Crown of Dust (23 page)

Her voice fades. Her eyes droop. Never so tired. The weight of her shoulders pulls her down and there is nothing but the accordion playing a wordless jig downstairs, the scrape of crickets calling, the humid air peeling sweat from her temple, her heartbeat like retreating footsteps in her ears. She can tell nothing from Emaline's expression; the tip of her tongue between her teeth, her eyes cast on the floor. Alex has said too much, but she couldn't stop. The truth, framed by words, seemed so short, like a storybook tale with witches and evil husbands and young, foolish girls.

“Emaline?” says Alex.

Emaline's lips purse. Her eyes narrow. She puts her hands on her knees and stands, retrieves her dress from where she had laid it on the bed, leaving Alex open, bloody.

“Did you like my dress?” she asks. Alex balks. “Lavender suits me, I think. You'd need a brighter color for dark eyes.”

Alex opens her mouth but no words come.

“I bleed. Every month I bleed,” says Emaline. “Barren is such an ugly word, don't you think?” She nods her head in agreement with herself. “The thing about dresses is, dresses can be changed, torn up, used for rags. Just put a new one on. Put on trousers, if you like. But people, people don't change like clothing. Not that easy. Mostly, we just discover parts of us we never knew we had, maybe never knew we needed, maybe never wanted. People don't change at all. We just unfold parts of ourselves while we fold other parts away, hide 'em. I imagine you haven't quite figured out what needs folding and what needs airing out. Would you do it again?”

“Would I …?”

“Would you kill him again?”

“I'm not sad he's dead. I didn't want to kill him …” But this is not the answer to the question asked. “Yes. I'd do it again.”

Emaline nods her approval. Downstairs, a sudden silence erupts into laughter. Limpy's deep guttural chuckle carries up the stairs and down the hall.

“What you gonna do?” Emaline asks finally.

“Leave.”

“Where to?”

“I don't know. North.”

Emaline sits and rests her elbows on her knees. Her lips purse in thought.

“You gonna need a plan,” she says. “You been lucky, like I said. Go rushing off, and you'll go rushing into trouble, more than you're in now. So far, no one knows nothing. But can't count on that lasting. Mr. James is convinced you're this Boy Bandit—but you leave Mr. James to me. No reason you shouldn't just stick, for a while, at least. Like you say, they ain't looking for Alex, and as far as everyone's concerned, that's just who you are, understand? Stick till you know what's what. Okay? And when you get your direction, what you're doing, how and when, tell no one. Now, I can keep secrets. Got more of 'em than is healthy. But I don't want to know where you going or who you are when you get there. You gotta make those decisions yourself, and the only person you can trust is yourself. You need anything in the meantime, you let me know. Anything. But don't go rushing off without knowing where you rushing to. Chances are, this whole thing'll just die out like a tall tale; newspapermen taking liberties with the truth. The law ain't strong enough to have a long memory round here, but San Francisco—San Francisco will never forget. He wasn't rich, was he?”

Alex nods. “Owned a share in the Union Bank.”

“Don't change nothing. Some men … some men just need killing. Now, best get off. No one stays the night. And when you get up tomorrow, you're still Alex. Just Alex. Okay?”

17

From the softness of her tick mattress, Alex stares at the ceiling and the woodgrain's whorled eyes stare back at her. Her arms and legs are languid, her stomach tumid, heavy, pulling her down from her center, warming her at her center. Outside wagons clatter by. Thin human voices compete with the throaty calls of crows and scrub jays and a dog barks in a long emotionless rhythm as though it has forgotten why it started barking in the first place. From the street sounds, she can see the whole town in her mind, beginning with the oak carved sign, the letters newly sanded, the wood newly stained, offering a one-word welcome. MOTHERLODE, it says. No “welcome to,” no unnecessary pleasantries. Just like Emaline. She allows her eyes to close, her arms to stretch out and over her head, her toes to point and flex. From here, breathing her own stale breath, she feels at once part of the commotion outside and separate, protected, the insulating familiarity of the room surrounding her like a warm liquid. If she could stay here, if it were possible never to leave this room, she would become this liquid—shapeless, faceless, unbreakable. She sits upright. She does not want to be shapeless or faceless.

