face. The horses, always attuned to the changing moods of men, throw their heads and jingle their bridles. Harry slaps Chang again, harder, before Kwong rises up to grab Harry’s hand with a strength that seems to surprise them both.
“Stop,” Kwong says.
A pick handle to his stomach. A fist to his face. Kwong slumps to knees, gasping for air and Emaline’s attention strays for a moment to the anguished man at her feet, his queue circling his neck like a noose.
Ridiculous to pity, she thinks, but she does pity. “Enough, Harry,” she says, and Kwong slumps to the ground. The smiling one snarls at no one in particular then and bends to drape himself over Kwong and pat him stiffly on the head.
“Not talking chicken thieves,” says Hudson, and sits back in his saddle, one arm crossed lazily over the other, an amused twitch teasing his lips. Never did learn a thing, did he? thinks Emaline. Still reckons he’s God’s gift to California. And John Thomas, holding that paper in front of him as if he expects me to fetch. Shit. Standing on the porch, she remains taller than the men on horseback. On the porch she will stay.
“Show the lady,” says Hudson, his voice greasy with condescension, and John Thomas dismounts, becoming suddenly very small. His horse tosses its head, readjusts the bit in its mouth and bares its teeth as though laughing. The tall fellow riding next to Hudson does laugh, looks quite amused as he plays with the clasp of his gun holster.
Emaline ignores this, focuses all her attention down at John Thomas, scrutinizing him with squinted eyes until she makes him the size of a beetle she can step on. Presumptuous little shit, that silly look of righteous indignation on his face, squaring his shoulders, preening and strutting like a goddamned banty rooster. She suspected that leaving town hadn’t been his idea this time, but she hadn’t expected him to return with company, with Jackson Hudson. Before he climbs the second step, Emaline reaches down, rips the paper from his hands and holds it to her nose to read.
Emaline lets the paper fall, does an about-face and disappears into the Victoria. John Thomas’s lips curl into something between a grin and a snarl. He steps on to the porch. He clears his throat. He holds the flier up like a prize, but Hudson speaks first.
“Looking for a fugitive slave, Jedediah Haversmith. Property of Mr. James Haversmith, deceased, and now the lawful inheritance of his brother, Amos Haversmith,” he says officiously. The crowd quiets its murmuring and swivels its many heads, searching for a Jedediah.
“He’s there, back there!” John Thomas shouts and points to the back of the crowd where Limpy looks to David and David looks to Jed. One by one, the heads of the crowd turn to see Jed as though for the first time. A black man. A slave. Property. Jed holds his shoulders back, his head high, and folds one arm over the other. Even now, dignity comes naturally. Limpy places his big body in front of him.
“Now wait a minute …” he says, just as Emaline reemerges from the Victoria, her shotgun cocked, ready and trained at John Thomas’s skull. The crowd becomes one eye, focused on Emaline.
“Emaline,” says Jed, edging forward, placing a hand on Limpy’s shoulder as he goes.
“Stay put!” she commands without looking at him, and steps closer to John Thomas. The gun barrel kisses his ear. She’s seen men die, slowly, battling their bodies for each moment of life, and fast, with a bullet to the brain. But she’s never killed a man. John Thomas whimpers, like a dog, she thinks, hoping he’ll continue. She could shoot a dog.
Hudson clears his throat and holds up his hand to silence the pistols behind him. He adopts a parental look of stern patience. “May I remind you—”
“No, you may not,” says Emaline, raising her voice above him as he finishes his sentence.
“—that harboring a fugitive slave is a federal offense.”
“Emaline,” says Jed again, parting the crowd. “’S all right.”
“I will decide when it’s all right!” says Emaline, then bends to whisper in John Thomas’s ear: “Now you just get back on that horse, turn and ride on out of here, and I may just forget all about this.”
She shoves him down the porch and he stumbles over Chang, landing hard on his backside. Chang giggles, then howls, his teeth gleaming in the sunlight. John Thomas thrusts himself to his feet, and kicks Chang in the mouth. The grinning man falls unconscious to the ground, so John Thomas gives Kwong a few solid kicks in the stomach.
