by C Pam Zhang
It’s Sam, youngest but best-loved, who leads the way. Inland Sam treks, East through the hills. They start out on the wagon trail that once brought the four of them to town, its dirt tamped flat by miners and prospectors and Indians come before them—and, to hear Ba tell it, the long-dead buffalo before that. But soon Sam veers off, pointing those cowboy boots through untrammeled grass and coyote brush, through thistle and stinging cane.
A new, fainter track takes shape underfoot. Narrow and rough, hidden from pursuers. Ba claimed knowledge of such trails from the Indians he traded with outside town; Lucy figured those for empty boasts. Ba didn’t show the trails the way he showed the scar on his bad leg that he swore came from a tiger.
At least, he didn’t show the trails to Lucy.
They walk near to an empty arroyo. Lucy keeps her head down, hoping to see it fill before their canteens run dry. In this way she almost misses the first buffalo bones.
The skeleton rises from the earth like a great white island. Around it the hush deepens—maybe it’s that the pinned-down grass has gone silent. Sam’s breath hitches, close to a sob.
They’ve seen buffalo bone in pieces along the wagon trail, but never whole. Years of travelers have brandished mallets and knives, boredom and need, taking what was easy to find for cook fires or tent poles or idle carving. This skeleton is untouched. The eye sockets glimmer—a trick of shadow. Sam could walk through the intact rib cage without ducking.
Lucy pictures the bones clothed in fur and flesh, the animal standing. Ba claimed these giants once ran thick through the hills, and the mountains, and the plains beyond. Three times the height of any man yet gentle beyond reckoning. A regular river of buffalo, Ba said. Lucy lets that ancient image flood her.
They grow accustomed to bones, but see few living creatures apart from the trunk’s attendant flies. Once, in the distance, what looks to be an Indian woman, her arm beckoning. Sam stands at quivering attention, the woman’s hand lifts—and then two children run to her side. The small tribe moves away, complete as it is. The arroyo remains dry. Lucy and Sam sip sparingly from canteens, rest for a beat at the shady lee side of each hill. Always there’s a next hill, and a next. Always, the sun. Their stolen provisions run out. Then it’s horse oats for breakfast and dinner. They suck pebbles for moisture, chew dry stems till they soften.
And Lucy ignores most of all the hunger for answers.
Sam struck out saying only that Ba liked space. Wild spaces. But how wild? And how far? Lucy doesn’t dare ask. The gun hangs heavy at Sam’s hip, lending Sam’s gait a swagger not unlike Ba’s. Ever since Ma died, Sam’s quit bonnets and long hair, quit dresses. Bareheaded, Sam dried out in the sun till Sam seemed a piece of cured wood: in danger of catching at the merest spark. Out here, there’s nothing to quell Sam’s burning.
Ba alone could change that. Where’s my girl? Ba said, looking round the shack at the end of the day. Sam hid quiet as Ba searched, playing a game that was theirs alone. Finally Ba roared, Where’s my boy? Sam leapt up. Here I am. Ba tickled Sam till tears sprang to Sam’s eyes. Apart from that, Sam quit crying.
* * *
—
Five days on, the arroyo trickles. Water. Silver. Lucy looks round: nothing but the press of hills. Surely this is wild enough to bury Ba.
“Here?” Lucy asks.
“Ain’t right,” Sam says.
“Here?” Lucy asks again some miles later.
“Here?”
“Here?”
“Here?”
The grass shushes her. The hills roll up and around. On the Eastern horizon the inland mountains are a smudge of blue. H, she thinks as they walk. O. M. E. Her head aches with heat and hunger, the lesson no clearer. They spend a week drifting like the spirits Ma warned against, and then the finger drops.
* * *
—
It appears in the grass, looking like an overgrown brown locust. Sam’s wandered off for a piss—any excuse to leave the flies and stench. Lucy bends to examine the insect. It doesn’t move.
A dry crook, jointed twice. Ba’s middle finger.
Lucy starts to yell for Sam. Then a thought strikes her like a blow across the cheek: if the finger’s lost, why, the hand’s in no position to be dispensing slaps. She takes a breath and throws the trunk open.