She swings her legs over the side of the bed, finds her boots still on her feet, her shirt tucked into her trousers. She follows the rectangle of light to the window, braces her elbows against the frame, and looks out.

With every blow Minford struck she simply grew away from herself, unsnapped the corners of her skin and crawled out, leaving only the body to beat. She was somewhere else, or else locked so tightly inside her own skin, inside her very marrow, that he could not reach her. He died trying.

The sun is stretching itself over the lip of the ravine. The cedars on the ridge are outlined as morning silhouettes. Had a morning ever presented such a welcome? She can see the tops of heads—bonnets, hats and bald spots—and jumbled conversations tickle her ears like the twirl of the vireos flitting this way and that, and the barn swallows swooping down from the trees to their mud nests plastered beneath the rim of every roof. The wagons kick dust into the air and it falls in layers, giving the sun palette enough to paint streaks of diagonal light. She can see Harry making his way toward the Victoria from his cabin.

“Hi, Harry, hi,” she calls, but before he can look, she pulls away from the window, resting her back flat against the bedroom wall. You're still Alex, she thinks, staring across the room where the mirror rests upon the floor. Just Alex. Quiet Alex. Neither boy nor woman; nothing. A nothing with the curse, she thinks, becoming all too conscious of the rag between her thighs, soiled, sticky, thick with the smell of her. She retreats further back into the shadows of the room.

She'll have to get rid of the rag, bury it or burn it. But for now she wraps another rag around it, shoves it beneath her bed with the dust devils and the short wooden safe Micah sold her to store her gold, and secures another rag between her legs. She adjusts the nugget, shivers as her fingers brush bare skin. Her body is coming back to life from the inside now, reasserting itself. The blood was proof of this, and she's not yet sure it's a good thing. It may just be safer to remain dead inside, if only to preserve the life outside. She's just now becoming accustomed to the Golden Boy, if never entirely comfortable. Surely, she thinks, buttoning her trousers, comfort was never an option. Surely she has never felt at ease with herself, except perhaps as a child climbing trees or running her hands through the clear spring water as the polly-wogs squirted this way and that. As a child, she didn't know any better.

She reaches down, lifts the mirror from the floor, holds it at arm's length. She places it up upon the washstand, behind the basin. This urge to look surprises her. She has resisted the temptation to catch more than a glimpse of herself in shop windows, or in the rippled distortion of the creek. She sensed that it was dangerous to look too closely. She was afraid she would dislike what she saw. Or, worse, that she too would become infatuated with the Golden Boy until those pieces of herself buried with her hair and her dress by the banks of the Sacramento River would rot and die there in the dark.

Her eyes trace the rose pattern of the mirror's frame, the dips and swirled branches gilded in bright gold, and only then does she allow herself to center on the reflection. She sees, at first, the face of a stranger. But her hair, hanging to her jaw and sun bleached to a lighter brown, carries with it the memory of that long braid falling heavy to her hip, or wound round and round her head like the coiled serpents of Gran's sermonizing. Her skin is brown, flaking in places, her cheekbones high, more defined than she remembers, and her jaw is square, jutting out over the wiry muscle of her neck. Her nose points just to the left of center, and bears a rounded knob of bone on its bridge. But there remain the small dark eyes of her mother as they gazed at her from the daguerreotype by her bed. There are the eyes of Alexandra. This is not what she expected, though she can't say exactly what she expected. Utter transformation, perhaps.

