Gold
Ba dies in the night, prompting them to seek two silver dollars.
Sam’s tapping an angry beat come morning, but Lucy, before they go, feels a need to speak. Silence weighs harder on her, pushes till she gives way.
“Sorry,” she says to Ba in his bed. The sheet that tucks him is the only clean stretch in this dim and dusty shack, every surface black with coal. Ba didn’t heed the mess while living and in death his mean squint goes right past it. Past Lucy. Straight to Sam. Sam the favorite, round bundle of impatience circling the doorway in too-big boots. Sam clung to Ba’s every word while living and now won’t meet the man’s gaze. That’s when it hits Lucy: Ba really is gone.
She digs a bare toe into dirt floor, rooting for words to make Sam listen. To spread benediction over years of hurt. Dust hangs ghostly in the light from the lone window. No wind to stir it.
Something prods Lucy’s spine.
“Pow,” Sam says. Eleven to Lucy’s twelve, wood to her water as Ma liked to say, Sam is nonetheless shorter by a full foot. Looks young, deceptively soft. “Too slow. You’re dead.” Sam cocks fingers back on pudgy fists and blows on the muzzle of an imagined gun. The way Ba used to. Proper way to do things, Ba said, and when Lucy said Teacher Leigh said these new guns didn’t clog and didn’t need blowing, Ba judged the proper way was to slap her. Stars burst behind her eyes, a flint of pain sharp in her nose.
Lucy’s nose never did grow back straight. She thumbs it, thinking. Proper way, Ba said, was to let it heal itself. When he looked at Lucy’s face after the bloom of bruise faded, he nodded right quick. Like he’d planned it all along. Proper that you should have something to rememory you for sassing.
There’s dirt on Sam’s brown face, sure, and gunpowder rubbed on to look (Sam thinks) like Indian war paint, but beneath it all, Sam’s face is unblemished.
Just this once, because Ba’s fists are helpless under the blanket—and maybe she isgood, issmart, thinks in some small part that riling Ba might make him rise to swing at her—Lucy does what she never does. She cocks herhands, points herfingers. Prods Sam’s chin where paint gives way to baby fat. The jaw another might call delicate, if not for Sam’s way of jutting it.
“Pow yourself,” Lucy says. She pushes Sam like an outlaw to the door.
Sun sucks them dry. Middle of the dry season, rain by now a distant memory. Their valley is bare dirt, halved by a wriggle of creek. On this side are the miners’ flimsy shacks, on the other the moneyed buildings with proper walls, glass windows. And all around, circumscribing, the endless hills seared gold; and hidden within their tall, parched grasses, ragtag camps of prospectors and Indians, knots of vaqueros and travelers and outlaws, and the mine, and more mines, and beyond, and beyond.
Sam squares small shoulders and sets out across the creek, red shirt a shout in the barrenness.
When they first arrived there was still long yellow grass in this valley, and scrub oaks on the ridge, and poppies after rain. The flood three and a half years back rooted up those oaks, drowned or chased away half the people. Yet their family stayed, set alone at the valley’s far edge. Ba like one of those lightning-split trees: dead down the center, roots still gripping on.
And now that Ba’s gone?
Lucy fits her bare feet to Sam’s prints and keeps quiet, saving spit. The water’s long gone, the world after the flood left somehow thirstier.
And long gone, Ma.
—
Across the creek the main street stretches wide, shimmering and dusty as snakeskin. False fronts loom: saloon and blacksmith, trading post and bank and hotel. People lounge in the shadows like lizards.
Jim sits in the general store, scritching in his ledger. It’s wide as him and half as heavy. They say he keeps accounts of what’s owed from every man in the territory.
“Excuse us,” Lucy murmurs, weaving through the kids who loiter near the candy, eyes hungering for a solution to their boredom. “Sorry. Pardon me.” She shrinks herself small. The kids part lazily, arms knocking her shoulders. At least today they don’t reach out to pinch.
Jim’s still fixed on his ledger.
Louder now: “Excuse me, sir?”
A dozen eyes prick Lucy, but still Jim ignores her. Knowing already that the idea’s a bad one, Lucy edges her hand onto the counter to flag his attention.
Jim’s eyes snap up. Red eyes, flesh raw at the rims. “Off,” he says. His voice flicks, steel wire. His hands go on writing. “Washed that counter this morning.”
Jagged laughter from behind. That doesn’t bother Lucy, who after years lived in towns like this has no more tender parts to tear. What scoops her stomach hollow, the way it was when Ma died, is the look in Sam’s eyes. Sam squints mean as Ba.
Ha!Lucy says because Sam won’t. Ha! Ha!Her laughter shields them, makes them part of the pack.
“Only whole chickens today,” Jim says. “No feet for you. Come back tomorrow.”
“We don’t need provisions,” Lucy lies, already tasting the melt of chicken skin on her tongue. She forces herself taller, clenches hands at her sides. And she speaks her need.
I’ll tell you the only magic words that matter,Ba said when he threw Ma’s books in the storm-born lake. He slapped Lucy to stop her crying, but his hand was slow. Almost gentle. He squatted to watch Lucy wipe snot across her face. Ting wo, Lucy girl: On credit.
Ba’s words work some sort of magic, sure enough. Jim pauses his pen.
“Say that again, girl?”
“Two silver dollars. On credit.” Ba’s voice booming at her back, in her ear. Lucy can smell his whiskey breath. Daren’t turn. Should his shovel hands clap her shoulders, she doesn’t know if she’ll scream or laugh, run or hug him round the neck so hard she won’t come loose no matter how he cusses. Ba’s words tumble out the tunnel of her throat like a ghost clambering from the dark: “Payday’s Monday. All we need’s a little stretch. Honest.”
She spits on her hand and extends it.
Jim’s no doubt heard this refrain from miners, from their dry wives and hollow children. Poor like Lucy. Dirty like Lucy. Jim’s been known to grunt, push the needed item over, and charge double interest come payday. Didn’t he once give out bandages on credit after a mine accident? To people desperate like Lucy.
But none of them quite like Lucy. Jim’s gaze measures her. Bare feet. Sweat-stained dress in ill-fitting navy, made from scraps of Ba’s shirt fabric. Gangly arms, hair rough as chicken wire. And her face.
“Grain I’ll give your pa on credit,” Jim says. “And whatever animal parts you find fit to eat.” His lip curls up, flashes a strip of wet gum. On someone else it might be called a smile. “For money, get him to the bank.”
The spit dries tight on Lucy’s untouched palm. “Sir—”
Louder than Lucy’s fading voice, Sam’s boot heel hits the floor. Sam marches, straight-shouldered, out of the store.
