Plum
A plum, Ba says tenderly as he studies Sam’s face. Though the bruise on Sam’s cheek, swelling from the cut that just missed Sam’s eye, bears little resemblance to the fruit Sam loves.
Lucy, sickened, turns away. Ba grabs her chin. Forces her to look.
“Didn’t I say?” Ba asks. “Stick by your family. I didn’t raise you this way. Not as a coward. Not as a girl who—”
Ma puts herself between them. Her belly, against Ba’s stomach, saying: The baby. Today Ba won’t be silenced.
“I told you,” he says, glaring now at Ma. “School’s no place for Sam.”
“Bu hui happen twice,” Ma says. “Sam will be a good girl now, won’t you? I’ll speak to the teacher. There’s value to be had from schooling. Kan kan Lucy. How well she’s doing.”
Ba pays Lucy no mind. He’s looking at Ma. A deadly hush falls once more in the room. It seems to seep from a place older and deeper than Lucy and Sam. From out of that place, Ba says in a peculiar, cold voice, “Didn’t you learn your lesson?” As if Ma isn’t Ma but a little girl like Lucy. “I figured the two hundred would rememory you against thinking you know best.”
The words mean nothing to Lucy, or to Sam, who returns her confused gaze. Two hundred is a nonsense number. Yet Ma clutches the table. For all her regained weight, she looks sick once more.
“Wo ji de,” Ma says, pressing her hands to her face. Hard, as if she means to push through to bone. “Dang ran.”
Though Ba’s won this argument, he looks even worse than Ma. The juice has left him. His bad leg wobbles. Sam rushes to him, and Lucy to Ma, and once more the house is split.
That marks the end of Sam’s schooling.
—
Sam’s wish comes true. The red dress is laid away, a shirt and pants cut down to size. Boys get paid more, Ba says, and Ma doesn’t argue, though she draws the line at cutting Sam’s hair. It’s braided to hide the missing portion, tucked under a cap.
Ma’s been awful quiet since the fight. A distance in her eyes. She startles when Lucy speaks, as if surfacing from a shaft.
“I want to stay home today,” Lucy repeats.
“School?” Ma says, blinking. She turns away at last from the oilcloth window, where she’s been staring at the smudge of horizon.
“Teacher Leigh said not to worry.” He came wading among the Cowboys, crying, Desist,you little beasts!He took Sam’s scissors and helped the redhead up. Go home,he said to Lucy. And don’t worry about returning tomorrow.
Lucy’s grateful for the pardon. Thing is, the teacher forgot to mention when she should return. A week passes with no word. Sam’s plum grows backward: black to purple to blue to unripe green. Ba still won’t look at Lucy. Ma won’t look at Ba. The shack more stifling than usual. Come Sunday, Lucy can bear it no longer. With Ba and Sam at the mine working a spare shift, she decides to visit the teacher. Weeks ago he mentioned extra lessons, and told her where to find his house.
To her surprise, Ma’s eyes uncloud. Ma insists on going along.
—
A ways down the main street on the South side of town, a sign reading LEIGHpoints them up a narrow path. The teacher lives on a road that is his alone, which starts out dirt and becomes gravel. Soon neat rows of coyote brush rise on either side, their tops trimmed and even. The dusty leaves hide the rough backsides of the stores, the view of the miners’ half of the valley. And they hide the people that look at Ma even sharper than they look at Sam.
When they arrive at the teacher’s house with its two stories and stone chimney, its porch and eight glass windows, its accompanying stable with a gray horse that must be the teacher’s Nellie—a house so orderly it makes Lucy’s heart beat fast—Lucy finds that she wishes Ma far, far away
Easy enough to tell tales of Ma to the teacher. In the flesh there’s no hiding Ma’s bare feet, slick, one toenail cracked. And for all that Ma disguises her belly under a skirt, her rough hands under gloves, nothing can disguise her voice. Next to history, Teacher Leigh’s favorite subject is elocution. There’s wrongness in Ma’s speech. Her lilt. Her way of swallowing some sounds and lingering too long on others.
“I want to talk to him alone,” Lucy says. And then, to stop Ma from protesting, “I can do it myself. I don’t need you.”
Ma doesn’t smile so much as bare her teeth. “Kan kan. You’ve grown up.” She takes a step back, then swoops close to Lucy’s ear and says, “Nu er, you remind me of myself at your age.”
A part of Lucy has waited her whole life to hear this. There’s a warm whoosh in her ears, her heart riding high in her chest. If they were alone on the trail she might well whoop into the dusk, and never care who heard it. Here she’s mindful of the glass windows, the dignified hush of the coyote-brush lane. She keeps still. She waits for Ma to step back against the wall, hidden from sight. Only then does Lucy knock.
