by C Pam Zhang
Under Ma’s gaze, this time, Lucy tips salt into the stew. No word this time about beholdenness as Ma’s spine bends over the pot. Lucy is jolted to see her own hunger in Ma’s face.
Her hand slips. A heap of white lands on the surface, dissolves. Surely it’s too much. No one else appears to notice. At dinner they gulp their portions and scrape their bowls, ask again and again for more. A ring of dark stew forms around Ma’s mouth. She eats so quick she doesn’t pause to wipe.
Lucy herself takes two bites and puts her spoon aside. Her tongue burns. Another taste mixes in with the salt, unwelcome and bitter.
Lessons in shame.
Gold
Then comes the day that Ba takes Lucy to the gold field.
It’s morning when they set out, yet they turn from the sun and slip beneath the plateau’s shadow. Lucy drags her feet in protest. It’s a school day. She shouldn’t be tramping the hills—this is where Sam belongs. But Sam took sick and it was Ma, forever counting coin, who insisted that Lucy go.
They reach the valley’s edge, where grass gives way to rock and a ridge rises like animal hackles: Turn back. Beware.
Ba steps over.
The plateau is bare and gray. Not even desperate miners venture out here—not even those who lost jobs in the fire and spend their days restless as starving dogs, scrounging for food, work, anything to keep busy. Yet Ba keeps his prospecting tools hidden in the fiddle case all the same.
Rock walls rise higher and higher on either side, shutting out the sun. “The river carved this path,” Ba says, a line of shadow splitting his face, and Lucy nearly laughs at the boldness of the lie.
The path deepens, widens, ascends. At its very top Lucy sees that the plateau isn’t flat. It’s scooped hollow. They stand at the bottom of an empty bowl. High up, a circle of sky. Her legs tremble. Is this what they came for? This nothing rock?
Ba points to a line of green far off. It gains complexity as they approach. Cottonwoods, reeds, blue irises and white lilies. Thirsty plants, all. Yet no water in sight.
“Take a look,” Ba says, that glitter in his eyes. “This here’s the lake.”
A long time ago, Lucy girl, a river ran through this land. Started right here in what used to be a lake. If we looked up a hundred hundred hundred years ago, why, we’d see water more’n a mile deep above us, and underwater forests taller than any forest on land, and fish swimming so thick they blocked the light. This lake was the birthing place for the creek that runs below.
Don’t look so surprised. Plenty of things in this land that used to be grander, just like the buffalo.
It was cold back then. Snow most of the year. I’ve reason to believe it got warmer with time, the animals smaller. The lake shrank some, and the fish shrank to fit, and all the salt and the dirt and the metal in that big bowl of water filled a smaller bowl.
That’s right. The gold too. It was always there.
There was no man alive back then to see it, but something must’ve happened to disappear the lake. You want to hear my thoughts, I figure it for a big quake. The ground must’ve leapt up like your ma when she saw a rattler, and when it fell back down it cracked. The lake leaked through.
Now, most of the fish and the salt and the gold flowed downstream, following that same path we just climbed. They made a river through town. That’s why this town grew up, in fact. Before it was a coal mine, it was a prospecting site. Men picked the river as clean as your ma picks bone. And they ruined that water. I tell you the creek used to be wider, and clearer, and filled with fish. It’s not right, that way of doing things. I don’t see how you can claim to own a place and treat it so poor, there are methods of getting what you want without tearing at the land like a pack of wild dogs—but I’m getting away from my story.
I heard tales of the lakebed from Indian traders and got to thinking: Gold’s heavy, right? The water down below had to come from somewhere, and if that somewhere was up, then maybe all the gold hadn’t washed away. Maybe some of it stuck. Your ma dislikes me associating with Indians; smart though she is, she hasn’t come round to how their knowledge of this land runs deep.
Anyhow, the lake is why there’s gold here, Lucy girl, and the bones of fish if you care to look. You’ll see it today, all around you. Sometimes when I’m up here at night and the wind’s blowing powerful strong and I hear a rustle, I’ll turn thinking to see Sam. But nothing’s there. Sometimes I feel like a sea leaf is brushing my face, or I hear a wet sound though the ground’s dry. Sometimes I think leaves and fish and water could haunt a man as much as anything else . . . but that’s ghost talk. Point is, there’s always been gold in these hills. You just had to believe.