—
Small, Sam is. But capable of a man’s strides in those calfskin boots. Sam’s shadow licks back at Lucy’s toes; in Sam’s mind the shadow is the true height, the body a temporary inconvenience. When I’m a cowboy, Sam says. When I’m an adventurer. More recently: When I’m a famous outlaw. When I’m grown. Young enough to think desire alone shapes the world.
“Bank won’t help the likes of us,” Lucy says.
She might as well have said nothing. Dust tickles her nose and she stops to cough. Her throat ripples. She retches last night’s dinner into the street.
Straightaway come the strays, licking at her leavings. For a moment Lucy hesitates, though Sam’s boots beat an impatient tattoo. She imagines abandoning her lone relation to crouch among the dogs, fight them for every drop that’s hers. Theirs is a life of belly and legs, run and feed. Simple life.
She makes herself straighten and walk two-legged.
“Ready, pardner?” Sam says. This one’s a real question, not a chewed-out spit-up line. For the first time today Sam’s dark eyes aren’t squinted. Under protection of Lucy’s shadow, they’ve opened wide, something there half-melting. Lucy moves to touch that short black hair where the red bandana’s come askew. Remembering the smell of Sam’s baby scalp: yeasty, honest with oil and sun.
But by moving she lets sun hit. Sam’s eyes squeeze shut. Sam steps away. Lucy can tell from the bulge of Sam’s pockets that those hands are cocked again.
“I’m ready,” Lucy says.
The floor of the bank is gleaming board. Blond as the hair on the lady teller’s head. So smooth no splinters catch Lucy’s feet. The tap of Sam’s boots acquires a raw edge, like gunshot. Sam’s neck reddens under the war paint.
Ta-tap, they go across the bank. The teller staring.
Ta-TAP. The teller leans back. A man appears from behind her. A chain swings from his vest.
TA-TAP TA-TAP TA-TAP. Sam stretches up to the counter on tiptoe, creasing boot leather. Sam’s always stepped so careful before.
“Two silver dollars,” Sam says.
The teller’s mouth twitches. “Do you have an—”
“They don’t have an account.” It’s the man who speaks, looking at Sam as one might a rat.
Sam gone quiet.
“On credit,” Lucy says. “Please.”
“I’ve seen you two around. Did your father send you to beg?”
In a way, he did.
“Payday’s Monday. We only need a little stretch.” Lucy doesn’t say, Honest. Doesn’t think this man would hear it.
“This isn’t a charity. Run on home, you little—” The man’s lips keep moving for a moment after his voice has stopped, like the woman Lucy once saw speaking in tongues, a force other than her own pushing between her lips. “—beggars. Run on before I call the sheriff.”
Terror walks cold fingers down Lucy’s spine. Not fear of the banker. Fear of Sam. She recognizes the look in Sam’s eyes. Thinks of Ba stiff in the bed, eyes slitted open. She was the first to wake this morning. She found the body and sat vigil those hours before Sam woke, and she closed the eyes as best she could. She figured Ba died angry. Now she knows different: his was the measuring squint of a hunter tracking prey. Already she sees the signs of possession. Ba’s squint in Sam’s eyes. Ba’s anger in Sam’s body. And that’s besides the other holds Ba has on Sam: the boots, the place on Sam’s shoulder where Ba rested his hand. Lucy sees how it’ll go. Ba will rot day by day in that bed, his spirit spilling from his body and moving into Sam till Lucy wakes to see Ba looking out from behind Sam’s eyes. Sam lost forever.
They need to bury Ba once and for all, lock his eyes with the weight of silver. Lucy must make this banker understand. She readies herself to beg.
Sam says,
“Pow.”
Lucy is about to tell Sam to quit fooling. She reaches for those chubby brown fingers, but they’ve gone curiously shiny. Black. Sam is holding Ba’s pistol.
The teller falls in a faint.
“Two silver dollars,” Sam says, voice pitched lower. A shadow of Ba’s voice.
“I’m so sorry, sir,” Lucy says. Her lips go up. Ha! Ha!“You know how kids are with their games, please excuse my little—”
“Run on before I have you lynched,” the man says. Looking straight at Sam. “Run on, you filthy. Little. Chink.”
Sam squeezes the trigger.
A roar. A bang. A rush. The sense of something enormous passing Lucy’s ear. Stroking her with rough palms. When she opens her eyes the air is gray with smoke and Sam has staggered back, hand clapped to a cheek bruised by the pistol’s recoil. The man lies on the ground. For once in her life Lucy resists the tears on Sam’s face, puts Sam second. She crawls away from Sam. Ears ringing. Her fingers find the man’s ankle. His thigh. His chest. His whole, unblemished, beating chest. There’s a welt on his temple from where he leapt back and banged his head on a shelf. Apart from that the man is unharmed. The gun misfired.
From the cloud of smoke and powder, Lucy hears Ba laughing
“Sam.” She resists the urge to cry too. Needing to be stronger than herself, now. “Sam, you idiot, bao bei, you little shit.” Mixing the sweet and the sour, the caress and the cuss. Like Ba. “We gotta go.”
—
What could almost make a girl laugh is how Ba came to these hills to be a prospector. Like thousands of others he thought the yellow grass of this land, its coin-bright gleam in the sun, promised even brighter rewards. But none of those who came to dig the West reckoned on the land’s parched thirst, on how it drank their sweat and strength. None of them reckoned on its stinginess. Most came too late. The riches had been dug up, dried out. The streams bore no gold. The soil bore no crops. Instead they found a far duller prize locked within the hills: coal. A man couldn’t grow rich on coal, or use it to feed his eyes and imagination. Though it could feed his family, in a way, weeviled meal and scraps of meat, until his wife, wearied out by dreaming, died delivering a son. Then the cost of her feed could be diverted into a man’s drink. Months of hope and savings amounting to this: a bottle of whiskey, two graves dug where they wouldn’t be found. What could almost make a girl laugh—ha! ha!—is that Ba brought them here to strike it rich and now they’d kill for two silver dollars.
—
So they steal. Take what they need to flee town. Sam resists at first, stubborn as ever.
“We didn’t hurt nobody,” Sam insists.
Didn’tyou mean to, though?Lucy thinks. She says, “They’ll make anything a crime for the likes of us. Make it law if they have to. Don’t you remember?”
Sam’s chin lifts, but Lucy sees hesitation. On this cloudless day they both feel the lash of rain. Remembering when storm howled inside and even Ba could do nothing.
“We can’t wait around,” Lucy says. “Not even to bury.”
Finally, Sam nods.
They crawl to the schoolhouse, bellies in the dirt. Too easy by half to become what others call them: animals, low-down thieves. Lucy sneaks around the building to a spot she knows is blocked from view by the chalkboard. Voices rise inside. Recitation has a rhythm near to holiness, the boom of Teacher Leigh calling and the chorus of students in answer. Almost, almost, Lucy lifts her voice to join.
