Crown of Dust (7 page)

6

Emaline opens the shutters to a sharp March chill and fills her lungs. The road below is a bustle of chicken banter and she squints toward the mass of feathered streaks clamoring after a hen-pecked Rhode Island Red. The poor thing's rump is already a balding mass of blood sores where feathers used to be. Half plucked already, Emaline thinks. If the ground were thawed enough for earthworms, they'd leave the old girl well enough alone. Funny, how boredom in chickens breeds cruelty, just as in men. Might as well put the old bird out of her misery. They won't stop pecking until she's dead, and Emaline hasn't made chicken and dumplings in a while. That makes ten chickens down from twenty last May, and spring is just beginning. A hungry coyote or mountain lion could take the rest in a matter of weeks, might have already if she'd kept the hens fenced like a damn city fool. No fence gonna keep out a coyote or mountain lion. Gathering all the victims in one enclosed space just makes the job of killing easier. Weren't too smart, chickens. But given room to run and roost high they had a better chance than penned. What's a little chickenshit splattered around town when fresh eggs and the occasional chicken dinner were at stake? She'll tell Randall to bring a rooster next time he makes the trip up. Chicks do well in the summer months.

She turns from the window, leaving the shutters open to vent the stale air. On the bed, Jed's head is nestled to the nose beneath the patchwork quilt and she's tempted to snuggle back into his warmth. She doesn't know when he came in last night. Either he couldn't wake her, or didn't care to, which was just as well for Emaline who finds no greater comfort than his closeness. Closeness, even without the urgency of desire. Closeness in the delicious exhaustion of Saturday nights.

Jed groans. His eyes open in tiny downward slits and are met by the upward curve of his smile.

“Morning,” he croaks and clears his throat. “Morning.” Emaline says nothing. He shouldn't still be in the room, but then no one is likely to be up early on a Sunday, even after yesterday's find, especially after yesterday's drinking. “Emaline?” She shakes herself, focuses on Jed.

“Just thinking. That's all. People start coming in here, we gonna have to pen them chickens. People start coming, things are gonna change.”

“Not everything.”

“No? I hope. I was waiting for a strike, same as all the rest of 'em. Got plans, you know, but …”

In the room down the hall she hears Micah retching into his chamber pot. A long wet belch resounds on the street below.

“Best get on outta here,” she says, “'fore the whole town wakes.”

“Ain't no secret no more.”

“Ain't common knowledge, neither.”

Jed looks dubious. He scratches his scalp through his tight curly hair and runs both hands down his face, wiping sleep away.

“Get on up and rouse that boy down the hall,” she says, hoping the task will give him motivation. In the daylight, in Jed's company, this room has never felt safe. Regardless of what people knew and what they pretended not to. Free state, sure, but no one ever looked kindly on mixing. There were plenty who'd string Jed up just for that, even in this town, her town, and Jed is no longer someone she can live without. She clutches her nightgown tighter to her chest and tries to warm herself against the chill that is creeping into her mind.

She and Jed had stumbled on this valley on the road from Sacramento. They were traveling light, heading north to the gold fields, aiming for Rough and Ready, or a camp outside one of the more populated towns like Grass Valley or Nevada City. She meant to set up her own establishment where city laws and the men who made them had yet to take hold of everyone's business.

The June heat pressed down on them from all angles and the sound of running water called them down from the lip of the ravine. There was no way of knowing what manner of men had made the camp they found. Two canvas tents squatted in the sun-scorched grass. The bedding was rolled, and a pair of tattered underclothes hung on a line to dry. A neat circle of stone marked their campfire; but the tidiest of men could still own the most wretched of souls.

Jed didn't think it safe to stay, but Emaline had no desire to climb back out of the valley in the June heat. Besides, she knew she could handle a few wretched souls. Setting her bundles down, she dug into her satchel for the breathing terry cloth of sourdough starter, flour, lard, and water; mixed them all in the pan she found by the fire. While the dough rose, she scrounged with Jed for long flat rocks and built them into a precarious little oven. By the time the miners tramped up from the creek at dusk, a steaming loaf of bread, a pot of coffee, and fried salt pork awaited them.

