Wind Wind Wind Wind Wind
Lucy girl.
Sun’s sinking down these hills and here you are sinking too. I know the sort of bone-deep tired you and Sam must feel these days as you run. I know what it is to flee with your past panting behind, claws extending in the dark. I’m not a cruel man, whatever you think.
Lucy girl, there were plenty of times I wanted to give you a soft, easy life. But if I did, the world would gnaw you down like these buffalo bones.
Night’s the only time I got now, and this wind the only sort of voice. I have your ear till sunup. It’s not too late, yet.
Lucy girl, there’s only one story worth telling now.
—
Every soul in this territory knows the year a man pulled gold from the river and the whole country drew up into itself, took a breath that blew wagons out across the West. All your life you heard people say the story starts in ’48. And all your life when people told you this story, did you ever question why?
They told it to shut you out. They told it to claim it, to make it theirs and not yours. They told it to say we came too late. Thieves, they called us. They said this land could never be our land.
I know you like things written down and read out by schoolteachers. I know you like what’s neat and pretty. But it’s high time you heard the truth story, and if it hurts—well, at least you’ll be tougher for it.
So listen. Tell yourself it’s the wind in your ear if you must, but I reckon these nights belong to me till you bury that body of mine.
That history in your books is plain lie. Gold wasn’t found by a man, but by a boy the same age as you. Twelve. And it wasn’t found in ’48 but back in ’42. I know because it was me that found it.
—
Well, it was properly Billy that touched gold first. Billy was my best friend, a grown man of forty or so, though it was hard to say and he sure wasn’t saying. People today’d call him mutt: his ma was Indian and his ba one of those small, dark vaqueros come from across the Southern desert. They left Billy with two names—one most people couldn’t pronounce, and one most could—plus skin the color of fresh-peeled manzanita bark. His arm shone in the river as he tickled a fish.
Something flashed against Billy’s dark red, brighter than scales. I shouted.
What Billy handed me was a pretty yellow rock. Too pliable to be of use, and me too old for trinkets. I let it fall back through my fingers. It caught the sun as it tumbled, a shard of light that lodged in my eye. For minutes after, I saw spots across the hills.
I swear that gold winked at me, like it knew what I didn’t.
This was the year of ’42, though the camp where I grew up didn’t call it ’42. Just as we didn’t call our hills the West. West of where? It was just our land, and we were just people. We ranged between ocean to one side, mountains to the other.
The camp I grew up in was full of Billys. By which I mean old men, quiet, many with more than one name. They didn’t like to talk of the past. Best that I could piece together, they were the remnants of three or maybe four tribes now jumbled up, old men and cripples too stubborn or tired to leave when the rest did for better hunting grounds. There’d been a priest when many of them were boys, who’d given them new names—and a pox that killed half their people. The priest had also given them a common language, which they taught me. That camp was all outcasts and stragglers, what your Ma considered the wrong kind of company. And sure there wasn’t a clean handkerchief among them, but there was kindness, or at least a kind of weariness that looked nearly the same. Too many had seen destruction.
Still, the hills were good for plenty when I grew up. Poppies in the wet season, fat rabbits in the dry. Manzanita berries and wild sorrel, miner’s lettuce, and the paw prints of wolves in streambeds. Never a shortage of green. As to how I got there—I knew as little about myself as about the old men. They’d found me on a foraging trip down the coast: a newborn, hours old, crying alone, my ma and ba dead beside me. Saltwater stains on their clothes.
I asked Billy, once, how he knew it was my ma and ba on account of their being dead, and the dead not speaking. He touched my eyes. Then touched the edges of his own and pulled them out till they narrowed.
Here’s the thing, Lucy girl: like you I never grew up among people who looked like me. But that’s no excuse, and don’t you use it. If I had a ba, then he was the sun that warmed me most days and beat me sweaty-sore on others; if I had a ma, then she was the grass that held me when I lay down and slept. I grew up in these hills and they raised me: the streams and rock shelves, the valleys where scrub oaks bunched so thick they seemed one mass but allowed me, skinny and swift, to slip between trunks and pierce the hollow center where branches knit a green ceiling. If I had a people, then I saw those people in the reflecting pools, where water was so clear it showed a world the exact double of this one: another set of hills and sky, another boy looking back with my same eyes. I grew up knowing I belonged to this land, Lucy girl. You and Sam do too, never mind how you look. Don’t you let any man with a history book tell you different
—
But I’m getting carried away. No need linger on the pretty stories, the kind I’ve always fed you because you were a child.
Well, things are different now. You thought me hard? You see the truth of it: the world’s a good deal harder. It ain’t fair, but you and Sam won’t get years for growing. Just maybe these nights. Just maybe what I can tell you.
Years went by and I hardly remembered that yellow rock. Until a day in ’49 when we woke up to a boom, then dust clouds, then the river by our camp running brown, running black. We woke up to wagons of men, and trees coming down while buildings went up. The old men in my camp turned their backs till it was too late. Till there was nothing to fish or hunt or eat. They slipped away rather than fight. Some went South, some over the mountains, some to cool grass wallows to wait for death. Too much destruction, you see.
Billy alone stayed with me. And just like in ’42, we waded looking for gold.
Too late, though. The easy gold was picked clean. What remained required whole teams of men, and carts of dynamite. We got jobs washing dishes, sweeping the saloon. Helped that Billy had taught me writing.
Seemed I woke up in ’49 and all my dreams were of gold: the wink of it slipping through my fingers seven years back. I panned when I could. Found a few flecks amounting to nothing.
I saw how hard the gold men worked their miners. Men lost legs to dynamite, got crushed by rock. Men shot each other, stole and stabbed, starved in lean weeks. Dozens of ’em turned around each month and headed back East. But hundreds replaced them. And a few struck it rich, became gold men themselves.
There came a night in ’50 when the gold man who owned the biggest mines—the fattest and richest of the lot—called across the saloon.
“You. Come here. No, not you. You, boy—with the funny eyes.”
Billy wouldn’t come along. I kept going.
“Are those eyes real, boy? Or you some kind of half-wit?”
Up close I saw that the gold man, for all his fatness, wasn’t so much older than me. I told him I was no half-wit, kept my fists behind my back. I’d learned that year about talking with fists instead of words when people looked at me funny. It saved me repeating myself. But the gold man wasn’t alone. A hired man in black stood behind him with a gun
“And you write? You read? Don’t lie to me.”
I told him Billy had taught me. Called Billy over, but the gold man didn’t even look at him. The gold man said he had a job for me. Young and soft that I was, I didn’t think to ask why he chose me. Let that be a lesson to you, Lucy girl. Always ask why. Always know what part of you they want.
The gold man explained that there would come a time when the hills were scraped empty. When men would bring families to settle. They’d need supplies. Houses. Food. The gold man planned to lay railroad track through the West, joining plains to ocean. For that he needed cheap labor. And he’d gotten a whole shipful of it.
Sure, I told him, I could go to the coast and train his workers. Sure, I could talk to them on his behalf.
Truth is, I hardly understood half of what the gold man said. I’d never seen a train, didn’t know the ocean route he spoke of, or where the workers came from. But I understood his power. I didn’t ask questions. He had a gold watch the size of my palm that he flicked as he talked. He was fat enough that I could cling like a tick to his wealth. Through him I could claim what had slipped from my fingers as a boy, what was always mine—didn’t me and Billy touch gold first?
I asked for Billy to come along too. I told that gold man about Billy’s loyalty and his circumspection, his strong arms and his tracker’s knowledge. I had the gold man near convinced, I could tell—but it was Billy himself who ruined his chance. Billy said he’d rather stay behind.
I never properly got an answer why. Billy wasn’t big on talking. All he said was he was staying. That it was better for me to go on alone. When I asked why, he touched my eyes. I never saw him after that night.
Lucy girl, I told you. I learned a long time back: family comes first. No one else matters.
—
Two of the gold man’s hired men rode along with me to meet the ship. That was my first horse, Lucy girl, and I pretended I knew what riding was. Bled for days till I hardened.
Wagonloads of railroad track set out behind us, going slower. They’d meet us at the coast after some weeks. The gold man said I was to teach the two hundred while we waited. I didn’t ask what I was meant to teach.
The hired men wore black and spoke mostly to each other. They camped a distance away at night and never invited me to join, not that I cared—I liked my solitary bed. I hardly recall those two weeks of travel to the coast; all I saw was the wealth in my future. My eyes were so dazzled, it took me a moment to see what came off that ship:
Two hundred people who looked like me.
Eyes the shape of mine, noses like mine, hair like mine. Men and women and some hardly more’n kids, dragging their trunks and bags, wearing funny robes. I started to count them.
And then I saw your ma.
You know your ma. So I won’t say how she looked. What I’ll tell you is the feeling that welled up in me as she passed, a feeling akin to striking groundwater when you’ve wandered hot all day and thirst is a knife at your throat. That promise of quenching to come. Same feeling I expect you had as a girl after playing all day in the grass, arriving home to a plate of dinner kept warm. That feeling of knowing someone will call your name—that’s the feeling I got when your ma met my eyes. I knew I was almost home.
I kept my head screwed tight and kept counting. Got to a hundred and ninety-three people before they quit coming. The two hired men looked at me; I looked at a sailor. The sailor went in and pushed six more onto the dock. Said one died on the way over.
The last six were ancient, bent like trees. God knows what work the gold man expected to get out of them. One fell on the gangplank. And guess who ran to help the old woman up?
That’s right. Your ma.
Your ma looked right at me. Under her gaze, I got a sailor to load the six into a wagon along with the trunks and satchels the two hundred had brought. I nudged the sailor along with a coin from the wallet the gold man had given me for buying supplies.
They tried to load your ma onto the wagon too, but she walked with the others. When the two hired men mounted up, I got down and walked too.
—
Lucy girl, you always thought it was your old ba pushing the family, wanting more. But the push came first from your ma. Because that day of the ship, she saw me wrong. She mistook me for the gold man who ordered other men around. She mistook me for someone who’d paid for a ship and jobs. She mistook me for something bigger than myself. By the time I understood what your ma believed, it was too late to correct her.
That first night, I learned we didn’t speak the same language.
The gold man had found a barn for the two hundred to stay in. I stood first watch outside and heard them jabbering in confusion. Some of them pounded on the door, angry, and yelled at me through the cracks. Maybe they hadn’t expected locks, or straw beds.
The two hired men were already camped way down on the beach, but they came over on account of the commotion.
“What’s the matter with them?” the taller of the hired men asked. “Tell ’em to settle down.”
I was younger than him, and had two good legs back then. I could’ve knocked him down. But he had a gun, and I didn’t.
“Do your job,” he said. “The one you’re paid for.”
