Crown of Dust

by Mary Volmer

  “Alex?” He startled her. She hadn’t heard him coming. His nightshirt hung just below his knees, and he’d pulled his socks high over his boots. She noticed a sliver of dark hair feathering his lip. “You look …” His eyebrows were sideways question marks. He wiped away a string of shiny snot.

  “Yes?” she said, moving closer, sashaying her hips right, then left, as Gertrude had done.

  “You look silly.”

  He was taller than Alex now, but skinny. His arms were ropes attached to knotted joints, and when she rammed him, shoulder to chest, he fell back upon the ground, pulling her with him. She could feel the dress tear on the edge of the hutch, could see mud branding the train. But his lips were touching hers now, his hands exploring the many layers of that dress. She kissed him back. She helped his hands by casting aside the veil still clinging to her skull, and she shed the petticoats from the inside out, no longer cold. Later, she hung the dress back inside its protective covering, the rips in the fabric like cuts, the mud stains like bleeding wounds on her mother’s body.

  She was careful not to sashay after that night. To Gran’s dismay, she was even more unmannered, more defiantly disheveled, and now enjoyed Peter’s eyes in the crowded room, his touch behind the rabbit hutch. In bed at night, she’d touch where he touched, but softer, and the next day showed him how. Until that day she bled and bled, this was just another kind of play; to Gran, just another torn petticoat; to Peter …? She still doesn’t know.

  Her insides pinch and curl around themselves. A man’s breath, bourbon. A man’s weight. The Golden Boy, Alex. I remember nothing. I feel nothing. She thinks of David, how his eyes, too, seem to find her in the saloon.

  No. His eyes find Alex. The Golden Boy, Alex. I feel nothing. She stares past the girl into the fading light.

  “You’re not coarse, are you, Alex?” says the girl. “You’re not a sinner.” The last word slides off her tongue.

  Alex shifts on her log and the girl speaks faster.

  “It’s because you’re quiet, is all. Boys aren’t supposed to be quiet, like you, and I talk entirely too much for a girl. Everyone says so. ‘Lou Anne,’ Pa says, ‘if you were a boy, you would have made a cracking lawyer.’ I don’t want to go back East with them, when they go. I’m not going. I’m gonna stay here in California, marry a miner and go to saloons and never wear a corset. She doesn’t, does she? Mrs. Erkstine says there’s not one that could contain her.”

  The girl takes a breath and Alex leans back against the wall. She is standing too close.

  “Do you like my dress?” Lou Anne asks, swaying so the fabric brushes Alex’s legs.

  Alex stares down at the hem under which peeks an ankle. The material is a peach-colored cotton with silk embroidered flowers, no less than six starched petticoats. The girl edges closer. Her breath is warm on Alex’s neck, her hand trembles on Alex’s shoulder. Too close.

  “Lou Anne?” A woman’s voice from around one side of the inn, a chipper whistling comes from the other. Jed appears with a bucket of chicken slop.

  “Kiss me,” the girl commands, mere inches away. Jed stops whistling.

  “Miss Lou Anne Dourity!”

  Alex turns toward the voice and the girl leans down and plants a kiss on her lips. Alex’s eyes go wide. Mrs. Dourity’s long face contorts like one stung by a bee. Alex shoves the girl away, springs from her log, runs past Jed, heading back toward the creek.

  10

  “Good Lord! I’m fit to burst!” Limpy roars.

  His great shoulders spasm with an infectious laughter that spreads through the saloon and tickles Emaline’s backbone. She loves a full house, new faces and old, a collection of teeth shining like coffee-stained stars. Alex sits before her at the bar, red faced, hunched over a glass of whiskey. He’s taking it well, Emaline thinks, a bit surprised by the pride that accompanies this thought.

  “Micah, feet,” she says.

  “Ah, Emaline. Charge me an ounce of gold per meal and you gonna tell me what to do with my feet? Bother me when the ritzy chairs come.”

  “Break the habit now, no need to break it later. And you can feed yourself, you want.”

  “… Nearly begged him,” Jed manages, gasping for breath, for once the center of attention, obviously enjoying it. She loves his smile; it fills his whole face but is usually reserved for her alone. “Kiss me, kiss me, Alex!” Around the room a chorus of falsetto voices joins the chant. Alex grins into his cup.

