Crown of Dust. Mary Volmer
were a man I would be loud like Limpy, and tell stories and everyone would laugh; or I would be very quiet like David, with everyone listening real hard those times I did speak.
She notices the way David moves from his stool to the bar and back again, filling space, not taking it like Limpy. His legs bow outward a bit and he walks on the outside of his feet. He looks it next to Limpy, but David is not a small man. He’s at least six feet tall with broad shoulders that angle from his neck. His drooping moustache calls attention to a small lipless mouth and cleft chin. His hands are always folded or at his side, different hands altogether than the ones straining white against the handle of his pick a few days ago. ‘Stay out of his way next time,’ he’d said, and now she sits alone on the stairwell, out of everyone’s way. She thinks, I would become a man who fills space and I would not be afraid to leave this step. And sometimes, when she loses focus, loses herself in the yellow smoke of the room, her thoughts turn into memories.
The hemlock grove and apple trees of the Hollinger orchards back home. She’s climbing as high as the apple branches will bear with Peter on the ground looking up. ‘Not so high,’ he says. And Gran poking a knobby knuckle through a tear in Alex’s petticoat. ‘Natural,’ Gran says, shaking her head. ‘Natural inclinations.’ Klein heaves the accordion into another song, and a lanky miner with the ears of a much larger man stands near the bar to sing a sad song about lovers and loss. As his voice trails off from a soft, flat tenor to a forced vibrato, the room is silent.
‘Uplifting as always, Mordicai,’ says Limpy. A clap of thunder takes his voice and the day outside flashes bright, and dulls as quickly. ‘Who’s next then? Bible verses allowed, but not recommended till twilight, ballads are capital and stories divine.’
The one called Harry folds a hand of cards, pushes his stool back, and sweeps down in a dramatic bow all but lost on his audience. He’s a stocky man, with thick coarse hair and fleshy cheeks. She’s never seen him without Fred, the gaunt-faced fellow to his right. Captain Fred. Captain Fred Henderson, if the cavalry cap he wears is his own. She’s heard stories of cavalrymen, and Fred looks anything but broad-chested and daring.
‘A poem…’ Harry says in the voice of someone used to being heard above a crowd. Around him card games and conversations continue, some in strange languages Alex couldn’t understand even if no other sound competed. ‘…by Harold Daniel Reynolds.’
‘The third!’ says Limpy.
‘Why not? The third!’
Old Bob Blue got his heart broke in twoWhen a lady, the love of his life,Ran off with a stranger in snake-skin bootsAnd a gift for throwing the dice…
And the rhythm of the poem, the way one line ends in expectation of the next, bring the walls of the inn even closer around her. The second ceiling of smoke and ash rises and falls with his voice, until the laughter and words are magnified, mixed and unintelligible.
Harry finishes his poem with a flourish and bows again, his balding head pointing to the floor. Alex claps with the rest. Emaline’s eyes scrunch at the sides, her mouth open, her big teeth crooked yellow. Women shouldn’t laugh with their mouths wide open, Alex thinks, but wants more than anything to feel that good, to be included. Outside, the rain continues. On the ridge the wind moans through the cedars and into the valley, and Alex feels the cold through her flannel. She thinks, I will grow a skin thick enough to fight the cold, tough enough to join the men below. But for three days she stays alone on the stairwell.
‘What do you think?’ David asks, surveying his claim.
Limpy jabs his shovel into the mud, folds his arms over his great chest. A wash of silt covers the rocker and the fungus-eaten bottom is now a gaping hole. The hopper and apron lie twenty feet away, wedged between a granite boulder and a wall of shale.
It would feel so good to rage, David thinks, to punish some tangible and contained foe. But the weather is neither tangible nor contained. Its neck cannot be snapped on a gallows rope, or safely imprisoned behind stone and mortar. A Cornishman knows that the weather will always be at large. And here in California there are no giants of legend to blame for it, no magic.
‘What do you think?’ David asks again.
Limpy shoves his hat back and scratches his receding hair. A half-dozen miners packed and left this morning, looking for richer claims upriver, east to Nevada, or north to Vancouver Island. Long-legged Mordicai had been among them.
‘Been hearing things about the Fraser River,’ he told David. ‘I aim to get there before the rush this time.’ He glanced back once at Bobcat Creek, tipped his hat to Emaline, and strode stork-like out of town.
David bends down and picks up a broken riffle bar. He will not write home about this. He hasn’t written in months and won’t until he has the gold to prove himself a success, to prove his father wrong. It’s a metal like any other. He’s been away two years now. Two years with nothing to show, and he won’t return until he can buy himself a farm in a quiet, out of the way valley and raise the wheat that refused to grow in that salty Land’s End air, that rocky Penzance soil. A heretical ambition for a fourth generation miner whose family had always dug for their dinner.
‘I think…I think I’d like to try a sluice this time,’ Limpy says.
David nods and hurls the splintered wood into the creek.
Alex has fleas. They invaded two nights ago when the rains began, emerging from the cloth tick of her bedclothes and taking happy bites ever since.
She slaps and misses a black speck, gone before she’s even sure it was there. The sun’s white light is tearing a hole through the cloud cover. She slogs through the red mud, sucking in the fresh air as if she’s been underwater. The creek crashes by.
That morning, several miners had left town. They blamed Motherlode for their bad luck.
‘Luck don’t have a location,’ Emaline told Mordicai, the lanky man who sang the sad songs.
‘Gold does,’ he said, and tipped his hat goodbye.
Alex had followed him out the door of the inn to the porch. She stood out of the way, but close enough to be noticed if Emaline wanted, close enough, she thought, to warrant some acknowledgement. ‘Got to build luck around you,’ is what Emaline said, more to the chickens clamouring about than to Alex, even as the heat of the woman’s body reached out to brush away some of Alex’s coldness. Alex waited. Her eyes wandered from Emaline’s wide posterior to the reed-thin man disappearing around the row of manzanita. She even scuffed her feet as a chicken might scratch for a worm, but Emaline had nothing to say to her. Alex could stay. Alex could go.
She thinks about the way Emaline laughed with her mouth wide open, how Limpy’s stories grew larger and longer with every whisky, how David held his cards to his chest as if they were sacred things, and how Preacher sat with his Bible and mumbled to himself, slipping drinks when he thought no one was looking. Alex was always looking, so that at night, warm in her little room, hugged by darkness, she could recreate those images and suffocate other pictures that crept into her dreams. Her mind had a skin too, and she could already feel it thickening. Stay a few more days, she thinks. Just a few more days and then I’ll go.
She picks her way up the narrow trail, past the wreckage of abandoned claims, over fallen trees and branches. Mud and gravel have slid from the ravine, forming a tongue of earth that sticks like a wedge from the wall of her clearing. Scrub jays and robins streak down to snap up earthworms wriggling in the red clay. Slivers of pastel grass poke through like fingers to the sun. One of the granite boulders protecting the cove has washed yards downstream and her quiet pool is now a mass of charging water. All remnants of the carcass have been washed away. She takes a wooden stake from her pack. She pounds it in at the water’s edge. She hefts her pick to her shoulder, looking for a spot to place the next stake, and allows her mind to travel back to another spring day, or one of many that featured she and Peter climbing trees in the Hollinger orchard. Back then the whole of her life took place tomorrow.
‘I want to be a soldier,’ Peter told her as he pulled himself up