But it’s been years since she was allowed inside. The desk she occupied holds two new students. Lucy bites her cheek till blood comes and unties Teacher Leigh’s gray mare, Nellie. At the last moment she takes Nellie’s saddlebags too, heavy with horse oats.
Back at their place, Lucy instructs Sam to pack what’s needed from inside. She herself keeps outside, probing the shed and garden. Within: thumps, clangs, the sounds of grief and fury. Lucy doesn’t enter; Sam doesn’t ask for help. An invisible wall came up between them in the bank, when Lucy crawled past Sam to touch the banker with gentle fingers.
Lucy leaves a note on the door for Teacher Leigh. She strains for the grand phrases he taught her years back, as if they could be a proof stronger than the proof of her thievery. She doesn’t manage it. Her handwriting scrawls end to end with Sorrys.
Sam emerges with bedrolls, scant provisions, a pot and pan, and Ma’s old trunk. It drags in the dirt, near as long as a man is tall, those leather latches straining. Lucy can’t guess what mementos Sam packed inside, and they shouldn’t tax the horse—but what’s between them makes her hair prickle. She says nothing. Only hands Sam a wizened carrot, their last bit of sweetness for a while. A peace offering. Sam puts half in Nellie’s mouth, half in a pocket. That kindness heartens Lucy, even if its recipient is a horse.
“Did you say goodbye?” Lucy asks as Sam throws rope over Nellie’s back, ties some slipknots. Sam only grunts, putting a shoulder under the trunk to heave it up. That brown face goes red, then purple from effort. Lucy lends her shoulder too. The trunk slips into a loop of rope, and Lucy fancies she hears from within a banging.
Beside her, Sam’s face whips round. Dark face, and in it, white-bared teeth. Fear shivers through Lucy. She steps back. She lets Sam tighten the rope alone.
Lucy doesn’t go in to bid farewell to the body. She had her hours beside it this morning. And truth be told, Ba died when Ma did. That body is three and a half years empty of the man it once held. At long last, they’ll be going far enough to outrun his haint.
—
Lucy girl, Ba says, limping into her dream, ben dan
He’s in rare good humor. Employing his fondest cuss, the one she was weaned on. She tries to turn and see him, but her neck won’t move.
What’d I teach you?
She starts on multiplication tables. Her mouth won’t move, either.
Don’t remember, d’you? Always making a mess. Luan qi ba zao.There’s the splat of Ba spitting in disgust. The uneven thump of his bad leg, then his good. Can’t get nothing right.As she grew older, Ba shrank. Eating rarely. What he consumed seemed only to feed his temper, which stuck to his side like a faithful old cur. Dui. Thasright.More splats, moving farther from her. He’s starting to slur with drink. Yaliddletraitor.Given up on math, he filled their shack with language. A rich vocabulary that Ma wouldn’t have approved. You lazy sackash—gou shi.
—
Lucy wakes up to gold all around her. The dry yellow grass of the hills sways jackrabbit-high a few miles outside town. Wind imparts a shimmer like sun off soft metal. Her neck throbs from a night on the ground.
The water. That’s what Ba taught her. She forgot to boil the water.
She tilts the flask: empty. Maybe she dreamed of filling it. But no—Sam whimpered from thirst in the night, and Lucy went down to the stream.
Soft and stupid, Ba whispers. Where d’you keep those brains you prize so much?The sun’s unforgiving; he fades with a parting shot. Why, they melt clean away when you’re scared.
Lucy finds the first splatter of vomit flickering like dark mirage. The mass of flies shifts lazily. More splatters lead her to the stream, which in daylight reveals itself as muddy. Brown. Like every other stream in mining country, it’s filthy with runoff. She forgot to boil the water. Farther down she finds Sam collapsed. Sam’s eyes closed, Sam’s fingers unfisted. Clothes a foul, buzzing mess.
This time Lucy boils the water, builds a fire so fierce it makes her head swim. When the water is as cool as it’ll get she washes Sam’s fevered body.
Sam’s eyes waver open. “No.”
“Shh. You’re sick. Let me help.”
“No.” Sam’s bathed alone for years, but surely this is different.
Sam’s legs kick without strength. Lucy peels back crusted fabric, holding her breath against the stench. Sam’s eyes burn so shiny with fever it looks like hate. Ba’s hand-me-down pants, bunched with rope, come away easy. At the join of Sam’s legs, tucked into a fold of the underdrawers, Lucy bumps something. A hard, gnarled protrusion.
Lucy draws half a carrot from the indent between her little sister’s legs: a poor replacement for the parts Ba wanted Sam to have.
Lucy finishes the job she started, hand shaking so that the washcloth scrapes harder than she means it to. Sam doesn’t whimper. Doesn’t look. Eyes turned toward the horizon. Pretending, as Sam always does when the truth can’t be avoided, that she has nothing to do with this body of hers, a child’s body, androgynous still, prized by a father who wanted a son.
Lucy knows she should speak. But how to explain this pact between Sam and Ba that never made sense to her? A mountain’s risen in Lucy’s throat, one she can’t cross. Sam’s eyes follow the ruined carrot as Lucy flings it away.
—
For a day Sam retches up dirty water, and for three more lies in fever. Eyes closed when Lucy brings oats cooked to porridge, twigs to feed the fire. In these slow hours Lucy studies a sister she almost forgot: the budded lips, the dark fern lashes. Illness sharpens Sam’s round face, making it more like Lucy’s: horsier, gaunter, the skin sallower, more yellow than brown. A face that shows its weakness
Lucy fans Sam’s hair out. Chopped short three and a half years back, it now reaches just under Sam’s ears. Silk-fine and sun-hot.
The ways Sam hid herself seemed innocent. Childish. Hair and dirt and war paint. Ba’s old clothes and Ba’s borrowed swagger. But even when Sam resisted Ma’s manners, insisted on working and riding out of town with Ba, Lucy figured those for the old games of dress-up. Never this far. Never this carrot, this trying to push and change something deep inside.
It’s a clever job. Loose fabric in the underdrawers, sewn to form a hidden pocket. Well-done for a girl who refused girl’s chores.
The stench of sickness clings to camp, though Sam’s shits have stopped and she’s strong enough to bathe alone. Clouds of flies persist and Nellie’s tail won’t quit its switching. Sam’s suffered enough blows to her pride, so Lucy doesn’t mention the stink.
One night Lucy comes back dangling a squirrel, Sam’s favorite. It was trying to scramble up a tree with a broken paw. Sam’s nowhere to be found. Nor Nellie. Lucy spins, hands bloody, heart ticking and ticking. To match its rhythm she sings a song about two tigers playing hide-and-seek. It’s been years since any stream in this territory ran deep enough to support a creature bigger than a jackal; the song comes from a lusher time. This is a song that Sam, if Sam is scared and hiding, won’t mistake. Twice Lucy thinks she sees a stripe in the brush. Little tiger, little tiger,she sings. Footfalls behind her. Lai.
