How Much of These Hills Is Gold

by C Pam Zhang

  Lucy leaves a note on the door for Teacher Leigh. She strains for the grand phrases he taught her years back, as if they could be a proof stronger than the proof of her thievery. She doesn’t manage it. Her handwriting scrawls end to end with Sorrys.

  Sam emerges with bedrolls, scant provisions, a pot and pan, and Ma’s old trunk. It drags in the dirt, near as long as a man is tall, those leather latches straining. Lucy can’t guess what mementos Sam packed inside, and they shouldn’t tax the horse—but what’s between them makes her hair prickle. She says nothing. Only hands Sam a wizened carrot, their last bit of sweetness for a while. A peace offering. Sam puts half in Nellie’s mouth, half in a pocket. That kindness heartens Lucy, even if its recipient is a horse.

  “Did you say goodbye?” Lucy asks as Sam throws rope over Nellie’s back, ties some slipknots. Sam only grunts, putting a shoulder under the trunk to heave it up. That brown face goes red, then purple from effort. Lucy lends her shoulder too. The trunk slips into a loop of rope, and Lucy fancies she hears from within a banging.

  Beside her, Sam’s face whips round. Dark face, and in it, white-bared teeth. Fear shivers through Lucy. She steps back. She lets Sam tighten the rope alone.

  Lucy doesn’t go in to bid farewell to the body. She had her hours beside it this morning. And truth be told, Ba died when Ma did. That body is three and a half years empty of the man it once held. At long last, they’ll be going far enough to outrun his haint.

  * * *

  —

  Lucy girl, Ba says, limping into her dream, ben dan.

  He’s in rare good humor. Employing his fondest cuss, the one she was weaned on. She tries to turn and see him, but her neck won’t move.

  What’d I teach you?

  She starts on multiplication tables. Her mouth won’t move, either.

  Don’t remember, d’you? Always making a mess. Luan qi ba zao. There’s the splat of Ba spitting in disgust. The uneven thump of his bad leg, then his good. Can’t get nothing right. As she grew older, Ba shrank. Eating rarely. What he consumed seemed only to feed his temper, which stuck to his side like a faithful old cur. Dui. Thasright. More splats, moving farther from her. He’s starting to slur with drink. Yaliddletraitor. Given up on math, he filled their shack with language. A rich vocabulary that Ma wouldn’t have approved. You lazy sackash—gou shi.

  * * *

  —

  Lucy wakes up to gold all around her. The dry yellow grass of the hills sways jackrabbit-high a few miles outside town. Wind imparts a shimmer like sun off soft metal. Her neck throbs from a night on the ground.

  The water. That’s what Ba taught her. She forgot to boil the water.

  She tilts the flask: empty. Maybe she dreamed of filling it. But no—Sam whimpered from thirst in the night, and Lucy went down to the stream.

  Soft and stupid, Ba whispers. Where d’you keep those brains you prize so much? The sun’s unforgiving; he fades with a parting shot. Why, they melt clean away when you’re scared.

  Lucy finds the first splatter of vomit flickering like dark mirage. The mass of flies shifts lazily. More splatters lead her to the stream, which in daylight reveals itself as muddy. Brown. Like every other stream in mining country, it’s filthy with runoff. She forgot to boil the water. Farther down she finds Sam collapsed. Sam’s eyes closed, Sam’s fingers unfisted. Clothes a foul, buzzing mess.

  This time Lucy boils the water, builds a fire so fierce it makes her head swim. When the water is as cool as it’ll get she washes Sam’s fevered body.

  Sam’s eyes waver open. “No.”

  “Shh. You’re sick. Let me help.”

  “No.” Sam’s bathed alone for years, but surely this is different.

  Sam’s legs kick without strength. Lucy peels back crusted fabric, holding her breath against the stench. Sam’s eyes burn so shiny with fever it looks like hate. Ba’s hand-me-down pants, bunched with rope, come away easy. At the join of Sam’s legs, tucked into a fold of the underdrawers, Lucy bumps something. A hard, gnarled protrusion.

  Lucy draws half a carrot from the indent between her little sister’s legs: a poor replacement for the parts Ba wanted Sam to have.

