Crown of Dust

by Mary Volmer

  “Why, Alex,” says Mrs. Dourity, smoothing an unruly strand escaping her daughter’s braid. “I—we are delighted that you have chosen to join us.” She looks delighted, flashing a self-satisfied glance at Mrs. Erkstine to her left, and Mrs. Waller to her right. Rose is nearly hidden behind her sister. Alex barely notices her. She feels full of secrets, one of which, acted out before her yesterday, like a play, is not her own. Emaline said nothing about what passed between herself and Jed. She didn’t try and explain it away or demand Alex’s silence. Jed’s hand on Emaline’s shoulder, that weighted look lingering in their eyes, seemed almost natural.

  “Aren’t we delighted, Mason?”

  Mason Dourity peers out from behind a pair of round spectacles. He is a head taller than Alex, but most of that height comes from the trunk up. His wide forehead funnels to a retreating chin, poorly disguised under a patchy beard, and he sticks that chin out when he speaks.

  “Alex,” he says with a nod, and rests a possessive arm around his daughter’s shoulders.

  “Sir,” Alex says. She glances toward the chapel door. When they enter, the warmth of Mrs. Dourity’s goodwill turns frigid. A short gasp escapes from Mrs. Erkstine. Lou Anne’s mouth falls open, then curves into a grin, and both of Mrs. Dourity’s hands latch on to her daughter’s shoulders.

  Miners occupy every seat. No room for the second congregation squeezing itself in the back. For the first time, Alex can see clear as a line in the sand, the division that had been growing as fast and solid as the town. The miners sit tight on the hard oak pews, their bodies grizzled and dirty and worn, their hair as sun bleached as their frayed flannel collars, their fingernails impacted with mud and clay. They outnumber the black slacks, stiff collars, and crinoline skirts two to one.

  “Hell,” says Limpy, from the front row. The knot on his forehead has shrunk to a nugget, but the bruise has spread into a black-and-blue mask down the left side of his face. “Glad you could join us. The Lord’s a calling sinners in today. Isn’t that right, Emaline?”

  Emaline sits next to Limpy facing the crucifix, her head bowed. She looks back, as if surprised by the company.

  “Welcome, welcome. Come on in and make yourselves comfy.”

  She beckons Erkstine forward with a magnanimous gesture, and Mrs. Dourity bristles. “Come on up now, Preacher,” Emaline says. John stands up. “No, no, the other one. John, you had your go this week.” She beckons Erkstine again. “Don’t be shy now, we’re all here for the same reason.”

  The reverend clears his throat, and it’s obvious he’s not at all happy about being invited to his own church service. He straightens his tie. He runs his hand down his lapel. His wife’s eyes go wide and worried, and Mrs. Waller and her sister Rose part to let him by. He steps high over booted feet resting in the aisle.

  “Well, go on.” Emaline waves him on. “Let’s hear some preaching!”

  Mrs. Dourity’s breath is coming harder than it did a moment ago. Her lips pinch tight, but she doesn’t turn to leave as Alex thought she might. Nobody leaves, and the chapels fills with the stench of boot leather and body odor. Singing voices compete to be heard, and never before has Alex sung the “Battle Hymn of the Republic” with such passionate fervor. It’s a patriotic zeal she feels—pride of a place and a people. The thought is shocking. Her people. She peels herself from the side wall. She nudges Fred and Harry over in the closest pew and sits down.

  Erkstine soldiers mightily through his sermon. Words boom from him as if ripped directly from a stone tablet. “John,” he says, “Chapter 4: ‘There came a woman of Samaria to draw water. Jesus said to her, “Give me a drink …”’”

  A smirk on Mrs. Dourity’s face. A glance passes from her to Mrs. Erkstine, but, even as the ire rises in Alex’s gut, Emaline sits expressionless. Reverend Erkstine reads on, stops to pontificate about everlasting thirst and eternal life, and reads again. Alex’s eyes become heavy. The people left standing shift from one leg to the other, and the miners fidget and whisper back and forth.

  “‘… “Go, call your husband and come here.” And the woman answered. She said, “I have no husband.”

