Gold
Slick underfoot, the dock sways. Lucy imagines herself thrown into the gray waters, looking up from the harbor’s bottom. Sea grass waving. Fish so thick they block the light
The ship’s captain is steady on his feet while Lucy and Sam stumble, disadvantaged already when they request two tickets. The captain counts their coin and looks at them when he’s done. Elske told true: this city sees only a person’s value.
“Come back when you’ve got the rest.”
Sam’s face darkens. “I asked you about the price last month.”
“Seas change. Repairs are costly.”
Sam empties the wallet. The last of the gold was meant for tonight’s lodging, and a place to stay across the ocean. Still the captain shakes his head. He tosses the pouch back, a nugget bouncing to the dock. Sam ducks to retrieve it, the captain already looking past. Lucy follows his gaze to a tall figure at the shore. Likely that person seeks passage too. What can she offer beyond coin?
And she thinks: a story.
She trips. Clutches the captain’s arm for balance. She steps clumsily back on the hem of her skirt, fabric pulling tight over her chest.
“I’m sorry,” Lucy says, lurching against the captain. “It makes me dizzy to see a real ship. I’ve wanted to ride one since I was a little girl. Isn’t it majestic?”
She looks yearningly at the ship. When she looks back at the captain, some of the yearning remains. She tells about her fear of the ocean. Her hope of a strong, seasoned man to guide them. Her helpfulness. Her cookery. Sam’s strength. “We could be of service,” she says, and smiles, and pauses, and lets his eyes drag on her silence.
Elske’s girls didn’t shock her. Not truly. What she saw wasn’t new, but an old, old lesson, learned in Sweetwater, learned at the door of a long-ago parlor from her very first teacher. Beauty is a weapon
Down the dock the figure has gone.
When, in the end, Lucy mentions their horses, the captain hands over two tickets. The paper is damp, the penmanship exquisite. Someone has taken care to edge the letters in gold.
—
A ways down the harbor, Sam punches a fist into the packet of food Elske gave them.
“She charged me extra today,” Sam says. “Damn her, she always knows how to press. Otherwise we wouldn’t have had to bargain like that.”
Lucy shrugs. She’s thinking of the blue book, and how she’ll get more like it when they arrive. She tosses a strip of jerky to Sam and commences to gnaw her own. Sam twists the strip till it breaks.
“Did she teach you that?” Sam says.
Lucy takes her time chewing. “She didn’t teach me anything most girls don’t already know. She’s not all bad. You know . . . she offered me a job.”
On Sam’s face, a shattered look.
“Not that kind,” Lucy says quickly. “Not like the other girls. She wanted me to work telling stories. Talking to men, nothing more.” She doesn’t say how Elske added, Unless you’d like to. There’s extra payment for that.
She expects Sam to rage. Instead, Sam sags.
“She made me an offer like that the first time,” Sam says, voice so small that Lucy knows Sam thinks again of the mountain man.
“Bao bei,” Lucy begins, then stops. Not the time for tenderness, now. Not the time to pick at old wounds. She rips into the hard bread. Shards of crust dig under her nails as she tears a hunk free. “None of what came before matters, alright? Once we have water behind us, it’ll be like—like—” A long-ago promise fills her mouth. Sweet and bitter. “Like a dream. We’ll wake up there and all this will have been a dream.”
“You mean it?” Sam says, voice still shrunken. “Everything we did before?”
Lucy considers the bread. It’s half-stale. They should force it down and swallow it. They should be grateful for the little they have. But. But.
She heaves the bread into the ocean, where it splashes out farther than she thought possible. And though the gulls swoop and dive, it’s a fish that rises up to claim it, longer than Lucy is tall. It could block out the sun if seen from below.
At noon their ship will sail. Till then, the night stretches before them. Apart from a few pennies in Sam’s pocket, they’ve got no coin for beds or meals. One last night in the open, the city’s hills around them.
—
That last night they are ghosts. Half of them already on the ship, halfway toward that misty place they will call home. Half disappeared as fog swallows the dock and frees them of mortal weights: the weight of missing gold, five lost years, two silver dollars, Ba’s hands, Ma’s words. That night they agree: what came before has vanished. Fog obscures. Through it, only the clink of their pennies as they sit playing gambling games.