“Sir,” Lucy says when the door opens. “I’m here, please, for the extra lessons.”
The teacher frowns, as if at a slow student. “Lucy. You must know it’s poor manners to come visiting uninvited.”
“I’m very sorry. That’s the thing, sir, there’s so much I don’t know. I’d be honored to learn from you.”
“I enjoyed teaching you. You’re a smart girl, and so unusual. It’s a shame—what a sensation you would have made back East had I included your development in my monograph!” Lucy starts to smile. Teacher Leigh puts his hand on the doorframe. “But that little tableau of violence was unacceptable. Savagery runs in your blood, and I can’t have my other students disturbed. I must think of the greater good.”
Lucy holds her smile, though it’s leaden now. “I wasn’t fighting, sir.”
“Lies don’t flatter your intellect, Lucy. I saw you in that circle. And I heard from the other students how Samantha instigated the affair. No—results don’t matter. I saw your intentions.”
The teacher lets go of the door as Lucy says, “I’m not like Sam. I’m not.”
Lucy could shove her arm through the gap, could grab for what she wants so desperately. That would only prove what the teacher suspects.
And then Ma grasps the knob. Teacher Leigh looks at her gloved hand, indignant. Up her arm, her shoulder. Into her face.
“Thank you for teaching Lucy,” Ma says.
That husky voice, unexpected against Ma’s smoothness. Ma who skins rabbits still twitching, who hauled the mule from a sinkhole. As if in answer, Ma speaks slower. A knife dragged through honey.
“We’ve walked a fair piece. May we come in for a glass of water?”
Ma gives Lucy the piercing look that says, This is our secret. Then she’s smiling at the teacher, the smile sweetened like the voice is sweetened. Nothing changes. Everything changes. The teacher steps back, holding the door wide open. Some power leaves him and moves to Ma. She steps through
—
Ma sinks into the teacher’s horsehair couch as if she’s sat there every day of her life. Her skin glows against the open window. She belongs here, of a piece with the lace curtains, the honeyed wood, the thin white teacups with their gold rims.
Lucy looks away, looks back. A thrill runs through her each time. Ma set in the center of that parlor like a picture in a frame. To judge by his face, the teacher feels that same thrill.
He pours tea and sets out cookies with dark, oozing centers. “The jam is made from cultivated hothouse plums. Not like these sour, wild trees in the West. My folks back East send the jam by train and then wagon, but once you taste you’ll see it’s well worth the extra cost.”
Ma refuses, giving Lucy another look. Don’t be beholden, Ma likes to say. Her gloved hands stay tidy in her lap. Miserably, Lucy leaves the cookies alone too.
“Tell me about yourself,” the teacher says.
Light shifts down the couch, down Ma’s body as the hours pass. Illuminating one piece at a time: the soft cheek, the long neck, the crease of an elbow, the ankle peeping just above the skirt. The shadows of Sam’s wildness are vanquished from this room—Ma proof that decency lives in Lucy. Teacher Leigh and Ma discuss where she came from, the latest news from back East, the cultivation of plants and gardens, Lucy’s reading, and how Ma taught her.
“And yourself?” Teacher Leigh says. “Where did you learn to read?”
Lucy’s heard the story half a hundred times. Your ma was a poor student, Ba starts. And Ma jumps in: Poor teacher, more like. Your ba couldn’t sit still. Together they recount how Ba taught Ma to read, interrupting and joking, silly as children.
Ma smiles. Looks down at her teacup, so that her lashes scatter shadows on the porcelain. “I picked it up here and there.”
“And where was that?”
Ma gives a tinkling laugh that fits this room. No kin to her other laugh that crackles. Roars. “I think Lucy should be the one to answer your questions. She’s a smart girl. I know she’d love to be in a classroom again.”
Who could refuse Ma?
—
As they leave, Ma dips her head to Lucy and asks if she is happy.
Sunset leaves a glaze on the coyote brush. The world looks good enough to eat. Teacher Leigh’s hair is corn silk as he waves from the porch, Ma’s lips marrow-dark.
“I’m happy. But, Ma? Why didn’t you tell him about learning to read?”
The house disappears from view. Rather than answer, Ma shucks her glove. Her fingers root in her pocket and emerge dirt-speckled. “Try this,” she says, reaching for Lucy’s mouth.
Lucy catches a hint of sweetness. Cautiously, she licks.
“From all the way back East,” Ma says, pulling a handful of plum cookies from her pocket. “Fang xin, Lucy girl. Did you see how many he ate? He won’t notice. He’s a good man under his ruffles. Ying gai accept those extra lessons.”
