then comes the night of nellie’s near escape.
she’ll never know exactly how, but lucy likes to think it began as most escapes do: in the dead of the night. what’s still called the hour of the wolf. decades back, before the buffalo were slaughtered and the tigers that fed on them died too, a lone horse in these hills would have quaked in fear of carnivores come slavering. though there are no tigers, nellie trembles like her ancestors. she’s smarter than most people, her master claimed. she knows there are things more fearsome than any living threat. the thing strapped to her back, for instance, that dead thing she can’t shake. nellie waits till the stars stare through their peepholes of sky and the two sleepers lie quiet. then she commences to dig.
nellie digs through the hours of the wolf, the snake, the owl, the bat, the mole, the sparrow. at the hour of earthworms stirring in their burrows, lucy and sam wake to the knock of hooves against the stake.
sam is quicker. four strides and sam’s caught the reins in one hand. with the other, sam slaps nellie. hard.
the mare only snorts, but the sound echoes in lucy along with the sound of other slaps by other hands on other parts. she leaps between girl and horse. sam’s hand halts in midair. only then, her neck loosening, does lucy admit she didn’t know if sam would stop.
“she tried to run,” sam says with arm still raised.
“you scared her.”
“she’s a traitor. she’d’ve made off with ba.”
“she’s got feelings too. she’s—”
“smarter than most people,” sam mocks, lowering her voice to ape teacher leigh. it’s half-convincing. a fit to sam’s new, leaner face. they both of them go quiet. when sam speaks again it’s still in a borrowed voice, not quite a man’s but not quite sam’s own. “if nellie’s so smart then she understands loyalty. if she’s so smart she can take her punishment.”
“she’s worn out by the weight. i’m tired too. aren’t you?”
“ba wouldn’t quit on account of being tired.”
and maybe that was ba’s problem. maybe he should’ve made peace with what they had before he died dirty in his bed, not a clean shirt to his name. lucy presses a hand to her hot scalp. her head buzzes. strange thoughts have been taking residence in her empty spaces. sometimes it seems the wind itself whispers notions at night.
“let’s let her rest a while,” lucy says. “anyhow, we can’t have much farther to go.” she looks around at the hills. not a soul to speak to since they left the two boys at that crossroads a month back. she’s got to ask, for nellie’s sake if not her own. “right?”
sam shrugs.
“sam?”
another shrug. this time lucy perceives the softening in sam’s shoulders as doubt.
“if we keep on,” sam says, “we might find a better place.”
the next place might be better, ba said each time they packed up for a new mine. better never came.
“you don’t know where you’re going,” lucy says. and then, unbidden, she is laughing. she hasn’t laughed since ba died. these aren’t her forced ha-has but something raw and hurting as it pulls free. if sam means to chase ba’s dream of wildness, they’ll never quit wandering. and maybe that’s what sam wants: ba forever on their backs.
“don’t be stupid,” lucy says when she catches her breath. “we can’t last.”
“we could if you were stronger.” those words are ba’s words. as the sneer is ba’s, and the swing of sam’s hand aiming once more for nellie.
lucy grabs sam. touch is a shock—sam’s wristbones so small and fine despite that brashness. sam tugs away, pulling lucy off-balance. lucy flings an arm out—and her nails graze sam’s cheek.
sam flinches. sam who’s never quailed before, not from the kids and their stones, not from ba at his drunkest. but why would sam? ba didn’t ever aim to hit sam, as lucy just did. the morning light is stark now, sam’s accusing eyes as wide as twin suns.
coward that she is, lucy flees. the blows resume behind her.
she climbs. up the biggest hill she can find, thirsting plants reaching up the hem of her dress, which is too short now, and faded from travel. the grass so parched it draws blood, hatching her legs with delicate pattern. at the summit, she folds her knees to her chest. puts her head between and squeezes her ears shut.ting le?ma asked, holding her hands over lucy’s ears. silence for that first moment. then the throb and whoosh of lucy’s own blood. it’s inside you. where you come from. the sound of the ocean.
salt water, poison to its drinkers. in teacher leigh’s history book, land stops at the ocean that borders this western territory. beyond: blank blue, sea monsters drawn among the waves. the savage unknown, the teacher said, and it troubled lucy that ma spoke so yearningly.
for the first time, lucy understands the desire to travel so far from the life she’s known. she meant for them to leave sam’s violence when they fled town. but violence lives in lucy too.
