by C Pam Zhang
“We may not need your teacher’s help. But I intend to hold on to that option. Ni zhi dao, Lucy girl, what real riches are?” Lucy points to the pouch, which Ma tucks back in her dress. “Bu dui, nu er. I could spend this gold tomorrow and it would belong to someone else. No—I want us rich in choices. That’s something no one can take.” Ma sighs, long and low, and later Lucy will recall that sigh every time she hears the wind moan through a too-small opening. “Mei guan xi, you’ll understand when you’re older.”
Ma’s said this before. “I don’t think so,” Lucy snaps. “I think I’d understand if I was prettier.”
Ma smiles. Lips, white teeth. And then the smile changes. Ma’s lips curl back to show gums, and two canines, one chipped, and the tip of a tongue between. Ma’s shoulders hunch, her eyes going slit—Ma still smiling, but transformed.
Then Ma lets her face relax. Once more it’s the face that Lucy knows.
“Ting wo, Lucy girl. What I meant to say that day was that beauty’s the kind of weapon that doesn’t last so long as others. If you choose to use it—mei cuo, there’s no shame. But you’re lucky. You have this too.” She raps Lucy’s head. “Xing le, xing le. Don’t cry.”
Lucy can’t help it. Like the rising creek, what’s in her has been weeks, months, in the gathering. The tears come harder. In the mirror she sees that the blood is gone from her chin, in its place this fresh wet. A drop falls to Ma’s hand. Lucy doesn’t look like Ma. Doesn’t have Ma’s beauty. And yet, in the warping mirror, there is resemblance. An answering sorrow on Ma’s reflection though she sheds no tears of her own. Ma brings Lucy’s salt to her mouth, and sucks it clean.
Wind
Ma instructs Lucy to say she fell against the stove while packing. It hardly matters—when Ba and Sam return that evening, they’re too preoccupied with trotting the new mule out from its hiding place behind the toolshed, with loading the new wagon.
As Sam carries Ma’s rocking chair over the threshold, wind blasts through the door. Nearly bowls Sam over with its fury. A wind from inland, with a sound like the slap of water.
They head out anyhow, bent against the gusts. Between the miners’ shacks, down the main road, people stare frankly. When they reach the road out of town, they find it flooded. Muddy water stretches wide as a river. An ocean.
For weeks they’ve heard rumors of entire valleys flooded inland, the once-dry land birthing a hundred hundred lakes. Now wind has blown the brown water here, cutting off the trails in and out of town. They’re trapped.
“It’ll go down tomorrow,” Ba reassures them after they’ve returned to a shack even more dismal than usual. A candle stub flickers over the bare table—they’ve left the tablecloth, the plates, most of their belongings packed in the wagon. “Next week,” he says when tomorrow comes. “This weather isn’t but a run of bad luck. It’ll pass.”
Ma’s eyes go blank as a caught rabbit’s. She averts her face from the mention of luck.
Jackals follow the floods. Soon they circle the town, howls braided into the wind. People say the creatures are drawn to the mines, parts of which are burning again even as other parts flood. A charred breeze. Ba alone doesn’t blame the jackals. He rails against the clogged rivers and cut-down trees, the small game overhunted to extinction, the mines that destroyed hillsides till the soil runs like ink. Bi zui, Ma snaps. Tells him to quit stirring up trouble.
* * *
—
Lucy can’t sleep. When she does she dreams of that lost fleck of gold. It appears each night in a new location: in the yawning mouth of a jackal, pinned to the mine boss’s hat, above a drawing of her own face reading WANTED, studded in Ma’s neck, winking from a bleeding gunshot hole where Ba’s eye once was. She wakes, whimpering, and spends the rest of the night watching the door.
No flesh-and-blood people arrive. The threat of beasts keeps the town indoors. The mine closes indefinitely, all its tunnels flooded now. Ba and Ma argue about what to do. Ba wants to set out and swim their wagon across the road—but Ma points out that wind has toppled several oaks and is liable to blow them off course. Ma says, The baby, the baby, the baby. He’s due soon now. Any day.
