by C Pam Zhang
“I’ll come back soon enough,” Lucy says, relenting. “I’ll bring something to eat. After I find work.”
Sam drifts away as Lucy washes the stain. When the fabric is as clean as it’ll get, and wrung only slightly damper than the damp day, when she’s stuffed grass in her underdrawers and swallowed cold water to ease her stomach, she squints down the bank. Catches sight of the figure in the trees.
“I’m heading to town now,” Lucy calls.
The figure lifts its head.
“You’ll be here?” Lucy says.
She meant it as a command. But the distance between them, and the river’s crashing, unmake her meaning. What she says comes out a question.
PART TWO
XX59
Skull
Ma is their sun and she is their moon. Her pale face shifts over the threshold of the new house, inside to out, light to shade, as she readies space for the tiger.
Outside, the family waits.
This house is really a shack, set alone at the valley’s edge, a long uphill walk from the creek. Gapped walls, tin ceiling. What Lucy can spy of the inside is twilit, on account of the single window. No glass—just stretched oilcloth, yellow and cloudy, admitting weak light and smudged shapes. Lucy’s heart sank at the sight after two weeks of travel, but the mine boss who led them here didn’t leave much choice. It’s this or you camp with the trash outside town, he said, spitting. He would’ve said more, but Ma put a warning hand on Ba’s chest and said, It’ll do.
Ma’s voice is husky and low, with the crackle of kept fire. Its roughness strange against her mannered movements, her smooth face. A stopping beauty in that mismatch. The mine boss reddened and went on his way. Ying gai care what other people see in you, Ma has said while straightening Lucy’s posture, neatening Sam’s braids, scolding Ba for his love of the gambling dens and Indian camps on the fringes of town. What people see shapes how they treat you, dong bu dong?
But once the boss left, Ma drooped. Inside the shack the shadows reached for her. Her beauty’s been worn thin by travel, during which she acquired a sickness that made her retch up her food. Her beauty now hardly covers her bones. As Ma moves in the house, Lucy can see the shape of her skull.
“Girls,” Ma calls when she’s swept a portion of dirt floor smooth. Her breath jerks and pulses at her throat, seeming like to tear the skin. “Fetch me a stick.”
Sam runs around one side of the shack, and Lucy the other.
Lucy’s side lies half in shadow, thanks to a plateau that looms over the valley’s edge. She kicks through heaped rubbish: dead grass, burnt wire, ashy sticks. At the bottom, a promising piece of wood. She tugs and a sign comes free.
HENCOOP, it spells once she’s brushed off the soot.
Those aren’t burnt twigs—they’re feathers. And this isn’t a house. Ma calls again as Lucy stomps the sign back into the rubbish.
“Hao de,” Ma says when Lucy returns. “That’s all of us together.”
Despite sickness, Ma is smiling. She holds the stick that Sam found as if it’s something precious. For all the worry that chased them here, there is a hum of hope in the air, as there always is at the start of this ritual. A proper home, Ba said before they set out. A settling-down kind of place this time.
Ma begins to draw her tiger.
Ma’s tiger is like none other. Always eight lines: some curved, some straight, some hooked like tails. Always in the same unchangeable order. Only if Lucy squints, looks away, watches from a slant, does the tiger that Ma draws flicker, for a moment, like a real tiger.
By the last stroke Ma is hunched in pain, skull once more straining through her skin. The protection is complete.
Quick then, bad leg forgotten, Ba is at Ma’s elbow, steadying. He calls for the rocking chair. Sam hurries it over the threshold, the plates piled on the seat beginning to slide. Lucy lunges to catch one. As she does, her foot smudges the last line of the tiger.
She considers telling. But Ma would insist on doing the whole ritual over, and Ba would scowl and call Lucy da zui, and say there’s a time and a place to use her big mouth. Lucy says nothing, as she says nothing about the pungent house, the imprint of old chicken shit unmistakable. Learning to keep her own secrets.
Mud
Six days a week Lucy wakes first. It’s the hour of the mole, an absolute dark, as she slips past her sleeping family.
Sam in the loft bed beside her, Ma and Ba on a mattress at the foot of the ladder—she circumvents them by memory as much as by sight, as she circumvents the heaped clothes, the bags of flour, the sheets, broom handles, trunks. The house has the close, stale musk of an animal’s burrow. Last week a tub of creek water overturned, not improving the odor.
