by C Pam Zhang
“You come from mining folk,” the man says, offering his own palms. Flecks of blue live under his skin, like a shoal of tiny fish. Lucy has only the one spot where coal dust got caught in a wound. “How’d you get away so clean and pretty?”
“I only worked the doors,” Lucy says, looking away. Her hands shame her. Sam’s hands are nicked blue all over, just like Ba’s, and Ma’s under her gloves. Lucy worked so little before she went to school, and Ma died, and Ba no longer wanted her help.
“We’re not miners,” Sam says.
One drunken night Ba put his palms to the stove, intending to burn the marks clear off. It took a week for his blisters to pop, another for the dead skin to slough. The color remained on the new skin. Coal hides deep. We’re prospectors, Ba insisted. This isn’t but temporary, to get by. Ting wo.
“We’re adventurers,” Sam continues in singsong. “We’re not like anyone else.” Sam leans forward and narrows those dark eyes. “Outlaws.”
“Sure,” the man says in his agreeable voice. “Outlaws are the most interesting kind of folk.”
He proceeds to tell of those other interesting folk. Sam’s face, on the hotter side of the fire, glows. On her side Lucy can feel the wind at her back. The man gives Sam a taste of partridge and nods gravely at Sam’s judgment. Lets Sam carve the meat. Only when they’re finished eating does the man ask, “So where do you come from? You some kind of mutts?”
Sam stiffens. Lucy shifts closer, ready to lay a steadying hand on Sam’s shoulder. Though this man took longer than most to get here, his destination is the same. Lucy never knows how to answer. Ba and Ma gave no clear answers. They spoke around it in a jumble of myth. Half-truths not found in Teacher Leigh’s histories, mixed with a longing that made Ma’s words fly up and apart. There’s no one like us here, Ma said sadly and Ba proudly. We come from across the ocean, she said. We’re the very first, he said. Special, he said.
To Lucy’s surprise, Sam gives the only correct response.
“I’m Sam.” That chin, rising. “And that’s Lucy.”
It’s broad cheek, yet the man seems pleased. “Hey,” he says, raising his hands. “Dogs are my favorite people. I’m a mutt myself. I didn’t mean it that way. I meant, I’m mighty curious about where you came from just now. You got the look of travel on you. And the look of running scared.”
A glance passes between Lucy and Sam. Lucy shakes her head.
“We were born in these hills,” Sam says.
“Never left them?”
“We’ve lived all sorts of places. We’ve gone miles and miles.”
“Then of course you know what’s in these mountains,” the man says, a smile playing on his face. “I don’t have to tell you about the creatures that hid up there to escape the miners. And of course you must know everything past the mountains, out on the plains and beyond. Of course you know there are things bigger than buffalo. Like the iron dragon.”
Sam, rapt.
“Bellies full of iron and smoke,” the man whispers. He’s as good a storyteller as Ba. Maybe better. “Trains.”
Lucy doesn’t show how the man’s caught her attention too. Teacher Leigh spoke of trains. According to this mountain man, the trains have advanced even farther West in the last few years.
“There’s a station in a town right past the mountains. I hear talk of laying track across the range, but that I’ll believe when I see it. No man on this continent can do it. Mark my words.”
The fire burns low. The two partridges are reduced to bone, yet a hunger remains in Sam. The man, obliging, drops tale after tale into Sam’s open mouth. About trains and other iron contraptions, smokestacks belching like enormous beasts. About wild forests far to the East and ice to the North. He’s talking about deserts when Lucy yawns. A big yawn that takes her over. When she reopens her watery eyes, the man is glaring.
“Do I bore you, girl?”
“I—”
“Here I thought you two might take amusement from an old man’s tales. God knows there’s little enough adventure out West. That place?” His voice hardens. “What would a body want with those hills? Them miners picked the territory clean. Can’t walk a step without falling into a hole dug by everlasting fools.”
Sam says nothing.
