by Mary Volmer
“I need a sign,” she tells him, holding her arms wide. “This big, or bigger.”
“All right,” he says, scratching his back with the blunt side of his chisel.
“MOTHERLODE, in big letters.”
9
“Up a little, your end, Alex,” says Limpy.
Alex strains on her tiptoes, edging the bracing timber upward another inch. The backs of her arms and shoulders ache. David supports the other half of the timber, laboring only slightly under the weight. In the shadow of the infant mine, his skin is translucent.
“Hurry, Limpy,” says Alex, feeling her arms deaden, the weight shift.
“Almost got it. Just one more … Okay.”
Alex’s arms fall to her sides. Her hands are leaden pincushions that prick and tickle as the blood rushes back. She leans against the damp wall of the shaft. She listens to the tap and crash of picks and shovels a mile upstream, a half mile down. Windlasses groan under the weight of ore buckets hauled to the grass and ever present is the hum of the creek. Purring, Limpy calls it, but Alex still remembers how loud it roared, how violently it pushed its way downstream during the rains; how, when filled with rage, the creek upended boulders and tore trees from their roots. She thinks about this when her shoulders ache and her hands throb; how much stronger this little creek could be than any man. For some reason this thought allows her to continue, as if she sensed that it was some strange grace that allowed her to hear the river and liken it to a purr, allowed her to linger here in the fading afternoon and think these thoughts.
“Don’t know about that last timber, Limp,” David says. “All right for now. But that crack isn’t getting any smaller.”
“Be fine. One of many, you know,” Limpy says. “Not gonna hold up the whole mountain on its own, is it?”
“I’m saying I’ve seen whole shafts caving in around one faulty timber. We’re not working with solid rock here.”
“Superstition’s what that is.”
Limpy leans on the timber to prove his point, and Alex grins. Superstition is a sword Limpy often draws against David. “Be fine till tomorrow, at least. Besides, don’t think Alex is up for another one today.”
She lets out an acceding breath and sinks down against the wall. Downstream, someone detonates a lodeful of black powder. Bits of earth shower down and the tendons of her lower back tighten. Digging holes with picks and shovels is frightening enough. The thought of blasting terrifies her. The smell of the char-silicon powder that the miners pack into drill holes bears a terrible resemblance to cauterized skin and, at any moment, Alex expects the entire ravine to tumble downward in pain or protest. Perhaps David is right about that last bracing timber. But she doesn’t feel like admitting this.
“It’ll wait till tomorrow, won’t it?” Alex asks, addressing Limpy more than David.
“We still got some daylight left,” says David. “We have time.”
Limpy wipes his hands down his trousers and lowers himself to a crouch.
“Daylight’s one thing, energy’s something else. I got no more poop.”
He winks at Alex, and she gives a conspiratorial sigh of agreement. David’s frustrated scowl follows her out into the fading light. The grass chokes under a layer of clay and the manzanita bushes on either side have been cut to make way for digging. The dead, graying limbs, still too green to burn, are piled across the creek, and heart-shaped leaves carpet the ground. Every cedar and pine within a half mile has been cut for support beams and sluice boxes, for the cabins and shops thriving where trees once stood along Victor Lane.
Limpy joins her outside and together they wait for David to concede, which he does only after washing one more bucket of ore through the sluice and gathering every tool scattered around the claim into an organized stack, with all pick handles facing the same direction and shovel heads spooning.
“Quite done, then?” Limpy asks as David rinses his hands in the creek. In reply, David strides off ahead of them downstream toward Motherlode.
That last timber moved a good inch when Harry blew his charge. No way it will hold in a local explosion, and David wants to be blasting by next week; would be blasting now if Limpy didn’t insist on wasting daylight’s last hour gabbing in front of the Victoria. A town full of new faces and Limpy thinks he had to be on first-name terms with everyone. They’d be another twenty feet deeper by now if the man moved his shovel as much as his mouth. But he never could sway Limpy, and the boy … Well, David doubts if Alex even bothered to listen to what the big man said before agreeing. He cannot shake the suspicion the boy did this to spite him.
