by C Pam Zhang
“Or—Ma, what if we went East instead? Teacher Leigh says there’s better schools there. It’s civilized. And I’ve already learned some of the books . . .”
Lightning flashes. Once, twice in quick succession. When it passes, Lucy blinks dazzled eyes. The room is left dimmer, as Ma’s face is dimmer. Gone the anger. What remains is the sadness that stalks Ma’s beauty. The ache of her.
“It’s got its claws in you,” Ma says. Her fingers dig into Lucy’s hand. “This land’s claimed you and your sister both, shi ma?”
That’s what Ba says. The jackals and their law say different. How’s Lucy to know when she’s never lived any other place? She can’t answer.
“You’re hurting me, Ma.” Ma’s hand is smaller than Ba’s. Delicate when gloved. But its grip is stronger. “You’re hurting me!”
“Ni ji de, what you said when we went to visit your teacher?” Ma lets go of Lucy. She squeezes the pouch inside her dress. Though it must be empty now, though the jackals found nothing inside, Ma seems to draw from it some comfort. “You wanted to go alone. You said, you didn’t need—” Ma’s voice breaks. She brushes Lucy’s cheek. A touch so familiar that Lucy can, and will for years, call it up by closing her eyes. Ma holds Lucy a long moment, then lets go. They hear thudding from the toolshed.
“Go help Sam,” Ma says. “Li kai wo, nu er.”
Those are the last words she speaks to Lucy.
* * *
—
By the time Ba returns without the doctor, Ma has lost all words. Lucy and Sam kneel by the mattress, dampened with sweat and strange water, but Ma doesn’t see them.
Ba roars. He drags Lucy and Sam out to the shed and tells them to stay put. They fall asleep entangled for warmth. The wind shrieks through their dreams, and Ma—
They wake to an impossible sun.
Lucy stands. The roof of the shed is missing. Below, the valley has birthed a lake. Gone the creek, gone the other miners’ shacks. On the South side only roofs poke up. People huddle atop. Their shack, cut off from the rest, pushed to the edge of the valley on undesirable land, is the only place untouched.
And then Ba is striding over, reaching down for them. His chest: a red smell. Mud, and blood.
“The baby was born dead. I buried him. And your ma—”
Lucy opens her mouth. This time Ba doesn’t call her da zui. Doesn’t tell her to hush. He claps a hand to her lips. Both of them go still as the lake water. His calluses scrape her teeth.
“Not another word. None of your damn questions. Ting wo?”
Ba leads them to the edge of the lake. His hands are hard as he pushes them into the water. There is panic on Sam’s face, a foamed thrashing. Lucy floats easily; she is hollow. She helps Sam. Ba isn’t watching either of them. He himself stays under the water a long, long time, teaching some kind of lesson. About survival, most like. Or fear. Or waiting. He won’t ever say.
The Ba that surfaces at last, wet sluicing off him, is a different man. Lucy won’t quite grasp it for a few weeks more, when the fists come out.
* * *
—
What they lose in that three-day storm:
The roof of the shed.
The dresses.
The baby.
The medicines.
The three storybooks.
Ba’s laugh.
Ba’s hope.
The prospecting tools.
The gold in the house.
The gold in the hills.
All talk of gold.
Ma.
And though they don’t know it for years, they lose Sam’s girlhood. Swept out, scoured clean. Disappeared the way Ma’s body disappeared. The Sam who swims out of the lake doesn’t wring that long hair dry, doesn’t brush it a hundred careful strokes. Sam cuts it. Mourning, Sam says, though Sam’s eyes glitter. The washed-clean sun fierce off Sam’s shorn head. One brother lost, another gained: that’s the night that Sam is born.
PART THREE
XX42/XX62
Wind Wind Wind Wind Wind
Lucy girl.
Sun’s sinking down these hills and here you are sinking too. I know the sort of bone-deep tired you and Sam must feel these days as you run. I know what it is to flee with your past panting behind, claws extending in the dark. I’m not a cruel man, whatever you think.
Lucy girl, there were plenty of times I wanted to give you a soft, easy life. But if I did, the world would gnaw you down like these buffalo bones.
Night’s the only time I got now, and this wind the only sort of voice. I have your ear till sunup. It’s not too late, yet.
Lucy girl, there’s only one story worth telling now.
* * *
—
Every soul in this territory knows the year a man pulled gold from the river and the whole country drew up into itself, took a breath that blew wagons out across the West. All your life you heard people say the story starts in ’48. And all your life when people told you this story, did you ever question why?
They told it to shut you out. They told it to claim it, to make it theirs and not yours. They told it to say we came too late. Thieves, they called us. They said this land could never be our land.
I know you like things written down and read out by schoolteachers. I know you like what’s neat and pretty. But it’s high time you heard the truth story, and if it hurts—well, at least you’ll be tougher for it.
So listen. Tell yourself it’s the wind in your ear if you must, but I reckon these nights belong to me till you bury that body of mine.
That history in your books is plain lie. Gold wasn’t found by a man, but by a boy the same age as you. Twelve. And it wasn’t found in ’48 but back in ’42. I know because it was me that found it.
