Emaline opens the shutters to a sharp March chill and fills her lungs. The road below is a bustle of chicken banter and she squints toward the mass of feathered streaks clamoring after a hen-pecked Rhode Island Red. The poor thing’s rump is already a balding mass of blood sores where feathers used to be. Half plucked already, Emaline thinks. If the ground were thawed enough for earthworms, they’d leave the old girl well enough alone. Funny, how boredom in chickens breeds cruelty, just as in men. Might as well put the old bird out of her misery. They won’t stop pecking until she’s dead, and Emaline hasn’t made chicken and dumplings in a while. That makes ten chickens down from twenty last May, and spring is just beginning. A hungry coyote or mountain lion could take the rest in a matter of weeks, might have already if she’d kept the hens fenced like a damn city fool. No fence gonna keep out a coyote or mountain lion. Gathering all the victims in one enclosed space just makes the job of killing easier. Weren’t too smart, chickens. But given room to run and roost high they had a better chance than penned. What’s a little chickenshit splattered around town when fresh eggs and the occasional chicken dinner were at stake? She’ll tell Randall to bring a rooster next time he makes the trip up. Chicks do well in the summer months.
She turns from the window, leaving the shutters open to vent the stale air. On the bed, Jed’s head is nestled to the nose beneath the patchwork quilt and she’s tempted to snuggle back into his warmth. She doesn’t know when he came in last night. Either he couldn’t wake her, or didn’t care to, which was just as well for Emaline who finds no greater comfort than his closeness. Closeness, even without the urgency of desire. Closeness in the delicious exhaustion of Saturday nights.
Jed groans. His eyes open in tiny downward slits and are met by the upward curve of his smile.
“Morning,” he croaks and clears his throat. “Morning.” Emaline says nothing. He shouldn’t still be in the room, but then no one is likely to be up early on a Sunday, even after yesterday’s find, especially after yesterday’s drinking. “Emaline?” She shakes herself, focuses on Jed.
“Just thinking. That’s all. People start coming in here, we gonna have to pen them chickens. People start coming, things are gonna change.”
“Not everything.”
“No? I hope. I was waiting for a strike, same as all the rest of ’em. Got plans, you know, but …”
In the room down the hall she hears Micah retching into his chamber pot. A long wet belch resounds on the street below.
“Best get on outta here,” she says, “’fore the whole town wakes.”
“Ain’t no secret no more.”
“Ain’t common knowledge, neither.”
Jed looks dubious. He scratches his scalp through his tight curly hair and runs both hands down his face, wiping sleep away.
“Get on up and rouse that boy down the hall,” she says, hoping the task will give him motivation. In the daylight, in Jed’s company, this room has never felt safe. Regardless of what people knew and what they pretended not to. Free state, sure, but no one ever looked kindly on mixing. There were plenty who’d string Jed up just for that, even in this town, her town, and Jed is no longer someone she can live without. She clutches her nightgown tighter to her chest and tries to warm herself against the chill that is creeping into her mind.
She and Jed had stumbled on this valley on the road from Sacramento. They were traveling light, heading north to the gold fields, aiming for Rough and Ready, or a camp outside one of the more populated towns like Grass Valley or Nevada City. She meant to set up her own establishment where city laws and the men who made them had yet to take hold of everyone’s business.
The June heat pressed down on them from all angles and the sound of running water called them down from the lip of the ravine. There was no way of knowing what manner of men had made the camp they found. Two canvas tents squatted in the sun-scorched grass. The bedding was rolled, and a pair of tattered underclothes hung on a line to dry. A neat circle of stone marked their campfire; but the tidiest of men could still own the most wretched of souls.
Jed didn’t think it safe to stay, but Emaline had no desire to climb back out of the valley in the June heat. Besides, she knew she could handle a few wretched souls. Setting her bundles down, she dug into her satchel for the breathing terry cloth of sourdough starter, flour, lard, and water; mixed them all in the pan she found by the fire. While the dough rose, she scrounged with Jed for long flat rocks and built them into a precarious little oven. By the time the miners tramped up from the creek at dusk, a steaming loaf of bread, a pot of coffee, and fried salt pork awaited them.
There were just three of them: Mordicai, the lanky singer; a scurvy-stricken fellow named Jake who’s long since gone his own way; and a solitary German who took his plate and ate outside the reach of the fire’s glow. “That there’s Klein, he calls hisself,” Mordicai told her by way of apology. “He doesn’t say much of anything to anybody, but I ’spect he’s ’bout as grateful as me and Jake.”