She looks again, coming close enough that her breath paints patches of moisture on the metal. There, in the shape of her mouth, the thin upper lip forming a wry line atop the lower, there in the set of her eyebrows, is another face. Gran is staring back. Alex does not draw away from this image, but stares at the old woman in the mirror, lets the old woman stare back, indifferent at first, as if failing to recognize the busted nose, the burned skin of her granddaughter. Then Gran draws a quick breath, pulls herself up to a height her arthritic back resents. She doesn't smile, or frown. Instead, Gran begins to hum that tuneless kitchen melody, softly at first, as if struggling to find her voice. Alex is an infant again, toddling down the road away from the cottage, and then gathered into Gran's corded arms, hearing the old woman's heart flutter, her breath rasp. She feels the weight of that desiccated hand easing a fever with a touch, remembers how Gran smelled after chewing peppermint and strawberries from the garden, and Alex begins to hum, bumping along with Gran's tuneless melody by some trick of harmony. She stops herself. She turns her back on the mirror. She can look no longer.

“Morning to you, Alex. Sleep well?” Micah says, as Alex clumps down the stairs into the saloon. “Sleep at all?”

“Wondering if you were ever gonna get yourself up,” says Harry, stirring his coffee. He brings it to his lips, decides against drinking, and starts stirring again.

“Alex had pressing business last night, isn't that right, Alex?” says Limpy, making room beside him at the table. David is not in the room but she decides not to ask where he is. Emaline, wiping cups behind the bar, flashes Alex the tiniest wink, then goes about her business with a sideways grin on her face that falls only when Jed walks through the door. Jed's hands are thrust in his pockets. Tired black bags hang beneath his eyes.

Alex doesn't remember much after leaving Emaline's room last night. She stumbled down the hall, bracing herself against the wall so her legs wouldn't collapse beneath her, and passed a dark figure whose voice reminded her of a bullfrog, whose words made about as much sense. When her senses finally made contact with her brain, she realized it was Jed in the hall, and that she had nodded her head in affirmation to a question she hadn't really heard. His whole body frowned at her response. His shoulders slumped. His hands hugged his shoulders as he gazed down the hall toward Emaline's door and Alex wanted to say, “She loves you.” Wanted to say these words so much that her chest ached. She hopes he knows. She hopes this kind of knowledge is possible without words.

“Expected you to be singing bass this morning,” says Limpy, and Jed pushes through the kitchen door, fails to look back when Emaline calls his name. Emaline follows after him, and only after the door closes behind her does Limpy lean in, beckoning the men around him closer.

“She take matters into her own hands, or …?” he asks, nodding his head as though “or” was all he needed to get a story from her. “Come on, spill it, boy. Details.”

She smiles, in spite of herself, and wonders what to tell them. She remembers Emaline's advice to tell them nothing, but doesn't think they'll settle for this, and she isn't sure she'd be able to “use” a man's imagination even if she could somehow capture it. “It was … It's … It's just … private,” she says finally, enduring the expelled breath of all four men.

“The hell it is!” says Limpy, turning Alex by the shoulders to face him. “Listen to me now, son, listen. You go upstairs with a woman that's looking like that, it ain't private!”

“She called me Golden Boy,” Alex offers, and Limpy's eyes become marble round. Preacher, sitting silent in the corner, groans.

“She—by God, boys! We got ourselves a natural! By God, a natural. What else? Don't blush, son. A man's duty to educate his peers. Duty, I say—”

“Did she bite yah?” says Micah. Only Emaline's return saves Alex from more explanation.

“I don't care what you do with your own time,” Emaline says, “but if you're just sitting and not eating or drinking, you're wasting mine.”

Emaline reaches the front porch in time to see six men riding out of town, pistols in the air. “Nigger whore!” yells a small man in a voice she recognizes and when his piebald excuse for a horse bucks, leaving him stunned on the ground, she makes no attempt to choke down her laughter. She hoots out loud with more vigor than she feels as he hobbles away, and while this is a paltry revenge, it's something. It takes several moments, and a bouquet of curious stares before she realizes she is standing in a mixture of blood and soft down feathers, and another moment to comprehend that the noxious soup was slopped on the entire porch. When the boys come rushing up from the creek, their faces more festive than concerned, her feet have already begun to stick. Limpy is smiling, goddamn him. He opens his mouth to speak, but Emaline cuts him off.