* * *
—
Well, it was properly Billy that touched gold first. Billy was my best friend, a grown man of forty or so, though it was hard to say and he sure wasn’t saying. People today’d call him mutt: his ma was Indian and his ba one of those small, dark vaqueros come from across the Southern desert. They left Billy with two names—one most people couldn’t pronounce, and one most could—plus skin the color of fresh-peeled manzanita bark. His arm shone in the river as he tickled a fish.
Something flashed against Billy’s dark red, brighter than scales. I shouted.
What Billy handed me was a pretty yellow rock. Too pliable to be of use, and me too old for trinkets. I let it fall back through my fingers. It caught the sun as it tumbled, a shard of light that lodged in my eye. For minutes after, I saw spots across the hills.
I swear that gold winked at me, like it knew what I didn’t.
This was the year of ’42, though the camp where I grew up didn’t call it ’42. Just as we didn’t call our hills the West. West of where? It was just our land, and we were just people. We ranged between ocean to one side, mountains to the other.
The camp I grew up in was full of Billys. By which I mean old men, quiet, many with more than one name. They didn’t like to talk of the past. Best that I could piece together, they were the remnants of three or maybe four tribes now jumbled up, old men and cripples too stubborn or tired to leave when the rest did for better hunting grounds. There’d been a priest when many of them were boys, who’d given them new names—and a pox that killed half their people. The priest had also given them a common language, which they taught me. That camp was all outcasts and stragglers, what your Ma considered the wrong kind of company. And sure there wasn’t a clean handkerchief among them, but there was kindness, or at least a kind of weariness that looked nearly the same. Too many had seen destruction.
Still, the hills were good for plenty when I grew up. Poppies in the wet season, fat rabbits in the dry. Manzanita berries and wild sorrel, miner’s lettuce, and the paw prints of wolves in streambeds. Never a shortage of green. As to how I got th
ere—I knew as little about myself as about the old men. They’d found me on a foraging trip down the coast: a newborn, hours old, crying alone, my ma and ba dead beside me. Saltwater stains on their clothes.
I asked Billy, once, how he knew it was my ma and ba on account of their being dead, and the dead not speaking. He touched my eyes. Then touched the edges of his own and pulled them out till they narrowed.
Here’s the thing, Lucy girl: like you I never grew up among people who looked like me. But that’s no excuse, and don’t you use it. If I had a ba, then he was the sun that warmed me most days and beat me sweaty-sore on others; if I had a ma, then she was the grass that held me when I lay down and slept. I grew up in these hills and they raised me: the streams and rock shelves, the valleys where scrub oaks bunched so thick they seemed one mass but allowed me, skinny and swift, to slip between trunks and pierce the hollow center where branches knit a green ceiling. If I had a people, then I saw those people in the reflecting pools, where water was so clear it showed a world the exact double of this one: another set of hills and sky, another boy looking back with my same eyes. I grew up knowing I belonged to this land, Lucy girl. You and Sam do too, never mind how you look. Don’t you let any man with a history book tell you different.
* * *
—
But I’m getting carried away. No need linger on the pretty stories, the kind I’ve always fed you because you were a child.
Well, things are different now. You thought me hard? You see the truth of it: the world’s a good deal harder. It ain’t fair, but you and Sam won’t get years for growing. Just maybe these nights. Just maybe what I can tell you.
Years went by and I hardly remembered that yellow rock. Until a day in ’49 when we woke up to a boom, then dust clouds, then the river by our camp running brown, running black. We woke up to wagons of men, and trees coming down while buildings went up. The old men in my camp turned their backs till it was too late. Till there was nothing to fish or hunt or eat. They slipped away rather than fight. Some went South, some over the mountains, some to cool grass wallows to wait for death. Too much destruction, you see.
Billy alone stayed with me. And just like in ’42, we waded looking for gold.
Too late, though. The easy gold was picked clean. What remained required whole teams of men, and carts of dynamite. We got jobs washing dishes, sweeping the saloon. Helped that Billy had taught me writing.
Seemed I woke up in ’49 and all my dreams were of gold: the wink of it slipping through my fingers seven years back. I panned when I could. Found a few flecks amounting to nothing.
I saw how hard the gold men worked their miners. Men lost legs to dynamite, got crushed by rock. Men shot each other, stole and stabbed, starved in lean weeks. Dozens of ’em turned around each month and headed back East. But hundreds replaced them. And a few struck it rich, became gold men themselves.
There came a night in ’50 when the gold man who owned the biggest mines—the fattest and richest of the lot—called across the saloon.
“You. Come here. No, not you. You, boy—with the funny eyes.”
Billy wouldn’t come along. I kept going.
“Are those eyes real, boy? Or you some kind of half-wit?”
Up close I saw that the gold man, for all his fatness, wasn’t so much older than me. I told him I was no half-wit, kept my fists behind my back. I’d learned that year about talking with fists instead of words when people looked at me funny. It saved me repeating myself. But the gold man wasn’t alone. A hired man in black stood behind him with a gun.
“And you write? You read? Don’t lie to me.”
