Crown of Dust (22 page)

She nears David. He trembles. He watches the careful placement of her feet—around table legs, over whiskey glasses—afraid to make eye contact. On this night he will go with her up those stairs. Tonight, he will not resist. He presses himself into the counter. Her hand brushes against the grain of his stubble and shivers squiggle to his toes. He leans close. Her breath teases his neck; her lips smack his and then—are gone?

His eyes blink open. She is moving away from him, continuing down the bar. She is stopping a foot from Alex and offering her hand. And Alex, Alex is laughing, with her or at her, with joy or stress, David can't tell. Alex takes her hand. The little runt takes her hand and allows her to lead him up the stairs.

New images: Emaline and Alex. Oh Lord. The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want … Alex risking his soul? Damn Emaline for tempting him. For tempting them all. Only he, only David has been strong enough to resist. He downs another drink.

“Well, I'll be goddamned!” yells Limpy. “Attaboy, son! Be a man by morning! Round on me!” He changes his mind. “Round on Alex.”

All serious talk is banished in favor of speculation. Memories circle the room, catching men like a sneeze or a yawn.

“I remember the time …”

“What you bet he cain't …”

“Care to put money on that?”

“She weren't pretty, I won't lie to you, but this girl, oh lordy,
this girl
…”

Sweat drips from David's forehead into his whiskey. His breath comes fast and his erection remains resilient. A heavy hand slams his shoulder. Limpy's foul breath descends.

“Got money on the boy. You in?”

David wrenches himself away and limps out into the humid night.

*     *     *

“Good Lord!” says Emaline, and closes the bedroom door with her rump. “Didn't think I was going to make it up them stairs. 'Bout peed my pants! You see David's face? You the envy of every man in that saloon believe you me. Better give 'em a good story tomorrow—or no! Don't tell them a damn thing. Just smile real big and embarrassed like, just like that. Let 'em use their imaginations. A man's imagination is a woman's strongest ally, if you know how to use it. Hell, sit down, sit down. Don't looks so damn nervous. Didn't ask you up here to bite yah.”

Alex sits. For all the renovations that have been done to the rest of the Victoria, Emaline's room has remained virtually untouched. The walls are bare. A modest mirror, rimmed with tarnished silver, reflects a porcelain washbasin sitting atop a narrow dressing table. She has allowed herself the luxury of a pulled-yarn throw rug of subdued autumn golds and browns like her curtains. They suit her coloring, but it's a contrast to the vivid reds decorating the rest of the inn. Emaline crosses the room. She unbuttons the lavender dress, pulls it up over her head, and wears nothing but her chemise. Alex turns away. Emaline smiles.

“What's this?” she asks. “Got the same parts. Am I right?”

Alex looks from her own chest to Emaline's, comparing the shape of their bodies, but finds as few similarities as a pumpkin and a pine pole. Emaline is right, of course. They do have the same parts, as she put it. No amount of clothing could change that. But the sight of skin seems to demand an open honesty Alex isn't sure she's ready for. She still doesn't know if the story she is about to tell will be the truth, or another fabrication, a new disguise that she will embrace as her own true identity. She sits on her hands, ignores the ache in her stomach, and anticipates Emaline's questions.

“I was thirty years old when I left Missouri,” Emaline says, pulling on her nightdress and taking a seat on the chair by the dressing table. “Two weeks married, happy as a cow to pasture. It was foolish, leaving so late in the spring like we did, but Harold was itching to get to San Francisco, and he was older and I trusted him. So I packed up everything I thought I couldn't do without, left my mamma, and Missouri, and set off for California.”

As she talks, Emaline releases her hair from its bonds and long amber strands fall, one after another, around her shoulders, framing her head in the lamplight. She pauses a moment, looking at herself in the mirror as though a stranger stares back, then continues, her voice lower now, shifting from an even conversational rhythm to the deep throaty flush of nostalgia.

“From the first there was trouble,” she says, nodding in agreement with her image. “Two oxen pulled up lame in that first week. One had to be put down right then. And the wagon train we were traveling with was already conflicted when a Mormon man offered to wed his wife's sister after her husband took ill and died with the cholera. I got myself all agitated over that, swearing crimes against God, but when I think back, I reckon he done it as much out of kindness as anything. Ended up splitting into two parties, one traveling directly behind in plain sight of the other, coming together during Indian scares. Silly.”

