Read Online Crown of Dust by Mary Volmer - Free Book Online

his way through the men. He wipes snot off his nose and mustache with the back of his hand and spits a mass of yellow to the ground at Alex’s feet.
    â€œDavid?” 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 color, 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 lusterless 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.
    â€œBest 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.”
    â€œHell, 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.
    â€œNow, shit, son, shit. Think this is funny? Think gold is funny business?” says Micah.
    â€œCould be all you got is pyrite, make fools of us all,” says Harry.
    â€œWouldn’t want that, would you, Alex?” says Limpy, his heavy hand on her shoulder. “To make fools of us?”
    â€œBest 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 bucktoothed 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