How Much of These Hills Is Gold

by C Pam Zhang

  The men only laugh louder. Chink! they bay from half a hundred throats. The hills echo with the sound, till the land itself is laughing.

  Ba in anger, eyes squinted, is to them only funny.

  Ba sweeps the coins from the table and walks away. His gait is wild, his bad leg swinging far to the side. Yet Lucy can hardly keep up. It could even be said that Ba runs.

  * * *

  —

  “Mei guan xi,” Ba says when he hands the coins to Ma. “Next payday we’ll have enough for steaks. Salt and candy. Seeds for the garden. And sturdy boots for the girls. Mark my words. I promise.”

  Far from the mine, far from the hooting miners, Ba’s voice in the shack is overloud. Past promises layer his words as grit layers their walls.

  Ma says, quietly, “The baby.”

  The baby’s got six months of growing, yet this stops Ba cold. He stares down at the coins, and when he looks up there’s an old glint in his eye. “I know I promised I wouldn’t gamble, qin ai de, but I swear I feel the luck. Here more than ever. If I took just a few coins—”

  Ma shakes her head. “The mule. The wagon.”

  Ba loves that old wagon, which he coddles like a living thing. At each stop he paints the wheels afresh. This is freedom, he likes to say. With this, we can go anywhere. Now his face reddens.

  Ma touches her belly. “For the baby.”

  Wordless, Ba slams out the door. They hear the grind of wheels, the mule’s clop, departing. At the last moment Sam rushes out too.

  * * *

  —

  Selling the wagon buys meat—of a sort. Enough for the butcher’s leavings, those scraps still ragged with gristle and bone. Ma stews them for hours, the house ever-thick with cooking.

  What others don’t want comes cheap. Pigs’ feet cooked to jelly, vertebrae that Ma sucks clean and spits, clattering, to her plate. Ma resumes her place at the table and sits longer than the rest. For hours each night she peels meat from bone and fills the house with gnawing. A crack splits the air and Lucy looks up, half in terror and half in fascination. Expecting Ma’s smile cracked too.

  “Why are we eating this?” Lucy complains.

  “The baby,” Ma says, and Lucy imagines tiny teeth chattering beneath Ma’s dress. “The more meat he eats, the more meat he’ll grow. Yi ding make him strong.”

  “But why do all of us have to?” Lucy says, knowing she pushes her luck. As expected, Ba tells her to shut her big mouth.

  Sam, usually stubborn, swallows down two plates without comment.

  Ma’s face smooths. Her hollows fill. She recommences her chores. The house becomes, if not clean, then no longer dirty. Now it’s Ma who sweeps twice a day, Ma who goes to the store and haggles. Ma with her voice to make shopkeepers shave a few cents from a bill, or wrap up an extra trotter with a wink.

  And Ma recommences to brush Sam’s hair when she brushes her own. A hundred strokes each night, untangling what Sam tangled in those few weeks of wandering. Neatened once more, bound by braids and bonnet, Sam no longer runs free all day. Sam grows prettier at Ma’s feet, and quieter too.

  Not so the baby. Mouthless, the baby speaks with Ma’s borrowed voice. The baby can silence Ba, stop Lucy’s questions, make Sam go sullen. What the baby demands, he gets.

  “Look at him eat,” Ba says in admiration one night. Ma smiles a smile distended around a chicken neck. Yet Ba stares as if he’s never seen lovelier. “He’ll be as strong as three men.”

  “Dui,” Ma says. “If we feed him right.” She spits her mouthful of chewed-up bone. “This isn’t enough. Ying gai red meat. Not just bone.”

  “I got a plan,” Ba says, as usual. But he mumbles it, shamefaced, instead of shouting.

  That night he leaves earlier than usual for his woodcutting job. Ma kisses him goodbye without rising from the table. She’s fixed on the last film of stew in the pot, the scrape and whine of her spoon setting Lucy’s teeth on edge. Ma doesn’t offer a bite to Sam or Lucy, as she once would have. Lucy asks if the baby isn’t selfish. After all, she and Sam didn’t make Ma sick. Ma laughs and laughs at the question. Explains, very gently, that boys are expected to raise a fuss.