That cleared the red from my eyes. I swallowed my questions. I told not a soul that I didn’t understand what the two hundred spoke. I tucked that secret down deep, deep, in the same soft spot where I was once a boy so stupid I let gold slip between my fingers.
I went inside the barn and rang a cowbell.
You know what makes a good teacher, Lucy girl? Not nice words or pretty clothes. A good teacher is a firm teacher. Ting wo. The first lesson I taught was that they couldn’t use the words they’d brought over. Not here. The first man to speak, I clapped a hand across his jaw. Held it shut. You need force to accomplish anything, Lucy girl.
Mouth, I said, pointing. Hand, I said, pointing. No, I said. Quiet, I said. And we began.
—
That first night: Teacher. Speak. Barn. Straw. Sleep. Corn. No. No. No.
The first day on the road: Horse. Road. Faster. Tree. Sun. Day. Water. Walk. Stand. Faster. Faster.
The second night: Corn. Dirt. Down. Hand. Foot. Night. Moon. Bed.
The third day: Stand. Rest. March. Sorry. Work. Work. No.
The third night, when we got to the place we were meant to build a railroad: Man. Woman. Baby. Born.
—
I was off my watch on that third night when your ma came and found me alone. How she did it I never figured; when I asked later, she just laughed and said a woman needed her secrets. I don’t know how she slipped past the hired man who stood guard. I guess she has—had—her ways. Her smiling ways. I didn’t think on it that night, though I’ve thought about it many times since.
We’d settled to wait for the wagons on a pretty piece of land not far from the coast. We smelled salt when the wind blew, and in the distance were cypress trees bent at unlikely angles. The two hundred slept, locked in for the night, in an old stone building up on the ridge. Rusted bell tower above and a stream out front. Half a mile beyond that were grassy hills where the hired men set up their own camp. And out in the other direction was a little lake, pretty if you ignored the bugs and marshy grass. That lake I claimed for my own.
Your ma came up to me as I stood looking into the lake. I was hoping for a glint in the water.
“Teach?” your ma said, startling me so that I nearly fell in. She didn’t say Sorrylike I’d taught them. She smiled, wickedly.
Your ma was eager to learn. Not like those among the two hundred who looked at me sullenly, who saw me as the enemy. Those sorts hated me more’n they hated the hired men, who whipped their ankles with green branches. I expect they took me for a traitor, saw my eyes and my face like theirs and hated me the worse for it. Those sorts whispered about me. Of course, I had no idea what they said. So I had to punish them for any words. All words. Otherwise my discipline would’ve fallen apart completely.
Which meant the two hundred watched me as carefully as the hired men watched me, and I worked to make my face a mask. No one could learn how much I didn’t know.
“You,” your ma said. She pointed to me. Then she cupped her hands over her stomach. Over and over she did this. I shook my head. She made a kind of frustrated growl and grabbed my hand.
I’d thought her lovely and mild. She was kind to the old people. Laughed easily. Had a high, clear voice like some little songbird. But the hand that grabbed mine could do more than hammer railroad ties. I remembered what the hired men said to each other when they traded watch: Don’t turn your back. They’re savages.
Your ma’s hand was strong, but her waist, when she made me touch it, was softer than anything since I lost my rabbit-skin hat from Billy. She made me trace around her waist, then drew me close till the sides of our bodies touched. She traced that touching line. Cupped her hands again over her stomach. Pointed at me.
I still didn’t understand.
Your ma put a hand on my chest and a hand on her own breast. She trailed down my chest, my belly. Stopped at my pants. I’m sure she could see my blush.
“Word?” she said, pushing at her breast. “Word?” she said again, two fingers lightly tracing my pants.
I taught her man.I taught her woman.As she cupped her stomach, I taught her baby. When again she pointed to me, I understood her original question.
“I was born back there,” I told her. There was still blood in my cheeks. I was half-dizzy with it as I pointed toward my hills. Your ma’s face lit up.
It wasn’t till after she’d left me alone that I cooled down, and realized I’d pointed in the wrong direction. Toward the ocean. She thought we came from the same place. And I didn’t have the words to explain otherwise.
—
I know you think me a liar, Lucy girl. But don’t you ever think me stupid. Don’t think I missed how you looked at me those nights I came back drunk. The sheer arrogance of you, looking at me like you knew better. Looking at me like you were disappointed.
That look so like your ma’s.
Your ma was like you in a whole lot of ways. She believed that dressing right and talking right could set the world right around her. She studied me and the hired men. Asked us the words for shirtand dress, asked what women wore in this land. Always looking to better herself, your ma.
You see, your ma had come seeking fortune. All the two hundred had. Back home your ma’s own ba was dead, her ma’s hands ruined gutting fish. She was promised to marry an old fisherman, till she boarded the ship.
Golden mountain, she told me the same night she told about the mother, the fisherman, the man at the harbor who promised this place over the ocean would make them rich. We were lying out that night in the grass beside my lake. I laughed fit to die when I heard: some poor teacher had blundered the word for hills
Lucy girl, I regretted that laughter all my life.
I couldn’t tell your ma why I laughed, of course. Couldn’t tell her why it was so funny, the idea of the two hundred getting rich. She still thought I could make it happen for them. That it was my ship, my man at the harbor making promises, my railroad we’d build when the wagons arrived.
So I said something stupid. I said I laughed on account of how she pronounced gold: thick as syrup, half-swallowed. Your ma flushed and left me alone that night.
Later on I caught her practicing the word. Gold gold gold gold gold.
Your ma spoke prettier than me by the end. Looked prettier too. People thought me hard, and her soft. We made a good team. Had a balance, same as you and Sam. But believe me, Lucy girl, when I say that your ma was even more fixed on making a fortune.
—
Your ma got the two hundred to trust me. She had a quality that made people listen, never mind that she was young, and a woman. She was—well, Sam might call it bossy. Like you, Lucy girl. She was smart so she figured she knew best. Most of the time she did, and convinced everyone else of it.
I started taking meals with the two hundred at your ma’s insistence, listening to them chatter in their own language in the corners. I pretended not to hear. So long as they didn’t speak it to my face, I let it pass.
Plenty of time for chatter, anyhow. The wagons of railroad supplies were late in coming. Couldn’t get through on account of the horizon being lit up by the worst fires these hills have seen.
Turns out that when you dig up streams and clog rivers, when you cut trees and their roots no longer hold the soil back, that soil goes dry. Crumbles like left-out bread. Like the whole land’s gone stale. The plants die, the grass bakes—and when the dry season comes, a spark can set it all aflame.
The hired men swore and paced. They polished their guns like they meant to rub through the metal. But there was nothing to be done. At least we were by the coast, with damp in the air. The fire didn’t seem like to reach us. We waited.
Animals started to show up one day. They darted over the stream, past the walls of the stone building, heading to the coast. Rabbits skinny with terror, mice and squirrels and possums. Flocks of birds blocking out the shrunken red sun. Once a young buck leapt clear over me with antlers ablaze. There was quiet for a while, then the slower creatures came: snakes, lizards. For a day and a night no one could step in the grass for fear of being bitten. Even the hired men abandoned their own camp and slept in the building.
And last, but unseen, the tiger.
I woke up one day to paw prints around the marshy edge of the lake. Too big for wolf. Hard to tell with the sky so red, but I swore I saw a flash of orange in the reeds.
Your ma came up to me yawning. Her hair was mussed, but she was never lovelier than in the morning, smelling of sleep and the people we were at night. I rarely saw her that way. Made idle by the fire, she’d started to fuss with her hair. She’d braid it and pin it and curl it, asking endless questions about how ladies here wore it. Same with her clothes. Your ma took thread from her trunk and stitched and hemmed that robe of hers into different shapes. She got other women to join her too. I didn’t have the heart to say those dresses would have no place once the wagons arrived, when they’d be sweating all day over railroad ties.
Your ma wanted to make me friendly with the rest of the two hundred. She poked fun at my quiet, teased me for being so solitary. Some people are born solitary, no less happy for it—I was, and I suspect you were, too, Lucy girl, but your ma didn’t understand. She pestered about my family till I told her they were dead. She made me talk dresses to the women, dragged me to join the circles of men gambling with straws. She bossed me.
Truth is, the faces of the two hundred didn’t warm me. Their language and gossip were strange, as was the easy way they called each other fat and picked loose threads from each other’s sleeves. What did it matter that we looked alike? I came from the hills, and the two hundred spooked at the sound of jackals. They were soft people who’d believed a pack of lies, and I didn’t need them. I sat down with the men just to please your ma, and, given how often I won, I suspect the men let me play just to please her too. I suspected your ma’d had a sweetheart among the two hundred before they reached shore. There was a certain man who argued with her constantly, and another who always tried to give her extra food. She didn’t say and I didn’t ask; all that mattered was that she’d brought her trunk to my lake and slept there most nights.
All that mattered, Lucy girl, was that there was a time when your ma had eyes only for me.
I forgot plenty of things in my life: Billy’s face, the color of poppies, how to sleep gentle so that I didn’t wake up with fists clenched and an ache already started in my shoulders, the word for the smell of earth after rain, the taste of clean water. And there’s other things I’m forgetting in death: how it felt to swing my fist and feel the knuckles crack, how mud squelched between my toes, how it was to have fingers and toes and hunger. I expect there’ll come a day when I forget everything of myself, after you and Sam bury me—not just my body but what little of me is in your blood and speech. But. Even if there comes a day when I’m no more than a wind roaming these hills, then I expect that wind will still remember one thing and whisper it to every blade of grass: the way I felt when your ma looked only at me. So bright a lesser man might fear it
In any case your ma stood that morning looking at the paw print. I put an arm around her, figuring she was scared. Tiger, I taught her, and started to describe the beast.
She threw my arm off and laughed. “Don’t you know?” she said, mocking. Then she bent and put her hand in the tiger’s print. Her eyes dared me. You might not believe this, Lucy girl, but she kissed that mud.
“Luck,” she said. “Home.” With her finger she drew a word in the mud. As she did she sang a tune I’d learn was the tiger song. Lao hu, lao hu.
Your ma shone with pure mischief. Fearless. She hadn’t broken my rule about speaking her language, but she’d stalked the edge of that rule as the tiger stalked the lake. She’d written it, sung it. She laughed at me as I tried to figure out what to do about her.
Fire behind her, the sky hot with the world’s burning, her muddy mouth and snarled hair, the print of a beast come so close it could have taken us in the night—all this and she laughed. Wilder than all this put together.
Something moved in my chest. As a child I’d awoken in the night to a shake in my bones. Billy said it was a tiger’s roar: from far off, they can’t be heard, only felt. My chest roared that morning beside the lake. What had stalked me since the day the ship arrived, what I’d feared some nights as I held your ma close, that day pounced. Sank claws into my heart. After weeks of rules, I spoke my first words of your ma’s language.
I’d listened to the two hundred. Their cusses came easiest. But I’d heard lovers too.
