by C Pam Zhang
“Let me explain. We didn’t mean to scare you. We were working to—to make you happy.”
“Me?” The words come rasping out of Ma. “You aim to blame me? Cuo shi wo de? Mine?” The unbroken plate left the promise of a crash in the air. “What’s real, then? Which of your promises? Ni bu shi dong xi, ni zhe ge—”
Ma made of their hard life something orderly. Amid grass and dirt, from wagon beds and hard-used houses, Ma wrangled for them a life of soft voices and clean speech. A life of braided hair and swept floors, cut nails and pressed collars. What people see shapes how they treat you, Ma said again and again. Now something’s come loose in Ma, her hair unwinding around her dirty face, her words unwinding into cusses.
Ba steps forward. No place for Ma to flee, unless it’s out the door. Her fingers grip the knob as Ba pushes his fist against her mouth.
Ma stops talking.
When Ba pulls back, he leaves something yellow between Ma’s lips. Something all the light in the room rushes toward.
“Bite down,” he says.
Ma’s fingers are still on the knob. One push and she could be gone.
She bites.
She spits a pebble into her hand. The print of her teeth in its soft yellow surface.
“This is real,” Ba says. “I had to make sure. I only meant to keep it secret till I ascertained it would be enough.”
“You’ve been prospecting,” Ma says. The forbidden word billows round the room. A hot, singed smell. “You promised you’d quit. The widows? The woodcutting?” Ba shakes his head. “Kan kan, this is what I think of prospecting.”
Ma tips the pebble to her mouth and swallows. Like bone and like mud, another piece of the land slips into her. Sam wails. Ba looks shaken. But then he grins.
“Mei wen ti,” Ba says. “Plenty where that came from.”
“I ate it,” Ma says, slumping. Poor posture pushes her belly out, rounded now as the hills are rounded.
“He ate it,” Ba says, and this time Ma lets him touch her. “Why, he’ll be rich. Come here, Sam. Show your ma.”
Sam comes forward with a dirty old pouch. Lucy recognizes it for the same one she used in the mine to hold a rag and a candle stub. In Sam’s hands that same pouch releases a gleaming shower. Lucy thinks of the fairy tale: the good sister and the bad. One passed through the door and soot stuck to her. Marked her all her life. The other passed through and came out dazzled.
Someone says, “Gold.”
* * *
—
For the first seven years of Lucy’s life, Ba was a prospector. Seven years of life lived as if windblown, drifting from site to site on the rumor of gold.
Ma set her foot down two years back. One night she left Lucy and Sam in the wagon, and for hours she and Ba talked in the open hills. Snatches drifted back, Ma’s voice holding forth on hunger and foolishness, pride and luck. Ba was silent. Come morning, the prospecting tools were packed away. Ba nursed sullenness for a month, gambled and drank. It was Ma who first mentioned coal mines.
Since then, Ba’s put away most of the gambling, and most of the drinking too. He blusters of fortunes made in coal, as he once blustered of fortunes made from other materials. The forbidden word went unsaid—till now.
Tonight, as ash from a burning mine falls through their window, Ba tells them about the gold.
How he heard rumors about these hills, plied from old prospectors and Indian trackers. Here, where a dried-up lake sits on a plateau, and where lone, mad wolves can still be found. How Ba figured that a quake a year back, and the digging of a big mine, might have unearthed something unseen for a decade. He prospected in secret, under guise of woodcutting in the dark.
“I struck gold early on,” Ba says as he kneels, washing grime from Ma’s feet. “That second payday—that was the gold. I walked ten miles south to trade it for coin at some little outpost—that’s why I was gone all night. Didn’t I promise you a fortune? We can buy whatever you want, qin ai de. Whatever he deserves. We’re special.” Ba turns to Sam and Lucy, grinning. “Girls, you know the only thing in this territory more powerful than a gun?”
“Tigers,” Sam says.
“History?” Lucy says.
“Family,” Ma says, hugging her stomach.
