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.

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.

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.

“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.

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.

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.