Qin ai de, I said to your ma. It was a guess. I didn’t know its proper meaning till I saw it in her eyes.
—
Softness took me over as rot took over the oaks one year when I was a boy. What looked a harmless fuzz weakened the trees from within. Years later, they split and died.
I’d grown up solitary, needing only shade, a stream, and from time to time a chat with one of the old men. My growing had made me strong enough to survive.
But your ma—she stroked my brow, made me lay my head in her lap as she cleaned out my earwax. She studied my eyes, a lighter brown than the rest of the two hundred, and declared the color contained liquid. Concluded I was water, and not wood as she’d once thought.
I let myself speak more of your ma’s words. Pet names, cusses. Giving them as little gifts to her. But only I was allowed to speak them—I still frowned on her using her own language. And I was still stern with the two hundred. They weren’t permitted to speak freely, or to go outside unaccompanied, save for an hour at dusk and dawn.
The rules were to protect them too. I saw the hired men getting more restless as the fires kept us trapped. Their hands itching at their guns.
And then one evening I came back from my lake, hand in hand with your ma. We’d found a grove of oaks much like my boyhood grove, the branches making a green room in the center. Your ma danced around me singing the last word of the tiger song: Lai. Lai. Lai.Calling as she’d called me to come beneath the trees.
There was a hush around the stone building as we arrived.
The hired men dragged a body around the corner. It was a man I’d gambled with, always clever at avoiding the short straw. Well, his luck had run out. It was that man, but his chest was a bloody hole.
“He was trying to run,” the taller of the hired men said as he shucked his bloody gloves.
But the bullet had entered from the front.
Your ma flew at the hired men, her right hand flashing out. “He don’t run! You run!”
The hired man was quick, and your ma’s hand whistled over his ear. She might as well have hit him. I saw the look on his face.
So I grabbed your ma. Harder than I would’ve otherwise, on account of the hired men watching.
Thing is, your ma spoke true: the hired men often wandered from their posts, sometimes with a woman from the two hundred trailing behind. Too often truth ain’t in what’s right, Lucy girl—sometimes it’s in who speaks it. Or writes it. The hired men had guns and I let them say what they said.
“Tell them,” your ma said to me. “Your men. Tell them.”
The taller one told me to control her, and went down to the stream to wash.
Your ma cried against me as I led her back to our lake. Her tears were hot enough to melt me, and after months of tucking it deep, I started to tell her the truth.
I told her they weren’t my men. I told her I owned no ship, no railroad. I told her the railroad jobs would be hard and hateful and wouldn’t make them rich. As a boy I’d stripped a baby bird of its pinfeathers till it was a raw pink thing, till I threw up in the grass. Speaking truth made me feel just as sick.
As I spoke, your ma went stiff. She pushed me away. That strength in her arms—she could snap me like I was nothing.
“Liar,” she said. I’d taught that word in the first week. “Liar.”
—
I’d made myself detestable in your ma’s eyes. Took her two days to speak to me again, two days while she prepared to bury the dead man. Even then she only acknowledged me because I gave her two pieces of silver for his eyes and paid the hired men for the right to wash the body in the stream.
And then I—
No.
No, no. Alright now, Lucy girl. I said I’d tell a true story, and there might be no time left. So here’s the truth. Sometimes you pay in coin. Sometimes you pay in dignity.
Alone outside the building, the two hundred locked up inside and only the dead man to watch, I got on my knees and put my lips to the hired men’s boots. Just as your ma’d kissed the tiger’s print. I begged them to let her do her burying. I begged them not to punish her for trying to hit them. Can you imagine, Lucy girl? Me?
Later on, I kissed your ma’s feet too. Then her ankles, her thighs. I begged her to forgive me. She kept her spine straight and looked down her nose.
“Hao de,” she said.
Those words changed us. She’d broken my rule against speaking her language, and I couldn’t stop her. From then on she’d use more and more of her words, and I’d muddle through, piecing their meaning together, mimicking them. I’d always had an aptitude for birdcalls; this imitation was similar enough, and if I had an accent then it could be excused by my isolation. But from then on I would live in fear.
“Don’t lie again,” your ma warned me.
That was when I realized I could never tell her the rest of the truth. Elsewise she’d leave me. I tucked my story, my true story, deep, deep down in that last layer of me, where I was still a boy running free in these hills. I resolved never to tell her where I came from. I resolved that it wouldn’t be lying if I didn’t speak of it.
Can you blame me, Lucy girl?
It’s a funny thing, how easy it was to keep this lie. No one suspected me, because no man seeing my face believed I was born here. Haven’t you seen that for yourself, Lucy girl? Those jackals with their paper law. They didn’t care about the truth. They assumed their own truth.
That night your ma made me answer question after question. About the railroads and the gold man. About how hard he worked his miners, and how much he paid, and where they lived, how big their houses, how well they ate. How many of them died. At the end of it, she made a plan.
—
Do you recall, Lucy girl, that night you found your nugget, and brought it to your ma, and pestered her to remember?
There was a reason I put you to bed that night. Rememory can hurt. I’ve got my leg to show it, and your ma—well, you can’t see the mark on her, but she has one all the same. She got it in the fire. We all have stories we can’t tell. And this story about the fire is the one your ma buried deepest.
The thing is, the fire was her idea.
—
From the beginning your ma and I shared a sense of fairness. I taught liarthe first week when a girl among the two hundred tried to sneak double rations. It was your ma who caught that girl by the hair and marched her to me.
Your ma nodded as I laid out punishment: two meals less for that girl the next day. Your ma deemed it fair.
You remember, Lucy girl, the way your ma listened when you and Sam fought? How she weighed every word before judging? How she believed in honest work? Well, the night she planned the fire, she weighed the cost of the two hundred’s passage against the dead man buried by the stream. She weighed promises told at a distant harbor against the truth of the gold man’s dealings. In the end she judged it fair that the two hundred should escape their railroad contract. It was built on deception, after all.
She talked so well. She was so smart. And maybe I let her boss me, on account of how I feared letting her down.
Her plan was simple. To escape, we had to get rid of the hired men.
To get rid of the hired men, we would set a fire.
I don’t scare easy, Lucy girl. And I don’t pretend to be blameless. I’ve hit many a man when my blood boils. But the way your ma talked was different. Chilly. A life for a life, she said, adding the old woman who’d died on the ship to the shot man. She has—had—a passion for sums, your ma. Tallied up grievances as if they were coins, and paid them back without a second thought. That’s why she was the one to handle our gold, those months before the storm. That’s why, the night of the storm—
But I’m getting ahead of myself.
Justicewas the word your ma had me teach her that night she planned the fire.
—
Soft as your ma’d made me by then, I couldn’t sleep after we decided on our plan. The hired men’s lives were a weight on me no matter how I lay. I left your ma sleeping—her face placid as the lake—and went for a walk. I nodded to the shorter hired man on watch as I passed—the younger one, who hadn’t shot the dead man.
He lifted his pipe in greeting, then kept it lifted. Offered it to me.
Who knows why these people do what they do, Lucy girl? I’ve turned that moment in my head time and again and still I can’t figure. Was he acting on some wager from his partner? Was he tired of tobacco and looking to get rid of it? Was he like the dumb animal who comes to the edge of the snare and stiffens, suddenly wary, instinct pricking its hairs? Was he the jackal who, cornered, lowers its ears slyly and cries like a human baby? Was he lonely? Was he foolish? Was he kind? What moves in the heads of these people each time they look at us and size us up, what makes them decide on one day to call us chinkand the next day to let us pass, and some days to offer charity? I don’t rightly know, Lucy girl. Never figured it out.
On that night I took the pipe, not wanting to rouse the hired man’s suspicions. He seemed restless. Eager for talk. Said something about the moon being pretty, which it was, and the wildfires dying down, which they were. He said something about a kid sister back at home that made my gut clench so that I was almost ready to wake your ma, take my promise back, tell her the whole truth about me and accept whatever judgment she passed, till the hired man said:
“Where do you come from? Same as them?”
I was half-mad that night, sloshing with pent truths. For some reason I told him. “I’m from this very territory. Not so far from here.”
And that man laughed.
I put his pipe in my mouth. I sucked down his tobacco. Fires still burned on the horizon beyond the glow of the bowl. Animals were fleeing, and they might never return. I sucked and glowed and thought about saying what was funny was how he and thousands of others came only last year to ravage this land and now they claimed it, when it was my land and Billy’s land and the Indians’ land and the tigers’ and the buffalos’ land burning—and then your ma’s word lit in my mind. Justice.I bid the man good night.
—
Only your ma and myself acted out her plan. The two hundred were stuck in the building, and your ma said we didn’t need to tell them anyhow. Said it’d be hard on their conscience. Said we should let them sleep easy. Said—with an impatient toss of her head—that anyhow she knew this would be better for them. Said they’d thank her.
She asked me the word for it. Not lie, or liar. The kinder word. I taught her secret
We slipped out holding hands. Nodded to the man standing watch. We went out, to the hills that huddled around the hired men’s camp. There we filled our arms and wove dry plants into a track, which we laid down for the fire to follow. We surrounded the hired men’s camp with scrub, with grass knotted tight enough to burn long, with thistle heads crackling menace. The high grass hid our intent as we built a circle, a fence, a prison of combustible stuff that would raise flames higher than walls. All it would take was a spark.
And as we did this deadly work? We lay on our bellies. We whispered softly. From a distance, if the hired men bothered to look, they’d see only the grasses swaying above us, as they do to mark the passage of lovers.
When it came time for my watch, I took my place by the building. The two hired men returned to their camp. They started dinner. Hidden from them, at the start of a long track of tinder, your ma struck a piece of flint.
—
This story’s hard to tell, Lucy girl. Even for me. Got no flesh and rightly I shouldn’t hurt, but rememory hurts me.
—
We meant to trade two lives for two. The fire had its own idea. That fire reared up like it wasn’t fire but something living: an enormous beast lofted into the sky, orange flames striped black with smoke. A thing born of the hills, born of the rage that the land should feel. Certainly not a tame thing. You ever corner an animal, Lucy girl? Even a mouse will turn and bite at the last, when it believes itself dying. Amidst the crackle and the smoke—Lucy girl, I swear those hills birthed a tiger.
I saw the fire follow its track downhill. I saw the black forms of the hired men run. Not fast enough. The flames found the dry circle we’d laid, and swallowed the hired men’s camp.
I whooped then. Saw your ma racing from her hiding spot, heading for our lake.
The fire, finished with the camp, went toward the stream as planned. We meant for it to die in the water. A quiet death.
But a fickle wind blew up, stronger than either of us had figured. It stoked the flames higher. I saw the beast raise one long, flaming limb—and step over the stream.