Already the place felt like home.
When the men offered to pay her, she didn’t think twice about taking their little bit of gold. For this Emaline knew to be true: gold don’t ease a belly’s hunger, calm a man’s urges, or know how much he’s afraid to miss his mamma. These boys were getting far more than they were giving. She didn’t think a thing about changing the name of the place to something more hopeful, accommodating. “Destitution Valley” implied a pessimism she couldn’t live with, and it certainly didn’t do justice to the beauty of the place. Motherlode filled her whole mouth with hope, and she wasn’t at all surprised by the steady stream of miners who found their way into and out of her valley. The walls of the Victoria rose even as the level of the creek and the number of men fluctuated and has stood much as it does now for a good year and a half. She likes to think she’d foreseen this particular future from the ridge above, likes to think she had looked down and seen a town sprouting like a sapling from the valley floor and gold oozing like pine pitch from the ravine wall.
And here she is, crushing a good thing by letting a few bad what if’s get in the way. Silly. A gold strike is just what her town needs, what the Victoria needs. More people, more customers, fancy fixings.
Jed throws the quilt from his body and his legs over the side of the bed, wiggles his bare toes on the chilled wood floor. He slips on his trousers, tucks in his shirt. He kisses Emaline gently on the forehead and tiptoes down the hall to Alex’s room.
Emaline forces her thoughts to follow him out the door and strips to wash.
Stale water in the washbasin. She’d meant to freshen it yesterday. She dips a rag, watching the fabric expand, places the rag on her face, tips her head back and lets the moisture seep into her skin. Her skin. So much drier than it used to be. In the mirror, she can see lines invading, making her look older than her thirty-five years, older than she feels. Lines. Signs of wisdom, experience, character. Lines gave personality to a face. Wrinkles, she knows, are something else entirely. Emaline has no wrinkles. She breathes slowly in and out through fabric and moisture, runs the rag along her neck, behind her ears, enjoys the chilling tingle of evaporating water on bare skin. Then down her front, encircles one breast, then the other, and her nipples perk in the damp cold; scrubs the dark mats of hair growing full and free under her arms. She dips the rag again, wrings it, scrubs her legs, beginning with her right calf, working her way up to her groin, pauses at the pleasure of cloth friction between her legs.
A knock on the door.
“Emaline, Emaline, he dead to the world, that’s the truth. He breathing, but I can’t wake him for nothing. Won’t hurt to let him sleep, yah think?”
“If he’s gonna sleep under this roof, he’s going to Sunday service. Try again, and if he don’t get up, you tell him I’ll come in and wake him good.”
Jed’s steps recede down the hallway. Emaline plaits her hair into a manageable rope and pulls on her Sunday best, a faded yellow dress with one small torn patch in the sleeve and a strip of off-color lace at the neck. Nothing compared to the silk fantasies worn by rich men’s wives. Nothing to be proud of, but she is. The dress defined the day, setting Sunday apart from the drudgery of every other day, with a splash of color, a bit of lace. She fastens the buttons, holding in her gut. She’d already let out the waist seam when she threw her corset away. Be damned if she’d extend it again. Another knock on the door.
“I’m on my way,” she says. She’s halfway down the hall when inspiration strikes. She leaves Jed waiting, bustles back into her room, hefts the washbasin, careful not to slosh water on her front. She nods at Alex’s door, waits while Jed opens it.
Alex is curled into a fetal ball, his arms around his head to shield the light. He doesn’t stir as Emaline approaches.
“Gold or no gold, I make the rules in this place and everyone goes to Sunday service. Give you one more chance to get up on your own.”
He doesn’t stir and she feels a smile warm her ears. Jed waits, biting his lower lip, his eyebrows raised. She dips her hand in the water and flicks her fingers at his face, turns back to Alex and dumps the whole basin, washrag and all.
Alex leaps from the bed, his eyes wild and his filthy flannel drenched. Emaline’s whole self shakes with laughter, and she’s trying very hard not to pop her buttons. She doesn’t notice how green his face becomes, how his cheeks puff. She isn’t prepared for his eyes to roll back in his head, or his body to lurch forward. He seizes the empty washbasin and sloshes the liquid contents of his stomach up over the rim, and down Emaline’s yellow dress.
Emaline is not laughing. She stands, arms out, mouth open, looking down at the vomit on her dress. Before Jed can curb his grin, she turns, glares death at his half-contained amusement and slams the door behind her.
