by C Pam Zhang
Sam is quicker. Four strides and Sam’s caught the reins in one hand. With the other, Sam slaps Nellie. Hard.
The mare only snorts, but the sound echoes in Lucy along with the sound of other slaps by other hands on other parts. She leaps between girl and horse. Sam’s hand halts in midair. Only then, her neck loosening, does Lucy admit she didn’t know if Sam would stop.
“She tried to run,” Sam says with arm still raised.
“You scared her.”
“She’s a traitor. She’d’ve made off with Ba.”
“She’s got feelings too. She’s—”
“Smarter than most people,” Sam mocks, lowering her voice to ape Teacher Leigh. It’s half-convincing. A fit to Sam’s new, leaner face. They both of them go quiet. When Sam speaks again it’s still in a borrowed voice, not quite a man’s but not quite Sam’s own. “If Nellie’s so smart then she understands loyalty. If she’s so smart she can take her punishment.”
“She’s worn out by the weight. I’m tired too. Aren’t you?”
“Ba wouldn’t quit on account of being tired.”
And maybe that was Ba’s problem. Maybe he should’ve made peace with what they had before he died dirty in his bed, not a clean shirt to his name. Lucy presses a hand to her hot scalp. Her head buzzes. Strange thoughts have been taking residence in her empty spaces. Sometimes it seems the wind itself whispers notions at night.
“Let’s let her rest a while,” Lucy says. “Anyhow, we can’t have much farther to go.” She looks around at the hills. Not a soul to speak to since they left the two boys at that crossroads a month back. She’s got to ask, for Nellie’s sake if not her own. “Right?”
Sam shrugs.
“Sam?”
Another shrug. This time Lucy perceives the softening in Sam’s shoulders as doubt.
“If we keep on,” Sam says, “we might find a better place.”
The next place might be better, Ba said each time they packed up for a new mine. Better never came.
“You don’t know where you’re going,” Lucy says. And then, unbidden, she is laughing. She hasn’t laughed since Ba died. These aren’t her forced ha-has but something raw and hurting as it pulls free. If Sam means to chase Ba’s dream of wildness, they’ll never quit wandering. And maybe that’s what Sam wants: Ba forever on their backs.
“Don’t be stupid,” Lucy says when she catches her breath. “We can’t last.”
“We could if you were stronger.” Those words are Ba’s words. As the sneer is Ba’s, and the swing of Sam’s hand aiming once more for Nellie.
Lucy grabs Sam. Touch is a shock—Sam’s wristbones so small and fine despite that brashness. Sam tugs away, pulling Lucy off-balance. Lucy flings an arm out—and her nails graze Sam’s cheek.
Sam flinches. Sam who’s never quailed before, not from the kids and their stones, not from Ba at his drunkest. But why would Sam? Ba didn’t ever aim to hit Sam, as Lucy just did. The morning light is stark now, Sam’s accusing eyes as wide as twin suns.
Coward that she is, Lucy flees. The blows resume behind her.
She climbs. Up the biggest hill she can find, thirsting plants reaching up the hem of her dress, which is too short now, and faded from travel. The grass so parched it draws blood, hatching her legs with delicate pattern. At the summit, she folds her knees to her chest. Puts her head between and squeezes her ears shut.Ting le? Ma asked, holding her hands over Lucy’s ears. Silence for that first moment. Then the throb and whoosh of Lucy’s own blood. It’s inside you. Where you come from. The sound of the ocean.
Salt water, poison to its drinkers. In Teacher Leigh’s history book, land stops at the ocean that borders this Western territory. Beyond: blank blue, sea monsters drawn among the waves. The savage unknown, the teacher said, and it troubled Lucy that Ma spoke so yearningly.
For the first time, Lucy understands the desire to travel so far from the life she’s known. She meant for them to leave Sam’s violence when they fled town. But violence lives in Lucy too.