Emaline stretches her feet in front of her. Years peel from her face, and weight melts from her arms until she sits before Alex a younger, trimmer, naïve stranger.

“Then Harold got sick, coughing with such a rattle in the lungs, worst I'd ever heard. Insisted that we keep going, and there really wasn't much else to do. By this time we'd already passed Pikes Peak, and home was as far away as California. Truth be told, I didn't want to go back. Never worked so hard in my life from sunset to sundown, but the country was so big and beautiful. Words never do them natural beauties justice, leastways not my words, or Harold's, bless him. Bet them English poets couldn't even say it right. Not tame enough for words. Not small enough. Level prairie as far as you could see in any direction for weeks, and the Rockies rising like Adam's curse, jagged and white capped. Like climbing to meet the clouds.

“It was in the Rockies that Harold died. The high plateau took his breath right away and he never got it back. Buried him next to the bodies of the four remaining oxen, just short of the Continental Divide. Grass was all eaten up by other wagons traveling early in the year like the guides tell you. Barely enough even then to feed the horses, and all them things I couldn't do without ended up stacked around Harold's grave like he was setting up home. A maple table that was my nana's. My mamma's porcelain dishes. I only kept the clothes on my back, and the little bit of money we had left. I cried then.”

But her voice inflects only residual emotion, as though she is telling of someone else's loss. It's Alex's eyes that sting. A lump of indigestible emotion forms in her throat. She tries to focus on Emaline's story, but words are growing in her stomach, boiling up from the ache in her abdomen, from the tension just behind her temple. She feels Emaline's eyes settle upon her, so she looks at the floor. Emaline continues, growing into herself with every word. Her face filling out, her arms and hands gaining weight and muscle.

“Was afraid for myself—a woman alone, you know. 'Course you know. So I went on with that Mormon man and his wives. Isaiah was his name. Never agreed to the marriage part of it, mind you. Might have, if he'd convinced me to stay in Utah with him. But freedom had a hold on me, so I traveled on, doing the cooking and washing for a couple of cousins. North Carolina boys, one dark headed and coarse as Cane, and the other as blond and delicate as Abel. Was with them I discovered my talent for pleasing men.

“Now, I know what you think,” Emaline says, her tone sharp. Her eyebrows make a straight line across her brow, but she's too consumed with her own story to notice the heaviness of Alex's breath, or the muddy line of sweat Alex swipes away with the back of her hand.

“But it wasn't about lust or greed—both deadly sins, I understand. I gave 'em comfort, made 'em feel big again on a trail that made everyone feel so small. I made 'em feel important in a place where man was just another trifle on God's plate. And by the time I got to San Francisco, I was quite capable of taking care of myself. Offered a service much needed in a place starved for women.

“A service,” Emaline says again, and opens the bottom drawer of her dresser. She pulls out two glasses and a bottle of New England rum. She offers some to Alex, who drinks it down in one gulp, holds out her glass for more and swallows that. The liquor burns a track through Alex's sinuses, coming to rest at a point just at the base of her neck. Emaline crosses her arms in front of her as if waiting for a response. Alex sets her glass on the floor by her feet. Her heartbeat thumps in her temple.

“Jed didn't kill nobody. No, dysentery got Haversmith, Haversmit, whatever his name was, in San Francisco, where I met Jed. Jed come into the Imperial with ol' Haversmith and after Haversmith passed out, Jed and I … well, we got acquainted.”

Alex's insides begin to swell, cresting and breaking. Her throat is dry, her eyes damp as the liquor, loosens unspoken memories.

“Jed came with me to Sacramento, and that's where they came looking for him. Claimed he was a fugitive under the Fugitive Slave Act. Claimed he was property of some long-lost Haversmith brother gonna take him back to Alabama. Woulda never found him if Jackson Hudson hadn't gotten it into his head to marry me. That's when Jed and me came to Motherlode, though it weren't nothing but a valley with a creek running through. Came to live in peace and a town sprung up around us.

