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.
‘Sit,’ says Emaline, and he slinks to the stool across from her. ‘I don’t allow hats inside the saloon.’ He sweeps it from his head and his hair falls forward into his face. He sits on his hands as though they were tied behind him.
She doesn’t mind the quiet ones, to a point. David is quiet, but the silence is natural on him. This one sits on his words same as he’s sitting on his hands, and she doesn’t like the way he won’t look at her. Up close, she can see his face is narrow, his nose and chin slender, his eyes, when he shows them, are the same black colour as the hair hanging shaggy and jagged before his eyes. I’ve got more whiskers on my face, she thinks, and scratches at the patch above her lip. When she was living in the city, she’d pluck them out, the thick black ones bringing tears to her eyes. Shedding tears over a few silly hairs. But she was younger then. Not stupid, or even vain, so much as inexperienced. Maybe that’s what bothers her about this boy: that spooked look of experience.
She pushes a cup in his direction. His hands remain beneath him. She leans forward, places her forearms on the table closer to Alex. He looks up, down.
‘I’m gonna ask you what you’re doing here,’ she says.
‘I’m looking for go—’
‘That’s not an answer,’ says Emaline, shaking her head. ‘Everybody’s looking for gold. What are you doing here, in Motherlode?’
But the boy clamps his mouth shut. Something close to defiance hangs there over his head, and his eyes look off beyond her.
‘Listen,’ she says. ‘You listening? You paid me enough for the week, and I understand you got a bit more stashed away. I ain’t even going ask how you got it. But let’s be clear right here and now…You listening?’
She slams her mug down, leaving an opaque ring of coffee on the table. She’s not used to being ignored. She never did like it much.
‘Look at me. We don’t want no trouble around here. If you’re running from something, best just keep on running, hear?’
She can almost feel the tension in his shoulders, can see his jaw clenching. His feet cross at the ankles and he hunches down, as if trying to be even smaller than he already is. If she were the mothering type, she’d act on this impulse to hug him.
‘I ain’t meaning to throw nobody out, ‘less they give me reason. You give me reason, you’re gone. Understand? Out of the Victoria. Out of Motherlode. Understand?’
Alex nods once.
‘Good. Now, if you got something to claim, I suggest you do it before John Thomas gets himself to the assay office. He’s already been here complaining like a son-of-a-bitch, but I know you wouldn’t jump nobody’s claim.’ She lets the statement arc into a question. Alex doesn’t respond. ‘The back of Micah’s general store. Sign reads “Assay Office”, though it ain’t much more than a counter.’
She drinks down her coffee in four gulps, leaves him sitting there.
When she returns, Alex’s full cup is blowing steam to the ceiling. Thankless little snot, she thinks, as she carries the cup back into the kitchen. She wishes she knew what he’s doing here. Spoiled little rich kid, running away from daddy’s expectations with daddy’s money, most likely. Yet she doesn’t detect the usual arrogance of the moneyed little pricks she’s known in the past. Cocky young things, strutting around like a bunch of banty roosters ‘cause no one ever told them they shit out the same hole as everyone else. And why would any rich kid come to a canvas town like Motherlode when Grass Valley and Nevada City were only miles away and fit to burst with pretty girls, theatres, saloons, restaurants, hotels, brothels and countless other ways to spend money? No, silent Alex had to be running from something.
She glances out the window at Jed bringing the day’s water from the creek. He sets down the buckets just inside the kitchen door and gives her one of his big-toothed smiles. Emaline walks over, takes his head in both hands and kisses him on the lips. They linger, exchanging air, grinning so their teeth click together. He leaves without a word and Emaline props herself in the doorway to watch. We’re all running from something, she thinks, but she stops her thoughts there.
The kitchen is a pine-sided addition to the back of the inn and can get mighty cold in the winter before the stove is stoked, and mighty warm in the summer when the heat puckers its dry lips to suck the energy right out of you. It’s the heat that gets you, she thinks, rolling her sleeves to her elbows. There are only so many clothes a woman can take off, though she’s sure the boys wouldn’t mind a certain amount of flesh exposed on a hot day. They walk around with their trousers rolled to their knees and their shirts in hand and wonder, at the end of the day, why they’re burnt to a crisp. Alex is bound to make that mistake as well. The new boys always do. A ball of grey fuzz scurries across the floor. Emaline stomps after it, misses. In the potatoes again. Just when she patches a hole in that barrel, the mice go and chew another one. With the raccoons getting into the beans and the mice in the ‘taters, it’s a wonder there’s any food left at all. Must be feeding half the county’s critters.
She takes the lid from the flour barrel, pours a measure into a large ceramic bowl with a bit of sourdough starter, adds a generous dollop of lard, an egg, a pinch of precious salt, and begins to knead. Someday she’ll have a proper kitchen, free of mice, with walls that keep the heat in over the winter and out in the summer. A cast-iron stove with a smokestack that doesn’t leak blackness into the place, and doesn’t blow itself out the minute she turns her back. There’ll be a cellar to keep wine, apples, cabbages, root vegetables and the dairy, if she ever gets a cow, and her floor will be polished flagstone that a once-over with a broom will keep clean. She’ll have polished oak counters to replace the splintered pine planking, a great big larder and a separate scullery and, oh, an indoor pump, so they can stop toting water from the creek. She wipes a line of sweat with the back of her hand. Lord knows what’s in the water with all those filthy miners wallowing in it every day. She hefts the iron pot from the floor, fills it with a bucket and a half of water, and stokes the fire.
Outside she hears the steady thump of Jed’s axe and looks up from her dough to watch. With his shirt rolled she can see his corded forearms ripple. A bead of sweat trickles down his cheek on to the chopping block. His muscled thighs press against the skin of his trousers and she imagines his back, hard and smooth under her touch, and his voice, a soft rumble in her ear. Who needs a nice kitchen when you have Jed? She smiles, adding water a trickle at a time to the bread bowl. Certain things in this life you can do without. She supposes running water is one of them.
The wind has come up on the ridge. The cedars brace themselves and Alex can hear the squeal of air through the crags and the branches. It sounds like an accusation; a noxious mix of guilt and indignation swirls within her. Who is that woman to throw her out of town? As if it were her right to do so, as if this muddy valley, that dark little room, is somewhere she wants to stay. There had been nothing to keep her from leaving, from following the direction of her gaze around the grove of manzanita and out of town. Nothing, that is, but the steepness of that trail, the blisters on her feet, the thought of shivering the night away in a thicket, and now she finds she wants to stay, for a while at least, until it’s her choice to leave.
The rain begins to fall, bringing men from the creek. She retreats within the general store—dank with layers of dust, dark for lack of a window.
Every square inch of wall space is covered with rows of empty plank shelves propped with metal rods. Piles of picks and shovels, barrels of black powder litter the floor, and scatterings of mateless boots lie prostrate like rotting carcasses. With the dust and the leather the place smells of a tack