* * *
—
What’s the name for this feeling? This being parched and quenched all at once. Lucy’s mouth is dry, her lips cracked. But inside her is a sloshing—water, Ma calls her—a sense that the world Ba speaks of is close. Move quick enough and she might puncture the thin skin of the day. Might feel the ancient lake flood her.
Because this land they live in is a land of missing things. A land stripped of its gold, its rivers, its buffalo, its Indians, its tigers, its jackals, its birds and its green and its living. To move through this land and believe Ba’s tales is to see each hill as a burial mound with its own crown of bones. Who could believe that and survive? Who could believe that and keep from looking, as Ba and Sam do, always toward the past? Letting it drag behind them. Letting it make them into fools.
And so Lucy fears that unwritten history. Easier to dismiss all Ba’s tales as tall ones—because believe, and where does it end? If she believes that tigers live, then does she believe that Indians are hunted and dying? If she believes in fish the size of men, does she believe in men who string up others like linefuls of catch? Easier to avoid that history, unwritten as it is except in the soughing of dry grass, in the marks of lost trails, in the rumors from the mouths of bored men and mean girls, in the cracked patterns of buffalo bone. Easier by far to read the history that Teacher Leigh teaches, those names and dates orderly as bricks, stacked to build a civilization.
Still. Lucy never quite escapes that other. The wild one. It prowls the edges of her vision, an animal just beyond the campfire’s glow. That history speaks not in words but in roar and beat and blood. It made Lucy as the lake made gold. Made Sam’s wildness, and Ba’s limp, and made the yearning in Ma’s voice when she speaks of the ocean. But to stare down that history makes Lucy dizzy, as if she peers from the wrong end of a spyglass to see Ba and Ma smaller than her, Ba and Ma with bas and mas of their own, across an ocean bigger than the vanished lake.
Lucy takes a breath and looks up. That circle of sky, blue as water. She gives in. She imagines the glint of fish, the sea grass taller than trees. If she is water, then let her be water. Let her slosh.
* * *
—
Ba walks the green and Lucy follows. Where bedrock cracks open, mud shows through, and ancient river pebbles, and the plants that draw from the lake’s last dregs. They fill their panning trays with earth. Swirl and stare, looking for a gleam.
The sun sears; water leaves Lucy at an astonishing rate. Where did it go, all that lost water? Can a lake, without proper burial, become a ghost? Can a place remember, and hurt, and rage against what hurt it? She thinks it might. She thinks: Not me. I didn’t hurt you. Help me.
She finds the fossil of a fish. She finds a big lump of quartz. She finds that hoping hurts worse than not hoping. Ba outpaces her—she wonders if Sam was able to keep up. In her hurry, Lucy trips and spills her pan, so that Ba sees her sprawled in failure.
She picks up the worthless quartz and throws it at a tree. It breaks into two halves, sinking to the mud.
Ba picks it up. Rubs it. Taps his chisel against it, knocking flakes free. “Lucy girl.”
She chokes back a sob. But his hand is moving toward her with
gentleness. In his palm, the cracked quartz shows its yellow center.
“How did you know?” Lucy whispers. She would have left it buried for another century.
“Why, Lucy girl, you feel where it’s buried. You just feel it.”
He passes the gold to her.
The nugget is heavy and sun-warm. The size of a small egg. She turns it. There’s a hollow through its center. It slips over her middle finger.
“Take a corner,” Ba says, squeezing his forefinger and thumb together to show how much. Lucy looks at him, disbelieving. “Try it, Lucy girl.”
It has no taste. No juice. Her mouth floods anyways. She was parched and quenched, and now only quenched. Does it change her, that fleck she swallows? Does it glimmer just under her skin, settle between stomach and heart? Years later, she will probe herself in the dark, wondering if she can see the difference.
“You’re a proper prospector now. That in there will call other riches to you. Ting wo.”