“Enough,” says Emaline, and John Thomas straightens, out of breath and red in the face. Emaline levels her gun at Hudson; she’s glad her eyes are too poor to see down the gun barrels pointing back at her. He sits up straight in his saddle, his hand on his holster. If it had been her, she’d already have drawn.
“No fugitives round here,” says Emaline. But Jed has made his way through the crowd and steps up on the porch next to her, followed by Limpy and David. Harry joins them, wiping Chang’s blood on his trousers. Micah and Fred come forward, leaving one of the regulars missing, but she’s of no mind to count. She bites the tip of her tongue, glances at the men behind her, feeling, at this moment, neither gratitude nor discord. Her focus returns to Hudson. The crowd takes a collective step back.
“And you ain’t no lawman. Am I right? Ah! Hands up,” she says.
The men behind Hudson are young, boys almost, surely with no desire to shoot a woman if their mothers taught them anything, if California hadn’t already unlearned it for them. “Y’all may get me, but I’ll get him first,” she says. “Tell ’em, Hudson.”
Hudson purses his lips, his confidence failing. He gives a backward glance and a nod. The guns lower and Hudson chuckles with unconvincing mirth. “Now …”
“Now you’re leaving,” says Emaline. “Take them—” she motions with her head to Chang and Kwong, “or take nobody. Go on.”
Hudson clears his throat, looks scornfully at the two Chinese men, then back down the barrel of Emaline’s shotgun. He yanks the reins of his horse, motions the posse to back-track the way they had come.
“Wait!” says John Thomas, limping behind. His mare is already halfway out of town with the others. “The money! You promised me. You can’t just …” He turns back to Emaline. “Emaline, I—”
Emaline fires one shot into the air. John Thomas leaps and hobbles after the retreating horsemen.
* * *
“They’ll be back. They’ll be back and they won’t just be looking for me next time,” says Jed. Emaline is hefting the stew pot, straining under the weight.
&nbs
p; “Stop a minute. Stop a minute, let me talk,” says Jed.
She turns to face him, but he remains in the doorway as though determined to maintain a distance. His features are a dark blur, but she has learned to read his expression from the tone of his voice. She wants to go to him, to put her hand on his lips, as though stopping the words would erase the problem. As though by refusing to think, by pushing that pulsing fear down, down, and down again, she could eliminate it entirely. As though it is words that make fear real.
She thunks the pot on the stove, pulls a forgotten loaf of blackened bread from the oven, slams it upon the counter. Her fingers are streaked charcoal black. She wipes them on her apron.
“You heard him,” says Jed. “Harboring a fugitive slave is a federal offense.”
“I’m not harboring anyone, am I? Not when you just come and offer yourself up. Didn’t bring you up here just for them to take you.”
“I’m not theirs to take.”
“Damn right!”
“Yours neither.”
Emaline places both of her hands on the counter. Her head falls forward.
“Emaline,” says Jed, lowering his voice, “you gonna get yourself in trouble.”
“Weren’t real concerned with that when I got you out of Sacramento, were you?”
“That was before …” Jed says.
“Before what?”
“Before …” he says again, and looks away. Emaline thumps her fingers on the charred loaf of bread, hard as fired clay, and waits for him to speak. Instead, he moves behind her. Pushes her hair aside and kisses the softness of her neck. He breathes in deeply, wraps his arms around her waist and presses himself into her.
“I …” he begins, massaging her belly, “I have to be a man.” Emaline stiffens.
“A man? A dead man?” She picks up the burned loaf and places it in his hands. Jed looks bewildered at the charcoal separating the two of them, tosses it back and forth between burning fingers. Emaline rushes out the back door.