“I love him,” she says, looking just past Alex now. “I ain't never told nobody. Never told my mamma when she was still alive in Missouri, or my Aunt Flo. Thinks I'm running a goddamned orphanage out here,” she chortles, then becomes serious. “I never told him. But I love him.”

Emaline downs her rum, pulls a strand of hair from her mouth. But Alex is elsewhere, a room in her head kept dark these many weeks, a room where dead things locked away release waves of sickness. Her backbone bends upon itself and her legs lock together beneath the chair, anchoring her to something solid, as the floor rolls in waves around her.

“Terrible things …” she says, bringing her knees up to her chin now, closing up.

“Now, it weren't all that bad—” Emaline starts. “What things? Alex?” She places her hand on Alex's shoulder and Alex, feeling the touch through every organ, springs away, tipping the chair with a crash.

“I have to leave,” Alex says and her mind flashes moving pictures: the white of an eye, a purple mound of bloody flesh, the glint of a knife, and closing her eyes does not bring darkness. She backs away toward the door. “I have to go.”

“What things?” Emaline repeats. Alex grips the door handle. “Alex!”

She sees Emaline through distorting tears that refuse to fall. Emaline's face fractured like a reflection in a broken mirror, the color of her nightdress blurred and indistinct. Alex is speaking to an aberration, a ghost or an angel, and the words come of their own accord, casting away the protective shell of silence that served her for so long.

“It hurt so much!” she says, hissing the words at first. “Like my insides were turning out, and Gran could barely look at me, wouldn't hold my hand, and Peter never came. After he said all those beautiful things, he never came, and I was glad it was dead 'cause Peter wouldn't marry me, and Gran didn't want me, and I held it, bloody and blue against my chest. I held it, but I didn't want it. Gran didn't say the word, like
he
did later, but that's what she meant, what her eyes said, and her frown.
Whore.
‘For out the heart come evil thoughts, murders, adulteries, fornications.' Murders, out the heart, she said, and put her hand on my stomach, pressing so hard, squeezed till all my blood was gone. My cycles, gone. She said I was barren, said it was better that way. ‘Out of the heart comes evil inclinations, natural and evil.' And I always thought natural was good, was God.

“When she died, I didn't cry. I wouldn't—and I was so proud of myself.”

“Alex, sit down.”

Alex remains standing, tipping and swaying with the room.

“I put chrysanthemums on her grave 'cause I hate the smell of them. Can you smell them?” Alex thrusts her nose into the scent of fermenting flowers. “I pulled them up, roots and all, from around the porch, and piled them high on the tombstone, and they let me because she was the only thing I had left in the world, they said. I heard them, I overheard, and I never felt so relieved. Like a brand-new person.

“She was still there,” Alex whispers. “Still floating in the walls, in the linen, squeezing. So I left for a new place where Gran couldn't find me, couldn't stop my cycle. I told the temperance lady who came round that I was a maid and fit for a bride, and she set me on a coach, set me off for California. California—I just liked the sound of it. California.”

The waves dip and crash, and Alex sits down hard on the chair, grips the legs with her ankles, holds on to the seat. Emaline hovers above her.

“She followed me. Her face in every frown I saw, in
his
frown. But I was going to be a bride: Mrs. Hanson Minford. The old name, Gran's name, Thompson, gone. White dress, flowers. California flowers. Bright orange poppies instead of red. And violets. No chrysanthemums. But I still didn't bleed, so he called me a whore, said he'd make me bleed, and when he hit me with his fists I could hear Gran laughing in that silent breathy way. Her hand on my stomach, pressing, pressing … I think I wanted to die, but he only hit so hard, you know. I tried to run away, to escape, but he kept the key. I had no choice. I had to stop her laughing. Do you understand that I had no choice? And I never cut off his fingers or his, his …” Emaline nods. “And I left him there. Took his money and left him there, and I thought that would be it. They'd look for Alexandra, but they'd never find Alex, and Gran would be gone.”

The room is rocking gently now, then calms altogether. “I could still hear her at first, at night. But not for a while now, a long time, months. Gran is silent and I'm bleeding again. Do you understand that I had to stop her? I should be happy. I
was
happy. Alex was happy, I think. Golden Boy, Alex. Now, I don't know. I don't know …”