storm days. the sky opens after they leave the mountain man. rain falls with such force that it explodes to white mist where it hits the earth, raising a boundary, a ragged caul. twice nellie steps into what seems mere puddle, and sinks to her chest before leaping back. a slower horse would have drowned them.
buffalo bones provide the only firm ground. they stop for the night before a particularly large skeleton. sam touches the skull first, as if asking permission. then they crack the brittle ribs from the spine. stacked together, the bones curve to sturdy cradles.
the rain pauses on the fourth day. they’ve reached the mountains’ end. nellie clops up a low, rocky foothill—the last hill—and from there they look down at the plains.
grass spreads low and flat and green, like good velvet rolled out for their aching feet. there’s a band of river in the distance, and a blot that must be sweetwater. lucy breathes deep of this new world. its scent so damp and so heavy on her tongue.
she moves forward—
wind taps her shoulder. not hard and blustering as it has been these days of storm, but plaintive. soft. it’s the sadness in the wind that makes lucy look back.
from afar, the hills of her childhood look washed clean. she’s lived her share of rainy seasons, but she lived them down in the muck. where thin soil became soup, each day waterlogged by the suck-tide of living. from afar she can’t see how dangerous the west is, how dirty. from afar the wet hills shine smooth and bright as ingots—riches upon riches stacked to the western horizon. her throat tightens. a tingle high up in her nose, behind her eyes.
it passes. she figures it for the rememory of old thirst.
—
meeting the river—
all lucy’s life, water meant thin, choked rivulets flowing downstream of mines. this river is wide, a living thing. it beats its banks and it rages. ma said ba was water too, and lucy never understood, before this day, how that could be true.
—
they camp that night on the bank. come morning: sweetwater. lucy draws her blanket close, then recoils. it stinks of trail dirt and old sweat, months of baked suffering. the river’s cleanness comes as rebuke.
“i’m leaving you behind,” she says into the cloth.
sam’s head turns. “what?”
lucy kicks the blanket away and stands. already she feels cleaner. the night is cool and damp.
water to purify, ma said.
“once we get there,” lucy says, with a nod to sweetwater’s lights, “there’s not a soul who knows who we are, or what we did. and we don’t have to tell. if someone asks where we’re from—we can say anything. i’ve been thinking. we don’t need any history at all.”
sam’s face tips up.
“it’s a chance to start over. don’t you see? we don’t have to be miners.” or failed prospectors. or outlaws, or thieves, or cast-off students, or animals, or prey.
sam leans back on elbows and says, so easy, “if they don’t want us, then we don’t gotta stay. we don’t want them, either.”
lucy looks down in astonishment. absurdly, sam grins.
three months they’ve traveled in fear and in hiding, and sam saw it as a game. sam who’s at home wherever sam goes, shining through hardship. the map sam drew, the path sam meant to take—it didn’t represent months or years, lucy realizes. it was the start of a lifetime.
“i can’t,” lucy says. “i’ve got to stop.”
“you’re leaving me?” sam’s face twists, as if it wasn’t sam talking of departure, sam the one so restless. “you’re leaving me.”
there’s no mistaking sam’s anger. this time lucy doesn’t give way. she hardens her spine. sam’s always claimed anger as a birthright. who gave sam that right?
“you’re so selfish,” lucy says, her heart beating hard all the way up her throat. her voice thrums with it. “all you do is want and want. do you ever ask what i want? you can’t expect that i’ll follow your whims forever.”
sam stands too. once lucy looked down, always down, into her little sister’s face. now it’s level with hers. the face of a stranger. a face to which she can’t say:
that sure she wants clean water and nice rooms, dresses and baths—but those are only things. beyond them, she doesn’t know. the hollow inside her doesn’t hold what it once held, as the grave they dug couldn’t accommodate all its old dirt. dig too deep, miners know, scoop away too much of what is good, and you tempt collapse. ba’s body, ma’s trunk, the shack and the streams and the hills—she left them willingly, expecting that at least sam would remain to cross over to the future.
but lucy can’t ask. can’t speak. the stink of her own filth chokes her. she pulls her dress over her head, shutting out sam’s face. then she shucks her shift, too, and jumps into the river.
water knocks thought right out of her. a cold slap. a grateful muffling. she kicks down for a handful of sand and scrubs her neck and shoulders, her armpits, her wrist the trapper held, her fingers that touched ba’s fingers. she breaks the surface six layers lighter. scrubs slower at her chest, where the skin is sore and puffy. she can’t quite reach her back. she calls to sam to lend a hand.
sam turns away. above the faded shirt, sam’s cheeks glow true red. surely sam can’t be blushing. lucy swims back to the bank, asks again for help. again sam refuses.
“selfish,” lucy says through the thrashing waves. she grabs for sam’s boot.
sam is dragged into the water fully clothed. lucy yanks sam’s collar and rubs at caked grime, ignoring the bubbles that stream from sam’s mouth. all sam’s stubbornness is, down here, turned to foam. now your back, lucy says, handling sam as ma handled her in the tub. a firm hand is what you need, lucy says, tugging down sam’s pants before she remembers who said that—ba—and why.
something tears. lucy’s hand brushes foreign hardness. she’s left holding a piece of sam’s pants as sam dives for the bottom. water is lucy’s element. she passes sam easily, scooping up the long gray rock that was kept hidden. yet sam swims on as if the rock doesn’t matter.
that’s when lucy sees what else sam dropped. it fell quick; after all, silver is heavier than common stone. twin flashes at the river’s bottom. not buried, not muddied, not left with a body.
ba’s two silver dollars.
lucy kicks back to the surface, passing sam. there is a moment in which they’re close enough to touch. one could reach out and arrest the other’s motion, suspending both between the surface and the bottom. neither one does. sam keeps diving as lucy heaves onto the far bank and lies panting in the green grass of a new land.
family comes first, ba said, and ma too. for all his blows and temper, this belief of his lucy respected to the end. this belief her sole inheritance.
but now?
sam is emerging at last. water slicks sam’s hair, sogs sam’s clothes so that the skinny bones beneath show through. in the dark, a creature unknown to lucy stands with hands full of silver stolen from the dead.