Nellie steps nervous as Ba’s arm springs out, accusing. Lucy gags, holds steady. The hand has not one but two missing fingers, two exposed knucklebones staring out like blind eyes.
Lucy walks farther and farther out, searching the grass, till Nellie and the trunk are out of sight. Then she looks up.
Ba taught this trick when Lucy was three or four. Playing, she’d lost sight of the wagon. The enormous lid of sky pinned her down. The grass’s ceaseless billow. She wasn’t like Sam, bold from birth, always wandering. She cried. When Ba found her hours later, he shook her. Then he told her to look up.
Stand long enough under open sky in these parts, and a curious thing happens. At first the clouds meander, aimless. Then they start to turn, swirling toward you at their center. Stand long enough and it isn’t the hills that shrink—it’s you that grows. Like you could step over and reach the distant blue mountains, if you so chose. Like you were a giant and all this your land.
You get lost again, you remember you belong to this place as much as anybody, Ba said. Don’t be afeared of it. Ting wo?
Lucy chooses to quit searching. The finger might’ve dropped miles back, indistinguishable by now from the bones of hare and tiger and jackal. The thought emboldens her. When she returns to the trunk, she grabs Ba’s hand.
In life Ba’s hand was huge and ornery and she’d no more touch it than she would a rattler. In death his hand is shriveled, wet. Hardly resists. It sticks, soft, as she pushes it back inside. A series of pops like dry twigs burning. When Lucy pulls away, Ba’s hand and its missing fingers are hidden.
She washes in the stream and considers the finger still in her pocket. Look at it this way, and it again resembles an insect. A talon. A twig. Just to see, she drops it into the mud. A curl of dog shit.
The grass sways to announce Sam’s return, and Lucy sweeps her bare foot over the finger.
Sam crosses the stream humming, one hand fastening the drawstring pants. A bit of gray rock peeps out the top. The rest of the rock is a long shape under fabric.
Sam stops.
“I was just . . .” Lucy says. “I was just thirsty. Nellie’s back there. I was just . . .”
Lucy stares at Sam’s pants, Sam at Lucy’s stuck-out foot. Their secrets so poorly hidden. For a moment it seems one of them will ask, and behind the question a dozen answers might tumble.
Then Sam hurries on past. Great rips occupy the air: Sam yanking grass to clear space for the fire. Lucy swivels to help, the finger sinking underfoot. A dry land, this one, hungry for richness. She bears down harder, kicks dirt over. She gives the mound one firm slap with her foot. Ma warned of haunting, but what can one finger do? It’s got no hand, and no arm to launch it, no shoulder to swing it, no body to put force behind the blow. The proper way, Ba said as Lucy watched across the room, Ba teaching Sam how to swing.
* * *
—
That night Lucy stirs oats one-handed, the hand that touched Ba at her side. The sticky feeling clings. And like one half-heard tune that recalls another, she remembers Ma’s fingers. How they clutched her the night Ma died.
Sam is talking.
Night, only night, draws words from Sam. When lengthening shadows have drenched the grass blue, then black, Sam tells tales. Tonight it’s about a man spotted on the horizon, mounted on buffaloback. The first night Sam mentioned pursuers, Lucy didn’t sleep a wink. But no tigers ever came leaping, no jackals on leashes, no posse of sheriff’s men. These stories are only a comfort to Sam, like another child’s favorite blanket. Most nights Lucy is grateful to hear Sam’s voice
, even if it adopts Ba’s bluster. Tonight the comparison doesn’t soothe.
“That’s ridiculous,” Lucy interrupts. “There’s no historical evidence.” Teacher talk, Ba called this, sneering. Lucy likes how the long words distract from her dirty hand. “The books say buffalo are extinct in these parts.”
“Ba said what a man knows to be true is different from what he reads.”
Most nights Lucy would retreat. Tonight she says, “Well, you’re not a man.”
Sam in silhouette cracks the knuckles of one hand. Lucy bites her lip.