Lucy abstains as Ma eats. The sweet fades to sour on her tongue. “But why did you lie, Ma?”
“Don’t whine.” Ma wipes her fingers. “Ni zhang da le. Old enough to know what’s a lie, and what’s better left unsaid. Remember I taught you about burying? Well, sometimes truth needs burying too.”
The cookies, and all traces of Ma’s gluttony, are gone. Her face has a cat’s satisfaction. So neat and clean that Lucy asks, meanly, “Like the two hundred?”
Later, Lucy will wonder what might’ve been different had she been kinder. Less selfish. Or as smart as Ma believed her to be, capable of reading what was written on Ma’s trembling lip. Ma says, so softly, “I’ll tell you when you’re older. Xian zai help me out, Lucy girl. Don’t tell your ba about this visit, or your lessons. Hao bu hao?”
Lucy wants to ask, Why not now? What’s older mean?But Ma smiles again, a smile Teacher Leigh didn’t see, because this smile has no place in that light-filled parlor. And Lucy is reminded that what makes Ma most beautiful is the contradiction of her. Rough voice over smooth skin. Smile stretched over sadness—this queer ache that makes Ma’s eyes look miles and miles away. Brimming with an ocean’s worth of wet.
“I won’t tell,” Lucy promises the woman who keeps her secrets.
Ma takes her hand and they walk in silence back down to the main street, coyote brush receding as they leave the teacher’s land. The town reappears.
And they see the clouds.
Strange clouds, too low and too early—the wet season is months away. Men spill from the stores, the saloon. They stare at the swift-moving clouds rushing from the direction of the mine, risen up from the ground to darken the sky. Ma squeezes so hard that Lucy yelps.
They last saw clouds like this a year ago on the trail. Mistook them for locusts till a boom lit the horizon orange. For three days fires raged, a distant mine burning. And Ma—Ma who braved storm and drought, who once set her own broken finger—Ma sank her head to her knees and shivered. Didn’t look up till they were long past. She doesn’t like fire, Ba said brusquely when Lucy asked. Shut that big mouth.
Now Ma hitches up her skirt and runs, dragging Lucy along. Other women are running too, barefoot women, a flood of miners’ wives heading home. Flashes of calf and thigh; the ragged pant of breath. Nothing ladylike about this dash. Ma, eyes wild, doesn’t appear to notice.
Ma stumbles crossing the creek. In the space opened up by her falling body, Lucy sees that the clouds have overtaken the sun.
Ma twists. Her shoulder hits the ground in place of her stomach. Darkness stains her dress—but it’s only plum jam.
“Ni zhi dao, Lucy girl, what happens to bodies in a fire?” Ma says as Lucy drags her up. Now they pass the other miners’ shacks. Lanterns glow within; the open doors punch yellow into the false night. “I know.” Women and girls stand outside, looking toward the clouds. “Fire leaves nothing to bury.” Lucy hums, as if soothing a panicked mule. “The haints yi bei zi follow. They never let you go.” Ash begins to fall. The bigger pieces like moths, which Ma always hated. She claimed that moths are the dead come visiting.
—
But there are no ghosts in their shack. Just Ba and Sam, the table set, a waft of good cooking.
“You’re filthy!” Sam says with glee.
Ba stands, holding two plates. “Lai,” he says. “Wash up after you eat.”
At the table, legs swinging, Sam hums Ma’s tiger song.
Ma steps back. “Where were you?”
“The mine.” Ba steps forward with a plate. Ma steps back again. “Right, Sam? Tell your ma.”
“We worked hard,” Sam says with a full mouth.
“When?” Ma says.
“We got back not long ago. Must’ve just missed you.” Ba frowns at the stain on Ma’s dress. Reaches. Ma twists away as if dancing, though there’s no humming now, no music in the silent room. Sam’s head turns like a wary creature to track Ma. “What happened to you?”
Ma slaps Ba’s hand aside. The plate falls, doesn’t break. Spins round and round, whining.
“Leave it,” Ma hisses as Ba stoops. His outstretched hand is as clean as his face, the nailbeds pink. How long since they were black with coal? Lucy can’t recall. “Where were you?”
“The mine.”
“Fei hua.”
“Might be we stopped along the way to explore. Can’t quite remember—”
“Liar.” Ma rips the dirty oilcloth from the window, and the eerie horizon shows.
“I can explain,” Ba says, staring out. “We left early. Ting wo—”
“I thought you were dead.”
“We’re safe, qin ai de.” Ba moves to hug her.
