Elsie was happy with her own name. But Thad wasn’t. This was how he ended up as “Jack.”
“I’ve always wanted to be a ‘Jack,’?” he told her, as if names were like shirts that you could just put on and take off. She refused to call him by his new name.
Once when Lily was alone with her mother she had told Lily that this was all because of the War.
“That Rebel bullet put him on his back in less than a day from when he got onto the field. This is what happens to a man when he has to lie on his back for eight months. He gets all sorts of strange notions into his head and not even an angelic manifestation can get those ideas out of him.”
If the Rebels were responsible for getting her family out here to Idaho, Lily wasn’t sure they were such evil people.
Lily had learned the hard way that if she stayed in the house her mother would always find something for her to do. Until school started again, the best thing for Lily was to get out of the house the first chance she had in the morning and not return until it was dinnertime.
Lily liked to be in the hills outside the town. The forest of Douglas firs, mountain maples, and ponderosa pines shaded her from the noon sun. She could take some bread and cheese with her for lunch, and there were plenty of streams to drink from. She spent some time picking out leaves that had been chewed by worms into shapes that reminded her of different animals. When she was bored with that she waded in a stream to cool off. Before she went into the water, she took the back hem of her dress, pulled it forward and up from between her legs, and tucked the hem into the sash at her waist. She was glad that her mother was not around to see her turning her skirt into pants. But it was much easier to wade in the mud and the water with her skirt out of the way.
Lily waded downstream along the shallow edge of the stream. The day was starting to get more hot than warm, and she splashed some water on her neck and forehead. Lily looked for bird nests in the trees and raccoon prints in the mud. She thought she could walk on like this forever, alone and not trying to get anything done in particular, her feet cool in the water, the sun warm on her back, and knowing that she had a good, filling lunch with her that she could have any time she wanted and would have an even better dinner waiting for her later.
Faint sounds of men singing came to her from around the bend in the river. Lily stopped. Maybe there was a camp of placer miners just downstream from where she was. That would be fun to watch.
She walked onto the bank of the river and into the woods. The singing became louder. Although she couldn’t make out any of the words, the melody told her it wasn’t any song that she recognized.
She carefully made her way among the trees. She was deep in the shadows now, and a light breeze quickly dried the sweat and water on her face. Her heart began to beat faster. She could hear the singing voices more clearly now. A lone deep, male voice sang in words that she could not make out, the strange shape of the melody reminding her of the way the Chinamen’s music had sounded. Then a chorus of other male voices answered, the slow, steady rhythm letting her know that it was a working men’s song, whose words and music came from the cycle of labored breath and heartbeat.
She came to the edge of the woods, and hiding herself behind the thick trunk of a maple, she peeked out at the singing men by the stream.
Except the stream was nowhere to be found.
After they found this bend to be a good placer spot, the Chinese miners had built a dam to divert the stream. Where the stream used to be, there were now five or six miners using picks and shovels to dig down to the bedrock. Others were digging out bits of gold-laden sand and gravel from between the crevices in areas where the digging had already been done. The men wore their straw hats to keep the sun off their heads. The solo singer, Lily now saw, was Logan. The red-faced Chinaman had wrapped a rolled-up handkerchief around his thick beard and tucked the ends of the handkerchief into his shirt to keep it out of his way as he worked. Every time he bellowed out another verse of the song, he stood still and leaned on his shovel, and his beard pouch moved with his singing like the neck of a rooster. Lily almost giggled out loud.
A loud bang cut through the noise and activity and echoed around the banks of the dry streambed. The singing stopped and all the miners stopped where they were. The mountain air suddenly became quiet and still, and only the sound of panicked birds taking flight into the air broke the silence.
Crick, slowly waving above his head the pistol that fired the shot, swaggered out of the woods across the streambed from where Lily was hiding. Obee came behind him, his shotgun’s barrel shifting from pointing at one miner to the next with each step he took.
“Well, well, well,” Crick said. “Lookee here. A singing circus of Chinee monkeys.”
Logan stared at him. “What do you boys want?”
“Boys?” Crick let out a holler. “Obee, listen to this. The Chinaman just called us ‘boys.’?”
“He won’t be saying much after I blow his head off,” Obee said.
Logan began to walk toward them. The heavy shovel trailed from his large hand and long arm.
“Stop right where you are, you filthy yellow monkey.” Crick pointed the pistol at him.
“What do you want?”
“Why, to collect what’s ours, of course. We know you’ve been keeping our gold safe, and we’ve come to ask for it back.”
“We don’t have any of your gold.”
“Jesus,” Crick said, shaking his head. “I’ve always heard that Chinamen are thieves and liars, on account of them growing up eating rats and maggots, but I’ve always kept an open mind about the Celestials. But now I’m seeing it with my own eyes.”
“Filthy liars,” Obee affirmed.
“Obee and me, we found this spot last spring and claimed it. We’ve been a little busy lately, and so we thought we’d take pity on you and let you work the deposit and pay you a fair wage for your work. We thought we were doing our Christian duty.”
“We were being nice,” Obee added.
“Very generous of us,” Crick agreed. “But look where that’s gotten us? Being kind doesn’t work with these heathens. On our way here I was still inclined to let you keep a little gold dust for your work these last few weeks, but now I think we are going to take it all.”
“Ingrates,” Obee said.
A young Chinaman, barely more than a boy, really, angrily shouted something in his own language at Logan. Logan waved his hand at the youth to keep him back, his gaze never leaving Crick’s face.
“I don’t think you have your facts straight,” Logan said. Even though he didn’t shout, his voice reverberated and echoed around the valley of the river and the woods in a way that made Lily tremble with its force and strength. “We found this deposit and we put the claim on it. You can go check at the courthouse.”