Crown of Dust (4 page)

“Cut her now, goddamn it,” says Jed. He grabs his own knife and slashes the doe's throat. Blood surges crimson from its jugular. He stabs the belly and the fawn's leg stills. He pauses a moment, letting the blood drain, then guts the animal, leaving the rope-like entrails steaming on the grass, and thrusts the small body of the fawn behind him, out of his line of sight, directly in front of Alex.

There are memories here, gathering like flies on the vein-tracked birth sac.

“Alex?” says Jed.

The smell of blood, thick enough to choke her …

“You all right? Alex?” She opens her eyes. The doe's legs drape about Jed's shoulders like a shawl.

“Nearly cost us the kill,” says John Thomas.

“Well now …” says Jed, and then, grunting under the weight, he heads down the trail to town.

“Don't know what the hell you're doing up here anyway. Hey—you deaf?” says John Thomas, waving his hand in front of her face.

He's only just taller than her, but far bigger through the shoulders. The pupils of his eyes are no bigger than pinheads. The curl of his lip disgusts her and for a moment it is this man dead on the grass before her, his belly ripped throat to gullet.

“I hear you,” she says.

John Thomas steps closer, as if hearing the challenge in her tone, and she's not so sure he won't shoot if she runs. She's not sure if she cares, but finds herself backing away, splashing into the creek. Cold water tugs at the hem of her trousers, soaks through the toes of her boots. John Thomas grins.

“Claim jumping's a hanging crime. You ever see a man hanged? No? Dangles there, like a dead fish. Broken neck, if you're lucky. Quick that way. Don't cry, though, don't piss your pants,” he says, and he aims the rifle at her water-stained crotch. “I'd shoot yah if you was to live through the drop. First in the balls. One POP, then the other—POP, POP. And then in the kneecaps—”

“Then the toes, then the elbows, then the stomach. Seems to me I heard this before sometime, Johnny. Seems to me David, here, has too,” Limpy hollers. He emerges from the upstream trail and David follows, his shoulders alive with compact energy.

“Limpy, this ain't no goddamned business of yours,” says John Thomas, but the gun falls to his side and Alex steps away.

“Yours neither, if I remember right,” Limpy replies.

“I made this claim four months ago.”

“And ain't been back for two. Ten days, Johnny. It's the law. Right, David?”

David's large hands strain white around the pick. His nostrils flare. Beneath the upturned brim of his Panama hat, his eyes pierce John Thomas.

“And don't try and tell me you was here workin' this claim all the time, 'cause me and David been by every day and never seen you. You ain't even staked it.”

Limpy winks at Alex, and John Thomas's face turns red to the roots of his eyebrows.

“Ain't no gold here, nohow,” John Thomas says. As he stomps away, he kicks the fawn with the toe of his boot, and Alex's stomach seizes. She wants them all to go, but her thoughts, her desires, go no deeper than this. She's wading shallow on the surface of her mind, afraid to slip deeper into the current of her memories.

Limpy ambles up as though a friendly hello was his only reason for being there.

“You ain't planning on getting rich with that, are yah?” he says, and she finds she is clutching the gold pan to her chest.

“Ah hell,” says Limpy, “never mind. Just stay out of the way of that fella. Them little ones is always the meanest, yourself excluded, 'course.” He chuckles a bit, raising his hands as if in surrender. “Come on, Dave,” he says, and lumbers up the path.

“You listen to Limpy, yeah? Stay out of the way of John Thomas,” David says, his voice tipping in a funny foreign lilt. He lingers for a response. He shifts his weight in the silence, transfers his pick to the other shoulder, and turns to follow Limpy, leaving Alex alone with the steaming carcass of the fawn.

Stay out of his way? She drops the gold pan to the grass and steps toward the fawn. Her eyes sting, but stay dry. Impossible, she thinks. Flies scatter as she bends down. Everywhere is in the way.

The little body is much heavier than it looks, the flesh warm to the touch, the blood and placental fluid slick like the green ooze of the rocks. She holds the fawn away from her, sits back on her haunches, squatting above the branching stream of blood. She imagines that it's her blood, thinks it should be her blood. The damp mercuric smell fills her head and the insects swarm about her, taunting, whispering, mimicking Gran's hissing breath. “Natural inclinations,” Gran says, shaking her head and rocking, rocking by the side of the bed.