  “And the look on her mamma’s face! Could have skinned a grizzly.” Jed mimics the face, opening his eyes wide so his pupils are dots in the whites. Emaline wishes he would sit down, or meld as usual into the background of the bar, unremarkable, unmemorable.

  “Lucky her daddy didn’t catch you!” yells Fred from across the room. “Might be in some Grass Valley jailhouse right about now.”

  “Or rip you a new asshole,” comes a voice from the corner.

  “Limpy, feet off my furniture,” says Emaline, and Limpy’s feet thump to the floor.

  She hasn’t seen David yet tonight, not since dinner, and he was sulking then, or at least thinking. She worries about him. He works too hard. The lines beneath his eyes tell her he’s not sleeping and he won’t let her help. She wipes the bar, fills a man’s glass, drapes the towel over her shoulder. She almost feels like drinking herself.

  “Dourity? Hell no! Why do you think the poor bastard left Grass Valley?” Harry sneers at Fred, his voice that of a man half drunk or half sober—a dangerous state for Harry. “That man changes political parties more often than a woman changes clothes—a Whig, a No-Nothing, now a Republican? Kisses the ass of any docket that will nominate. The fact is he’s a piss-poor lawyer. Don’t hush me, Fred. He couldn’t win a case if the judge was there to witness the crime and take names. Wants to be a politician? Congress? Shit! The man’s got the personality of a tree frog. Looks like one too. What’s that, Fred? I heard that, Fred. What’d you say to me?”

  “Easy, Harry,” says Emaline, as she pours another drink. Never seen two men argue so. She ducks behind the bar for another bottle of whiskey.

  “I said,” says Fred, “got himself elected county counsel, didn’t he?”

  Nothing like politics to sour a night. Emaline puts a whiskey beneath Harry’s nose, but already feels the energy in the room changing with Harry’s face. Especially personal politics, she thinks, and sets the whiskey down with a thump. Around here, it’s always personal.

  “Just goes to show you, doesn’t it?” Fred continues, addressing the whole room but looking at Harry. “Don’t go kissing the judge’s wife.” Then, turning to Alex: “Or a lawyer’s daughter.”

  “I didn’t …” Alex begins.

  “Sure you did, boy,” Limpy chimes, and Emaline is grateful. Limpy has that ability to diffuse conflict—even when he’s the cause. “Don’t have to want the attention, or even deserve it. Some men have that irresistible flair. Women flock.” He puffs his chest, licks his hand, and slicks back his hair, preening like that new rooster in the coop. Still the scowl on Harry’s face lingers. Emaline knows a few secrets he hasn’t told her, but they have nothing to do with another man’s wife.

  “She a good kisser, Alex?” Micah asks.

  “I don’t—”

  “Long and wet, or a bit of a peck, lip smack?” asks Limpy.

  “She laid it on him, all right,” says Jed. “Thought her mamma’d have to pull ’er off.”

  “Nothing to be ashamed of, boy. Get Emaline to educate you. My treat,” says Micah, winking his one eye at Emaline. The thought strikes Emaline strange, almost incestuous, but the impression has no time to linger as Harry is standing now, jabbing his pointer finger into Fred’s skinny chest.

  “You know full well that I didn’t kiss Judge Debb’s wife.”

  “Hell, why not?” comes a voice from across the room. “I know four others who did.”

  “All right, all right.” Emaline steps round the bar. “Less jawing, more drinking.”

  �
�You never kissed ol’ Debb’s wife?” says Fred.

  “No, I did not.”

  “That so? W’hell, why don’t you tell …” Fred pauses and looks about. A ratty smile cuts a line across his sallow face. “Why don’t you tell us all what did happen? Who did you kiss, Harry?”

  “His son?” roars Limpy, pounding the bar for emphasis. But the round of hoots and hollers that follows ends in an abrupt and expectant silence.

  From outside, the cry of a screech owl as David comes through the door. He stomps his feet and looks about, sensing something amiss.

  Fights are so much easier to predict than the weather, Emaline thinks. She should break in now, offer a round on the house, or call for a song, but she doesn’t. She watches with the rest of them as Harry wipes his mouth with an exaggerated gesture. He turns to Alex, but his eyes remain on Fred.

