by Mary Volmer
“A girl, from the time she is born, is at battle with her natural inclinations,” the minister confirmed one day at tea while Peter, his son, made faces at Alex through the living-room window.
Alex had fidgeted in her chair, scowling at Peter and staring past him into the fall day. The leaves were just turning rose-brown. The apples were ripe.
“She must, growing and through adulthood, quell the evil spirit within her and, by her submissiveness, gain eternal redemption.”
Gran’s head was bowed when the minister said this, and did not see Alex stick out her tongue at Peter.
Alex looks up from the picture, suddenly aware that the shadow is still there. Gran fades into the nitric fumes of the outhouse.
“It’s not for reading,” Emaline barks, “and you’re welcome.” Then the shadow is gone.
Alex wads the front cover of the magazine, scrunching the dress, smashing the woman into a mass of crinkled paper. She wipes with the soft inside pages and drops them down the hole. But even as she makes her way along the road to the creek, the model’s hollow eyes take the form of the rough-cut windows of canvas shacks, giving her the disconcerting sensation that the town itself is somehow following her, closer and closer toward the sputtering edge of the creek until the town too is swallowed by the sound of rushing water. She turns to face the silence behind her.
The windows of the frame and canvas cabins are not eyes. The splintered gray walls are not inching closer. The clouds gathering on the lip of the ravine look as if they are brushing the feathered heads of cedars, but the ravine walls are not collapsing around her. The brown-butted chickens, worrying their way up the road, scratching for worms and other treasures, ignore her completely. It’s only the Victoria Inn, with its ornamental balcony, splintered balusters and peeling whitewash, that reminds her of an old woman’s crumbling face.
At the creek the tops of men’s heads bob from holes in the ground. They gather beside long wooden sluices, washing soil down hollow slat-lined boxes. Most work silently, adjusting to each other’s tempo, and the few that stop to watch as she passes make no effort to speak. Better to keep her feet ahead of her thoughts. Better to fill her senses with California, once a word light with hope. She keeps step with the thump of an axe, pulls her hat to the very bridge of her nose, tries to ignore the blisters pinching the skin of her heel. Biting air fills her lungs. Her aching legs begin to warm and loosen.
Further upstream, the path narrows. Her eyes begin to wander. The overcast sky allows the ravine above the thinnest of shadows, while brambles and thickets form dark impenetrable outgrowths of branches and leaves. Fallen limbs, black with mold, litter the trail. Mushrooms grow from the fermenting dead leaves, and the crevices of lichen-covered rocks. The clank of metal on rock becomes distant. Men’s voices are all but swallowed by the rush of water, the squawk of scrub jays. She pauses for breath at a flat outcropping.
She likes the way the valley opens here, offering a shelf of gravel and sand that gives way to a carpet of grass and clover running to the ravine wall. The clearing is buttressed on either side by a twisted thicket of red brush bursting with pale, coin-sized leaves. Black-skinned scrub oaks reach arthritically outward, and above, on the ridge, fir trees stand rigid.
At the creek, a row of rounded boulders protects a calm enclave of frigid water. She skims her hands across the slippery green skin growing on a rock. She rummages in her pack for the gold pan, past the tin cup, the canteen, the money pouch. How heavy these few belongings had felt, how light she feels now, alone here by the creek. She scoops up a brimming pan of sand and water, remembering the old prospector on the outskirts of Rough and Ready.
FROM $10 TO RICHES, his sign had read, and beneath it a stack of gold pans rose one on top of the other like tortoise shells. She’d choked down a bite of the old man’s barley bread. “The first fortune is always the hardest, wettest, coldest, meanest son-a-bitch you ever chase,” he said. His voice was a gravel rasp, high pitched, and in this way reassuring to Alex. Already her shaking hands had stilled some. “They don’t tell you that in those shipping fliers, do they? They don’t need to. Gold! That’s all they need, save the ink and paper. A man’s not bound to read between the lines with a word like that to tempt him.”
