Meat
Sam quits speaking of hunger, of cold. Of the low gray clouds that stalk at the horizon. As if Sam means to out-stubborn the truth of the house that won’t stand, the tiger skull that for all its snarl can’t protect from starvation now that the oats have run out, and the bullets too. Lucy tries to speak of their future. Sam has words only for the long-dead past.
Despite the overcast days, Sam shines ever harder. Brighter. Each morning Sam admires her reflection in the stream, like any girl—but warped. Sam doesn’t put up her hair or brush it. Sam hacks her short hair shorter till bare scalp shows through. Delights in lost pounds, and the sharpening of elbows and cheeks.
And yet, in these vanities, Lucy sees Ma’s likeness.
Once Sam studied Ma as Sam now studies herself. Ma transformed each morning before heading to the mine with Ba. She hid her hair under a cap, her white arms in sleeves. Bending to tie her boots, Ma’s face nearly touched the ashes. Like the story of a serving girl raised from cinders—only the wrong way round. It was a costume, Ma explained. Just till they saved enough. When Sam clamored for a costume too, Ma opened her trunk with its sweet and bitter perfume. She ripped a red dress for a bandana.
Sam shone so fierce with joy that day, Lucy had to look away.
Of all their faded and travel-worn clothes, that bandana alone holds its color. Sometimes Sam hums while tying it. A song to which they’ve both forgotten most of the words. The melody is Ma’s.
—
Worn down, arguments nibbled by hunger, Lucy dozes day and night. She dreams of green trees with heavy fruit, of fountains spitting chicken broth. Pale fur creeps down her limbs. Her teeth pain her. She shivers and grinds her jaw, dreaming of an animal roasting, the flesh overcooked, oversalted, dried like jerky—
When she blinks awake this particular afternoon, the smell of meat persists. A line of smoke splits the sky, rising from a copse at the foot of the mountains.
Saliva fills Lucy’s mouth. Sweet at first, then bittered by fear. Cooked meat means killed meat, means men with guns and knives. She wakes Sam from her nap. Run, Lucy mouths, indicating the smoke, Nellie, the trail where they can still slip away. Sam yawns slow, rolls those shoulders in a shirt so frayed the movement seems like to split the cloth.
Sam reaches for the frying pan. As if this is another day of easy living, as if there’s bacon or potatoes to fry, as if Sam is blind, still, to the impossible fantasy of living life alone in these hills.
“Swing with your whole arm,” Sam says, passing the pan to Lucy. Sam takes a sharpened fish spear and strikes out toward the smoke. Calling behind, “This is ours to defend.”
—
This is what they find in the middle of the copse at dusk:
A dying fire.
A staked horse.
A dead man half-buried in leaves.
No stench yet, though flies buzz at his beard. He’s wrapped in a coat of many pelts like some creature from tale. This is the jackal’s hour, when edges disappear and the line softens between the real and the not.
“Look at that,” Sam breathes. Then Sam is sliding through the branches, aimed at the dead man’s bags—and the plump bird laid atop them.
That leaves the man to Lucy. It’s easier this second time she kneels by the dead. At least his eyes are shut instead of squinted, his furs clean though his beard and nails are filthy. Lucy can’t help stroking the pelt, up and down and up and—
The dead man grips her wrist and says, “Don’t cry, girl.”
Lucy wrenches back as the man sits, molting leaves. A rifle lifts up with him. Jackal hour. The leaves that covered him go black in the shadows. But the hand around her wrist—that’s real. His breath, the gleam of his weapon, the spit at the corner of his mouth—they’re real. As are his eyes. Strange, round eyes with much more white than iris. They roll up and over Lucy.
“And you there, don’t come any closer.”
Sam stops with one of the man’s skinning knives in hand. Plundered bags lie behind, all the proof needed of their intentions.
“You tricked us,” Sam howls, stomping in place. “You wanted us to think you were dead, you hun dan piece of low-down lying—”
“Please, sir,” Lucy whispers. “Don’t hurt us. We meant no harm.”
The man drags his eyes from Sam. Looks at Lucy. A lingering look that pauses at her mouth, continues to her chest, belly, legs. His eyes prickle her skin. She wets her lips, parts them to speak. Nothing comes out.
He winks at her.
“Don’t do anything you’ll regret,” the man calls to Sam. They’re the wrong words. “Listen careful.” Sam bristles, newly shorn hair on end.
And then the man says, “Boy.”
Sam’s eyes flash, brighter in that dusk than the knife. Lucy thinks again of Ma in the ashes, and Sam’s rapt gaze. That look of transformation.