Ba shakes his head. Closes his eyes. “I mean to buy a big parcel of land out in these hills. So big we won’t need to see another soul. We’ll have all the space in the world to hunt and breathe. That’s the kind of place I aim for him to grow up in. Imagine that, girls. That’s proper power.”
They all of them go quiet, imagining. Till Ma breaks the spell. Doesn’t say yes, and doesn’t say no. She says, “This is the last time you lie to me.”
Salt
A new kind of morning, now.
The oilcloth Ma ripped from the window is never replaced, the shack brighter with nothing between them and the sun. They eat breakfast as a family again, four together chewing, teasing, offering, squabbling, planning, dreaming. Illuminated—every gesture lit by the promise of morning. At last Ba and Sam tug on their boots and heft their prospecting tools, which are hidden in a fiddle case. They head to the gold field at a leisurely pace, the deception of the miner’s hour done. Isn’t it easier, Ba says, with no more secrets?
* * *
—
Each Sunday right after Ba and Sam set out, Lucy leaves the house on a journey of her own. Unknown to all but Ma, she goes to Teacher Leigh’s for extra lessons.
Lessons in politeness. How to drink tea and pretend fullness. How to refuse food—cookies, cakes, crustless sandwiches. How not to stare at the salt that arrives in its silver box. All that heaped white gleaming. How not to want its clean burn on her tongue.
Lessons in answering questions.
What does your family eat?
Can you describe the medicines in your mother’s trunk?
How long has your family traveled?
What are your hygiene practices? How often do you bathe?
At what age did you grow your first adult tooth?
Lucy doesn’t like answering half so much as she likes watching the teacher write her answers down. The fresh ink so crisp and fine. On an empty stomach, the fumes make Lucy dizzy.
What does your father drink? How much?
Can you describe his attitude toward violence?
Would you call it savage?
What is your mother’s breeding?
Does she perhaps come from royal stock?
The teacher improves Lucy’s answers. Brow furrowed he scratches out, rewrites, pauses to ask Lucy to repeat herself. On that blank page he orders her family’s story with words neatened as the schoolhouse is neatened, the parlor, the rows of coyote brush that shut out what’s unpleasant to see. Lucy’s story set down as part of the teacher’s monograph on the Western territory. One day she’ll hold that book, heavier even than Jim’s ledger. She’ll lay it before Ma. She’ll smooth its pages and hear its living spine crack.
Lessons in imagining herself better.
* * *
—
Nights, Ma counts. Each fleck and pebble passes into her hands. She weighs them on a scale, scribbles down their value in coin. Then she squirrels the gold in pouches—big and small, fat and thin—hidden around the house.
And she grows stingy, despite the bounty. Ma declares an end to steaks and salt and sugar. A return to bony cuts. Only one new dress for Lucy. Practical boots for Ba and Sam. Sam throws a tantrum at this news, keening for the promised cowboy boots and horse.
“We’re saving,” Ma says, the crackle so strong in her words that Sam stops midyell.
Pouches in the stovepipe, behind the tin mirror. Down the coal bin and in the heel of an old shoe. The shack that was once a hen coop acquires a new gleam. Lucy’s dreams glint with half-seen light. Ma, too, seems to peer at something just beyond view. Sh
e’s often idle, sat by the window with chin propped. The line of her neck dreamy.
Ba kisses the spot where Ma’s shoulder curves to neck. “A nugget for your thoughts.”
“The baby,” Ma says, eyes half-shut in pleasure. Three months since they arrived, and Ma’s stomach pushes against her loosest dress. “I’m imagining how he’ll grow up.”
* * *
—
Some Sundays, when the teacher’s hand is too cramped to write, he tells the story of his own raising, so far from here as to be fairy tale.
Back in the East. An older, more civilized territory. Seven brothers, a doting mother, a father who ruled from a distance, his kingdom a fragrant heap of cedar wood shipped near and far. Teacher Leigh the special one. The smart one. Among his frivolous brothers, he alone thought bigger. Some men are drawn to sporting and hunting; I’m drawn to doing good. My mission is to spread education across this territory. He traveled months, by boat and by train, by horse and by cart, to build this shining new school on a hill. A charity school for miners’ children.
