Crown of Dust. Mary Volmer

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СКАЧАТЬ split around the wound and a small, hoofed leg twitches through the hole.

      ‘Cut the throat,’ says Jed.

      ‘Be dead in a minute.’

      ‘Cut her now, goddamn it,’ says Jed. He grabs his own knife and slashes the doe’s throat. Blood surges crimson from its jugular. He stabs the belly and the fawn’s leg stills. He pauses a moment, letting the blood drain, then guts the animal, leaving the rope-like entrails steaming on the grass, and thrusts the small body of the fawn behind him, out of his line of sight, directly in front of Alex.

      There are memories here, gathering like flies on the veintracked birth-sac.

      ‘Alex?’ says Jed.

      The smell of blood, thick enough to choke her…

      ‘You all right? Alex?’ She opens her eyes. The doe’s legs drape about Jed’s shoulders like a shawl.

      ‘Nearly cost us the kill,’ says John Thomas.

      ‘Well now…’ says Jed, and then, grunting under the weight, he heads down the trail to town.

      ‘Don’t know what the hell you’re doing up here anyway. Hey—you deaf?’ says John Thomas, waving his hand in front of her face.

      He’s only just taller than her, but far bigger through the shoulders. The pupils of his eyes are no bigger than pinheads. The curl of his lip disgusts her and for a moment it is this man dead on the grass before her, his belly ripped throat to gullet.

      ‘I hear you,’ she says.

      John Thomas steps closer, as if hearing the challenge in her tone, and she’s not so sure he won’t shoot if she runs. She’s not sure if she cares, but finds herself backing away, splashing into the creek. Cold water tugs at the hem of her trousers, soaks through the toes of her boots. John Thomas grins.

      ‘Claim jumping’s a hanging crime. You ever see a man hanged? No? Dangles there, like a dead fish. Broken neck, if you’re lucky. Quick that way. Don’t cry, though, don’t piss your pants,’ he says, and he aims the rifle at her water-stained crotch. ‘I’d shoot yah if you was to live through the drop. First in the balls. One POP, then the other—POP, POP. And then in the kneecaps—’

      ‘Then the toes, then the elbows, then the stomach. Seems to me I heard this before sometime, Johnny. Seems to me David, here, has too,’ Limpy hollers. He emerges from the upstream trail and David follows, his shoulders alive with compact energy.

      ‘Limpy, this ain’t no goddamned business of yours,’ says John Thomas, but the gun falls to his side and Alex steps away.

      ‘Yours neither, if I remember right,’ Limpy replies.

      ‘I made this claim four months ago.’

      ‘And ain’t been back for two. Ten days, Johnny. It’s the law. Right, David?’

      David’s large hands strain white around the pick. His nostrils flare. Beneath the upturned brim of his Panama hat, his eyes pierce John Thomas.

      ‘And don’t try and tell me you was here workin’ this claim all the time, ‘cause me and David been by every day and never seen you. You ain’t even staked it.’

      Limpy winks at Alex, and John Thomas’s face turns red to the roots of his eyebrows.

      ‘Ain’t no gold here, no how,’ John Thomas says. As he stomps away, he kicks the fawn with the toe of his boot, and Alex’s stomach seizes. She wants them all to go, but her thoughts, her desires, go no deeper than this. She’s wading shallow on the surface of her mind, afraid to slip deeper into the current of her memories.

      Limpy ambles up as though a friendly hello was his only reason for being there.

      ‘You ain’t planning on getting rich with that, are yah?’ he says, and she finds she is clutching the gold pan to her chest.

      ‘Ah hell,’ says Limpy, ‘never mind. Just stay out of the way of that fella. Them little ones is always the meanest, yourself excluded, ‘course.’ He chuckles a bit, raising his hands as if in surrender. ‘Come on, Dave,’ he says, and lumbers up the path.

      ‘You listen to Limpy, yeah? Stay out of the way of John Thomas,’ David says, his voice tipping in a funny foreign lilt. He lingers for a response. He shifts his weight in the silence, transfers his pick to the other shoulder, and turns to follow Limpy, leaving Alex alone with the steaming carcass of the fawn.

      Stay out of his way? She drops the gold pan to the grass and steps towards the fawn. Her eyes sting, but stay dry. Impossible, she thinks. Flies scatter as she bends down. Everywhere is in the way.

      The little body is much heavier than it looks, the flesh warm to the touch, the blood and placental fluid slick like the green ooze of the rocks. She holds the fawn away from her, sits back on her haunches, squatting above the branching stream of blood. She imagines that it’s her blood, thinks it should be her blood. The damp mercuric smell fills her head and the insects swarm about her, taunting, whispering, mimicking Gran’s hissing breath. ‘Natural inclinations,’ Gran says, shaking her head and rocking, rocking by the side of the bed.

      Alex doesn’t bleed as she should, not any more, not since the night her blood filled that bed, soaking through the mattress to the wood beneath. She lay there as her insides shredded themselves, and she bled and bled until there was no blood left, and Peter never came, and Gran just sat and rocked like Alex rocks, holding the fawn away from her as the flies surround them both. In California she’s learned that there are many ways to bleed. The smell of bourbon…Don’t think. She moves to the side of the creek, holds the fawn underwater, lets the current tug and take it away.

      She washes her hands.

      ‘Got a brother about that age,’ David says when he catches up to Limpy. ‘At least, he was when I left. Must be near a man now, working underground with the rest of them.’

      ‘We all got someone, somewhere,’ Limpy replies, and David says nothing more.

      They settle down to work a half-mile upstream from Alex at a claim that has yielded modest yet steady returns of an ounce a day for the nine months they’d been there. But David is not satisfied. There is gold in this creek, more than an ounce a day. He can feel it like some men feel storms coming. He can smell it in the iron-rich soil, taste it when he puts the soft igneous mud to his tongue. So different from Cornwall, this country. Soil the colour of dried blood. Trees rising like the giants of Cornish legend. Clandestine peaks and valleys breaking the horizon into pieces. He misses the sound of the ocean, the pebble beaches and flat expanses of crab grass interrupted by white seven-lobed flowers, feathery, yellow dandelions and sun-sensitive bluebells in spring. He misses the salt smell of the air, and watching storms appear and then recede into the Atlantic. He misses the insistence of the wind, at times soft like a fluttering kiss, and at others brutal with an angry intensity, refusing to be ignored or even merely appreciated. Demanding respect and fear, like God.

      ‘Without the wind,’ his father told him, ‘a man might forget just how small he is.’

      Over time, his father had shrunk, and not just in relation to his second son’s growing body. Only forty years old and already the tin mines had blackened his consumptive lungs and bent his back like a man many years older. His hands were hard-cut stones and his arms wire sinew СКАЧАТЬ