How Much of These Hills Is Gold

by C Pam Zhang

  * * *

  —

  It seems that to tell you the whole story, I got to tell as well the story I wish was true.

  Here’s the truth: until the night your ma took off, I believed that under my hardness there still hid a softer man. I figured that one day when we were rich and comfortable, when your ma didn’t have to stand on her feet to work, let alone think of running—then I’d take the shining nuggets from the shelves of our own house on a piece of land so big we never saw another body. I’d put those nuggets in your hands, in Sam’s hands, in the boy’s hands. Soft hands all. And I’d tell a story. About how, as a boy, me and Billy found the first gold in these hills.

  * * *

  —

  There, Lucy girl. Now you’ve heard what you always wanted to know. I told Sam years back. Why didn’t I tell you? Well, maybe it was on account of shame. Maybe fear that you’d run after your ma. I know you loved her best. I saw how you looked at me by the end, and it was what I’d seen in your ma: love and hate both.

  It was hard to bear, Lucy girl. Because truth is, I loved you just as well as Sam, though it was Sam I spoke to on account of Sam being tough enough to hear me out. Maybe I even loved you better, though that’s a shameful thing to say. Shameful to love just because you needed the loving more, soft that you were. I remember the morning you were born. Your eyes opened and they were my eyes. Light brown, nearly gold. Not like your ma’s or Sam’s. Too much of my water in you.

  Maybe I treated you hard on account of you growing to look more and more like her.

  It’s likely you’ll hate me after this telling. Come morning, if you remember, I wouldn’t be surprised to see you tumble my bones into a ditch and leave me for the jackals.

  Lucy girl.

  Bao bei.

  Nu er.

  I looked for a fortune and thought it slipped between my fingers, but it occurs to me I did make something of this land after all—I made you and Sam. You turned out alright, didn’t you? I taught you to be strong. I taught you to be hard. I taught you to survive. To look at you now, taking care of Sam, trying to bury my body proper—I don’t regret that teaching. I got no need to apologize. I only wish I’d stayed and taught you more. You’ll have to make do with bits, as you have all your life. You’re a smart girl. Just remember: your family comes first. Ting wo.

  PART FOUR

  XX67

  Mud

  Summer comes, bringing rumors of a tiger.

  The air is close and sweat-sticky. Cicadas, crickets, sighs, a dark ratcheting. A time for lingering after lamps are lit, for windows swung wide—a languorous heat in ordinary times, a loosening.

  But this year the tiger presses its claw against the vein of the town, and all Sweetwater shivers. A few chickens went missing three days back, and a side of beef. A guard dog was found with its throat slashed. Yesterday a woman fainted while hanging laundry and woke gibbering about a creature behind her sheets. A print left in the mud. Fear is this summer’s excitement, as hoops were last summer’s, and syrup over crushed ice the summer before’s.

  Anna, of course, wants a taste.

  “Don’t you think,” Anna says, tipping her head back as Lucy untangles her curls, “that a baby tiger would make a lovely pet? I could train it to come when called. Maybe I should ask for one.”

  Lucy raps Anna’s forehead with the comb. “I think you should quit squirming. Turn around.”

  “Or maybe a wolf pup. Or a little jackal. Those I know Papa can find.”

  Lucy remembers jackals, and what those teeth can do to a girl. But she only smiles at Anna, her face kept clear and sweet.

  Anna talks of the tiger as Lucy buttons the thirty pearl buttons down the back of Anna’s linen dress. Anna talks as she does the same for Lucy: same buttons, same dress, same boots excepting that Lucy’s have three extra inches of heel to make her match Anna’s height. Lucy’s hair takes longest—her curls must be set and heated. Anna goes quiet at last, tongue poking out in concentration.

  But as they leave for the station, Anna strokes the orange throat of a flower in her garden. “I’ve decided to call it a tiger lily,” she says, her green eyes even wider in pleasure. Last week the baker renamed his two-color loaves tiger bread, the dressmaker a striped fabric. “Isn’t it clever?”

  The flower on its stalk nods along with Lucy.

  The streets stand eerily empty as they pass through Anna’s side of town, those mansions themselves sprawling wide and lazy as sunning cats. People are sparse, moving in nervous knots when they do appear. A group of three or more, it’s said, and the tiger won’t dare approach.