A shadow swallows Lucy’s feet. A pressure between her shoulders.
This time Sam does not say, Pow
In the silence Lucy’s thoughts circle and come down slow, almost peaceful, the way vultures drift without hurry—nothing to hurry once the deed’s been done. Where did Sam stash the gun after they fled the bank? How many of its chambers are still loaded?
She speaks Sam’s name.
“Shaddup.” This is Sam’s first word since No. “We shoot traitors in these parts.”
She reminds Sam of what they are. Pardners.
The pressure slides down to rest on the small of Lucy’s back. The natural height of Sam’s arm, as if Sam grows weary.
“Don’t move.” The pressure lifts. “I’ve got my sights on you.” Lucy should turn. She should. But. Know what you are?Ba snarled at Lucy the day Sam came back from school, left eye a plum. Lucy’s clothes damningly clean. A coward. A lily-livered girl.The truth is Lucy didn’t know that day, watching Sam face the kids who taunted, if it was bravery that made Sam yell. Was it braver to move loud or to stand quiet as Lucy did, letting spittle run down her lowered face? She didn’t know and doesn’t know now. She hears reins slap, hears Nellie’s whicker. Hooves hit the ground, each step trembling through her bare feet.
—
She says, “I’m looking for my little sister.”
High noon at a settlement that’s little more than two streets and crossroads. Every soul naps through the heat save two brothers who kick a can till the cheap metal ruptures. For a while now they’ve been eyeing a dog, a stray, trying to lure it with their rucksack of groceries. The dog hungry but wary, remembering old blows.
And then they look up at her, an apparition blown in to end their boredom.
“You seen her?”
Spooked at first, the boys peer closer. A tall girl with a long face, crooked nose, strange eyes over high, broad cheeks. A face made stranger by an altogether awkward body. Patched dress, old bruises slipping shadows under the skin. The boys see a child even less loved than they.
The plumper boy starts to say no. The skinny one jabs him.
“Maybe we did and maybe we didn’t. What’s she look like, huh? She got hair like yours?” A hand jerks out and grips a black braid. The other hand twists the bumpy nose. “An ugly nose like yours?” Now both pairs of hands are grabbing wrist and ankle, pulling narrower her narrow eyes, pinching hard at the skin stretched tight over her cheeks. “Funny eyes like yours, huh?”
The dog watches from a distance, with relief.
Her quiet perplexes them. The fat one grabs her throat, as if to milk her of words. She’s seen his kind. Not those bullies who ran toward the task but the others, slow or lazy-eyed or stuttering, who trailed, reluctant. Those with gratitude mixed into their hate—because her strangeness let them into the pack.
For now the fat one holds her gaze, wondering, holds her throat, longer perhaps than he means to. She starts to choke. Who knows how long he would have held if a round brown body didn’t come barreling into his back. The fat boy falls, gasping from the impact.
“Get off her,” says the newcomer who hit him. Furious eyes, cut narrow.
“You and what army?” says the skinnier boy, sneering.
And Lucy, breath reentering in one shuddering whoosh, looks up at Sam.
Sam whistles, summoning Nellie from behind an oak. Sam reaches for a bundle on the horse’s back. What Sam means to grab, none of the others will know. Lucy fancies she sees a gleam, hard and black as purest coal. But first, a fat white something plops from the trunk and lands in the dust.
Lucy, head spinning, thinks: Rice.
They are white grains, like rice, but they wriggle, and crawl, and split outward as if lost and seeking. Sam’s face is impassive. A breeze insinuates itself among them, bringing the churning smell of rot.
The skinny brother skitters, shrieks: Maggots!
Nellie, good-natured well-bred mare, but shuddering, wild-eyed, barely contained, carrying fear on her back for five full days now, takes this voice as a message and finally decides to bolt.
She doesn’t go far with Sam holding the reins. Nellie jerks, the load of pots clanging alarm. A knot loosens, the trunk slides, the lid bangs open. Spilling an arm. Part of what was once a face.
Ba is half jerky and half swamp. His skinny limbs dried to brown rope. While his softer parts—groin, stomach, eyes—swim with greenish-white pools of maggots. The boys don’t see it, not truly. They run at the first suggestion of the face. Only Lucy and Sam look full on. He’s theirs, after all. And Lucy thinks—why, this is no worse than his face in a dozen other permutations, monstrous with drink or rage. She steps closer, Sam’s gaze a weight on her back. Gently, she lowers the trunk from the ropes that hold it. Pushes the body back inside.
But she’ll remember.
More than drink and more than rage, Ba’s face reminds her of that once she saw him crying and didn’t dare go up, his features so melted by grief she feared her well-meant touch would dissolve his flesh. Expose the skull beneath. Now there it is, that peek of bone, and it is not so fearful. She shuts the lid and reties the latches. Turns.
“Sam,” she says, and in that moment, with eyes full of Ba, she sees that same melting on Sam’s face.
“What,” Sam says.
Lucy remembers, then, tenderness, a thing she thought dead along with Ma.
“You were right. I should have listened to you. We’ve got to bury.”
She saw more than she thought she could, bore it while those boys cowered. They ran, and their imaginings will follow all their lives at their heels. For her, who didn’t turn away, the haunting may begin to be done. She feels a swell of gratitude for Sam.
“I aimed to miss,” Sam says. “That banker. I only meant to scare him.”
Lucy looks down, always down, into Sam’s sweat-shiny face. A face brown as mud and just as malleable, a face on which Lucy has seen emotions take shape with an ease she envies. Many emotions but never fear. Yet there is fear now. For the first time she sees herself reflected in her sister. And this, Lucy realizes, this more than the schoolyard taunts or the press of the gun’s cold snout, is her moment of courage. She closes her eyes. She sits, face in her arms. She judges the proper way is quiet.
A shadow cools her. She feels rather than sees Sam bending, hovering, sitting too.
“We still need two silver dollars,” Sam says.
Nellie chews a tangle of grass, calmed now that the burden’s off her back. Soon the weight will return, but for now. For now. Lucy reaches for Sam’s hand. She brushes something rough in the dirt. It’s the boys’ rucksack, abandoned. Slowly, Lucy swings it. Remembers the clank of it hitting her. She reaches in.
“Sam.”
A hunk of salt pork, the greasy leak of cheese or lard. Hard candy. And waaay beneath, knotted in the fabric, hidden if her fingers didn’t know where to look, if she weren’t a prospector’s daughter, one whose ba said, Why, Lucy girl, you feel where it’s buried. You just feel it,she touches on coins. Copper pennies. Nickels etched with beasts. And silver dollars to lay over two white-swimming eyes, close them the proper way, sending the soul to its final good sleep.