When she charges back into the room wearing her usual brown dress, Alex is still holding the basin before him and Jed’s expression is nearly neutral. She focuses on Alex, just a shade less green.
“Change your clothes. Breakfast downstairs in half an hour, if you can stomach it. No one misses Sunday service.”
The door closes, but the hallway light fades slowly from her eyes, leaving an ambient glow that breaks apart into colliding shards of light. Alex has to swallow every time they burst. She wraps her arms about her stomach to find the front of her flannel slimy with globs of rewetted blood. In another instant the flannel lies crumpled on the floor, and sweat freezes dry on her chest, so suddenly, so completely exposed.
Her breasts, never very large, now mere impressions of flesh, erupt in goose bumps and it’s the chill that makes her cover up so quickly. It’s the chill that forces her hands into fists, preventing her fingers from touching the clammy cold of her own skin. It’s the chill that clenches like a hand to the back of her throat. This is what she tells herself—even as she kicks the bloody flannel away under the bed, out of sight—just a chill.
She clutches the calico about her, careful not to miss any buttons. It smells familiar: spiced pie, a little too sweet for her stomach right now. She adjusts the nugget between her legs, ties and reties the knot until it presents a modest bulge beneath her loose trousers.
Morning light washes the hallway a sickly yellow-orange and walls of green wood sweat sap. Her arms and legs are distant, heavy, attached to the wrong head, and her thoughts take their time in forming. The muted rumble of voices in the saloon below is only Preacher arguing with himself. His cheeks are a flaccid shade of gray, and he looks up as she passes, holds his finger up as if preparing to speak, lets it fall with a puff of air.
“Shit!” Emaline’s voice from the kitchen, the resounding clang of an iron pot hitting floorboards. Alex has no wish to see the woman. She pushes through the front door, but ventures no further than the porch before cold air, a mix of woodsmoke and damp earth, slaps her in the face. She blows the old air out, and out again, until there’s nothing left to do but suck the new back in, pressing her fingers gently to the lumpy bridge of her swollen nose as she does so. She sinks down to the porch bench. Chickens puff and preen in the road, and Harry and Fred urinate in two arching streams off their front porch, straining for height and distance.
“Hell, that ain’t nothing.” Limpy’s voice from the other direction. Alex glances away, embarrassed he’d caught her staring. His long legs make short work of Victor Lane and he steps straight from the ground to the porch.
“Now, David there,” he says of the Cornishman apparently deep in thought behind him, ignoring them both as he climbs the stairs and pushes past Limpy into the saloon, “he’s the reigning king of us all. Could piss from here to the creek,” Limpy says. “You’re young yet. You’ll get there.”
“You and Limp make some kinda deal with that boy?” Emaline asks, setting a cup of thick coffee in front of David. Her scowl is angled such that he decides to accept this morning. He even takes a sip. It runs like boiling acid down his throat, and he wakes enough to find the place empty but for Preacher, bent over that tattered rag of a Bible. His hat is off, revealing a strip of gray just above his deaf ear, and his eyebrows contort in time to his moving lips. David takes another sip of coffee, delaying an answer. Limpy’s deep gut laugh sounds from the porch.
“We talked,” he lies, and drinks down the coffee, grounds and all, before Emaline can question him further.
“Don’t be forgetting to open my chapel,” she calls after him. He’s out the door in time to see Limpy with his thick arm draped over Alex’s narrow shoulders, disappear up the creek.
He and Limpy had talked this morning, to an extent. David wanted to stake a claim just upstream from the boy, but Limpy wouldn’t have it. Luck’s with him, he said, and crossed his arms in a way that said he was going to be stubborn.
“I shoulda talked it over with you, I know. But I gave the boy my word. I shook on it.”
“You shook on it?” asked David, making no effort to hide the incredulous tone of his voice. Limpy gave as many hand-shakes as a politician, kept about as many promises. Dishonesty was the one thing you could count on from Limp. Even accounts of his past—especially accounts of his past—grew layers with each telling, until it was impossible to determine which details might be true and which were merely convenient. Limpy could be married, single, Republican, Democrat, or American Party, Presbyterian, Lutheran—even Catholic, if it suited his purposes. Most times David didn’t say anything. Most times Limpy’s purposes also suited David.
“Gave my word,” Limpy said again.
“It’s a Sunday.”
“Sunday? Ain’t no such thing as a Sunday after a strike. You surprise the hell out of me, standing around here like you got something better to do. Do you? Now look, I understand piety, saving Sunday for God, and all that, but … you’re either with us, or you’re not.”
It was the “us” that gave David pause.