The fire split in two. One part roared forward, toward me and the building that held the two hundred. The other part lunged to the side, licking the grasses, pursuing your ma
—
Like your ma I believe in fairness. But more’n than, I believe in family. Ting wo, Lucy girl. Your family comes first. You stick by them. You don’t betray your family.
—
I’m not a cruel man, Lucy girl. There were three horses tied up by the building and I left two. I unlocked the door and screamed at the two hundred to run. I gave them as much a chance as I could give them, and then I rode after your ma.
It turned out that building wasn’t stone through and through. Whoever built it built lazy, and inside those stones hid a center of straw and dung. A secret heart that dried out over many years in the sun. That caught the fire and fed it.
Half a mile away, holding your ma waist-deep in our lake, I saw the building go up in flame.
It blazed so big and hungry I felt the blast of heat from that distance. It caught any stray people who’d started to run. Your ma was unconscious from breathing smoke; I’d dragged her onto the back of the horse and crashed right into the water. She didn’t see it, or breathe the awful smoke of cooking flesh. But I did. I watched, knowing she’d want me to witness the two hundred as they died.
I never did take to meat again after that, though your ma liked it plenty.
—
A question that’s followed me for years, Lucy girl, is this: can you love a person and hate them all at once? I think so. I think so. When your ma first woke in the ashfall, she smiled at me. No—grinned. The wicked grin of a girl who’d pulled off her prank. She was bold as anything. So certain we’d done right. So certain she knew best.
Then she coughed, and when she sat up—she saw what stretched behind. Our lake of fire, reflecting the sky. The spooked and lathered horse I’d saved. The flames still flicking along the ridge where the building was charred black rubble.
Your ma cried as an animal cries, rocking back and forth in the shallows. She tipped her head back and howled. Night came and still she scratched me if I approached, and bared her teeth. The cracking, hissing sounds from her smoke-torn throat—they weren’t words.
You’ve heard me tell stories of transformation, Lucy girl. Men into wolves. Women into seals and swans. Well, your ma transformed that night, though her face and body looked the same.
Twice she ran to the far edge of the lake and looked out at the ruins of the two hundred. Her whole body quivered, pointed toward them. Away from me. I could see in her the wildness. I could see her desire to run. I left the horse where it was. Let her leave if she wanted.
And then, in the smeared gray dawn, I felt her burrow into my side. Her fingers sharp enough to rip my belly, my guts. I wouldn’t have stopped her. All she tore was my shirt, my pants. Her howls didn’t stop so much as turn into moans, grunts. At last she curled against me and asked me, over and over, in a scratchy, smoke-ruined voice, not to leave her alone.
The weeks that passed while we waited for the fire to die, for your ma’s throat to heal—they went this way: Sometimes I’d catch your ma staring at me with hate. Other times, love. I was the only person left to her. I suppose I had to carry both. She raged and beat my chest, but lay quiet to let me rub poultices on her throat.
Her throat never did heal proper. Just like your nose, Lucy girl. That voice of your ma’s, that scratch and rustle of it—that was something made.
—
I’ve told you before that I met a tiger, and came away with this bad leg. You never believed me. I saw the judgment in your eyes. Sometimes that made me furious—my own daughter practically calling me a liar—and other times I was pleased. Didn’t I tell you, Lucy girl? That you should always ask why a person is telling you their story?
The truth, now: here’s how I met the tiger.
This was some weeks on and us two still the only two in a blackened world. No animal or man had set foot over the burnt hills—and no wagons of railroad supplies. If the gold man had heard of the fire, likely he thought us perished with the rest.
When the ground cooled enough, your ma wanted to look.
First we went to the hired men’s camp. Your ma kicked through, ignoring their charred bones and the remains of their guns. We panned the ashes for their gold and their silver. Lumpen things that were once coins. She spat on the campsite as we left.
And then we took what we’d found to the remains of the building on the ridge.
“Word,” your ma said as she used her hand to cover a piece of bone.
I taught her bury, and she taught me how. Silver. Running water. Something to remind of home. She’d brought cloth from her trunk—a small miracle that its contents smelled of perfume and not smoke. Your ma bundled bone into scraps of cloth. Laid the silver on top.
“Better?” she asked me.
I said I reckoned the two hundred were in a better place. In a way, they were. I didn’t know what kind of life they could have had in this land.
Your ma shook her head. For the first time since I’d known her, she spoke with doubt. “Better if not us?”
I soothed her. I told her, over and over, it wasn’t her fault.
Her voice healed some, and some of her confidence came back, so that she would become a mother who could say right from wrong. But I tell you, Lucy girl, that day in the ashes she lost her convictions. I saw the guilt and the wondering eat at her worse than flames.
Which is why I waited for her to fall asleep before I returned to the building alone.
Night in those burnt hills was eerie. Darker than any night before or since. Nothing to reflect what little moon showed through the smoke: an unchanging dark. I stole into the burnt building. I found those bundles of bone. And I took back the silver.
We needed it more than the dead did, Lucy girl.
As I walked back I got the sense that something watched me. I walked quicker. Halted. It halted too. Seemed footsteps were matching mine. Soon I was running, the earth thudding under a weight greater than my own. I heard a roar behind me, louder than fire or wind. A sharpness reached from the dark and sliced my knee. I stumbled onward, bleeding, so scared I never once looked back.
—
This is my story, Lucy girl. My truth. And I’m telling you, the tiger that marked me and caused my limp—I didn’t see it. But I felt the truth of it in my bones. Your ma cleaned my wound and dressed it the next morning. I didn’t want to saddle her with more guilt—she was shaky those days—so I said I’d cut myself walking to the latrine in the dark. Just bad luck.
But was it? The cut, though shallow, went through the tendon, severed it so neatly that I never walked true again. The skin healed, but something essential had been nicked from me. Did chance make that clean cut? Or the claws of a canny predator, a beast that still guarded these hills after everything else was gone and dead? Was it punishment for the secret in my pocket, clanking silver? I never saw the tiger’s face, but does that make my story any less true?
—
Not much more to tell, Lucy girl. Morning’s coming.
I promised your ma we’d build a fortune all our own. I promised her there was still gold in these hills so long as we looked. Just over the horizon, I promised her. The next place will be better. And I promised her, on those nights she cried till she went stony, that if it didn’t work out I’d take her back. To that place beyond the ocean.
She didn’t talk near as much as she had before, on account of her throat paining her. Some nights as we traveled through the prospecting sites, I felt her rise from our bed. She stood beside the horse, looking out, pointed away, that wildness in her.
But she didn’t run. And she didn’t run. And her throat healed a bit, and soon you swelled in her belly. She started sleeping through the night. She smiled once in a while. When you were born, Lucy girl, you were like an anchor dropping on the ship your ma used to tell about: holding us down, holding us together. Holding us to this land. For that, I was always grateful.
—
Your ma after the fire was never quite the same girl who’d come off the ship bossing two hundred and kissing tigers’ prints. She grew wary—you saw, Lucy girl, how prospecting spooked her. How she was fearful of luck.
The new Ma had love and hate in her both. She sang you songs and sewed you dresses and rubbed my bad leg and teased. And she fought me over the gold, over the raising of you and Sam, over my dislike of rich men and my preference for Indian camps where I gambled and traded—over the right way to be, the right people to be. Once she’d mistaken me for a man with power, and ever after she was careful to track who had it, who to speak to, who to avoid. If I was a gambler, then she was a clerk. That hating part of her never stopped measuring what was fair. Never stopped counting up my sins, my rare successes.
But she stayed with me. I figure it was on account of the two hundred, in the end. They’d made her doubt herself, and I was cowardly enough to use it. I’m not proud to say that sometimes I reminded your ma of what had happened to them, out of spite.
And then, the storm.
Sure, when we were robbed of our gold that night, your ma saw my worth drop lower than ever. Sure, we lost our supplies. But I figure it was the baby that decided her.
We’d wanted him so much. When you were born, when Sam was, you knit us—I figure we counted on the baby to do the same. And when he was born dead, that tiny blue body, when I cut the cord on him—something else was cut too. Your ma looked at him the way she’d looked at those bundles of bone in the ash. That same guilt. I saw her tallying the decisions we’d made over the years—the meat we didn’t have for so long, the jostling of the wagon, the coal dust down her lungs—and I saw her see the baby as judgment passed on our living.
Years ago in that burnt building, she meant to say those people would’ve been better off without us. Maybe she figured that you, and Sam, and that dead baby, would be better off without her.
She didn’t die, Lucy girl. I went out to bury your brother and came back to an empty house. Your ma was always strong. As to where she went, I never wanted to know. If questions rose up in me, why, I drank them down. I drowned them as the storm had drowned most other things.
When you get to be older, Lucy girl, you’ll learn that sometimes, knowing is worse than not knowing. I didn’t want to know about your ma. Not what she did, or with whom, or how she felt looking into some other man’s face. I didn’t want to know the precise spot on a map that could hurt me.
—
It seems that to tell you the whole story, I got to tell as well the story I wish was true.
Here’s the truth: until the night your ma took off, I believed that under my hardness there still hid a softer man. I figured that one day when we were rich and comfortable, when your ma didn’t have to stand on her feet to work, let alone think of running—then I’d take the shining nuggets from the shelves of our own house on a piece of land so big we never saw another body. I’d put those nuggets in your hands, in Sam’s hands, in the boy’s hands. Soft hands all. And I’d tell a story. About how, as a boy, me and Billy found the first gold in these hills.
—
There, Lucy girl. Now you’ve heard what you always wanted to know. I told Sam years back. Why didn’t I tell you? Well, maybe it was on account of shame. Maybe fear that you’d run after your ma. I know you loved her best. I saw how you looked at me by the end, and it was what I’d seen in your ma: love and hate both.
It was hard to bear, Lucy girl. Because truth is, I loved you just as well as Sam, though it was Sam I spoke to on account of Sam being tough enough to hear me out. Maybe I even loved you better, though that’s a shameful thing to say. Shameful to love just because you needed the loving more, soft that you were. I remember the morning you were born. Your eyes opened and they were my eyes. Light brown, nearly gold. Not like your ma’s or Sam’s. Too much of my water in you.
Maybe I treated you hard on account of you growing to look more and more like her.
It’s likely you’ll hate me after this telling. Come morning, if you remember, I wouldn’t be surprised to see you tumble my bones into a ditch and leave me for the jackals.
Lucy girl.
Bao bei.
Nu er.
I looked for a fortune and thought it slipped between my fingers, but it occurs to me I did make something of this land after all—I made you and Sam. You turned out alright, didn’t you? I taught you to be strong. I taught you to be hard. I taught you to survive. To look at you now, taking care of Sam, trying to bury my body proper—I don’t regret that teaching. I got no need to apologize. I only wish I’d stayed and taught you more. You’ll have to make do with bits, as you have all your life. You’re a smart girl. Just remember: your family comes first. Ting wo.