  “Want to know how to kiss a woman, boy?” The boy’s eyes open wide, but he doesn’t say no and a smile sweeps Harry’s brow upward. His eyes track sideways to David on his right, who takes his hat in hand and prepares to sit.

  Harry moves quickly, engulfs David in a sweeping embrace, and kisses him full on the lips.

  David’s arms dangle behind him in shocked helplessness. His back is rigid. Then his arms find motion and he flails. Harry lets go and David falls gracelessly to the floor, holding his mouth as though stopping blood. Harry stands above him, arms held high in victory, with a sneering grin directed at Fred.

  “You son of a bitch,” says Fred, his red face revealing, Emaline thinks, something more than surprise. “You’re a son of a bitch.”

  His cheekbones seem to grow more prominent on his gaunt face. His eyes glaze with moisture as he rushes out the door, knocking the portrait of Queen Victoria to the floor with the slam. But Harry holds his pose a moment, soaking in the silence as if it were applause, then sweeps into a bow, lingering at the bottom until the first hoots begin. The miners roar, pound him on the back, offer him drinks in payment for his comic bravery. No sense making more of it than it is, right? A well-executed practical joke. Emaline allows a puzzled smile to twitch her lips, but her eyes are on David, and David is not smiling.

  He sits stiff on the floor, the vein on his temple pulsing. She can almost hear his breath over the hilarity, can see the subtle coil of his body, can only watch from across the room as he springs from the ground, knocking Harry flat on his back, heaving him up again by his waistcoat, slamming him down again before Limpy can pull him off.

  The new faces in the room, a red-headed Virginia boy, not much older than Alex, a saucer-faced Frenchman with a bent back, and nearly a dozen others, are caught between adulation and shock. Emaline can almost hear their thoughts. All in good fun. Fellow can’t take a joke. As soon pound you as laugh with you. While others, the dark-headed Georgian, perhaps, and the thick-lipped Maryland man, would have liked to see Harry beaten bloody. You can joke about most everything, says the arch of Maryland’s eyebrow, but a man’s dignity. And she knows this is true. Out here, where a name means nothing and no one cares who your daddy is, dignity is the one thing that separates men. That and gold.

  She moves through the crowd, parting men like water, barely conscious of Alex following in her wake. All David needs to do is smile, she thinks. Call Harry a son of a bitch and help him up. Tell him he kisses like an old woman, make a joke about his mother …

  But David struggles mightily, a man possessed, and to step before him would not be the smartest thing to do. She’s not in the mood for a black eye, and Harry might just benefit from one. Both of them take themselves too damn serious. It’s not healthy. And as she thinks this, Alex slips around her, placing his body between David and Harry.

  “David, don’t,” Alex says, barely a whisper.

  Emaline only watches; seeing, but not sure she’s seeing everything.

  “Out of the way,” David breathes, but the will has gone out of him and Alex seems to grow larger, more solid.

  “No,” says Alex. “I’m not moving.”

  Emaline looks, and looks again, squinting her eyes to see better. David drops his fists and stomps out, leaving the door gaping behind him.

  The chapel tonight has a witch’s profile, the crooked steeple silhouetted like a bent black hat against the full moon, the unfinished front stoop edging outward like a broken nose. The door swings open quietly on new metal hinges and David closes it softly behind him, keeping the silence undisturbed. He takes a seat in the very back, as far from the crucifix as possible, and lets his head fall into his hands. Rough calluses scrape across his skin. A pounding ache rises just below his temple. He lifts his head to a room lit with moonlight.

  Dear Father, he thinks, hoping other words will volunteer themselves and purge him. “Dear God,” he says aloud. When he was a child, those two words, Dear God, brought warmth to his entire body. He had a connection that was immediate and unconditional, and he cannot remember when or how that connection left him. Tonight the words slap benignly off the walls and land on the floor, as useless as river sludge.

