Crown of Dust (26 page)

“We need gravestones,” he says. “For both of them. Jed was a good ol' guy.”

Silent nods all round. He was a good ol' guy. The fact that he was black hadn't made much of a difference until today, until they dug his grave and, in broad daylight, laid him next to the white woman with whom he spent most of his nights.

Limpy giggles again and David rises. Best get him home. He'll never get him to bed if he passes out here. As if on cue, the others stand and the circle disperses. David helps Limpy zigzag toward the cabin and Alex hustles ahead to open the door, then follows them in uninvited.

“Close the door,” says David, letting Limpy fall unconscious into bed. His convictions, his fears and reservations, slip like raw ore through hopper holes. He's tired of fighting himself. Alex closes the door and stands in the darkness, breathing as one asleep.

“Go on,” David tells Alex, motioning to his own bed. “I'm not tired.” He takes a seat on the stool in the corner, crosses his arms at his chest and falls asleep.

Alex's mother died when memory was only strong enough to grasp and hold misted images. A face so close as to consist only of a nose, a limitless warmth of skin on skin, a heartbeat slower and counter to her own, a dangled brightness, swinging back and forth like a pendulum in a golden blur, and a flaking, powdered-skin smell, corrupted by tobacco and peppermint. Alex coveted these memories, called them Mother, and kept them separate from all others until they assumed their own context, their own identity. And later they became her definition for something equally abstruse, became her definition for love.

Now, lying in the warmth of David's bed, with his quilt wrapped around her, she again hears a heartbeat, and a doubt enters her cache of coveted memories. The smell of skin, a sun-splotched hand with large knobbly knuckles like a living skeleton, a pipe smoked only in private, the tobacco tamped, lit and relit until the odor escaped underneath the bedroom door to the kitchen where Alexandra dressed her doll. Lips, cracked and abrasive as wool, kiss her forehead as she pretends to sleep, and suddenly the intangible blur of her wordless definition of love breaks apart into visions of a tired old woman with arthritic hands. And though she didn't at Gran's funeral, though she couldn't at Emaline's, Alex begins to cry. Tears ooze from the corners of her eyes like water from cracks in granite, building in intensity until her shoulders shake. The blanket only buffers the sound.

Then her grandmother's arms, like corrugated wires, wind around her, holding her, rocking her, squeezing her unexpected guilt into a manageable shape, a cylinder to tuck away in a closet corner. The old woman's hissing breath softens, her voice deepens. “Shhh. It's all right. Shhh.”

Fingers augment to match gout-swollen joints. Palms grow leather-tough calluses. Legs elongate. Shoulders and chest widen, becoming dense and heavy. Lips make warm indents on Alex's temple, on her cheek, her neck, her lips. Hands roam, cupping her buttocks, sliding up to her neck and down to her breasts, then pull away, leaving behind a heat signature and a chill.

Alex shivers and opens her eyes to David staring at his hands. He's barely breathing. Moonlight penetrates the canvas roof. Alex can see the whites of his eyes as his mind works through exhausted confusion. Too much thinking. She lunges for his legs, wraps her arms around him and holds on until his knees bend and hairy knuckles skim the back of her neck.

“Please,” she says.

She healed, and then she bled, and she could not change this. But the blood was still someone else's blood, the return of someone else's cycle. The curse of Alexandra of Pennsylvania. Alex is finished with curses, she's finished with lies. She was ready to bury herself with Emaline, to jump into the grave and close her eyes, letting roots and worms take what was left. But she knew then, and she knows now, that this is not what Emaline would want. It's not what Alex wants, though at this moment her desire stretches no further than David.

