Crown of Dust

by Mary Volmer

  A giant oak of a man to Muddy Boots’s right lets out a long curving whistle that rises upward to the low-beam ceiling and spills in a puddle on the floor. The kitchen door bangs open and the woman bustles through with a large iron pot.

  “Look out,” she says, brushing Alex aside, and slams the pot on the table. Muddy Boots moves his feet.

  “You need an invitation?” she asks. Alex sits, feels her cheeks flush hot.

  “All right, Preacher,” says the woman.

  “Dearly Beloved,” says a dark-haired man with just a hint of whiskey in his voice. He stands, as if it just occurred to him to do so, and runs his hands up and down his flannel. His eyeballs search for words beneath his lids and his hands clasp so tightly his knuckles show white. “We are gathered here today, Lord, to thank you for your wondrous bounty.”

  “’Cept when it comes to gold,” says a baritone to Alex’s right; the whistler, she thinks. A low chuckle catches, then dies. She bows her head, but lets her eyes dart to the pot mid-table. A large round loaf of bread sweats under a cloth and she begs her stomach silent.

  “And lead us not into temptation, Lord. No, lead us far from temptation, our Father who art in heaven. We hallow thy name, giving glory, Lord. Thanks for health, we ask for wealth. Hallelujah, let’s eat.”

  Preacher’s plate is half empty before Alex is allowed to scrape the bottom of the iron pot for the last chunks of rabbit stew. What bread there was has already been snatched.

  “Don’t get used to it, boys,” says Emaline. Her tone is thick with disappointment, and men pause mid-chew to listen. “Be cinching our belts by the end of the week, thanks to our new friend here.”

  The serving spoon and nine faces point in Alex’s direction. Alex looks down at her plate. Alex chews. She has to tell herself to do these things.

  “But damned if he ain’t offered to buy drinks all round to make up for it!”

  “Attaboy, son,” says the baritone and slaps her on the back, propelling the chunk of rabbit meat across the table and into the bowl of a beardless man with expressionless gray eyes. A drooping auburn mustache curtains his thin lips and frames his cleft chin.

  “No forgiveness like whiskey. Ain’t that right, Preacher?” The baritone stands, nearly brushing his head on the crossbeam. A grin fills his face. Alex flinches, afraid there’s another slap coming, good natured though the first one seemed. The mustache man fishes with both fingers for Alex’s meat in his stew. His eyes flit to Alex and away.

  “Don’t think we’ve been properly introduced,” the baritone says. “Mighty hard to be polite on an empty stomach, you know. No excuse, mind you, but the truth. I ’spect you met Preacher John yonder, but don’t ask him to remember it. The one-eyed fella next to you is Micah Daniels, also a resident here at the Victoria. Owns a sore excuse for a general store and assay office just down the walk. Claims he can figure fine, but you watch him careful when he’s weighing your gold. Been known to lighten the load some, yah know what I mean, and grows his fingernails long enough to get two dollars in one pinch of gold dust.

  “Harry Reynolds there lives in the first cabin as you come into town, along with good Mr. Fred Henderson, self-proclaimed expert on rocks, animals, plants and all things natural. Next to him is our German friend Klein, master builder and jack-of-all-trades—when he feels like doing ’em. Got no other name, so don’t go asking him. Just Klein. You met Jed—” he nods to the black man—“and Emaline; Miss Emaline, if you know what’s good for you.

  “My name is Samson Limpkin, but most call me Limpy on account of, well, let’s say a crooked limb. And the man you so graciously shared your stew with—” he nods to the mustache man—“is my cousin, David Trellona, fresh out of Cornwall and thinkin’ he knows more about mining than those Empire folks over in Grass Valley. Why work like a dog for some other man? Aye, Dave. Why indeed?”

  Limpy takes a swig from his cup, wipes his mouth with the back of his hand, and with the same hand points at Muddy Boots, still bent over his bowl as if intent on ignoring him.

  “And that there is John Thomas. Not much on manners, but … well, not much on anything.”

  “Damn you, Limpy,” says Muddy Boots, his mouth full of food.

  Alex can feel the big man’s breath down her neck. He pulls a gold pouch from his pocket, holds it like an egg in the palm of his hand.

  “And you are …?” Limpy asks.