They settle down to wait with everyone else. The valley a brown bowl, starting to froth.
* * *
—
Signs are posted.
WANTED
Jackal hides
$1 bounty
Packs of men roam the hills at night, former miners desperate for any pay. Sam petitions to join the hunt, pestering till Ma cries, shaking Sam’s arm, Why can’t you be a good girl?
* * *
—
For all that the men go hunting, the number of jackals only grows. Howling thrums their ears. Clouds so dark they look like pieces of sky cut out, wind whipping them along, the air like a drum about to burst—though rain is still withheld. Children are warned from outdoor chores.
The air in the shack goes soupy. Sam, cooped up, is prone to sudden fits of motion, thudding heels against the walls, chasing nothing round and round for hours. Ma quits scolding—there’s no stopping Sam, and anyhow the baby is kicking too. Ma spends her days laid flat, talking to the baby. She coaxes him to stay sleeping. To stay inside.
Ba returns with news of food prices gone sky-high, people sickening on dirty creek water. Miners form grim lines outside the hotel, whose owner posted about the bounty. No one’s been paid for their hides yet.
* * *
—
And then a child is taken.
Ba and Ma whisper. Won’t share details. They say it isn’t fit for children, say they don’t want to give Lucy and Sam bad dreams. Lucy doesn’t explain that her dreams are bad enough anyhow.
* * *
—
That night a man howls, and the jackals join in. So mournful that a body might think they were the ones who’ve lost.
Blood
Lucy knows they can survive the jackals because they have before.
There was a night between one town and another, between one mine and the next, when the family came to a line of dung laid across the road like a missive. So fresh it steamed. The ancient mule stumbled. The crack of its leg split the night.
From the mule’s throat came a mewling. Three years they’d had this gentle beast and never heard her cry. Her rolling eye found Lucy.
They went on. Their one remaining mule panted, made quicker by fear and a lightened load. Their extra provisions were tossed out in the grass. The noise of jackals grew closer, then paused. The silence more terrible than howls. The family hurried on.
* * *
—
The jackals who finally enter the shack on the first day of storm, on the day the clouds open and the bones of a child stir up from the swollen creek, aren’t the jackals Lucy expected.
They look mostly like men. One has a brown beard, the other red as the hair of the girl who was taken. Half-familiar—Lucy must have seen them a dozen times in the low light of those early mornings at the mine. Only the hides on their shoulders are of the beast, giving off a wet, rank odor.
Like men, they carry guns.
They crash through the door before Ba can grab his pistol. The pounding rain hid their approach till too late. The brown one orders Ba into a chair. The red jackal herds Lucy and Sam to the stove. Ma, on the mattress under a heap of extra blankets, goes unseen.
“We’d like a bite to eat,” the brown one says.
Strange that a wild thing can speak so polite. He sounds like a guest in Teacher Leigh’s parlor. Ba cusses as the red one bats pans and plates off the stove. He plunges hands into the cold stewpot and crunches a mess of cartilage, spitting a long splinter of bone to the floor. Gobbets drop from his lips onto Lucy and Sam.
Out of Sam’s small chest, a warning rumble. Lucy holds tight to Sam’s arm. Keeps Sam from rashness.
“It loo
ks like you’ve more than enough to share,” the brown one says, poking through their supplies. The potatoes, the flour, the lard, all damning. “Doesn’t seem right when most of us are starving. Doesn’t seem right that you sat snug and rich while the rest of us were out of work. Why, we had to send our families out looking for gold to buy food. You’d know something about that, I think.”
Ba’s cussing subsides.
“My little girl went out there,” the red one screams, his voice like breaking glass. He flings his arm toward the half-open door. The long-awaited storm is gray froth, spitting in angry globs like schoolyard kids. Like the redheaded girl once spat at Lucy before she tired of bullying. The red jackal’s gaze bores through Lucy, as if he reads her mind.
“A real shame,” the brown one says, pressing his rifle into Ba’s bad leg. “This could all have been avoided if we’d known where that fleck of gold we found came from. My brother’s girl wouldn’t have had to wander willy-nilly.”