Lucy girl.
Sun’s sinking down these hills and here you are sinking too. I know the sort of bone-deep tired you and Sam must feel these days as you run. I know what it is to flee with your past panting behind, claws extending in the dark. I’m not a cruel man, whatever you think.
Lucy girl, there were plenty of times I wanted to give you a soft, easy life. But if I did, the world would gnaw you down like these buffalo bones.
Night’s the only time I got now, and this wind the only sort of voice. I have your ear till sunup. It’s not too late, yet.
Lucy girl, there’s only one story worth telling now.
—
Every soul in this territory knows the year a man pulled gold from the river and the whole country drew up into itself, took a breath that blew wagons out across the West. All your life you heard people say the story starts in ’48. And all your life when people told you this story, did you ever question why?
They told it to shut you out. They told it to claim it, to make it theirs and not yours. They told it to say we came too late. Thieves, they called us. They said this land could never be our land.
I know you like things written down and read out by schoolteachers. I know you like what’s neat and pretty. But it’s high time you heard the truth story, and if it hurts—well, at least you’ll be tougher for it.
So listen. Tell yourself it’s the wind in your ear if you must, but I reckon these nights belong to me till you bury that body of mine.
That history in your books is plain lie. Gold wasn’t found by a man, but by a boy the same age as you. Twelve. And it wasn’t found in ’48 but back in ’42. I know because it was me that found it.
—
Well, it was properly Billy that touched gold first. Billy was my best friend, a grown man of forty or so, though it was hard to say and he sure wasn’t saying. People today’d call him mutt: his ma was Indian and his ba one of those small, dark vaqueros come from across the Southern desert. They left Billy with two names—one most people couldn’t pronounce, and one most could—plus skin the color of fresh-peeled manzanita bark. His arm shone in the river as he tickled a fish.
Something flashed against Billy’s dark red, brighter than scales. I shouted.
What Billy handed me was a pretty yellow rock. Too pliable to be of use, and me too old for trinkets. I let it fall back through my fingers. It caught the sun as it tumbled, a shard of light that lodged in my eye. For minutes after, I saw spots across the hills.
I swear that gold winked at me, like it knew what I didn’t.
This was the year of ’42, though the camp where I grew up didn’t call it ’42. Just as we didn’t call our hills the West. West of where? It was just our land, and we were just people. We ranged between ocean to one side, mountains to the other.
The camp I grew up in was full of Billys. By which I mean old men, quiet, many with more than one name. They didn’t like to talk of the past. Best that I could piece together, they were the remnants of three or maybe four tribes now jumbled up, old men and cripples too stubborn or tired to leave when the rest did for better hunting grounds. There’d been a priest when many of them were boys, who’d given them new names—and a pox that killed half their people. The priest had also given them a common language, which they taught me. That camp was all outcasts and stragglers, what your Ma considered the wrong kind of company. And sure there wasn’t a clean handkerchief among them, but there was kindness, or at least a kind of weariness that looked nearly the same. Too many had seen destruction.
Still, the hills were good for plenty when I grew up. Poppies in the wet season, fat rabbits in the dry. Manzanita berries and wild sorrel, miner’s lettuce, and the paw prints of wolves in streambeds. Never a shortage of green. As to how I got there—I knew as little about myself as about the old men. They’d found me on a foraging trip down the coast: a newborn, hours old, crying alone, my ma and ba dead beside me. Saltwater stains on their clothes.
I asked Billy, once, how he knew it was my ma and ba on account of their being dead, and the dead not speaking. He touched my eyes. Then touched the edges of his own and pulled them out till they narrowed.
Here’s the thing, Lucy girl: like you I never grew up among people who looked like me. But that’s no excuse, and don’t you use it. If I had a ba, then he was the sun that warmed me most days and beat me sweaty-sore on others; if I had a ma, then she was the grass that held me when I lay down and slept. I grew up in these hills and they raised me: the streams and rock shelves, the valleys where scrub oaks bunched so thick they seemed one mass but allowed me, skinny and swift, to slip between trunks and pierce the hollow center where branches knit a green ceiling. If I had a people, then I saw those people in the reflecting pools, where water was so clear it showed a world the exact double of this one: another set of hills and sky, another boy looking back with my same eyes. I grew up knowing I belonged to this land, Lucy girl. You and Sam do too, never mind how you look. Don’t you let any man with a history book tell you different
—
But I’m getting carried away. No need linger on the pretty stories, the kind I’ve always fed you because you were a child.
Well, things are different now. You thought me hard? You see the truth of it: the world’s a good deal harder. It ain’t fair, but you and Sam won’t get years for growing. Just maybe these nights. Just maybe what I can tell you.
Years went by and I hardly remembered that yellow rock. Until a day in ’49 when we woke up to a boom, then dust clouds, then the river by our camp running brown, running black. We woke up to wagons of men, and trees coming down while buildings went up. The old men in my camp turned their backs till it was too late. Till there was nothing to fish or hunt or eat. They slipped away rather than fight. Some went South, some over the mountains, some to cool grass wallows to wait for death. Too much destruction, you see.
Billy alone stayed with me. And just like in ’42, we waded looking for gold.
Too late, though. The easy gold was picked clean. What remained required whole teams of men, and carts of dynamite. We got jobs washing dishes, sweeping the saloon. Helped that Billy had taught me writing.
Seemed I woke up in ’49 and all my dreams were of gold: the wink of it slipping through my fingers seven years back. I panned when I could. Found a few flecks amounting to nothing.
I saw how hard the gold men worked their miners. Men lost legs to dynamite, got crushed by rock. Men shot each other, stole and stabbed, starved in lean weeks. Dozens of ’em turned around each month and headed back East. But hundreds replaced them. And a few struck it rich, became gold men themselves.
There came a night in ’50 when the gold man who owned the biggest mines—the fattest and richest of the lot—called across the saloon.
“You. Come here. No, not you. You, boy—with the funny eyes.”
Billy wouldn’t come along. I kept going.
“Are those eyes real, boy? Or you some kind of half-wit?”
Up close I saw that the gold man, for all his fatness, wasn’t so much older than me. I told him I was no half-wit, kept my fists behind my back. I’d learned that year about talking with fists instead of words when people looked at me funny. It saved me repeating myself. But the gold man wasn’t alone. A hired man in black stood behind him with a gun
“And you write? You read? Don’t lie to me.”
I told him Billy had taught me. Called Billy over, but the gold man didn’t even look at him. The gold man said he had a job for me. Young and soft that I was, I didn’t think to ask why he chose me. Let that be a lesson to you, Lucy girl. Always ask why. Always know what part of you they want.
The gold man explained that there would come a time when the hills were scraped empty. When men would bring families to settle. They’d need supplies. Houses. Food. The gold man planned to lay railroad track through the West, joining plains to ocean. For that he needed cheap labor. And he’d gotten a whole shipful of it.
Sure, I told him, I could go to the coast and train his workers. Sure, I could talk to them on his behalf.
Truth is, I hardly understood half of what the gold man said. I’d never seen a train, didn’t know the ocean route he spoke of, or where the workers came from. But I understood his power. I didn’t ask questions. He had a gold watch the size of my palm that he flicked as he talked. He was fat enough that I could cling like a tick to his wealth. Through him I could claim what had slipped from my fingers as a boy, what was always mine—didn’t me and Billy touch gold first?
I asked for Billy to come along too. I told that gold man about Billy’s loyalty and his circumspection, his strong arms and his tracker’s knowledge. I had the gold man near convinced, I could tell—but it was Billy himself who ruined his chance. Billy said he’d rather stay behind.
I never properly got an answer why. Billy wasn’t big on talking. All he said was he was staying. That it was better for me to go on alone. When I asked why, he touched my eyes. I never saw him after that night.
Lucy girl, I told you. I learned a long time back: family comes first. No one else matters.
—
Two of the gold man’s hired men rode along with me to meet the ship. That was my first horse, Lucy girl, and I pretended I knew what riding was. Bled for days till I hardened.
Wagonloads of railroad track set out behind us, going slower. They’d meet us at the coast after some weeks. The gold man said I was to teach the two hundred while we waited. I didn’t ask what I was meant to teach.
The hired men wore black and spoke mostly to each other. They camped a distance away at night and never invited me to join, not that I cared—I liked my solitary bed. I hardly recall those two weeks of travel to the coast; all I saw was the wealth in my future. My eyes were so dazzled, it took me a moment to see what came off that ship:
Two hundred people who looked like me.
Eyes the shape of mine, noses like mine, hair like mine. Men and women and some hardly more’n kids, dragging their trunks and bags, wearing funny robes. I started to count them.
And then I saw your ma.
You know your ma. So I won’t say how she looked. What I’ll tell you is the feeling that welled up in me as she passed, a feeling akin to striking groundwater when you’ve wandered hot all day and thirst is a knife at your throat. That promise of quenching to come. Same feeling I expect you had as a girl after playing all day in the grass, arriving home to a plate of dinner kept warm. That feeling of knowing someone will call your name—that’s the feeling I got when your ma met my eyes. I knew I was almost home.
I kept my head screwed tight and kept counting. Got to a hundred and ninety-three people before they quit coming. The two hired men looked at me; I looked at a sailor. The sailor went in and pushed six more onto the dock. Said one died on the way over.
The last six were ancient, bent like trees. God knows what work the gold man expected to get out of them. One fell on the gangplank. And guess who ran to help the old woman up?
That’s right. Your ma.
Your ma looked right at me. Under her gaze, I got a sailor to load the six into a wagon along with the trunks and satchels the two hundred had brought. I nudged the sailor along with a coin from the wallet the gold man had given me for buying supplies.
They tried to load your ma onto the wagon too, but she walked with the others. When the two hired men mounted up, I got down and walked too.
—
Lucy girl, you always thought it was your old ba pushing the family, wanting more. But the push came first from your ma. Because that day of the ship, she saw me wrong. She mistook me for the gold man who ordered other men around. She mistook me for someone who’d paid for a ship and jobs. She mistook me for something bigger than myself. By the time I understood what your ma believed, it was too late to correct her.
That first night, I learned we didn’t speak the same language.
The gold man had found a barn for the two hundred to stay in. I stood first watch outside and heard them jabbering in confusion. Some of them pounded on the door, angry, and yelled at me through the cracks. Maybe they hadn’t expected locks, or straw beds.
The two hired men were already camped way down on the beach, but they came over on account of the commotion.
“What’s the matter with them?” the taller of the hired men asked. “Tell ’em to settle down.”
I was younger than him, and had two good legs back then. I could’ve knocked him down. But he had a gun, and I didn’t.
“Do your job,” he said. “The one you’re paid for.”
That cleared the red from my eyes. I swallowed my questions. I told not a soul that I didn’t understand what the two hundred spoke. I tucked that secret down deep, deep, in the same soft spot where I was once a boy so stupid I let gold slip between my fingers.