Again Ma says, “I thought you were dead.” She steps back. Her shoulder meets the door. And Lucy sees for the first time how Ma’s eyes could be what the kids say: small, unlovely, mean. Ma studies Ba as she studies food gone rancid. Judging what good is left, and what to toss out. “I thought you were dead.” Three times she’s said it now, flat and strange, like a spell. “What’s real, then? Na ge outside is real. Ni ne? What does that make you? Some kind of haint?”
“Let me explain. We didn’t mean to scare you. We were working to—to make you happy.”
“Me?” The words come rasping out of Ma. “You aim to blame me? Cuo shi wo de? Mine?” The unbroken plate left the promise of a crash in the air. “What’s real, then? Which of your promises? Ni bu shi dong xi, ni zhe ge—”
Ma made of their hard life something orderly. Amid grass and dirt, from wagon beds and hard-used houses, Ma wrangled for them a life of soft voices and clean speech. A life of braided hair and swept floors, cut nails and pressed collars. What people see shapes how they treat you, Ma said again and again. Now something’s come loose in Ma, her hair unwinding around her dirty face, her words unwinding into cusses.
Ba steps forward. No place for Ma to flee, unless it’s out the door. Her fingers grip the knob as Ba pushes his fist against her mouth.
Ma stops talking.
When Ba pulls back, he leaves something yellow between Ma’s lips. Something all the light in the room rushes toward.
“Bite down,” he says.
Ma’s fingers are still on the knob. One push and she could be gone.
She bites.
She spits a pebble into her hand. The print of her teeth in its soft yellow surface.
“This is real,” Ba says. “I had to make sure. I only meant to keep it secret till I ascertained it would be enough.”
“You’ve been prospecting,” Ma says. The forbidden word billows round the room. A hot, singed smell. “You promised you’d quit. The widows? The woodcutting?” Ba shakes his head. “Kan kan, this is what I think of prospecting.”
Ma tips the pebble to her mouth and swallows. Like bone and like mud, another piece of the land slips into her. Sam wails. Ba looks shaken. But then he grins.
“Mei wen ti,” Ba says. “Plenty where that came from.”
“I ate it,” Ma says, slumping. Poor posture pushes her belly out, rounded now as the hills are rounded.
“Heate it,” Ba says, and this time Ma lets him touch her. “Why, he’ll be rich. Come here, Sam. Show your ma.”
Sam comes forward with a dirty old pouch. Lucy recognizes it for the same one she used in the mine to hold a rag and a candle stub. In Sam’s hands that same pouch releases a gleaming shower. Lucy thinks of the fairy tale: the good sister and the bad. One passed through the door and soot stuck to her. Marked her all her life. The other passed through and came out dazzled.
Someone says, “Gold.”
—
For the first seven years of Lucy’s life, Ba was a prospector. Seven years of life lived as if windblown, drifting from site to site on the rumor of gold.
Ma set her foot down two years back. One night she left Lucy and Sam in the wagon, and for hours she and Ba talked in the open hills. Snatches drifted back, Ma’s voice holding forth on hunger and foolishness, pride and luck. Ba was silent. Come morning, the prospecting tools were packed away. Ba nursed sullenness for a month, gambled and drank. It was Ma who first mentioned coal mines.
Since then, Ba’s put away most of the gambling, and most of the drinking too. He blusters of fortunes made in coal, as he once blustered of fortunes made from other materials. The forbidden word went unsaid—till now.
Tonight, as ash from a burning mine falls through their window, Ba tells them about the gold.
How he heard rumors about these hills, plied from old prospectors and Indian trackers. Here, where a dried-up lake sits on a plateau, and where lone, mad wolves can still be found. How Ba figured that a quake a year back, and the digging of a big mine, might have unearthed something unseen for a decade. He prospected in secret, under guise of woodcutting in the dark.
“I struck gold early on,” Ba says as he kneels, washing grime from Ma’s feet. “That second payday—that was the gold. I walked ten miles south to trade it for coin at some little outpost—that’s why I was gone all night. Didn’t I promise you a fortune? We can buy whatever you want, qin ai de. Whatever hedeserves. We’re special.” Ba turns to Sam and Lucy, grinning. “Girls, you know the only thing in this territory more powerful than a gun?”
“Tigers,” Sam says.
“History?” Lucy says.
“Family,” Ma says, hugging her stomach.
Ba shakes his head. Closes his eyes. “I mean to buy a big parcel of land out in these hills. So big we won’t need to see another soul. We’ll have all the space in the world to hunt and breathe. That’s the kind of place I aim for him to grow up in. Imagine that, girls. That’s proper power.”
They all of them go quiet, imagining. Till Ma breaks the spell. Doesn’t say yes, and doesn’t say no. She says, “This is the last time you lie to me.
