How Much of These Hills Is Gold

From afar, Lucy couldn’t grasp it. Always from a distance she saw miners’ wives flitting between shacks, borrowing washboards, thimbles, recipes, soap. They don’t know self-sufficiency, Ba said pityingly. He taught Lucy silence was better than gossip. He taught her to stand under the yawn of sky and listen to the wind through the grass. Listen hard enough and you can hear the land.

But now Lucy hears the baker talk about the butcher, who talks about the girl working at Jim’s store, who talks about a miner’s wife run off with a cowboy. Their talk a bright thread stitching the town together, rich as the tapestry Lucy saw hung from a porch. Its owner hurried it away, as if Lucy meant thievery. Lucy only wanted to look. To touch, maybe, and let it drape around her, like those honeyed Sundays with the glass windows and the talk, the bodies, heating the room.

Anna is a prospector’s daughter, but there the likeness ends. Because when Annas father took gold from these hills, he kept it. He has deeds to prove his claim, and men who work under him. He hoarded mines, hotels, stores, trains, a house in Sweetwater far from the hills he’d emptied of riches, a daughter.

Fool’s gold is a thing Lucy learns of in Sweetwater. A cheap stone, it deceives the untrained eye. Fool’s gold has become a saying about that which imitates truth. Prospector’s daughter Anna may be, but she looked at Lucy and was deceived.

Lucy amended her life. An orphan. Don’t know. No one. But I suspect my father was a prospector. Anna forgave. Anna forgives easy […] And still Anna insists, We’re just the same, deep down.

“Didn’t you ever wonder?” The swagger leaves Sam’s voice. […] “We weren’t the only ones wronged. There’s others, Indian and brown and black. None of us think it was right, what got took from us. Didn’t you wonder what the gold men did with what honest folks dug up?”

[…]

“Those gold men really think this land belongs to them,” Sam says, scornful. “Isn’t that the greatest joke?”

Lucy can’t locate her laughter. What she can locate is the precise spot on a wall, in the biggest house in town, where a deed hangs in a frame that, if melted down and sold, could feed a hundred families. […] Lucy knows the answer to Sam’s question, and it shames her. She’s seen where the gold goes. She is a guest in its house, she wears its gifts, she is its friend and walks arm in arm with it through Sweetwater.

“Besides,” Anna says, laughing her rippling, carefree laugh. “What would Charles want with you?”

Lucy tastes metal. Her teeth haven’t let go her tongue.

Anna smiles at her.

Lucy could speak and she could scream and she could spit her bloody tongue to the rug and still Anna would see what Anna wants to see. Anna who thinks tigers are pets, or decorations to mount beautiful and glassy-eyed on her walls beside a deed that diminishes the land even as it claims it. Anna wants Lucy docile beside her, the third seat in their train car, wearing their clothes, lapping their cocoa, sleeping near their bed and maybe even allowing the scratch of Charles’s fingers at night. Anna wants a domestic thing, a harmless thing—Anna’s tigers are as different from Lucy’s tigers as Anna’s Charles is different from Lucy’s Charles.

There is claiming the land, which Ba wanted to do, which Sam refused—and then there is being claimed by it. The quiet way. A kind of gift in never knowing how much of these hills might be gold. Because maybe if you only went far enough, waited long enough, held enough sadness pooled in your veins, soon you might come upon a path you knew, the shapes of rocks would look like familiar faces, the trees would greet you, buds and birdsong lilting up, and because this land had gouged in you an animal’s kind of claiming, senseless to words and laws […] then, if you ran, you might hear the wind, or welling up in your own parched mouth, something like and unlike an echo, coming from before or behind, the sound of a voice you’ve always known calling your name—

She opens her mouth. She wants