The stranger shifts under his load, pulls his duster hat low as if he could hide there beneath it, as if my piss-poor eyes can see anything but his shape anyway, she thinks. She can see that he’s small. Narrow shoulders, his pack just about as wide as his whole back, his trousers and flannel draping over him like they have only bone to cling to. She’s known too many men to judge this one’s threat by his size.
‘Randall?’ she asks.
‘Hell if I know.’ He shrugs, but seems content that he is no longer her focus.
The mule’s ears rotate as if it too is waiting for a response, and the stranger seems to shrink down inside of himself in a way that raises the hairs on the back of Emaline’s neck. The mule shifts its weight foot to foot, shakes its halter.
‘I’m talking to you! Who are you?’ Emaline charges forward and the mule rears its ornery self, eyes wild as if she’d struck the damn thing. Packages jar from the animal’s back and slap the ground. Some burst open and precious flour thickens the air and powders the red mud of the road. Randall’s beard trails behind him as he hustles after the frenzied animal, tripping in a wake of pinto beans and hollering, ‘Goddamn you, Contrary Julie!’ Red-speckled hens poke their heads round the side of the inn, pick up their skirts and run towards the mess of oats and beans. Scrub jays descend in blue streaks to scold and scratch. Emaline bustles about the muddy road, shooing chickens, flailing at jays, salvaging what she can: a sack of potatoes, a side of salt pork. By the time she charges back to the stranger she’s sweated clean through her dress. At least, she thinks, catching her breath, at least he’s seen fit to pick up a sack of flour. He holds it there like a shield between them.
‘I suppose you can pay for these goods?’ No response. Up the road, beyond the grove of manzanita, the echoes of a braying mule and a swearing man do battle. ‘I don’t take credit nor scrip, and—Look at me.’ Small black eyes peek out beneath the duster hat. ‘And I ain’t here to nursemaid no runaway mamma’s boy. Your name, if you got one?’
But his mouth pops closed. Flour sifts from his shoulders as he rummages in a small pouch at his waist.
‘Alex?’ he says, but it sounds like a question, a question she forgets when he holds out what looks to be a gold coin, San Francisco mint—double eagle, no less. The potatoes thump to the ground. She snatches the coin. Such a pleasing weight, twenty dollars. She gives it a bite, finds herself softening.
‘Well, Alex,’ she says, placing the coin in her dress pocket, patting it twice, ‘you got the voice of a choirboy.’
‘Haven’t got a sign up yet,’ says the woman, closing the door firmly behind her. Her voice fills every inch of space her body leaves open and she moves with an agility surprising and a little frightening in such a large woman. ‘But that’s what I call her—the Victoria Inn.’
She thumps the pork and potatoes on a plank table, or rather a series of tables held as one by a grubby cloth. Alex follows suit with the sack of flour and a puff of white escapes.
‘Victoria, like the Queen,’ the woman says. She dusts her hands on her apron and motions with her head to the water-stained portrait of a crowned woman on the opposite wall. Two windows of distorting mason glass offer the only light in the room and the painting’s features are indistinct. The face of a youthful older woman, Alex thinks, or an aged young woman, with round cheeks to match her chin.
A ramshackle bar traverses one corner and three-legged stools are scattered about. It smells of alcohol, yeast and strong burnt coffee, and Alex’s stomach grumbles with hunger, clearly not the response the woman is waiting for.
Emaline puffs a curl from her eyes. It catches in the frizzy halo framing her angular face. She turns on her heel and charges up the stairwell into a shaft of hallway light without pausing to see if Alex follows. She stops by one of eight doors in the narrow corridor, her hand on the latch, and squints in the same probing manner she used on the muleteer, the scowl on her face made deeper by crease lines like poorly healed scars.
Alex pulls the duster hat low, makes an effort to look aloof, would have spit as the muleteer had done if they hadn’t been inside.
No one, yet, has taken her for a girl. No one, yet, has looked this closely.
‘You’re from where, you say?’
Alex hadn’t said, and is so relieved by the question she fails to answer.
‘That’s a question,’ says the woman.
‘Pennsylvania.’
‘Don’t talk much, do you?’
Alone in the room, the darkness is complete and endless, even as Alex feels the closeness of the walls, the low ceiling. Little by little her eyes adjust and the corners of the room take shape. The bed smells sharply of cedar. The only other furniture is a three-legged stool resting at a slant on the uneven floorboards. There is no window, no need for curtains; a single candle burnt nearly to the nub sits on the floor by the bed. The woman’s heavy steps descend the stairs. Victoria, like the Queen, Alex thinks, and sees again the whitewash peeling down the inn’s face, the unpainted balusters, the ornamental balcony propped precariously over the porch. She eases down to draw a line in the dust with her finger. A few days is all she needs, to rest, to think.
How far had she come since stepping off the steamer into the frenzied chaos of the Marysville docks? Was it only three days ago that she’d stood there on the river bank amidst that sea of canvas sacks, barrels and boxes? Delicate chairs, end tables and bookshelves looked out of place perched alongside kegs of black powder, stacks of picks and shovels, piles of hydraulic tubing coiled like earthworms. Alex pulled her duster hat low, avoiding the eyes of the men scurrying back and forth, hauling skeins of fabric and barrels of whisky. She wanted to be back on the boat, surrounded by the hissing blast of steam and the clank of pistons, away from cursing muleteers and braying donkeys and important-looking men dressed in black. But after Marysville the river split in two, the Feather shooting north, the Yuba branching east, both too rough for riverboats.
Alex followed the Yuba because it sounded foreign and far away from San Francisco, because those men she had seen on the boat—lawmen, perhaps, with their trimmed moustaches, their pressed black trousers—were heading north. She’d joined the line of wagons rolling east, kept her head low, spoken to no one, and stopped briefly at a shanty store on the edge of town. It was here she’d learned of her need for boots.
‘Best there is,’ the merchant claimed, stroking the blackened leather with an arm that ended in a rounded stump of flesh. As he spoke, he gestured with the arm, as if forgetting his fingers were gone. ‘Made special for a colonel. Small man—they all are. Killed by Comanche, ‘fending women and children. For you, forty dollars. Boy don’t deserve boots like this. A man’s boots. War hero’s…’
Gaps in the wall behind him let in streamers of light and the roof shuddered with every gust of wind.
‘The hell kinda shoes are those? You steal ‘em off your mama’s feet? Won’t last the week. Not half a week,’ said the merchant. His cackle turned to a cough. Alex stepped back.
‘Wait now, thirty dollars then,’ said the man. ‘Can’t believe I’m saying it—three kids and a wife back home…’ He bowed his head, rubbed his salt-and-pepper beard with his good hand. ‘Should just save ‘em for my son, but with his one leg, won’t do much good, see.’
Alex said nothing, fearing the high pitch of her voice. She shook her head no, turned to leave.
‘Goddamn! Goddamn, twenty dollars,’ said the merchant, dangling the boots from his stump by the laces.
She had rested in thickets, when she rested at all, and followed the twisted path of the Yuba to Rough and Ready, a town whose citizens had looked both rough and ready for all manner of mischief, staring openly at any passersby as if assessing their worth. Here she bought a loaf of bread and a gold pan from what could have been the same grizzled merchant, apart from the missing