A Tyranny of Petticoats (21 page)

I held up my hands. “Wait. Thomas speaks.”

A silence. I shifted my eyes beneath my eyelids. “He is telling you to seek out your bright future.”

“Bright? You mean like gold?”

I cocked my head to the side, pretending to listen. “He is unclear. But I see much joy. There is piano music in a dimly lit hall. A pretty girl is trying to catch —”

A crushing grip wrapped around my wrist, yanking me forward. I cried out, my eyes snapping open. The incense clattered to the floor.

The man sneered. “Do I look like a fool, you slant-eyed witch? You think I care about an overpriced whore? You think
Tom
did?”

I winced, as much from his rotted breath as the insult, which, truth be told, was one of the less creative my patrons had called me.

“Tom and me been working the same goddamn gold claim for nine months, with nothing but goddamn rocks to show for it. So you tell me if you can talk to his ghost or not, ’cause I need to know if he found gold, or if I should sell my claim and get the hell out of here.”

“S-sorry,” I stammered.

“You’d better be, ’cause if I think you’re tryin’ to make an idiot of me, I will gut you like a pig.”

My gaze darted to the tattered sheet that divided my room from the front of the shop, but I knew my uncle wasn’t back from visiting with the neighbors.

I tried to pull away, but his fingers only tightened. “We try again,” I assured him, wrapping my free hand around the brass bowl that held the lone cigarette. “Thomas Manning come for sure this time.”

His grip began to loosen.

I smiled submissively and, hard as I could, smashed the bowl against his temple.

The man reeled back, startled. I flipped the table, catching him in the jaw and sending him and his stool toppling backward. The candle on the table extinguished. The man released a stream of curses and slurs, but I was already at the desk on which we’d built our spirit altar, yanking open the top drawer.

I grabbed the pistol my uncle had given me when he said we were leaving San Francisco. Leaving behind the only life I’d ever known. Leaving behind my mother’s still-wandering ghost.

I raised the gun and locked my elbow. I’d never fired the gun before, and I hoped the sight of it alone would persuade the prospector to leave.

Except, when the prospector spotted my tiny pistol, an amused grin showed his cracked teeth. In a blink, he unholstered his own gun, much larger than mine, and trained it on me. I guessed it would not be
his
first time pulling a trigger.

Panic scratched at my throat.

Then, all in unison, the candle flames on the altar flickered. The world hesitated. A familiar hum vibrated through my chest.

The prospector frowned and glanced at a shelf on the wall, where three candles dripped with old wax.

A chill of air brushed against my neck. Gooseflesh tickled down my arms. Not in fear, but not in relief either. I was used to ghosts on the streets and in the hills and drifting aimlessly through town, but I didn’t care for those who came into my home, uninvited and rarely welcome.

“Tell him that gold has been found.”

The deep voice tumbled and rolled with the measured cadence of the dead. Though I strained my eyes to the edge of their sockets, I could not see him behind me and I dared not turn my back on the prospector.

“What was that?” The man twisted his head. I couldn’t tell if he meant the whisper or the flicker of candlelight.

I wet the roof of my mouth. “He says that gold has been found,” I said, dropping the fragmented English to better echo the ghost. With so few chances to communicate with the living, spirits could be sensitive about being misunderstood, and translating them falsely could lead to more upsets than a few coins in a tin cup were worth.

The prospector turned wary. “What’re you on about?”

The ghost appeared at the edge of my vision, gripping the straps of his suspenders as tight as one would grip a butcher knife. His messy yellow hair was full of dust, and a feather-tipped arrow jutted from between his shoulder blades, like a flag marking its territory. The shaft was striped in the traditional red and blue paint of the Sioux. Blood had crisped to dark brown on his shirt.

There was something unnervingly familiar about him, but I couldn’t see his face, and anyhow, all the white men with their bushy mustaches and dirty linen shirts looked the same.