Alex doesn't bleed as she should, not any more, not since the night her blood filled that bed, soaking through the mattress to the wood beneath. She lay there as her insides shredded themselves, and she bled and bled until there was no blood left, and Peter never came, and Gran just sat and rocked like Alex rocks, holding the fawn away from her as the flies surround them both. In California she's learned that there are many ways to bleed. The smell of bourbon … Don't think. She moves to the side of the creek, holds the fawn underwater, lets the current tug and take it away.

She washes her hands.

“Got a brother about that age,” David says when he catches up to Limpy. “At least, he was when I left. Must be near a man now, working underground with the rest of them.”

“We all got someone, somewhere,” Limpy replies, and David says nothing more.

They settle down to work a half mile upstream from Alex at a claim that has yielded modest yet steady returns of an ounce a day for the nine months they'd been there. But David is not satisfied. There is gold in this creek, more than an ounce a day. He can feel it like some men feel storms coming. He can smell it in the iron-rich soil, taste it when he puts the soft igneous mud to his tongue. So different from Cornwall, this country. Soil the color of dried blood. Trees rising like the giants of Cornish legend. Clandestine peaks and valleys breaking the horizon into pieces. He misses the sound of the ocean, the pebble beaches and flat expanses of crab grass interrupted by white seven-lobed flowers, feathery, yellow dandelions and sun-sensitive bluebells in spring. He misses the salt smell of the air, and watching storms appear and then recede into the Atlantic. He misses the insistence of the wind, at times soft like a fluttering kiss, and at others brutal with an angry intensity, refusing to be ignored or even merely appreciated. Demanding respect and fear, like God.

“Without the wind,” his father told him, “a man might forget just how small he is.”

Over time, his father had shrunk, and not just in relation to his second son's growing body. Only forty years old and already the tin mines had blackened his consumptive lungs and bent his back like a man many years older. His hands were hard-cut stones and his arms wire sinew blanched pale in the pitch darkness of the mine. Soon he would be restricted to the crushing grounds, sorting the pulverized ore in the wind and rain with the women, girls and young boys, while one by one his sons descended underground.

David imagines them waking before dawn, choking down a thin gruel, trekking three miles down the Penzance coast in a ragged line with father in the lead and mother in tow. Six boys, five now with David gone, and a baby girl, a three-year-old who runs screaming with the other children, kicking clods of ore like other kids kick cans. Two miles off, the ore stamps move the ground in a steady rumble the family hardly feels. Then they part. The four oldest boys and father climb an hour down into the belly of the earth, with its damp, black walls. Climb down with only a candle for light, a pick for work, and a pasty for lunch to:

earn enough money
to buy enough bread

to get enough strength
to dig in a hole

Unending. Such a future makes any man feel small, wind or no. David wanted more. But his father was a stubborn man.

“Follow in the paths of greed and find sorrow in the next life as well as this.”

“It's not greed. It's a new life, a chance to work for yourself.”

“It's a metal, like any other.” He grabbed the flier from his son's hand and tore it down the middle, separating the
Cali
from the
fornia
and the
G
from the
old
.

“You planning on working today?” Limpy asks. David shakes himself into the present, bends and sets his pick on the ground by a wooden contraption. A rocker, they call it, or a cradle, like an infant's bed made from an old whiskey barrel cut in half and fitted with a row of wooden slats. It is not an elegant machine. The sides of the barrel are splintering and a pungent black fungus has begun to eat away the bottom. More a coffin than a cradle, David thinks. He picks up the hopper with its perforated metal bottom and places it back atop the cradle. Limpy dips two buckets in the creek as David shovels a load of earth into the hopper. While David rocks the cradle, Limpy pours water over the agitated soil, making several trips to the creek until the dirt has washed through the hopper. The lighter, worthless minerals wash away, leaving the gold trapped in riffle slats at the bottom. Same idea as the gold pan really, only more efficient; if efficient is a word rightly used to describe alluvial mining. Returns have been too low. David didn't come all the way from Cornwall to dig in the mud, freezing his knackers off in the winter, frying them in the summer, all for one or two ounces of gold a day. He came for the lucky strike, the rich vein, the motherlode. Be damned if he'll ever again climb down a hole to make some other man rich.

After a while, they switch; David totes the water and Limpy shovels and rocks. Their faces are pink. Little beads of sweat gather at their temples, mix with the mud and streak rust-brown tracks down their cheeks. Downstream, the steady clank of picks and shovels mixes with the noisy murmur of the creek. The sun is directly overhead, and most of the birds have muted their songs till evening time. On flat, worn rocks, winter-stiff lizards rouse themselves to bask.

