The organ grinder is silent and at first Alex thinks the Hasglow Elixir crowd is staring at her. But when she looks toward Bobcat Creek, she finds herself in the path of Harry and five other miners dragging a grinning Chinese man. The man’s hair is braided in a long raveled queue that falls limp and muddy over his slender shoulders. A bruise glows purple on his right cheek and blood drips from either side of his mouth. The seat of his loose blue pants is red with river mud, yet his eyes are full of mirth, apparently unconcerned with his captivity or treatment. His grin grows wider when he sees Alex, and his eyes narrow to slits. He bends as if to sit and Harry jerks him up again.
“Where’s Emaline?” Harry asks Alex.
Where she always is, Alex thinks, but says, “At the Victoria,” and the men forge ahead, prodding the smiling Chinese man from behind with a shovel. Alex stumbles along after, overwhelmed and a bit embarrassed by her curiosity. She can feel the heavy presence of the crowd creeping close behind her.
“What did he—?” says Alex, before another voice, strained, heavily accented, interrupts.
“Wait! Wait, please, sir!” and another Chinese man, whose lucid eyes hold the desperation she expected from the captive, teases his way through the crowd. “Wait, sir,” he pleads. His voice cracks as if English forces his voice a half step higher than is comfortable. With his narrow shoulders and quick, light steps he looks diminutive next to the lumps of flesh and muscle that sit like cats on the white men’s shoulders.
“Chicken thief,” Harry tells Alex, turning his back on the pleading man to pound on the door of the Victoria. “Emaline!”
“Innocent,” the Chinese man insists. And then, tugging on Alex’s sleeve: “He simple man. Please, sir.” She pulls away, but in his eyes she can almost see the dammed-up lake of words that English will not allow him. She opens her hand and her feather flutters to the ground.
“Six chickens’ necks broke. Sound innocent to you?” Harry directs his reply to Alex but glares at the Chinese man as he speaks. “Emaline!” he yells again just as Emaline opens the door. Her face is flushed from the heat of the kitchen. Damp hair swirls about her head and when she sees the smiling captive, her face hardens in a way Alex hasn’t seen.
“What the hell is he smiling about?” Emaline says. She’s no longer squinting, but gazing generally over the crowd, as if she has already determined the look of everyone present.
“Wait, please, sir—”
“Harry?” says Emaline.
Harry produces the body of a chicken, holding it high above his head by its broken neck like a trophy for all to see. In the doorway of the inn, Mr. James scribbles away in his notebook. The crowd bunches closer. Alex’s stomach clenches like a fist. She can see Limpy’s red head bobbing near the back of the pack and she knows David must be nearby. Across the road, Micah steps out of his store onto the porch where Mrs. Dourity, Erkstine, Waller and her sister Rose flank Lou Anne, two on each side. Lou Anne stretches to her tiptoes to see better and her mother tugs her down again.
“I Kwong Ting-lang. Kwong, sir.” The man bows, but Emaline’s expression is unchanged. He motions to the captive. “Chang,” he says, bowing again for his companion. “His head. He simple man, he—”
“He thinks he can just go and kill my chickens?”
Kwong scowls at his feet. His lips move, but he says nothing and Alex bites her lip, willing the man to stay silent, sensing that, guilty or not, nothing he says will make a difference, except to make things worse. The other one won’t quit smiling at her.
“I’m talking to you, Wong,” says Emaline.
On level ground Emaline would still stand a head taller than Kwong, and for a moment Alex is conflicted. For a moment she is the young woman who walked into town dressed as a boy. For a moment she too is standing helpless before a powerful stranger. At the same time she is the Golden Boy, Alex, who loves nothing more than to sweep in the stuffy heat of the kitchen, to watch Emaline move with the robust efficiency of a woman Alex has always known, or wanted to know. “Here is as good a place as any,” Emaline had said, and Alex loved her for that.
And Alex knew how much Emaline loved those chickens and if they did kill them—Chang picks up the feather Alex dropped, rubs it past his nose, holds it out to her as if to give it back. If they killed those chickens, then they deserve whatever they get. She’s trying hard to believe this.
“He sleep all night,” Kwong says, and bats the feather from Chang’s hand, says a sharp word to the man in his own language. “Chickens there in morning.”
“And I’m a Chinaman’s squaw!” says a voice from the crowd.
“Hang ’em!” yells another and Alex’s head jerks up with Kwong’s.
“We pay!” Kwong says, and turns to Harry. “Gold we pay.”
“No. You’ll leave,” says Emaline.
“I pay,” Kwong says again, this time to Emaline.
“Got that right,” says Harry, and shoves Kwong to the ground.
The crowd buzzes, squirms, and resettles like flies on a carcass. Kwong stays down on his knees, his head bowed.