With a fistful of oak leaves, Alex sits scrubbing bloody underwear. The outhouse is alive with flies, bouncing themselves off the walls, basking in the warm nitric fumes. Spiderwebs span corners like suspension bridges spotted with decomposing insects. The sour stench of sewage overpowers the odor of menstrual blood and Alex pushes the gold pouch aside to rest like a growth on her hip as she works. The thin walls trap heat like an oven, and on these walls shadows take shapes.
Gran’s face, dry, cracked and flaking like butter pastry. Gran’s nose, as straight and severe as her words. A half-formed demon the size of a newborn kitten, with large unseeing eyes and shriveled appendages, dead on a towel before Alex. Proof of sin, of lechery, Gran said. “You’re not to see that boy again.” That boy whose lips never whispered the word sin when they lay together behind the rabbit hutch. That boy who said he’d love her if she swore never to tell, who left her in Gran’s unforgiving home, waiting for the old woman to die. His face fades into that of a San Francisco businessman, his heavy cheeks flushed with liquor, leaving his mark in bruises on Alex’s skin. This man gave a name to Gran’s unvoiced accusations. “Whore,” Minford called her, “barren whore,” and hit her. Her womb remained dry while she bled from her nose. Her womb remained dry while she bled from her mouth. Alex grew tired of bleeding.
She clamps her arms round her stomach, squeezes as if she could somehow will both the memories and the blood back inside. A gunshot sounds, crackling off the ravine and down her spine.
Alex scrubs harder and faster, even after ripping a hole through the fabric. She’s become too comfortable in this place, too accustomed to thinking of herself in terms of he. He didn’t need to run. He hadn’t lost his baby. He hadn’t killed anyone, was far too timid, too innocent. He was lucky, a Golden Boy, the Golden Boy, Alex.
Elbows on knees, head in hands, Alexandra sits.
A moment, or a minute, or twenty minutes later, the outhouse door opens and cool air rushes to dry the sweat on her face. She finds Emaline standing in the doorway with tears welling like foreign bodies in her eyes. Emaline’s gaze falls from the nugget dangling in the pouch on Alex’s hip to the dark hair between her legs, to the bloody underwear Alex struggles to pull back up. Emaline opens her mouth to speak, surprises them both when no words come. Alex tries to escape and Emaline grabs her. Alex can feel the sinew and bone of Emaline’s fingers making bloodless indentions on her upper arm. She can feel Emaline’s unsteady breath on the back of her neck. The only sounds, beyond the usual commotion of Victor Lane, are avian. Alex wants to hear Emaline say something, to say, “Could use you in the kitchen.” But Emaline lets go and Alex jolts forward, corners the Victoria Inn and disappears without looking back.
16
Preacher John is waiting inside the Victoria when Emaline bursts through the door.
“Alex,” she says, out of breath. “Have you seen Alex?” She runs her hand over her hair, smoothing lumpy curls. Preacher John removes his hat, scrunches the brim, swallows. “Alex, Preacher—have you seen Alex?”
Preacher clears his throat and lowers his head. “Emaline, I came here ’cause I … well, I wanted to ask …” Emaline stares at him open mouthed. His beard has been trimmed, his face washed, the holes in his trousers mended. He wears a new starched flannel, pressed at the seams and smelling like the dry goods section of Micah’s store. Most striking to Emaline, however, is the sight of his brown eyes showing clear and sober beneath his brows.
“What I wanted to say was, I know them Chinamen didn’t steal no chickens.”
Emaline’s mouth pops closed. She forgets, for a moment, what or who she is looking for.
“You know that, do you?”
“And I don’t think it’s right or Christian of you to blame someone you know to be innocent. Do unto others, you know,” he says, producing his decaying Bible from the pocket of his pants.
“You don’t, huh?”
He holds the Bible under her nose. The pages are yellowed, smelling of tobacco, stale whiskey, and faintly of wildflowers. Not at all unpleasant, if the words and the scent weren’t being shoved in her face like he was force-feeding a toddler. She pushes the Bible away from her and Preacher John clutches it to his chest.