A plum, Ba says tenderly as he studies Sam’s face. Though the bruise on Sam’s cheek, swelling from the cut that just missed Sam’s eye, bears little resemblance to the fruit Sam loves.
Lucy, sickened, turns away. Ba grabs her chin. Forces her to look.
“Didn’t I say?” Ba asks. “Stick by your family. I didn’t raise you this way. Not as a coward. Not as a girl who—”
Ma puts herself between them. Her belly, against Ba’s stomach, saying: The baby. Today Ba won’t be silenced.
“I told you,” he says, glaring now at Ma. “School’s no place for Sam.”
“Bu hui happen twice,” Ma says. “Sam will be a good girl now, won’t you? I’ll speak to the teacher. There’s value to be had from schooling. Kan kan Lucy. How well she’s doing.”
Ba pays Lucy no mind. He’s looking at Ma. A deadly hush falls once more in the room. It seems to seep from a place older and deeper than Lucy and Sam. From out of that place, Ba says in a peculiar, cold voice, “Didn’t you learn your lesson?” As if Ma isn’t Ma but a little girl like Lucy. “I figured the two hundred would rememory you against thinking you know best.”
The words mean nothing to Lucy, or to Sam, who returns her confused gaze. Two hundred is a nonsense number. Yet Ma clutches the table. For all her regained weight, she looks sick once more.
“Wo ji de,” Ma says, pressing her hands to her face. Hard, as if she means to push through to bone. “Dang ran.”
Though Ba’s won this argument, he looks even worse than Ma. The juice has left him. His bad leg wobbles. Sam rushes to him, and Lucy to Ma, and once more the house is split.
That marks the end of Sam’s schooling.
—
Sam’s wish comes true. The red dress is laid away, a shirt and pants cut down to size. Boys get paid more, Ba says, and Ma doesn’t argue, though she draws the line at cutting Sam’s hair. It’s braided to hide the missing portion, tucked under a cap.
Ma’s been awful quiet since the fight. A distance in her eyes. She startles when Lucy speaks, as if surfacing from a shaft.
“I want to stay home today,” Lucy repeats.
“School?” Ma says, blinking. She turns away at last from the oilcloth window, where she’s been staring at the smudge of horizon.
“Teacher Leigh said not to worry.” He came wading among the Cowboys, crying, Desist,you little beasts!He took Sam’s scissors and helped the redhead up. Go home,he said to Lucy. And don’t worry about returning tomorrow.
Lucy’s grateful for the pardon. Thing is, the teacher forgot to mention when she should return. A week passes with no word. Sam’s plum grows backward: black to purple to blue to unripe green. Ba still won’t look at Lucy. Ma won’t look at Ba. The shack more stifling than usual. Come Sunday, Lucy can bear it no longer. With Ba and Sam at the mine working a spare shift, she decides to visit the teacher. Weeks ago he mentioned extra lessons, and told her where to find his house.
To her surprise, Ma’s eyes uncloud. Ma insists on going along.
—
A ways down the main street on the South side of town, a sign reading LEIGHpoints them up a narrow path. The teacher lives on a road that is his alone, which starts out dirt and becomes gravel. Soon neat rows of coyote brush rise on either side, their tops trimmed and even. The dusty leaves hide the rough backsides of the stores, the view of the miners’ half of the valley. And they hide the people that look at Ma even sharper than they look at Sam.
When they arrive at the teacher’s house with its two stories and stone chimney, its porch and eight glass windows, its accompanying stable with a gray horse that must be the teacher’s Nellie—a house so orderly it makes Lucy’s heart beat fast—Lucy finds that she wishes Ma far, far away
Easy enough to tell tales of Ma to the teacher. In the flesh there’s no hiding Ma’s bare feet, slick, one toenail cracked. And for all that Ma disguises her belly under a skirt, her rough hands under gloves, nothing can disguise her voice. Next to history, Teacher Leigh’s favorite subject is elocution. There’s wrongness in Ma’s speech. Her lilt. Her way of swallowing some sounds and lingering too long on others.
“I want to talk to him alone,” Lucy says. And then, to stop Ma from protesting, “I can do it myself. I don’t need you.”
Ma doesn’t smile so much as bare her teeth. “Kan kan. You’ve grown up.” She takes a step back, then swoops close to Lucy’s ear and says, “Nu er, you remind me of myself at your age.”
A part of Lucy has waited her whole life to hear this. There’s a warm whoosh in her ears, her heart riding high in her chest. If they were alone on the trail she might well whoop into the dusk, and never care who heard it. Here she’s mindful of the glass windows, the dignified hush of the coyote-brush lane. She keeps still. She waits for Ma to step back against the wall, hidden from sight. Only then does Lucy knock.