Ba dies in the night, prompting them to seek two silver dollars.
Sam’s tapping an angry beat come morning, but Lucy, before they go, feels a need to speak. Silence weighs harder on her, pushes till she gives way.
“Sorry,” she says to Ba in his bed. The sheet that tucks him is the only clean stretch in this dim and dusty shack, every surface black with coal. Ba didn’t heed the mess while living and in death his mean squint goes right past it. Past Lucy. Straight to Sam. Sam the favorite, round bundle of impatience circling the doorway in too-big boots. Sam clung to Ba’s every word while living and now won’t meet the man’s gaze. That’s when it hits Lucy: Ba really is gone.
She digs a bare toe into dirt floor, rooting for words to make Sam listen. To spread benediction over years of hurt. Dust hangs ghostly in the light from the lone window. No wind to stir it.
Something prods Lucy’s spine.
“Pow,” Sam says. Eleven to Lucy’s twelve, wood to her water as Ma liked to say, Sam is nonetheless shorter by a full foot. Looks young, deceptively soft. “Too slow. You’re dead.” Sam cocks fingers back on pudgy fists and blows on the muzzle of an imagined gun. The way Ba used to. Proper way to do things, Ba said, and when Lucy said Teacher Leigh said these new guns didn’t clog and didn’t need blowing, Ba judged the proper way was to slap her. Stars burst behind her eyes, a flint of pain sharp in her nose.
Lucy’s nose never did grow back straight. She thumbs it, thinking. Proper way, Ba said, was to let it heal itself. When he looked at Lucy’s face after the bloom of bruise faded, he nodded right quick. Like he’d planned it all along. Proper that you should have something to rememory you for sassing.
There’s dirt on Sam’s brown face, sure, and gunpowder rubbed on to look (Sam thinks) like Indian war paint, but beneath it all, Sam’s face is unblemished.
Just this once, because Ba’s fists are helpless under the blanket—and maybe she isgood, issmart, thinks in some small part that riling Ba might make him rise to swing at her—Lucy does what she never does. She cocks herhands, points herfingers. Prods Sam’s chin where paint gives way to baby fat. The jaw another might call delicate, if not for Sam’s way of jutting it.
“Pow yourself,” Lucy says. She pushes Sam like an outlaw to the door.
Sun sucks them dry. Middle of the dry season, rain by now a distant memory. Their valley is bare dirt, halved by a wriggle of creek. On this side are the miners’ flimsy shacks, on the other the moneyed buildings with proper walls, glass windows. And all around, circumscribing, the endless hills seared gold; and hidden within their tall, parched grasses, ragtag camps of prospectors and Indians, knots of vaqueros and travelers and outlaws, and the mine, and more mines, and beyond, and beyond.
Sam squares small shoulders and sets out across the creek, red shirt a shout in the barrenness.
When they first arrived there was still long yellow grass in this valley, and scrub oaks on the ridge, and poppies after rain. The flood three and a half years back rooted up those oaks, drowned or chased away half the people. Yet their family stayed, set alone at the valley’s far edge. Ba like one of those lightning-split trees: dead down the center, roots still gripping on.
And now that Ba’s gone?
Lucy fits her bare feet to Sam’s prints and keeps quiet, saving spit. The water’s long gone, the world after the flood left somehow thirstier.
And long gone, Ma.
—
Across the creek the main street stretches wide, shimmering and dusty as snakeskin. False fronts loom: saloon and blacksmith, trading post and bank and hotel. People lounge in the shadows like lizards.
Jim sits in the general store, scritching in his ledger. It’s wide as him and half as heavy. They say he keeps accounts of what’s owed from every man in the territory.
“Excuse us,” Lucy murmurs, weaving through the kids who loiter near the candy, eyes hungering for a solution to their boredom. “Sorry. Pardon me.” She shrinks herself small. The kids part lazily, arms knocking her shoulders. At least today they don’t reach out to pinch.
Jim’s still fixed on his ledger.
Louder now: “Excuse me, sir?”
A dozen eyes prick Lucy, but still Jim ignores her. Knowing already that the idea’s a bad one, Lucy edges her hand onto the counter to flag his attention.
Jim’s eyes snap up. Red eyes, flesh raw at the rims. “Off,” he says. His voice flicks, steel wire. His hands go on writing. “Washed that counter this morning.”
Jagged laughter from behind. That doesn’t bother Lucy, who after years lived in towns like this has no more tender parts to tear. What scoops her stomach hollow, the way it was when Ma died, is the look in Sam’s eyes. Sam squints mean as Ba.
Ha!Lucy says because Sam won’t. Ha! Ha!Her laughter shields them, makes them part of the pack.
“Only whole chickens today,” Jim says. “No feet for you. Come back tomorrow.”
“We don’t need provisions,” Lucy lies, already tasting the melt of chicken skin on her tongue. She forces herself taller, clenches hands at her sides. And she speaks her need.
I’ll tell you the only magic words that matter,Ba said when he threw Ma’s books in the storm-born lake. He slapped Lucy to stop her crying, but his hand was slow. Almost gentle. He squatted to watch Lucy wipe snot across her face. Ting wo, Lucy girl: On credit.
Ba’s words work some sort of magic, sure enough. Jim pauses his pen.
“Say that again, girl?”
“Two silver dollars. On credit.” Ba’s voice booming at her back, in her ear. Lucy can smell his whiskey breath. Daren’t turn. Should his shovel hands clap her shoulders, she doesn’t know if she’ll scream or laugh, run or hug him round the neck so hard she won’t come loose no matter how he cusses. Ba’s words tumble out the tunnel of her throat like a ghost clambering from the dark: “Payday’s Monday. All we need’s a little stretch. Honest.”
She spits on her hand and extends it.
Jim’s no doubt heard this refrain from miners, from their dry wives and hollow children. Poor like Lucy. Dirty like Lucy. Jim’s been known to grunt, push the needed item over, and charge double interest come payday. Didn’t he once give out bandages on credit after a mine accident? To people desperate like Lucy.
But none of them quite like Lucy. Jim’s gaze measures her. Bare feet. Sweat-stained dress in ill-fitting navy, made from scraps of Ba’s shirt fabric. Gangly arms, hair rough as chicken wire. And her face.
“Grain I’ll give your pa on credit,” Jim says. “And whatever animal parts you find fit to eat.” His lip curls up, flashes a strip of wet gum. On someone else it might be called a smile. “For money, get him to the bank.”
The spit dries tight on Lucy’s untouched palm. “Sir—”
Louder than Lucy’s fading voice, Sam’s boot heel hits the floor. Sam marches, straight-shouldered, out of the store.