  The curve of Emaline’s brow, the curl of her lips, tells Alex these men know very well the name she gave.

  “A simple question, son,” says Limpy. “Name?”

  Men lean forward, listening, and names and faces swim as mismatched pairs through Alex’s mind. She pulls her head into her neck, says as deeply as she can manage:

  “Alex.”

  “Hah!” says Limpy, his paw slamming down again, this time square on her back, forcing all the air from her chest. “Eighteen, my ass. Who said eighteen? John Thomas, trying to hide? Alex what?”

  “Shee-it,” says Micah, thumping a small pouch of gold on the table and giving Alex a close look at the concave indention of skin where his left eye should be.

  “Why thank you, Micah. Alex what?” Limpy asks again. Outside, a scrub jay screams the sun down.

  “Ford?” Alex says, hearing the doubt in her own voice. Emaline’s arms cross before her and her eyes narrow to slits, but Limpy doesn’t seem to notice.

  “Alex Ford,” he says. “Solid name. No more than sixteen, if that. Pay up.” Leather pouches thump on the table. “Pay up, John Thomas,” says Limpy.

  “Now just hold on a goddamn minute,” John Thomas says, his fair skin turning the red of Micah’s empty eye socket. “I’ll pay you later.”

  “My ass.”

  “Hell yes, your ass—you calling me a liar?”

  “Both of you better sit yourselves right back down,” says Emaline, barely raising her voice. “Y’all know I don’t permit no gambling at the dinner table. And you, Alex—” the serving spoon again jabs her direction—“finish up so I can get to getting done with dinner.”

  With the plank tables separated, the room feels smaller, cluttered. The ramshackle bar at the far end of the room now dominates, the counter lined with tin cups and a few glass canning jars, and now the elbows of Limpy and the one-eyed Micah. Bloated whiskey jugs on shelves behind the bar are blurred in the orange lamplight and look, to Alex, like a row of rotund women. Several card games are already in progress when Alex eases her way up the stairs.

  “Hey,” says Emaline, pushing through the kitchen door. She thumps a stool down next to her own. “Stick a while.”

  And something, the weight of her filling that doorway, or the calm authority in her voice, triggers an old habit of obedience. Alex sits, but remains above on the stairwell with her chin tucked into her knees. She hadn’t liked the suspicious glances the woman had been casting through dinner. She prays the woman’s eyes are as poor as they seem.

  “Whatever suits you,” says Emaline, dismissing her with a wave of the hand.

  “’Scuse me, gents, Emaline …” Limpy’s voice and body rise as one from the bar and the saloon goes silent. “A toast. To Alex and his gentle way with mules. May his way with women be less costly, but just as exciting!”

  He tips his glass, leads a collective swallow, motions to Jed to fill his cup again. “Now don’t you dare smile there, Alex, don’t.” Alex does not feel like smiling, makes no attempt to smile. Six coins left, she thinks. She’d felt so rich with twelve.

  “And speaking of costly,” says Limpy, downing the next glass, “how ’bout it Emaline? Nearly hit it today. Sho’ ’nough pay dirt. Pay you double price. I say I’ll pay you double, tomorrow—”

  “Now hold on there, Limp. You know the woman doesn’t take credit, and I’m a hell of a lot prettier than you anyway—and richer,” says Micah, winking his one eye.

  “The hell—”

  “And I can hold my liquor.”

  Alex is only vaguely aware of what they’re sayi
ng. The rest of their banter is lost beneath the groan of the accordion in the corner—a tune that just might be “The Old Oaken Bucket” or “Clementine,” or a wobbly combination of the two—and as if called by this racket, miners begin to trickle into the saloon. No less than thirty, if she had a head to count, and she doubts whether some of those mud-stained canvas pants and holey flannels had ever been, or would ever be washed. It would certainly ease the competing stench of rotting canvas, stale tobacco, whiskey. The men lean on the bar and against the walls and against each other. They swear and laugh with their mouths wide open, chew plugs of tobacco, smoke cob pipes, and soon the air is thick and yellow. Their hands stroke leather pouches of gold dust, arrange and rearrange dog-eared playing cards, fiddle with the worn visors of discolored hats and punctuate speech with herky-jerky movements in the air. To Alex they are a collection of parts, of hands, feet and hats, interchangeable with a few exceptions: John Thomas; the big man, Limpy; the black man, Jed; one-eyed Micah; the mustache man, David, whose broad-angled shoulders give him a stocky compact appearance next to Limpy, even as he tops Micah by inches.