  “The fact is,”’” his voice rises almost imperceptibly, “‘“you have had many husbands …”’”

  Sweat shines on Emaline’s temple, but her face is not nearly as red as the reverend’s. It seems he’s suffering the very penance he seeks to exact. Emaline bows her head for the prayers, and during hymns her warbling soprano is heard above all other voices. But she doesn’t say a word until the last “Amen” has rippled through the overheated congregation.

  “Amen!” she says and stands up, holding her belly as if she’d just eaten a large meal. “Thank you so much, Preacher—excuse me, Reverend Ely.”

  “Erkstine. Reverend Erkstine.”

  “Don’t be silly, Ely,” she says and winks at him.

  “Reverend,” says Mrs. Dourity, stepping forward from the crowd, “I have an announcement.”

  “Well now, I was just going to say …” says Emaline, stretching the word long enough to face Mrs. Dourity in the aisle. Mrs. Dourity does not step back, and Alex isn’t so sure Emaline won’t walk right through her to the door. The faces around the room, those sitting, those standing, gawk. Limpy grins; with the bruise darkening half his face, it looks malicious. Jed hunches two pews over from Alex. He bites his lip, folds his arms before him, as if trying to hold himself down on the pew. Lou Anne’s mouth is hanging open and she gazes upon her mother as if she were a brave and worthy stranger. But even Mrs. Dourity is caught like a fish on Emaline’s last word.

  “I was just going to say that I’m just about as thirsty as Jesus at that well. Anybody wanting a drink is welcome to one free on the Victoria.” She takes two steps toward the door. Stops and looks about. “Best come quick, before the spirit leaves me.”

  Alex joins the current of bodies following Emaline to the Victoria. She pushes through to the front.

  “Alex,” says Emaline. “Golden Boy.” And she lays her hand on Alex’s shoulder, her face so close there’s no need to squint.

  Alex laughs with her mouth wide open.

  13

  A week and a day later, Monday, Fred holds up a dark green plant with silver-dollar leaves surrounding the stem. “This one you can eat,” he tells Alex. “Miner’s lettuce, Montia perfoliata.”

  “Just showing off now,” says Harry, who never had anything positive to say about Fred’s mining ideas, either. Yesterday Fred had gone on and on about pressurized tubing and the power of the four humors in carefully controlled imbalance. “Earth, air, fire and water,” he had said, pointing a bony finger of warning at Alex. “Mighty powerful, mighty destructive, and mighty useful—if controlled. River runs a levy and everyone swims. Wipes out a whole town, whoosh, in hours. How smart you gotta be to build the levy higher, wider? How smart you gotta be to let that water do the work of a hundred shovels? Thousands, maybe. Move more earth in a week than we could do in ten years of digging; wash that mountain away in great chunks.”

  Alex had imagined a gaping hole where the ravine stood, imagined the mountains leveled, the red earth baked and barren in sun. A frightening image, but somehow inspiring as well.

  “Hydraulicking. Besides,” Fred had said, speaking to Harry’s incredulous expression, “someone is bound to make a whole hell of a lot of money.”

  Today he speaks of plants.

  “Go ahead,” says Fred, handing Alex the sprig of Miner’s lettuce. “Tastes like nothing really.”

  Alex takes a careful bite, her lip curling up like a horse taking a carrot. If green has a taste, this is it.

  “Not bad, eh? And this one here’s a lily; in the same family, anyway. Star tulips, they’re called, on account of their five ray-like petals.” To Harry: “Calochortus monophyllus. But I wouldn’t be eating this one.”

  She has begun to look forward to these lunchtime conversations; far more enjoyable than being caught between Limpy’s constant stream of language and Da
vid’s careful silence. It intrigues her that a man with a cavalry cap could be so fascinated by minute details of nature that most people stepped over, or on, without ever paying heed. Flowers and rocks and insects, the shelf-like growths that skirted the oak trees—Fred knew the names for all these things, and if he didn’t know the name, he made it up.

  “It is a named world, my friend,” says Fred. “Most plants, see, they’ve got themselves names that describe ’em. White globe lily, red clover, wild pea. And the Latin names, they mean something specific, descriptive, more so than common names. Butter weed—” he holds up a tall plant with a yellow head of feathery flowers. “Butter weed all right to say unless you want to describe more than color. But you say the family name, Compositae, you know already the flower head’s going to be made up of many hundreds of flowers all clustered together. See? And you say Senicio, you’re going to know those flowers are probably whitish yellow, like an old man’s beard, and covering the really important parts, the pistils and ovaries. The female parts you know. Hiding them like armor. Like a disguise. A better description, see, the scientific name. A more complete description.”

