How Much of These Hills Is Gold

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.

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.

“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.

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 look at me when she’s bathing me. She sees me. The proper way.”

Lucy closes her eyes and tries to see.

She sees Sam, shining.

Sam at seven, shining in dress and braid.

Sam at eleven, shining through loss and grime.

Sam at sixteen, this conviction, these grown-up bones.

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