Once, Ma might have made it inviting. A bunch of sweet grasses, a strategically spread cloth. Nowadays her sole occupation is sleep. Her cheeks look ever more gouged or bitten, as if something nibbles her in the night. She hasn’t eaten a proper meal in weeks. Says she can stomach only meat, which they lack the coin to buy.
Ba promised meat when they got to this big new mine, and a garden, good clothes, proper horses, school. Too many men beat them here. Wages are lower than promised. With Ma sick, it’s Lucy who puts off school to accompany Ba to the mine, Lucy who wakes first, fixes breakfast.
She sets a pan on the stove. Too loud—Ma stirs at the clang. If woken, Ma argues endlessly with Ba. The girls are hungry. / I’d be earning more if we’d gotten here sooner. / But we didn’t. / Not on my account. / Say what you mean. / All I mean is this taking sick was awful inconvenient. / You think I did this on purpose? / Sometimes, qin ai de, you can be right stubborn.
Quiet, quiet, Lucy presses potatoes down into the pan. The oil leaps and scalds her hands, but at least the hiss is muted. Two potatoes in a cloth for her and Ba, one on the table for Sam. She leaves a hopeful fourth on the stove for Ma.
* * *
—
Two miles to the next valley. Ba splits from Lucy when they reach the mine, heading down the main shaft with the men. That leaves Lucy to face her tunnel alone.
She looks East. The sky is still a bruise’s deep blue, yet she lingers as if she could afford to wait for sunrise. She crawls down. Colors disappear, then sounds. The black is entire by the time she reaches her door. Nothing else for a long while, until the first knock.
Miners emerge as Lucy drags the heavy door open and wedges her arm in the gap to hold it. Walls reappear at the slice of lanterns. She hardly feels the welt on her forearm. It’s nothing compared to the pain of the miners leaving, sight snuffed out.
In the long idle periods she rubs her body against the shaft wall, or screams experimentally. Five enormous bites of potato at what she guesses for noon. The food tastes of earth, too.
“Not forever,” Ba promises at the end of the day that might as well be the beginning. It’s dark again. The usual sorrow passes over Lucy like the line of sunlight over the distant hills. Where other miners cluster in fours and fives—slapping backs, exchanging greetings and complaints—Ba and Lucy walk apart. He smooths her wiry hair. “Ting wo. I got a plan. You’ll have that school soon enough if you want it, nu er.”
She believes him. She does. But belief only makes the pain worse, just as, in the tunnel, the desired lanterns hurt her eyes.
* * *
—
The shack is another darkness till Ba touches match to lamp. Ma dozes, Sam runs wild somewhere in play. Lucy starts dinner while Ba changes behind a curtain. He’ll gobble his food and head across the creek to a second job cutting firewood for widows. They need the extra coin. Night after night. Day after day. The slow trickle of savings, emptied so quick by the needs of their stomachs.
Tonight, something different.
The fourth potato is gone from the stove. Fingermarks split the pan’s congealed grease. Joy floods Lucy, strong as missing sunlight: Ma must have eaten.
Yet Ma’s cheeks look hollow as ever, Ma’s fingers clean. The only whiff on her breath is old vomit.
“Did you see?” Lucy asks the moment Sam comes through the door. “Did she eat?”
Sam, skin bronzed, flits through the house like a piece of caught daylight. Over the course of the day Sam’s lost ribbons, bonnet, a piece of fabric torn from her hem. Gained, instead, this smell of sun and grass.
“Potatoes again?” Sam asks, sniffing at the pot of dinner.
“Did you keep an eye on Ma, like I asked you?” Lucy swats Sam’s hand away. “It needs another ten minutes. Did you watch her? We talked about this. You didn’t have a single other thing to do today.”
“Quit nagging!”
Sam dodges Lucy and grabs for the pot lid, which slips away, clattering. Sam’s outstretched fingers are shiny and slick. Sam marked by sun, grass—and grease.
“That potato wasn’t for you,” Lucy hisses. “It was Ma’s.”
“I got hungry,” Sam says, clear-eyed, not trying to deny it. “Ma wasn’t eating it anyhow.”