“You will leave!” says Emaline to Kwong. “All of you—” She motions downstream to the colony of clustered huts. “All of you.”
Chang’s smile vanishes. His mouth falls open. He edges between Harry and Kwong, holding his arms out like a barrier. He screams high and clear, shocking even the birds to silence. He runs out of breath, gulps air like a drowning man and screams again as six men on horseback appear on the edge of town.
Alex’s mouth drops open. Breath comes in panting gasps. She should run, should have run weeks ago, or last night, or this morning. Now her legs fail her, each seems to have its own separate agenda. Her knees shake. Her hands lose feeling, but her head swings from Chang to the approaching posse, back to Chang again. The crowd, too, has frozen. Men swallow their sentences whole, and Chang’s pure tenor howl echoes back and forth between the ravine walls.
Alex’s mind closes and opens within itself to memory. A bouquet on the side table, white layered flowers interspersed with yellow buttercups and blue drooping lilies. The smell of fabric and rosemary and something bitter, metallic. Blood.
Alex lying flat. Pain clamping her stomach in a vice. Gran’s finger pointing downward like an arrow to Alex’s forehead. Warm, salty tears down Alex’s cheeks.
“Just looking for death, just like your father and his father. Want to leave an old woman all alone to herself. All alone,” says Gran, so soft. “You’re not to see that boy again.”
Emaline slaps Chang hard across the face. Chang takes a breath, the silence more deafening than the scream, and Alex finds movement. She backs up against the porch of the inn, ducks quickly around the corner. Tries to think. The road? Blocked. Hide.
Behind the Victoria, past the chopping block, the feather-strewn coop, its lone occupant ruffled and agitated, to the outhouse. The door slams shut and shards of light through the plank walls slice her into pieces. Her insides chew themselves. Flies bash their heads into the wall. Thick, warm moisture between her thighs. She unbuckles her trousers, edges her hand down. Her fingers return red.
Emaline’s hand hovers in the air above Chang, but her attention is focused on the six riders approaching along Victor Lane. She steps back up on the porch, straining to see clearly. Behind her, Mr. James’s furious scribbling is amplified and grating. Someone sneezes. A murmur passes through the crowd, rippling outward as the riders force their way through.
“Well,” says Hudson, leaning against his saddle horn, his wide-brim hat masking half his face in shadow. “Where is he?”
Emaline doesn’t answer. He isn’t speaking to her. He turns around, repeats his question and John Thomas spurs his jittery piebald mare forward, looking comically self-important in his filthy tattered trousers and sweat-stained shirt.
“We come for him, Emaline,” says John Thomas. Emaline tilts her head to the side, folds her arms in front of her. A smirk spreads across Hudson’s face. “You might as well stand aside, ’cause … we’ve come for him.”
“You come for who?” Emaline says.
“You know who,” says Hudson. “Dangerous criminal in your midst. A fugitive. Show her, John.”
John Thomas pulls a paper from his shirt and a sly grin reveals dimples beneath the thick blond beard. When she first met him, he’d barely had enough facial hair to cover a flea’s ass, and Hudson … Hudson was a bear-faced mountain man, and no better behaved for his pampered upbringing. Seeing the two of them now reminds her of men who put on masks for follies—except she finds neither one funny.
“Told you to get rid of him, told you nothing good would come,” says Hudson, and he lowers his voice, making the crowd lean in to hear. “I told you I’d give you everything—”
“Dangerous?” she says, shaking her head, acknowledging only what she chooses. She hadn’t wanted the everything Hudson had offered. She’d never loved him. He was lonely, and he was rich, and she was only doing her job. Yet he had been so sure of her answer. So sure that he went down on his knees in that crowded Sacramento saloon. He’d humiliated himself. She simply said no. And when he didn’t accept that, Jed had told him no with his fists.
“Chicken thieves is what I got,” she says.
Harry laughs, slaps Chang’s face, leaving red marks on his cheeks and, strangely, another smile on Chang’s face. The horses, always attuned to the changing moods of men, throw their heads and jingle their bridles. Harry slaps Chang again, harder, before Kwong rises up to grab Harry’s hand with a strength that seems to surprise them both.
“Stop,” Kwong says.
A pick handle to his stomach. A fist to his face. Kwong slumps to knees, gasping for air and Emaline’s attention strays for a moment to the anguished man at her feet, his queue circling his neck like a noose.
Ridiculous to pity, she thinks, but she does pity. “Enough, Harry,” she says, and Kwong slumps to the ground. The smiling one snarls at no one in particular then and bends to drape himself over Kwong and pat him stiffly on the head.
“Not talking chicken thieves,” says Hudson, and sits back in his saddle, one arm crossed lazily over the other, an amused twitch teasing his lips. Never did learn a thing, did he? thinks Emaline. Still reckons he’s God’s gift to California. And John Thomas, holding that paper in front of him as if he expects me to fetch. Shit. Standing on the porch, she remains taller than the men on horseback. On the porch she will stay.