Ba’s mouth stays shut. The stubbornness that Sam inherited—he’ll never tell.
“I’d say a trade seems fair,” the brown jackal says. A confused silence, and then Lucy understands as the red one locks mad eyes on Sam. Sam who shines.
Lucy’s voice is mute, but her legs move. It was her fault. She took what was precious from the house. She takes a step—half a step, stiff with dread. It’s enough. The red one seizes her instead.
Ba’s face is torn between fury and fear as the red jackal drags Lucy to the door. She wonders which will win, whether Ba will speak. She never knows. Because Sam lunges for the red jackal, stabbing with the spat-out bone shard.
The jackal howls, releasing Lucy. Grabbing for Sam.
Sam is small and wily, brown and strong from days on the gold field. As the red jackal slashes with his knife, Sam ducks and dances. The brown jackal waves his gun, can’t shoot for fear of hitting his partner. Sam catches Lucy’s eye across the room. Impossibly, Sam grins.
And then the red one takes hold—not of Sam’s arm, but Sam’s long, grown-back hair.
Ba yells. Lucy screams. But it’s the third voice that the jackals attend to. A voice like a sweep of fire, hot in a house grown cold.
“Stop,” Ma says, standing by stages. Blankets shed from her. Her huge belly like a piece of the hills come alive. And then she speaks to Ba, only Ba. “Ba jin gei ta men. Ni fa feng le ma? Yao zhao gu hai zi. Ru guo wo men jia ren an quan, na jiu zu gou le.”
It’s a language the rest can’t decipher. Words so quick they might as well be the senseless patter and shriek of rain. For the first time Lucy understands that the language Ma shared with them, in bits and pieces, was only a child’s game.
Ba’s face slackens, Ba’s shoulders puddling as the red jackal strides to Ma and slaps her so hard her lip splits open.
“Speak proper,” he hisses.
Calmly, Ma puts a hand to her chest. She draws a crumpled handkerchief from the pouch inside her dress and holds it to her bleeding lip. When she drops the soiled cloth, her lips are sealed, her right cheek squirrel-swollen from the blow.
Ma says no more. Not when the men ask where the money is hid, not when they contemplate cutting out Ba’s tongue, not when they slash the bundles and tear the clothes, shatter the medicine bottles in the trunk. That sweet, bitter perfume mingles with the jackals’ stink. Ma says nothing even when they find the first hidden pouch, and tear the shack and the wagon apart in search of the rest. Ma doesn’t look at them, doesn’t look at Ba or Sam or Lucy. Ma looks out the open door.
* * *
—
At the last, the jackals herd the family together and search their bodies for gold. Stripped and patted, Ma is once again the sun, the moon, her naked belly casting a horrible light around which the day turns. The jackals take the pouch from between her breasts, turn it inside out—empty. Ba closes his eyes, as if the sight could blind him.
* * *
—
“There’s more in these hills,” Ba says that night as they sit in their own wreckage. No mattress left whole, no blankets, no pillows, no medicines, no plates, no food, no gold. The new mule and the new wagon were taken. Near on six months in this town and they’re poorer than when they arrived. “We’ll find more. All we need’s time, qin ai de. Might be another six months. Maybe a year. He’ll still be young.”
Still Ma is silent.
They sleep all four together that night, two torn mattresses dragged to make one. Lucy and Sam cling together in the center, Ma and Ba at either side. Ma faces out from Lucy, her back a long occlusion. That night there are no whispers.
* * *
—
The next day, as the storm grows fiercer, Lucy fits together what parts she can, sews what she can, makes meals of what she can—the pork rinds retrieved from a dark corner, the flour painstakingly scooped though it bakes up gritty.
Sam helps. Unasked, Sam cleans and stacks, dusts and sorts. The sound of Sam’s body a sturdy speech. Otherwise, the shack is silent. Ma lies prone, unspeaking though her swollen cheek has deflated. Ba paces and paces.
And then again, the pounding.