  A rumble jolts the street, and shoulders tense, faces draining. It’s only a carriage with its wheel stuck. Movement returns as a gust of nervous laughter.

  Anna presses close to Lucy. “Maybe . . . maybe it isn’t safe to go to the station today.”

  There’s a jump in Lucy’s heart that even the rumored tiger couldn’t incite. She tamps it down, as she’s learned to tamp down so much else. “Don’t be silly, Anna. You have to meet your fiancé.”

  Yet Anna wheedles, coaxes, cajoles, her capacity for speech a marvel—an endless, carrying current that flows past all obstacles. Seventeen like Lucy, there are times when Anna seems a child. She begs for one stop.

  * * *

  —

  Long before they see it, they hear it: the house of the woman who claims she was visited by a tiger. A crowd’s gathered, chattering, on her lawn. “It came right up,” the woman says. “I heard it growl.”

  Anna tugs Lucy to the front. Two slight girls, and yet people part around them because they’re really three. Anna’s hired man follows. Gossip says that all of the hired men employed by Anna’s father—taciturn, stealthy men outfitted in nondescript black—carry guns under their coats. Ordinarily, Anna rolls her eyes at the notion.

  Today Anna’s too transfixed to notice. She hunkers in the mud, seeming ready to kiss the print, or ask of it some benediction. So alive with hope and possibility that envy snaps in Lucy with the sudden, cold teeth of a steel trap. What she’d give to feel that.

  Lucy steps closer. The print’s half a print. Two toes, a partial paw pad, hardly bigger than a saucer. Some lesser cat left it—lynx or bobcat, or even a fat domestic tom.

  Anna says something about her heart racing, and Lucy echoes it, as if her own heart isn’t flat and sluggish, as if the old disappointment doesn’t rankle. She could turn and tell the crowd the truth of this print, watch their faces fall. But. She’s told her story in Sweetwater. Orphan. Left on a doorstep. Don’t know who my parents are. No one but me. That girl doesn’t know tigers.

  “I think that if you were an animal,” Anna says, “you’d be a tiger. The very sweetest, most beautiful kind.”

  Lucy kisses the top of Anna’s head. Flowers, warm milk. A soothing nursery scent. She puts a hand out to help Anna up.

  “Of course,” Anna says, taking the hand, “we’d have to get you declawed.”

  Heat makes sap, and blood, rise faster. Lucy’s hand so sweat-slippery around her friend’s. Who could blame her, on this hot day, for losing her grip? Not even the hired man would know the difference if she let go, sending Anna sprawling into the mud, brown eating up the clean white field of fabric.

  Lucy pulls Anna up so fast that their shoulders knock together. As Anna turns back through the crowd, Lucy hangs behind, wiping her sweaty palm. There’s a second print some distance from the first. Not a paw—a pointed boot.

  “Your sister’s leaving,” a man says, glancing over. That first glance quick. The second protracted. It takes Lucy apart, eyes and nose and mouth and hair. Counting up her differences. By then Lucy is past him, slipping her arm through her friend’s. From behind, they’re identical.

  * * *

  —

  So there is no tiger, no terror, no crisis to avert what Lucy’s dreaded
all week long. Right on schedule the train comes ripping. Its whistle pierces the station. Track trembles, cottonwoods shedding loose leaves. Anna says something the wheels drown out.

  Lucy mouths the words she hopes to hear: I’ve decided not to get married.

  What? she sees Anna say as the smell of chicken shit enters the station.

  A part of Lucy stays on the platform where a freight car halts, feathers puffing from between its slats. Another part staggers back into a dim shack at the edge of a valley. She feels Anna propping her up, asking if she’s unwell.

  Lucy swallows back bile. I’m quite well, excepting this train reminds me of living in a hen coop. Likely the shit got in my food and bed. “I’m only thirsty.”

  Anna offers to call a carriage. Today even that kindness is souring, spoiling in the summer heat. Summer is Lucy’s least favorite season. How heavy it drags. How damp. After five years in this town, a longing still fills her for the clear-cut world of two seasons only: dry or wet. She stands, brushing Anna off. Says she’ll walk back alone.