He passes claim after claim, the freshly turned soil like festering blemishes on the ravine face. He stops to watch two greenhorns hacking away at the mountain. He can see by the way these fellows have laid their shaft that they’ll have trouble with drainage. He should say something—let them know the load of work they’ll save by cutting up into the mountain, let the water run out on its own—but feels no need to help another man get rich. Likely, they’ll spend their profit as fast as they dig it for a fancy new hat, a night in Emaline’s bed.
David could use a new hat. His panama smells as rank as he does. But he hates the thought of spending money, and doing business in raw gold dust still baffles him. One pinch from a man’s pouch was never equal to a dollar, whatever Micah said. Depending on the size of a man’s thumb and forefinger and the length of his nails, one pinch could take closer to two dollars, or more. And you had to watch careful that a fellow didn’t press buckshot into his fingers, increasing his yield with the indent, or lick his thumb or rub his nose before dipping in your pouch. Micah was a master at this. Pretend he was itching that ugly socket, make a detour past his tongue, and rid you of a few more flakes than dry fingers would have.
Across the creek, the valley grass rises tall and brown. A few of the newest arrivals have settled for the flats downstream. He can see the conical hats of Chinamen bobbing over their pans, adding ounces of slag at a time to the mud-choked creek. Ten or so have made camp there. They packed in silently at night, and he can’t see one without remembering the hundreds landing on docks in San Francisco when he arrived two years ago.
“You stay away from them,” a woman’s voice had called from the window above, but for a moment all he’d seen were the screaming gulls. Human bodies of every size, shape, and color bumped past him as if he were but a box in the sea of boxes stacked along the wharf. After months at sea his legs shook on the solid ground. “Up here, honey, haloo,” said the woman at the window. “Hey, Jenny,” she called behind her. “Come look at the face of this one.”
“I seen all the faces there are,” came the answer, and the woman on the railing leaned out further. Her breasts swelled round and bare as moons before him.
“You stay away from them—” she gestured at the Chinamen. “’Less you want to smoke your pecker off.” She held up her finger, wiggled it around. She made a perfect circle with her mouth and bit the finger at its base. “HA!” she said, and disappeared through the window.
His letter home mentioned only the hundreds of Chinamen—Celestials, they called them in San Francisco.
He should write home. No reason to be hesitant now that he’s making a profit. A hundred dollars in gold dust a day, split three ways. More money than his father saw in six months of wages. But when he sits down to write, there is always more to say than he can put into words on paper. He sends only gold, and even the act of scrawling his name feels dishonest.
He trips over a fallen log, keeps his eyes to the trail. When I have enough gold, I will return to Cornwall. I will sit with my family surrounding me and I will show them a place in stories—evergreens standing taller than the giants of Cornish legend, the violent stillness of the Sierras in winter, San Francisco Harbor choked with the bulk of hundreds and hundreds of ships—I’ll show them a place.
He stops. A Chinese man stands knee deep in water ten yards downstream. He grins and points. Another man, his long black qu
eue hanging to his waist, tugs at the grinning man’s shirt. His eyes flit from David to the grinning man. His frown is that of a frustrated parent or an older brother.
“Gold,” Grinning Man says, or something like it.
“He simply man, sir,” says his partner and bows. “Simple man,” he says, correcting himself, and leads Grinning Man away by the arm.
Enough gold, David thinks, as he watches them go. How much is enough gold?
Grinning Man looks back. He shakes his head and his queue swings back and forth across his chest.
Alex passes the livery and Heinrich’s shoe store, a solid wood building that has sprouted and grown to overshadow David and Limpy’s cabin on its left and the cigar shop on its right. Shopkeepers are just shutting their doors. They linger outside to talk and sweep dust from their storefronts into a choking fog that settles back in much the same place. Alex loiters a moment in front of the haberdasher, staring at the assorted headwear, at the panama hats in particular. Their straw-colored brims turn down at a pleasingly jaunty angle and, if David didn’t wear one, she’d already have bought one for herself. She might still, she thinks, and ducks between Sander’s dry goods and the Victoria Inn, to be alone among the dwindling cedars.
Even here, with the jumble of wagons and construction and human voices buffered by the body of the inn, Alex can hear Emaline’s voice from somewhere near the chapel.