“No, and I think that … well, Rose says …”
“Rose?” Emaline asks. “Mrs. Waller’s Rose? What in high heaven are you doing talking with Mrs. Waller’s Rose?”—who, as far as Emaline is concerned, is but a fixture on her sister’s skirts, but she doesn’t say this.
“Yes, Rose says she heard Micah talking, and Rose says those Chinamen never stole any of your chickens. Rose says you told Micah to—”
“Preacher!” He sucks in his breath, doesn’t meet her eyes. “None of Rose’s business, is it? No? Not yours, neither.” An image of Rose passes before Emaline. A severe, small-busted woman with a meager mouth and a face devoid of expression. Rose says? She couldn’t care less what Rose says. Emaline waves her hand in the direction of the bar. “Go. Go get yourself a drink.” A thump against the ceiling brings her back to the task at hand. She hurries toward the stairs.
“Rose don’t let me drink no more. Rose says the devil’s in it, and Rose won’t have any man the devil already owns, and them two Chinamen already left town, but Rose wanted me to tell you that them Chinamen didn’t kill those chickens.”
The words come out in a flourish and, when Emaline turns, Preacher looks relieved to be rid of them. “Wanted me to give you this—” he says, holding out a small scrap of newsprint like the ones she and Lou Anne had shredded that morning. He looks toward the bar, the shiny oak tabletop, the crystal-glass bottles bending the light, casting rainbow and amber refractions on the far wall. Emaline marches back to him, arms swinging, eyes set. He retreats a step, but does nothing when she swipes the paper from his hands, rips it into four pieces, and stomps them into the floor with such force that the tumblers rattle on their shelves.
“Alex is up there,” Preacher John says softly, and points to the ceil
ing. Emaline gives a “humph,” turns and springs up the steps two at a time.
In the upstairs hall, hand over her heart, catching her breath, she starts to knock on Alex’s door; stops. She strides to her own room, rummages in her closet and strides back. She knocks on the door. No answer. She knocks again and swings the door open, nearly hitting Alex, who stands with her pack on her back, ready to leave.
“Wait,” says Emaline, and invites herself in. “Lordy!” She crosses the room to sit her hefty self upon the stool, leaving the doorway unbarred. “This day ’bout killed me already, and it’s an hour ’fore supper.” She squints in the light of the newly cut window, and Alex backs into the shadow.
“I brought you these,” says Emaline, producing a bundle of torn rags from her pocket.
Alex’s eyes sting, but don’t tear. Before her, Emaline sits, knees apart, a line of sweat making a track down her forehead. Her hair is a frazzled disarray with wild wisps curling in a halo about her head, and the fringe on her upper lip is damp from her tongue. The rags hang limp from her outstretched hand.
She looks about her as if she were simply taking inventory of the washstand and basin, the window, the gilded mirror yet to be hung on the wall. For a moment neither woman moves, and neither speaks and to Alex both the stillness and the silence are pregnant. She edges forward into the light, feeling like a stray accepting a piece of meat. She reaches out, takes the rags from Emaline, who holds on only for a moment, then lets go. Emaline sits back on the stool, chewing on her upper lip as if holding back words or searching for them. If Emaline had tried to prevent her from leaving, Alex might have burst through that door biting and snarling like a stray. But the doorway remains open. She can feel the woman’s myopic eyes strain over her body like a thousand fingers, peeling away her clothing layer by layer to reveal thin muscular arms, narrow hips, and small, fist-sized breasts. If this body were the only thing Alex was hiding, she might not shift under this gaze, might not hug her arms over her chest even as Emaline’s eyes range lower to her trousers and the bulge of the nugget still hidden beneath. Alex turns away to face the window. The light is warm upon her face, the noise of traffic outside somehow subdued, almost lazy. She’d prefer the loud chaos of her imagined city, a place to get lost in, to go unnoticed, but this thought, too, brings a pang of sadness. She stuffs the rags in her pack and hefts the pack to her back. Emaline still says nothing. Alex takes a small step toward the door.