“Wouldn't hurt to have some help. Someone to shake the cradle,” Limpy says, as David pours a bucket into the hopper. The water splashes, speckling his trousers. “Been thinking 'bout a long tom or a sluice box. Need more men to work one of those.” He rocks the cradle until David returns with another bucket of water. “Said yourself he reminded you of your brother.”

“My brothers are in Cornwall.” David dumps the water. “That boy's too scrawny to hold a shovel. He probably wouldn't know gold from pyrite.”

“I don't know. Got me a feeling about that boy.” Limpy stares off down the creek.

“You got a feeling about anyone you made money off,” says David.

Limpy only acknowledges this remark with a gesture. “'Sides,” he says, “bound to fill out working claims, ain't he? What with Emaline feeding 'im.”

“I'd like to know how he's paying for that.”

“City boy with a face for theatre,” Limpy says.

David glances at him, looks away. “Not that pretty.”

3

The saloon door squeals open and footsteps clump toward the stairs. Emaline sticks her head through the kitchen door.

“Alex,” she says. The boy stops but doesn't turn. “Come on back a minute, have a seat at the table.”

It's not a request, but when she returns from the kitchen with two cups of coffee, he's still standing in the stairwell, bracing himself with a hand on the railing, a hand on the wall.

“Sit,” says Emaline, and he slinks to the stool across from her. “I don't allow hats inside the saloon.” He sweeps it from his head and his hair falls forward into his face. He sits on his hands as though they were tied behind him.

She doesn't mind the quiet ones, to a point. David is quiet, but the silence is natural on him. This one sits on his words same as he's sitting on his hands, and she doesn't like the way he won't look at her. Up close, she can see his face is narrow, his nose and chin slender, his eyes, when he shows them, are the same black color as the hair hanging shaggy and jagged before his eyes. I've got more whiskers on my face, she thinks, and scratches at the patch above her lip. When she was living in the city, she'd pluck them out, the thick black ones bringing tears to her eyes. Shedding tears over a few silly hairs. But she was younger then. Not stupid, or even vain, so much as inexperienced. Maybe that's what bothers her about this boy: that spooked look of experience.

She pushes a cup in his direction. His hands remain beneath him. She leans forward, places her forearms on the table closer to Alex. He looks up, down.

“I'm gonna ask you what you're doing here,” she says.

“I'm looking for go—”

“That's not an answer,” says Emaline, shaking her head. “Everybody's looking for gold. What are you doing here, in Motherlode?”

But the boy clamps his mouth shut. Something close to defiance hangs there over his head, and his eyes look off beyond her.

“Listen,” she says. “You listening? You paid me enough for the week, and I understand you got a bit more stashed away. I ain't even going ask how you got it. But let's be clear right here and now … You listening?”

She slams her mug down, leaving an opaque ring of coffee on the table. She's not used to being ignored. She never did like it much.

“Look at me. We don't want no trouble around here. If you're running from something, best just keep on running, hear?”

She can almost feel the tension in his shoulders, can see his jaw clenching. His feet cross at the ankles and he hunches down, as if trying to be even smaller than he already is. If she were the mothering type, she'd act on this impulse to hug him.

“I ain't meaning to throw nobody out, 'less they give me reason. You give me reason, you're gone. Understand? Out of the Victoria. Out of Motherlode. Understand?”

Alex nods once.

“Good. Now, if you got something to claim, I suggest you do it before John Thomas gets himself to the assay office. He's already been here complaining like a son-of-a-bitch, but I know you wouldn't jump nobody's claim.” She lets the statement arc into a question. Alex doesn't respond. “The back of Micah's general store. Sign reads ‘Assay Office,' though it ain't much more than a counter.”

She drinks down her coffee in four gulps, leaves him sitting there.

When she returns, Alex's full cup is blowing steam to the ceiling. Thankless little snot, she thinks, as she carries the cup back into the kitchen. She wishes she knew what he's doing here. Spoiled little rich kid, running away from daddy's expectations with daddy's money, most likely. Yet she doesn't detect the usual arrogance of the moneyed little pricks she's known in the past. Cocky young things, strutting around like a bunch of banty roosters 'cause no one ever told them they shit out the same hole as everyone else. And why would any rich kid come to a canvas town like Motherlode when Grass Valley and Nevada City were only miles away and fit to burst with pretty girls, theaters, saloons, restaurants, hotels, brothels and countless other ways to spend money? No, silent Alex had to be running from something.