“I mean you’re not grown yet. We’re kids, aren’t we? We need a house and food. And first we need to bury. It’s already been two weeks since he—”
Sam jumps up to stomp a spark that leapt from the fire. It’s caught a clump of grass. They should have made their firebreak bigger, should have worked longer. Should have, should have. Each small act teeters close to disaster these days—the wink of a star like a search party’s lantern, the clop of Nellie’s hoof like a gun being cocked—and increasingly Lucy lacks the energy to care. She’s scooped so hollow the wind is liable to carry her away. Let the hills burn, she thinks as Sam stomps far longer and harder than the spark called for. Sam always finds some distraction when Lucy comes close to speaking the word.
Died, Lucy says to herself. Dead, death, died. She lays the words down, as she imagines Ma’s trunk laid down in the earth. Soil falling over the latches and the wood. Handfuls, then shovelfuls, pounded neat. They’ve got silver. They’ve got water. Why does Sam keep looking?
“What makes a home a home?” Lucy asks, and for the first time in days, Sam looks her full in the face, on account of the three-legged dog.
Lucy first saw the dog across the lake born of the storm-swollen creek. This was the day after Ma died, and across steely water the dog flashed white. Lucy mistook it for a ghost till it ran—no ghost had that hobble. The stump of the dog’s back leg poked out, red and chewed-looking. It limped like Ba. Lucy didn’t give chase. She was looking for signs of where Ba had buried Ma.
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, and 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 blown leaves, while at home Ba got clumsier. He stubbed his toe, misjudged steps, fell against the bench where Lucy sat. Girl, bench, man, clattered together. Lucy close enough, for the first time since Ma died, to feel Ba’s whiskey breath. They stumbled trying to stand. Ba yanked her straight, and kept yanking till she was pressed against the wall, his fist at her stomach.
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 of the grave, the dog approached. Close-up its eyes were brown and sorrowful. Close-up it was a she.
Lucy fed the dog in secret behind the house. Scraps of what Ba didn’t eat, he who mostly drank. She didn’t fear discovery; Ba’s world had narrowed to the inside of a bottle, and Sam’s world to the space around him.
Then came the day that drink ran dry. Ba went to work in the morning and surprised Lucy on his return, flour and pork in one arm, whiskey in the other. Sam tagged behind; Sam’s hands, like Ba’s, black with coal dust. Lucy’s clean fingers held only scraps of dinner, and the dog’s snout.
Proper reward, Ba said as he hefted the bottle, for a hard day’s work. He swung between the dog’s eyes.
As the dog toppled, Lucy held still. She’d learned true hurt from fakery. Sure enough the dog leapt up when Ba looked away, a piece of pork in its mouth.
Lucy couldn’t help smiling, despite Sam’s warning shake. Ba saw. Something was planted that day, in the remnants of Ma’s garden—an ache, a sour crop.
That was the start of a new balance. For days at a stretch Ba stayed sober enough to work the coal mines. A few swigs at breakfast held his hands steady on a pick. On paydays he brought home his reward, and a jangly rhythm swung his fists round and round. Lucy learned the steps of her part: quiet, nimble, spinning away. If she was quick enough, Ba’s fists hardly clipped her. Sam learned the steps that cut between Ba and Lucy when the dance grew too violent.
Lucy asked, once, with Ba fallen from a missed swing, if she should help in the mines too. He laughed in her face. A gap showed in his teeth, and that sight startled her worse than any blow. When had he lost it? When had a hole opened up in the man she knew, without her seeing it happen? Mining is a man’s work, he spat out. Sam helped him rise, Sam who dressed like a boy and worked like one and was paid like one too. Sam whose hands grew calloused and nicked, strong enough to support Ba’s body.
Their family, too, learned to move on three legs. And then the dog returned.
One night Ba called them out behind the house. There Lucy and Sam found him petting the dog’s hindquarters, which stuck out from a barrel of lard. Good leg, stump leg, and flag of tail between. Ba stroked that tail, then reared back and slammed his boot into the good leg.
“What makes a dog a dog?” Ba asked. This time when the dog tried to run, two bad legs dragged behind two good. It could only crawl. Ba crouched and laid a finger on Lucy’s knee. “It’s a test. You’re fond of tests, smart girl like you.”
He twisted Lucy’s skin. Sam moved closer so that Ba couldn’t pull his arm back all the way. The bark, Lucy answered. The bite. The loyalty. Pinches grew down her calf as she spoke.
