by C Pam Zhang
The center Sam keeps empty till last.
It’s close to dawn by the time Sam finishes. The grass ceiling is clumsy and gaping, the pan still clumped with oats. Sam is a poor housekeeper on account of having no practice. All the same, Sam shooed Lucy’s help away. Now Sam walks to the tiger skull and holds the shovel aloft. Does Sam’s hand quiver as the blade sinks into dirt?
Sam stops. The quivering continues. Maybe it’s lack of sleep. Maybe something else. Sam’s face is dry. Sam stares at the skull as if expecting an answer.
Lucy comes up and takes Sam’s hand. Today she encounters no protest as she lays Sam down and tucks the blanket beneath that trembling chin. There’s no hurry now. They’ll bury come daybreak. Till then, Lucy offers to sit vigil.
* * *
—
And all the rest of that night the wind blows with particular fierceness. Blows Sam’s house down, blows straight through Lucy’s threadbare dress and blanket, down her throat and into her hollows so that she’s cold from the inside. A slapping wind. Quick gusts against her cheeks. It means the rainy season is coming.
Though coming’s too strong a word, unless it’s meant as Ba meant it, saying I’ll come home tonight and meaning the next morning, the next night, the next Monday, red-eyed and fuming with whiskey. Rain’s coming in the way Ba was and was not coming: a far-off, brooding cloud. While Sam sleeps, the wind blows loud enough to keep Lucy awake. A wind unlike the daytime wind, a wind like a voice, low and blustering through the grass. Aaa, the wind says. And sometimes, Uoooo. And sometimes iiiiiiiin, sometimes aaaaaaan, ben daaaaaan. Can’t sass wind or beg wind, so Lucy does what she’s learned to do: keep quiet. She lets the wind batter her and sting her eyes. She lets the wind blow gifts from far-off places. Withered leaves it brings, long-fingered as hands. Fine dirt that yellows her hair. Gifts or warnings? Smells of wet and rot. Cicada husks, which on first reckoning she mistakes for fingers and toes, which on third, fourth, fifth reckoning she takes for the ghosts of fingers and toes. The haunting comes in the way the wind blows down her throat with vengeful force, fills her ears with words she won’t dare remember by day. Aaaa, the wind screams, claiming her with coldness. Eeeeeer, the wind screams. Nu eeeeeer. Wind’s blowing up and as Sam sleeps, Lucy sits and listens. Listens. Listens.
* * *
—
And then it is day.
Sam has the shovel,
Lucy the ladle.
Burial zhi shi another recipe, Ma said.
“Ready?” Sam says.
Aaaaaard, the wind says.
And Lucy says, to herself, Remember? How he taught us to prospect. Remember? How his wrists were spotted with oil burns. Remember? His stories. Remember? His nails bitten to the quick. Remember? How he snored when he drank. Remember? His white hairs. Remember? His bluster. Remember? How he loved pork cooked with peppers. Remember? The smell of him.
They dig a hole. The size of a pistol. They dig. The size of a dead baby. They dig. The size of a dog. They dig. The size of a girl who wants only to lie down and rest. They dig though there’s soon space enough for a rucksack, two rucksacks, four. They dig and the grave takes on a shape like the one inside Lucy, a hollow filled with the smell of loam and morning breath. They dig until sun crawls down the backs of the hills, drops shadow over the lip of the grave.
Cowaaaaaaard, the wind says sadly.
Lucy knows better than to talk back.
Sam opens the sack.
Ba falls in a jumble. No hope of straightening him. Already the soil, so dry and so thirsty, is drinking him up. He sinks. Where will he go? Down to mix in a common murk alongside Ma’s bones, in the grave Lucy never saw?
Sam reaches into a pocket. For a moment the bulge of fist recalls the bulge of the gun Sam drew in the bank. They gave up so much for these two pieces of silver—she hopes this grave was worth their thieving.
Remember? How he taught you to ride. Remember? His boots that held the shape of his feet when empty. Remember? The smell of him, not after he quit washing, not after the drink, but the smell before.
And still Lucy doesn’t speak. As Sam doesn’t move. Sam holds those pieces of silver till Lucy realizes: Sam wants her gone.