Teacher Leigh sits taller when he tells this part. His voice is sonorous, vibrating the fine thin panes of window glass. He surveys his audience—friends who gather to him on Sundays. And then, from that height, he looks fondly at Lucy.
Imagine my delight when I found Lucy. She and her family have a unique role in my book, and it’s my responsibility to record them correctly.
Lucy tingles, her eyes downturned and fixed on the saltcellar.
You see how these miners insist on drinking and gambling their coin away. And those Indian camps that resist civilizing . . . this family, however! They’re different. Lucy’s mother is of great breeding, you can tell.
“We’re not miners,” Lucy says, softly, so that she doesn’t interrupt Teacher Leigh.
Shopkeepers and mine bosses, kept wives and ranchers riding from the surrounding plots of land—they come chattering into the parlor, through the door that Teacher Leigh props open when he isn’t working on his monograph. Has it really been— Come, Leigh, I must tell you— How’s that mare of yours? I heard—
Lessons in how other people live.
From afar, Lucy couldn’t grasp it. Always from a distance she saw miners’ wives flitting between shacks, borrowing washboards, thimbles, recipes, soap. They don’t know self-sufficiency, Ba said pityingly. He taught Lucy silence was better than gossip. He taught her to stand under the yawn of sky and listen to the wind through the grass. Listen hard enough and you can hear the land.
But now Lucy hears the baker talk about the butcher, who talks about the girl working at Jim’s store, who talks about a miner’s wife run off with a cowboy. Their talk a bright thread stitching the town together, rich as the tapestry Lucy saw hung from a porch. Its owner hurried it away, as if Lucy meant thievery. Lucy wanted only to look. To touch, maybe, and let it drape around her, like these honeyed Sundays with the glass windows and the talk, the bodies, heating the room.
Unseen, mouth watering with words she can’t contribute, Lucy puts out a finger. Licks up fallen granules of salt. How bright the sting on her tongue. How fleeting.
* * *
—
At home, dusk, Lucy waits for the private moment when she and Ma stand alone at the stove. Another dinner of potatoes, of marrow and cartilage stewed to sludge. It’s only midweek and Sunday so far off, yet Lucy is tired of it: the brown taste of unsalted meat, the dirt floor that roughens her heels, the scrimping and saving when gold clamors all around them.
“Ma? How long will it take us to save up for that parcel of land?”
Even to Lucy, Ma won’t say. Ma smiles the smile of secrets.
Lessons in wanting what she can’t have.
* * *
—
Best of the Sunday company are the real ladies. Not the women of the town but those from the teacher’s old life, come visiting with no sign of the West stamped as sun-lines in their skin. They bring news of the velvet seats on train cars, of the flowers planted on their green lawns. These ladies sometimes beckon Lucy close. Tell me, they say.
For these women Teacher Leigh and Lucy play a game. He asks and she answers, batting her education back and forth like a colorful ball. What’s thirty-eight into fourteen thousand eight hundred and sixteen? Three hundred eighty-nine and thirty-four remaining. How long ago was the first civilized outpost founded in this territory? Twoscore years ago and three.
This Sunday, an older lady sits on the horsehair couch.
“Meet my own teacher,” the teacher says. “Miss Lila.”
Miss Lila looks Lucy over. A severe face, out of which comes a voice harder than the red lines drawn around her lips. “She seems clever. You always did have an eye for that. Clever’s easy, though. Far harder to teach is character. Moral fiber.”
“Lucy has a fair share of that too.”
Lucy tucks the compliment away, to relay later to Ma. Miss Lila’s gaze rests on her, like the gazes in the schoolhouse when Lucy walks to the chalkboard. Wanting her to fail.
“Let me demonstrate,” Teacher Leigh says. “Lucy?”
“Yes?” She looks up. Belief makes handsome the teacher’s narrow face.