“I’ll tell you,” Ba finally said. Not because Lucy trembled, but because his own bad leg did. “A dog’s a cowardly creature. What makes a dog a dog is it can run. That’s no dog. Ting wo.”
“I’m not a dog. I promise, Ba, I wouldn’t run.”
“You know why your ma’s gone?”
Lucy jolted. Even Sam cried out. But Ba would take that answer to his death. He shook his head. Spoke over Lucy’s shoulder, as if the sight of her disgusted him.
“Family comes first. You bring a thief among us, Lucy girl, and you betray us. You’re as good as a thief yourself.”
Funny thing was, Ba’s lesson did bring a part of their family closer. What makes a dog a dog? Sam and Lucy came to swap the words as a joke, a riddle. By incantation stripping it of its origins: the cold night, the broken creature. When Ba staggered home and fell asleep in the water trough, when he searched for a boot he’d flung out the window, they whispered, What makes a bed a bed? What makes a boot a boot? These words stretched between them as other distances grew: between their heights, between the shack where Lucy sat reading and the wide world of open hills and hunting sites that Sam explored at Ba’s side.
Tonight, Sam looks at Lucy across the campfire. Those feet quiet at last from their stomping.
For a moment, Lucy hopes.
But the old spell of the words is broken. Sam walks alone into the grass.
Fool that she was, Lucy thought Ba’s death would return Sam to her. Thought that the jokes Sam shared with Ba, the games and confidences, would fill the emptiness inside Lucy. Lucy thought they might even speak of Ma.
Sam doesn’t return that night, though Lucy waits up for hours. When at last she smothers the fire, she piles the soil higher than needed. Both hands are caked and filthy by the end. She should have known. A dog can’t stand on two legs, and neither can a family.
* * *
—
Piece by piece, step by step, they part with bits of themselves. Hunger reshapes them. Two weeks on and Sam’s cheekbones emerge like rocky outcrops. Three weeks and Sam shoots up taller, thinner. Four weeks and Sam begins to range the hills alone after they make camp, returning with a shot rabbit or squirrel. Pistol swinging at that growing hip.
Lucy does her own hunting while Sam is gone. Hers more like panning. She shakes the trunk and collects a toe, a piece of scalp,
a tooth, another finger, each part buried with a slap on the mound. That slap ought to feel enough like home to Ba. And if it doesn’t? What makes a haint a haint? She pictures a spirit toe floating behind, trailing its cloud of flies. Each small burial drops a fistful of soil into her hollow, filling her for a little while.
Then comes a string of days when nothing drops. Silent days, hardly a word spoken. Lucy shakes the trunk hard enough to rattle. She’s sweating by the time a piece falls loose. It’s as long as a finger but thicker. Softer, with wrinkled skin. No bone that she can see. It gives under her toes, like a dried plum.
She understands.
Dirt-speckled and shrunken, it bears little resemblance to what she saw by accident the night Ba buried Ma. He came up from the lake dripping, shedding wet clothes. Soon he stood in underpants. As he reached for his bottle, Lucy caught a swing of flesh through the thin cloth. Darkly purple, a strange and heavy fruit.
What makes a man a man? The parts that Ba and Sam hold so dear didn’t look like much even then. This time, Lucy slaps the burial mound twice.
Salt
Then comes the night of Nellie’s near escape.
She’ll never know exactly how, but Lucy likes to think it began as most escapes do: in the dead of the night. What’s still called the hour of the wolf. Decades back, before the buffalo were slaughtered and the tigers that fed on them died too, a lone horse in these hills would have quaked in fear of carnivores come slavering. Though there are no tigers, Nellie trembles like her ancestors. She’s smarter than most people, her master claimed. She knows there are things more fearsome than any living threat. The thing strapped to her back, for instance, that dead thing she can’t shake. Nellie waits till the stars stare through their peepholes of sky and the two sleepers lie quiet. Then she commences to dig.
Nellie digs through the hours of the wolf, the snake, the owl, the bat, the mole, the sparrow. At the hour of earthworms stirring in their burrows, Lucy and Sam wake to the knock of hooves against the stake.