“Sorry,” Lucy says. This time to Ma. She hasn’t taken care of Sam as Ma bid her. She doesn’t know if she can. And then, because Sam isn’t there to witness weakness, Lucy finally lets herself cry. She licks the tears as she goes. Salt’s expensive, missing from their table for many years. She cries till her tongue shrivels. Then she chews a blade of grass to clear the taste.
The grass tastes of ocean too.
A second blade proves just as salty. Lucy stands, looking over the hilltop. There: a gleam of white.
She walks till she reaches the edge of a huge white disk that crunches underfoot, burning her scratches. Height of the dry season and all through the hills, the shallow pools and creeks are disappearing. Here a whole lake has gone, and left behind a salt flat.
Lucy stands long enough for the clouds to gather, the world to swirl around her. She thinks of the plums Ma pickled in salt, the way they took a form more potent than their origins. She thinks of Ba salting his game. Of salt to scour iron. Of salt in an open wound, a burn that purifies. Salt to clean and salt to save. Salt on a rich man’s table every Sunday, a flavor to mark the passage of the week. Salt shrinking the flesh of fruit and meat both, changing it, buying time.
* * *
—
The sun’s swung low when Lucy descends. Sam’s face is mottled, but not on account of shadows. Sam rages—yet there is fear behind it. What here in this emptiness could scare Sam?
“You left,” Sam spits out between a string of cusses, and Lucy understands. She broke the unspoken contract of their lives. Always it’s been Sam who ranges wide while Lucy sat, waiting. Sam’s never been left behind.
Lucy speaks, gently, as she would to a spooked horse. Of salt and pork, venison and squirrel, while Sam refuses. Yells louder.
“It’ll mean we can keep looking,” Lucy says. “Nellie’s not as strong as you.” She pauses. “Nor am I.”
This soothes Sam, but what convinces is the wind that insinuates itself between them, carrying the flies and the odor of Ba. Both siblings pale. So when Lucy says certain Indian tribes honored their warriors this way, Sam relents at last.
Does it matter that agreement was bought with a lie?
For the first time they untie the ropes from Nellie’s back. Freed, the mare rolls in the grass, leaving a black mash of flies.
What makes a man a man? They tip the trunk. Is it a face to show the world? Hands and feet to shape it? Two legs to walk it? A heart to beat, teeth and tongue to sing? Ba has few of these left. He lacks even a man’s shape. He’s shaped by the trunk as a stew is shaped by its pot. Lucy has salted meat gone green at the edges, and meat frozen for days. Nothing like this.
* * *
—
Sam approaches the salt flat at a run. By evening it’s as if one great white moon has sunk to the ground, leaving a lesser in the sky that rises, unconvincing. Sam leaps high and slams down those boots. A crack splits the surface, twice as long as Sam is tall. The boom like close thunder. Lucy peers up at the now-dark sky. Sure enough the clouds are circling.
She shoulders the shovel. Where Sam leaps, Lucy follows, prying hunks of white. Goose bumps swim on Lucy’s skin despite the heat. This here’s a familiar rhythm. The digging. The heat. Even the boom like laughter from a man full-grown. Lucy looks up to find Sam looking back.
“It’s near as pretty as gold,” Sam agrees. Then, “Wish he coulda seen it.”
* * *
—
Sprinkled over Ba’s body, the salt looks like ash. Flies flee the onslaught, but the maggots can’t escape. In their death throes they look for all the world like small white tongues, curled in screams.
It takes four blistering days for Ba to transform to something other. Time to rest Nellie and let her eat her fill of grass. Sam turns the parts, using the shovel to give them an even coat of salt. From time to time
Sam chops apart a joint, a knot of flesh. At a distance Sam looks to hold an enormous spoon.
Burial is just another recipe, Ma said.
* * *
—
Ba dries up smaller than Lucy, smaller than Sam. They pour him into the empty rucksack: the startling brown flower of his ribs, the butterfly of his pelvis, the grin stuck to his skull. And lengths and lumps they can’t identify, hardened mysteries that may hold the answer to questions Lucy never could ask. Why’d he drink? Why’d he sometimes look like he was crying? Where’d he bury Ma?
