Gold

West for the last time. The same mountains, the same pass.
And then the hills, the hills.
In reverse they chart their own course. The prospecting¹ sites, the coal mines. Same and yet changed, as they are same and yet changed.
Old sites litter the grass like broken beads². Travel goes quicker than the last time. Maybe on account of what they’ve left behind, maybe on account of their longer legs. Maybe on account of their rushing toward a place they want to be. What makes a home a home? The bones, the grass, the sky bleached³ white at its edges from heat—familiar and yet not, as if, flipping⁴ through an old book read once upon a time, they find the pages disordered, the colors melted by sun and years, the story misremembered. So that each morning dawns both known and surprising: a smoking mine, a town no larger than one crossroads and two boys loitering, white bone, a town all ashes with tiger prints in its crust, another crossroads with two girls one tall one short, a choked stream, another crossroads, a mound⁶ in the sighing grass, a stream blackened yet running, a mound in the singing grass where something might be buried, a mine where wildflowers have grown over broken earth, another crossroads, another saloon, another morning, another night, another high noon with sweat stinging their squinted⁷ eyes, another crossroads, another dusk with the wind seeming to whisper over an unmarked mound in the weeping grass where something might be buried, another crossroads, another crossroads, another crossroads, gold, grass, grass, grass, gold, grass, gold—
Maybe the travel goes quicker on account of the two horses Sam steals. Sister, one is named, and the other, Brother. Sam swings in, then out, of the trading post. They’ve ridden half a day before Lucy sees the weight of Sam’s wallet: as plump as before.
“They’re ours,” Sam calls back through the wind of their passage. “We’ve paid our dues.”
Lucy lets loose a string of cusses. The grass swallows them, nodding

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