She glances out the window at Jed bringing the day's water from the creek. He sets down the buckets just inside the kitchen door and gives her one of his big-toothed smiles. Emaline walks over, takes his head in both hands and kisses him on the lips. They linger, exchanging air, grinning so their teeth click together. He leaves without a word and Emaline props herself in the doorway to watch. We're all running from something, she thinks, but she stops her thoughts there.

The kitchen is a pine-sided addition to the back of the inn and can get mighty cold in the winter before the stove is stoked, and mighty warm in the summer when the heat puckers its dry lips to suck the energy right out of you. It's the heat that gets you, she thinks, rolling her sleeves to her elbows. There are only so many clothes a woman can take off, though she's sure the boys wouldn't mind a certain amount of flesh exposed on a hot day. They walk around with their trousers rolled to their knees and their shirts in hand and wonder, at the end of the day, why they're burned to a crisp. Alex is bound to make that mistake as well. The new boys always do. A ball of gray fuzz scurries across the floor. Emaline stomps after it, misses. In the potatoes again. Just when she patches a hole in that barrel, the mice go and chew another one. With the raccoons getting into the beans and the mice in the 'taters, it's a wonder there's any food left at all. Must be feeding half the county's critters.

She takes the lid from the flour barrel, pours a measure into a large ceramic bowl with a bit of sourdough starter, adds a generous dollop of lard, an egg, a pinch of precious salt, and begins to knead. Someday she'll have a proper kitchen, free of mice, with walls that keep the heat in over the winter and out in the summer. A cast-iron stove with a smokestack that doesn't leak blackness into the place, and doesn't blow itself out the minute she turns her back. There'll be a cellar to keep wine, apples, cabbages, root vegetables and the dairy, if she ever gets a cow, and her floor will be polished flagstone that a once-over with a broom will keep clean. She'll have polished oak counters to replace the splintered pine planking, a great big larder and a separate scullery and, oh, an indoor pump, so they can stop toting water from the creek. She wipes a line of sweat with the back of her hand. Lord knows what's in the water with all those filthy miners wallowing in it every day. She hefts the iron pot from the floor, fills it with a bucket and a half of water, and stokes the fire.

Outside she hears the steady thump of Jed's axe and looks up from her dough to watch. With his shirt rolled she can see his corded forearms ripple. A bead of sweat trickles down his cheek on to the chopping block. His muscled thighs press against the skin of his trousers and she imagines his back, hard and smooth under her touch, and his voice, a soft rumble in her ear. Who needs a nice kitchen when you have Jed? She smiles, adding water a trickle at a time to the bread bowl. Certain things in this life you can do without. She supposes running water is one of them.

The wind has come up on the ridge. The cedars brace themselves and Alex can hear the squeal of air through the crags and the branches. It sounds like an accusation; a noxious mix of guilt and indignation swirls within her. Who is that woman to throw her out of town? As if it were her right to do so, as if this muddy valley, that dark little room, is somewhere she wants to stay. There had been nothing to keep her from leaving, from following the direction of her gaze around the grove of manzanita and out of town. Nothing, that is, but the steepness of that trail, the blisters on her feet, the thought of shivering the night away in a thicket, and now she finds she wants to stay, for a while at least, until it's her choice to leave.

The rain begins to fall, bringing men from the creek. She retreats within the general store—dank with layers of dust, dark for lack of a window.

Every square inch of wall space is covered with rows of empty plank shelves propped with metal rods. Piles of picks and shovels, barrels of black powder litter the floor, and scatterings of mateless boots lie prostrate like rotting carcasses. With the dust and the leather the place smells of a tack room and Alex holds her nose against a sneeze. Along the back wall, behind the counter, are tins of tobacco, bottles of large blue pills marked QUININE and CALOMEL, jars of brandied fruits, and a mound of clothing, heaped like boneless bodies.

Alex sits, resting her head in her hands. The gloom of the place is quickly turning angry determination to self-pity, when a blast of cold air and light rush into the room.

“Well, hello there, Alex. Heard you been claim jumping a claim jumper. No, no need to get up,” says Micah. He closes the door behind him and scratches at that empty eye socket. “Might as well make use of them clothes.”

She stands anyway as raindrops thwap one by one, each making its own indention in the canvas roof. Lightning flashes blue and the rain begins in earnest.