  “You can’t!” Anna cries. “Sweetheart, the tiger. I won’t do a thing except worry if you leave. You shouldn’t—you can’t—”

  It’s too hot to protest, and pointless anyhow, as Anna will get her way. Lucy sits. “Look. Here. I’ll wait right on this bench.” She resists a strange compulsion to purr.

  * * *

  —

  In that thronged station, Anna manages to be first at the train door when it opens.

  Charles’s light hair is a fit to Anna’s dark curls, his chin a fit to the top of her head, his gold watch a fit to her gold rings, his hired man a fit to hers. Most of all they fit in how they stand. At the center, unconcerned with the passengers forced to step around, unconcerned with tucking in their elbows, shrinking the circle of their feet. Anna throws her head back all the way in laughter, and a woman jumps away from the swing of those curls—which are doused, Lucy knows, with rose water.

  Soon it’s just Anna and Charles talking on the empty platform, and their hired men, and Lucy. Time creeps. Sun slants over the bench. The creases of Lucy’s dress grow limp with sweat.

  A last, lone cart drives into the station. The butcher’s boy has come for his chickens. Red-faced, collar askew, he stands too close to Lucy as he struggles with the freight car’s door. She edges away, intending to unpair herself—and then the door slams open. A gritty wind swallows her dress.

  Down the platform, Charles’s hand has fallen to Anna’s waist. Neither notices the commotion.

  Lucy beats at herself, but it’s too late. Dirt and sweat mix into a muddy paste that clings to white fabric, dirtying her dress as, earlier, she imagined Anna’s dress dirtied. She must look as filthy as the butcher’s boy. Anna’s voice carries on, and on, and when Lucy leaves, only the hired men take notice.

  Water

  It’s a swollen orange sunset by the time Lucy wades into the river.

  Rumor has emptied the banks. No one around to see as she damps her skirts, pauses. As, very carefully, she contorts herself to undo all thirty pearl buttons. She floats naked beside her dress. The water rushes over flesh and fabric alike, dispassionate in its cleansing.

  If Anna is her second friend in Sweetwater, the river is her first.

  Five years ago she first crossed into town. Carts banged into her, a crowd spun her round. She was lost. The sky no help—look up as she’d learned to do in the hills, and buildings crowded her view. Clouds didn’t circle. She was the center of nothing and the land didn’t speak. She was no one.

  She found her way to a restaurant kitchen. A relief in what she knew: greasy dishes, low ceiling, ache in her bent neck. Three other girls stood at the sink. One pale, two dark. Lucy murmured: An orphan. Left. Don’t know. No one. The pale girl lost interest. The dark girls were persistent, whispering together till they approached Lucy in the alley.

  “Who are you?” the taller asked.

  “An orphan.”

  “No,” said the shorter, stepping closer. Lucy looked them full in the face: Indian, most like. There were a number of Indians, people of all stripes, in Sweetwater’s streets. “Who are your people?” The short girl pressed a hand to her chest, spoke the name of her tribe.

  Another long-ago name, spoken to her in a loft, whirled across Lucy’s memory, broke apart like dust. This is the right word. Gone. Taste of her own dry tongue. If she’d had a people, she could no longer name them. The taller Indian girl put her hand on her chest, too, and Lucy realized that the two must be sisters.

  The girls kept looking at Lucy, kept asking, kept inviting her to share their strange, wrapped lunches. Kept pestering till one day Lucy turned and said something about skin. About water. About filth.

  The Indian girls never spoke to her again. Lick of shame, consuming, then an emptiness that she learned to see as lightness. Deliberately this time, she let the name of the girls’ people drop between the gaps in her memory, gone where her own name had gone. At least they left her alone.

  She wasn’t completely alone, not yet. Noon and night she returned to the river with kitchen scraps that Sam wrinkled a nose at. Sam offered those two silver dollars, Lucy pretending deafness till the offering stopped. Other talk stopped too. Sam grew more picky, more fidgety, more absent. Gone for hours, Sam acquired food some other way.

  Finally came the trade fair the mountain man had spoken of. Cowboys and trappers and cattlemen, games and shows, blew through Sweetwater like weather. When the fair lifted away, Sam was gone too—and Nellie.

