“What,” Sam says.
Lucy remembers, then, tenderness, a thing she thought dead along with Ma.
“You were right. I should have listened to you. We’ve got to bury.”
She saw more than she thought she could, bore it while those boys cowered. They ran, and their imaginings will follow all their lives at their heels. For her, who didn’t turn away, the haunting may begin to be done. She feels a swell of gratitude for Sam.
“I aimed to miss,” Sam says. “That banker. I only meant to scare him.”
Lucy looks down, always down, into Sam’s sweat-shiny face. A face brown as mud and just as malleable, a face on which Lucy has seen emotions take shape with an ease she envies. Many emotions but never fear. Yet there is fear now. For the first time she sees herself reflected in her sister. And this, Lucy realizes, this more than the schoolyard taunts or the press of the gun’s cold snout, is her moment of courage. She closes her eyes. She sits, face in her arms. She judges the proper way is quiet.
A shadow cools her. She feels rather than sees Sam bending, hovering, sitting too.
“We still need two silver dollars,” Sam says.
Nellie chews a tangle of grass, calmed now that the burden’s off her back. Soon the weight will return, but for now. For now. Lucy reaches for Sam’s hand. She brushes something rough in the dirt. It’s the boys’ rucksack, abandoned. Slowly, Lucy swings it. Remembers the clank of it hitting her. She reaches in.
“Sam.”
A hunk of salt pork, the greasy leak of cheese or lard. Hard candy. And waaay beneath, knotted in the fabric, hidden if her fingers didn’t know where to look, if she weren’t a prospector’s daughter, one whose ba said, Why, Lucy girl, you feel where it’s buried. You just feel it, she touches on coins. Copper pennies. Nickels etched with beasts. And silver dollars to lay over two white-swimming eyes, close them the proper way, sending the soul to its final good sleep.
Plum
It was Ma who laid down rules for burying the dead.
Lucy’s first dead thing was a snake. Five and full of destruction, she stomped puddles just to see the world flood. She leapt, landed. When the waves quit their crashing she stood in a ditch emptied of water. Coiled at its bottom, a drowned black snake.
The ground steamed pungent wet. The buds on the trees were splitting, showing their paler insides. Lucy ran home with scales between her palms, aware that the world unfurled its hidden side.
Ma smiled to see her. Kept smiling as Lucy opened her hands.
Later, too late, Lucy would think on how another mother might have screamed, scolded, lied. How Ba, if Ba were there, might have said the snake was sleeping, and spun a tale to chase the hush of death right out the window.
Ma only hefted her pan of pork and tied her apron tighter. Said, Lucy girl, burial zhi shi another recipe.
Lucy prepared the snake alongside the meat.
First rule, silver. To weigh down the spirit, Ma said as she peeled a caul of fat from the pork. She sent Lucy to her trunk. Beneath the heavy lid and its peculiar smell, between layers of fabric and dried herbs, Lucy found a silver thimble just large enough to fit over the snake’s head.
Second, running water. To purify the spirit, Ma said as she washed the meat in a bucket. Her long fingers picked maggots free. Beside her, Lucy submerged the snake’s body.
Third, a home. The most important rule of all, Ma said as her knife hacked through gristle. Silver and water could seal a spirit for a time, keep it from tarnish. But it was home that kept the spirit safe-settled. Home that kept it from wandering back, restless, returning time and again like some migrant bird. Lucy? Ma asked, knife paused. You know where?
Lucy’s face warmed, as if Ma quizzed her on sums she hadn’t studied. Home, Ma said again, and Lucy said it back, chewing her lip. Finally Ma cupped Lucy’s face with a hand warm and slick and redolent of flesh.
Fang xin, Ma said. Told Lucy to loosen her heart. It’s not hard. A snake belongs in its burrow. You see? Ma told Lucy to leave the burying. Told her to run off and play.
They’re running, like Ma told them, but this time it doesn’t feel like play.
* * *
—
All those years and still Lucy can’t grasp the thing called home. For all that Ma praised her smarts, she’s a dunce in what matters. Lacking answers, she can only spell. H, as the yellow grasses rustle. O, as she grinds stems underfoot. M, as she cuts her toe and watches a line of blood rise like rebuke. E, as she hurries up the next hill to catch Sam and Nellie disappearing down its slope.
What’s home mean when Ba made them live a life so restless? He aimed to find his fortune in one fell swoop, and all his life pushed the family like a storm wind at their backs. Always toward the newer. The wilder. The promise of sudden wealth and shine. For years it was gold he pursued, rumors of unclaimed land and untapped veins. Always they arrived to find the same ruined hills, dug up, the same streams choked with rubble. Prospecting as much a game of luck as the gambling dens Ba haunted from time to time—and luck was never with him. Even when Ma put her foot down and insisted they make an honest living through coal, little changed. From coal mine to coal mine their wagon crossed the hills like a finger scraping the barrel’s last taste of sugar. Each new mine drew men with the promise of high wages, but those wages fell as more men arrived. So the family chased the next mine, and the next. Their savings swelled and shrank in seasons as reliable as dry and wet, hot and cold. What’s home mean when they moved so often into shacks and tents that stank of other people’s sweat? How can Lucy find a home to bury a man she couldn’t solve.
It’s Sam, youngest but best-loved, who leads the way. Inland Sam treks, East through the hills. They start out on the wagon trail that once brought the four of them to town, its dirt tamped flat by miners and prospectors and Indians come before them—and, to hear Ba tell it, the long-dead buffalo before that. But soon Sam veers off, pointing those cowboy boots through untrammeled grass and coyote brush, through thistle and stinging cane.
A new, fainter track takes shape underfoot. Narrow and rough, hidden from pursuers. Ba claimed knowledge of such trails from the Indians he traded with outside town; Lucy figured those for empty boasts. Ba didn’t show the trails the way he showed the scar on his bad leg that he swore came from a tiger.
At least, he didn’t show the trails to Lucy.
They walk near to an empty arroyo. Lucy keeps her head down, hoping to see it fill before their canteens run dry. In this way she almost misses the first buffalo bones.
The skeleton rises from the earth like a great white island. Around it the hush deepens—maybe it’s that the pinned-down grass has gone silent. Sam’s breath hitches, close to a sob.
They’ve seen buffalo bone in pieces along the wagon trail, but never whole. Years of travelers have brandished mallets and knives, boredom and need, taking what was easy to find for cook fires or tent poles or idle carving. This skeleton is untouched. The eye sockets glimmer—a trick of shadow. Sam could walk through the intact rib cage without ducking.