I went inside the barn and rang a cowbell.
You know what makes a good teacher, Lucy girl? Not nice words or pretty clothes. A good teacher is a firm teacher. Ting wo. The first lesson I taught was that they couldn’t use the words they’d brought over. Not here. The first man to speak, I clapped a hand across his jaw. Held it shut. You need force to accomplish anything, Lucy girl.
Mouth, I said, pointing. Hand, I said, pointing. No, I said. Quiet, I said. And we began.
—
That first night: Teacher. Speak. Barn. Straw. Sleep. Corn. No. No. No.
The first day on the road: Horse. Road. Faster. Tree. Sun. Day. Water. Walk. Stand. Faster. Faster.
The second night: Corn. Dirt. Down. Hand. Foot. Night. Moon. Bed.
The third day: Stand. Rest. March. Sorry. Work. Work. No.
The third night, when we got to the place we were meant to build a railroad: Man. Woman. Baby. Born.
—
I was off my watch on that third night when your ma came and found me alone. How she did it I never figured; when I asked later, she just laughed and said a woman needed her secrets. I don’t know how she slipped past the hired man who stood guard. I guess she has—had—her ways. Her smiling ways. I didn’t think on it that night, though I’ve thought about it many times since.
We’d settled to wait for the wagons on a pretty piece of land not far from the coast. We smelled salt when the wind blew, and in the distance were cypress trees bent at unlikely angles. The two hundred slept, locked in for the night, in an old stone building up on the ridge. Rusted bell tower above and a stream out front. Half a mile beyond that were grassy hills where the hired men set up their own camp. And out in the other direction was a little lake, pretty if you ignored the bugs and marshy grass. That lake I claimed for my own.
Your ma came up to me as I stood looking into the lake. I was hoping for a glint in the water.
“Teach?” your ma said, startling me so that I nearly fell in. She didn’t say Sorrylike I’d taught them. She smiled, wickedly.
Your ma was eager to learn. Not like those among the two hundred who looked at me sullenly, who saw me as the enemy. Those sorts hated me more’n they hated the hired men, who whipped their ankles with green branches. I expect they took me for a traitor, saw my eyes and my face like theirs and hated me the worse for it. Those sorts whispered about me. Of course, I had no idea what they said. So I had to punish them for any words. All words. Otherwise my discipline would’ve fallen apart completely.
Which meant the two hundred watched me as carefully as the hired men watched me, and I worked to make my face a mask. No one could learn how much I didn’t know.
“You,” your ma said. She pointed to me. Then she cupped her hands over her stomach. Over and over she did this. I shook my head. She made a kind of frustrated growl and grabbed my hand.
I’d thought her lovely and mild. She was kind to the old people. Laughed easily. Had a high, clear voice like some little songbird. But the hand that grabbed mine could do more than hammer railroad ties. I remembered what the hired men said to each other when they traded watch: Don’t turn your back. They’re savages.
Your ma’s hand was strong, but her waist, when she made me touch it, was softer than anything since I lost my rabbit-skin hat from Billy. She made me trace around her waist, then drew me close till the sides of our bodies touched. She traced that touching line. Cupped her hands again over her stomach. Pointed at me.
I still didn’t understand.
Your ma put a hand on my chest and a hand on her own breast. She trailed down my chest, my belly. Stopped at my pants. I’m sure she could see my blush.
“Word?” she said, pushing at her breast. “Word?” she said again, two fingers lightly tracing my pants.
I taught her man.I taught her woman.As she cupped her stomach, I taught her baby. When again she pointed to me, I understood her original question.
“I was born back there,” I told her. There was still blood in my cheeks. I was half-dizzy with it as I pointed toward my hills. Your ma’s face lit up.
It wasn’t till after she’d left me alone that I cooled down, and realized I’d pointed in the wrong direction. Toward the ocean. She thought we came from the same place. And I didn’t have the words to explain otherwise.
—
I know you think me a liar, Lucy girl. But don’t you ever think me stupid. Don’t think I missed how you looked at me those nights I came back drunk. The sheer arrogance of you, looking at me like you knew better. Looking at me like you were disappointed.
That look so like your ma’s.
Your ma was like you in a whole lot of ways. She believed that dressing right and talking right could set the world right around her. She studied me and the hired men. Asked us the words for shirtand dress, asked what women wore in this land. Always looking to better herself, your ma.
You see, your ma had come seeking fortune. All the two hundred had. Back home your ma’s own ba was dead, her ma’s hands ruined gutting fish. She was promised to marry an old fisherman, till she boarded the ship.
Golden mountain, she told me the same night she told about the mother, the fisherman, the man at the harbor who promised this place over the ocean would make them rich. We were lying out that night in the grass beside my lake. I laughed fit to die when I heard: some poor teacher had blundered the word for hills
Lucy girl, I regretted that laughter all my life.
I couldn’t tell your ma why I laughed, of course. Couldn’t tell her why it was so funny, the idea of the two hundred getting rich. She still thought I could make it happen for them. That it was my ship, my man at the harbor making promises, my railroad we’d build when the wagons arrived.
So I said something stupid. I said I laughed on account of how she pronounced gold: thick as syrup, half-swallowed. Your ma flushed and left me alone that night.
Later on I caught her practicing the word. Gold gold gold gold gold.
Your ma spoke prettier than me by the end. Looked prettier too. People thought me hard, and her soft. We made a good team. Had a balance, same as you and Sam. But believe me, Lucy girl, when I say that your ma was even more fixed on making a fortune.
—
Your ma got the two hundred to trust me. She had a quality that made people listen, never mind that she was young, and a woman. She was—well, Sam might call it bossy. Like you, Lucy girl. She was smart so she figured she knew best. Most of the time she did, and convinced everyone else of it.
I started taking meals with the two hundred at your ma’s insistence, listening to them chatter in their own language in the corners. I pretended not to hear. So long as they didn’t speak it to my face, I let it pass.
Plenty of time for chatter, anyhow. The wagons of railroad supplies were late in coming. Couldn’t get through on account of the horizon being lit up by the worst fires these hills have seen.
Turns out that when you dig up streams and clog rivers, when you cut trees and their roots no longer hold the soil back, that soil goes dry. Crumbles like left-out bread. Like the whole land’s gone stale. The plants die, the grass bakes—and when the dry season comes, a spark can set it all aflame.
The hired men swore and paced. They polished their guns like they meant to rub through the metal. But there was nothing to be done. At least we were by the coast, with damp in the air. The fire didn’t seem like to reach us. We waited.
Animals started to show up one day. They darted over the stream, past the walls of the stone building, heading to the coast. Rabbits skinny with terror, mice and squirrels and possums. Flocks of birds blocking out the shrunken red sun. Once a young buck leapt clear over me with antlers ablaze. There was quiet for a while, then the slower creatures came: snakes, lizards. For a day and a night no one could step in the grass for fear of being bitten. Even the hired men abandoned their own camp and slept in the building.
And last, but unseen, the tiger.
I woke up one day to paw prints around the marshy edge of the lake. Too big for wolf. Hard to tell with the sky so red, but I swore I saw a flash of orange in the reeds.
Your ma came up to me yawning. Her hair was mussed, but she was never lovelier than in the morning, smelling of sleep and the people we were at night. I rarely saw her that way. Made idle by the fire, she’d started to fuss with her hair. She’d braid it and pin it and curl it, asking endless questions about how ladies here wore it. Same with her clothes. Your ma took thread from her trunk and stitched and hemmed that robe of hers into different shapes. She got other women to join her too. I didn’t have the heart to say those dresses would have no place once the wagons arrived, when they’d be sweating all day over railroad ties.
Your ma wanted to make me friendly with the rest of the two hundred. She poked fun at my quiet, teased me for being so solitary. Some people are born solitary, no less happy for it—I was, and I suspect you were, too, Lucy girl, but your ma didn’t understand. She pestered about my family till I told her they were dead. She made me talk dresses to the women, dragged me to join the circles of men gambling with straws. She bossed me.
Truth is, the faces of the two hundred didn’t warm me. Their language and gossip were strange, as was the easy way they called each other fat and picked loose threads from each other’s sleeves. What did it matter that we looked alike? I came from the hills, and the two hundred spooked at the sound of jackals. They were soft people who’d believed a pack of lies, and I didn’t need them. I sat down with the men just to please your ma, and, given how often I won, I suspect the men let me play just to please her too. I suspected your ma’d had a sweetheart among the two hundred before they reached shore. There was a certain man who argued with her constantly, and another who always tried to give her extra food. She didn’t say and I didn’t ask; all that mattered was that she’d brought her trunk to my lake and slept there most nights.
All that mattered, Lucy girl, was that there was a time when your ma had eyes only for me.
I forgot plenty of things in my life: Billy’s face, the color of poppies, how to sleep gentle so that I didn’t wake up with fists clenched and an ache already started in my shoulders, the word for the smell of earth after rain, the taste of clean water. And there’s other things I’m forgetting in death: how it felt to swing my fist and feel the knuckles crack, how mud squelched between my toes, how it was to have fingers and toes and hunger. I expect there’ll come a day when I forget everything of myself, after you and Sam bury me—not just my body but what little of me is in your blood and speech. But. Even if there comes a day when I’m no more than a wind roaming these hills, then I expect that wind will still remember one thing and whisper it to every blade of grass: the way I felt when your ma looked only at me. So bright a lesser man might fear it
In any case your ma stood that morning looking at the paw print. I put an arm around her, figuring she was scared. Tiger, I taught her, and started to describe the beast.
She threw my arm off and laughed. “Don’t you know?” she said, mocking. Then she bent and put her hand in the tiger’s print. Her eyes dared me. You might not believe this, Lucy girl, but she kissed that mud.
“Luck,” she said. “Home.” With her finger she drew a word in the mud. As she did she sang a tune I’d learn was the tiger song. Lao hu, lao hu.
Your ma shone with pure mischief. Fearless. She hadn’t broken my rule about speaking her language, but she’d stalked the edge of that rule as the tiger stalked the lake. She’d written it, sung it. She laughed at me as I tried to figure out what to do about her.
Fire behind her, the sky hot with the world’s burning, her muddy mouth and snarled hair, the print of a beast come so close it could have taken us in the night—all this and she laughed. Wilder than all this put together.
Something moved in my chest. As a child I’d awoken in the night to a shake in my bones. Billy said it was a tiger’s roar: from far off, they can’t be heard, only felt. My chest roared that morning beside the lake. What had stalked me since the day the ship arrived, what I’d feared some nights as I held your ma close, that day pounced. Sank claws into my heart. After weeks of rules, I spoke my first words of your ma’s language.
I’d listened to the two hundred. Their cusses came easiest. But I’d heard lovers too.
