How Much of These Hills Is Gold

The dog was there again the next day, and again Lucy found no grave. It was there the next day, its maimed body cutting a perfect arc through the air. The dog was there, the dog was there, and the dog was there as Lucy searched in vain for the grave Ba refused to speak of. The dog learned to walk, run, chase brown leaves, while at home Ba got clumsier. […]

Day by day Lucy spent more time studying the dog. Its grace among the broken things. On the day she quit searching, the day the lake dried up and the valley lay exposed with no sign on the grave, the dog approached. Close-up its eyes were brown and sorrowful. Close up it was a she.

“It’s—” Lucy says, heart quickening.

“A sign,” Sam says.

Most times Lucy can’t read Sam’s dark eyes. Tonight the moonlight has pierced Sam through, made Sam’s thoughts clear as the blades of grass. Together they stand as if at a threshold, remembering the tiger Ma drew in the doorway of each new house. Ma’s tiger like no other tiger Lucy has seen, a set of eight lines suggesting the beast only if you squinted. A cipher. Ma drew her tiger as protection against what might come. Singing, Lao hu, lao hu.

Ma drew her tiger in each new home.

Wind blows down the slopes, a change-smell in the air. By the moon’s keen light, Sam readies the site for burial.

Around the tiger, Sam lays a circle of stones. Home, Sam calls this. To one side of the circle, their pot and pan and ladle and knife and spoons. Kitchen, Sam calls this. To the other, their blankets. Bedroom, Sam calls this. At the edge, branches stuck upright. Walls, Sam calls this. Over the branches, woven grass mats. Roof, Sam calls this.

The center Sam keeps empty till last.

And then, long after the Indians, came new men, from a different direction. These men sowed bullets in place of seeds. They were puny and yet they pushed the buffalo back, and back, till the last herd was rounded up in a valley not far from here. A pretty valley with a deep river running through. The men intended to tame them, and mix them into their cattle. Shrink them down to size.

But when the sun rose, the men saw that hills had risen overnight.

Those hills were the bodies of a thousand thousand dead buffalo that had walked into the river and drowned.

A dozen times Lucy has heard this story. It was Ba’s favorite. But Teacher Leigh laughed and showed, in a book, the truth of the last herd of buffalo, kept in a rich man’s garden far to the East. The creatures in the drawing did not stretch skyward like these ancient bones. Captivity had diminished them to the size of docile cows. Pure sentiment, the teacher chided. A pretty little folktale.

After that, when Ba told any story, Lucy no longer saw buffalo parting grass with broad shoulders, or tiger stripes slipping through shadow. She saw only the empty space in Ba’s lying mouth, where once there was a tooth.

[…]

“You can’t trust everything Ba said. Besides, things are different now. The territory’s been civilized, improved. We can follow suit.”

The tiger’s snarl sits in Sam’s mouth. This time it points at Lucy.

Wind taps her shoulder. Not hard and blustering as it has been these days of storm, but plaintive. Soft. It’s the sadness in the wind that makes Lucy look back.

From afar, the hills of her childhood look washed clean. She’s lived her share of rainy seasons, but she lived them down in the muck. Where thin soil became soup, each day waterlogged by the suck-tide of living. From afar, she can’t see how dangerous the West is, how dirty. From afar the wet hills shine smooth and bright as ingots—riches upon riches stacked to the Western horizon. Her throat tightens. A tingle high up in her nose, behind her eyes.

It passes. She figures it for the rememory of thirst.

Once Lucy looked down, always down, into her little sister’s face. Now it’s level with hers. The face of a stranger. A face to which she can’t say:

That sure she wants clean water and nice rooms, dresses and baths—but those are only things. Beyond them, she doesn’t know. The hollow inside her doesn’t hold what it once held, as the grave they dug couldn’t accommodate all its old dirt. Dig too deep, miners know, scoop away too much of what is good, and you tempt collapse. Ba’s body, Ma’s trunk, the shack and the streams and the hills—she left them willingly, expecting that at least Sam would remain to cross over to the future.

But Lucy can’t ask. Can’t speak. The stink of her own filth chokes her. She pulls her dress over her head, shutting out Sam’s face. Then she […] jumps into the river.

It used to be that Ma and Lucy kept one another’s secrets. Each day on the wagon trail Ba and Sam disappeared at dusk to hunt or scout; and each day Lucy and Ma were left alone among hills emptied of noise. Into that wide, quiet space Lucy spilled her fear of the mule, how she’d nicked Ba’s knife, how she envied Sam. Ma drank Lucy’s words in, as her skin drank in the gilded late afternoons. Ma knew how to hold a secret in silence, sometimes murmuring, sometimes tipping her head, sometimes brushing Lucy’s hand. Ma listened.

In turn, Ma told Lucy how she rubbed lard on her hands to keep them soft […] how she chose, very carefully, who she associated with. In these moments, Lucy knew that Ma loved her best. Sam might have Ma’s hair and Ma’s beauty, but Ma and Lucy were joined by words.

