Crown of Dust by Mary Volmer Page A

“I aim to get there before the rush this time.” He glanced back once at Bobcat Creek, tipped his hat to Emaline, and strode stork-like out of town.
    David bends down and picks up a broken riffle bar. He will not write home about this. He hasn’t written in months and won’t until he has the gold to prove himself a success, to prove his father wrong. It’s a metal like any other. He’s been away two years now. Two years with nothing to show, and he won’t return until he can buy himself a farm in a quiet, out of the way valley and raise the wheat that refused to grow in that salty Land’s End air, that rocky Penzance soil. A heretical ambition for a fourth-generation miner whose family had always dug for their dinner.
    â€œI think … I think I’d like to try a sluice this time,” Limpy says.
    David nods and hurls the splintered wood into the creek.
    Alex has fleas. They invaded two nights ago when the rains began, emerging from the cloth tick of her bedclothes and taking happy bites ever since.
    She slaps and misses a black speck, gone before she’s even sure it was there. The sun’s white light is tearing a hole through the cloud cover. She slogs through the red mud, sucking in the fresh air as if she’s been underwater. The creek crashes by.
    That morning, several miners had left town. They blamed Motherlode for their bad luck.
    â€œLuck don’t have a location,” Emaline told Mordicai, the lanky man who sang the sad songs.
    â€œGold does,” he said, and tipped his hat goodbye.
    Alex had followed him out the door of the inn to the porch. She stood out of the way, but close enough to be noticed if Emaline wanted, close enough, she thought, to warrant some acknowledgement. “Got to build luck around you,” is what Emaline said, more to the chickens clamoring about than to Alex, even as the heat of the woman’s body reached out to brush away some of Alex’s coldness. Alex waited. Her eyes wandered from Emaline’s wide posterior to the reed-thin man disappearing around the row of manzanita. She even scuffed her feet as a chicken might scratch for a worm, but Emaline had nothing to say to her. Alex could stay. Alex could go.
    She thinks about the way Emaline laughed with her mouth wide open, how Limpy’s stories grew larger and longer with every whiskey, how David held his cards to his chest as if they were sacred things, and how Preacher sat with his Bible and mumbled to himself, slipping drinks when he thought no one was looking. Alex was always looking, so that at night, warm in her little room, hugged by darkness, she could recreate those images and suffocate other pictures that crept into her dreams. Her mind had a skin too, and she could already feel it thickening. Stay a few more days, she thinks. Just a few more days and then I’ll go.
    She picks her way up the narrow trail, past the wreckage of abandoned claims, over fallen trees and branches. Mud and gravel have slid from the ravine, forming a tongue of earth that sticks like a wedge from the wall of her clearing. Scrub jays and robins streak down to snap up earthworms wriggling in the red clay. Slivers of pastel grass poke through like fingers to the sun. One of the granite boulders protecting the cove has washed yards downstream and her quiet pool is now a mass of charging water. All remnants of the carcass have been washed away. She takes a wooden stake from her pack. She pounds it in at the water’s edge. She hefts her pick to her shoulder, looking for a spot to place the next stake, and allows her mind to travel back to another spring day, or one of many that featured her and Peter climbing trees in the Hollinger orchard. Back then the whole of her life took place tomorrow.
    â€œI want to be a soldier,” Peter told her as he pulled himself up into the apple tree.
    â€œSo?” said Alex, straddling a branch, enjoying the friction between her legs.