Crown of Dust. Mary Volmer

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      Alex wakes to an empty cocoon of darkness, oblivious to all but the steady thump of her heart, the coarse wool blanket twining around her legs, hot breath against the skin of her arm. Last night she’d smelled bourbon, woke herself screaming. But for a moment she lingers in the pleasant fog of half sleep. For a moment there is no morning, no dreaming, no smell but the musk of her own sweat. There is only her pulse pounding at her temple, only the sheet beneath her head, and now unmistakably, unforgivably, the need to pee. She stands too fast, steadies herself against the wall. 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 СКАЧАТЬ