  Lucy finishes the job she started, hand shaking so that the washcloth scrapes harder than she means it to. Sam doesn’t whimper. Doesn’t look. Eyes turned toward the horizon. Pretending, as Sam always does when the truth can’t be avoided, that she has nothing to do with this body of hers, a child’s body, androgynous still, prized by a father who wanted a son.

  Lucy knows she should speak. But how to explain this pact between Sam and Ba that never made sense to her? A mountain’s risen in Lucy’s throat, one she can’t cross. Sam’s eyes follow the ruined carrot as Lucy flings it away.

  * * *

  —

  For a day Sam retches up dirty water, and for three more lies in fever. Eyes closed when Lucy brings oats cooked to porridge, twigs to feed the fire. In these slow hours Lucy studies a sister she almost forgot: the budded lips, the dark fern lashes. Illness sharpens Sam’s round face, making it more like Lucy’s: horsier, gaunter, the skin sallower, more yellow than brown. A face that shows its weakness.

  Lucy fans Sam’s hair out. Chopped short three and a half years back, it now reaches just under Sam’s ears. Silk-fine and sun-hot.

  The ways Sam hid herself seemed innocent. Childish. Hair and dirt and war paint. Ba’s old clothes and Ba’s borrowed swagger. But even when Sam resisted Ma’s manners, insisted on working and riding out of town with Ba, Lucy figured those for the old games of dress-up. Never this far. Never this carrot, this trying to push and change something deep inside.

  It’s a clever job. Loose fabric in the underdrawers, sewn to form a hidden pocket. Well-done for a girl who refused girl’s chores.

  The stench of sickness clings to camp, though Sam’s shits have stopped and she’s strong enough to bathe alone. Clouds of flies persist and Nellie’s tail won’t quit its switching. Sam’s suffered enough blows to her pride, so Lucy doesn’t mention the stink.

  One night Lucy comes back dangling a squirrel, Sam’s favorite. It was trying to scramble up a tree with a broken paw. Sam’s nowhere to be found. Nor Nellie. Lucy spins, hands bloody, heart ticking and ticking. To match its rhythm she sings a song about two tigers playing hide-and-seek. It’s been years since any stream in this territory ran deep enough to support a creature bigger than a jackal; the song comes from a lusher time. This is a song that Sam, if Sam is scared and hiding, won’t mistake. Twice Lucy thinks she sees a stripe in the brush. Little tiger, little tiger, she sings. Footfalls behind her. Lai.

  A shadow swallows Lucy’s feet. A pressure between her shoulders.

  This time Sam does not say, Pow.

  In the silence Lucy’s thoughts circle and come down slow, almost peaceful, the way vultures drift without hurry—nothing to hurry once the deed’s been done. Where did Sam stash the gun after they fled the bank? How many of its chambers are still loaded?

  She speaks Sam’s name.

  “Shaddup.” This is Sam’s first word since No. “We shoot traitors in these parts.”

  She reminds Sam of what they are. Pardners.

  The pressure slides down to rest on the small of Lucy’s back. The natural height of Sam’s arm, as if Sam grows weary.

  “Don’t move.” The pressure lifts. “I’ve got my sights on you.” Lucy should turn. She should. But. Know what you are? Ba snarled at Lucy the day Sam came back from school, left eye a plum. Lucy’s clothes damningly clean. A coward. A lily-livered girl. The truth is Lucy didn’t know that day, watching Sam face the kids who taunted, if it was bravery that made Sam yell. Was it braver to move loud or to stand quiet as Lucy did, letting spittle run down her lowered face? She didn’t know and doesn’t know now. She hears reins slap, hears Nellie’s whicker. Hooves hit the ground, each step trembling through her bare feet.

 
* * *

  —

  She says, “I’m looking for my little sister.”

  High noon at a settlement that’s little more than two streets and crossroads. Every soul naps through the heat save two brothers who kick a can till the cheap metal ruptures. For a while now they’ve been eyeing a dog, a stray, trying to lure it with their rucksack of groceries. The dog hungry but wary, remembering old blows.

  And then they look up at her, an apparition blown in to end their boredom.

  “You seen her?”

  Spooked at first, the boys peer closer. A tall girl with a long face, crooked nose, strange eyes over high, broad cheeks. A face made stranger by an altogether awkward body. Patched dress, old bruises slipping shadows under the skin. The boys see a child even less loved than they.

