lucy knows they can survive the jackals because they have before.
there was a night between one town and another, between one mine and the next, when the family came to a line of dung laid across the road like a missive. so fresh it steamed. the ancient mule stumbled. the crack of its leg split the night.
from the mule’s throat came a mewling. three years they’d had this gentle beast and never heard her cry. her rolling eye found lucy.
they went on. their one remaining mule panted, made quicker by fear and a lightened load. their extra provisions were tossed out in the grass. the noise of jackals grew closer, then paused. the silence more terrible than howls. the family hurried on.
—
the jackals who finally enter the shack on the first day of storm, on the day the clouds open and the bones of a child stir up from the swollen creek, aren’t the jackals lucy expected.
they look mostly like men. one has a brown beard, the other red as the hair of the girl who was taken. half-familiar—lucy must have seen them a dozen times in the low light of those early mornings at the mine. only the hides on their shoulders are of the beast, giving off a wet, rank odor.
like men, they carry guns.
they crash through the door before ba can grab his pistol. the pounding rain hid their approach till too late. the brown one orders ba into a chair. the red jackal herds lucy and sam to the stove. ma, on the mattress under a heap of extra blankets, goes unseen.
“we’d like a bite to eat,” the brown one says.
strange that a wild thing can speak so polite. he sounds like a guest in teacher leigh’s parlor. ba cusses as the red one bats pans and plates off the stove. he plunges hands into the cold stewpot and crunches a mess of cartilage, spitting a long splinter of bone to the floor. gobbets drop from his lips onto lucy and sam.
out of sam’s small chest, a warning rumble. lucy holds tight to sam’s arm. keeps sam from rashness.
“it looks like you’ve more than enough to share,” the brown one says, poking through their supplies. the potatoes, the flour, the lard, all damning. “doesn’t seem right when most of us are starving. doesn’t seem right that you sat snug and rich while the rest of us were out of work. why, we had to send our families out looking for gold to buy food. you’d know something about that, i think.”
ba’s cussing subsides.
“my little girl went out there,” the red one screams, his voice like breaking glass. he flings his arm toward the half-open door. the long-awaited storm is gray froth, spitting in angry globs like schoolyard kids. like the redheaded girl once spat at lucy before she tired of bullying. the red jackal’s gaze bores through lucy, as if he reads her mind.
“a real shame,” the brown one says, pressing his rifle into ba’s bad leg. “this could all have been avoided if we’d known where that fleck of gold we found came from. my brother’s girl wouldn’t have had to wander willy-nilly.”
ba’s mouth stays shut. the stubbornness that sam inherited—he’ll never tell.
“i’d say a trade seems fair,” the brown jackal says. a confused silence, and then lucy understands as the red one locks mad eyes on sam. sam who shines.
lucy’s voice is mute, but her legs move. it was her fault. she took what was precious from the house. she takes a step—half a step, stiff with dread. it’s enough. the red one seizes her instead.
ba’s face is torn between fury and fear as the red jackal drags lucy to the door. she wonders which will win, whether ba will speak. she never knows. because sam lunges for the red jackal, stabbing with the spat-out bone shard.
the jackal howls, releasing lucy. grabbing for sam.
sam is small and wily, brown and strong from days on the gold field. as the red jackal slashes with his knife, sam ducks and dances. the brown jackal waves his gun, can’t shoot for fear of hitting his partner. sam catches lucy’s eye across the room. impossibly, sam grins.
and then the red one takes hold—not of sam’s arm, but sam’s long, grown-back hair.
ba yells. lucy screams. but it’s the third voice that the jackals attend to. a voice like a sweep of fire, hot in a house grown cold.
“stop,” ma says, standing by stages. blankets shed from her. her huge belly like a piece of the hills come alive. and then she speaks to ba, only ba. “ba jin gei ta men. ni fa feng le ma? yao zhao gu hai zi. ru guo wo men jia ren an quan, na jiu zu gou le.”
it’s a language the rest can’t decipher. words so quick they might as well be the senseless patter and shriek of rain. for the first time lucy understands that the language ma shared with them, in bits and pieces, was only a child’s game.
ba’s face slackens, ba’s shoulders puddling as the red jackal strides to ma and slaps her so hard her lip splits open.
“speak proper,” he hisses.
calmly, ma puts a hand to her chest. she draws a crumpled handkerchief from the pouch inside her dress and holds it to her bleeding lip. when she drops the soiled cloth, her lips are sealed, her right cheek squirrel-swollen from the blow.
ma says no more. not when the men ask where the money is hid, not when they contemplate cutting out ba’s tongue, not when they slash the bundles and tear the clothes, shatter the medicine bottles in the trunk. that sweet, bitter perfume mingles with the jackals’ stink. ma says nothing even when they find the first hidden pouch, and tear the shack and the wagon apart in search of the rest. ma doesn’t look at them, doesn’t look at ba or sam or lucy. ma looks out the open door.
—
at the last, the jackals herd the family together and search their bodies for gold. stripped and patted, ma is once again the sun, the moon, her naked belly casting a horrible light around which the day turns. the jackals take the pouch from between her breasts, turn it inside out—empty. ba closes his eyes, as if the sight could blind him.
—
“there’s more in these hills,” ba says that night as they sit in their own wreckage. no mattress left whole, no blankets, no pillows, no medicines, no plates, no food, no gold. the new mule and the new wagon were taken. near on six months in this town and they’re poorer than when they arrived. “we’ll find more. all we need’s time, qin ai de. might be another six months. maybe a year. he’ll still be young.”
still ma is silent.
they sleep all four together that night, two torn mattresses dragged to make one. lucy and sam cling together in the center, ma and ba at either side. ma faces out from lucy, her back a long occlusion. that night there are no whispers.
—
the next day, as the storm grows fiercer, lucy fits together what parts she can, sews what she can, makes meals of what she can—the pork rinds retrieved from a dark corner, the flour painstakingly scooped though it bakes up gritty.
sam helps. unasked, sam cleans and stacks, dusts and sorts. the sound of sam’s body a sturdy speech. otherwise, the shack is silent. ma lies prone, unspeaking though her swollen cheek has deflated. ba paces and paces.
and then again, the pounding.
this time ba opens the door with pistol in hand. there’s only a piece of paper tied to the knob. dark shapes hurrying away in the rain.
lucy reads the words aloud. her voice shrinks with every sentence.
it’s a proclamation of new law. approved already in town, and soon to be proposed to the rest of the territory. ba rages pointlessly through the reading, tearing again what’s already been torn.
the jackals’ power isn’t in the gold they stole, or in their guns. their power is in this paper that takes away the family’s future before it can even be dug up. the hills may run flush with gold but none of it will be theirs. hold it in their hands, swallow it down, and still it won’t be theirs. the law strips all rights to gold and land from any man not born in this territory.
—
how did they survive the attack on the wagon all those years back?
they didn’t. leastways not all of them. they left the mule and didn’t shoot or bury her. ma made no mention, then, of silver or water.
“bie kan,” ma instructed as they ran. but lucy looked back. a dozen pinpoint eyes stung through the dark as the pack closed in. the living mule a distraction. a sacrifice. all that lucy could bear—she’d seen dead things in plenty. what made her shudder was how firm ma held her head. where the rest of the family looked back at the faithful mule, only ma heeded her own command. she bit her lip, and blood pinked her teeth. likely it pained her. but ma showed no pain, and never looked back.