“Not a word, Limpy. What are we going to do about this?”

That sparks a whole mess of hogwash and fancy talk. They make threats to footprints, brag about what they'd do if they caught
them
, string
them
up, curse
them
with Chinese hocuspocus, but no one offers to saddle up and give chase. No one mentions the law. Probably are the law. Hudson with a badge to go with his bravado. Whipping and lynching; tarring and feathering—there isn't much difference. Emaline raises her hand for silence, feeling like a schoolmarm in a class of over-grown teenagers.

“They say anything?” asks Jed.

“Nothing,” Emaline replies, biting her lip. Jed eyes her suspiciously. Concern dragging his whole face downward and Emaline grows aware of her unconscious gesture.

Too many secrets. She collects them like buttons: big ones with shiny surfaces that look good enough to eat, miniature ones too tiny for use which she preserves for novelty alone. She knows that Limpy keeps a picture of his mamma in his trouser pocket, that he never knew his daddy, that he mysteriously blames his propensity for chatter on this fact. She knows that Klein is a Lutheran pastor's son who fled Germany in order to marry a peasant girl with the misfortune of being Catholic. The girl died a hundred miles from the California Coast on a steamship
,
prompting him to forsake his name, Gunter Kranz, for Klein, a name whose meaning Emaline assumes carries some significance. She even knows secrets no one has told her; about Harry and Fred, for instance, that the reason they never come upstairs to see her bears no relation to David's claims of piety. She suspects that eventually they'll tell her outright, confirming her suspicion, or Fred will. Harry takes too much pleasure in the social game, playing with the town's unwillingness to acknowledge the relationship. It's the same with her and Jed. Ignorance, even self-perpetuated ignorance, is easier than outrage, if less intriguing. The town is not yet established enough for such scandal, although Mrs. Dourity, Erkstine and Waller and her sister Rose are changing that. Outrage comes from stable places like Grass Valley. And David? She's seen the way he looks at Alex. Should put the poor sap out of his moral misery, but what fun to watch him squirm, flailing himself with guilt. Besides, she would never tell Alex's secret. Of all her secrets, she knows that this one will lie with her in the grave.

She squints down from the porch at the small form she knows to be Alex. Her head barely reaches the level of Limpy's armpit. All other details are a blur, moving into and out of focus. She feels a headache coming.

Vultures congregate to the smell of blood, chasing each other in circles, taking pieces from the sun like the blades of a giant windmill. If Victor Lane weren't populated by a crowd of people trying to appear casually disinterested as they stroll past for a second and a third time, the big ugly birds might land, displaying for Emaline their featherless heads, red and wrinkled like the rotting flesh they eat. No one place or person deserves so much attention two days in a row, she thinks. Mrs. Dourity and Mrs. Erkstine, standing a safe distance across the street, probably believe Emaline planned these spectacles; a variety show that Lola Montez, the infamous spider dancer herself, would envy. Orphanage? Hell. Emaline considers herself a patient woman, but there are limits to the virtue. She sucks in her breath and her belly, letting both out at once in a rush of air and flesh as Limpy leads a silent retreat back to the mine. Emaline doesn't try to stop them. They'd just track blood across her floor. Be more of a mess than a help. Only Alex and Jed remain.

“Go on, Alex,” she says. “You paid me plenty last night. Go on now.”

Alex hesitates, showing a genuine concern that Emaline appreciates but doesn't need right now. She winks, gives Alex a smile, and watches her trudge back down Victor Lane, passing Rose and a well-dressed man with a striking resemblance to Preacher John. The Preacher tips his hat, receives a poke in the ribs for his civility, and continues down toward Sander's dry goods.