“Sir,” Lucy says when the door opens. “I’m here, please, for the extra lessons.”
The teacher frowns, as if at a slow student. “Lucy. You must know it’s poor manners to come visiting uninvited.”
“I’m very sorry. That’s the thing, sir, there’s so much I don’t know. I’d be honored to learn from you.”
“I enjoyed teaching you. You’re a smart girl, and so unusual. It’s a shame—what a sensation you would have made back East had I included your development in my monograph!” Lucy starts to smile. Teacher Leigh puts his hand on the doorframe. “But that little tableau of violence was unacceptable. Savagery runs in your blood, and I can’t have my other students disturbed. I must think of the greater good.”
Lucy holds her smile, though it’s leaden now. “I wasn’t fighting, sir.”
“Lies don’t flatter your intellect, Lucy. I saw you in that circle. And I heard from the other students how Samantha instigated the affair. No—results don’t matter. I saw your intentions.”
The teacher lets go of the door as Lucy says, “I’m not like Sam. I’m not.”
Lucy could shove her arm through the gap, could grab for what she wants so desperately. That would only prove what the teacher suspects.
And then Ma grasps the knob. Teacher Leigh looks at her gloved hand, indignant. Up her arm, her shoulder. Into her face.
“Thank you for teaching Lucy,” Ma says.
That husky voice, unexpected against Ma’s smoothness. Ma who skins rabbits still twitching, who hauled the mule from a sinkhole. As if in answer, Ma speaks slower. A knife dragged through honey.
“We’ve walked a fair piece. May we come in for a glass of water?”
Ma gives Lucy the piercing look that says, This is our secret. Then she’s smiling at the teacher, the smile sweetened like the voice is sweetened. Nothing changes. Everything changes. The teacher steps back, holding the door wide open. Some power leaves him and moves to Ma. She steps through
—
Ma sinks into the teacher’s horsehair couch as if she’s sat there every day of her life. Her skin glows against the open window. She belongs here, of a piece with the lace curtains, the honeyed wood, the thin white teacups with their gold rims.
Lucy looks away, looks back. A thrill runs through her each time. Ma set in the center of that parlor like a picture in a frame. To judge by his face, the teacher feels that same thrill.
He pours tea and sets out cookies with dark, oozing centers. “The jam is made from cultivated hothouse plums. Not like these sour, wild trees in the West. My folks back East send the jam by train and then wagon, but once you taste you’ll see it’s well worth the extra cost.”
Ma refuses, giving Lucy another look. Don’t be beholden, Ma likes to say. Her gloved hands stay tidy in her lap. Miserably, Lucy leaves the cookies alone too.
“Tell me about yourself,” the teacher says.
Light shifts down the couch, down Ma’s body as the hours pass. Illuminating one piece at a time: the soft cheek, the long neck, the crease of an elbow, the ankle peeping just above the skirt. The shadows of Sam’s wildness are vanquished from this room—Ma proof that decency lives in Lucy. Teacher Leigh and Ma discuss where she came from, the latest news from back East, the cultivation of plants and gardens, Lucy’s reading, and how Ma taught her.
“And yourself?” Teacher Leigh says. “Where did you learn to read?”
Lucy’s heard the story half a hundred times. Your ma was a poor student, Ba starts. And Ma jumps in: Poor teacher, more like. Your ba couldn’t sit still. Together they recount how Ba taught Ma to read, interrupting and joking, silly as children.
Ma smiles. Looks down at her teacup, so that her lashes scatter shadows on the porcelain. “I picked it up here and there.”
“And where was that?”
Ma gives a tinkling laugh that fits this room. No kin to her other laugh that crackles. Roars. “I think Lucy should be the one to answer your questions. She’s a smart girl. I know she’d love to be in a classroom again.”
Who could refuse Ma?
—
As they leave, Ma dips her head to Lucy and asks if she is happy.
Sunset leaves a glaze on the coyote brush. The world looks good enough to eat. Teacher Leigh’s hair is corn silk as he waves from the porch, Ma’s lips marrow-dark.
“I’m happy. But, Ma? Why didn’t you tell him about learning to read?”
The house disappears from view. Rather than answer, Ma shucks her glove. Her fingers root in her pocket and emerge dirt-speckled. “Try this,” she says, reaching for Lucy’s mouth.
Lucy catches a hint of sweetness. Cautiously, she licks.
“From all the way back East,” Ma says, pulling a handful of plum cookies from her pocket. “Fang xin, Lucy girl. Did you see how many he ate? He won’t notice. He’s a good man under his ruffles. Ying gai accept those extra lessons.”