There were just three of them: Mordicai, the lanky singer; a scurvy-stricken fellow named Jake who's long since gone his own way; and a solitary German who took his plate and ate outside the reach of the fire's glow. “That there's Klein, he calls hisself,” Mordicai told her by way of apology. “He doesn't say much of anything to anybody, but I 'spect he's 'bout as grateful as me and Jake.”

Already the place felt like home.

When the men offered to pay her, she didn't think twice about taking their little bit of gold. For this Emaline knew to be true: gold don't ease a belly's hunger, calm a man's urges, or know how much he's afraid to miss his mamma. These boys were getting far more than they were giving. She didn't think a thing about changing the name of the place to something more hopeful, accommodating. “Destitution Valley” implied a pessimism she couldn't live with, and it certainly didn't do justice to the beauty of the place. Motherlode filled her whole mouth with hope, and she wasn't at all surprised by the steady stream of miners who found their way into and out of her valley. The walls of the Victoria rose even as the level of the creek and the number of men fluctuated and has stood much as it does now for a good year and a half. She likes to think she'd foreseen this particular future from the ridge above, likes to think she had looked down and seen a town sprouting like a sapling from the valley floor and gold oozing like pine pitch from the ravine wall.

And here she is, crushing a good thing by letting a few bad
what if's
get in the way. Silly. A gold strike is just what her town needs, what the Victoria needs. More people, more customers, fancy fixings.

Jed throws the quilt from his body and his legs over the side of the bed, wiggles his bare toes on the chilled wood floor. He slips on his trousers, tucks in his shirt. He kisses Emaline gently on the forehead and tiptoes down the hall to Alex's room.

Emaline forces her thoughts to follow him out the door and strips to wash.

Stale water in the washbasin. She'd meant to freshen it yesterday. She dips a rag, watching the fabric expand, places the rag on her face, tips her head back and lets the moisture seep into her skin. Her skin. So much drier than it used to be. In the mirror, she can see lines invading, making her look older than her thirty-five years, older than she feels. Lines. Signs of wisdom, experience, character. Lines gave personality to a face. Wrinkles, she knows, are something else entirely. Emaline has no wrinkles. She breathes slowly in and out through fabric and moisture, runs the rag along her neck, behind her ears, enjoys the chilling tingle of evaporating water on bare skin. Then down her front, encircles one breast, then the other, and her nipples perk in the damp cold; scrubs the dark mats of hair growing full and free under her arms. She dips the rag again, wrings it, scrubs her legs, beginning with her right calf, working her way up to her groin, pauses at the pleasure of cloth friction between her legs.

A knock on the door.

“Emaline, Emaline, he dead to the world, that's the truth. He breathing, but I can't wake him for nothing. Won't hurt to let him sleep, yah think?”

“If he's gonna sleep under this roof, he's going to Sunday service. Try again, and if he don't get up, you tell him I'll come in and wake him good.”

Jed's steps recede down the hallway. Emaline plaits her hair into a manageable rope and pulls on her Sunday best, a faded yellow dress with one small torn patch in the sleeve and a strip of off-color lace at the neck. Nothing compared to the silk fantasies worn by rich men's wives. Nothing to be proud of, but she is. The dress defined the day, setting Sunday apart from the drudgery of every other day, with a splash of color, a bit of lace. She fastens the buttons, holding in her gut. She'd already let out the waist seam when she threw her corset away. Be damned if she'd extend it again. Another knock on the door.

“I'm on my way,” she says. She's halfway down the hall when inspiration strikes. She leaves Jed waiting, bustles back into her room, hefts the washbasin, careful not to slosh water on her front. She nods at Alex's door, waits while Jed opens it.

Alex is curled into a fetal ball, his arms around his head to shield the light. He doesn't stir as Emaline approaches.

“Gold or no gold, I make the rules in this place and everyone goes to Sunday service. Give you one more chance to get up on your own.”

He doesn't stir and she feels a smile warm her ears. Jed waits, biting his lower lip, his eyebrows raised. She dips her hand in the water and flicks her fingers at his face, turns back to Alex and dumps the whole basin, washrag and all.