Sam’s no liar, no thief. Simply lives by a code of honor all her own, refusing to bend to other rules. Scoldings erode to laughter because Sam makes even stubbornness charming. On the worst days, Lucy wonders if this is the real reason Sam hasn’t been sent to the mines, a reason more enduring than young age: that Sam is too pretty to be harmed.
Lucy clutches the bruise on her arm. There are more on her shoulders and back if she consults the tin mirror. “I’m telling Ba on you.” But Ba will just pinch the baby fat on Sam’s cheeks. “I’ll tell him,” she adds with sudden inspiration, “and see if he thinks you’re grown enough to work.”
“No!”
Lucy crosses her arms.
Through gritted teeth, Sam says, “I guess I’m sorry.”
Ma likens an apology from Sam to water from dry firewood. Lucy savors the triumph till her stomach grumbles. “I’m still telling.”
“Don’t! If you don’t . . . I’ll show you what Ma ate.”
Lucy hesitates.
“Tonight,” Sam adds, grinning. And then Sam is off, running crash into Ba as he emerges in clean clothes, axe and pistol hanging from his belt. Sam begs, as usual, to be taken along.
* * *
—
Some time later, Ma walks out the door with a dreamer’s shambling gait.
Lucy figures it for a visit to the outhouse, but Sam beckons her to follow. She leaves her book without marking the page. Anyhow she’s read each of the family’s three storybooks so often the drawings are faded, the princess’s face a blur atop which she can imagine her own.
Way down the slope of valley, the prick of distant lights. Ma turns away from them. She heads to a plot of land at the very back of the shack, where all evidence of others is obscured. There she roots in the earth, bare-handed, as if hoping for vegetables in the garden Ba hasn’t yet planted. Deep, unladylike grunts—then she pulls something free.
Hidden, Lucy and Sam crouch too. The night is warm, Lucy’s back sweating. She can see the white stripe of Ma’s neck, the wings of shoulder blades through fabric. Nothing else. Then she hears the chewing. Ma half-turns, holding a long something—carrot? Yam? The caked soil makes it hard to discern.
“What is it?” Lucy whispers.
“Mud,” Sam says.
It can’t be. Ma reproaches Sam for picking food off the floor, wipes each plate twice—once for dryness, once for shine. Yet dark grains stand out against Ma’s cheeks. Sam isn’t quite right, though. Ma licks till a flat edge shows through the thing in her hand, then a round joint, gleaming. She holds a piece of bone.
“No,” Lucy says, louder than she intends. Her cry is masked by crunching.
Sam watches the rest, seemingly at home in the night, in the dirt with skirt hiked and one braid dragging. Lucy averts her eyes, not wanting to witness what else Ma might eat: earthworms, pebbles, ancient twigs, buried eggs and leaf mold, the scritch-scratch of beetle legs. A feast of the land’s dank secrets.
* * *
—
Used to be that Ma and Lucy kept one another’s secrets. Each day on the wagon trail Ba and Sam disappeared at dusk to hunt or scout; and each day Lucy and Ma were left alone among hills emptied of noise. Into that wide, wide quiet Lucy spilled her fear of the mule, how she’d nicked Ba’s knife, how she envied Sam. Ma drank Lucy’s words in, as her skin drank in the gilded late afternoons. Ma knew how to hold a secret in silence, sometimes murmuring, sometimes tipping her head, sometimes brushing Lucy’s hand. Ma listened.
In turn, Ma told Lucy how she rubbed lard on her hands to keep them soft, how she had tricks for bargaining with the butcher’s boy, how she chose, very carefully, who she associated with. In these moments, Lucy knew that Ma loved her best. Sam might have Ma’s hair and Ma’s beauty, but Ma and Lucy were joined by words.
Yet tonight, Lucy intends betrayal. She stays up long after Sam snores. She can’t sleep. Close her eyes and in seeps, like moonlight, the shine of Ma’s teeth. When the door creaks open below, Lucy waves Ba up.
“Say that again,” Ba says when Lucy has told. He stands on the rungs, face level with hers, conspiratorial. “Man man de. What was she eating?”
Oddly, he grins when Lucy asks if they should open Ma’s trunk. It holds fabric and dried plums, and most of all fragrant, bitter medicines that Ma brews into healing soups.