  The plumper boy starts to say no. The skinny one jabs him.

  “Maybe we did and maybe we didn’t. What’s she look like, huh? She got hair like yours?” A hand jerks out and grips a black braid. The other hand twists the bumpy nose. “An ugly nose like yours?” Now both pairs of hands are grabbing wrist and ankle, pulling narrower her narrow eyes, pinching hard at the skin stretched tight over her cheeks. “Funny eyes like yours, huh?”

  The dog watches from a distance, with relief.

  Her quiet perplexes them. The fat one grabs her throat, as if to milk her of words. She’s seen his kind. Not those bullies who ran toward the task but the others, slow or lazy-eyed or stuttering, who trailed, reluctant. Those with gratitude mixed into their hate—because her strangeness let them into the pack.

  For now the fat one holds her gaze, wondering, holds her throat, longer perhaps than he means to. She starts to choke. Who knows how long he would have held if a round brown body didn’t come barreling into his back. The fat boy falls, gasping from the impact.

  “Get off her,” says the newcomer who hit him. Furious eyes, cut narrow.

  “You and what army?” says the skinnier boy, sneering.

  And Lucy, breath reentering in one shuddering whoosh, looks up at Sam.

  Sam whistles, summoning Nellie from behind an oak. Sam reaches for a bundle on the horse’s back. What Sam means to grab, none of the others will know. Lucy fancies she sees a gleam, hard and black as purest coal. But first, a fat white something plops from the trunk and lands in the dust.

  Lucy, head spinning, thinks: Rice.

  They are white grains, like rice, but they wriggle, and crawl, and split outward as if lost and seeking. Sam’s face is impassive. A breeze insinuates itself among them, bringing the churning smell of rot.

  The skinny brother skitters, shrieks: Maggots!

  Nellie, good-natured well-bred mare, but shuddering, wild-eyed, barely contained, carrying fear on her back for five full days now, takes this voice as a message and finally decides to bolt.

  She doesn’t go far with Sam holding the reins. Nellie jerks, the load of pots clanging alarm. A knot loosens, the trunk slides, the lid bangs open. Spilling an arm. Part of what was once a face.

  Ba is half jerky and half swamp. His skinny limbs dried to brown rope. While his softer parts—groin, stomach, eyes—swim with greenish-white pools of maggots. The boys don’t see it, not truly. They run at the first suggestion of the face. Only Lucy and Sam look full on. He’s theirs, after all. And Lucy thinks—why, this is no worse than his face in a dozen other permutations, monstrous with drink or rage. She steps closer, Sam’s gaze a weight on her back. Gently, she lowers the trunk from the ropes that hold it. Pushes the body back inside.

  But she’ll remember.

  More than drink and more than rage, Ba’s face reminds her of that once she saw him crying and didn’t dare go up, his features so melted by grief she feared her well-meant touch would dissolve his flesh. Expose the skull beneath. Now there it is, that peek of bone, and it is not so fearful. She shuts the lid and reties the latches. Turns.

  “Sam,” she says, and in that moment, with eyes full of Ba, she sees that same melting on Sam’s face.

  “What,” Sam says.

  Lucy remembers, then, tenderness, a thing she thought dead along with Ma.

  “You were right. I should have listened to you. We’ve got to bury.”

  She saw more than she thought she could, bore it while those boys cowered. They ran, and their imaginings will follow all their lives at their heels. For her, who didn’t turn away, the haunting may begin to be done. She feels a swell of gratitude for Sam.

  “I aimed to miss,” Sam says. “That banker. I only meant to scare him.”

  Lucy looks down, always down, into Sam’s sweat-shiny face. A face brown as mud and just as malleable, a face on which Lucy has seen emotions take shape with an ease she envies. Many emotions but never fear. Yet there is fear now. For the first time she sees herself reflected in her sister. And this, Lucy realizes, this more than the schoolyard taunts or the press of the gun’s cold snout, is her moment of courage. She closes her eyes. She sits, face in her arms. She judges the proper way is quiet.

  A shadow cools her. She feels rather than sees Sam bending, hovering, sitting too.

  “We still need two silver dollars,” Sam says.

