‘Pa says I’m meant to be a pastor.’
It must have been spring. The wind was colder than the air and the smell of mountain laurel and apple blossom made her eyes water. She wiped her nose and rubbed the snot across Peter’s leg.
‘Stop.’ He punched her in the arm and fought to stay balanced. She’d begun to enjoy teasing him like this. She didn’t know why.
Alex dropped to the ground, scanned the rows of apple trees for Farmer Hollinger, who hated children in his orchard even more than birds. ‘My Pa was a soldier,’ she said, and Peter swung upside down by his legs. His hair fell on end and she could see up his nostrils. ‘My Pa’s dead.’
Peter knew both of these facts, but she often dangled the death of her parents above him like a prize gem, though she never understood his fascination.
‘You can be anything,’ Peter said once in explanation. ‘Anything you want to be.’ They both knew it wasn’t true.
She swings the pick, ducks as metal rebounds off rock. Chunks of granite and shale cascade around her. She swings again.
She used to lie in bed wondering what it would be like to be Peter. What would it be like to call someone mother and someone father, to wake each morning to organ music and hymns, for as a small child this was how Alex imagined Peter starting every day. Alex held no such illusions now.
Down comes a satisfying clump of red clay and a chunk of granite, speckled black like dirty rock salt. Again and again she swings, finding a haunting satisfaction in the crumbling mountainside, as if she were tearing away pieces of herself with the chunks of rock and sand, as if digging far enough would bring her face to face with…Who? What? She doesn’t know any more. Perhaps digging is enough; to make a small indention in an unknown mountain. She digs until her breath comes hard, and her shoulders and back burn. She sucks in cold damp air, rubbing rough stones back and forth in her hands. Drops them. Olive-coloured plants with velvet lobes nearly a foot long grow out from the hillside. Root stems, some thick as a man’s arm, course the wall as if holding it together or clawing to get out. And there, wedged in the crook of a wooden elbow where bits of rock and dirt have gathered, is an egg-sized stone. Lustreless yellow and much heavier than it looks, she thinks, rolling it back and forth in the palm of her hand.
‘Alex?’
A shadow drapes itself across her. She whips around, but it’s only David, squinting up at the crater, down at her hand. He’d come up so silent.
‘What is it you have there?’
David steps closer. Alex backs away a bit, opens her mouth to answer, then looks down at the rock in her hand. She holds the solid mass out to David.
‘Gold?’
Of course, as soon as she says the word gold she begins to doubt, and while David does not deny her statement, he does not confirm it either. He drops to his knees and bows his head as if in prayer, rubbing ore between his fingers. He touches his fingers to his tongue, and his eyes grow round. His eyes track the angle of the ravine from base to skyline.
‘David?’ says Alex, but he’s up now and striding out of the clearing. He looks back once, a gesture she receives as an invitation to follow.
Men attach, like links in a chain, as they weave down the trail. The only sound is the sucking of boots in the mud; even the birds are silent, watching this strange migration. The afternoon sun, magnified and reflected through drops of water beading from tree leaves and rooftops, creates a million shimmering lights dripping to the ground. Alex jogs to keep up with David and ahead of those boots behind her. She’s surprised to find a small knot of men already waiting outside the general store.
‘What in the Sam Hill is going on? Back in ten minutes, you said. What is everyone…?’
Limpy pushes his way through the men. He wipes snot off his nose and moustache with the back of his hand and spits a mass of yellow to the ground at Alex’s feet.
‘David?’ he says.
The crowd contracts, tightening around her like the constricting segments of an earthworm, becoming one animal with eighty eyes. She’s afraid to look and find a fist full of mud. The gold she’s seen came in flakes of colour, or minted coins with heads and letters stamped like epitaphs, or gleaming nuggets filling the pages of the steamship fliers and travel bills. This had been a lump of jagged edges, just the size of her palm, a heavy lustreless stone like any of the hundreds she’d thrown as a child. She looks to David for reassurance, but David’s teeth clamp over his lower lip. His arms are crossed before him.
‘Best just to relax,’ says Micah, even as the vein of his empty socket strains through the skin. He swipes his hands down his apron. ‘Can’t tell by looking.’
‘Hell, I know gold when I see it,’ says Limpy. ‘When I see it, Alex…’ A murmur of agreement ripples through the crowd. She steps back and up the first step of the general store, and every head follows.
‘Now, shit, son, shit. Think this is funny? Think gold is funny business?’ says Micah.
‘Could be all you got is pyrite, make fools of us all,’ says Harry.
‘Wouldn’t want that, would you, Alex?’ says Limpy, his heavy hand on her shoulder. ‘To make fools of us?’
‘Best just to relax,’ Micah says again.
She opens her fingers, slow for the stiffness, expecting something larger, more substantial to match the way she suddenly feels.
Emaline has a drawer full of men’s clothing, shirts mainly, for it’s easier to walk out of a room without your shirt than your trousers. She has moth-eaten flannels with frayed collars and missing and mismatched buttons; silky-white dress shirts with embroidered initials, looking very official and somewhat smug next to blue muslin and tough, weathered buckskin. There are ruffled sleeves and holes in seams and stains in unusual places. Orphans all, which might explain why she can’t bear to throw them out, or even give them away. Lord knows, only a fool keeps more than she needs, but she smiles now as she digs through the musty pile of cloth, looking for one article in particular. Her ears prick and tingle at the sound of gunshots fired skyward. The echo rebounds back and forth between the ravine walls with the sharp unnerving staccato of firecrackers. Somebody gonna be bitten by one angry mosquito if they’re not careful, and she’s in no mood to be plucking bullets from a miner’s ass. She closes the drawer with her hip and holds up a blue calico shirt, remembering the buck-toothed young man she’d taken it from.
He was just off the boat from Italy or Chile or some such place and had tried to slip away without paying. ‘Everyone pays,’ she told him, catching him by the scruff of the neck, ‘even if it is with the shirt off your back.’
She’d laughed as the scrawny little bloke hightailed it down the hall, his backbone sawing holes through his skin. But as the evening wore on and the night howled cold and angry off the bay, she found herself clutching the shirt. Three days later, when the city of San Francisco was coated in a thin sheen of white, Emaline huddled warm by the fire as her stomach churned ice cubes, and resolved that, from now on, she would demand payment first. Of course, there was no way to tell if one of the fifty frozen bodies found the next morning was her Italian, but she’d kept the shirt just the same, carrying it to Sacramento, and now to Motherlode.
She spreads it on her bed, running her hands over the wrinkles. She’d washed it twice, but never managed to get rid of the smell of him. Cloves, was it? He had been chewing on cloves, and his black hair had streaks of brown that matched his eyes. He should be, he would be, too big for the shirt now, with broad shoulders and muscles filling in the wiry sinew of his arms. She shook her head and blew a curl from her face. It will be a relief to get rid of the thing, a redemption of sorts—the only motive she considers as she knocks on Alex’s door. She flings it