* * *
—
So they steal. Take what they need to flee town. Sam resists at first, stubborn as ever.
“We didn’t hurt nobody,” Sam insists.
Didn’t you mean to, though? Lucy thinks. She says, “They’ll make anything a crime for the likes of us. Make it law if they have to. Don’t you remember?”
Sam’s chin lifts, but Lucy sees hesitation. On this cloudless day they both feel the lash of rain. Remembering when storm howled inside and even Ba could do nothing.
“We can’t wait around,” Lucy says. “Not even to bury.”
Finally, Sam nods.
They crawl to the schoolhouse, bellies in the dirt. Too easy by half to become what others call them: animals, low-down thieves. Lucy sneaks around the building to a spot she knows is blocked from view by the chalkboard. Voices rise inside. Recitation has a rhythm near to holiness, the boom of Teacher Leigh calling and the chorus of students in answer. Almost, almost, Lucy lifts her voice to join.
But it’s been years since she was allowed inside. The desk she occupied holds two new students. Lucy bites her cheek till blood comes and unties Teacher Leigh’s gray mare, Nellie. At the last moment she takes Nellie’s saddlebags too, heavy with horse oats.
Back at their place, Lucy instructs Sam to pack what’s needed from inside. She herself keeps outside, probing the shed and garden. Within: thumps, clangs, the sounds of grief and fury. Lucy doesn’t enter; Sam doesn’t ask for help. An invisible wall came up between them in the bank, when Lucy crawled past Sam to touch the banker with gentle fingers.
Lucy leaves a note on the door for Teacher Leigh. She strains for the grand phrases he taught her years back, as if they could be a proof stronger than the proof of her thievery. She doesn’t manage it. Her handwriting scrawls end to end with Sorrys.
Sam emerges with bedrolls, scant provisions, a pot and pan, and Ma’s old trunk. It drags in the dirt, near as long as a man is tall, those leather latches straining. Lucy can’t guess what mementos Sam packed inside, and they shouldn’t tax the horse—but what’s between them makes her hair prickle. She says nothing. Only hands Sam a wizened carrot, their last bit of sweetness for a while. A peace offering. Sam puts half in Nellie’s mouth, half in a pocket. That kindness heartens Lucy, even if its recipient is a horse.
“Did you say goodbye?” Lucy asks as Sam throws rope over Nellie’s back, ties some slipknots. Sam only grunts, putting a shoulder under the trunk to heave it up. That brown face goes red, then purple from effort. Lucy lends her shoulder too. The trunk slips into a loop of rope, and Lucy fancies she hears from within a banging.
Beside her, Sam’s face whips round. Dark face, and in it, white-bared teeth. Fear shivers through Lucy. She steps back. She lets Sam tighten the rope alone.
Lucy doesn’t go in to bid farewell to the body. She had her hours beside it this morning. And truth be told, Ba died when Ma did. That body is three and a half years empty of the man it once held. At long last, they’ll be going far enough to outrun his haint.
* * *
—
Lucy girl, Ba says, limping into her dream, ben dan.
He’s in rare good humor. Employing his fondest cuss, the one she was weaned on. She tries to turn and see him, but her neck won’t move.
What’d I teach you?
She starts on multiplication tables. Her mouth won’t move, either.
Don’t remember, d’you? Always making a mess. Luan qi ba zao. There’s the splat of Ba spitting in disgust. The uneven thump of his bad leg, then his good. Can’t get nothing right. As she grew older, Ba shrank. Eating rarely. What he consumed seemed only to feed his temper, which stuck to his side like a faithful old cur. Dui. Thasright. More splats, moving farther from her. He’s starting to slur with drink. Yaliddletraitor. Given up on math, he filled their shack with language. A rich vocabulary that Ma wouldn’t have approved. You lazy sackash—gou shi.
* * *
—
Lucy wakes up to gold all around her. The dry yellow grass of the hills sways jackrabbit-high a few miles outside town. Wind imparts a shimmer like sun off soft metal. Her neck throbs from a night on the ground.
The water. That’s what Ba taught her. She forgot to boil the water.
She tilts the flask: empty. Maybe she dreamed of filling it. But no—Sam whimpered from thirst in the night, and Lucy went down to the stream.
Soft and stupid, Ba whispers. Where d’you keep those brains you prize so much? The sun’s unforgiving; he fades with a parting shot. Why, they melt clean away when you’re scared.
Lucy finds the first splatter of vomit flickering like dark mirage. The mass of flies shifts lazily. More splatters lead her to the stream, which in daylight reveals itself as muddy. Brown. Like every other stream in mining country, it’s filthy with runoff. She forgot to boil the water. Farther down she finds Sam collapsed. Sam’s eyes closed, Sam’s fingers unfisted. Clothes a foul, buzzing mess.
This time Lucy boils the water, builds a fire so fierce it makes her head swim. When the water is as cool as it’ll get she washes Sam’s fevered body.
Sam’s eyes waver open. “No.”
“Shh. You’re sick. Let me help.”
“No.” Sam’s bathed alone for years, but surely this is different.
Sam’s legs kick without strength. Lucy peels back crusted fabric, holding her breath against the stench. Sam’s eyes burn so shiny with fever it looks like hate. Ba’s hand-me-down pants, bunched with rope, come away easy. At the join of Sam’s legs, tucked into a fold of the underdrawers, Lucy bumps something. A hard, gnarled protrusion.
Lucy draws half a carrot from the indent between her little sister’s legs: a poor replacement for the parts Ba wanted Sam to have.
Lucy finishes the job she started, hand shaking so that the washcloth scrapes harder than she means it to. Sam doesn’t whimper. Doesn’t look. Eyes turned toward the horizon. Pretending, as Sam always does when the truth can’t be avoided, that she has nothing to do with this body of hers, a child’s body, androgynous still, prized by a father who wanted a son.
Lucy knows she should speak. But how to explain this pact between Sam and Ba that never made sense to her? A mountain’s risen in Lucy’s throat, one she can’t cross. Sam’s eyes follow the ruined carrot as Lucy flings it away.
* * *
—
For a day Sam retches up dirty water, and for three more lies in fever. Eyes closed when Lucy brings oats cooked to porridge, twigs to feed the fire. In these slow hours Lucy studies a sister she almost forgot: the budded lips, the dark fern lashes. Illness sharpens Sam’s round face, making it more like Lucy’s: horsier, gaunter, the skin sallower, more yellow than brown. A face that shows its weakness.