Sam drops the knife.
“That too,” the man says, nodding toward the pistol.
Sam releases Ba’s empty gun. For a thing so heavy in Lucy’s mind, it makes no thump in falling.
“I don’t aim to hurt anyone, except maybe these durn flies,” the man says. “You know that, right?” He addresses Lucy, who’s spinning her trapped wrist. He lets go so sudden she falls. “Easy.” His eyes go to her legs, new-exposed under the hem of her dress. “Easy.”
“We weren’t going to hurt you, either,” Sam bluffs.
“’Course not. Aren’t we all passing through? This spot belongs to none of us travelers.”
Sam tenses. Lucy expects Sam to shoot back, Our land. Instead Sam says, “That’s right. It belongs to the buffalo.”
“I’m glad they’ll share it,” the man says solemnly. “Speaking of sharing, I’ve got a brace of partridges, if you folks can do without salt.”
“I don’t need salt,” Sam says, as Lucy says, “We’ve got plenty.” They took a hunk from the salt flat for eating.
“There’s what a man needs, and what he likes.” The man pats his belly, as round as his eyes. “Company, for instance. It gets lonely out here. I’ll take some of your salt and thank you for it. I could also use a girl.”
His eyes spin toward Lucy like empty plates.
She offers to launder his clothes. Cook his dinner. His eyes widen, till at last he howls in laughter. He wipes spittle from the corners of his lips with two dirty fingers.
“I could use a girl, but you’re a girl, aren’t you?”
Lucy doesn’t know what he means, but she nods.
“You’re tall for your age. I mistook you. How old are you? Eleven? Ten?”
“Ten,” Lucy lies. Sam doesn’t correct her.
—
Later, Lucy will understand. The language of his looking that she’s too young to speak. She’s nervous through dinner though the partridges are so plump that Sam whistles. Lucy leans close to the sizzling meat and warms her hands.
“You come from mining folk,” the man says, offering his own palms. Flecks of blue live under his skin, like a shoal of tiny fish. Lucy has only the one spot where coal dust got caught in a wound. “How’d you get away so clean and pretty?”
“I only worked the doors,” Lucy says, looking away. Her hands shame her. Sam’s hands are nicked blue all over, just like Ba’s, and Ma’s under her gloves. Lucy worked so little before she went to school, and Ma died, and Ba no longer wanted her help.
“We’re not miners,” Sam says.
One drunken night Ba put his palms to the stove, intending to burn the marks clear off. It took a week for his blisters to pop, another for the dead skin to slough. The color remained on the new skin. Coal hides deep. We’re prospectors, Ba insisted. This isn’t but temporary, to get by. Ting wo.
“We’re adventurers,” Sam continues in singsong. “We’re not like anyone else.” Sam leans forward and narrows those dark eyes. “Outlaws.”
“Sure,” the man says in his agreeable voice. “Outlaws are the most interesting kind of folk.”
He proceeds to tell of those other interesting folk. Sam’s face, on the hotter side of the fire, glows. On her side Lucy can feel the wind at her back. The man gives Sam a taste of partridge and nods gravely at Sam’s judgment. Lets Sam carve the meat. Only when they’re finished eating does the man ask, “So where do you come from? You some kind of mutts?”
Sam stiffens. Lucy shifts closer, ready to lay a steadying hand on Sam’s shoulder. Though this man took longer than most to get here, his destination is the same. Lucy never knows how to answer. Ba and Ma gave no clear answers. They spoke around it in a jumble of myth. Half-truths not found in Teacher Leigh’s histories, mixed with a longing that made Ma’s words fly up and apart. There’s no one like us here, Ma said sadly and Ba proudly. We come from across the ocean, she said. We’re the very first, he said. Special, he said.
To Lucy’s surprise, Sam gives the only correct response.
“I’m Sam.” That chin, rising. “And that’s Lucy.”
It’s broad cheek, yet the man seems pleased. “Hey,” he says, raising his hands. “Dogs are my favorite people. I’m a mutt myself. I didn’t mean it that way. I meant, I’m mighty curious about where you came from just now. You got the look of travel on you. And the look of running scared.”
A glance passes between Lucy and Sam. Lucy shakes her head
“We were born in these hills,” Sam says.
“Never left them?”
“We’ve lived all sorts of places. We’ve gone miles and miles.”
“Then of course you know what’s in these mountains,” the man says, a smile playing on his face. “I don’t have to tell you about the creatures that hid up there to escape the miners. And of course you must know everything past the mountains, out on the plains and beyond. Of course you know there are things bigger than buffalo. Like the iron dragon.”