“Show the lady,” says Hudson, his voice greasy with condescension, and John Thomas dismounts, becoming suddenly very small. His horse tosses its head, readjusts the bit in its mouth and bares its teeth as though laughing. The tall fellow riding next to Hudson does laugh, looks quite amused as he plays with the clasp of his gun holster.
Emaline ignores this, focuses all her attention down at John Thomas, scrutinizing him with squinted eyes until she makes him the size of a beetle she can step on. Presumptuous little shit, that silly look of righteous indignation on his face, squaring his shoulders, preening and strutting like a goddamned banty rooster. She suspected that leaving town hadn’t been his idea this time, but she hadn’t expected him to return with company, with Jackson Hudson. Before he climbs the second step, Emaline reaches down, rips the paper from his hands and holds it to her nose to read.
Emaline lets the paper fall, does an about-face and disappears into the Victoria. John Thomas’s lips curl into something between a grin and a snarl. He steps on to the porch. He clears his throat. He holds the flier up like a prize, but Hudson speaks first.
“Looking for a fugitive slave, Jedediah Haversmith. Property of Mr. James Haversmith, deceased, and now the lawful inheritance of his brother, Amos Haversmith,” he says officiously. The crowd quiets its murmuring and swivels its many heads, searching for a Jedediah.
“He’s there, back there!” John Thomas shouts and points to the back of the crowd where Limpy looks to David and David looks to Jed. One by one, the heads of the crowd turn to see Jed as though for the first time. A black man. A slave. Property. Jed holds his shoulders back, his head high, and folds one arm over the other. Even now, dignity comes naturally. Limpy places his big body in front of him.
“Now wait a minute …” he says, just as Emaline reemerges from the Victoria, her shotgun cocked, ready and trained at John Thomas’s skull. The crowd becomes one eye, focused on Emaline.
“Emaline,” says Jed, edging forward, placing a hand on Limpy’s shoulder as he goes.
“Stay put!” she commands without looking at him, and steps closer to John Thomas. The gun barrel kisses his ear. She’s seen men die, slowly, battling their bodies for each moment of life, and fast, with a bullet to the brain. But she’s never killed a man. John Thomas whimpers, like a dog, she thinks, hoping he’ll continue. She could shoot a dog.
Hudson clears his throat and holds up his hand to silence the pistols behind him. He adopts a parental look of stern patience. “May I remind you—”
“No, you may not,” says Emaline, raising her voice above him as he finishes his sentence.
“—that harboring a fugitive slave is a federal offense.”
“Emaline,” says Jed again, parting the crowd. “’S all right.”
“I will decide when it’s all right!” says Emaline, then bends to whisper in John Thomas’s ear: “Now you just get back on that horse, turn and ride on out of here, and I may just forget all about this.”
She shoves him down the porch and he stumbles over Chang, landing hard on his backside. Chang giggles, then howls, his teeth gleaming in the sunlight. John Thomas thrusts himself to his feet, and kicks Chang in the mouth. The grinning man falls unconscious to the ground, so John Thomas gives Kwong a few solid kicks in the stomach.
“Enough,” says Emaline, and John Thomas straightens, out of breath and red in the face. Emaline levels her gun at Hudson; she’s glad her eyes are too poor to see down the gun barrels pointing back at her. He sits up straight in his saddle, his hand on his holster. If it had been her, she’d already have drawn.
“No fugitives round here,” says Emaline. But Jed has made his way through the crowd and steps up on the porch next to her, followed by Limpy and David. Harry joins them, wiping Chang’s blood on his trousers. Micah and Fred come forward, leaving one of the regulars missing, but she’s of no mind to count. She bites the tip of her tongue, glances at the men behind her, feeling, at this moment, neither gratitude nor discord. Her focus returns to Hudson. The crowd takes a collective step back.
“And you ain’t no lawman. Am I right? Ah! Hands up,” she says.
The men behind Hudson are young, boys almost, surely with no desire to shoot a woman if their mothers taught them anything, if California hadn’t already unlearned it for them. “Y’all may get me, but I’ll get him first,” she says. “Tell ’em, Hudson.”
Hudson purses his lips, his confidence failing. He gives a backward glance and a nod. The guns lower and Hudson chuckles with unconvincing mirth. “Now …”
“Now you’re leaving,” says Emaline. “Take them—” she motions with her head to Chang and Kwong, “or take nobody. Go on.”
Hudson clears his throat, looks scornfully at the two Chinese men, then back down the barrel of Emaline’s shotgun. He yanks the reins of his horse, motions the posse to back-track the way they had come.