* * *
—
Descending that evening, Ba hoists Lucy over the rock wall and pulls himself up after her. He points out the inland mountains to the East, the coast to the West. On clear days, he claims Lucy could see fog from the ocean. Ships’ sails riding the air like wings.
“Your ma thinks there’s nothing more beautiful than a ship. I prefer real birds. Look at them two goshawks.”
Two forms wheel and dive, landing atop an oak.
“See that there?”
Lucy sees nothing. Sam’s eyes are sharp from days in the sun; when Lucy looks up from books, the edges of the world are blurred. Another of her disappointments.
To her surprise, Ba brings his face to her level, puts his stubbled cheek against hers. This close, it’s as if his smell is hers, too: tobacco and sun, sweat and dust. He turns their heads together and Lucy sees the nest with two small mouths, gaping.
“The moment those hatchlings are big enough, I mean to climb up and get chicks for the two of you. You can train them to hunt, with no need for gun or knife. Did you know?”
Ba’s voice is washed with wonder. Today, Lucy can see what he sees: those two chicks grown bigger than their parents, wheeling free. Before Ba takes his face away, Lucy asks, “I did good today, right?”
“Sure you did.” Both of them consider the nugget in Lucy’s hand. It looks larger now, brushed clean of dirt. “That’s three or four months’ work in a day, I’ll wager. Your ma’ll be pleased. Now, you want to know what’s the biggest help?” Ba pulls back and narrows his eyes. “Keep quiet about this place. Ting wo? What we do here . . . well, it ain’t wrong. This land’s unclaimed. But many a man might think it wasn’t right, either. People are jealous of us, dong bu dong? Always have been. Because we’re adventurers. What are we, Lucy girl?”
“Special,” she says. Up here she even believes it.
* * *
—
Ma’s in bed when they return. Five months on and her ankles have swollen, the baby a perpetual ache on her back. Usually Ba handles her as if she’s made of gold herself. Today he dives to the mattress, making it bounce. Sam, feverish beside Ma, groans.
Ma pushes Ba off. She yanks her dress straight and sits. “The mine boss came around. He said we can’t live on mine property if you aren’t working. Lei si wo, that little man.”
Ba and Ma whisper about the mine boss at night. But never this loud, and never in front of Lucy or Sam. Ma’s eyes have a fierce look. Something like the goshawks.
“Did he say when?” Ba asks.
“I talked him down.” Ma’s mouth twists as if she’s bitten something bad. “Begged, more like. He’ll give us another month. Dan shi payment next time is double.”
“What’d you say to him?”
“Bie guan—”
“What’d you promise him?”
“I smiled and talked sweet. Told him we’ll pay extra.” Ma gives an impatient flick of her head. “Men like him are easy to handle.” Ba’s hands clench behind his back. He starts to speak, but Ma talks over him as she does when Sam throws a tantrum. “That’s not important. Gao su wo, what will we do? We haven’t saved enough. And the baby’s on his way. What’s next?”
What’s next? Ma has asked at the end of their time at each prospecting site, at each mine, when hope and coin run low. Ba blusters sometimes, other times goes sullen, other times stomps out to clear his head and return the next morning reeking of remorse and drink. He’s never answered straight. Until now.
“We’ll go,” he says, slipping the nugget onto Ma’s finger.
Ma’s hand drops from the weight. She lifts her trembling fingers to her face.
“Our Lucy’s a genius for gold,” Ba says. “We’ll be gone in a month if we work quick enough. And settled on our own land, bought free and clear. All five of us.”
Ma weighs the nugget in her palm. Nestled there, it looks more like an egg than ever. Her lips move, counting.
“I’ve got my eye on a piece of land eight miles toward the ocean. Between two hills, forty acres, plenty of trails for riding, and the prettiest little pond—”
“We’ll have horses?” Sam says, rousing.
“Sure. Sure. And—” Ba turns to Lucy. “Close enough that you could ride to school if you get up early on a fast horse. Though I don’t figure why—” He stops himself. Says, simply, “If you want.”
Lucy knows the effort it took him to say that. She reaches for his hand.
“And for your ma—”
Ma’s head shoots up. She’s finished calculating. “Gou le. This is enough.”