Lucy abstains as Ma eats. The sweet fades to sour on her tongue. “But why did you lie, Ma?”
“Don’t whine.” Ma wipes her fingers. “Ni zhang da le. Old enough to know what’s a lie, and what’s better left unsaid. Remember I taught you about burying? Well, sometimes truth needs burying too.”
The cookies, and all traces of Ma’s gluttony, are gone. Her face has a cat’s satisfaction. So neat and clean that Lucy asks, meanly, “Like the two hundred?”
Later, Lucy will wonder what might’ve been different had she been kinder. Less selfish. Or as smart as Ma believed her to be, capable of reading what was written on Ma’s trembling lip. Ma says, so softly, “I’ll tell you when you’re older. Xian zai help me out, Lucy girl. Don’t tell your ba about this visit, or your lessons. Hao bu hao?”
Lucy wants to ask, Why not now? What’s older mean?But Ma smiles again, a smile Teacher Leigh didn’t see, because this smile has no place in that light-filled parlor. And Lucy is reminded that what makes Ma most beautiful is the contradiction of her. Rough voice over smooth skin. Smile stretched over sadness—this queer ache that makes Ma’s eyes look miles and miles away. Brimming with an ocean’s worth of wet.
“I won’t tell,” Lucy promises the woman who keeps her secrets.
Ma takes her hand and they walk in silence back down to the main street, coyote brush receding as they leave the teacher’s land. The town reappears.
And they see the clouds.
Strange clouds, too low and too early—the wet season is months away. Men spill from the stores, the saloon. They stare at the swift-moving clouds rushing from the direction of the mine, risen up from the ground to darken the sky. Ma squeezes so hard that Lucy yelps.
They last saw clouds like this a year ago on the trail. Mistook them for locusts till a boom lit the horizon orange. For three days fires raged, a distant mine burning. And Ma—Ma who braved storm and drought, who once set her own broken finger—Ma sank her head to her knees and shivered. Didn’t look up till they were long past. She doesn’t like fire, Ba said brusquely when Lucy asked. Shut that big mouth.
Now Ma hitches up her skirt and runs, dragging Lucy along. Other women are running too, barefoot women, a flood of miners’ wives heading home. Flashes of calf and thigh; the ragged pant of breath. Nothing ladylike about this dash. Ma, eyes wild, doesn’t appear to notice.
Ma stumbles crossing the creek. In the space opened up by her falling body, Lucy sees that the clouds have overtaken the sun.
Ma twists. Her shoulder hits the ground in place of her stomach. Darkness stains her dress—but it’s only plum jam.
“Ni zhi dao, Lucy girl, what happens to bodies in a fire?” Ma says as Lucy drags her up. Now they pass the other miners’ shacks. Lanterns glow within; the open doors punch yellow into the false night. “I know.” Women and girls stand outside, looking toward the clouds. “Fire leaves nothing to bury.” Lucy hums, as if soothing a panicked mule. “The haints yi bei zi follow. They never let you go.” Ash begins to fall. The bigger pieces like moths, which Ma always hated. She claimed that moths are the dead come visiting.
—
But there are no ghosts in their shack. Just Ba and Sam, the table set, a waft of good cooking.
“You’re filthy!” Sam says with glee.
Ba stands, holding two plates. “Lai,” he says. “Wash up after you eat.”
At the table, legs swinging, Sam hums Ma’s tiger song.
Ma steps back. “Where were you?”
“The mine.” Ba steps forward with a plate. Ma steps back again. “Right, Sam? Tell your ma.”
“We worked hard,” Sam says with a full mouth.
“When?” Ma says.
“We got back not long ago. Must’ve just missed you.” Ba frowns at the stain on Ma’s dress. Reaches. Ma twists away as if dancing, though there’s no humming now, no music in the silent room. Sam’s head turns like a wary creature to track Ma. “What happened to you?”
Ma slaps Ba’s hand aside. The plate falls, doesn’t break. Spins round and round, whining.
“Leave it,” Ma hisses as Ba stoops. His outstretched hand is as clean as his face, the nailbeds pink. How long since they were black with coal? Lucy can’t recall. “Where were you?”
“The mine.”
“Fei hua.”
“Might be we stopped along the way to explore. Can’t quite remember—”
“Liar.” Ma rips the dirty oilcloth from the window, and the eerie horizon shows.
“I can explain,” Ba says, staring out. “We left early. Ting wo—”
“I thought you were dead.”
“We’re safe, qin ai de.” Ba moves to hug her.