As she did on many nights, Lucy leaves Sam and Ba alone together. She doesn’t see what passes at last between father and daughter, father and false son.
Mud
They sleep. Not down in the grave but on the soft, loose mound born of it. The hole is filled in, tamped down, but they couldn’t quite return the dirt they originally took. For the first night since they fled near on two months ago, Lucy sleeps heavy. Dreamless. Though she doesn’t remember Sam coming to bed, there in the morning is Sam’s body beside hers, dirty and stinking of life.
Wet has visited overnight, those distant clouds issuing damp breath. Sam’s face is beaded. Dirt’s thickened to mud on their skins. When Lucy tries to clean Sam’s cheek, her finger leaves a streak of even darker brown.
She cocks her head, raises a second finger. Draws a second streak parallel to the first.
Two tiger stripes.
“Good morning,” Lucy says to the skull that guards the grave. It ignores her, of course, as it ignores the Western hills behind. It faces the mountains’ end. On this morning, the air boding a new season, it seems Lucy can see farther than before. Squint, and can’t she see the peak of the last mountain? Squint, and don’t the clouds resemble lace? Squint, and can’t she see a new white dress, and broad streets, and a house of wood and glass?
Lucy presses her fingers to her wrist. Her thighs. Her cheeks and neck and chest, avoiding the new soreness there. On the surface she’s no fatter and no thinner than she was the night before, but something inside has changed, laid to rest with Ba’s body. Wet on her cracked lips. She smiles, small at first, wary of tearing dry flesh. Then bigger. She licks her lips.
Water is coming back to the world.
Quietly, so as not to wake Sam, Lucy moves through the camp unmaking the home Sam built for burial. She unweaves the grass mats and lays the blades over the grave to hide it. She drops the stones back in the stream. She plucks up the branches and smooths mud over their holes. She packs their gear. She saddles Nellie.
By the time Sam sits up, looking around in bewilderment, Lucy has made Ba’s gravesite look wild once more, as he liked.
“Wake up, sleepyhead. It’s time to go.”
“Where?” Sam says thickly.
“Onward. To hot meals. White bread. Meat. A nice long bath.” Lucy claps her hands. “Clean new clothes. A bandana and pants that fit for you. A new dress for me.” She grins at Sam, who blinks in that sticky way. Lucy faces the tiger skull and points. Then she pulls her hand up. Squints down its line as if down a gun’s barrel. She aims at the horizon. “Once we get past the mountains, we’ve plenty of time to find a new home.”
And Sam says, “We are home.”
Sam stands. Walks East as Lucy wants. But Sam stops too soon. Plants a foot on the tiger’s skull.
“Here,” Sam says, clearly now.
One foot raised, head thrown back, hands on hips: Sam doesn’t realize the image this calls up. Lucy’s history books were filled with conquering men who stood this way. Flags waved behind them in land emptied of buffalo and Indians.
Lucy drops to her knees, trying to nudge Sam’s boot away. Sam stands firm. Gone the tapping impatience.
“Spurs!” Lucy says. “A proper town will have proper spurs.”
“I don’t need ’em for Nellie. Just like we don’t need any old town.”
“We can’t survive out here. There’s nothing. No people.”
“What’d people ever do for us?” Sam runs the tip of a boot over the skull’s teeth. An eerie music rises from the dead mouth. “There’s tigers here. Buffalo. Freedom.”
“Dead tigers. Dead buffalo.”
“Once upo
n a time,” Sam says, and what can Lucy do but listen?
Once upon a time, these hills were barren. And they weren’t hills yet. They were plains. No sun, only ice. Nothing grew till the buffalo came. Some say they crossed a bridge of land over the Western ocean, and that the bridge sank from the weight of their passage.
The buffalo’s hooves plowed the earth, and their breath warmed it, and in their mouths they carried seeds, and in their hides they carried birds’ nests. Their hooves made gullies to hold the streams, their wallows made valleys. They spread East, South, through mountains and plains and forest. Across the territories so that there was a time they walked near every inch of this country, bigger with every generation born, stretching up to fill the open sky.
