Crown of Dust by Mary Volmer

become a man who fills space and I would not be afraid to leave this step. And sometimes, when she loses focus, loses herself in the yellow smoke of the room, her thoughts turn into memories.
    The hemlock grove and apple trees of the Hollinger orchards back home. She’s climbing as high as the apple branches will bear with Peter on the ground looking up. “Not so high,” he says. And Gran poking a knobby knuckle through a tear in Alex’s petticoat. “Natural,” Gran says, shaking her head. “Natural inclinations.” Klein heaves the accordion into another song, and a lanky miner with the ears of a much larger man stands near the bar to sing a sad song about lovers and loss. As his voice trails off from a soft, flat tenor to a forced vibrato, the room is silent.
    â€œUplifting as always, Mordicai,” says Limpy. A clap of thunder takes his voice and the day outside flashes bright, and dulls as quickly. “Who’s next then? Bible verses allowed, but not recommended till twilight, ballads are capital and stories divine.”
    The one called Harry folds a hand of cards, pushes his stool back, and sweeps down in a dramatic bow all but lost on his audience. He’s a stocky man, with thick coarse hair and fleshy cheeks. She’s never seen him without Fred, the gaunt-faced fellow to his right. Captain Fred. Captain Fred Henderson, if the cavalry cap he wears is his own. She’s heard stories of cavalrymen, and Fred looks anything but broad chested and daring.
    â€œA poem …” Harry says in the voice of someone used to being heard above a crowd. Around him card games and conversations continue, some in strange languages Alex couldn’t understand even if no other sound competed. “… by Harold Daniel Reynolds.”
    â€œThe third!” says Limpy.
    â€œWhy not? The third!”
    Old Bob Blue got his heart broke in two
    When a lady, the love of his life,
    Ran off with a stranger in snake-skin boots
    And a gift for throwing the dice …
    And the rhythm of the poem, the way one line ends in expectation of the next, bring the walls of the inn even closer around her. The second ceiling of smoke and ash rises and falls with his voice, until the laughter and words are magnified, mixed and unintelligible.
    Harry finishes his poem with a flourish and bows again, his balding head pointing to the floor. Alex claps with the rest. Emaline’s eyes scrunch at the sides, her mouth open, her big teeth crooked yellow. Women shouldn’t laugh with their mouths wide open, Alex thinks, but wants more than anything to feel that good, to be included. Outside, the rain continues. On the ridge the wind moans through the cedars and into the valley, and Alex feels the cold through her flannel. She thinks, I will grow a skin thick enough to fight the cold, tough enough to join the men below. But for three days she stays alone on the stairwell.
    â€œWhat do you think?” David asks, surveying his claim.
    Limpy jabs his shovel into the mud, folds his arms over his great chest. A wash of silt covers the rocker and the fungus-eaten bottom is now a gaping hole. The hopper and apron lie twenty feet away, wedged between a granite boulder and a wall of shale.
    It would feel so good to rage, David thinks, to punish some tangible and contained foe. But the weather is neither tangible nor contained. Its neck cannot be snapped on a gallows rope, or safely imprisoned behind stone and mortar. A Cornishman knows that the weather will always be at large. And here in California there are no giants of legend to blame for it, no magic.
    â€œWhat do you think?” David asks again.
    Limpy shoves his hat back and scratches his receding hair. A half dozen miners packed and left this morning, looking for richer claims upriver, east to Nevada, or north to Vancouver Island. Long-legged Mordicai had been among them.
    â€œBeen hearing things about the Fraser River,” he told David.