Ash thickens the stale air. Across the room, Limpy snores. Alex pulls off her flannel. David opens his mouth to speak. No words come. Alex rises to her knees, kisses his open mouth, runs her hands behind his head where hair gives way to the nape of his neck. Her fingers tingle. The sensation spreads, giving weight to empty muscles, and density to hollow bones. Her tongue dampens his chapped lips. She guides his hand to her chest and her hands roam, discovering in the length of his back, the arch of her own. Discovering in the hollow of his neck, the voice of her own. She moans, lets her head fall back, lets his tongue redefine her collarbone and color in her ears. His tongue meets hers. The quilt is cast to the floor. They lie back. The bed frame groans. His hands make circles around small breasts and edge downward, finding the nugget in its pouch. He follows the leather cord, easing his hands behind her to the knot. The pouch falls with a thump to the floor. She scrapes her cheek against the stubble of his chin, arches when he twists black hairs between his fingers. She tastes the salt of his navel, runs her tongue to the top of his trousers. He shivers. “Alex,” he says.

20

She stands above him. His chest is bare and the thin fuzz of blond hair curls this way and that. His right arm is slung to the side where the imprint of her body remains.

There is, Alex thinks, only conditional love. Or if unconditional love were possible it could only arise if one could manage unconditional faith. Alex never has. So many things larger than she, stronger than she, have shaken her faith like sand from a pair of boots, and yet she marvels as she stands there, watching David's breath tease the hairs of his arm, something like faith always seems to reappear at the least predictable of moments. She wishes he would wake, and hopes that he will not. She wants to bend, to trace her hands along the contours of his chest, to hide there in the warmth of him, to hear only the beat of his heart. Instead, she reaches down for the leather pouch, frees the nugget into the palm of her hand, marvels at the density. In her other hand, a green stone from the scales above the stove, the polished skin so smooth.

Across the room, Limpy's snoring changes cadence from the even rumble of deep sleep to short choppy snorts. Alex tucks the green stone into her pouch and lets the nugget fall into the open mouth of David's boot, sitting as if placed by his bed for that purpose. The gold is not a gift. An invitation to forget her, or to remember her only as the Golden Boy? To follow her? She doesn't know and she wishes she didn't care. David gave Alex her body back, and she won't ask any more of him. Already, the lonely road is weight enough on her shoulders. Already she can feel the heat of blisters, her tongue parched with thirst. She can't remain in this town that knows her only as the Golden Boy, cannot watch as Emaline slips away beneath the walls of new buildings, or rots with the remains of the Victoria. There is no Motherlode without Emaline. There is no Golden Boy without Motherlode.

Outside, the ash has settled, and a thin layer of dew masks the smell of the embers. Smoldering serpents of smoke hiss softly, and it feels as if she's looking through a movable fog, a haze on the inside instead of out. She blows cabin air from her chest and rubs the crust of tears and sleep from her eyes. She scuffs her feet through the damp ash, unearthing the dry underlayer, making a cloud about her. The birds are just now waking. The morning light loosens the darkness to shadows, and on the lip of the ravine cedars sway against a breeze. Two seagulls rise on an air current and disappear to the west.

She picks up her feet now, a tentative optimism filling her, and tiptoes past a makeshift tent filled with sleeping men, past the debris of Micah's store and Sander's dry goods, past the charred chapel ruins to stand in the spot where the Victoria should be. The Rhode Island Red rouses itself from the singed blanket where it slept the night, looks sideways at Alex before scampering off. The hen's feet make three-pronged tracks as it goes. Alex looks back, following her own tracks through the soot to the cabin where David sleeps. No one stirs. Limpy's snoring is barely audible next to the murmur of the creek and, as she turns back, her feet brush something hard. The broken fragment of a frame.

From a mirror, she thinks at first, but looks closer to find a corner of parchment sticking out under the ash. She shakes the parchment free of char and coal, finds Queen Victoria's gray-blue eyes squinting off into the distance. Apart from one scorched corner, the painting is undamaged. The queen's full cheeks droop into a double chin, and her ears are heavy with jewels. When Alex squints she can almost see the shadow of a mustache darkening her upper lip. On her head is a veiled crown, but neither this, nor the jeweled pendant around her neck, nor the baby blue sash draped across her frock, can match the regal image of Emaline descending the stairs in that lavender dress nearly three weeks ago. She sees the set of Emaline's broad shoulders; her breasts, a burden all on their own; her hair, a cascading crown around her head. Alex holds the portrait before her, wishing there was a body to fill the space between the parchment and the ground.

