Salt
A new kind of morning, now.
The oilcloth Ma ripped from the window is never replaced, the shack brighter with nothing between them and the sun. They eat breakfast as a family again, four together chewing, teasing, offering, squabbling, planning, dreaming. Illuminated—every gesture lit by the promise of morning. At last Ba and Sam tug on their boots and heft their prospecting tools, which are hidden in a fiddle case. They head to the gold field at a leisurely pace, the deception of the miner’s hour done. Isn’t it easier, Ba says, with no more secrets?
—
Each Sunday right after Ba and Sam set out, Lucy leaves the house on a journey of her own. Unknown to all but Ma, she goes to Teacher Leigh’s for extra lessons.
Lessons in politeness. How to drink tea and pretend fullness. How to refuse food—cookies, cakes, crustless sandwiches. How not to stare at the salt that arrives in its silver box. All that heaped white gleaming. How not to want its clean burn on her tongue.
Lessons in answering questions.
What does your family eat?
Can you describe the medicines in your mother’s trunk?
How long has your family traveled?
What are your hygiene practices? How often do you bathe?
At what age did you grow your first adult tooth?
Lucy doesn’t like answering half so much as she likes watching the teacher write her answers down. The fresh ink so crisp and fine. On an empty stomach, the fumes make Lucy dizzy.
What does your father drink? How much?
Can you describe his attitude toward violence?
Would you call it savage?
What is your mother’s breeding?
Does she perhaps come from royal stock?
The teacher improves Lucy’s answers. Brow furrowed he scratches out, rewrites, pauses to ask Lucy to repeat herself. On that blank page he orders her family’s story with words neatened as the schoolhouse is neatened, the parlor, the rows of coyote brush that shut out what’s unpleasant to see. Lucy’s story set down as part of the teacher’s monograph on the Western territory. One day she’ll hold that book, heavier even than Jim’s ledger. She’ll lay it before Ma. She’ll smooth its pages and hear its living spine crack.
Lessons in imagining herself better.
—
Nights, Ma counts. Each fleck and pebble passes into her hands. She weighs them on a scale, scribbles down their value in coin. Then she squirrels the gold in pouches—big and small, fat and thin—hidden around the house.
And she grows stingy, despite the bounty. Ma declares an end to steaks and salt and sugar. A return to bony cuts. Only one new dress for Lucy. Practical boots for Ba and Sam. Sam throws a tantrum at this news, keening for the promised cowboy boots and horse.
“We’re saving,” Ma says, the crackle so strong in her words that Sam stops midyell.
Pouches in the stovepipe, behind the tin mirror. Down the coal bin and in the heel of an old shoe. The shack that was once a hen coop acquires a new gleam. Lucy’s dreams glint with half-seen light. Ma, too, seems to peer at something just beyond view. She’s often idle, sat by the window with chin propped. The line of her neck dreamy.
Ba kisses the spot where Ma’s shoulder curves to neck. “A nugget for your thoughts.”
“The baby,” Ma says, eyes half-shut in pleasure. Three months since they arrived, and Ma’s stomach pushes against her loosest dress. “I’m imagining how he’ll grow up.”
—
Some Sundays, when the teacher’s hand is too cramped to write, he tells the story of his own raising, so far from here as to be fairy tale.
Back in the East. An older, more civilized territory. Seven brothers, a doting mother, a father who ruled from a distance, his kingdom a fragrant heap of cedar wood shipped near and far. Teacher Leigh the special one. The smart one. Among his frivolous brothers, he alone thought bigger. Some men are drawn to sporting and hunting; I’m drawn to doing good. My mission is to spread education across this territory.He traveled months, by boat and by train, by horse and by cart, to build this shining new school on a hill. A charity school for miners’ children.
Teacher Leigh sits taller when he tells this part. His voice is sonorous, vibrating the fine thin panes of window glass. He surveys his audience—friends who gather to him on Sundays. And then, from that height, he looks fondly at Lucy.
Imagine my delight when I found Lucy. She and her family have a unique role in my book, and it’s my responsibility to record them correctly.