He emptied his pipe on the stump next to him and pointed up at her with a finger more bone than skin.
“I see myself in you, is what I’m saying, and I’m telling you it’s not as easy as they make it sound, finding gold, getting rich. Nothing is, is it? A man can lose himself in the search—forget anything else ever mattered to him but gold, forget who he was and what he valued ’fore he came. It’s a danger, like scurvy—sneak up and take your teeth ’fore you know it.”
He bared a set of blackened incisors, yellow at their roots, but Alex’s eyes lingered on the gold pans, and the word gold rested there on her shoulder as if it meant to follow her wherever she was going. She found herself reaching for her money pouch, giving the man a coin from her precious stash, though she knew better by now than to put faith in words, even those as shiny as gold. A crooked grin tugged his whiskers as he tucked the coin into his boot.
“What you do is, you find a likely spot, one that smells rich, like a rusted wheel axle. Hunch down, like this—” He eased off his stool and bent down to demonstrate, his knees jutting on either side of his shoulders. He mimicked scooping up a pan of soil and water. “Then you just rotate it round in a little circle. All in the wrist, see—” His hands were small and slender with brown sunspots dotting the backs like islands. The crease lines in his hands were mirrored in his face, and a thin white beard was the only trace of hair on his head. He moved the pan in circles. “The lighter stuff, sand and such—worthless. That’ll slough off first, so what’s left at the bottom, see, is the black sand, the heavy stuff. And the gold.” When he stood, the man’s back remained curved like the keel of a boat, and he had to crane his neck to look directly at Alex. “’Course, most nowadays is using the rocker and long tom, if they don’t want to go down a hole, but thems require at least three to work right. Not long ago, miner by hisself only needed his pan. I know, I was here in ’47 taking gold ’fore anyone know’d the name Cal-i-for-ni-a.”
She takes a deep breath. The smell is organic, cedar bark, fermenting mud and mushrooms. No rust. She rotates her wrists clockwise. Small flecks of white, black, gold and gray swirl in suspension, spilling over the edge of the pan, staining her crotch and the front of her flannel. She sucks in her breath at the chill, dusts off the sand and silt, and bends down again, allowing her knees to jut on either side of her as the old man had done. She scoops less sand this time, less water.
She sets the pan like a boat on the water and watches it float downstream, catches it before it’s swept away. She gives the pan a spin, it twirls like a top, throwing flashes of sunlight into her eyes. She scoops another bit of water and sand, this time angling the pan away. She works slowly, biting the end of her tongue, losing herself in the water and silt. Her forearms burn and she uses the pain to keep her mind from wandering back into memory. The manzanita rustles behind her.
She turns to face the teardrop ears of a doe frozen mid-step. Its tail twitches; its ears rotate, listening. Its pregnant belly is stretched taut. Liquid eyes fix beyond Alex, beyond the end of the clearing. Alex turns to look and the deer, even with her big belly, springs forward in two arching leaps before again halting, motionless.
Alex’s ears twitch. Her heart begins to thud. She follows the direction of the doe’s gaze to find herself in line with the muzzle of a rifle.
All she can see now is the gun, the tip round and glinting silver, and she thinks, how quickly, how effortlessly they found me, before I even knew where I was going. She rises to her feet and the doe braces to run, every muscle and ligament tense. The gunshot shatters the stillness; the metal whizzes like a breath past her ear. She hears metal strike flesh and flesh thump to the ground, and only now does Alex begin to shake, the instinct to run so strong she
is paralyzed.
John Thomas leaps from the manzanita grove. “I got ’em, Jed,” he yells, eyeballing Alex.
“You get ’em?” says Jed, crashing through the brush behind John Thomas.
“I said I got ’em.”
The two men crouch over the body as it slides into death. Its eyes stare, too pained for fright, and Alex can’t help but look down where the bullet has pierced the belly. The taut skin has split around the wound and a small, hoofed leg twitches through the hole.
“Cut the throat,” says Jed.
“Be dead in a minute.”
“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 m
iles 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.