Qin ai de, I said to your ma. It was a guess. I didn’t know its proper meaning till I saw it in her eyes.
—
Softness took me over as rot took over the oaks one year when I was a boy. What looked a harmless fuzz weakened the trees from within. Years later, they split and died.
I’d grown up solitary, needing only shade, a stream, and from time to time a chat with one of the old men. My growing had made me strong enough to survive.
But your ma—she stroked my brow, made me lay my head in her lap as she cleaned out my earwax. She studied my eyes, a lighter brown than the rest of the two hundred, and declared the color contained liquid. Concluded I was water, and not wood as she’d once thought.
I let myself speak more of your ma’s words. Pet names, cusses. Giving them as little gifts to her. But only I was allowed to speak them—I still frowned on her using her own language. And I was still stern with the two hundred. They weren’t permitted to speak freely, or to go outside unaccompanied, save for an hour at dusk and dawn.
The rules were to protect them too. I saw the hired men getting more restless as the fires kept us trapped. Their hands itching at their guns.
And then one evening I came back from my lake, hand in hand with your ma. We’d found a grove of oaks much like my boyhood grove, the branches making a green room in the center. Your ma danced around me singing the last word of the tiger song: Lai. Lai. Lai.Calling as she’d called me to come beneath the trees.
There was a hush around the stone building as we arrived.
The hired men dragged a body around the corner. It was a man I’d gambled with, always clever at avoiding the short straw. Well, his luck had run out. It was that man, but his chest was a bloody hole.
“He was trying to run,” the taller of the hired men said as he shucked his bloody gloves.
But the bullet had entered from the front.
Your ma flew at the hired men, her right hand flashing out. “He don’t run! You run!”
The hired man was quick, and your ma’s hand whistled over his ear. She might as well have hit him. I saw the look on his face.
So I grabbed your ma. Harder than I would’ve otherwise, on account of the hired men watching.
Thing is, your ma spoke true: the hired men often wandered from their posts, sometimes with a woman from the two hundred trailing behind. Too often truth ain’t in what’s right, Lucy girl—sometimes it’s in who speaks it. Or writes it. The hired men had guns and I let them say what they said.
“Tell them,” your ma said to me. “Your men. Tell them.”
The taller one told me to control her, and went down to the stream to wash.
Your ma cried against me as I led her back to our lake. Her tears were hot enough to melt me, and after months of tucking it deep, I started to tell her the truth.
I told her they weren’t my men. I told her I owned no ship, no railroad. I told her the railroad jobs would be hard and hateful and wouldn’t make them rich. As a boy I’d stripped a baby bird of its pinfeathers till it was a raw pink thing, till I threw up in the grass. Speaking truth made me feel just as sick.
As I spoke, your ma went stiff. She pushed me away. That strength in her arms—she could snap me like I was nothing.
“Liar,” she said. I’d taught that word in the first week. “Liar.”
—
I’d made myself detestable in your ma’s eyes. Took her two days to speak to me again, two days while she prepared to bury the dead man. Even then she only acknowledged me because I gave her two pieces of silver for his eyes and paid the hired men for the right to wash the body in the stream.
And then I—
No.
No, no. Alright now, Lucy girl. I said I’d tell a true story, and there might be no time left. So here’s the truth. Sometimes you pay in coin. Sometimes you pay in dignity.
Alone outside the building, the two hundred locked up inside and only the dead man to watch, I got on my knees and put my lips to the hired men’s boots. Just as your ma’d kissed the tiger’s print. I begged them to let her do her burying. I begged them not to punish her for trying to hit them. Can you imagine, Lucy girl? Me?
Later on, I kissed your ma’s feet too. Then her ankles, her thighs. I begged her to forgive me. She kept her spine straight and looked down her nose.
“Hao de,” she said.
Those words changed us. She’d broken my rule against speaking her language, and I couldn’t stop her. From then on she’d use more and more of her words, and I’d muddle through, piecing their meaning together, mimicking them. I’d always had an aptitude for birdcalls; this imitation was similar enough, and if I had an accent then it could be excused by my isolation. But from then on I would live in fear.
“Don’t lie again,” your ma warned me.
That was when I realized I could never tell her the rest of the truth. Elsewise she’d leave me. I tucked my story, my true story, deep, deep down in that last layer of me, where I was still a boy running free in these hills. I resolved never to tell her where I came from. I resolved that it wouldn’t be lying if I didn’t speak of it.
Can you blame me, Lucy girl?
It’s a funny thing, how easy it was to keep this lie. No one suspected me, because no man seeing my face believed I was born here. Haven’t you seen that for yourself, Lucy girl? Those jackals with their paper law. They didn’t care about the truth. They assumed their own truth.
That night your ma made me answer question after question. About the railroads and the gold man. About how hard he worked his miners, and how much he paid, and where they lived, how big their houses, how well they ate. How many of them died. At the end of it, she made a plan.
—
Do you recall, Lucy girl, that night you found your nugget, and brought it to your ma, and pestered her to remember?
There was a reason I put you to bed that night. Rememory can hurt. I’ve got my leg to show it, and your ma—well, you can’t see the mark on her, but she has one all the same. She got it in the fire. We all have stories we can’t tell. And this story about the fire is the one your ma buried deepest.
The thing is, the fire was her idea.
—
From the beginning your ma and I shared a sense of fairness. I taught liarthe first week when a girl among the two hundred tried to sneak double rations. It was your ma who caught that girl by the hair and marched her to me.
Your ma nodded as I laid out punishment: two meals less for that girl the next day. Your ma deemed it fair.
You remember, Lucy girl, the way your ma listened when you and Sam fought? How she weighed every word before judging? How she believed in honest work? Well, the night she planned the fire, she weighed the cost of the two hundred’s passage against the dead man buried by the stream. She weighed promises told at a distant harbor against the truth of the gold man’s dealings. In the end she judged it fair that the two hundred should escape their railroad contract. It was built on deception, after all.
She talked so well. She was so smart. And maybe I let her boss me, on account of how I feared letting her down.
Her plan was simple. To escape, we had to get rid of the hired men.
To get rid of the hired men, we would set a fire.
I don’t scare easy, Lucy girl. And I don’t pretend to be blameless. I’ve hit many a man when my blood boils. But the way your ma talked was different. Chilly. A life for a life, she said, adding the old woman who’d died on the ship to the shot man. She has—had—a passion for sums, your ma. Tallied up grievances as if they were coins, and paid them back without a second thought. That’s why she was the one to handle our gold, those months before the storm. That’s why, the night of the storm—
But I’m getting ahead of myself.
Justicewas the word your ma had me teach her that night she planned the fire.
—
Soft as your ma’d made me by then, I couldn’t sleep after we decided on our plan. The hired men’s lives were a weight on me no matter how I lay. I left your ma sleeping—her face placid as the lake—and went for a walk. I nodded to the shorter hired man on watch as I passed—the younger one, who hadn’t shot the dead man.
He lifted his pipe in greeting, then kept it lifted. Offered it to me.
Who knows why these people do what they do, Lucy girl? I’ve turned that moment in my head time and again and still I can’t figure. Was he acting on some wager from his partner? Was he tired of tobacco and looking to get rid of it? Was he like the dumb animal who comes to the edge of the snare and stiffens, suddenly wary, instinct pricking its hairs? Was he the jackal who, cornered, lowers its ears slyly and cries like a human baby? Was he lonely? Was he foolish? Was he kind? What moves in the heads of these people each time they look at us and size us up, what makes them decide on one day to call us chinkand the next day to let us pass, and some days to offer charity? I don’t rightly know, Lucy girl. Never figured it out.
On that night I took the pipe, not wanting to rouse the hired man’s suspicions. He seemed restless. Eager for talk. Said something about the moon being pretty, which it was, and the wildfires dying down, which they were. He said something about a kid sister back at home that made my gut clench so that I was almost ready to wake your ma, take my promise back, tell her the whole truth about me and accept whatever judgment she passed, till the hired man said:
“Where do you come from? Same as them?”
I was half-mad that night, sloshing with pent truths. For some reason I told him. “I’m from this very territory. Not so far from here.”
And that man laughed.
I put his pipe in my mouth. I sucked down his tobacco. Fires still burned on the horizon beyond the glow of the bowl. Animals were fleeing, and they might never return. I sucked and glowed and thought about saying what was funny was how he and thousands of others came only last year to ravage this land and now they claimed it, when it was my land and Billy’s land and the Indians’ land and the tigers’ and the buffalos’ land burning—and then your ma’s word lit in my mind. Justice.I bid the man good night.
—
Only your ma and myself acted out her plan. The two hundred were stuck in the building, and your ma said we didn’t need to tell them anyhow. Said it’d be hard on their conscience. Said we should let them sleep easy. Said—with an impatient toss of her head—that anyhow she knew this would be better for them. Said they’d thank her.
She asked me the word for it. Not lie, or liar. The kinder word. I taught her secret
We slipped out holding hands. Nodded to the man standing watch. We went out, to the hills that huddled around the hired men’s camp. There we filled our arms and wove dry plants into a track, which we laid down for the fire to follow. We surrounded the hired men’s camp with scrub, with grass knotted tight enough to burn long, with thistle heads crackling menace. The high grass hid our intent as we built a circle, a fence, a prison of combustible stuff that would raise flames higher than walls. All it would take was a spark.
And as we did this deadly work? We lay on our bellies. We whispered softly. From a distance, if the hired men bothered to look, they’d see only the grasses swaying above us, as they do to mark the passage of lovers.
When it came time for my watch, I took my place by the building. The two hired men returned to their camp. They started dinner. Hidden from them, at the start of a long track of tinder, your ma struck a piece of flint.
—
This story’s hard to tell, Lucy girl. Even for me. Got no flesh and rightly I shouldn’t hurt, but rememory hurts me.
—
We meant to trade two lives for two. The fire had its own idea. That fire reared up like it wasn’t fire but something living: an enormous beast lofted into the sky, orange flames striped black with smoke. A thing born of the hills, born of the rage that the land should feel. Certainly not a tame thing. You ever corner an animal, Lucy girl? Even a mouse will turn and bite at the last, when it believes itself dying. Amidst the crackle and the smoke—Lucy girl, I swear those hills birthed a tiger.
I saw the fire follow its track downhill. I saw the black forms of the hired men run. Not fast enough. The flames found the dry circle we’d laid, and swallowed the hired men’s camp.
I whooped then. Saw your ma racing from her hiding spot, heading for our lake.
The fire, finished with the camp, went toward the stream as planned. We meant for it to die in the water. A quiet death.
But a fickle wind blew up, stronger than either of us had figured. It stoked the flames higher. I saw the beast raise one long, flaming limb—and step over the stream.