“Now hold on there. I know you’re excited, qin ai de, but we’ve got a few more weeks of work yet. I asked about the price—”
“Not that land.” The secret smile is curving Ma’s lips, stretching them wider than Lucy’s ever seen. Ma’s mouth parts. Behind, a glisten. “Somewhere much better. This is enough for five tickets on the ship.”
* * *
—
Ba was always the storyteller. Ma delivered instructions, reprimands, quizzes, calls to dinner, lullabies, facts. She told no stories about herself. Now, at last, she gathers them around her on the mattress.
The story Ma carried inside her is bigger than a baby, bigger than the West, bigger than the whole of the world Lucy was born to. Inside Ma is a place of wide cobbled streets and low red walls, mists and rocky gardens. A place that grows bitter melons and peppers so hot they’d set fire to this dry grass. Home is the place. Ma’s voice so accented with longing that Lucy can hardly understand her. Home sounds like a fairy tale that Ma reads from a secret fourth book, written on the backs of her shut eyelids. Ma speaks of fruit that bears in the shape of stars. Green rocks harder and rarer than gold. She speaks the unpronounceable name of the mountain where she was born.
Lucy’s hands go clammy. The old feeling of being lost. In Ba’s stories she recognizes the land she grew up in. The hills in Ba’s stories are these hills, but greener; these trails, but thick with creatures. Ma’s place is unknowable. Even Ma’s names slide or knot on Lucy’s tongue.
“What about school?” Lucy asks.
“Mei guan xi.” Ma laughs. “There’ll be schools there. Bigger than this provincial little place.”
Ma calls on Ba to tell too. About the fruit called dragon’s eye, and the mist on the mountains, and the fish grilled at the harbor on a summer’s day.
Instead, Ba says, “Qin ai de, I thought we agreed to stay here. A piece of land for our own.”
Ma shakes her head till blood muddles her cheeks. “Gold can’t buy everything. This will never be our land. Ni zhi dao. I want our boy to grow up among his people.” She presses the nugget between her breasts, as if it’s truly an egg she means to hatch with the heat of her conviction. “Zhe ge means we can leave as soon as he’s born. We’ll get there before he’s off milk. Xiang xiang: his first tas
te will be the taste of home. You promised.” The crackle in her voice rises. “Cong kai shi, you promised we’d go back to our people.”
And Sam, voice thick with fever, says, “What people?”
“People like you, nu er,” Ma says, brushing hair from Sam’s sweaty face. “Going across will be like—like—a dream. Water’s easier than traveling by wagon, bao bei. You’ll be like princesses falling asleep under an enchantment. Waking up somewhere better.”
But Lucy read that story as nightmare. She asks again about school. Sam asks about horses. Lucy asks about lessons, and trains, and Sam about buffalo. Ma winces as if cut.
“Girls,” Ma says. “You’ll like it.”
“If this place is so wonderful,” Lucy says, “then why did you leave? Why’d you come here alone?”
Ma’s face, which has opened wide, closes. She pulls her arms to her chest, so quick her elbow clips Lucy’s shoulder. “That’s enough for tonight. Lei si wo.”
“Ow,” Lucy says, more astonished than hurt. But Ma doesn’t apologize.
Lucy doesn’t like how Ma licked her lips at the memory of star fruit, which Lucy hasn’t tasted. She doesn’t like how Ma, speaking of the tiled roof of her childhood home, damns the roofs of Lucy’s. Well, sometimes the rain against tin or canvas can make a music as pretty as the two-stringed fiddles Ma talks about. Sometimes the dust that Ma hates so much furs the hills a tender gold. Lucy demands to know what makes Ma’s streets prettier, Ma’s rain nicer, Ma’s food tastier. She asks and asks, her voice swelling, and gets no answers as Ma shrinks back into the pillows with every question. As if Lucy’s words are a violence.
Then Ba is saying, Da zui, and he is lifting Lucy away. She screams into his shoulder as he carries her, kicking, up to the loft. By the time he’s carried Sam up too, the sloshing Lucy felt on the plateau has come to a boil.