And then, long after the Indians, came new men, from a different direction. These men sowed bullets in place of seeds. They were puny and yet they pushed the buffalo back, and back, till the last herd was rounded up in a valley not far from here. A pretty valley with a deep river running through. The men intended to rope the buffalo instead of killing them. They intended to tame them, and mix them into their cattle. Shrink them down to size.
But when the sun rose, the men saw that hills had risen overnight.
Those hills were the bodies of a thousand thousand dead buffalo that had walked into the river and drowned.
The hills stank so high the men were forced to leave. Even after birds picked the buffalo clean, the river never flowed again, and what grew back between the bones wasn’t the same green grass. It was yellow, cursed, dry. No good for planting. No one can settle these hills the proper way till the buffalo decide to come back.
A dozen times Lucy has heard this story. It was Ba’s favorite. But Teacher Leigh laughed and showed, in a book, the truth of the last herd of buffalo, kept in a rich man’s garden far to the East. The creatures in the drawing did not stretch skyward like these ancient bones. Captivity had diminished them to the size of docile cows. Pure sentiment, the teacher chided. A pretty little folktale.
After that, when Ba told any story, Lucy no longer saw buffalo parting the grass with broad shoulders, or tiger stripes slipping through shadow. She saw only the empty space in Ba’s lying mouth, where once there was a tooth.
“Like you said,” Lucy reminds Sam. “This is cursed land.”
“What if we’re not cursed? The buffalo came from across the ocean—just like us. And the tiger marked Ba special.”
“You can’t trust everything Ba said. Besides, things are different now. The territory’s been civilized, improved. We can follow suit.”
The tiger’s snarl sits in Sam’s mouth. This time it points at Lucy.
Meat
Sam quits speaking of hunger, of cold. Of the low gray clouds that stalk at the horizon. As if Sam means to out-stubborn the truth of the house that won’t stand, the tiger skull that for all its snarl can’t protect from starvation now that the oats have run out, and the bullets too. Lucy tries to speak of their future. Sam has words only for the long-dead past.
Despite the overcast days, Sam shines ever harder. Brighter. Each morning Sam admires her reflection in the stream, like any girl—but warped. Sam doesn’t put up her hair or brush it. Sam hacks her short hair shorter till bare scalp shows through. Delights in lost pounds, and the sharpening of elbows and cheeks.
And yet, in these vanities, Lucy sees Ma’s likeness.
Once Sam studied Ma as Sam now studies herself. Ma transformed each morning before heading to the mine with Ba. She hid her hair under a cap, her white arms in sleeves. Bending to tie her boots, Ma’s face nearly touched the ashes. Like the story of a serving girl raised from cinders—only the wrong way round. It was a costume, Ma explained. Just till they saved enough. When Sam clamored for a costume too, Ma opened her trunk with its sweet and bitter perfume. She ripped a red dress for a bandana.
Sam shone so fierce with joy that day, Lucy had to look away.
Of all their faded and travel-worn clothes, that bandana alone holds its color. Sometimes Sam hums while tying it. A song to which they’ve both forgotten most of the words. The melody is Ma’s.
* * *
—
Worn down, arguments nibbled by hunger, Lucy dozes day and night. She dreams of green trees with heavy fruit, of fountains spitting chicken broth. Pale fur creeps down her limbs. Her teeth pain her. She shivers and grinds her jaw, dreaming of an animal roasting, the flesh overcooked, oversalted, dried like jerky—
When she blinks awake this particular afternoon, the smell of meat persists. A line of smoke splits the sky, rising from a copse at the foot of the mountains.
Saliva fills Lucy’s mouth. Sweet at first, then bittered by fear. Cooked meat means killed meat, means men with guns and knives. She wakes Sam from her nap. Run, Lucy mouths, indicating the smoke, Nellie, the trail where they can still slip away. Sam yawns slow, rolls those shoulders in a shirt so frayed the movement seems like to split the cloth.
Sam reaches for the frying pan. As if this is another day of easy living, as if there’s bacon or potatoes to fry, as if Sam is blind, still, to the impossible fantasy of living life alone in these hills.