They leave the stained trunk behind. Once, Ma carried it across the ocean. Now it’s a gift to the flies. Lucy feels an unexpected pang of pity for those flies, which followed faithfully for weeks, buzzing and mating and birthing young. Countless lives lived on the bounty of Ba’s corpse, a generosity of the kind the living Ba never showed. They’re doomed to die by the hundreds. Each morning will dawn on more black bodies cold in the grass. If Lucy had a handful of silver, she’d scatter it in their midst.
Skull
Teacher Leigh claimed Nellie for the fastest horse in a hundred miles, come from a line of breeding older than the Western territory. He never raced her. Said it wouldn’t be fair sport to the cowboy ponies.
Now they test the truth of it. Sam mounts first, Lucy behind. The two of them, and the rucksack of Ba, are still lighter than the trunk was. Nellie paws the ground, eager to run despite her skimpy diet of grass. Lucy expects an answering impatience from Sam.
Instead, Sam leans forward and whispers. The mare’s gray ears twitch back, subtle as speech.
And then Sam whoops.
Nellie stretches long, long—legs flicker over grass and they are flying, the wind shrieking, the sound from Sam’s throat raw and thrilling, at once Ba’s pride and Ma’s husky rasp and something all Sam’s own, wild as a beast—and Lucy realizes the sound isn’t from one throat. It’s hers too.
If this is a haunting, then it’s a good one.
* * *
—
Were a traveler to go by wagon, it takes a month to cross the Western territory. The main trail that they left starts at the ocean in the West, bumps against the inland mountains to the East. There the trail turns North, hugging the range till it flattens. East the trail loops, into the gentle plains of the next territory. A clear path, well-traveled. Easy enough to find again if they wished. But Sam, drawing in the dirt that night, has other plans.
“Most people do this,” Sam says, tracing the first part of the wagon trail with a stick. Sam depicts mountains as Ma did: clusters of three peaks.
“And then,” Lucy says, picking up her own stick, “most people keep going.” She draws the next piece of trail that crosses into the neighboring territory.
Sam scowls. Taps Lucy’s stick away. “But no one goes here.” Taking up a thinner stick, Sam draws a new line. This one splits from the wagon trail. “Or here.” The line cuts clean through the middle of the range. “Or here.” Now it leaps to the side as if shoved. “Or here.” When Sam is finished, the map holds a wriggling snake of a trail, one that loops and circles, cuts through the mountains, wends South, jumps North, leans into the far Western coast.
Lucy squints. Sam’s new line seems to end where it begins, so many times does it curl. “No one would go that way. It’s senseless.”
“Exactly. No one would. This here’s all the wild places.” Sam studies Lucy. “Ba said that’s where to find buffalo.”
“Those are stories, Sam. The buffalo are dead.”
“You read that. You don’t know it.”
“Nobody’s seen buffalo in these parts in years.”
“You said we could keep looking.”
“Not forever.” Sam’s line represents months of travel through the most rugged, unbroken places. Maybe years.
“You promised.” Sam turns away. The red fabric across Sam’s back is faded, stretched tighter than when they set out. A line of stomach peeps from the shirt’s bottom edge—Sam has grown. A dark splotch forms, unaccountably, at the corner of the dirt map though Sam’s stick doesn’t move. The splotch spreads, Sam’s shoulders shake. The darkness is wet. Sam—is Sam crying?
“Promised,” Sam says again, quieter, the words before and after unheard except for a sloshing, and this time Lucy hears, He promised he wouldn’t die.
Lucy knew of Ba’s dying for years. All she lacked was the day. Though he lived not even two decades, Ma’s death aged him. Ba refused meals and took whiskey like water. His lips sank into his leathery face, his teeth loosened and spotted, and his eyes went red, then yellow, then a mix of both like fatty beef. Lucy wasn’t truly surprised to find his body. It’s been years since she mourned Ba’s broken promises.
But it was different for Sam. Ba saved what little tenderness was left in him for Sam.
“Shh,” Lucy says, though Sam is silent. “Hao de, hao de. We’ll go. We’ll look.”