Lucy tingles, her eyes downturned and fixed on the saltcellar.
You see how these miners insist on drinking and gambling their coin away. And those Indian camps that resist civilizing . . . this family, however! They’re different. Lucy’s mother is of great breeding, you can tell.
“We’re not miners,” Lucy says, softly, so that she doesn’t interrupt Teacher Leigh.
Shopkeepers and mine bosses, kept wives and ranchers riding from the surrounding plots of land—they come chattering into the parlor, through the door that Teacher Leigh props open when he isn’t working on his monograph. Has it really been— Come, Leigh, I must tell you— How’s that mare of yours? I heard—
Lessons in how other people live.
From afar, Lucy couldn’t grasp it. Always from a distance she saw miners’ wives flitting between shacks, borrowing washboards, thimbles, recipes, soap. They don’t know self-sufficiency, Ba said pityingly. He taught Lucy silence was better than gossip. He taught her to stand under the yawn of sky and listen to the wind through the grass. Listen hard enough and you can hear the land.
But now Lucy hears the baker talk about the butcher, who talks about the girl working at Jim’s store, who talks about a miner’s wife run off with a cowboy. Their talk a bright thread stitching the town together, rich as the tapestry Lucy saw hung from a porch. Its owner hurried it away, as if Lucy meant thievery. Lucy wanted only to look. To touch, maybe, and let it drape around her, like these honeyed Sundays with the glass windows and the talk, the bodies, heating the room.
Unseen, mouth watering with words she can’t contribute, Lucy puts out a finger. Licks up fallen granules of salt. How bright the sting on her tongue. How fleeting.
—
At home, dusk, Lucy waits for the private moment when she and Ma stand alone at the stove. Another dinner of potatoes, of marrow and cartilage stewed to sludge. It’s only midweek and Sunday so far off, yet Lucy is tired of it: the brown taste of unsalted meat, the dirt floor that roughens her heels, the scrimping and saving when gold clamors all around them.
“Ma? How long will it take us to save up for that parcel of land?”
Even to Lucy, Ma won’t say. Ma smiles the smile of secrets.
Lessons in wanting what she can’t have.
—
Best of the Sunday company are the real ladies. Not the women of the town but those from the teacher’s old life, come visiting with no sign of the West stamped as sun-lines in their skin. They bring news of the velvet seats on train cars, of the flowers planted on their green lawns. These ladies sometimes beckon Lucy close. Tell me, they say.
For these women Teacher Leigh and Lucy play a game. He asks and she answers, batting her education back and forth like a colorful ball. What’s thirty-eight into fourteen thousand eight hundred and sixteen?Three hundred eighty-nine and thirty-four remainingHow long ago was the first civilized outpost founded in this territory? Twoscore years ago and three.
This Sunday, an older lady sits on the horsehair couch.
“Meet my own teacher,” the teacher says. “Miss Lila.”
Miss Lila looks Lucy over. A severe face, out of which comes a voice harder than the red lines drawn around her lips. “She seems clever. You always did have an eye for that. Clever’s easy, though. Far harder to teach is character. Moral fiber.”
“Lucy has a fair share of that too.”
Lucy tucks the compliment away, to relay later to Ma. Miss Lila’s gaze rests on her, like the gazes in the schoolhouse when Lucy walks to the chalkboard. Wanting her to fail
“Let me demonstrate,” Teacher Leigh says. “Lucy?”
“Yes?” She looks up. Belief makes handsome the teacher’s narrow face.
“Let’s say you and I are traveling the same wagon trail. We start out with equal provisions. One month into the journey, you lose your goods in a fording. It’s the hottest time of the year. The river is foul, not fit to drink from. The next town is weeks away. What do you do?”
Lucy nearly laughs. Why, this question is easy. The answer comes quicker than math or history.
“I’d butcher an ox. I’d drink its blood and continue on till fresh water.”
This lesson is burned into Lucy’s skin. She’s stood on that bank, inhaled that foul water. Watched Ma and Ba argue as thirst stuck her tongue to her mouth. But Teacher Leigh has frozen, and Miss Lila’s hand covers her throat. They both of them stare as if Lucy’s got food on her face.