“Won’t have a leaning steeple, Klein,” says Emaline, and Alex smiles, imagining the woman’s arms crossed, her foot tapping, and Klein squirming. “You look there and tell me it ain’t leaning.”
“Jesus H. Christ, Emaline!”
“Three other carpenters in this town now, Klein, most charging less than you, so—”
“All right now …”
Klein’s voice falls below the level of the hammering and the exploratory squawks of the chickens who tiptoe around the edges of their pen, testing the extent of their new confinement. Alex eases down onto a log and closes her eyes on the outhouse and the chicken coop.
After two months, her body is just now acclimatizing to the daily toil of the mine. She no longer minds the fatigue, the rough calluses forming on her hands, the solid indentions developing where she never dreamed muscles lurked. With each new ache, she discovers a new, living part of herself. Filling out, the men call it, but to Alex it feels more like filling in, for she’s not becoming much bigger. Her arms are still spindly, and her stomach has lost its former softness and shrunk to a firm, flat surface. She now simply feels more complete. The dirt beneath her nails, the tough layers of skin hardening on her feet and hands, and the veins showing thick and blue through the darkening tan of her skin, is rooting her, establishing her in this place, and in this body. With every muscle formed and every ounce of sweat lost comes an unaccustomed sense of self, independent of her past. Even her nose, healing just off center with a bump in the bridge, fits her.
She runs her hands down her nose, her aching arms, as much out of curiosity as comfort and is sinking deep into the pleasant exhaustion of evening when she becomes conscious of someone approaching around the side of the inn. Graceful steps, too quiet for Limpy, too casual for Emaline.
The girl, Lou Anne, appears, her red hair barely contained by a lacy blue bonnet, a wilting batch of wildflowers in her hand. Not more than thirteen, Alex thinks. The girl advances, not coyly, but cautiously, as though Alex might bite. Alex closes her eyes to slits, hopes the girl will go away. Instead, she lays the flowers in the dirt, produces a small ball of twine and throws it, thump, thump, thump against the wall, edging ever closer to Alex. Alex opens her eyes.
“I’m not supposed to be here,” Lou Anne says, throwing the ball just above Alex’s head. It rebounds into Alex’s lap. The girl grins.
“Mother, she doesn’t want me here. Says she’ll tan me good. She thinks I’m picking flowers. I am …” She looks down at the pile at her feet. “Was.”
She selects a long-stemmed lily, blue petals with yellow tongues, and holds it out for Alex. The wildflowers in the valley are almost all dry. She must have ventured downstream. Past the Chinamen’s huts? Alex takes the flower.
The girl giggles and her face reddens to match her freckles. “She says only coarse men and fallen women come here. That’s what she says.”
Emaline’s voice again, barking orders at Preacher John. The girl turns toward the sound, then back to Alex. “Like her.”
“Emaline,” Alex blurts, unthinking.
“Living in sin. No right to build a church if you plan to go right on living in sin. They all say that: Mrs. Erkstine, Mrs. Waller, her sister Rose. All of them. Should let other than a drunk do the preaching, too. That’s what they say.”
Alex’s neck warms at the collar. Who are they to say anything? Emaline’s presence is like a quilt around Alex’s shoulders. Emaline’s hands heal blisters.
The girl stands with her hip jutting to the side, her toe tapping. Her very presence is loud and reminds Alex of Gertrude Mellon who came to Shackelford just after Alex’s fifteenth birthday.
Gertrude wasn’t a pretty girl, at least not to Alex’s eye. Her hair was a strange sort of blonde that looked as if she’d washed it in red wine and was pulled back into a maze of clips and braids. Her body was soft and pasty white, like bread dough. The white gloves made her hands look like small, boneless decorations. But she was a year older than Alex, and seemed to carry with her a strange confidence that drew invitations to tea and supper all about town. She was from New York City and had gone to boarding schools, her manners fashioned under the eyes and expectations of other young girls expected to marry well and live comfortably. Her laugh curled upward like a climbing vine, remaining in a room like a scent, hours after she’d left. When she sat down in a chair, it seemed as if she were floating in midair, and she could drink from a tea cup in a way that demanded an audience: her finger pointed just so, her lips poised, but never slurping, never a drop of liquid escaping to dribble down her chin. And when she walked, she swayed, the layers of petticoats whispering secret messages Alex heard but couldn’t interpret, not like Peter seemed to.