“There’s plenty more marvels out East. And more space than in this blasted territory. The worst kinds of people crawled West to pan for gold.”
“What kinds of people?” Sam says.
“Killers. Rapers. Disgraced men. Men too small or stupid to make a living back home.”
“My ba said—” Sam’s voice squeaks. “Ba said the Western territory was once the prettiest land anyone ever saw.”
“You couldn’t pay me to go any farther West.” The man throws a partridge bone in that direction. “It’s dead and they’re all over there sticking their heads in shafts, telling each other the sun’s a rumor too.”
A ripple like laughter runs through his words. But he hasn’t lived on that land or worked it, hasn’t seen morning strike the hills and gild them—how else could he step so lightly over them?
“My ba—” Sam says.
“Maybe your ba was one of them fools too.”
Some men grow drunk on whiskey. This mountain man seems drunk on his own talk. Loose and careless. He’s left his skinning knife by the fire, smack between him and Sam.
Lucy sees Sam see it.
She thought she wished Ba’s spirit gone. But in this moment, she desires that vengeful squint back in Sam’s eyes.
The mountain man thumps Sam’s back, chuckling, saying it was a joke, calling Sam boy, likening Sam to an Indian boy he kept for a winter and used to help set traps, asking if Sam would like to hear about that. Sam leaves the knife be. Yes, Sam says. Yes, yes.
* * *
—
Sam hates women’s work. Takes perverse pride in loose stitches and half-burnt food. Yet there Sam stands in the morning, stirring the breakfast pot with the sun showing just so through the trees. As pretty a sight as if Lucy had dreamed it—except for the mountain man calling out advice.
The slop Sam dishes up looks like mud and tastes like meat. Pemmican, the man names it. Dried venison and berries pounded fine. Lucy eats so fast she chokes, wishing she was brave enough to spit out the food.
This morning Sam feeds the man right back. A feast of words tip into his round, dinner-plate eyes. Sam explains the gun and the banker, the two boys and their groceries. The man laughs, ruffles Sam’s hair, and follows them back to their campsite.
What right does Lucy have to suspect a man who checks Nellie’s swollen knee, who gives them horse oats and a bag of pemmican too? Who draws a map on a piece of hide and circles a town just past the mountains?
“I wager you’ll like it, boy. There’s a trade fair soon, the biggest for hundreds of miles. That town’s big enough that you’ll run into fine ladies as well as Indians and vaqueros and outlaws—all sorts of characters a sight tougher than me.”
To him, Sam doesn’t say, We’re staying here. Sam says, “Where are you going?”
“What’s the town called?” Lucy breaks in.
The man says, “Sweetwater.”
Oh.
Lucy’s mouth floods. Even in the hard years, they had their tastes of sugar and salt. But no amount of coin in mining country could buy a drink of clear water. Sweetwater glows in Lucy’s mind like the tiger’s skull, and she hardly even cares when the man rests a hand on Nellie to hold them a minute longer.
“You remember that Indian boy I kept? I been thinking. Might be I could use another boy. These fingers of mine”—he spreads his hands—“they aren’t as nimble as they used to be. Might be I could use smaller hands to help me, and pass on what I know.”
The silence presses like the storm clouds. No longer so distant.
“That’s kind of you,” Lucy
says, her stomach clenching. “But we’ve got plans. For our family.”
The man looks her up and down one last time. “Best get off before the rain.”
Water
Storm days. The sky opens after they leave the mountain man. Rain falls with such force that it explodes to white mist where it hits the earth, raising a boundary, a ragged caul. Twice Nellie steps into what seems mere puddle, and sinks to her chest before leaping back. A slower horse would have drowned them.
Buffalo bones provide the only firm ground. They stop for the night before a particularly large skeleton. Sam touches the skull first, as if asking permission. Then they crack the brittle ribs from the spine. Stacked together, the bones curve to sturdy cradles.
