Crown of Dust

‘Don’t know what the hell you’re doing up here anyway. Hey—you deaf?’ says John Thomas, waving his hand in front of her face.

He’s only just taller than her, but far bigger through the shoulders. The pupils of his eyes are no bigger than pinheads. The curl of his lip disgusts her and for a moment it is this man dead on the grass before her, his belly ripped throat to gullet.

‘I hear you,’ she says.

John Thomas steps closer, as if hearing the challenge in her tone, and she’s not so sure he won’t shoot if she runs. She’s not sure if she cares, but finds herself backing away, splashing into the creek. Cold water tugs at the hem of her trousers, soaks through the toes of her boots. John Thomas grins.

‘Claim jumping’s a hanging crime. You ever see a man hanged? No? Dangles there, like a dead fish. Broken neck, if you’re lucky. Quick that way. Don’t cry, though, don’t piss your pants,’ he says, and he aims the rifle at her water-stained crotch. ‘I’d shoot yah if you was to live through the drop. First in the balls. One POP, then the other—POP, POP. And then in the kneecaps—’

‘Then the toes, then the elbows, then the stomach. Seems to me I heard this before sometime, Johnny. Seems to me David, here, has too,’ Limpy hollers. He emerges from the upstream trail and David follows, his shoulders alive with compact energy.

‘Limpy, this ain’t no goddamned business of yours,’ says John Thomas, but the gun falls to his side and Alex steps away.

‘Yours neither, if I remember right,’ Limpy replies.

‘I made this claim four months ago.’

‘And ain’t been back for two. Ten days, Johnny. It’s the law. Right, David?’

David’s large hands strain white around the pick. His nostrils flare. Beneath the upturned brim of his Panama hat, his eyes pierce John Thomas.

‘And don’t try and tell me you was here workin’ this claim all the time, ‘cause me and David been by every day and never seen you. You ain’t even staked it.’

Limpy winks at Alex, and John Thomas’s face turns red to the roots of his eyebrows.

‘Ain’t no gold here, no how,’ John Thomas says. As he stomps away, he kicks the fawn with the toe of his boot, and Alex’s stomach seizes. She wants them all to go, but her thoughts, her desires, go no deeper than this. She’s wading shallow on the surface of her mind, afraid to slip deeper into the current of her memories.

Limpy ambles up as though a friendly hello was his only reason for being there.

‘You ain’t planning on getting rich with that, are yah?’ he says, and she finds she is clutching the gold pan to her chest.

‘Ah hell,’ says Limpy, ‘never mind. Just stay out of the way of that fella. Them little ones is always the meanest, yourself excluded, ‘course.’ He chuckles a bit, raising his hands as if in surrender. ‘Come on, Dave,’ he says, and lumbers up the path.

‘You listen to Limpy, yeah? Stay out of the way of John Thomas,’ David says, his voice tipping in a funny foreign lilt. He lingers for a response. He shifts his weight in the silence, transfers his pick to the other shoulder, and turns to follow Limpy, leaving Alex alone with the steaming carcass of the fawn.

Stay out of his way? She drops the gold pan to the grass and steps towards the fawn. Her eyes sting, but stay dry. Impossible, she thinks. Flies scatter as she bends down. Everywhere is in the way.

The little body is much heavier than it looks, the flesh warm to the touch, the blood and placental fluid slick like the green ooze of the rocks. She holds the fawn away from her, sits back on her haunches, squatting above the branching stream of blood. She imagines that it’s her blood, thinks it should be her blood. The damp mercuric smell fills her head and the insects swarm about her, taunting, whispering, mimicking Gran’s hissing breath. ‘Natural inclinations,’ Gran says, shaking her head and rocking, rocking by the side of the bed.

Alex doesn’t bleed as she should, not any more, not since the night her blood filled that bed, soaking through the mattress to the wood beneath. She lay there as her insides shredded themselves, and she bled and bled until there was no blood left, and Peter never came, and Gran just sat and rocked like Alex rocks, holding the fawn away from her as the flies surround them both. In California she’s learned that there are many ways to bleed. The smell of bourbon…Don’t think. She moves to the side of the creek, holds the fawn underwater, lets the current tug and take it away.

She washes her hands.

‘Got a brother about that age,’ David says when he catches up to Limpy. ‘At least, he was when I left. Must be near a man now, working underground with the rest of them.’

‘We all got someone, somewhere,’ Limpy replies, and David says nothing more.

They settle down to work a half-mile upstream from Alex at a claim that has yielded modest yet steady returns of an ounce a day for the nine months they’d been there. But David is not satisfied. There is gold in this creek, more than an ounce a day. He can feel it like some men feel storms coming. He can smell it in the iron-rich soil, taste it when he puts the soft igneous mud to his tongue. So different from Cornwall, this country. Soil the colour of dried blood. Trees rising like the giants of Cornish legend. Clandestine peaks and valleys breaking the horizon into pieces. He misses the sound of the ocean, the pebble beaches and flat expanses of crab grass interrupted by white seven-lobed flowers, feathery, yellow dandelions and sun-sensitive bluebells in spring. He misses the salt smell of the air, and watching storms appear and then recede into the Atlantic. He misses the insistence of the wind, at times soft like a fluttering kiss, and at others brutal with an angry intensity, refusing to be ignored or even merely appreciated. Demanding respect and fear, like God.