  “Providing you know Latin,” says Harry.

  “You don’t?”

  Alex wiggles her feet, letting the mud slip between her toes. The end of May had been dry, and as June nears its end, drought is on the horizon. This day is overcast but stiflingly warm, and there’s little chance of rain to douse the parched and shedding pines. Fred and Harry have both abandoned their shirts, revealing the pasty white skin that represents their only physical similarity. Fred’s chest is concave, his tiny nipples inverted, while his rib-racked stomach boasts a protruding belly button sticking boldly outward like a stunted finger. His shoulders are lean and bony, leading to a pair of thin but defined arms covered in a meager coat of dark brown fur. Harry is round and soft where Fred is thin and bony. He has recently shaved his beard and his jowls are a shade lighter than his cheeks. His shoulders are fleshy, but not without the density of hidden muscle, and his hands are like two starfish, each digit beginning thick and funneling downward to a nail nub. Diffuse islands of coarse hair populate his torso like oases of well-watered grass in a desert. Two utterly different species, in Alex’s mind: a climbing vine and a shrub.

  She’s glad Emaline warned her about too much sun. It gives her a viable excuse to leave her shirt on, and the men no longer razz her about it. If Emaline is behind Alex’s stubborn refusal to bare her chest, there is no reasoning. Besides, it’s getting too hot to tease. Alex wonders whether the men envy the time she spends alone with Emaline, even if this time includes sweeping the floor, stoking the fire, or a host of other small jobs Emaline could just as well do herself. She wonders if the men listen in on any of their surface-level conversations, wonders if they, too, can hear how much is never said.

  Limpy is the only one who seems to care. “Look at you, then,” he said one day as Alex carried the bread to the dinner table. “A regular woman’s helper. What would your mamma say if she saw this?”

  “My momma’s dead,” Alex replied, and Limpy’s mouth popped shut, his eyes angled down.

  “I’m sorry ’bout that, son. Skin me up, will you?”

  Alex wasn’t looking for pity, but it felt good. “My pa’s dead, too.”

  Limpy never broached the subject again.

  Harry heaves himself to his feet. His stomach, resting in three distinct rolls upon his torso, melds into one drooping mound of flesh. “Excuse me while I get back to mining gold,” he says, letting the current clean his feet before plunging them into his boots. Under his breath, he mumbles something about blisters.

  “Now, take Harry, for instance,” Fred continues. “What’s his name tell about him? That he’s got green eyes, a crooked left pinkie finger and a bald spot? No. It tells you nothing. Not even that Harry is a he. I’ve known a man called himself Jan—big barrel-chested fellow—and I’ve heard of a woman called Joe. Short for something: Jo Anne … Josephine. But that’s what she called herself: Joe. It’s all wrong, you ask me, backward somehow. Fred, now, that’s a family name. Couldn’t escape it. Fred Henderson III, if you want to know the truth. Don’t mind the third part, but Fred don’t suit me.”

  “Poor don’t suit you, neither,” says Limpy from behind. “Y’all planning on working today? David’s getting a little agitated, you understand. Throwing things, giving me hell.” Alex turns. Beyond Limpy, David stands with his arms crossed and foot tapping with nervous impatience. His glance jumps from Alex to Fred and back to Alex. Let him wait, Alex thinks, and takes her time with her boots. She wonders what scientific name would suit David? What name would suit her?

  That same day, near sunset, a reporter rode into town and demanded a room for the night. Alex couldn’t help but grin as Emaline stared down her nose at the man, making him wait for an answer, reminding him it was her answer to give.

  Now the man lounges in one of Emaline’s new velvet-upholstered settees, one leg crossed easily over the other, looking just a bit too comfortable for Alex’s liking. Over a bleached muslin shirt with pearl buttons, he wears a gray wool waistcoat with a short stand-up collar and lapel that matches his trousers. His oiled hair looks darker than its natural dusty blond, and is parted down the center, dividing his head into two halves, drawing attention to his long, pointed nose and the manicured square of mustache above his lips. Beneath his blond eyebrows and lashes are sunken eyes the color of old urine. Only a wide and ready smile saves his face from a sinister severity.