He was much too calm to be
è guĭ,
and I could be glad of that, at least. Even after all these years, the hungry ghosts terrified me. Perhaps he was
yuān guî,
a wandering spirit seeking justice for a wrongful death. The arrow would suggest as much.

“Tell him,”
the ghost said, moving past me, “there is still gold to be found in these hills.”

“A male spirit has arrived,” I said, before repeating his words.

The prospector’s eyes widened. He followed my look, but to him there was only empty air. Maybe a shadow. Maybe a spot of cold. Maybe his own superstitions creeping through the candle smoke. “Tom? Tom, that you?”

The ghost shook his head. “Thomas Manning is gone.”

I wasn’t surprised. “No, he says Thomas Manning has gone on to —”

The prospector spat onto the wood floor. The glob passed through the ghost’s shoe. “You
are
a witch.”

The ghost inhaled — a sharp hiss. “She told you what you wanted to hear, you ignorant ass.” Though he was so close, I knew the prospector couldn’t hear him, and I wasn’t about to repeat
those
words. I thought again that maybe I should shoot the prospector before he shot me — the pistol was still warm in my palm — but then the walls and floorboards began to tremble, the candlesticks rattling, the brass bowl vibrating across the floor.

The prospector turned ashen.

“Tell him,” said the ghost, “that while there is gold to be found, he’ll see not one nugget nor a pinch of dust. Death is painted in ashes upon his forehead. He’ll die if he stays in Deadwood.”

I gaped at his back. Though I was willing to make up fortunes to satisfy my patrons, it was rare to hear one from the lips of a true ghost. They were secretive beings, and even now it was unclear to me how much of the future they could see, and how much of it could be changed.

“Is that true?” I whispered.

The ghost cut a glare at me, his pupils dilated with anger, and I gasped at seeing his face.

I’d been right before. He
was
familiar, and a sorry sight to my eyes.

“Just tell him,” said the ghost, at the same time the prospector stammered, “Is what true?”

Again, I repeated the ghost’s words. Perhaps the prospector could see the truth in my face, for he did not gut me like a pig after all, just lowered his gun and cursed, a lot. “You goddamn Celestials and your goddamn superstitions,” he railed, but there was more fear in his voice than gall. “You should all be hanged for bringing your curses down on us!”

Despite his hubris, he snatched up his filth-covered hat and fled, shoving his way through the curtain. I wondered if by morning light he’d be hitching a ride on the first stagecoach, or discovered whiskey-drunk in a saloon.

Summer heat seeped back through the walls as the ghost’s fury began to ebb. My pulse stayed erratic. My palm would be ridged with lines where the gun’s handle pressed into it.

I stared at the arrow in the ghost’s back and waited for him to speak, willing away my distress at recognizing him.

He was a ghost now, and I would treat him no different than all the others. He’d helped me, and I knew he would want something in return. That was the way of the wandering spirits.

Perhaps if I didn’t show gratitude, he might not realize how much I was in his debt.

He turned and watched me through reddish-gold eyelashes.

My traitorous chest tightened.

I didn’t know his name, but all last fall I had seen the boy coming and going from the pest tents erected on the edge of the Badlands during the smallpox outbreak. Most men hid in their camps, but he’d helped the doctor tend to those poor quarantined souls and not once turned poorly himself. Then, he had been very much alive.

Once, I’d passed him on my way to the mercantile, and though he’d looked halfway to dead with exhaustion, he’d paused and smiled at me.

Then he’d tipped his hat, like a gentleman to a lady.

I’d turned away, fast, but that smile had clung to me for days. It had led to a great many fancies, most of which involved him coming to ask for his fortune to be told. I’d imagined tracing the lines on his palm and telling him of the many children in his future, and blushing like a witless little girl.

“Sorry for intruding upon you,” he said, breaking our silence. Though he wasn’t wearing a hat, he tipped an imaginary one at me anyhow, and it was by a force of will that I smothered a sad, pitiful sigh at the gesture. “My name is James Hill, ma’am.”

I stared.

A hesitation. “I mean miss.”