“Let’s say you and I are traveling the same wagon trail. We start out with equal provisions. One month into the journey, you lose your goods in a fording. It’s the hottest time of the year. The river is foul, not fit to drink from. The next town is weeks away. What do you do?”
Lucy nearly laughs. Why, this question is easy. The answer comes quicker than math or history.
“I’d butcher an ox. I’d drink its blood and continue on till fresh water.”
This lesson is burned into Lucy’s skin. She’s stood on that bank, inhaled that foul water. Watched Ma and Ba argue as thirst stuck her tongue to her mouth. But Teacher Leigh has frozen, and Miss Lila’s hand covers her throat. They both of them stare as if Lucy’s got food on her face.
She licks her lips. Sweat beads over them.
“The answer,” the teacher says, “is of course that you should ask for help. I would offer half my provisions, and therefore spread goodwill. So that the next time I myself have an accident, I’ll receive assistance in return.”
The teacher pours tea for Miss Lila, coaxes sweets into her hand. His back to Lucy is rigid with disappointment. Lucy listens to their crunching. Remembering the crunch in her own teeth, that night on the trail when Ma sifted the last of the flour and found the wriggling bodies of weevils. They baked biscuits anyhow, and ate after dark so as not to see what they chewed. All those miles they traveled, and not once did another wagon offer help.
Lucy reaches, unseen, for the salt.
Lessons in agreement.
* * *
—
Lessons in trickery.
Lucy waits for Ma to look away from the pot. In one deft movement, Lucy opens her handkerchief and sprinkles salt in.
Ba declares the oxtail extra-fine that night. Oxtail on Sunday, porridge on Monday, potatoes on Tuesday, trotters on Wednesday, potatoes potatoes potatoes again. Lucy doesn’t use much. Just a hint. Salt expands the tired taste of the food. Close her eyes, and as she chews the house expands too, many-roomed. A taste to stretch her till Sunday.
“Lucy,” Ma says, catching Lucy’s hand before the stove’s red heat. The handkerchief sticks out from between Lucy’s fingers. A few grains of salt trickle free. “Where did you take this from?”
“He gave it to me.” The teacher passes the saltcellar every Sunday, anyhow. Lessons in near-truths. “Besides, you took the cookies.” Lucy yanks the handkerchief back. “It’s not fair. You—you—it’s not fair!”
She crouches, shaking a little from fear. Ma’s anger is rarer than Ba’s, but more precise. More liable to hunt out tender spots. Ma knows to pinch Lucy’s earlobe where it’s thinnest, to forbid what Lucy loves most.
Lucy turns. There’s only blank wall where Ma stares. She tries to see the home Ma sees. From the dry soil of rememory she digs up this: grass rustling, streaked and dusty light. A familiar path underfoot, and Ba’s shadow with its dowsing rod, and somewhere the call of Ma’s voice, and dinner-smoke in the air—
“We always had salt,” Ma says. “Mei tian. And fish from the ocean, Lucy girl. Wo de ma—your grandmother—the way she steamed them—”
Oh. Ma doesn’t mean their campsites, their prospecting days. She means a home Lucy can’t see. Across the ocean.
“You’re a good girl, Lucy. You don’t ask for much. Try to understand. I’m saving, dong bu dong, every bit we can. Though sometimes I think—you and Sam might have had a better life there. He might.”
Lucy tries to picture Ma’s mother, Ma’s father, the family Ma speaks of crowded into a room. All she conjures is Teacher Leigh’s parlor, full of voices on a Sunday.
“Ma—are you lonely?”
“Shuo shen me. I have you, Lucy girl.”
But not during the day. For the first time Lucy considers Ma alone in the house, considers the long dim hours Ma rocks by the window while Lucy reads in the schoolhouse, while Ba and Sam dig gold. How quiet it must get. The only sound the leak of other wives’ talk when the wind blows just so from far across the valley.
Ma pats the handkerchief in Lucy’s hand. “You can use this for now, nu er. I suppose he did give it to you.”