Across the road, Klein pushes through the door of his cabin. He arches his back to give full volume to a mighty yawn, shoots snot from one nostril, then the other. A raw-butted chicken hops up to the porch, scrutinizes David’s bootlaces with one eye then the other. David gives the bird a gentle kick just as Jed rounds the side of the inn.
“Aw now, David! You know how long it took to corner that damn bird?” He bunches up the potato sack in his hand and steps onto the porch. The hen runs up the road and back before stopping in front of them as if daring Jed to lunge. Jed sighs, cusses.
“Easier to just shoot the damn thing,” he says. He kicks a rock from the front step and the hen fluffs up and runs a few harried steps. “Been by his place this morning and I ain’t seen him. I ain’t told Emaline. Don’t plan to tell her.”
David’s eyes wander down the road to John Thomas’s cabin. A squirrel’s bushy tail twitches just inside the open door. “He’ll be back,” he says.
The two men stare as though the hen is still their focus. The clashing ruckus of birdsong surrounds them. Woodpeckers pound percussion in the digger pines, robins belt melody from the underbrush, vireos sing harmonies from the manzanita. Loud-mouthed scrub jays throw the whole ensemble into tunelessness. Jed takes a breath, blows it out.
“How you feel about rabbit tonight?”
David smiles, slaps Jed on the shoulder. He jumps from the porch. Right to the chapel, left to the creek. Each call with different voices. His hands itch for a pick. The sound of metal on rock clatters through his head.
Surely God will understand his absence this particular Sunday. It could even be God’s will.
“I had a brother once. Still have a brother,” says Preacher, leaning his elbows on the pulpit, his voice a drink-worn rasp.
Emaline crosses and recrosses her legs. Through the open windows she can hear the Sabbath breakers, their voices rising over the creek, their picks and shovels moving at a faster tempo than usual. Jed fidgets by her side. His eyes find the window, even as his head bows in prayer. His body is in the chapel, but his mind is swinging a pick, and in her experience God don’t care so much where your body is if your head’s not right there with it.
God has found her body in the most remote of places, where the only sight in any direction was yellow-brown grass bowing in the wind, or in the crook of Devil’s Gate or lost in canyons so steep on either side that only a sliver of sky was visible. God was with her in Salt Lake City and San Francisco, and in other places she’d never want her mother to see.
Here in Motherlode, she’s built a place for her body and mind to worship together. She’d thought these walls would make her closer to God. She thought of the pine planks as an offering of sorts, a gift for the gift of herself. But nowhere has she ever felt as full of that presence as when she was walking step after labored step behind the wagon train, a mere tick on the hide of the great plains.
Maybe a steeple will help; hard oak pews with back rests, a real carved pulpit, maybe.
“When we were little, lads, you know, young, Pa gave Sal—that was his name, my brother, Sal. Pa gave him a pony to raise and train all on his own.” Preacher straightens, bracing himself against the pulpit. “And was I jealous? Did I ENVY him?” Preacher licks his lips. Emaline leans forward on her knees. Jed’s hand finds the base of her lower back and she shakes him away, even though only Preacher is there to see.
“Damn right I hated him!” booms Preacher. He looks up as though shocked by the power of his words, and continues with a flourish. “Getting a pony when I got nothing, not even a puppy or a piglet to raise. Not even a chicken. Nothing! Wanted to kill him, or the pony, just ’cause I ENVIED him so much. See what I’m saying? It’s natural. Like passing wind. Human. Just gotta get over it somehow, like me. Get over it, ’cause it don’t do you no good, none. And people that have ponies and such, be advised to be generous, let others ride ’em. See? Let us read …”
Emaline’s foot is tapping. She stills it. Jed shifts in his seat, sighs heavily, puts his hands over his lips as if embarrassed by the sound. The chapel door is open, inviting any latecomers. She’s made a point of not turning around to look, but she knows there’s no one there. No one is coughing or breathing too loud, or whispering to their neighbor. When she does turn, she finds that raw-butted hen peeking its head through the doorway. Its toenails click down the aisle. It stops to peck at something of interest as Preacher continues:
“… if I have made gold my hope, or have said to the fine gold, ‘Thou get my confidence …’” She looks up, but Preacher is turning pages as if looking for the rest of this passage somewhere else. The chicken stands at Preacher’s feet, its head a-tilt, this way then that, utterly unconcerned that the man who was trying to kill it is sitting just yards away, a wide grin on his dark face.