—
Small, Sam is. But capable of a man’s strides in those calfskin boots. Sam’s shadow licks back at Lucy’s toes; in Sam’s mind the shadow is the true height, the body a temporary inconvenience. When I’m a cowboy, Sam says. When I’m an adventurer. More recently: When I’m a famous outlaw. When I’m grown. Young enough to think desire alone shapes the world.
“Bank won’t help the likes of us,” Lucy says.
She might as well have said nothing. Dust tickles her nose and she stops to cough. Her throat ripples. She retches last night’s dinner into the street.
Straightaway come the strays, licking at her leavings. For a moment Lucy hesitates, though Sam’s boots beat an impatient tattoo. She imagines abandoning her lone relation to crouch among the dogs, fight them for every drop that’s hers. Theirs is a life of belly and legs, run and feed. Simple life.
She makes herself straighten and walk two-legged.
“Ready, pardner?” Sam says. This one’s a real question, not a chewed-out spit-up line. For the first time today Sam’s dark eyes aren’t squinted. Under protection of Lucy’s shadow, they’ve opened wide, something there half-melting. Lucy moves to touch that short black hair where the red bandana’s come askew. Remembering the smell of Sam’s baby scalp: yeasty, honest with oil and sun.
But by moving she lets sun hit. Sam’s eyes squeeze shut. Sam steps away. Lucy can tell from the bulge of Sam’s pockets that those hands are cocked again.
“I’m ready,” Lucy says.
The floor of the bank is gleaming board. Blond as the hair on the lady teller’s head. So smooth no splinters catch Lucy’s feet. The tap of Sam’s boots acquires a raw edge, like gunshot. Sam’s neck reddens under the war paint.
Ta-tap, they go across the bank. The teller staring.
Ta-TAP. The teller leans back. A man appears from behind her. A chain swings from his vest.
TA-TAP TA-TAP TA-TAP. Sam stretches up to the counter on tiptoe, creasing boot leather. Sam’s always stepped so careful before.
“Two silver dollars,” Sam says.
The teller’s mouth twitches. “Do you have an—”
“They don’t have an account.” It’s the man who speaks, looking at Sam as one might a rat.
Sam gone quiet.
“On credit,” Lucy says. “Please.”
“I’ve seen you two around. Did your father send you to beg?”
In a way, he did.
“Payday’s Monday. We only need a little stretch.” Lucy doesn’t say, Honest. Doesn’t think this man would hear it.
“This isn’t a charity. Run on home, you little—” The man’s lips keep moving for a moment after his voice has stopped, like the woman Lucy once saw speaking in tongues, a force other than her own pushing between her lips. “—beggars. Run on before I call the sheriff.”
Terror walks cold fingers down Lucy’s spine. Not fear of the banker. Fear of Sam. She recognizes the look in Sam’s eyes. Thinks of Ba stiff in the bed, eyes slitted open. She was the first to wake this morning. She found the body and sat vigil those hours before Sam woke, and she closed the eyes as best she could. She figured Ba died angry. Now she knows different: his was the measuring squint of a hunter tracking prey. Already she sees the signs of possession. Ba’s squint in Sam’s eyes. Ba’s anger in Sam’s body. And that’s besides the other holds Ba has on Sam: the boots, the place on Sam’s shoulder where Ba rested his hand. Lucy sees how it’ll go. Ba will rot day by day in that bed, his spirit spilling from his body and moving into Sam till Lucy wakes to see Ba looking out from behind Sam’s eyes. Sam lost forever.
They need to bury Ba once and for all, lock his eyes with the weight of silver. Lucy must make this banker understand. She readies herself to beg.
Sam says,
“Pow.”
Lucy is about to tell Sam to quit fooling. She reaches for those chubby brown fingers, but they’ve gone curiously shiny. Black. Sam is holding Ba’s pistol.
The teller falls in a faint.
“Two silver dollars,” Sam says, voice pitched lower. A shadow of Ba’s voice.
“I’m so sorry, sir,” Lucy says. Her lips go up. Ha! Ha!“You know how kids are with their games, please excuse my little—”
“Run on before I have you lynched,” the man says. Looking straight at Sam. “Run on, you filthy. Little. Chink.”
Sam squeezes the trigger.
A roar. A bang. A rush. The sense of something enormous passing Lucy’s ear. Stroking her with rough palms. When she opens her eyes the air is gray with smoke and Sam has staggered back, hand clapped to a cheek bruised by the pistol’s recoil. The man lies on the ground. For once in her life Lucy resists the tears on Sam’s face, puts Sam second. She crawls away from Sam. Ears ringing. Her fingers find the man’s ankle. His thigh. His chest. His whole, unblemished, beating chest. There’s a welt on his temple from where he leapt back and banged his head on a shelf. Apart from that the man is unharmed. The gun misfired.
From the cloud of smoke and powder, Lucy hears Ba laughing
“Sam.” She resists the urge to cry too. Needing to be stronger than herself, now. “Sam, you idiot, bao bei, you little shit.” Mixing the sweet and the sour, the caress and the cuss. Like Ba. “We gotta go.”
—
What could almost make a girl laugh is how Ba came to these hills to be a prospector. Like thousands of others he thought the yellow grass of this land, its coin-bright gleam in the sun, promised even brighter rewards. But none of those who came to dig the West reckoned on the land’s parched thirst, on how it drank their sweat and strength. None of them reckoned on its stinginess. Most came too late. The riches had been dug up, dried out. The streams bore no gold. The soil bore no crops. Instead they found a far duller prize locked within the hills: coal. A man couldn’t grow rich on coal, or use it to feed his eyes and imagination. Though it could feed his family, in a way, weeviled meal and scraps of meat, until his wife, wearied out by dreaming, died delivering a son. Then the cost of her feed could be diverted into a man’s drink. Months of hope and savings amounting to this: a bottle of whiskey, two graves dug where they wouldn’t be found. What could almost make a girl laugh—ha! ha!—is that Ba brought them here to strike it rich and now they’d kill for two silver dollars.
—
So they steal. Take what they need to flee town. Sam resists at first, stubborn as ever.
“We didn’t hurt nobody,” Sam insists.
Didn’tyou mean to, though?Lucy thinks. She says, “They’ll make anything a crime for the likes of us. Make it law if they have to. Don’t you remember?”
Sam’s chin lifts, but Lucy sees hesitation. On this cloudless day they both feel the lash of rain. Remembering when storm howled inside and even Ba could do nothing.
“We can’t wait around,” Lucy says. “Not even to bury.”
Finally, Sam nods.
They crawl to the schoolhouse, bellies in the dirt. Too easy by half to become what others call them: animals, low-down thieves. Lucy sneaks around the building to a spot she knows is blocked from view by the chalkboard. Voices rise inside. Recitation has a rhythm near to holiness, the boom of Teacher Leigh calling and the chorus of students in answer. Almost, almost, Lucy lifts her voice to join.