Beyond the chapel where the twin mounds point north up Victor Lane, Alex kneels, smoothes the earth and lays the portrait of the queen like a mantle over the grave.

“Emaline,” she says and places her hand flat on her stomach. She looks about for the presence she feels but sees no one and nothing but the hesitant movements of the chicken picking its way back through the ashes of the Victoria across the street.

She wishes it were Jackson Hudson lying there instead of Emaline. Some men, Emaline said, some men just need killing; she can see his face, the wide set of his eyes, his beard trimmed and clipped to a square on his pointed chin, the set of his shoulders. She can see him as clearly as the portrait, and if they meet again … If they meet again, there will be bullets in her gun.

She leans down, touches her lips to the cheek of the paper face, whispers “thank you” into the paper ear.

The town is stirring now. Loud pneumatic coughing makes her anxious. If she sees the sun come up over the lip of the ravine, she might just stay. She stands, dusts off her knees, and turns to find David standing in her path. He says nothing, but offers the lump of gold in the palm of his outstretched hand. She shakes her head and reaches into her pocket for the green stone she took in exchange.

“Serpentine,” he says. His eyes bore into her, searching for the woman, searching for the boy, or a combination of the two; she doesn't know. His hair is disheveled, his feet bare and covered in a film of dust and ash.

“Emaline,” is all she can say, and even this word catches thick in her throat. They stand close, without touching.

“You're leaving?” he says.

“Yes.”

A few resilient miners are making their way to their claims, as if by digging they can tunnel away from the charred remains of town. Alex yearns for a pick, a shovel, for the repetitive, mindless exertion of the mine.

“If they dam the creek, for the water,” says David, shifting his weight, “they'll flood this valley.”

Alex doesn't answer, but she can see the water rising, drowning the summer grass, lapping at the foundations of deserted buildings, reflecting in flashes of white when the sun rises above the ravine wall. It feels like another death, a death she's glad she won't be here to see. She looks back at David, but he is elsewhere, perhaps envisioning a similar landscape.

She can feel his breath brush the top of her head as she moves past him. She closes her eyes against the impulse to stop, to stand there before him for a few moments more, warding off the loneliness already clutching at her pant legs. She can feel him watching as she walks up the road. No pack, no pan. Only the clothes on her back, and a pouch of gold dust. She's leaving with less than when she arrived.

She walks past the high grasses, tall enough now to brush the lowest branches of the scrub oaks skirting the ravine. She keeps to the hard-packed earth between the wagon ruts until the road becomes steep and the sounds of the creek are hushed. She slows her pace, not waiting, she tells herself, afraid even to hope, just easing into the journey, one foot in front of the other. When she hears footsteps behind her, she doesn't stop to wait, but keeps the same steady rhythm, swinging her arms, careful to avoid tripping in the ruts and holes, until their elbows brush and his heavy breath is the only thing she hears.

He carries a large canvas pack, a bedroll strapped to one side, an iron pot on the other. A pick and a shovel extend over one shoulder like tree branches, and he lugs the big rifle from the wall of his cabin in his free hand. She takes the rifle, balances the muzzle like a yoke across her shoulders, and continues on, weaving back and forth along the switch-backs of the road until the wind brushes cold on her face.

“I couldn't stay,” she says. He doesn't ask why.

“Where are we going?”

She stares off into the valley. The wind weaves between the cedars on the opposite ridge, and the smoke curls of a campfire rise from the valley floor. She leans in closer to David. His arm finds its way round her shoulders and she feels his body relax and his breath ease, as if this simple embrace had confirmed something his mind could not. She shades her eyes from the sun, and points to the parallel path cutting its way eastward into the Sierra Nevadas, to what, to where, she doesn't know.