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.

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.

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.

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.

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.