They last saw clouds like this a year ago on the trail. Mistook them for locusts till a boom lit the horizon orange. For three days fires raged, a distant mine burning. And Ma—Ma who braved storm and drought, who once set her own broken finger—Ma sank her head to her knees and shivered. Didn’t look up till they were long past. She doesn’t like fire, Ba said brusquely when Lucy asked. Shut that big mouth.

[…]

“Ni zhi dao, Lucy girl, what happens to bodies in a fire?” Ma says as Lucy drags her up. […] “I know […] Fire leaves nothing to bury.” Lucy hums, as if soothing a panicked mule. “The haints yi bei zi follow. They never let you go.

What does your father drink? How much?

Can you describe his attitude toward violence?

Will you call it savage?

What is your mother’s breeding?

Does she perhaps come from royal stock?

The teacher improves Lucy’s answers. Brow furrowed, he scratches out, rewrites, pauses to ask Lucy to repeat herself. On that blank page he orders her family’s story with words neatened as the schoolhouse is neatened, the parlor, the rows of coyote brush that shut out what’s unpleasant to see. Lucy’s story set down as part of the teacher’s monograph on the Western territory. One day she’ll hold that book […]. She’ll lay it before Ma. She’ll smooth its pages and hear its living spine crack.

Lessons in imagining herself better.

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.

And so Lucy fears that unwritten history. Easier to dismiss all Ba’s tales as tall ones—because believe, and where does it end? If she believes that tigers live, then does she believe that Indians are hunted and dying? If she believes in fish the size of men, does she believe in men who string up others like linefuls of catch? Easier to avoid that history, unwritten as it is except in the soughing of dry grass, in the marks of lost trails, in the rumors from the mouths of bored men and mean girls, in the cracked pattern of buffalo bone. Easier by far to read the history that Teacher Leigh teaches, those names and dates as orderly as bricks, stacked to build a civilization.

Still. Lucy never quite escapes that other. The wild one. It prowls the edges of her vision, an animal just beyond the campfire’s glow.

Lucy doesn’t like how Ma licked her lips at the memory of star fruit, which Lucy hasn’t tasted. She doesn’t like how Ma, speaking of the tiled roof of her childhood home, damns the roofs of Lucy’s. Well, sometimes the rain against tin or canvas can make a music as pretty as the two-stringed fiddles Ma talks about. Sometimes, the dust that Ma hates so much furs the hills a tender gold. Lucy demands to know what makes Ma’s streets prettier, Ma’s rain nicer, Ma’s food tastier. She asks and asks, her voice swelling, and gets no answers. Ma shrinks back into the pillows with every question. As if Lucy’s words are a violence.

No trace of them is to remain. Their footprints in the dirt floor will be swept, their clotheslines taken down, their garden left to drown or rot. Another set of miners will be given this house, or maybe another flock of hens. It was never their house, or their land, to begin with. The wet season will wash away every imprint, shoe print, hair, fingernail, mark, chewed pencil, dented pan, drawn tiger, voice, story.

A fresh horror surges through Lucy as she listens to rain soften the land, swell the creeks, chill the air. A recurring image of the family tossed out like Ma’s pail of muddy brown dishwater. What proof will there be that they existed at all in these hills?

Surely she can leave something behind. Something that lasts.

How did they survive the attack on the wagon all those years back?

They didn’t. Leastways, not all of them. They left the mule and didn’t shoot or bury her. Ma made no mention, then, of silver or water.

“Bie kan,” Ma instructed as they ran. But Lucy looked back. A dozen pinpoint eyes stung through the dark as the pack closed in. The living mule a distraction. A sacrifice. All that Lucy could bear—she’d seen dead things in plenty. What made her shudder was how firm Ma held her head. Where the rest of the family looked back at the faithful mule, only Ma heeded her own command. She bit her lip, and blood pinked her teeth. Likely it pained her. But Ma showed no pain, and never looked back.

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, and if it hurts—well, at least you’ll be tougher for it.

[…]

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.

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. […] I grew up knowing I belonged to this land, Lucy girl. You and Sam do too, no matter how you look. Don’t you let any man with a history book tell you different.

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 shirt and 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.

“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.

Lucy is afraid as she kneels with Sam behind her. Not of the knife—of herself. These last years, her wiry hair grew in smooth and sleek at last, as Ma said it would. What if she proves as vain as Ma? As selfish?

She closes her eyes so as not to see it. As the hanks fall free, a space opens on her neck. A lightness.

There is, she is coming to see, a place that exists between the world Ba pursued and the world Ma wanted. His a lost world, doomed to make the present and future dim in comparison. Hers so narrow it could accommodate only one. A place Lucy and Sam might arrive at together. Almost a new kind of land.

Maybe the travel goes quicker on account of the buffalo. One moment they’re riding, the next moment the light is half-gone. They look up through shadow. There it is. As if a piece of the hills has shifted, stepped close. Does either one breathe? Even the wind hangs still. Ancient thing with its pelt gone blond at the tips, brown body fringed with gold. Its hooves are wider than Lucy’s hand. She raises hers to compare. Keeps it raised in greeting. And then the buffalo is moving, blowing its sweet grass breath, and its coat brushes her palm. At her side, Sam holds a hand up too. The buffalo passes, melting back into the hills that have its color and shape. I thought they were dead. Me too.

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