But it’s been years since she was allowed inside. The desk she occupied holds two new students. Lucy bites her cheek till blood comes and unties Teacher Leigh’s gray mare, Nellie. At the last moment she takes Nellie’s saddlebags too, heavy with horse oats.
Back at their place, Lucy instructs Sam to pack what’s needed from inside. She herself keeps outside, probing the shed and garden. Within: thumps, clangs, the sounds of grief and fury. Lucy doesn’t enter; Sam doesn’t ask for help. An invisible wall came up between them in the bank, when Lucy crawled past Sam to touch the banker with gentle fingers.
Lucy leaves a note on the door for Teacher Leigh. She strains for the grand phrases he taught her years back, as if they could be a proof stronger than the proof of her thievery. She doesn’t manage it. Her handwriting scrawls end to end with Sorrys.
Sam emerges with bedrolls, scant provisions, a pot and pan, and Ma’s old trunk. It drags in the dirt, near as long as a man is tall, those leather latches straining. Lucy can’t guess what mementos Sam packed inside, and they shouldn’t tax the horse—but what’s between them makes her hair prickle. She says nothing. Only hands Sam a wizened carrot, their last bit of sweetness for a while. A peace offering. Sam puts half in Nellie’s mouth, half in a pocket. That kindness heartens Lucy, even if its recipient is a horse.
“Did you say goodbye?” Lucy asks as Sam throws rope over Nellie’s back, ties some slipknots. Sam only grunts, putting a shoulder under the trunk to heave it up. That brown face goes red, then purple from effort. Lucy lends her shoulder too. The trunk slips into a loop of rope, and Lucy fancies she hears from within a banging.
Beside her, Sam’s face whips round. Dark face, and in it, white-bared teeth. Fear shivers through Lucy. She steps back. She lets Sam tighten the rope alone.
Lucy doesn’t go in to bid farewell to the body. She had her hours beside it this morning. And truth be told, Ba died when Ma did. That body is three and a half years empty of the man it once held. At long last, they’ll be going far enough to outrun his haint.
—
Lucy girl, Ba says, limping into her dream, ben dan
He’s in rare good humor. Employing his fondest cuss, the one she was weaned on. She tries to turn and see him, but her neck won’t move.
What’d I teach you?
She starts on multiplication tables. Her mouth won’t move, either.
Don’t remember, d’you? Always making a mess. Luan qi ba zao.There’s the splat of Ba spitting in disgust. The uneven thump of his bad leg, then his good. Can’t get nothing right.As she grew older, Ba shrank. Eating rarely. What he consumed seemed only to feed his temper, which stuck to his side like a faithful old cur. Dui. Thasright.More splats, moving farther from her. He’s starting to slur with drink. Yaliddletraitor.Given up on math, he filled their shack with language. A rich vocabulary that Ma wouldn’t have approved. You lazy sackash—gou shi.
—
Lucy wakes up to gold all around her. The dry yellow grass of the hills sways jackrabbit-high a few miles outside town. Wind imparts a shimmer like sun off soft metal. Her neck throbs from a night on the ground.
The water. That’s what Ba taught her. She forgot to boil the water.
She tilts the flask: empty. Maybe she dreamed of filling it. But no—Sam whimpered from thirst in the night, and Lucy went down to the stream.
Soft and stupid, Ba whispers. Where d’you keep those brains you prize so much?The sun’s unforgiving; he fades with a parting shot. Why, they melt clean away when you’re scared.
Lucy finds the first splatter of vomit flickering like dark mirage. The mass of flies shifts lazily. More splatters lead her to the stream, which in daylight reveals itself as muddy. Brown. Like every other stream in mining country, it’s filthy with runoff. She forgot to boil the water. Farther down she finds Sam collapsed. Sam’s eyes closed, Sam’s fingers unfisted. Clothes a foul, buzzing mess.
This time Lucy boils the water, builds a fire so fierce it makes her head swim. When the water is as cool as it’ll get she washes Sam’s fevered body.
Sam’s eyes waver open. “No.”
“Shh. You’re sick. Let me help.”
“No.” Sam’s bathed alone for years, but surely this is different.
Sam’s legs kick without strength. Lucy peels back crusted fabric, holding her breath against the stench. Sam’s eyes burn so shiny with fever it looks like hate. Ba’s hand-me-down pants, bunched with rope, come away easy. At the join of Sam’s legs, tucked into a fold of the underdrawers, Lucy bumps something. A hard, gnarled protrusion.
Lucy draws half a carrot from the indent between her little sister’s legs: a poor replacement for the parts Ba wanted Sam to have.
Lucy finishes the job she started, hand shaking so that the washcloth scrapes harder than she means it to. Sam doesn’t whimper. Doesn’t look. Eyes turned toward the horizon. Pretending, as Sam always does when the truth can’t be avoided, that she has nothing to do with this body of hers, a child’s body, androgynous still, prized by a father who wanted a son.
Lucy knows she should speak. But how to explain this pact between Sam and Ba that never made sense to her? A mountain’s risen in Lucy’s throat, one she can’t cross. Sam’s eyes follow the ruined carrot as Lucy flings it away.
—
For a day Sam retches up dirty water, and for three more lies in fever. Eyes closed when Lucy brings oats cooked to porridge, twigs to feed the fire. In these slow hours Lucy studies a sister she almost forgot: the budded lips, the dark fern lashes. Illness sharpens Sam’s round face, making it more like Lucy’s: horsier, gaunter, the skin sallower, more yellow than brown. A face that shows its weakness
Lucy fans Sam’s hair out. Chopped short three and a half years back, it now reaches just under Sam’s ears. Silk-fine and sun-hot.
The ways Sam hid herself seemed innocent. Childish. Hair and dirt and war paint. Ba’s old clothes and Ba’s borrowed swagger. But even when Sam resisted Ma’s manners, insisted on working and riding out of town with Ba, Lucy figured those for the old games of dress-up. Never this far. Never this carrot, this trying to push and change something deep inside.
It’s a clever job. Loose fabric in the underdrawers, sewn to form a hidden pocket. Well-done for a girl who refused girl’s chores.
The stench of sickness clings to camp, though Sam’s shits have stopped and she’s strong enough to bathe alone. Clouds of flies persist and Nellie’s tail won’t quit its switching. Sam’s suffered enough blows to her pride, so Lucy doesn’t mention the stink.
One night Lucy comes back dangling a squirrel, Sam’s favorite. It was trying to scramble up a tree with a broken paw. Sam’s nowhere to be found. Nor Nellie. Lucy spins, hands bloody, heart ticking and ticking. To match its rhythm she sings a song about two tigers playing hide-and-seek. It’s been years since any stream in this territory ran deep enough to support a creature bigger than a jackal; the song comes from a lusher time. This is a song that Sam, if Sam is scared and hiding, won’t mistake. Twice Lucy thinks she sees a stripe in the brush. Little tiger, little tiger,she sings. Footfalls behind her. Lai.