“Wait!” says John Thomas, limping behind. His mare is already halfway out of town with the others. “The money! You promised me. You can’t just …” He turns back to Emaline. “Emaline, I—”
Emaline fires one shot into the air. John Thomas leaps and hobbles after the retreating horsemen.
* * *
“They’ll be back. They’ll be back and they won’t just be looking for me next time,” says Jed. Emaline is hefting the stew pot, straining under the weight.
“Stop a minute. Stop a minute, let me talk,” says Jed.
She turns to face him, but he remains in the doorway as though determined to maintain a distance. His features are a dark blur, but she has learned to read his expression from the tone of his voice. She wants to go to him, to put her hand on his lips, as though stopping the words would erase the problem. As though by refusing to think, by pushing that pulsing fear down, down, and down again, she could eliminate it entirely. As though it is words that make fear real.
She thunks the pot on the stove, pulls a forgotten loaf of blackened bread from the oven, slams it upon the counter. Her fingers are streaked charcoal black. She wipes them on her apron.
“You heard him,” says Jed. “Harboring a fugitive slave is a federal offense.”
“I’m not harboring anyone, am I? Not when you just come and offer yourself up. Didn’t bring you up here just for them to take you.”
“I’m not theirs to take.”
“Damn right!”
“Yours neither.”
Emaline places both of her hands on the counter. Her head falls forward.
“Emaline,” says Jed, lowering his voice, “you gonna get yourself in trouble.”
“Weren’t real concerned with that when I got you out of Sacramento, were you?”
“That was before …” Jed says.
“Before what?”
“Before …” he says again, and looks away. Emaline thumps her fingers on the charred loaf of bread, hard as fired clay, and waits for him to speak. Instead, he moves behind her. Pushes her hair aside and kisses the softness of her neck. He breathes in deeply, wraps his arms around her waist and presses himself into her.
“I …” he begins, massaging her belly, “I have to be a man.” Emaline stiffens.
“A man? A dead man?” She picks up the burned loaf and places it in his hands. Jed looks bewildered at the charcoal separating the two of them, tosses it back and forth between burning fingers. Emaline rushes out the back door.
With a fistful of oak leaves, Alex sits scrubbing bloody underwear. The outhouse is alive with flies, bouncing themselves off the walls, basking in the warm nitric fumes. Spiderwebs span corners like suspension bridges spotted with decomposing insects. The sour stench of sewage overpowers the odor of menstrual blood and Alex pushes the gold pouch aside to rest like a growth on her hip as she works. The thin walls trap heat like an oven, and on these walls shadows take shapes.
Gran’s face, dry, cracked and flaking like butter pastry. Gran’s nose, as straight and severe as her words. A half-formed demon the size of a newborn kitten, with large unseeing eyes and shriveled appendages, dead on a towel before Alex. Proof of sin, of lechery, Gran said. “You’re not to see that boy again.” That boy whose lips never whispered the word sin when they lay together behind the rabbit hutch. That boy who said he’d love her if she swore never to tell, who left her in Gran’s unforgiving home, waiting for the old woman to die. His face fades into that of a San Francisco businessman, his heavy cheeks flushed with liquor, leaving his mark in bruises on Alex’s skin. This man gave a name to Gran’s unvoiced accusations. “Whore,” Minford called her, “barren whore,” and hit her. Her womb remained dry while she bled from her nose. Her womb remained dry while she bled from her mouth. Alex grew tired of bleeding.
She clamps her arms round her stomach, squeezes as if she could somehow will both the memories and the blood back inside. A gunshot sounds, crackling off the ravine and down her spine.
Alex scrubs harder and faster, even after ripping a hole through the fabric. She’s become too comfortable in this place, too accustomed to thinking of herself in terms of he. He didn’t need to run. He hadn’t lost his baby. He hadn’t killed anyone, was far too timid, too innocent. He was lucky, a Golden Boy, the Golden Boy, Alex.
Elbows on knees, head in hands, Alexandra sits.
A moment, or a minute, or twenty minutes later, the outhouse door opens and cool air rushes to dry the sweat on her face. She finds Emaline standing in the doorway with tears welling like foreign bodies in her eyes. Emaline’s gaze falls from the nugget dangling in the pouch on Alex’s hip to the dark hair between her legs, to the bloody underwear Alex struggles to pull back up. Emaline opens her mouth to speak, surprises them both when no words come. Alex tries to escape and Emaline grabs her. Alex can feel the sinew and bone of Emaline’s fingers making bloodless indentions on her upper arm. She can feel Emaline’s unsteady breath on the back of her neck. The only sounds, beyond the usual commotion of Victor Lane, are avian. Alex wants to hear Emaline say something, to say, “Could use you in the kitchen.” But Emaline lets go and Alex jolts forward, corners the Victoria Inn and disappears without looking back.