This time Ba opens the door with pistol in hand. There’s only a piece of paper tied to the knob. Dark shapes hurrying away in the rain.
Lucy reads the words aloud. Her voice shrinks with every sentence.
It’s a proclamation of new law. Approved already in town, and soon to be proposed to the rest of the territory. Ba rages pointlessly through the reading, tearing again what’s already been torn.
The jackals’ power isn’t in the gold they stole, or in their guns. Their power is in this paper that takes away the family’s future before it can even be dug up. The hills may run flush with gold but none of it will be theirs. Hold it in their hands, swallow it down, and still it won’t be theirs. The law strips all rights to gold and land from any man not born in this territory.
* * *
—
How did they survive the attack on the wagon all those years back?
They didn’t. Leastways not all of them. They left the mule and didn’t shoot or bury her. Ma made no mention, then, of silver or water.
“Bie kan,” Ma instructed as they ran. But Lucy looked back. A dozen pinpoint eyes stung through the dark as the pack closed in. The living mule a distraction. A sacrifice. All that Lucy could bear—she’d seen dead things in plenty. What made her shudder was how firm Ma held her head. Where the rest of the family looked back at the faithful mule, only Ma heeded her own command. She bit her lip, and blood pinked her teeth. Likely it pained her. But Ma showed no pain, and never looked back.
Water
He is born that third night of storm.
That little creek, descended from ancient lake, remembers its history and rises. At the first wet touch, the sleepers in the valley dream the same dream: Fish so thick they block the light. Sea grass taller than trees.
At the edge of the valley, on higher ground, Ma thrashes on a ruined mattress. For six months Ba has praised the baby for its headstrong nature. For what made it a boy. Now he curses it. He takes Ma’s hand. She stares at him with eyes so shiny with pain, it looks like hate.
Ba leaves to fetch the doctor. After a look at Ma’s pulsing belly, Sam leaves too. Saying something about gathering tools from the shed.
“Lucy girl,” Ma growls when they’re alone. Her eyes roll back, teeth a rictus. These are her first words since the jackals left, though her cheek healed so quick it’s as if it were never injured. “Talk to me. Distract me. Anything.” Her stomach ripples. “Shuo!”
“It was me,” Lucy says before she can lose her nerve. “I took gold out of the house—just to show the teacher, for his research—I was going to bring it back—it was just a speck—and, and, I fell and I lost it.”
As she has countless times before, Ma holds Lucy’s secret in silence.
“
I mean,” Lucy whispers into the terrible quiet, “I think those men who broke in took it. I saw someone. When I fell. It was all my fault, Ma.”
Ma starts to laugh. Laughter that’s closer kin to rage than joy, laughter like a consuming. Lucy thinks again of fire. But what’s being burned?
“Bie guan,” Ma says. She catches her breath, throat spasming as it did when she first took sick with the baby. “It doesn’t matter, Lucy girl. What does it matter who it was? They all hate us. Bu neng blame yourself for our bad luck. That’s what passes for justice in this gou shi piece of land.”
Ma points to the wrecked door, and past—to the hills with faceless men lurking in every house, from every lit window. Ma’s hate is big enough for all of it.
“I’m sorry,” Lucy says again.
“Hen jiu yi qian, I did worse without intending. When I was young, I thought I knew what was right for everyone. You remind me of myself. Bellyful of anger.”
But that’s Sam. Lucy’s not angry. She’s good.
“Gao su wo, Lucy girl, my smart one, why didn’t your ba listen to me when the men came? I’ve been trying to figure. Zhi yao give those men a few pouches, they would’ve left us alone. I know their kind. Lazy. You heard me tell him, dui bu dui?”
Ma wrings Lucy’s hand. Lucy can only say, miserably, “You spoke too quick, Ma. I didn’t understand you.”
Ma blinks. “You didn’t—understand me? Wo de nu er. My own daughter and she can’t understand me.”
Another wave of pain curls Ma’s body like a fist. When she loosens, her voice is less certain.
“Mei wen ti,” Ma pants. “Not too late to learn. Yi ding get you into a proper school. Back home.”