“Son-of-a-bitch,” says Jed under his breath, and Emaline elbows him in the side. He’s biting his lip over a smile, but his ribs shake under the strain of laughter. He elbows her back, much more gently than she did him. She stares straight ahead, trying to focus on Preacher but seeing only that chicken shift its weight foot to foot as if getting comfortable.
“‘He that hath a bountiful eye shall be blessed-ed …’” Pages turn. The chicken is unmoved. Emaline is laughing silently, holding her hand over her mouth so her teeth won’t show. Showing teeth is defeat, and this is Sunday. A shout rises from the creek and her ears strain, but no more comes of it. Preacher sounds out another word and is on to another verse on another page, and she’s struck by how focused his sermon has been by comparison.
This Sunday his usual choice of verses, one from Genesis and one from Revelations, and other creative, or perhaps haphazard, combinations, seem governed by a recognizable theme. Too bad no one is present to hear it, she thinks, and this thought brings with it a sobering sense of righteous indignation that even the chicken, pecking now at the worm-like laces of Preacher’s boots, cannot break. Not even David came. She could usually depend upon David. The set of his shoulders this morning had been telling. He’d been tense as a rattler last night, tense and distracted this morning. He’d even drunk her coffee.
“‘If you harbor bitter envy and selfish ambition in your hearts …’ No, wait,” says Preacher, staring down at the Bible, tapping the chicken away with his foot. He deters it only a minute from the tough leather worm bobbing there. Emaline finds tears streaking down Jed’s cheeks. A falsetto he-he-he escapes his lips. Pages turn.
“Oh, here—” says Preacher, beginning again, “‘For where you have envy and selfish ambition—’”
“Ah hell! Save it, Preacher!” Emaline stands as she says this, ruffling both the chicken and Preacher John, who looks about the room as if noticing for the first time the size of his congregation. She picks up her skirt, climbs over the pew into the aisle. There is bread to be made, wood to chop, a dress to wash and, if she were the betting sort, she’d bet even God himself was down there at the creek, swinging a pick with the rest of them.
White light meets her at the doorway. Her eyes adjust and follow the sound of hooves up Victor Lane.
“Preacher?” she says, then turns to stick her head back through the door. “No, Jed, you stay put.”
She ignores the way his cheeks darken. His smile vanishes. Preacher sets his Bible on the whiskey-barrel pulpit and follows her outside, laying a hand on Jed’s shoulder as he goes.
In the gullet of the ravine, the sound of hooves has multiplied, but she sees only one man on a horse. Sitting so straight in the saddle, full to bursting with his own self-importance, Emaline would have guessed he was a military man. But as he gets closer, the cocky tilt of his head and the set of his shoulders remind her of someone.
“Emaline?” says the rider, crossing one arm casually over the other.
She barely recognizes him, his boots so shiny black, his frilly shirt so white next to that purple waistcoat. But, most striking, his bushy beard has been trimmed to a perfect square of whiskers on his knobby chin.
“Jackson Hudson.” She spits the name out at him.
“Good to see you, too, Emaline,” he says, and licks his lips as though preparing for a meal. Preacher John nods hello, but Hudson ignores him.
“What are you doing here?” says Emaline.
“Heard you were living up here in a mudpit, and I thought, sure, she’d need a kingdom of her own …”
The horse throws its head for a shake and Hudson cusses, gives the reins a violent yank.
“I’m a changed man, Emaline.”
“You changed your clothes,” she says. The animal adjusts its mouth painfully over the bit.
The last time she’d seen Hudson was in Sacramento, nearly two years ago. He’d been one week off the overland trail and looked more like a beggar than a doctor’s son from Ohio. She’d made him wash and comb his matted beard and hair before she would serve him. Of course, back then her bodice had been silk, and she’d been working from a rented room.
Emaline wraps her arms across the tattered cotton of her dress.
“Light attendance for a Sunday service, ain’t it?” says Hudson.
“A find!” Preacher says, then lowers his head as if it was a secret he should have kept. Hudson’s shoulders lift, his eyes follow the sound of digging to the creek.
“Is that right?”
“Might be poor,” Emaline says, but knows as she says these words that he hears their opposites. “What is it you want, Hudson?”
“I have come to …” he pauses to doff his hat. “I have come to offer my services. My protection—”
“Your protection?” she says.
“I am a servant of the citizens of Grass Valley. Elected.” He brandishes a flimsy badge, glinting cheap copper rust.
“The only thing you ever protect is your own interest.”
“Bandits!” he says, and his eyebrows flatten across his forehead. “Thieves, Emaline. Foreigners and celestials—all sorts of undesirables running round since the water strikes.”
