Touch by Alexi Zentner

kept the prices high, yet there seemed to be enough gold in Sawgamet—at sixteen dollars an ounce—that men paid what Franklin asked.
    After he sold his first load of tin pans, Franklin bought a ramshackle cabin and then hired my grandfather to saw and build a solid, handsome store in front of the cabin.
    As for my grandfather, by then he had already stopped trying to use his own tin pan. While gold seemed to leap from the ground for other men, my grandfather had not found even a glint of the metal since digging the nugget from the floor of his cabin. Instead, my grandfather worked the trees, providing lumber to miners. By the time he was finished building the store for Franklin, Jeannot had more than a dozen men whip-sawing for him up the hill. Whatever wood he could produce was spoken for before the sawdust settled: the miners needed to build sluice boxes and flumes.
    My grandmother and her brother spent their first winter in the rickety cabin behind the store, and though it was nota particularly cold winter—certainly no colder than any they had experienced on the Red River—for Martine, the cabin felt like penance for a sin that she had not committed. Franklin did not mind that the cabin was small and let the wind leak through it. He spent most of his time in the store, weighing gold dust and sending for more supplies by sea from San Francisco or by land and river from Quesnellemouthe; it was Martine who spent her days trapped inside the hovel, baking goods for her brother to sell, the poorly vented stove sending choking smoke against the low ceiling. At least she was near the fire, she sometimes thought, because she could never seem to keep warm, and the flames gave off more light than the one small greased-paper window let in.
    The wind blew constantly that winter, but the snow held itself. Only a few inches stuck to the ground—not enough to stop men from working—and by the spring, ten thousand men had transformed Sawgamet into a dirty, noisy, bustling boomtown. Jews, fishermen, Indians, farmers, Chinamen, Londoners, Irishmen, Russians, bankrupt men needing a fresh start, former slaves and former slave owners, beat-down soldiers, dreamers, adventurers, and even honest-to-God miners boiled over the landscape, and with them came saloons and whorehouses, but never enough dressed lumber or tin pans.

    WHEN MY GRANDMOTHER realized that the winter had passed but that she still could not get warm, she marched fiercely into the store and demanded that her brother build her a proper house.
    My great-uncle looked up from the counter and blinked at his sister, as if Franklin were not sure whom the angry young woman was. “I’d no idea,” he said. “Why didn’t you say something earlier?”
    “Franklin,” Martine said, “I did say something. I said something every morning and every night. Even my bones said something while I was sleeping. Did you not hear me shivering from across the room?”
    Franklin rubbed at his temples. My grandmother watched him pressing on the side of his head, as if the bright sun that streamed through the large windows in the front of the store pierced his eyes. She wondered if he still thought of her as simply his younger sister. He was certainly capable of looking at her and not realizing that she was eighteen and attractive, one of the few unmarried women in Sawgamet who was not a whore or worse. They ought not to be sharing a single-room cabin anyway.
    “Franklin.” She was careful to make sure that her voice did not sound angry, though she was insistent, and Franklin nodded and reached for the ledger book under the counter. She did not know why he bothered to reach for the book: he well knew how much gold they had earned.
    “I’ll order you some dresses,” he said, and she thought of silk and beads and swiss waists and buttoned shoes that were more appropriate for an opera than for the muddy streets of Sawgamet. “And books. I know you’d like to have some more books, and