I told him Billy had taught me. Called Billy over, but the gold man didn’t even look at him. The gold man said he had a job for me. Young and soft that I was, I didn’t think to ask why he chose me. Let that be a lesson to you, Lucy girl. Always ask why. Always know what part of you they want.
The gold man explained that there would come a time when the hills were scraped empty. When men would bring families to settle. They’d need supplies. Houses. Food. The gold man planned to lay railroad track through the West, joining plains to ocean. For that he needed cheap labor. And he’d gotten a whole shipful of it.
Sure, I told him, I could go to the coast and train his workers. Sure, I could talk to them on his behalf.
Truth is, I hardly understood half of what the gold man said. I’d never seen a train, didn’t know the ocean route he spoke of, or where the workers came from. But I understood his power. I didn’t ask questions. He had a gold watch the size of my palm that he flicked as he talked. He was fat enough that I could cling like a tick to his wealth. Through him I could claim what had slipped from my fingers as a boy, what was always mine—didn’t me and Billy touch gold first?
I asked for Billy to come along too. I told that gold man about Billy’s loyalty and his circumspection, his strong arms and his tracker’s knowledge. I had the gold man near convinced, I could tell—but it was Billy himself who ruined his chance. Billy said he’d rather stay behind.
I never properly got an answer why. Billy wasn’t big on talking. All he said was he was staying. That it was better for me to go on alone. When I asked why, he touched my eyes. I never saw him after that night.
Lucy girl, I told you. I learned a long time back: family comes first. No one else matters.
* * *
—
Two of the gold man’s hired men rode along with me to meet the ship. That was my first horse, Lucy girl, and I pretended I knew what riding was. Bled for days till I hardened.
Wagonloads of railroad track set out behind us, going slower. They’d meet us at the coast after some weeks. The gold man said I was to teach the two hundred while we waited. I didn’t ask what I was meant to teach.
The hired men wore black and spoke mostly to each other. They camped a distance away at night and never invited me to join, not that I cared—I liked my solitary bed. I hardly recall those two weeks of travel to the coast; all I saw was the wealth in my future. My eyes were so dazzled, it took me a moment to see what came off that ship:
Two hundred people who looked like me.
Eyes the shape of mine, noses like mine, hair like mine. Men and women and some hardly more’n kids, dragging their trunks and bags, wearing funny robes. I started to count them.
And then I saw your ma.
You know your ma. So I won’t say how she looked. What I’ll tell you is the feeling that welled up in me as she passed, a feeling akin to striking groundwater when you’ve wandered hot all day and thirst is a knife at your throat. That promise of quenching to come. Same feeling I expect you had as a girl after playing all day in the grass, arriving home to a plate of dinner kept warm. That feeling of knowing someone will call your name—that’s the feeling I got when your ma met my eyes. I knew I was almost home.
I kept my head screwed tight and kept counting. Got to a hundred and ninety-three people before they quit coming. The two hired men looked at me; I looked at a sailor. The sailor went in and pushed six more onto the dock. Said one died on the way over.
The last six were ancient, bent like trees. God knows what work the gold man expected to get out of them. One fell on the gangplank. And guess who ran to help the old woman up?
That’s right. Your ma.
Your ma looked right at me. Under her gaze, I got a sailor to load the six into a wagon along with the trunks and satchels the two hundred had brought. I nudged the sailor along with a coin from the wallet the gold man had given me for buying supplies.
They tried to load your ma onto the wagon too, but she walked with the others. When the two hired men mounted up, I got down and walked too.
* * *
—
Lucy girl, you always thought it was your old ba pushing the family, wanting more. But the push came first from your ma. Because that day of the ship, she saw me wrong. She
mistook me for the gold man who ordered other men around. She mistook me for someone who’d paid for a ship and jobs. She mistook me for something bigger than myself. By the time I understood what your ma believed, it was too late to correct her.
That first night, I learned we didn’t speak the same language.
The gold man had found a barn for the two hundred to stay in. I stood first watch outside and heard them jabbering in confusion. Some of them pounded on the door, angry, and yelled at me through the cracks. Maybe they hadn’t expected locks, or straw beds.
The two hired men were already camped way down on the beach, but they came over on account of the commotion.
“What’s the matter with them?” the taller of the hired men asked. “Tell ’em to settle down.”
I was younger than him, and had two good legs back then. I could’ve knocked him down. But he had a gun, and I didn’t.
“Do your job,” he said. “The one you’re paid for.”
That cleared the red from my eyes. I swallowed my questions. I told not a soul that I didn’t understand what the two hundred spoke. I tucked that secret down deep, deep, in the same soft spot where I was once a boy so stupid I let gold slip between my fingers.
I went inside the barn and rang a cowbell.
You know what makes a good teacher, Lucy girl? Not nice words or pretty clothes. A good teacher is a firm teacher. Ting wo. The first lesson I taught was that they couldn’t use the words they’d brought over. Not here. The first man to speak, I clapped a hand across his jaw. Held it shut. You need force to accomplish anything, Lucy girl.
Mouth, I said, pointing. Hand, I said, pointing. No, I said. Quiet, I said. And we began.
* * *
—
That first night: Teacher. Speak. Barn. Straw. Sleep. Corn. No. No. No.