For years after, Lucy will hold this night close to her chest. A private history, written only for herself.
Other players gather. Faces blurred by mist so that no one can ask, Who are you?Where are you from?Hard men and women, shoulders in a familiar slump, stained with sweat and whiskey and tobacco. The stink of work and despair. And hope. So much hope gleaming on that wet dock
That night not a word is exchanged. This city has a language of clink and jingle. Their pennies started the game; their luck keeps them in. Lucy sits in the circle, Sam behind her. When Lucy reaches for the facedown cards she feels a heaviness that calls her hand, tugs her heart. Aims her like a dowsing rod to the right card again and again. She plays with eyes closed. Tapping her feet. She’s not on the dock but walking the gold of the hills in the early morning, in the early years, the best years, when Ba’s hands held only hope and a dowsing rod. They walked out, but the plume of Ma’s cook fire kept them anchored to home. Ba taught her to wait for the tug. Because gold was heavy, she needed something heavy inside her to call to it. Think of the saddest thing you can. Don’t tell me. Keep it inside, Lucy girl. Let it grow.Among the gamblers, that’s just what Lucy does. Sam’s hands on her shoulders lend the weight of what Sam carries too. Prospector’s children, both of them. Why, you feel where it is, Lucy girl. You just feel it.They swallowed sadness and they swallowed gold. Neither left their bodies but grew within them, nourishing their lengthening limbs. And that night it calls to the cards. Every card Lucy draws is the right one. The other gamblers lay down their hands one by one, in a hush. As if paying respects before a grave. They look at the two strangers in the fog and without faces to judge by—they see. Call it luck or call it a kind of haunting.
By the end of the night, a small fortune mounds high.
This is what Lucy will remember on the worst of the days to come: that for one night, at least, they made the hills hold gold.
—
Silver light pries Lucy awake. For a moment she’s twelve again, moonlight ringing off a tiger’s skull. What makes a home a home?
She lifts her head. A card peels from her cheek. The light comes from a stack of silver dollars. Sam snores beside her on the dock. The harbor is empty but for the anchored ships, a few hours left till noon. Lucy grins, watching a bubble of spit form at the corner of Sam’s mouth. She leans to pop it.
The burst shakes the world.
A hole has opened in the dock. A ragged mouth of wood, hungry ocean churning beneath. Sam scrambles. A foot, a leg, slip into the breach. Lucy screams, pulls. Drags Sam away, a hairsbreadth from falling.
Fog’s burned off. The sky has a different aspect. A hard, clear light. It shows two men at the end of the dock. One is tall and dressed in black. He holds the gun he fired—so burnished by day that the sun off metal pains her. At long last Lucy has seen the gun such men are rumored to carry. Anna claimed otherwise—but there are things Anna’s kind are blind to.
Sam doesn’t look at the hired man, or the gun. Sam watches the figure who shambles up behind. An older man, slow, enormously fat and bald. He wears white. The only color is in his cheeks, in the gold on his ringed fingers and dripping from his vest.
“We can sort this out,” Lucy says to the hired man.
Not a soul pays her mind. The fat man draws a heavy gold pocket watch from his vest. He taps its face. Looks past Lucy. Straight to Sam. “Imagine my pleasure last night when my man informed me of your return. Now let’s settle up.”
The coins they won last night are filthy with gunpowder, diminished by day. Inconsequential beside the debt the gold man names.
Lucy starts to laugh.
At last the gold man looks at her. The slow look of a man with all the time in the world. At her shorn hair, at her dirty shift, and finally at her throat. His look disassembles her. He doesn’t smile or frown, explain or menace. She understands why Sam fled from saloons where a bald head shone. This gold man is a rock. Impermeable to pleading.
And so when Lucy speaks again, she uses the language of coin. She offers last night’s winnings to buy time alone with Sam.
When the two men have retreated a ways down the harbor, Lucy grabs Sam’s face.
“What did you do, Sam?”
“I only took the gold back. What they took from honest prospectors. There was a group of us together; we agreed.”