Alex leaps from the bed, his eyes wild and his filthy flannel drenched. Emaline's whole self shakes with laughter, and she's trying very hard not to pop her buttons. She doesn't notice how green his face becomes, how his cheeks puff. She isn't prepared for his eyes to roll back in his head, or his body to lurch forward. He seizes the empty washbasin and sloshes the liquid contents of his stomach up over the rim, and down Emaline's yellow dress.

Emaline is not laughing. She stands, arms out, mouth open, looking down at the vomit on her dress. Before Jed can curb his grin, she turns, glares death at his half-contained amusement and slams the door behind her.

When she charges back into the room wearing her usual brown dress, Alex is still holding the basin before him and Jed's expression is nearly neutral. She focuses on Alex, just a shade less green.

“Change your clothes. Breakfast downstairs in half an hour, if you can stomach it. No one misses Sunday service.”

The door closes, but the hallway light fades slowly from her eyes, leaving an ambient glow that breaks apart into colliding shards of light. Alex has to swallow every time they burst. She wraps her arms about her stomach to find the front of her flannel slimy with globs of rewetted blood. In another instant the flannel lies crumpled on the floor, and sweat freezes dry on her chest, so suddenly, so completely exposed.

Her breasts, never very large, now mere impressions of flesh, erupt in goose bumps and it's the chill that makes her cover up so quickly. It's the chill that forces her hands into fists, preventing her fingers from touching the clammy cold of her own skin. It's the chill that clenches like a hand to the back of her throat. This is what she tells herself—even as she kicks the bloody flannel away under the bed, out of sight—just a chill.

She clutches the calico about her, careful not to miss any buttons. It smells familiar: spiced pie, a little too sweet for her stomach right now. She adjusts the nugget between her legs, ties and reties the knot until it presents a modest bulge beneath her loose trousers.

Morning light washes the hallway a sickly yellow-orange and walls of green wood sweat sap. Her arms and legs are distant, heavy, attached to the wrong head, and her thoughts take their time in forming. The muted rumble of voices in the saloon below is only Preacher arguing with himself. His cheeks are a flaccid shade of gray, and he looks up as she passes, holds his finger up as if preparing to speak, lets it fall with a puff of air.

“Shit!” Emaline's voice from the kitchen, the resounding clang of an iron pot hitting floorboards. Alex has no wish to see the woman. She pushes through the front door, but ventures no further than the porch before cold air, a mix of woodsmoke and damp earth, slaps her in the face. She blows the old air out, and out again, until there's nothing left to do but suck the new back in, pressing her fingers gently to the lumpy bridge of her swollen nose as she does so. She sinks down to the porch bench. Chickens puff and preen in the road, and Harry and Fred urinate in two arching streams off their front porch, straining for height and distance.

“Hell, that ain't nothing.” Limpy's voice from the other direction. Alex glances away, embarrassed he'd caught her staring. His long legs make short work of Victor Lane and he steps straight from the ground to the porch.

“Now, David there,” he says of the Cornishman apparently deep in thought behind him, ignoring them both as he climbs the stairs and pushes past Limpy into the saloon, “he's the reigning king of us all. Could piss from here to the creek,” Limpy says. “You're young yet. You'll get there.”

“You and Limp make some kinda deal with that boy?” Emaline asks, setting a cup of thick coffee in front of David. Her scowl is angled such that he decides to accept this morning. He even takes a sip. It runs like boiling acid down his throat, and he wakes enough to find the place empty but for Preacher, bent over that tattered rag of a Bible. His hat is off, revealing a strip of gray just above his deaf ear, and his eyebrows contort in time to his moving lips. David takes another sip of coffee, delaying an answer. Limpy's deep gut laugh sounds from the porch.

“We talked,” he lies, and drinks down the coffee, grounds and all, before Emaline can question him further.

“Don't be forgetting to open my chapel,” she calls after him. He's out the door in time to see Limpy with his thick arm draped over Alex's narrow shoulders, disappear up the creek.

He and Limpy had talked this morning, to an extent. David wanted to stake a claim just upstream from the boy, but Limpy wouldn't have it. Luck's with him, he said, and crossed his arms in a way that said he was going to be stubborn.