The rain pauses on the fourth day. They’ve reached the mountains’ end. Nellie clops up a low, rocky foothill—the last hill—and from there they look down at the plains.
Grass spreads low and flat and green, like good velvet rolled out for their aching feet. There’s a band of river in the distance, and a blot that must be Sweetwater. Lucy breathes deep of this new world. Its scent so damp and so heavy on her tongue.
She moves forward—
Wind taps her shoulder. Not hard and blustering as it has been these days of storm, but plaintive. Soft. It’s the sadness in the wind that makes Lucy look back.
From afar, the hills of her childhood look washed clean. She’s lived her share of rainy seasons, but she lived them down in the muck. Where thin soil became soup, each day waterlogged by the suck-tide of living. From afar she can’t see how dangerous the West is, how dirty. From afar the wet hills shine smooth and bright as ingots—riches upon riches stacked to the Western horizon. Her throat tightens. A tingle high up in her nose, behind her eyes.
It passes. She figures it for the rememory of old thirst.
* * *
—
Meeting the river—
All Lucy’s life, water meant thin, choked rivulets flowing downstream of mines. This river is wide, a living thing. It beats its banks and it rages. Ma said Ba was water too, and Lucy never understood, before this day, how that could be true.
* * *
—
They camp that night on the bank. Come morning: Sweetwater. Lucy draws her blanket close, then recoils. It stinks of trail dirt and old sweat, months of baked suffering. The river’s cleanness comes as rebuke.
“I’m leaving you behind,” she says into the cloth.
Sam’s head turns. “What?”
Lucy kicks the blanket away and stands. Already she feels cleaner. The night is cool and damp.
Water to purify, Ma said.
“Once we get there,” Lucy says, with a nod to Sweetwater’s lights, “there’s not a soul who knows who we are, or what we did. And we don’t have to tell. If someone asks where we’re from—we can say anything. I’ve been thinking. We don’t need any history at all.”
Sam’s face tips up.
“It’s a chance to start over. Don’t you see? We don’t have to be miners.” Or failed prospectors. Or outlaws, or thieves, or cast-off students, or animals, or prey.
Sam leans back on elbows and says, so easy, “If they don’t want us, then we don’t gotta stay. We don’t want them, either.”
Lucy looks down in astonishment. Absurdly, Sam grins.
Three months they’ve traveled in fear and in hiding, and Sam saw it as a game. Sam who’s at home wherever Sam goes, shining through hardship. The map Sam drew, the path Sam meant to take—it didn’t represent months or years, Lucy realizes. It was the start of a lifetime.
“I can’t,” Lucy says. “I’ve got to stop.”
“You’re leaving me?” Sam’s face twists, as if it wasn’t Sam talking of departure, Sam the one so restless. “You’re leaving me.”
There’s no mistaking Sam’s anger. This time Lucy doesn’t give way. She hardens her spine. Sam’s always claimed anger as a birthright. Who gave Sam that right?
“You’re so selfish,” Lucy says, her heart beating hard all the way up her throat. Her voice thrums with it. “All you do is want and want. Do you ever ask what I want? You can’t expect that I’ll follow your whims forever.”
Sam stands too. 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 shucks her shift, too, and jumps into the river.
Water knocks thought right out of her. A cold slap. A grateful muffling. She kicks down for a handful of sand and scrubs her neck and shoulders, her armpits, her wrist the trapper held, her fingers that touched Ba’s fingers. She breaks the surface six layers lighter. Scrubs slower at her chest, where the skin is sore and puffy. She can’t quite reach her back. She calls to Sam to lend a hand.
Sam turns away. Above the faded shirt, Sam’s cheeks glow true red. Surely Sam can’t be blushing. Lucy swims back to the bank, asks again for help. Again Sam refuses.
“Selfish,” Lucy says through the thrashing waves. She grabs for Sam’s boot.