  And there, sitting apart from the rest by the kitchen door, is Emaline. In her lap, a pair of trousers, needle, thread. Her fingers are busy, but she glances down only so often at her work.

  Her weight is not so much the round softness of other women Alex has known, or the wire sinew of her gran. Emaline is solid, with wide, square shoulders and thick vein-tracked forearms. A fringe of dark hair feathers her upper lip. Her only softness appears to be her generous bosom that strains the front of her dress like mounds of rising sourdough. Emaline’s hands work the cloth. Deft, confident movements, and Alex finds her fingers moving of their own accord, with life and memory of their own.

  She forces her hands to fists, stuffs them in her pockets. Gran, too, could sew by feel alone, her fingers unconscious of themselves and of the bent-wire body to which they were attached. Gran was never so patient with Alex as she was with cloth. “After three boys,” she liked to say, “three foolish, foolish boys, God at least could have given me a proper granddaughter.”

  Proper, Alex thinks. What would Gran think of her now, after all she’s seen? After what she’s done? She rises unnoticed, climbs the stairs. Thigh muscles catch and pull with every step. She slips across the hallway and closes the door of the dark little room behind her.

  Mountain lion, Emaline thinks, and close by. She curses and grabs the shotgun by the bed. It won’t be the first time she’s been roused in the middle of the night to protect those damn chickens. Bothersome old biddies, scratching through the leaves all day, dining on leftovers. Women should be valued so much and paid so well for their monthly cycles. A dozen eggs brought her five dollars on Tuesday, more than that big-mouthed Limpy and his cousin David made together digging in the mud all day.

  She hears the scream again—high pitched, like a woman—and hurries out of her bedroom door. The hall is morning dark, but Emaline has memorized the irregularities in the floorboards like the lines of her mother’s face. She knows the sound of Micah’s high nasal snoring escaping from the second room on her right. She’d thrown him out at midnight and listened while he clumped down the hall in unlaced boots. They never spent the night, her boys. She refuses to do business after midnight. They all know it by now and don’t even grumble when she lights the lantern and hands them their boots. Grumbling costs extra.

  She offers a product in limited supply in these parts, which is one of the reasons she moved to this little mud-hole town in the first place. Too much competition in the cities. Younger women, girls really, with exotic slanting eyes, or skin of rich amber—girls with pliant rubber bodies, born with their legs wide open. They monopolize the market. They work cheap, happy to sell themselves on street corners. Or they work for someone else, leasing their bodies for a fancy costume, a place to stay and a tiny fraction of the price paid. Emaline is not cheap. She is experienced. She has the touch and can tell what a man needs by the length of his stride, the angle of his grin, the shape of the erection through his trousers. Her callused, muscled hands transform from tough and insistent to feather-soft, almost tender, and she knows that in the dark she is more beautiful than any of those city ladies.

  She’s halfway down the stairs when she hears the scream again, above her this time. Her arm hairs stand straight. The snoring stops, sputters, then begins again, softer. She grips the gun with white knuckles. She eases up the stairs. The hall is empty. She creeps on. Her ears twitch. A soft, high murmur from the first room. She opens the door. It whines.

  Young Alex is lying tangled in his quilts. His head is thrashing back and forth, and pellets of sweat roll down his forehead. Emaline eases the gun to the floor, folds her arms in front of her and watches.

  In the hallway, a floorboard creaks. Arms encircle Emaline’s waist. A fuzzy head rests on her shoulder.

  “Should we wake him?” Jed whispers in her ear.

  “No,” she says. “Better to deal with demons in sleep.”

  She closes the door and follows Jed back to her room.

  2

  Alex wakes to an empty cocoon of darkness, oblivious to all but the steady thump of her heart, the coarse wool blanket twining around her legs, hot breath against the skin of her arm. Last night she’d smelled bourbon, woke herself screaming. But for a moment she lingers in the pleasant fog of half sleep. For a moment there is no morning, no dreaming, no smell but the musk of her own sweat. There is only her pulse pounding at her temple, only the sheet beneath her head, and now unmistakably, unforgivably, the need to pee. She stands too fast, steadies herself against the wall. Her hair sticks out at all angles, perpendicular to her head, and she smashes the duster hat over the mess, stumbles to where she remembers the door to be and flings it open to the shock of sunlight.

