one his sons descended underground.
David imagines them waking before dawn, choking down a thin gruel, trekking three miles down the Penzance coast in a ragged line with father in the lead and mother in tow. Six boys, five now with David gone, and a baby girl, a three-year-old who runs screaming with the other children, kicking clods of ore like other kids kick cans. Two miles off, the ore stamps move the ground in a steady rumble the family hardly feels. Then they part. The four oldest boys and father climb an hour down into the belly of the earth, with its damp, black walls. Climb down with only a candle for light, a pick for work, and a pasty for lunch to:
earn enough money
to buy enough bread
to get enough strength
to dig in a hole
Unending. Such a future makes any man feel small, wind or no. David wanted more. But his father was a stubborn man.
‘Follow in the paths of greed and find sorrow in the next life as well as this.’
‘It’s not greed. It’s a new life, a chance to work for yourself.’
‘It’s a metal, like any other.’ He grabbed the flier from his son’s hand and tore it down the middle, separating the Cali from the fornia and the G from the old.
‘You planning on working today?’ Limpy asks. David shakes himself into the present, bends and sets his pick on the ground by a wooden contraption. A rocker, they call it, or a cradle, like an infant’s bed made from an old whisky barrel cut in half and fitted with a row of wooden slats. It is not an elegant machine. The sides of the barrel are splintering and a pungent black fungus has begun to eat away the bottom. More a coffin than a cradle, David thinks. He picks up the hopper with its perforated metal bottom and places it back atop the cradle. Limpy dips two buckets in the creek as David shovels a load of earth into the hopper. While David rocks the cradle, Limpy pours water over the agitated soil, making several trips to the creek until the dirt has washed through the hopper. The lighter, worthless minerals wash away, leaving the gold trapped in riffle slats at the bottom. Same idea as the gold pan really, only more efficient; if efficient is a word rightly used to describe alluvial mining. Returns have been too low. David didn’t come all the way from Cornwall to dig in the mud, freezing his knackers off in the winter, frying them in the summer, all for one or two ounces of gold a day. He came for the lucky strike, the rich vein, the motherlode. Be damned if he’ll ever again climb down a hole to make some other man rich.
After a while, they switch; David totes the water and Limpy shovels and rocks. Their faces are pink. Little beads of sweat gather at their temples, mix with the mud and streak rustbrown tracks down their cheeks. Downstream, the steady clank of picks and shovels mixes with the noisy murmur of the creek. The sun is directly overhead, and most of the birds have muted their songs till evening time. On flat, worn rocks, winter-stiff lizards rouse themselves to bask.
‘Wouldn’t hurt to have some help. Someone to shake the cradle,’ Limpy says, as David pours a bucket into the hopper. The water splashes, speckling his trousers. ‘Been thinking ‘bout a long tom or a sluice box. Need more men to work one of those.’ He rocks the cradle until David returns with another bucket of water. ‘Said yourself he reminded you of your brother.’
‘My brothers are in Cornwall.’ David dumps the water. ‘That boy’s too scrawny to hold a shovel. He probably wouldn’t know gold from pyrite.’
‘I don’t know. Got me a feeling about that boy.’ Limpy stares off down the creek.
‘You got a feeling about anyone you made money off,’ says David.
Limpy only acknowledges this remark with a gesture. ‘’Sides,’ he says, ‘bound to fill out working claims, ain’t he? What with Emaline feeding ‘im.’
‘I’d like to know how he’s paying for that.’
‘City boy with a face for theatre,’ Limpy says.
David glances at him, looks away. ‘Not that pretty.’
The saloon door squeals open and footsteps clump towards the stairs. Emaline sticks her head through the kitchen door.
‘Alex,’ she says. The boy stops but doesn’t turn. ‘Come on back a minute, have a seat at the table.’
It’s not a request, but when she returns from the kitchen with two cups of coffee, he’s still standing in the stairwell, bracing himself with a hand on the railing, a hand on the wall.
‘Sit,’ says Emaline, and he slinks to the stool across from her. ‘I don’t allow hats inside the saloon.’ He sweeps it from his head and his hair falls forward into his face. He sits on his hands as though they were tied behind him.
She doesn’t mind the quiet ones, to a point. David is quiet, but the silence is natural on him. This one sits on his words same as he’s sitting on his hands, and she doesn’t like the way he won’t look at her. Up close, she can see his face is narrow, his nose and chin slender, his eyes, when he shows them, are the same black colour as the hair hanging shaggy and jagged before his eyes. I’ve got more whiskers on my face, she thinks, and scratches at the patch above her lip. When she was living in the city, she’d pluck them out, the thick black ones bringing tears to her eyes. Shedding tears over a few silly hairs. But she was younger then. Not stupid, or even vain, so much as inexperienced. Maybe that’s what bothers her about this boy: that spooked look of experience.
She pushes a cup in his direction. His hands remain beneath him. She leans forward, places her forearms on the table closer to Alex. He looks up, down.
‘I’m gonna ask you what you’re doing here,’ she says.
‘I’m looking for go—’
‘That’s not an answer,’ says Emaline, shaking her head. ‘Everybody’s looking for gold. What are you doing here, in Motherlode?’
But the boy clamps his mouth shut. Something close to defiance hangs there over his head, and his eyes look off beyond her.
‘Listen,’ she says. ‘You listening? You paid me enough for the week, and I understand you got a bit more stashed away. I ain’t even going ask how you got it. But let’s be clear right here and now…You listening?’
She slams her mug down, leaving an opaque ring of coffee on the table. She’s not used to being ignored. She never did like it much.
‘Look at me. We don’t want no trouble around here. If you’re running from something, best just keep on running, hear?’
She can almost feel the tension in his shoulders, can see his jaw clenching. His feet cross at the ankles and he hunches down, as if trying to be even smaller than he already is. If she were the mothering type, she’d act on this impulse to hug him.
‘I ain’t meaning to throw nobody out, ‘less they give me reason. You give me reason, you’re gone. Understand? Out of the Victoria. Out of Motherlode. Understand?’
Alex nods once.
‘Good.