“Go to sleep,” Ba says, descending. “Your ma’s not sick. I’d wager good money on it.”
Lucy waits till he’s out of view, then rolls off the mattress and puts her eye to a knothole in the floor. Below she can see Ma huddled in the chair, Ba approaching to wake her. Ma’s eyes fly open first. Then her mouth.
Ma cusses at him.
Lucy has never heard Ma cuss—but she’s beginning to understand that night is a different territory. How many years and centuries were swallowed with those bones? Enough, this night, to make it seem as if something else clambers out of Ma’s throat. Something enormous, ungentle. History, Lucy thinks suddenly, remembering a drunk who spat at their wagon two towns back. While Ba and Ma stared ahead, the drunk shouted about the land, and claims to it, and who belonged by law, and what should be buried. Lucy doesn’t remember the man’s precise words, but she recognizes in Ma’s spitting, rising voice the same fearsome creature. It must be history.
Ma asks the hour. She calls Ba a liar. She asks how many widows there can be. She accuses him of gambling again.
When she pauses for breath, Ba says, “You’ve been eating mud.”
Ma snatches her blanket higher, likely to hide the filth beneath her nails. Cloth across dry hands like the sound of snakeskin being shed. “You have my own children spying on me? Ni zhe ge—”
“Don’t you see what it means?” Ba drops to his knees. Ma tilts back, surprised. “Qin ai de.” Ba’s hands take up Ma’s clawed ones, stroke them gentle. “These cravings. This sickness. This strain between us. It must be a baby.”
Ma shakes her head. Her cheeks catch pools of shadow. She looks scared. Though Ba’s voice is too quiet for Lucy to catch the words, she hears the old singsong of promises. Ma smiles partway through, and then her face changes once more. Goes hard. This hardness Lucy will remember years later. Trying to decide if it was resolve on Ma’s face, or courage, or coldness. Trying to call it to herself.
“I thought we couldn’t—” Ma says, though the argument has slunk from her voice. “And I wasn’t sick with the girls. I didn’t get this hunger.”
Ba laughs so loud that Sam wakes. Two bright slits in the dark—Sam’s eyes sting Lucy. Both of them hear Ba say, “It’s a boy. What else could be so greedy?”
* * *
—
In the morning, Ba takes to the hills with the tools of his old prospector’s trade, shut up two years back. Lovingly, now, he sharpens his pick and hefts his
shovel, fans his little brushes out.
The pick pries bones from the hillside rocks; the shovel digs them. Brushes shiver, biggest to smallest, along the dug-up lengths. Exposing the old white. Ba grinds the bones down and mixes them into water.
Lying back in bed, her too-thin hands shaking on the glass—Ma drinks. Her throat swells and falls. Hours of Ba’s work, centuries of life, disappearing into the baby.
History, Lucy thinks, and shivers.
Meat
But bone is temporary; they await payday. When it arrives the next week, the tunnels are charged as if a storm brews belowground. In the evening the mine boss appears on the ridge like some odd, huffing star to set up his table. He shuffles papers, stirs the crate with its pouches of coin. Counts, recounts. Lingers.
A string of miners ravels out, too long to see to its end. Minutes pass, an hour, impatience twitching the line. Lucy sticks by Ba. She means to hold the proof of her work in her hands.
Stars are up by the time they reach the table. One glance at Ba and the mine boss tosses a pouch, already looking to the next man. Ba unfastens the drawstring right there and commences to count. The boss clears his throat again and again.
“It’s short,” Ba says, tossing the pouch back. Behind him men shift and crane, murmur angrily.
“Rent for that fine house.” The boss flicks up a finger. “Coal.” Another finger. “Your tools.” Another. “Your company-issue lantern.” Another. “And a girl earns one-eighth wages. Now git.”
Ba’s hands clench. The men behind shuffle closer, begin to yell. Can’t you count, boy? Can’t see, more like. Not outta them eyes.
Someone says, Like trying to fit a cow through a chink in the wall.
This last is met with a roar of approval. The word passes from mouth to mouth, till it spills from every direction in the dark. Ba spins to face the insult, and Lucy trembles. Ba in the fullness of anger is fearsome. Those rare times he spanks her, he grows tall despite his bad leg. He fills the room.