  “I understand what you’re saying, Mr. James,” says Harry. “I simply cannot agree with your assessment. The law is put in place precisely so the line between good and evil, justice and injustice is maintained. Allow vigilantes to run wild, all you got is a mob that cares more about hanging than the truth.”

  “But California is a land of extremes. Take the weather,” says Mr. James, clicking his front teeth together in the pause. His voice has a neutral, soothing pitch, good for putting babies to sleep. Alex slumps back in her chair, and stares at that patch of thinning hair on Harry’s head. “Three years ago, floods,” Mr. James continues. “Sacramento nearly washed down the river. And now we’re looking at the worst drought in state history.”

  “All six years of it,” Emaline says from above on the stairwell.

  Mr. James clicks his teeth and continues in spite of the self-satisfied grin on Emaline’s face. “She’d just as soon freeze you as fry you, drown you as starve you. And she’s not too particular. Some get rich. Some get dead. She needs a quick, extreme justice. Justice,” he says again, as if the word alone could prove his point.

  Alex nods hello to Limpy, who makes a space for himself between Fred and David. Her mind wanders happily back to names and flowers. She had walked in a tunneled fog all day, glaring down at daisies, scrutinizing dogwood blooms, looking for evidence of nature’s disguises when she should have been sifting the sluice for gold. The camouflage, the deception, it was ubiquitous. A praying mantis posing as a branch, a moth holding motionless and leaf-like, a red water snake basking in the sun, impersonating river mud. She marveled at the relief she felt at this revelation, as though nature had somehow exonerated her for posing as someone, something she was not. Nature, a coconspirator, a fellow master of disguise, if survival demanded, and it so often did. Deception was natural, expected, even, making the disguises themselves defining features.

  As the last of the afternoon light fades, she runs her fingers down the ridge of muscles along her forearms, comparing them to David’s.

  The days are getting longer. In Marysville and Sacramento, where flat land stretches out into the horizon, she imagines the sunlight lingering in the sky, fighting the urge to move time along. But in Motherlode the sun slips over the edge of the ravine and is swallowed every day by six. Sometimes she wishes the days would linger, that time would slow or stop, and hold her here in this moment, or the one before, working the claim every day, sweeping floors and sipping whiskey every nig
ht.

  She watches David’s face grow darker with the room, but pays scant attention to the presumptuous Mr. James, whose audience grows as men come in from the mines.

  Emaline lights the oil lamps. Kerosene fumes, sweeter smelling than the fish oil, mix visibly with tobacco smoke. Fred is shaking his head and waving his finger in the air. “No, no, no. The opposite. Like I was saying earlier, about hydraulicking—” he appeals to Harry—“gotta have more control, not less, even if it takes longer. Build the levy up so it lasts. Get more lawmen, real lawmen, more courts. Never be safe if people are running round half cocked in the name of justice. Has to be more than a name, has to be ordered, or it’ll all just go to hell.”

  For once Harry nods his agreement. “The courts are too slow, is that it?” he asks Mr. James.

  “And too few and far between just now. Just now, I’m saying, not in five years or ten. We got Mexicans and Chinamen and Negroes running around like they own the place; got women and children robbing and murdering.”

  “The hell,” says Limpy, nudging Alex in the side. Alex sits up to listen.

  “It was in all the papers. I set both articles myself for the Telegraph,” says Mr. James. He smoothes his oiled mustache with the pointer and pinky finger of his left hand, then produces a folded newspaper from his attaché case. Harry grabs it up, frowns at the small print. “I don’t have to tell you that these are the kind of stories that establish a newspaper,” says Mr. James. “Murder and politics—not necessarily in that order. Hate to say it, but gold is pretty old news nowadays. Two or three new strikes in every issue, and we wouldn’t even print those except that it beats reminding everyone how much debt the city of Grass Valley is in after that fire.”

  “I tell you what news is,” says Emaline. Mr. James turns. She’s been standing by the kitchen door, her arms crossed just beneath her bosom, as though she’s hefting a pair of flour sacks. “News is what’s killing my chickens.”