The amount the gold man named could buy ships. Half a dozen coal mines. Far beyond what Lucy had imagined.
“What did you spend it on?” Surely they can use it to bargain. Whatever goods Sam bought must have more worth than the spread of Sam’s brains on this dock.
“I didn’t spend it.”
“You hid it?” A trickle of hope. Sam can lead the gold man to the stash. That and Lucy’s best apologies might do the trick after all. They’ll miss today’s ship, but there’s always next month’s. Next year’s. They’ll find work in the city. Lucy will accept Elske’s offer to tell stories. They’ll make do.
“It was pure gold. Too heavy to take along.” Sam’s chin lifts. Sap begins to rise in Sam’s voice. “I split some with the others. Kept what you saw. Then I had an idea—we agreed to dump the rest into the ocean. We gave it back to the land to keep, and we all left something.” There flashes over Sam’s face that old grin. “Each of us carved a piece of gold. Some wrote their mother’s names, or the old names of rivers, or the marks of their tribes. I carved our tiger. That gold won’t wash up for ages and ages. Maybe next time someone honest will find it—someone like us. Maybe things’ll be different by then. Either way, the gold men will be dead. And the gold will be marked. It’ll be ours.”
You belong here too, Lucy girl. Never let them tell you otherwise.
Sam rolls backward on the dock, overcome with a fit of the giggles—silly as the girl Sam never was. “Dead just like the buffalo!”
No amount of bargaining or planning, no amount of smarts will get that gold back. And yet they’ve got to try. Lucy says, “We’ll ask for time. We’ll—”
The giggling stops. “They killed two of the others. My friends. And they killed Nellie. Shot her out from under me when I fled.” Sam’s voice cracks over the mare’s name. “This ain’t some game. Quit acting a child. They’ll kill me, but I figure they’ll let you go if you don’t raise a fuss.”
“If you knew—” Lucy chokes on the question. “If you knew they were this dangerous, why’d you risk going all the way to Sweetwater? You could’ve taken a ship weeks ago. Alone.”
Stubborn, Sam is. Won’t answer. Only looks at Lucy with speaking eyes. The question Sam asked in Sweetwater fills the silence between them. Don’t you ever get lonely?All along she called Sam selfish. Turns out it was Lucy who couldn’t see past herself—who didn’t ask the same.
A thing she learned gambling was when to fold her cards down. She lets go the other questions. She could ask why Sam insisted on carrying this burden alone, why Sam didn’t tell her when Sam had a chance, why Sam’s so damn proud. So stubborn. But. All this is as much a part of Sam as the bandana and the boots, Sam who lives by different, unbent rules—Sam who could take a fortune and dump it in the ocean. Lucy folds down her anger and her fear. What’s left is the old, tired-out feeling of arriving at the end of a long trail to a dirty house.
And then it floats up, the last question that matters. “Why baths?”
Sam shrugs. Lucy yanks hard at the bandana. It slips, showing skin two shades lighter. So soft. This, out of everything, brings the threat of tears close. “You used to hate baths. Tell me why, Sam.”
“She looks at me. Renata, that’s her name. They don’t look at the men who buy time in their beds. You know that? They don’t kiss them, or really look. But she looks at me when she’s bathing me. She seesme. The proper way.”
Lucy closes her eyes and tries to see.
She sees Sam, shining.
Sam at seven, shining in dress and braids.
Sam at eleven, shining through loss and grime.
Sam at sixteen, this conviction, these grown-up bones.
She sees the gold. Not what Sam dumped, but the other kind. These hills. These streams. Shining too, despite their history, with a value more than metal. So much lost from this place. So much stolen. And yet the land is beautiful to them, because it was their home too. Sam, in Sam’s own way, tried to give that land a proper burial.
All that, Lucy can accept. The dead hills, the dead rivers. She’d shoot the last buffalo clear in the heart if it could save Sam.
Not Sam.
Lucy’s whole life, Sam was undimmed. That, she can’t see: the world without Sam in it.
Lucy opens her eyes. She reties the bandana. Hiding, once more, the tenderest part of Sam.
“Let me try talking to him alone,” Lucy says. “I’m the clever one, remember? I can figure something.