Again Ma says, “I thought you were dead.” She steps back. Her shoulder meets the door. And Lucy sees for the first time how Ma’s eyes could be what the kids say: small, unlovely, mean. Ma studies Ba as she studies food gone rancid. Judging what good is left, and what to toss out. “I thought you were dead.” Three times she’s said it now, flat and strange, like a spell. “What’s real, then? Na ge outside is real. Ni ne? What does that make you? Some kind of haint?”
“Let me explain. We didn’t mean to scare you. We were working to—to make you happy.”
“Me?” The words come rasping out of Ma. “You aim to blame me? Cuo shi wo de? Mine?” The unbroken plate left the promise of a crash in the air. “What’s real, then? Which of your promises? Ni bu shi dong xi, ni zhe ge—”
Ma made of their hard life something orderly. Amid grass and dirt, from wagon beds and hard-used houses, Ma wrangled for them a life of soft voices and clean speech. A life of braided hair and swept floors, cut nails and pressed collars. What people see shapes how they treat you, Ma said again and again. Now something’s come loose in Ma, her hair unwinding around her dirty face, her words unwinding into cusses.
Ba steps forward. No place for Ma to flee, unless it’s out the door. Her fingers grip the knob as Ba pushes his fist against her mouth.
Ma stops talking.
When Ba pulls back, he leaves something yellow between Ma’s lips. Something all the light in the room rushes toward.
“Bite down,” he says.
Ma’s fingers are still on the knob. One push and she could be gone.
She bites.
She spits a pebble into her hand. The print of her teeth in its soft yellow surface.
“This is real,” Ba says. “I had to make sure. I only meant to keep it secret till I ascertained it would be enough.”
“You’ve been prospecting,” Ma says. The forbidden word billows round the room. A hot, singed smell. “You promised you’d quit. The widows? The woodcutting?” Ba shakes his head. “Kan kan, this is what I think of prospecting.”
Ma tips the pebble to her mouth and swallows. Like bone and like mud, another piece of the land slips into her. Sam wails. Ba looks shaken. But then he grins.
“Mei wen ti,” Ba says. “Plenty where that came from.”
“I ate it,” Ma says, slumping. Poor posture pushes her belly out, rounded now as the hills are rounded.
“Heate it,” Ba says, and this time Ma lets him touch her. “Why, he’ll be rich. Come here, Sam. Show your ma.”
Sam comes forward with a dirty old pouch. Lucy recognizes it for the same one she used in the mine to hold a rag and a candle stub. In Sam’s hands that same pouch releases a gleaming shower. Lucy thinks of the fairy tale: the good sister and the bad. One passed through the door and soot stuck to her. Marked her all her life. The other passed through and came out dazzled.
Someone says, “Gold.”
—
For the first seven years of Lucy’s life, Ba was a prospector. Seven years of life lived as if windblown, drifting from site to site on the rumor of gold.
Ma set her foot down two years back. One night she left Lucy and Sam in the wagon, and for hours she and Ba talked in the open hills. Snatches drifted back, Ma’s voice holding forth on hunger and foolishness, pride and luck. Ba was silent. Come morning, the prospecting tools were packed away. Ba nursed sullenness for a month, gambled and drank. It was Ma who first mentioned coal mines.
Since then, Ba’s put away most of the gambling, and most of the drinking too. He blusters of fortunes made in coal, as he once blustered of fortunes made from other materials. The forbidden word went unsaid—till now.
Tonight, as ash from a burning mine falls through their window, Ba tells them about the gold.
How he heard rumors about these hills, plied from old prospectors and Indian trackers. Here, where a dried-up lake sits on a plateau, and where lone, mad wolves can still be found. How Ba figured that a quake a year back, and the digging of a big mine, might have unearthed something unseen for a decade. He prospected in secret, under guise of woodcutting in the dark.
“I struck gold early on,” Ba says as he kneels, washing grime from Ma’s feet. “That second payday—that was the gold. I walked ten miles south to trade it for coin at some little outpost—that’s why I was gone all night. Didn’t I promise you a fortune? We can buy whatever you want, qin ai de. Whatever hedeserves. We’re special.” Ba turns to Sam and Lucy, grinning. “Girls, you know the only thing in this territory more powerful than a gun?”
“Tigers,” Sam says.
“History?” Lucy says.
“Family,” Ma says, hugging her stomach.
Ba shakes his head. Closes his eyes. “I mean to buy a big parcel of land out in these hills. So big we won’t need to see another soul. We’ll have all the space in the world to hunt and breathe. That’s the kind of place I aim for him to grow up in. Imagine that, girls. That’s proper power.”
They all of them go quiet, imagining. Till Ma breaks the spell. Doesn’t say yes, and doesn’t say no. She says, “This is the last time you lie to me.