  * * *

  —

  Ba’s late nights stretch later. He yawns through mine shifts. Each morning, half-asleep, his feet rise and fall through the blue-soaked hills in a driving rhythm: The baby. The baby.

  On the morning of the next payday, Ba still hasn’t returned. A tense breakfast, the three of them staring out the propped-open door at the empty stretch of field, the other miners’ shacks, the creek, the South side beyond. Ma’s eyes tick steadily to the pistol Ba forgot to take last night, left heavy on its hook.

  Ba returns from an unexpected direction, swinging from behind the house with a clink and a clatter. He throws a bulging pouch on the table.

  “Where—” Ma says.

  “Payday. I collected early.” Ba’s voice swells with pride like the pouch’s seams. “Didn’t I promise you, qin ai de?”

  “It can’t be,” Ma says. “Zen me ke neng?” But the truth spills free. Coins lie hard and weighty in her counting hands. She smiles. Ba flicks up his fingers, as the mine boss did, and explains. The house, the tools, the lantern—all paid for last time.

  “Nu er,” Ma says to Lucy, some of that coin-shine in her face too. “No more mines. Tomorrow, you and Sam go to school.”

  * * *

  —

  There are new dresses laid out in the morning. Lucy reaches for the red one, but Ma nudges her to the green.

  “This suits you,” Ma says, pulling Lucy to the tin mirror. Lucy stares, unblinking, into her own long face, made longer by the warped metal. “Like school will suit you. That teacher will see your true value.”

  Lucy thinks of her one-eighth wages. “Even if I’m not a boy?”

  Most times Ma’s voice is banked fire, cozy. Now its crackle rises. “Nu er, I don’t want to hear that self-pity. Rang wo tell you something. When I first came to this territory, I had nothing except . . .” Ma looks down at her hands. She’s careful to wear gloves outside the house, but here her skin is exposed. Roughened by callus, flecked blue by coal. “Girls have power too. Beauty is a weapon. And you—”

  Above them, Sam’s feet hit the ladder. Ma lowers her voice, puts her forehead against Lucy’s. “Not the kind of weapons your sister plays with. Help me out, Lucy girl. Sam’s . . . different. Ni zhi dao. Family comes first. Keep an eye on her.”

  As if Lucy ever needed reminding. Truth is, her eye can’t help but follow Sam, who strides out of the house in the red dress that calls gold to the surface of Sam’s brown skin. All eyes follow Sam. Though they hold hands across the creek and down the main street, gazes skitter past Lucy, straight to Sam.

  What is it about Sam? Lucy has long studied her sister, trying to see what strangers see. That bold gaze swinging round, limbs in perpetual motion. Like a wild creature, Sam holds the promise of movement. People watch for the sheer pleasure of seeing what shape Sam will cut through the grass.

  * * *

  —

  The schoolhouse appears as a cool white beacon. But first there’s the expanse of yard to cross, no shelter apart from a dead oak. Little boys’ eyes blink from its leafless branches, bigger boys peer from spots against the trunk. And in the grass, among the curves and wriggles of the tree’s reaching shadows, sit rings of girls. Their eyes glint hardest.

  Lucy steps smaller and smaller, slower and slower, as if she could disappear like a rabbit into tall grass. The others, miners’ children all, wear faded calico and gingham. Ma’s good dresses are a brand. Lucy lets go of Sam’s hand, crossing her arms over the rich embroidery on her chest. Stand tall, Ma says. Speak up. How often has Lucy seen Ma pry silence open with her voice?

  “Good morning,” Lucy says.

  But Lucy isn’t Ma. A few eyes blink incuriou
sly. A boy laughs in the tree.

  One of the girls steps forward. Other girls match her pace as geese trail their leader in a flock. The lead girl has beady eyes and unruly red curls.

  “This is nice,” she says, tugging the sleeve of Lucy’s dress, and then Sam’s. Girls swarm at that signal, stroking the embroidery, the ribbon in Lucy’s hair, speculating among themselves how much each yard of fabric cost. The questions aren’t directed at Lucy, exactly, but they flow easy around her. She tries to answer—It’s brocade. Thank you. Thank you, thank you, even to those comments she isn’t sure are kindly meant. Her voice goes quieter. These girls don’t wait for her to answer. They don’t need her to speak. She sees a way forward and through them, maybe—a new, silent way.