  He’d just turned fourteen when he first went down into the mines at St. Just, tallow candles slung round his neck and the hard felt hat slumping a size too large over his ears. He had been so proud as he climbed, hand over hand, down into the mine, expecting to emerge at the end of the day a man and a miner. But over the pounding of picks upon rock, the metal upon metal of the hand-held drills, and the hissing blast of steam engines, David heard his father’s labored breathing and the consumptive hacks of other miners echoing through the damp, narrow tunnels. They were dying down there in the humid heat of the mines, choking on dust and asbestos, the walls ever poised to cave in and end their labored chorus. He felt death reach softly around him, inviting him to stay as he dug deeper and deeper into the furnace of that pit. And the hole he dug, like the pick he swung, was not his, would never be his. Even in death, his bones would belong to the pit boss. In the glow of his tallow candle, his father’s unquestioned authority cracked. David knew he could not spend his life as his father had, singing about heaven every Sunday, just to climb into hell every Monday. He did not reject his father. He did not reject God. Each still maintained the power of condemnation, but now they were useless to comfort, useless to forgive his irrational ambitions. His unnatural desires.

  Is desire the word?

  He wipes his mouth with the back of his hand. The tips of his fingers are warm. He sees Alex before him, head down, shoulders slumped, black hair flecked with mine dust. David feels his cheeks flush, his ears pulse. He shifts in his seat. I might have killed Harry—would have killed him, he thinks. He needs to strike something, to exert his own will, his own force.

  He slaps his face, softly at first, then harder, until both cheeks sting. His hands form fists and he pummels his thighs, then his chin, his forehead, the thin membrane of his upper ear. His temple throbs. His knuckles ache. Tears ooze from his eyes.

  “David?”

  Emaline’s voice behind him. He wipes tears from his face.

  “Go away,” he says.

  Her squinting eyes pierce the back of his head.

  “Go away!” He slams his fist against the pew before him. His knuckles bleed. The door closes, and he’s left with moonlight.

  He leaves the chapel and crunches through the brittle, thirsty thicket, up into the ravine. Brambles and bushes grab like thousands of pinching fingers. The sound of crickets is everywhere and nowhere. A screech owl flutters from a tree branch. He climbs faster until his legs ache.

  He nears the top of the ravine and sits exhausted on a jutting granite boulder overlooking the valley. The wind whistles softly through the cedars above him and the moon casts shapeless milky shadows. The remaining canvas roofs in the town glow like paper lanterns. Gone is the noise of the saloon. The wail of the accordion is replaced by the high-pitched whine of crickets. Sweat dries cold on his brow and his breath slowly evens.

  He will leave. He will take his share of the gold, go back to Cornwall an
d marry a nice Methodist girl. He has more than enough money now for the passage and would return, in all eyes but his own, a success. He will buy his mother a milk cow, a small plot of land to grow potatoes and corn, inland where the soil is less salty, less congested with granite. Limpy will be fine without him. And Alex? To hell with Alex. If the boy were a woman … if the boy were a woman, David would suspect sorcery, like the witches of St. Buryan, condemning men to hell with strange enchantments, evoking sinful waking dreams and ungodly urges. David will return to Cornwall, join his brothers below ground, where at least his soul will be safe. He’ll leave his unholy desires to scorch in the California sun.

  David takes a deep breath, eager for the anxiety to dissipate. He slaps at an insect scaling his forearm and watches the lights go out one by one in the town below. Perhaps peace will come with morning.

  * * *

  Mrs. Dourity believed in God and her husband, though both, at certain times of her life, had proved equally ineffectual. Neither, for instance, had seen fit to give her another son. Not that she would ever presume to replace Marcus, whose fever never left him even after they had cleared the humid climbs of Panama. As the steamship chug—chugged up the coast of North America, her baby son’s heart slowed with each breath, then stopped, and she thought grief would take her too. It was her daughter, Lou Anne, who gave her reason to live, and it was the society ladies of San Francisco who lent her purpose.

  “Mrs. Dourity,” said Mrs. Fareweather one day at tea. The women had never stooped to the vulgarity of addressing one another by their first names. “Our upbringing offers us a singular opportunity.” Mrs. Fareweather’s head looked puny without her broad hat. Her hair was dull brown and her eyes lacked the luster of her voice. When Mrs. Dourity closed her eyes, she always imagined a much grander face. “There are boys and girls here—your girl, Lou Anne,” she added pointedly, “who are without the benefit of a Christian education.” Together they joined the local Ladies Temperance League, raised funds for an orphanage, and worked to establish an academy for young ladies, which, for most of its six-month existence, boasted only two students: Lou Anne and a flatulent young girl whose face was ever contorted in an effort to contain unladylike essences.