  Nellie chews a tangle of grass, calmed now that the burden’s off her back. Soon the weight will return, but for now. For now. Lucy reaches for Sam’s hand. She brushes something rough in the dirt. It’s the boys’ rucksack, abandoned. Slowly, Lucy swings it. Remembers the clank of it hitting her. She reaches in.

  “Sam.”

  A hunk of salt pork, the greasy leak of cheese or lard. Hard candy. And waaay beneath, knotted in the fabric, hidden if her fingers didn’t know where to look, if she weren’t a prospector’s daughter, one whose ba said, Why, Lucy girl, you feel where it’s buried. You just feel it, she touches on coins. Copper pennies. Nickels etched with beasts. And silver dollars to lay over two white-swimming eyes, close them the proper way, sending the soul to its final good sleep.

  Plum

  It was Ma who laid down rules for burying the dead.

  Lucy’s first dead thing was a snake. Five and full of destruction, she stomped puddles just to see the world flood. She leapt, landed. When the waves quit their crashing she stood in a ditch emptied of water. Coiled at its bottom, a drowned black snake.

  The ground steamed pungent wet. The buds on the trees were splitting, showing their paler insides. Lucy ran home with scales between her palms, aware that the world unfurled its hidden side.

  Ma smiled to see her. Kept smiling as Lucy opened her hands.

  Later, too late, Lucy would think on how another mother might have screamed, scolded, lied. How Ba, if Ba were there, might have said the snake was sleeping, and spun a tale to chase the hush of death right out the window.

  Ma only hefted her pan of pork and tied her apron tighter. Said, Lucy girl, burial zhi shi another recipe.

  Lucy prepared the snake alongside the meat.

  First rule, silver. To weigh down the spirit, Ma said as she peeled a caul of fat from the pork. She sent Lucy to her trunk. Beneath the heavy lid and its peculiar smell, between layers of fabric and dried herbs, Lucy found a silver thimble just large enough to fit over the snake’s head.

  Second, running water. To purify the spirit, Ma said as she washed the meat in a bucket. Her long fingers picked maggots free. Beside her, Lucy submerged the snake’s body.

  Third, a home. The most important rule of all, Ma said as her knife hacked through gristle. Silver and water could seal a spirit for a time, keep it from tarnish. But it was home that kept the spirit safe-settled. Home that kept it from wandering back, restless, returning time and again like some migrant bird. Lucy? Ma asked, knife paused. You know where?

  Lucy’s face warmed, as if Ma quizzed her on sums she hadn’t studied. Home, Ma said again, and Lucy said it back, chewing her lip. Finally Ma cupped Lucy’s face with a hand warm and slick and redolent
of flesh.

  Fang xin, Ma said. Told Lucy to loosen her heart. It’s not hard. A snake belongs in its burrow. You see? Ma told Lucy to leave the burying. Told her to run off and play.

  They’re running, like Ma told them, but this time it doesn’t feel like play.

  * * *

  —

  All those years and still Lucy can’t grasp the thing called home. For all that Ma praised her smarts, she’s a dunce in what matters. Lacking answers, she can only spell. H, as the yellow grasses rustle. O, as she grinds stems underfoot. M, as she cuts her toe and watches a line of blood rise like rebuke. E, as she hurries up the next hill to catch Sam and Nellie disappearing down its slope.

  What’s home mean when Ba made them live a life so restless? He aimed to find his fortune in one fell swoop, and all his life pushed the family like a storm wind at their backs. Always toward the newer. The wilder. The promise of sudden wealth and shine. For years it was gold he pursued, rumors of unclaimed land and untapped veins. Always they arrived to find the same ruined hills, dug up, the same streams choked with rubble. Prospecting as much a game of luck as the gambling dens Ba haunted from time to time—and luck was never with him. Even when Ma put her foot down and insisted they make an honest living through coal, little changed. From coal mine to coal mine their wagon crossed the hills like a finger scraping the barrel’s last taste of sugar. Each new mine drew men with the promise of high wages, but those wages fell as more men arrived. So the family chased the next mine, and the next. Their savings swelled and shrank in seasons as reliable as dry and wet, hot and cold. What’s home mean when they moved so often into shacks and tents that stank of other people’s sweat? How can Lucy find a home to bury a man she couldn’t solve.