I swallowed, hard. “My name is Fei-Yen. Sun Fei-Yen.”

I was prepared for scorn, but James Hill apologetically asked if I could repeat that before he attempted it himself.

“Soon Fay Yen.” His atrocious accent prompted a weak smile from me, which I didn’t like. I did not smile at ghosts. Not even
this
ghost.

After a long, long pause, James held out a hand. “It’s a pleasure to make your acquaintance.”

His sleeves were rolled up, and I could tell he had a miner’s arms, strong and dark from the sun. Callused palms and dirt-stained fingernails. There was a presence about him that drew me in, a stickiness that was hard to resist. Few could understand the magnetism of spirits. How they could be simultaneously appalling and alluring, like the opium pipe to an addict.

James slowly pulled his hand back, embarrassed that I hadn’t taken it. “Please don’t be frightened,” he said, not understanding. He gripped his suspenders again. “I intend you no harm, but Millie Ann said you might help me.”

Finally my tongue loosened. “I cannot help you.”

His eyes bored into mine. “I think you can.”

I tempered my sympathy. I had gotten better at this over the years. After all the ghosts and all their demands. The angry ones, the sad ones, the wronged ones — they all wanted just one thing. “No, I can’t. I’m sorry, James Hill, but you’ll have no vengeance from me. Not against the Sioux.”

His brow creased. “Pardon?”

“That’s a Sioux arrow in your back. This land belongs to them. It is a sacred place upon which we are all trespassers. Maybe you deserved to be shot. Maybe we all do.” I inhaled, bracing. “Besides. I’m one girl, and they are warriors. I cannot avenge you.”

Then, unexpectedly, he smiled, and my heart thundered like a gong, remembering that smile.

“Did Millie Ann want vengeance after
she
died?”

I turned away and busied myself with returning the gun to the drawer beneath the altar and relighting the candles.

Millie Ann was
gū hún yě guĭ
— a sad, restless ghost who died too far from home. She had come to Deadwood after being promised work as a waitress. Spent all her money on a train ticket only to find a different occupation waiting for her, and it was too late to go back. Four months later she’d lain dying in a pest tent, covered in those awful sores and crying for her mother.

I often visited Millie Ann’s ghost when she became agitated, listening to her sad tale over and over again.

“No,” I said, setting aside the matches. “She asked to go home.” A request I was powerless to help with. “Though some days she’s just hungry, so I bring her sliced apples. But Millie Ann wasn’t murdered.”

“There’s already a group of men plotting retaliation against the savages for the murders, whether we all deserve to be shot or not. I need your help with something else.” He paused, his body flickering in the candlelight. A faint smile still lingered along the bow of his upper lip. “Though I wouldn’t mind some sliced apples too, miss, if it isn’t too much of a bother.”

I’d seen hundreds of ghosts in my sixteen years, and Deadwood, barely a year settled, already felt like standing on the bridge to
Diyu
itself.

On every hillside I could see the ghosts of the Sioux, donning their animal skins and bear-claw necklaces and glowering at the trespassers who trampled their ground. A treaty had once promised that the Black Hills would be theirs for the keeping, but those signatures meant nothing once gold was found — so much gold it grew up from the roots of the grass, the newspapers reported.

Gold attracted its own ghosts. Diseases swept through the mining camps. Outlaws and horse thieves roamed the trails in search of easy targets. Whiskey led to brawls and gunfights, and the few who didn’t take to drink found comfort in the opium dens.

Then there were the soiled doves, many of whom, like Millie Ann, had been promised good paying jobs only to find themselves trapped in a pleasure house with no money and no way out. The ghosts of women who had committed suicide,
n
guĭ,
frightened me almost as much as the hungry ghosts — those whose families forgot to honor them after their death. Hungry ghosts emerged from the gates of hell during the seventh month, seeking food to fill their bulging stomachs and dragging mischief and misfortune in their wake. They were hideous things to behold, some with long needle-thin necks, others with rotting mouths and flaming tongues.