  Through the press of bodies, Lucy gives Sam an uncertain smile.

  Sam is holding still for the moment, but impatience begins to twitch Sam’s mouth. Let them, Lucy begs silently. Please let them do this. It isn’t so bad. Now the girls are admiring Sam herself. Her skin looks like brown sugar, don’t you think? I dare you to lick it. Look at her nose! Like a doll. And that hair—

  The first girl, the redhead, grabs Sam’s glossy, half-loosed hair. “Pretty,” the redhead croons, her own hair a frizz around her head. She lifts Sam’s braid to her nose to sniff.

  Two quick smacks ring through the courtyard. The redhead is left empty-handed, mouth hung foolishly open. Once set in motion, Sam can’t seem to stop. Sam slaps and shoos the whole flock away, birdlike shrieks rising. Soon Sam stands alone.

  “You all talk too much,” Sam says.

  A shifting in the yard. Like water on the first cold day of the year, what flowed through to greet them now begins to freeze. There’s a moment when Sam could apologize—when Lucy could. But Lucy’s tongue is thick and clumsy. “You idiot,” she says under her breath. “You idiot, Sam.”

  “It’s just dumb hair,” Sam says scornfully, and tosses it over her shoulder.

  A girl steps forward and spits. Misses. Saliva runs off Sam’s shiny skirt, leaving the red that much deeper. The next girls don’t make that mistake. The next girls use fingers, and nails.

  * * *

  —

  School seems little different from the mine. The mockery, the bruises on Lucy’s skin, the weight of so many gazes like the press of the underground dark—and even that same taunt Lucy heard on payday, passed down by miners to their children.

  No difference until the bell rings and they enter the schoolhouse.

  The order makes Lucy’s heart ache. Desks, chairs, planks, chalkboard, maps—all fall in perfect lines. A clean room, airy. No sign of the territory’s persistent dust. Real glass windows line the front, so that the first few rows look washed in butter. Kids sit two to a desk, leaving the very first and the very last empty. Lucy and Sam stand at the back till the teacher enters.

  He came, it’s said, on the long, hard trail from the East. But his thin white shirt would soil in minutes of travel, and his gold buttons would be lost or stolen. His is a costume absurd for trail or mine, possible only in this spotless place that he walks, greeting students by name. The girls who spat and pulled now beam at him with hands folded. Changed by his regard. He stops for a full minute to speak to one boy, who flushes at the attention. At the end of that talk, the teacher sends the boy to the very first, unoccupied desk.

  It’s a victory march. Lucy watches, along with everyone else, the pride that lengthens the boy’s gait.

  When the teacher arrives at Lucy and Sam, he rocks back on boots as polished as the planks. “I’ve heard of you two. I hoped to see you here one day. Welcome to my schoolhouse, which draws the border of civilization a little farther West. You may call me Teacher Leigh. And where do you come from?”

  Lucy falters, takes heart from the teacher’s kind gaze. She describes the trail they took from the last mine, but the teacher shakes his head.

  “Where are you really from, child? I’ve written at length about this territory, and never encountered your like.”

  “We were born here,” Sam says, mulish.

  Lucy says, guessing, “Our ma said we come from beyond the ocean.”

  The teacher smiles. He seats them at the backmost desk and lays a book before them. It’s so new he must push the pages flat, and Lucy can’t help it—bends to the pages to breathe in the ink.

  When she lifts up, the teacher says, very gently, “This isn’t for smelling or eating. This is called reading.” He points to the alphabet that marches in letters half the size of his hand.

  Lucy colors. She reads those letters, and the ones in the next book, and the words in the next one, and the next, the books getting thicker and the print smaller. Finally the teacher borrows the book from the boy at the first desk. He claps after Lucy reads a full page, sounding out those words she doesn’t recognize. A roomful of eyes look back.

  “Who taught you?”

  “Our ma.”

  “She must be a very special woman. You’ll introduce me one day. Tell me, Lucy, what would you most like to learn?”

  No one has ever asked that question. Lucy’s mind stumbles with the enormity of it. Inside that neat, closed schoolhouse she thinks all of a sudden of the open hills, their endless wander. Ba’s bidding comes to her: Don’t be afeared. How many books can there be? She hadn’t dared imagine till now. Then she remembers the word.