Sam, rapt.
“Bellies full of iron and smoke,” the man whispers. He’s as good a storyteller as Ba. Maybe better. “Trains.”
Lucy doesn’t show how the man’s caught her attention too. Teacher Leigh spoke of trains. According to this mountain man, the trains have advanced even farther West in the last few years.
“There’s a station in a town right past the mountains. I hear talk of laying track across the range, but that I’ll believe when I see it. No man on this continent can do it. Mark my words.”
The fire burns low. The two partridges are reduced to bone, yet a hunger remains in Sam. The man, obliging, drops tale after tale into Sam’s open mouth. About trains and other iron contraptions, smokestacks belching like enormous beasts. About wild forests far to the East and ice to the North. He’s talking about deserts when Lucy yawns. A big yawn that takes her over. When she reopens her watery eyes, the man is glaring.
“Do I bore you, girl?”
“I—”
“Here I thought you two might take amusement from an old man’s tales. God knows there’s little enough adventure out West. That place?” His voice hardens. “What would a body want with those hills? Them miners picked the territory clean. Can’t walk a step without falling into a hole dug by everlasting fools.”
Sam says nothing.
“There’s plenty more marvels out East. And more space than in this blasted territory. The worst kinds of people crawled West to pan for gold.”
“What kinds of people?” Sam says.
“Killers. Rapers. Disgraced men. Men too small or stupid to make a living back home.”
“My ba said—” Sam’s voice squeaks. “Ba said the Western territory was once the prettiest land anyone ever saw.”
“You couldn’t pay me to go any farther West.” The man throws a partridge bone in that direction. “It’s dead and they’re all over there sticking their heads in shafts, telling each other the sun’s a rumor too.”
A ripple like laughter runs through his words. But he hasn’t lived on that land or worked it, hasn’t seen morning strike the hills and gild them—how else could he step so lightly over them?
“My ba—” Sam says.
“Maybe your ba was one of them fools too.”
Some men grow drunk on whiskey. This mountain man seems drunk on his own talk. Loose and careless. He’s left his skinning knife by the fire, smack between him and Sam.
Lucy sees Sam see it.
She thought she wished Ba’s spirit gone. But in this moment, she desires that vengeful squint back in Sam’s eyes.
The mountain man thumps Sam’s back, chuckling, saying it was a joke, calling Sam boy, likening Sam to an Indian boy he kept for a winter and used to help set traps, asking if Sam would like to hear about that. Sam leaves the knife be. Yes, Sam says. Yes, yes
—
Sam hates women’s work. Takes perverse pride in loose stitches and half-burnt food. Yet there Sam stands in the morning, stirring the breakfast pot with the sun showing just so through the trees. As pretty a sight as if Lucy had dreamed it—except for the mountain man calling out advice.
The slop Sam dishes up looks like mud and tastes like meat. Pemmican, the man names it. Dried venison and berries pounded fine. Lucy eats so fast she chokes, wishing she was brave enough to spit out the food.
This morning Sam feeds the man right back. A feast of words tip into his round, dinner-plate eyes. Sam explains the gun and the banker, the two boys and their groceries. The man laughs, ruffles Sam’s hair, and follows them back to their campsite.
What right does Lucy have to suspect a man who checks Nellie’s swollen knee, who gives them horse oats and a bag of pemmican too? Who draws a map on a piece of hide and circles a town just past the mountains?
“I wager you’ll like it, boy. There’s a trade fair soon, the biggest for hundreds of miles. That town’s big enough that you’ll run into fine ladies as well as Indians and vaqueros and outlaws—all sorts of characters a sight tougher than me.”
To him, Sam doesn’t say, We’re staying here. Sam says, “Where are yougoing?”
“What’s the town called?” Lucy breaks in.
The man says, “Sweetwater.”
Oh.
Lucy’s mouth floods. Even in the hard years, they had their tastes of sugar and salt. But no amount of coin in mining country could buy a drink of clear water. Sweetwaterglows in Lucy’s mind like the tiger’s skull, and she hardly even cares when the man rests a hand on Nellie to hold them a minute longer.
“You remember that Indian boy I kept? I been thinking. Might be I could use another boy. These fingers of mine”—he spreads his hands—“they aren’t as nimble as they used to be. Might be I could use smaller hands to help me, and pass on what I know.”
The silence presses like the storm clouds. No longer so distant.
“That’s kind of you,” Lucy says, her stomach clenching. “But we’ve got plans. For our family.”
The man looks her up and down one last time. “Best get off before the rain.