“sorry,” lucy says. this time to ma. she hasn’t taken care of sam as ma bid her. she doesn’t know if she can. and then, because sam isn’t there to witness weakness, lucy finally lets herself cry. she licks the tears as she goes. salt’s expensive, missing from their table for many years. she cries till her tongue shrivels. then she chews a blade of grass to clear the taste.
the grass tastes of ocean too.
a second blade proves just as salty. lucy stands, looking over the hilltop. there: a gleam of white.
she walks till she reaches the edge of a huge white disk that crunches underfoot, burning her scratches. height of the dry season and all through the hills, the shallow pools and creeks are disappearing. here a whole lake has gone, and left behind a salt flat.
lucy stands long enough for the clouds to gather, the world to swirl around her. she thinks of the plums ma pickled in salt, the way they took a form more potent than their origins. she thinks of ba salting his game. of salt to scour iron. of salt in an open wound, a burn that purifies. salt to clean and salt to save. salt on a rich man’s table every sunday, a flavor to mark the passage of the week. salt shrinking the flesh of fruit and meat both, changing it, buying time.
—
the sun’s swung low when lucy descends. sam’s face is mottled, but not on account of shadows. sam rages—yet there is fear behind it. what here in this emptiness could scare sam?
“you left,” sam spits out between a string of cusses, and lucy understands. she broke the unspoken contract of their lives. always it’s been sam who ranges wide while lucy sat, waiting. sam’s never been left behind.
lucy speaks, gently, as she would to a spooked horse. of salt and pork, venison and squirrel, while sam refuses. yells louder.
“it’ll mean we can keep looking,” lucy says. “nellie’s not as strong as you.” she pauses. “nor am i.”
this soothes sam, but what convinces is the wind that insinuates itself between them, carrying the flies and the odor of ba. both siblings pale. so when lucy says certain indian tribes honored their warriors this way, sam relents at last.
does it matter that agreement was bought with a lie?
for the first time they untie the ropes from nellie’s back. freed, the mare rolls in the grass, leaving a black mash of flies.
what makes a man a man? they tip the trunk. is it a face to show the world? hands and feet to shape it? two legs to walk it? a heart to beat, teeth and tongue to sing? ba has few of these left. he lacks even a man’s shape. he’s shaped by the trunk as a stew is shaped by its pot. lucy has salted meat gone green at the edges, and meat frozen for days. nothing like this.
—
sam approaches the salt flat at a run. by evening it’s as if one great white moon has sunk to the ground, leaving a lesser in the sky that rises, unconvincing. sam leaps high and slams down those boots. a crack splits the surface, twice as long as sam is tall. the boom like close thunder. lucy peers up at the now-dark sky. sure enough the clouds are circling.
she shoulders the shovel. where sam leaps, lucy follows, prying hunks of white. goose bumps swim on lucy’s skin despite the heat. this here’s a familiar rhythm. the digging. the heat. even the boom like laughter from a man full-grown. lucy looks up to find sam looking back.
“it’s near as pretty as gold,” sam agrees. then, “wish he coulda seen it.”
—
sprinkled over ba’s body, the salt looks like ash. flies flee the onslaught, but the maggots can’t escape. in their death throes they look for all the world like small white tongues, curled in screams.
it takes four blistering days for ba to transform to something other. time to rest nellie and let her eat her fill of grass. sam turns the parts, using the shovel to give them an even coat of salt. from time to time sam chops apart a joint, a knot of flesh. at a distance sam looks to hold an enormous spoon.
burial is just another recipe, ma said.
—
ba dries up smaller than lucy, smaller than sam. they pour him into the empty rucksack: the startling brown flower of his ribs, the butterfly of his pelvis, the grin stuck to his skull. and lengths and lumps they can’t identify, hardened mysteries that may hold the answer to questions lucy never could ask. why’d he drink? why’d he sometimes look like he was crying? where’d he bury ma?
they leave the stained trunk behind. once, ma carried it across the ocean. now it’s a gift to the flies. lucy feels an unexpected pang of pity for those flies, which followed faithfully for weeks, buzzing and mating and birthing young. countless lives lived on the bounty of ba’s corpse, a generosity of the kind the living ba never showed. they’re doomed to die by the hundreds. each morning will dawn on more black bodies cold in the grass. if lucy had a handful of silver, she’d scatter it in their midst.