  Emaline’s voice meets her at the stairwell.

  “You heard me, John. You want, I’ll yell in your good ear and pull your left right off your head, I will, preacher or no.”

  Her wide frame is bent at the waist over Preacher, spread-eagled in the middle of the doorway. She holds a whiskey jug by its eyelet and Preacher’s red eyes follow its bobbing movement. He mumbles a response and she raises the jug high above her head.

  “I don’t care what the Lord tells you to do,” says Emaline. “You get drunk on my whiskey, you pay for it.”

  Every bone, every muscle of Alex’s body is stiff. She tiptoes down the stairs, bent like an old woman, clutching her pack to her chest to quiet the metallic jangle of the gold pan against the canteen. She pulls her hat low over her eyes, but this does nothing to prevent the last step from moaning beneath her.

  “Well,” says Emaline, “if it ain’t our newest prospector.”

  With her hands on her hips, Emaline is as wide as the doorway.

  “You missed breakfast,” she says, and moves aside. Alex squeezes past her, steps over Preacher and out the door.

  The outhouse squats forty yards beyond the inn. Alex crouches over the wooden hole, careful not to wiggle and get splinters. She holds her breath against the smell. Flies knock themselves against the walls. A wasp makes circles near the ceiling as though anchored with a string and Alex watches, glorying in that blessed release when a branch snaps. Her bladder freezes. A shadow blocks the slices of sunlight piercing the open spaces in the plank walls. Something slides beneath the door. A newspaper? No, a magazine: Godey’s Lady’s Book, the same Gran read, sometimes aloud in her high north-eastern rasp, pointing out details of different fashions and pooh-poohing the poems. “All trying to be clever. Just say what needs said,” she’d say. Or, if she really liked a poem, “Bunch of foolish fancy, that one.”

  All but two of the newsprint pages have been torn out. On the cover a woman with hollow eyes smiles primly. She wears a dark gown embroidered with gray flowers. The sleeves are long, ballooning slightly at the wrists, and the corseted waist tapers to a triangle, cutting the woman into two halves. The skirt billows like a napkin doily,
the layers of petticoats beneath forming a womb-like vase of fabric, accentuating the very region they profess to protect.

  “Hogwash,” Gran would say. “One for her hips, one for her husband and one for the Holy Ghost. If a woman can’t keep her peace with three petticoats, she won’t do with ten.”

  She looked at Alex when she said this, as though imparting some great knowledge. Alex could only nod, never quite sure what “keeping the peace” entailed; she suspected it had something to do with walking slowly and with “proper reservation.” Gran wasn’t one to be questioned or contradicted, especially on her topic of expertise: women. She spoke in a removed manner of confident authority, as though age had absolved her of the vices of womanhood, leaving her only with the burden of virtue to pass on to her granddaughter, who, even as a young girl, especially as a young girl, found sitting still and walking slowly the most difficult virtues to master.

  From Gran, Alex had learned the true nature of women—deceitful, manipulative, full of the sin of Eve—and she’d wondered more than once what kind of woman her mother had been, wondered if she too had been stricken with a wandering soul. Gran spoke little of Alex’s mother, obviously did not think her worthy of her youngest son, Charles. Alex knew her only as the gold-etched daguerreotype by her bed.

  Her mother’s lips, thin and straight. Her mother’s eyes, looking out but seeing nothing. Her body, a thin, flat frame.

  Instead, Gran related her own family history as a moral tale. She told of her husband Nicolas, who insisted on fighting and, by Gran’s telling, insisted on dying, in the Battle of New Orleans. Nicolas left her with three sons and no income, apart from her father’s dairy farm, and the boys grew fast and foreign to her, each one following their father’s reckless lead into military life, and eventually military death. Charles left behind baby Alex and a consumptive wife fated to live but three months longer than her husband. Alex had always understood that her existence was in itself a “burden endured”—had heard it put just this way by Minister Bosworth who, on occasion, was called upon to confirm Gran’s low estimate of female virtue.