She licks her lips. Sweat beads over them.
“The answer,” the teacher says, “is of course that you should ask for help. I would offer half my provisions, and therefore spread goodwill. So that the next time I myself have an accident, I’ll receive assistance in return.”
The teacher pours tea for Miss Lila, coaxes sweets into her hand. His back to Lucy is rigid with disappointment. Lucy listens to their crunching. Remembering the crunch in her own teeth, that night on the trail when Ma sifted the last of the flour and found the wriggling bodies of weevils. They baked biscuits anyhow, and ate after dark so as not to see what they chewed. All those miles they traveled, and not once did another wagon offer help.
Lucy reaches, unseen, for the salt.
Lessons in agreement.
—
Lessons in trickery.
Lucy waits for Ma to look away from the pot. In one deft movement, Lucy opens her handkerchief and sprinkles salt in
Ba declares the oxtail extra-fine that night. Oxtail on Sunday, porridge on Monday, potatoes on Tuesday, trotters on Wednesday, potatoes potatoes potatoes again. Lucy doesn’t use much. Just a hint. Salt expands the tired taste of the food. Close her eyes, and as she chews the house expands too, many-roomed. A taste to stretch her till Sunday.
“Lucy,” Ma says, catching Lucy’s hand before the stove’s red heat. The handkerchief sticks out from between Lucy’s fingers. A few grains of salt trickle free. “Where did you take this from?”
“He gave it to me.” The teacher passes the saltcellar every Sunday, anyhow. Lessons in near-truths. “Besides, you took the cookies.” Lucy yanks the handkerchief back. “It’s not fair. You—you—it’s not fair!”
She crouches, shaking a little from fear. Ma’s anger is rarer than Ba’s, but more precise. More liable to hunt out tender spots. Ma knows to pinch Lucy’s earlobe where it’s thinnest, to forbid what Lucy loves most.
But Ma doesn’t move. “You shi,” she says, her gaze skipping over Lucy’s face, “I wonder if we shouldn’t have left home.”
Lucy turns. There’s only blank wall where Ma stares. She tries to see the home Ma sees. From the dry soil of rememory she digs up this: grass rustling, streaked and dusty light. A familiar path underfoot, and Ba’s shadow with its dowsing rod, and somewhere the call of Ma’s voice, and dinner-smoke in the air—
“We always had salt,” Ma says. “Mei tian. And fish from the ocean, Lucy girl. Wo de ma—your grandmother—the way she steamed them—”
Oh. Ma doesn’t mean their campsites, their prospecting days. She means a home Lucy can’t see. Across the ocean.
“You’re a good girl, Lucy. You don’t ask for much. Try to understand. I’m saving, dong bu dong, every bit we can. Though sometimes I think—you and Sam might have had a better life there. Hemight.”
Lucy tries to picture Ma’s mother, Ma’s father, the family Ma speaks of crowded into a room. All she conjures is Teacher Leigh’s parlor, full of voices on a Sunday.
“Ma—are you lonely?”
“Shuo shen me. I have you, Lucy girl.”
But not during the day. For the first time Lucy considers Ma alone in the house, considers the long dim hours Ma rocks by the window while Lucy reads in the schoolhouse, while Ba and Sam dig gold. How quiet it must get. The only sound the leak of other wives’ talk when the wind blows just so from far across the valley.
Ma pats the handkerchief in Lucy’s hand. “You can use this for now, nu er. I suppose he did give it to you.”
Under Ma’s gaze, this time, Lucy tips salt into the stew. No word this time about beholdenness as Ma’s spine bends over the pot. Lucy is jolted to see her own hunger in Ma’s face.
Her hand slips. A heap of white lands on the surface, dissolves. Surely it’s too much. No one else appears to notice. At dinner they gulp their portions and scrape their bowls, ask again and again for more. A ring of dark stew forms around Ma’s mouth. She eats so quick she doesn’t pause to wipe.
Lucy herself takes two bites and puts her spoon aside. Her tongue burns. Another taste mixes in with the salt, unwelcome and bitter.
Lessons in shame.