“Lordy, here we go,” says Micah, looking skeptically at his roof. He wears canvas pants like the other men, but he keeps a pencil in a pocket he's stitched to his flannel. He stands with his hips thrust out as if his back hurts him. His brown hair hangs shaggy over his ears, and his low round forehead and bulbous nose wrinkle in a smile, friendly even with the one eye.

“John Thomas can be an ass—don't I know it. Gave me hell my first week as well, so don't take it personal. Challenged me to a duel for sitting in his chair at supper, and probably would have done me in, too, if Emaline hadn't put a stop to it. Foolishness, she told us. Grown men going around killing each other when there are plenty other things in this country to do it for us. Makes sense, doesn't it? That put us straight, of course. That and the double-barreled shotgun she likes to tote around with her. There is wisdom in women, boy. And pure hellfire. A frightening combination, to be sure, but effective. Remember that. Between you and me, I think ol' John Thomas has got a thing for her. Not that most of us haven't, had a thing, now and again—you know what I mean? No?”

Alex feels her cheeks flush. Colored women, Gran called them. A colored woman was threatening to kick her out of town? She certainly didn't fit the description of bawdyhouse ladies Alex has heard about. Emaline's cheeks were unpainted, and Alex doubts that her shoulders, or any other part of her, would fit into the dresses they wore.

“Of course you know,” says Micah, winking his one eye. “But John Thomas has got a
thing
for her.” Micah rummages for a match, but the lamp on the counter produces only a yellow light, feeble and sickly.

“Now, what can I do you for? You got yourself a pan, though if Limpy isn't telling tales, you got some learning to go on how to use it. You're gonna need a pick and shovel, no doubt, a bit of quicksilver … You got a hat, good. Every miner needs a good solid hat. Keeps off the rain, keeps off the sun. Though both are good in moderation. In moderation, son, like women and whiskey. Remember that. Lordy! If you paid any more than fifteen dollars for those boots you got had. Now, don't go looking down, it happens to the best of us …”

Micah pauses as if he needs a moment to digest his own wisdom, then scuttles around the shop giving a verbal inventory.

“Limited variety, I know. But that's what you get in a town full of men. All a man really wants is his tobacco, a little salt pork and flour, and a new shirt when the old one falls off his back.”

He hands Alex a pick. The wood is smooth and cool in her hands and heavier than she imagined from the way the men were swinging them this morning.

“Nice, huh? Try this one for size—” Micah takes the pick and hands her a shovel. “Man's got to be comfortable with his equipment. Feel good, yeah? Yeah?”

She can see the muscles of the empty socket twitching beneath his skin, trying to focus. He rests his weight against the pick.

“Women, see—real, civilized, lacy women—they bring variety to a place. Soon you're stocking fancy furniture and silk cloth and fancy plates and such. Women, son, the spice of life. Remember that. Should have seen my store in Grass Valley. Packed with trinkets and trifles from France, Chile, England, God knows where else. Barely had room for breeches.”

Micah sighs and quiets for a moment.

“Mr.…” Alex begins.

“Micah, son, call me Micah.”

“Micah. I suppose I'm meant to, well, a claim?”

“‘Meant to well a claim.' Nearly got yourself a sentence there, boy. But the answer's yes. Limpy came in here not ten minutes ago, made that claim for you, in your name. Took care of it, is what I'm saying, and not a minute before John Thomas came in here whining about it. Be thankful to him, if I were you, but not too thankful. Limpy's got his ways of getting more than he gives out of folks, remember that.

“'Course, you got to go to Nevada City and file in the county court to make it official, but we like to keep our own selves straight. More of a formality till someone finds something worth claiming. I doubt the county even knows we're up here.”

A shout sounds from the road outside, and another answers.

“Anyhow,” says Micah, “it's typically done the other way round, see. Find the gold, then make the claim. I'd do my own staking, too, if I was you. Later. Right now it's looking—” Lightning flashes again, the electric energy stands tiny hairs on Alex's neck and arms on end. “I say it looks like the weather's gonna keep us all in for a while. 'Bout time, too. Been a dry winter. Mark it clear, when you mark it. Each corner. Sell you some of these, if you want—” He brandishes four wooden stakes. “And a sign nearby stating your right. The law says one hundred feet by fifty, but no one really follows that round here. Just as long as it's clearly marked and not overlapping anyone else, which shouldn't be a problem up there. Nobody's found enough gold to waste the water on, in truth. But, hell, luck's no predictable animal. Remember that.”