Lucy knows they won’t find a thing. Not one buffalo. The truth of those wild places is written in books. But Sam trusts only two sources: Ba, and Sam’s own eyes. One is lost. The other will see the empty mountains soon enough. It may take a few weeks more, but soon, Lucy hopes, Sam will lay Ba down.
* * *
—
From atop Nellie, the hills roll by with a speed that makes them liquid. The ocean Ma spoke of, remade in yellow grass. The distant mountains draw closer till one day Lucy sees: why, they’re not blue. Green brush and gray rock, purple shadows held deep in ridges.
The land, too, regains color. The stream widens. Cattails, miner’s lettuce, clusters of wild garlic and carrots. Hills grow craggier, valleys deeper. From time to time, the grass bursts full green in the shade of a grove.
Is this, then, the wildness Ba sought? This sense that they might disappear into the land—a claiming of their bodies like invisibility, or forgiveness? The hollow in Lucy shrinks as she shrinks, insignificant against the mountains, the gold light filtered green through unbent oaks. Even Sam is gentling in a wind that tastes of life as much as it tastes of dust.
One day Lucy wakes to birdsong, and it isn’t a dream of the past that holds her. It’s a new vision of the future, clinging like dew.
There was a kind of miner’s wife who faced inland and sighed, Civilization. Such wives came from those fertile plains on the far side of the mountains, tugged West by letters from miner husbands. The letters made no mention of coal dust. The wives arrived in cheerful dresses that faded fast as their hopes in the strong Western sun.
Soft, Ba scoffed. Kan kan, they’ll die off quick. He was right. When cough came, those wives crumpled like flowers tossed to fire. Their widowers remarried sturdy women who fixed eyes to their tasks and never looked inland.
But Lucy liked to hear about the next territory, and the next one, even farther East. Those flat plains where water is abundant and green stretches in every direction. Where towns have shade trees and paved roads, houses of wood and glass. Where instead of wet and dry there are seasons with names like song: autumn, winter, summer, spring. Where stores carry cloth in every color, candy in every shape. Civilization holds the word civil in its heart and so Lucy imagines kids who dress nice and speak nicer, storekeepers who smile, doors held open instead of slammed, and everything—handkerchiefs, floors, words—clean. A new place, where two girls might be wholly unremarkable.
In Lucy’s fondest dream, the one she doesn’t want to wake from, she braves no dragons and tigers. Finds no gold. She sees wonders from a distance, her face unnoticed in the crowd. When she walks down the long street that leads her home, no one pays her any mind at all.
* * *
—
They’ve nearly reached the foot of the mountains, one week later, when the rib in the sky thickens. Wolf moon, rarest kind. Bright enough that after sunset and star rise comes moonrise. Silver pries their eyes awake. The blades of grass, the
bristles of Nellie’s mane, the creases of their clothes—illuminated.
Across the grass, an even brighter glow.
Like two still sleeping they rise from their blankets and walk. Their hands brush. Did Sam reach across? Or is it a coincidence of strides grown similar thanks to Sam’s new height?
The light comes from a tiger skull.
It’s pristine. The snarl untouched. Chance didn’t place this skull; the beast didn’t die here. No other bones surround it. The empty sockets face East and North. Follow its gaze, and Lucy sees the very end of the mountains, where the wagon trail curves to the plains.
“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.
Song shivers through Lucy’s head as she touches the skull’s intact teeth. A threat, or else a grin. What was the last word of the song? A call to the tiger: Lai.
“What makes a home a home?” Lucy says.
Sam faces the mountains and roars.
Wind
Wind blows down the slopes, a change-smell in the air. By the moon’s keen light, Sam readies the site for burial.
Around the tiger, Sam lays a circle of stones. Home, Sam calls this. To one side of the circle, their pot and pan and ladle and knife and spoons. Kitchen, Sam calls this. To the other, their blankets. Bedroom, Sam calls this. At the edge, branches stuck upright. Walls, Sam calls this. Over the branches, woven grass mats. Roof, Sam calls this.