‘Without the wind,’ his father told him, ‘a man might forget just how small he is.’

Over time, his father had shrunk, and not just in relation to his second son’s growing body. Only forty years old and already the tin mines had blackened his consumptive lungs and bent his back like a man many years older. His hands were hard-cut stones and his arms wire sinew blanched pale in the pitch darkness of the mine. Soon he would be restricted to the crushing grounds, sorting the pulverized ore in the wind and rain with the women, girls and young boys, while one by one his sons descended underground.

David imagines them waking before dawn, choking down a thin gruel, trekking three miles down the Penzance coast in a ragged line with father in the lead and mother in tow. Six boys, five now with David gone, and a baby girl, a three-year-old who runs screaming with the other children, kicking clods of ore like other kids kick cans. Two miles off, the ore stamps move the ground in a steady rumble the family hardly feels. Then they part. The four oldest boys and father climb an hour down into the belly of the earth, with its damp, black walls. Climb down with only a candle for light, a pick for work, and a pasty for lunch to:

earn enough money

to buy enough bread

to get enough strength

to dig in a hole

Unending. Such a future makes any man feel small, wind or no. David wanted more. But his father was a stubborn man.

‘Follow in the paths of greed and find sorrow in the next life as well as this.’

‘It’s not greed. It’s a new life, a chance to work for yourself.’

‘It’s a metal, like any other.’ He grabbed the flier from his son’s hand and tore it down the middle, separating the Cali from the fornia and the G from the old.

‘You planning on working today?’ Limpy asks. David shakes himself into the present, bends and sets his pick on the ground by a wooden contraption. A rocker, they call it, or a cradle, like an infant’s bed made from an old whisky barrel cut in half and fitted with a row of wooden slats. It is not an elegant machine. The sides of the barrel are splintering and a pungent black fungus has begun to eat away the bottom. More a coffin than a cradle, David thinks. He picks up the hopper with its perforated metal bottom and places it back atop the cradle. Limpy dips two buckets in the creek as David shovels a load of earth into the hopper. While David rocks the cradle, Limpy pours water over the agitated soil, making several trips to the creek until the dirt has washed through the hopper. The lighter, worthless minerals wash away, leaving the gold trapped in riffle slats at the bottom. Same idea as the gold pan really, only more efficient; if efficient is a word rightly used to describe alluvial mining. Returns have been too low. David didn’t come all the way from Cornwall to dig in the mud, freezing his knackers off in the winter, frying them in the summer, all for one or two ounces of gold a day. He came for the lucky strike, the rich vein, the motherlode. Be damned if he’ll ever again climb down a hole to make some other man rich.

After a while, they switch; David totes the water and Limpy shovels and rocks. Their faces are pink. Little beads of sweat gather at their temples, mix with the mud and streak rustbrown tracks down their cheeks. Downstream, the steady clank of picks and shovels mixes with the noisy murmur of the creek. The sun is directly overhead, and most of the birds have muted their songs till evening time. On flat, worn rocks, winter-stiff lizards rouse themselves to bask.

‘Wouldn’t hurt to have some help. Someone to shake the cradle,’ Limpy says, as David pours a bucket into the hopper. The water splashes, speckling his trousers. ‘Been thinking ‘bout a long tom or a sluice box. Need more men to work one of those.’ He rocks the cradle until David returns with another bucket of water. ‘Said yourself he reminded you of your brother.’

‘My brothers are in Cornwall.’ David dumps the water. ‘That boy’s too scrawny to hold a shovel. He probably wouldn’t know gold from pyrite.’

‘I don’t know. Got me a feeling about that boy.’ Limpy stares off down the creek.

‘You got a feeling about anyone you made money off,’ says David.

Limpy only acknowledges this remark with a gesture. ‘’Sides,’ he says, ‘bound to fill out working claims, ain’t he? What with Emaline feeding ‘im.’

‘I’d like to know how he’s paying for that.’

‘City boy with a face for theatre,’ Limpy says.

David glances at him, looks away. ‘Not that pretty.’

3 (#ulink_29bbd1d0-29e6-598e-80d8-02aff59ebd95)

The saloon door squeals open and footsteps clump towards the stairs. Emaline sticks her head through the kitchen door.

‘Alex,’ she says. The boy stops but doesn’t turn. ‘Come on back a minute, have a seat at the table.’

It’s not a request, but when she returns from the kitchen with two cups of coffee, he’s still standing in the stairwell, bracing himself with a hand on the railing, a hand on the wall.