Sam is dragged into the water fully clothed. Lucy yanks Sam’s collar and rubs at caked grime, ignoring the bubbles that stream from Sam’s mouth. All Sam’s stubbornness is, down here, turned to foam. Now your back, Lucy says, handling Sam as Ma handled her in the tub. A firm hand is what you need, Lucy says, tugging down Sam’s pants before she remembers who said that—Ba—and why.
Something tears. Lucy’s hand brushes foreign hardness. She’s left holding a piece of Sam’s pants as Sam dives for the bottom. Water is Lucy’s element. She passes Sam easily, scooping up the long gray rock that was kept hidden. Yet Sam swims on as if the rock doesn’t matter.
That’s when Lucy sees what else Sam dropped. It fell quick; after all, silver is heavier than common stone. Twin flashes at the river’s bottom. Not buried, not muddied, not left with a body.
Ba’s two silver dollars.
Lucy kicks back to the surface, passing Sam. There is a moment in which they’re close enough to touch. One could reach out and arrest the other’s motion, suspending both between the surface and the bottom. Neither one does. Sam keeps diving as Lucy heaves onto the far bank and lies panting in the green grass of a new land.
Family comes first, Ba said, and Ma too. For all his blows and temper, this belief of his Lucy respected to the end. This belief her sole inheritance.
But now?
Sam is emerging at last. Water slicks Sam’s hair, sogs Sam’s clothes so that the skinny bones beneath show through. In the dark, a creature unknown to Lucy stands with hands full of silver stolen from the dead.
Blood
In the morning Sam is sat by Lucy with shoulders straight and solemn. Sam commences to talk as if speech is a coin hoarded for these past three months.
“Wasn’t doing nobody good buried,” Sam says as Lucy folds her blanket.
“It’s stupid superstition,” Sam says as Lucy picks grass from her dress.
“It won’t even matter,” Sam says as Lucy combs her hair with her fingers and braids it as best she can. “You know what happened to that dead snake of yours? Ba took the thimble back. I saw him. And nothing happened, right? Right?”
A week ago Lucy would’ve lapped up these confidences. Now they turn her stomach.
; “He told me that the living need silver more’n the dead,” Sam says as Lucy prepares to head to town. “He told me a long time ago not to bury him proper.” Sam says, quieter, “Said he didn’t deserve it. I swear, I meant to leave the coins with him anyhow, but that night it was like he told me himself. Over the grave. Didn’t you hear him?”
Lucy studies Sam from one side, from the other. Hard as she squints, she can’t see where Sam’s stories end, where Sam’s lies begin. If there is, to Sam, any difference.
“Wait,” Sam says, gripping Lucy’s elbow. “And Ma. He said that Ma—”
Lucy pushes Sam away. “Don’t. Don’t talk to me about Ma.”
Sam doesn’t come forward again. Lucy steps back. They stare at each other. Lucy steps back, and steps back, and back, and a part of her rejoices, a part of her already in Sweetwater, already rehearsing her orphan’s story—a small, clotted part of her relieved that Sam won’t be there, that Sam with Sam’s strangeness won’t have to be explained.
Lucy turns.
One last time Sam calls. The fear unmistakable. “Lucy—you’re bleeding.”
Lucy puts a hand to the back of her dress. It comes away wet. She lifts her skirt to find her underdrawers bloody too. Yet somehow, beneath, the skin is unbroken. She feels no pain despite the slick between her thighs. Sniff her fingers and there, beneath the copper tang—a richer rot.
Ma said there’d be cake to celebrate this day, and salted plums, and a new dress for Lucy. Ma said this day would make Lucy a woman. The blood trickles free, leaving a hollow ache. Just another thing Lucy loses with little pain. Though there is no cake, no celebration, she feels with a certainty heavy in her body the truth of what Ma said: she’s no longer a little girl.
Sam’s face is stripped younger by horror, as if Lucy wields a new and frightful power. For the first time Lucy, looking at her little sister, feels pity course through her along with the blood. This is a different sort of leaving behind.