She watched him when Gertrude came into the room, the way he pushed his shoulders back, held his head at an angle, like his father. He laughed loudly at Gertrude’s jokes—much louder, Alex thought, than the jokes themselves warranted—and made a point of sitting beside her at services, his leg carefully aligned with hers but careful not to touch.
Gran insisted that Gertrude come to tea at least once a week, as if hoping these manners, this grace, this impeccable dress, would somehow lend themselves to her granddaughter, would somehow linger in the room like the sound of that laugh.
“A beautiful girl,” Gran would say. “Quite charming.” And Alex would remain silent, unable to disagree, but not willing to agree. Silence had become her only true protection, especially since Peter was spending less and less time with her in the fields behind Hollinger’s place and more and more time studying for his seminary exams. He still spoke of soldiering, but his words had lost that dreamy ring of possibility, coming out like a nursery rhyme repeated so many times that it was only the rhythm that mattered. Alex would climb to the attic to escape Gran. She’d look upon the dusty remnants of her family: wooden soldiers and toy hammers, readers with little-boy scrawl, and clothing of various sizes documenting the growth of three boys. And in the corner of this room, whose slanted ceiling offered only enough head-room for Alex to stand bent at the waist, hung her mother’s wedding dress, wrapped in a protective dustcover of terry cloth and muslin.
Alex would sit here among the trunks and hatboxes and talk to her mother. She would run the satin sleeve of the dress down her cheek, feeling in this the tips of her mother’s fingers. She told her mother. All the things she would have told her if she was alive, and many things she wouldn’t. She’d told her mother about stealing apples and climbing trees, how bright the teacher said she was, how misshapen the s’s always turned out on her stitch sampler, looking more l
ike a coiled serpent than a letter. She told her mother of the fliers and editorials about the West that she and Peter had read behind the rabbit hutch.
But one day, nearly three months after Gertrude imposed upon her life, Alex took the dress down from its hook. It was heavier than she’d anticipated, as if she were folding a real body over itself, the whalebone stays of the bodice like a woman’s ribs. She hugged it tight in her arms, careful not to expose the silk to the dusty floor, and eased her way down the ladder, back to her room.
The neckline was round, edged with pearls and bits of lace. The heavy train pulled her back and down, making every step forward an act of strength and balance. There were satin panels on either side of the skirt, accentuated with layers of pleating and lace, and pearls were stitched along every seam. She closed her eyes and let her fingers explore the flared sleeves, slipping over the satin, sticking on the lace, bumping over the pearls. She filled out everything except the bodice, but this was no matter to Alex. She could not tighten the stays, so she left them hanging as she practiced walking about the room. She twirled, she swayed, loving the whispering sound the fabric made as she moved. She claimed sickness at dinner, waited for the April sun to set and Gran’s door to click shut, then tiptoed from the house, picking up her skirts so their whispering wouldn’t wake Gran.
“Peter,” she hissed through his window. His light was still on. She knew he was awake. He liked to make her wait. “I’m going to the rabbit hutch. I want to show you something … Peter?”
She heard his chair scrape back against the floor. She ran before he could see her, picking up her skirts, her feet very light even as the dress dragged her down, her lungs drinking in the cool spring air. She waited at the rabbit hutch a very long time. She wondered if he hadn’t heard her after all, or if he’d heard and was simply ignoring her. The ground was getting damp and she was tired of standing there, holding the skirt and train off the ground, careful not to brush up against wood and snag the fabric, which wasn’t nearly as warm as the layers would suggest. Hollinger’s dog was howling, and the moon was full enough to see all the way across the field where the orchards began. And beyond that the creek, and beyond that the Alleghenies, and beyond that …? Alex didn’t know. She wanted to, but also wanted Peter to look at her like he looked at Gertrude, wanted to be able to move her hips like that, and hold her cup and laugh in more than her usual choppy giggle.