“Swing with your whole arm,” Sam says, passing the pan to Lucy. Sam takes a sharpened fish spear and strikes out toward the smoke. Calling behind, “This is ours to defend.”
* * *
—
This is what they find in the middle of the copse at dusk:
A dying fire.
A staked horse.
A dead man half-buried in leaves.
No stench yet, though flies buzz at his beard. He’s wrapped in a coat of many pelts like some creature from tale. This is the jackal’s hour, when edges disappear and the line softens between the real and the not.
“Look at that,” Sam breathes. Then Sam is sliding through the branches, aimed at the dead man’s bags—and the plump bird laid atop them.
That leaves the man to Lucy. It’s easier this second time she kneels by the dead. At least his eyes are shut instead of squinted, his furs clean though his beard and nails are filthy. Lucy can’t help stroking the pelt, up and down and up and—
The dead man grips her wrist and says, “Don’t cry, girl.”
Lucy wrenches back as the man sits, molting leaves. A rifle lifts up with him. Jackal hour. The leaves that covered him go black in the shadows. But the hand around her wrist—that’s real. His breath, the gleam of his weapon, the spit at the corner of his mouth—they’re real. As are his eyes. Strange, round eyes with much more white than iris. They roll up and over Lucy.
“And you there, don’t come any closer.”
Sam stops with one of the man’s skinning knives in hand. Plundered bags lie behind, all the proof needed of their intentions.
“You tricked us,” Sam howls, stomping in place. “You wanted us to think you were dead, you hun dan piece of low-down lying—”
“Please, sir,” Lucy whispers. “Don’t hurt us. We meant no harm.”
The man drags his eyes from Sam. Looks at Lucy. A lingering look that pauses at her mouth, continues to her chest, belly, legs. His eyes prickle her skin. She wets her lips, parts them to speak. Nothing comes out.
He winks at her.
“Don’t do anything you’ll regret,” the man calls to Sam. They’re the wrong words. “Listen careful.” Sam bristles, newly shorn hair on end.
And then the man says, “Boy.”
Sam’s eyes flash, brighter in that dusk than the knife. Lucy thinks again of Ma in the ashes, and Sam’s rapt gaze. That look of transformation.
Sam drops the knife.
“That too,” the man says, nodding toward the pistol.
Sam releases Ba’s empty gun. For a thing so heavy in Lucy’s mind, it makes no thump in falling.
“I don’t aim to hurt anyone, except maybe these durn flies,” the man says. “You
know that, right?” He addresses Lucy, who’s spinning her trapped wrist. He lets go so sudden she falls. “Easy.” His eyes go to her legs, new-exposed under the hem of her dress. “Easy.”
“We weren’t going to hurt you, either,” Sam bluffs.
“’Course not. Aren’t we all passing through? This spot belongs to none of us travelers.”
Sam tenses. Lucy expects Sam to shoot back, Our land. Instead Sam says, “That’s right. It belongs to the buffalo.”
“I’m glad they’ll share it,” the man says solemnly. “Speaking of sharing, I’ve got a brace of partridges, if you folks can do without salt.”
“I don’t need salt,” Sam says, as Lucy says, “We’ve got plenty.” They took a hunk from the salt flat for eating.
“There’s what a man needs, and what he likes.” The man pats his belly, as round as his eyes. “Company, for instance. It gets lonely out here. I’ll take some of your salt and thank you for it. I could also use a girl.”
His eyes spin toward Lucy like empty plates.
She offers to launder his clothes. Cook his dinner. His eyes widen, till at last he howls in laughter. He wipes spittle from the corners of his lips with two dirty fingers.
“I could use a girl, but you’re a girl, aren’t you?”
Lucy doesn’t know what he means, but she nods.
“You’re tall for your age. I mistook you. How old are you? Eleven? Ten?”
“Ten,” Lucy lies. Sam doesn’t correct her.
* * *
—
Later, Lucy will understand. The language of his looking that she’s too young to speak. She’s nervous through dinner though the partridges are so plump that Sam whistles. Lucy leans close to the sizzling meat and warms her hands.