She shakes her head, “Don’t need your kind of protection.”
“And fugitive slaves, Emaline. Niggers taking what’s ours,” he says, thumping his chest. His voice takes a lower pitch. “Where’s the nigger, Emaline?” A shadow darkens the doorway of the chapel.
Stay put, Jed, she’s praying. Stay put.
“Knew you’d get rid of him sooner or later,” says Hudson and chuckles, sits straighter in his saddle. Emaline hears floor-boards give. Goddamn, goddamn, Jed, stay put. Preacher John’s flaccid cheeks color beneath his beard.
“Got rid of you, didn’t I?” she says. She steps close enough to run her hand down the leg of Hudson’s black trousers, but Hudson is already turning in his saddle. His hand edges toward his holster. A scratch of footsteps on the porch behind her; her breath skips. Her eyes are focused the level of a man’s shoulders, so when the chicken pokes its head sideways through the chapel door, it takes Emaline a moment to see it. The bird takes two tentative steps forward, stops, clucks a salutation, and Emaline remembers to breathe.
“Haw!” says Hudson, waving his gun at the bird. The horse frights, jerks its bridle, wide eyed, nostrils flaring. But the bird just stands there cocking its head, unimpressed.
“The lady wants you to leave,” says Preacher, puffing himself up like the chicken.
“Woman don’t know what she needs,” says Hudson, and stays there a moment, staring at the chapel door. He gives the reins a jerk, digs his spurs into the horse’s flank.
Emaline stands listening as the sounds of hooves multiply then fade; listens to the metal-on-rock sound of digging, to the gutter caw of crows, and the swirling song of blackbirds. This time the groan of the floorboards brings Jed from beyond the shadows of the doorway. He runs his hand down the back of his neck, presses his head against the doorframe. His face, half in, half out of the light, is two-tone—tan and black. His eyes flicker white. He opens his mouth to speak, but Emaline cuts him off.
“I’ve got dinner,” she says, and hurries away to the Victoria.
The shock of it, grown men, their trousers to their ankles, one bent over the other, clinging to a barrel of beer, pale skin only just visible as his eyes adjusted to the light. David should not have been there so late at night. There were reasons for rules, and the captain had told them the very first day: “Passengers will be confined to their accommodations by ten o’clock.” But the night was humid, the smell of puke and shit suffocating, so he’d crawled from steerage down to the luggage hold, bracing himself against the steady rise and fall of the water.
A movement caught his eye. A rat, or the ship’s cat on the prowl, he thought, except there was rhythm to it, a frantic pulsing rhythm, and as his eyes adjusted, his breath caught in short panting breaths.
Living so close to the ocean, seeing the ships appear and disappear on the horizon as he trudged to the mine each day, well, of course he’d heard stories. Violent bloody initiations into sea life or dramas of capture and punishment, designed to shock the sons of miners, to keep them away from the ocean and under the ground where they belonged. But the stories had never had this effect on him. These sailors were friends. He’d seen them talking on deck, slapping each other on the back as lads do. Even now, there was no anger in their dance. It was a satisfied grunting duet. David shuffled back the way he’d come. He told no one. He pretended to sleep on the hard wood of his bunk until morning, afraid to dream. He’s dreaming now, his body rising and falling with the waves.
“David?”
Limpy, naked to the waist, sits on the side of the bed. His eyes are coal indentions in the dim light. It cannot be past midnight. Limpy’s breath and voice are thick with whiskey.
“Hope I didn’t tear you away from a good one,” he says, shoving David in the shoulder. David doesn’t answer.
“Golden Boy, what I tell you? Ha! Sho’ ’nough pay dirt. How many ounces a’ color you think we washed today? Twenty, thirty dollars’ worth, I’m thinking. And washing with pans? With a sluice we’d make five, six times that, easy. Easy,” he says, spreading his foul breath over the bed.
“Go get some sleep, Limp.”
“There it were …” Limpy sits back on his haunches and the bed groans relief. His head tilts back to the canvas roof and a toothy grin shows white. “There it were, sitting there in the ravine all along, winking at us. Was I not the one what told you? I told you I got me a feeling about that boy.” He clears his throat, spits on the floor, sings, “I got me a feeling …”
David rolls away to face the wall. “Go on, Limpy!”
“All right. Hell, sleep, sleep,” says Limpy, crawling on hands and knees across the room to his bed, humming the same tuneless jig. The humming turns to silence, the silence to snoring. David takes himself in hand.