  “History,” she says.

  The teacher smiles. “‘He who writes the past writes the future too.’ Do you know who said that?” He bows. “I did. I’m a historian myself, and may require your assistance in my newest monograph. What about you, Samantha? Are you a reader too?”

  Sam glares. Doesn’t answer. Silence simmers off Sam’s brown skin, stirred thicker by every question, till at last the teacher gives up. He leaves Sam in the back and offers his hand to Lucy. Down the aisle she steps, all eyes watching—Sam’s eyes too. She crosses into the sunshine that falls square on the first desk, and the boy sitting there hunches his shoulders high, as if to block the sight of her. But here he can’t help seeing her. None of them can. He slides over. Makes room for Lucy.

  * * *

  —

  “He says we’re gifted,” Lucy announces that night, pushing steak around her plate. Ma cooked up a special dinner, but Lucy is too occupied with telling to chew. She doesn’t mention that the teacher said that only to Lucy. She doesn’t mention the schoolyard, or Sam’s silence in the back of the room. “He wants to meet you, Ma. He said you must be brilliant too.” Ma pauses with her hand on the ladle. Goes faintly pink. “He wants to meet all of us. And he wants to give me special lessons. He said there’s people back East who’ll want to hear about me, and maybe I could go with him the next time he talks to—”

  “I don’t like this,” Ba says. He, too, has left his steak untouched. He grimaces at the char. “What’s this teacher doing fishing around?”

  “He’s writing a history,” Lucy says, as Sam says, “Nosy.”

  “I don’t see what’s so bad about the girls asking where they come from,” Ma says. “Gao su wo, what else did the teacher say?”

  “We can teach the girls,” Ba says. “Not some stranger with his lies. Fei hua. I’ve half a mind to stop this.”

  They weren’t lies, though. They were histories, set in ink. Lucy’s hands still harbor that scent. Even the chicken shit fades in comparison.

  “They’ll learn,” Ma says, “how to be something other than coal miners.”

  Silence pools through the room. In the mine, silence is deadlier than quake or fire. It precedes a fatal gas, invisible and scentless, its only sign this hush.

  “We’re not miners,” Ba says.

  Ma laughs. Her throat crackles with danger.

  “We’re—” Ba stops himself. The word he reaches for can’t be said. It was banished from their family two years back, when Ma insisted on a differ
ent way of living. Ba doesn’t say it, but they four feel its weight. You just feel it, Ba explained many years ago when he first taught Lucy to dowse. When he could still call himself a prospector.

  “Then what do you call what we do?” Ma says, standing. “People who live zhe yang? In this kind of place?”

  Ma draws her foot back and kicks the floor. No ring of boot on planks. Just a heavy sort of sigh. Dust blooms up, grit scattering over the steaks. Lucy starts to cough. Sam too. And still Ma kicks till the room is a haze, till Ba seizes her from behind.

  “Fa feng le,” he pants, lifting Ma so that her feet kick the air. “Mining’s what we do for now. Not who we are.” He lowers Ma cautiously, then reaches for her belly. “We’re saving up. Remember? I promised.”

  “Time with this teacher is a kind of saving up too. Not like what you do, gambling at those dirty camps. Don’t think I don’t know where you sneak off to. Dui bu dui, Lucy girl?” Ma looks sharp at Lucy, as she does when she shares a secret.

  Hesitantly, Lucy nods.

  Ba clenches the fabric at Ma’s belly. Then he lets go. She glides back to her seat, her body parting the dust. Drawing a clean line between Lucy and Ba.

  “The teacher’s stuck-up,” Sam says.

  Ma tsks, but doesn’t object when Ba snorts, when Sam sits in Ba’s lap and whispers. That night Ma is blind to manners, pretending she doesn’t see the grit speckled over the steak, or Sam’s laughing in a spray of half-chewed food. Lucy catches, over and over in Sam and Ba’s whispering, the word plateau.

  * * *

  —

  Ma washes the leftover steak, and fries it, and tucks it between bread for the next day’s lunch. Lucy learns to swallow what scratches: the dust, the schoolyard insults, the spit that runs down her face and into her mouth, Ba’s black moods at any mention of Teacher Leigh. Her big mouth learns another function.