The fire split in two. One part roared forward, toward me and the building that held the two hundred. The other part lunged to the side, licking the grasses, pursuing your ma
—
Like your ma I believe in fairness. But more’n than, I believe in family. Ting wo, Lucy girl. Your family comes first. You stick by them. You don’t betray your family.
—
I’m not a cruel man, Lucy girl. There were three horses tied up by the building and I left two. I unlocked the door and screamed at the two hundred to run. I gave them as much a chance as I could give them, and then I rode after your ma.
It turned out that building wasn’t stone through and through. Whoever built it built lazy, and inside those stones hid a center of straw and dung. A secret heart that dried out over many years in the sun. That caught the fire and fed it.
Half a mile away, holding your ma waist-deep in our lake, I saw the building go up in flame.
It blazed so big and hungry I felt the blast of heat from that distance. It caught any stray people who’d started to run. Your ma was unconscious from breathing smoke; I’d dragged her onto the back of the horse and crashed right into the water. She didn’t see it, or breathe the awful smoke of cooking flesh. But I did. I watched, knowing she’d want me to witness the two hundred as they died.
I never did take to meat again after that, though your ma liked it plenty.
—
A question that’s followed me for years, Lucy girl, is this: can you love a person and hate them all at once? I think so. I think so. When your ma first woke in the ashfall, she smiled at me. No—grinned. The wicked grin of a girl who’d pulled off her prank. She was bold as anything. So certain we’d done right. So certain she knew best.
Then she coughed, and when she sat up—she saw what stretched behind. Our lake of fire, reflecting the sky. The spooked and lathered horse I’d saved. The flames still flicking along the ridge where the building was charred black rubble.
Your ma cried as an animal cries, rocking back and forth in the shallows. She tipped her head back and howled. Night came and still she scratched me if I approached, and bared her teeth. The cracking, hissing sounds from her smoke-torn throat—they weren’t words.
You’ve heard me tell stories of transformation, Lucy girl. Men into wolves. Women into seals and swans. Well, your ma transformed that night, though her face and body looked the same.
Twice she ran to the far edge of the lake and looked out at the ruins of the two hundred. Her whole body quivered, pointed toward them. Away from me. I could see in her the wildness. I could see her desire to run. I left the horse where it was. Let her leave if she wanted.
And then, in the smeared gray dawn, I felt her burrow into my side. Her fingers sharp enough to rip my belly, my guts. I wouldn’t have stopped her. All she tore was my shirt, my pants. Her howls didn’t stop so much as turn into moans, grunts. At last she curled against me and asked me, over and over, in a scratchy, smoke-ruined voice, not to leave her alone.
The weeks that passed while we waited for the fire to die, for your ma’s throat to heal—they went this way: Sometimes I’d catch your ma staring at me with hate. Other times, love. I was the only person left to her. I suppose I had to carry both. She raged and beat my chest, but lay quiet to let me rub poultices on her throat.
Her throat never did heal proper. Just like your nose, Lucy girl. That voice of your ma’s, that scratch and rustle of it—that was something made.
—
I’ve told you before that I met a tiger, and came away with this bad leg. You never believed me. I saw the judgment in your eyes. Sometimes that made me furious—my own daughter practically calling me a liar—and other times I was pleased. Didn’t I tell you, Lucy girl? That you should always ask why a person is telling you their story?
The truth, now: here’s how I met the tiger.
This was some weeks on and us two still the only two in a blackened world. No animal or man had set foot over the burnt hills—and no wagons of railroad supplies. If the gold man had heard of the fire, likely he thought us perished with the rest.
When the ground cooled enough, your ma wanted to look.
First we went to the hired men’s camp. Your ma kicked through, ignoring their charred bones and the remains of their guns. We panned the ashes for their gold and their silver. Lumpen things that were once coins. She spat on the campsite as we left.
And then we took what we’d found to the remains of the building on the ridge.
“Word,” your ma said as she used her hand to cover a piece of bone.
I taught her bury, and she taught me how. Silver. Running water. Something to remind of home. She’d brought cloth from her trunk—a small miracle that its contents smelled of perfume and not smoke. Your ma bundled bone into scraps of cloth. Laid the silver on top.
“Better?” she asked me.
I said I reckoned the two hundred were in a better place. In a way, they were. I didn’t know what kind of life they could have had in this land.
Your ma shook her head. For the first time since I’d known her, she spoke with doubt. “Better if not us?”
I soothed her. I told her, over and over, it wasn’t her fault.
Her voice healed some, and some of her confidence came back, so that she would become a mother who could say right from wrong. But I tell you, Lucy girl, that day in the ashes she lost her convictions. I saw the guilt and the wondering eat at her worse than flames.
Which is why I waited for her to fall asleep before I returned to the building alone.
Night in those burnt hills was eerie. Darker than any night before or since. Nothing to reflect what little moon showed through the smoke: an unchanging dark. I stole into the burnt building. I found those bundles of bone. And I took back the silver.
We needed it more than the dead did, Lucy girl.
As I walked back I got the sense that something watched me. I walked quicker. Halted. It halted too. Seemed footsteps were matching mine. Soon I was running, the earth thudding under a weight greater than my own. I heard a roar behind me, louder than fire or wind. A sharpness reached from the dark and sliced my knee. I stumbled onward, bleeding, so scared I never once looked back.
—
This is my story, Lucy girl. My truth. And I’m telling you, the tiger that marked me and caused my limp—I didn’t see it. But I felt the truth of it in my bones. Your ma cleaned my wound and dressed it the next morning. I didn’t want to saddle her with more guilt—she was shaky those days—so I said I’d cut myself walking to the latrine in the dark. Just bad luck.
But was it? The cut, though shallow, went through the tendon, severed it so neatly that I never walked true again. The skin healed, but something essential had been nicked from me. Did chance make that clean cut? Or the claws of a canny predator, a beast that still guarded these hills after everything else was gone and dead? Was it punishment for the secret in my pocket, clanking silver? I never saw the tiger’s face, but does that make my story any less true?
—
Not much more to tell, Lucy girl. Morning’s coming.
I promised your ma we’d build a fortune all our own. I promised her there was still gold in these hills so long as we looked. Just over the horizon, I promised her. The next place will be better. And I promised her, on those nights she cried till she went stony, that if it didn’t work out I’d take her back. To that place beyond the ocean.
She didn’t talk near as much as she had before, on account of her throat paining her. Some nights as we traveled through the prospecting sites, I felt her rise from our bed. She stood beside the horse, looking out, pointed away, that wildness in her.
But she didn’t run. And she didn’t run. And her throat healed a bit, and soon you swelled in her belly. She started sleeping through the night. She smiled once in a while. When you were born, Lucy girl, you were like an anchor dropping on the ship your ma used to tell about: holding us down, holding us together. Holding us to this land. For that, I was always grateful.
—
Your ma after the fire was never quite the same girl who’d come off the ship bossing two hundred and kissing tigers’ prints. She grew wary—you saw, Lucy girl, how prospecting spooked her. How she was fearful of luck.
The new Ma had love and hate in her both. She sang you songs and sewed you dresses and rubbed my bad leg and teased. And she fought me over the gold, over the raising of you and Sam, over my dislike of rich men and my preference for Indian camps where I gambled and traded—over the right way to be, the right people to be. Once she’d mistaken me for a man with power, and ever after she was careful to track who had it, who to speak to, who to avoid. If I was a gambler, then she was a clerk. That hating part of her never stopped measuring what was fair. Never stopped counting up my sins, my rare successes.
But she stayed with me. I figure it was on account of the two hundred, in the end. They’d made her doubt herself, and I was cowardly enough to use it. I’m not proud to say that sometimes I reminded your ma of what had happened to them, out of spite.
And then, the storm.
Sure, when we were robbed of our gold that night, your ma saw my worth drop lower than ever. Sure, we lost our supplies. But I figure it was the baby that decided her.
We’d wanted him so much. When you were born, when Sam was, you knit us—I figure we counted on the baby to do the same. And when he was born dead, that tiny blue body, when I cut the cord on him—something else was cut too. Your ma looked at him the way she’d looked at those bundles of bone in the ash. That same guilt. I saw her tallying the decisions we’d made over the years—the meat we didn’t have for so long, the jostling of the wagon, the coal dust down her lungs—and I saw her see the baby as judgment passed on our living.
Years ago in that burnt building, she meant to say those people would’ve been better off without us. Maybe she figured that you, and Sam, and that dead baby, would be better off without her.
She didn’t die, Lucy girl. I went out to bury your brother and came back to an empty house. Your ma was always strong. As to where she went, I never wanted to know. If questions rose up in me, why, I drank them down. I drowned them as the storm had drowned most other things.
When you get to be older, Lucy girl, you’ll learn that sometimes, knowing is worse than not knowing. I didn’t want to know about your ma. Not what she did, or with whom, or how she felt looking into some other man’s face. I didn’t want to know the precise spot on a map that could hurt me.
—
It seems that to tell you the whole story, I got to tell as well the story I wish was true.
Here’s the truth: until the night your ma took off, I believed that under my hardness there still hid a softer man. I figured that one day when we were rich and comfortable, when your ma didn’t have to stand on her feet to work, let alone think of running—then I’d take the shining nuggets from the shelves of our own house on a piece of land so big we never saw another body. I’d put those nuggets in your hands, in Sam’s hands, in the boy’s hands. Soft hands all. And I’d tell a story. About how, as a boy, me and Billy found the first gold in these hills.
—
There, Lucy girl. Now you’ve heard what you always wanted to know. I told Sam years back. Why didn’t I tell you? Well, maybe it was on account of shame. Maybe fear that you’d run after your ma. I know you loved her best. I saw how you looked at me by the end, and it was what I’d seen in your ma: love and hate both.
It was hard to bear, Lucy girl. Because truth is, I loved you just as well as Sam, though it was Sam I spoke to on account of Sam being tough enough to hear me out. Maybe I even loved you better, though that’s a shameful thing to say. Shameful to love just because you needed the loving more, soft that you were. I remember the morning you were born. Your eyes opened and they were my eyes. Light brown, nearly gold. Not like your ma’s or Sam’s. Too much of my water in you.
Maybe I treated you hard on account of you growing to look more and more like her.
It’s likely you’ll hate me after this telling. Come morning, if you remember, I wouldn’t be surprised to see you tumble my bones into a ditch and leave me for the jackals.
Lucy girl.
Bao bei.
Nu er.
I looked for a fortune and thought it slipped between my fingers, but it occurs to me I did make something of this land after all—I made you and Sam. You turned out alright, didn’t you? I taught you to be strong. I taught you to be hard. I taught you to survive. To look at you now, taking care of Sam, trying to bury my body proper—I don’t regret that teaching. I got no need to apologize. I only wish I’d stayed and taught you more. You’ll have to make do with bits, as you have all your life. You’re a smart girl. Just remember: your family comes first. Ting wo.