A shadow swallows Lucy’s feet. A pressure between her shoulders.
This time Sam does not say, Pow
In the silence Lucy’s thoughts circle and come down slow, almost peaceful, the way vultures drift without hurry—nothing to hurry once the deed’s been done. Where did Sam stash the gun after they fled the bank? How many of its chambers are still loaded?
She speaks Sam’s name.
“Shaddup.” This is Sam’s first word since No. “We shoot traitors in these parts.”
She reminds Sam of what they are. Pardners.
The pressure slides down to rest on the small of Lucy’s back. The natural height of Sam’s arm, as if Sam grows weary.
“Don’t move.” The pressure lifts. “I’ve got my sights on you.” Lucy should turn. She should. But. Know what you are?Ba snarled at Lucy the day Sam came back from school, left eye a plum. Lucy’s clothes damningly clean. A coward. A lily-livered girl.The truth is Lucy didn’t know that day, watching Sam face the kids who taunted, if it was bravery that made Sam yell. Was it braver to move loud or to stand quiet as Lucy did, letting spittle run down her lowered face? She didn’t know and doesn’t know now. She hears reins slap, hears Nellie’s whicker. Hooves hit the ground, each step trembling through her bare feet.
—
She says, “I’m looking for my little sister.”
High noon at a settlement that’s little more than two streets and crossroads. Every soul naps through the heat save two brothers who kick a can till the cheap metal ruptures. For a while now they’ve been eyeing a dog, a stray, trying to lure it with their rucksack of groceries. The dog hungry but wary, remembering old blows.
And then they look up at her, an apparition blown in to end their boredom.
“You seen her?”
Spooked at first, the boys peer closer. A tall girl with a long face, crooked nose, strange eyes over high, broad cheeks. A face made stranger by an altogether awkward body. Patched dress, old bruises slipping shadows under the skin. The boys see a child even less loved than they.
The plumper boy starts to say no. The skinny one jabs him.
“Maybe we did and maybe we didn’t. What’s she look like, huh? She got hair like yours?” A hand jerks out and grips a black braid. The other hand twists the bumpy nose. “An ugly nose like yours?” Now both pairs of hands are grabbing wrist and ankle, pulling narrower her narrow eyes, pinching hard at the skin stretched tight over her cheeks. “Funny eyes like yours, huh?”
The dog watches from a distance, with relief.
Her quiet perplexes them. The fat one grabs her throat, as if to milk her of words. She’s seen his kind. Not those bullies who ran toward the task but the others, slow or lazy-eyed or stuttering, who trailed, reluctant. Those with gratitude mixed into their hate—because her strangeness let them into the pack.
For now the fat one holds her gaze, wondering, holds her throat, longer perhaps than he means to. She starts to choke. Who knows how long he would have held if a round brown body didn’t come barreling into his back. The fat boy falls, gasping from the impact.
“Get off her,” says the newcomer who hit him. Furious eyes, cut narrow.
“You and what army?” says the skinnier boy, sneering.
And Lucy, breath reentering in one shuddering whoosh, looks up at Sam.
Sam whistles, summoning Nellie from behind an oak. Sam reaches for a bundle on the horse’s back. What Sam means to grab, none of the others will know. Lucy fancies she sees a gleam, hard and black as purest coal. But first, a fat white something plops from the trunk and lands in the dust.
Lucy, head spinning, thinks: Rice.
They are white grains, like rice, but they wriggle, and crawl, and split outward as if lost and seeking. Sam’s face is impassive. A breeze insinuates itself among them, bringing the churning smell of rot.
The skinny brother skitters, shrieks: Maggots!
Nellie, good-natured well-bred mare, but shuddering, wild-eyed, barely contained, carrying fear on her back for five full days now, takes this voice as a message and finally decides to bolt.
She doesn’t go far with Sam holding the reins. Nellie jerks, the load of pots clanging alarm. A knot loosens, the trunk slides, the lid bangs open. Spilling an arm. Part of what was once a face.
Ba is half jerky and half swamp. His skinny limbs dried to brown rope. While his softer parts—groin, stomach, eyes—swim with greenish-white pools of maggots. The boys don’t see it, not truly. They run at the first suggestion of the face. Only Lucy and Sam look full on. He’s theirs, after all. And Lucy thinks—why, this is no worse than his face in a dozen other permutations, monstrous with drink or rage. She steps closer, Sam’s gaze a weight on her back. Gently, she lowers the trunk from the ropes that hold it. Pushes the body back inside.
But she’ll remember.
More than drink and more than rage, Ba’s face reminds her of that once she saw him crying and didn’t dare go up, his features so melted by grief she feared her well-meant touch would dissolve his flesh. Expose the skull beneath. Now there it is, that peek of bone, and it is not so fearful. She shuts the lid and reties the latches. Turns.
“Sam,” she says, and in that moment, with eyes full of Ba, she sees that same melting on Sam’s face.
“What,” Sam says.
Lucy remembers, then, tenderness, a thing she thought dead along with Ma.
“You were right. I should have listened to you. We’ve got to bury.”
She saw more than she thought she could, bore it while those boys cowered. They ran, and their imaginings will follow all their lives at their heels. For her, who didn’t turn away, the haunting may begin to be done. She feels a swell of gratitude for Sam.
“I aimed to miss,” Sam says. “That banker. I only meant to scare him.”
Lucy looks down, always down, into Sam’s sweat-shiny face. A face brown as mud and just as malleable, a face on which Lucy has seen emotions take shape with an ease she envies. Many emotions but never fear. Yet there is fear now. For the first time she sees herself reflected in her sister. And this, Lucy realizes, this more than the schoolyard taunts or the press of the gun’s cold snout, is her moment of courage. She closes her eyes. She sits, face in her arms. She judges the proper way is quiet.
A shadow cools her. She feels rather than sees Sam bending, hovering, sitting too.
“We still need two silver dollars,” Sam says.
Nellie chews a tangle of grass, calmed now that the burden’s off her back. Soon the weight will return, but for now. For now. Lucy reaches for Sam’s hand. She brushes something rough in the dirt. It’s the boys’ rucksack, abandoned. Slowly, Lucy swings it. Remembers the clank of it hitting her. She reaches in.
“Sam.”
A hunk of salt pork, the greasy leak of cheese or lard. Hard candy. And waaay beneath, knotted in the fabric, hidden if her fingers didn’t know where to look, if she weren’t a prospector’s daughter, one whose ba said, Why, Lucy girl, you feel where it’s buried. You just feel it,she touches on coins. Copper pennies. Nickels etched with beasts. And silver dollars to lay over two white-swimming eyes, close them the proper way, sending the soul to its final good sleep.