  For a week more, Lucy waited alone with the river. So clear up top. So much rubble at its bottom. At last she threw her belongings—threadbare, dented, tattered and mean, sun-stained and stinking of the long road from the Western territory—into the water. She moved with just the dress on her back into a boardinghouse.

  Her first year, she scanned Sweetwater’s crowds. Thousands of faces, more types than she’d seen before. None familiar.

  Her second year she quit seeking disappointment, hurried head-down through the streets. Sometimes voices called. Never those she knew. Men, mostly, and mostly at night.

  Her third year she said Orphan, Left, No one so often the words made a lacquer over the truth. A blank story to suit this town where she learned what civilization properly meant: no danger, no adventure, no uncertainty in a place so bled of wildness that a false tiger could be an event.

  Three years of suds, wrinkled hands, cobbles, neat corners, green leaves then brown leaves then no leaves then green again, sharp-creased dresses, coins slid over the grocer’s counter, white curtains, starched sheets, salt, sweet water, heavy air, streetlamps, cricked neck, dish suds turned to laundry suds, a new job at the hotel with higher pay, the Indian girls left behind in the kitchen where Lucy heard they were indentured to work eight years more to pay a debt, salt, sweet water, aching hands, air so hard to breathe, glint of fork and knife at a table set for one, and no touch on her own skin but for the touch of river water.

  And then at the start of the fourth year, Lucy met Anna by the river.

  “What are you doing with that?” a voice asked that day from behind. A hand shot over Lucy’s shoulder, pointing at the stick in Lucy’s hand. A strange girl stepped forward on the riverbank. She held a dowsing rod just like Lucy’s.

  “I’m Anna,” she said. Her voice broke the solitude.

  Up till then Lucy had come to the river alone. On days off she swam, or scrubbed her skin, or searched the water for glimpses of her own face: slash of cheek, wing of hair, an eye’s narrow line. She picked up objects—long gray rocks, pebbles black as bullets, a branch forked into a Y like a dowsing rod—and held them to her ear as if they might speak to her as no one did.

  And then, Anna.

  I hear it’ll rain tomorrow.

  I like your hair.

  I like your freckles.

  Will you teac
h me to swim like that?

  How old are you?

  Sixteen.

  Me too.

  Lucy came to suspect that her new friend, too, had something to hide. They never spoke of the past. Anna had interest only in the future. A train she wanted to ride, a dress she wanted made, a fruit she wanted to eat come autumn. Life as a bloom of possibilities, just waiting for to ripen.

  One Sunday the bank was white with frost and Anna carried three of the autumn apples she’d talked about for weeks—so red that Lucy’s eyes smarted. Anna spun her dowsing rod in rare silence, then said, “My father was a prospector.”

  Lucy’s mouth was full of juice. Sweetness loosed her tongue. “Mine too.”

  To her surprise Anna didn’t let the words lie between them as usual. “I knew it,” she said, gripping Lucy’s hands. Lucy tried to slide back. Tried to divine what the girl knew, and how. The gun, the bank, the jackal-men? “I knew you were the same as me. Papa said not to tell people, he said I’m too naïve, he doesn’t like when I come here without my hired man—but I knew I could trust you. The moment I saw you, I knew. We’re going to be the very best of friends.”

  * * *

  —

  Anna is a prospector’s daughter, but there the likeness ends. Because when Anna’s father took gold from these hills, he kept it. He has deeds to prove his claim, and men who work under him. He hoarded mines, hotels, stores, trains, a house in Sweetwater far from the hills he’d emptied of riches, a daughter.

  Fool’s gold is a thing Lucy learns of in Sweetwater. A cheap stone, it deceives the untrained eye. Fool’s gold has become a saying about that which imitates truth. Prospector’s daughter Anna may be, but she looked at Lucy and was deceived.

  Lucy amended her lie. An orphan. Don’t know. No one. But I suspect my father was a prospector. Anna forgave. Anna forgives easy, laughs easy, cries so easy that Lucy, who does none of this easy, who has packed so tight the grave of her girlhood that little feeling trembles through, marvels. And still Anna insists, We’re just the same, deep down.