Her hair sticks out at all angles, perpendicular to her head, and she smashes the duster hat over the mess, stumbles to where she remembers the door to be and flings it open to the shock of sunlight.
Emaline’s voice meets her at the stairwell.
‘You heard me, John. You want, I’ll yell in your good ear and pull your left right off your head, I will, preacher or no.’
Her wide frame is bent at the waist over Preacher, spreadeagled in the middle of the doorway. She holds a whisky jug by its eyelet and Preacher’s red eyes follow its bobbing movement. He mumbles a response and she raises the jug high above her head.
‘I don’t care what the Lord tells you to do,’ says Emaline. ‘You get drunk on my whisky, you pay for it.’
Every bone, every muscle of Alex’s body is stiff. She tiptoes down the stairs, bent like an old woman, clutching her pack to her chest to quiet the metallic jangle of the gold pan against the canteen. She pulls her hat low over her eyes, but this does nothing to prevent the last step from moaning beneath her.
‘Well,’ says Emaline, ‘if it ain’t our newest prospector.’
With her hands on her hips, Emaline is as wide as the doorway.
‘You missed breakfast,’ she says, and moves aside. Alex squeezes past her, steps over Preacher and out the door.
The outhouse squats forty yards beyond the inn. Alex crouches over the wooden hole, careful not to wiggle and get splinters. She holds her breath against the smell. Flies knock themselves against the walls. A wasp makes circles near the ceiling as though anchored with a string and Alex watches, glorying in that blessed release when a branch snaps. Her bladder freezes. A shadow blocks the slices of sunlight piercing the open spaces in the plank walls. Something slides beneath the door. A newspaper? No, a magazine: Godey’s Lady’s Book, the same Gran read, sometimes aloud in her high northeastern rasp, pointing out details of different fashions and pooh-poohing the poems. ‘All trying to be clever. Just say what needs said,’ she’d say. Or, if she really liked a poem, ‘Bunch of foolish fancy, that one.’
All but two of the newsprint pages have been torn out. On the cover a woman with hollow eyes smiles primly. She wears a dark gown embroidered with grey flowers. The sleeves are long, ballooning slightly at the wrists, and the corseted waist tapers to a triangle, cutting the woman into two halves. The skirt billows like a napkin doily, the layers of petticoats beneath forming a womb-like vase of fabric, accentuating the very region they profess to protect.
‘Hogwash,’ Gran would say. ‘One for her hips, one for her husband and one for the Holy Ghost. If a woman can’t keep her peace with three petticoats, she won’t do with ten.’
She looked at Alex when she said this, as though imparting some great knowledge. Alex could only nod, never quite sure what ‘keeping the peace’ entailed; she suspected it had something to do with walking slowly and with ‘proper reservation’. Gran wasn’t one to be questioned or contradicted, especially on her topic of expertise: women. She spoke in a removed manner of confident authority, as though age had absolved her of the vices of womanhood, leaving her only with the burden of virtue to pass on to her granddaughter, who, even as a young girl, especially as a young girl, found sitting still and walking slowly the most difficult virtues to master.
From Gran, Alex had learned the true nature of women—deceitful, manipulative, full of the sin of Eve—and she’d wondered more than once what kind of woman her mother had been, wondered if she too had been stricken with a wandering soul. Gran spoke little of Alex’s mother, obviously did not think her worthy of her youngest son, Charles. Alex knew her only as the gold-etched daguerreotype by her bed.
Her mother’s lips, thin and straight. Her mother’s eyes, looking out but seeing nothing. Her body, a thin, flat frame.
Instead, Gran related her own family history as a moral tale. She told of her husband Nicolas, who insisted on fighting and, by Gran’s telling, insisted on dying, in the Battle of New Orleans. Nicolas left her with three sons and no income, apart from her father’s dairy farm, and the boys grew fast and foreign to her, each one following their father’s reckless lead into military life, and eventually military death. Charles left behind baby Alex and a consumptive wife fated to live but three months longer than her husband. Alex had always understood that her existence was in itself a ‘burden endured’—had heard it put just this way by Minister Bosworth who, on occasion, was called upon to confirm Gran’s low estimate of female virtue.
‘A girl, from the time she is born, is at battle with her natural inclinations,’ the minister confirmed one day at tea while Peter, his son, made faces at Alex through the livingroom window.
Alex had fidgeted in her chair, scowling at Peter and staring past him into the fall day. The leaves were just turning rosebrown. The apples were ripe.
‘She must, growing and through adulthood, quell the evil spirit within her and, by her submissiveness, gain eternal redemption.’
Gran’s head was bowed when the minister said this, and did not see Alex stick out her tongue at Peter.
Alex looks up from the picture, suddenly aware that the shadow is still there. Gran fades into the nitric fumes of the outhouse.
‘It’s not for reading,’ Emaline barks, ‘and you’re welcome.’ Then the shadow is gone.
Alex wads the front cover of the magazine, scrunching the dress, smashing the woman into a mass of crinkled paper. She wipes with the soft inside pages and drops them down the hole. But even as she makes her way along the road to the creek, the model’s hollow eyes take the form of the roughcut windows of canvas shacks, giving her the disconcerting sensation that the town itself is somehow following her, closer and closer towards the sputtering edge of the creek until the town too is swallowed by the sound of rushing water. She turns to face the silence behind her.
The windows of the frame and canvas cabins are not eyes. The splintered grey walls are not inching closer. The clouds gathering on the lip of the ravine look as if they are brushing the feathered heads of cedars, but the ravine walls are not collapsing around her. The brown-butted chickens, worrying their way up the road, scratching for worms and other treasures, ignore her completely. It’s only the Victoria Inn, with its ornamental balcony, splintered balusters and peeling whitewash, that reminds her of an old woman’s crumbling face.
At the creek the tops of men’s heads bob from holes in the ground. They gather beside long wooden sluices, washing soil down hollow slat-lined boxes. Most work silently, adjusting to each other’s tempo, and the few that stop to watch as she passes make no effort to speak. Better to keep her feet ahead of her thoughts. Better to fill her senses with California, once a word light with hope. She keeps step with the thump of an axe, pulls her hat to the very bridge of her nose, tries to ignore the blisters pinching the skin of her heel. Biting air fills her lungs. Her aching legs begin to warm and loosen.
Further upstream, the path narrows. Her eyes begin to wander. The overcast sky allows the ravine above the thinnest of shadows, while brambles and thickets form dark impenetrable outgrowths of branches and leaves. Fallen limbs, black with mould, litter the trail. Mushrooms grow from the fermenting dead leaves, and the crevices of lichencovered rocks. The clank of metal on rock becomes distant. Men’s voices are all but swallowed by the rush of water, the squawk of scrub jays. She pauses for breath at a flat outcropping.
She likes the way the valley opens here, offering a shelf of gravel and sand that gives way to a carpet of grass and clover running to the ravine wall. The clearing is buttressed on either side by a twisted thicket of red brush bursting with pale, coin-sized leaves. Black-skinned scrub oaks reach arthritically outward, and above, on the ridge, fir trees stand rigid.
At the creek, a row of rounded boulders protects a calm enclave of frigid water. She skims her hands across the slippery green skin growing on a rock. She rummages in her pack for the gold pan, past the tin cup, the canteen, the money pouch. How heavy these few belongings had felt, how light she feels now, alone here by the creek. She scoops up a brimming pan of sand and water, remembering the old prospector on