The syrup of rose hips can be used to relieve dysentery, digestive issues, scurvy, and bad temper. —Galen’s Anatomy

Chapter 12

“Why did you have to go and tell Gentle Annie and Louis about the skeleton clues?” groused Jenny.

In the pink of a mountain sunset, the two girls were on their way back to Quinn’s Sweet Shop. Main Street—for once in its sordid life—was quiet. Houses were puffing gently on their chimney pipes, and the scent of burned tobacco lingered in the air.

Jenny was in no mood to appreciate the scenery. There was a gnawing, twisted feeling in her gut that was wrenching its way toward her heart. She knew she should have acted. She knew she should have spoken. But she hadn’t.

Having recovered from her first bout of gold fever, Jenny was seeing her world with cold and cynical eyes. Men were cruel, dreams were silly, and money was king. As a young girl, you might as well accept you’d been given the bum steer.

“I like Gentle Annie,” said Pandora. “She’s got grit.”

“It was a private quest,” insisted Jenny. “And why did you keep harping on about Silent Jack? He’s none of our business.”

Pandora wrinkled her nose. “Course he is. He might have important information.”

“About what? Fool’s gold?” Jenny slapped the side of the sign for Boz’s Miracle Cough Syrup. “The hunt is over, Pandora. We got played liked suckers, and I’m leaving town. And that’s the end of it.”

Pandora paused on the foot of her stairs. “You’re giving up?”

“Yes,” said Jenny.

“Because of iron pyrite?” asked Pandora.

“No,” snapped Jenny. “Because I want to.”

“Well, that makes no sense.”

“Oh, to heck with it, Pandora!” yelled Jenny, venting her spleen. “Not everything in this world makes sense!”

Turning on her heel, Jenny bolted for the hills. She wanted to be away from teacups and bankers and keys. She wanted to be back at the top of Reed’s Terrace, before the dry and the drought. Before her father had lost his thousandth job and put them in this position.

But if you’ve been paying attention to my rambling, you will have discovered that mountains don’t care much for the troubles of humans. Year after year, they sit and wait for the earth to turn, and their bones to freeze, and the snow to fall. In the past week, when no one was watching, autumn had come to the valley. And it was promising to be a hard season.

So Jenny went home.

Home wasn’t much to speak of—a patchwork of corrugated siding attached to the sheep shed—but it was all Jenny wanted. A good, quiet night and a sleep without end. She ought to have recalled one little thing.

“Owwwwww! Oh, Jenny, my skin is on fire!”

Stripped to his waist, Hapless was hopping around in the middle of the room. From his wrists to his chest, he was covered in patches of vicious red welts. Some were cracked like volcanoes; some were oozing with lava. In less than a day, he had become an atlas of eruptions.

“Dad! What on earth have you done to yourself?”

“I was fetching poison oak for Mrs. Quinn’s medicine like you suggested,” he moaned. “Oh, lordy, lordy, Jenny, my skin is fair crawling! I took to scratching my arms and it seemed to make it spread. Is it very bad?”

What could Jenny say to such haplessness? She could hardly tell her dad he appeared to have been boiled in hot oil. Besides, it was her fault in the first place for devising the code words for Pandora. Her day went from desperate to dire.

“Dad, stop itching!”

Hapless dropped his hands to his side.

“You stay right there while I get you a bath. And don’t touch anything, you hear me? You’ve probably got the stuff all over your clothes.”

You’re unlikely to encounter a more pathetic sight than your scrawny excuse for a father trying to pick at his wounds without moving his fingers. Jenny didn’t know whether to scream or cry.

Instead, she took a trip to the pump, heated the cooking kettle, filled a tin bath with warm water, strung up a modesty curtain, and instructed her dad to soap himself down.

Then she took another trip to the pump, put on her working gloves, picked up her father’s clothes, and stuffed them into a stew pot. She’d have to soak them with lye, she reckoned, to strip out the poisonous oil.

Hapless emerged from his bath with his long johns damp and his rashes shining. Jerking with agony, he sat down on the floor and stuck his hands under his butt.

“I don’t know what kind of curing Mrs. Quinn was expecting, but I don’t think plants are going to do her much good.”

In lieu of a direct reply, Jenny stirred his socks into the pot with a rod. “Sorry, Dad. I should have told you to wear gloves.”

“Lordy, Jenny, I should have realized. I’m hopeless at brainwork, that’s the trouble.”

That was always the trouble with the Burns family, thought Jenny. No brains and no luck. She stared at the murky water and pondered where the two of them might be headed next. Someplace wet, most likely—wet and swarming with sandflies. Kam had told her of places on the west coast with mud eight feet deep. She hated mud.

“Something bothering you?” asked Hapless.

Without knowing quite where the desire came from, Jenny felt the need to hear that there was good and truth to life. That her presence on the planet might still have some uncharted meaning.

“Dad,” said Jenny, looking up from the water, “can you tell me again how you met Mum?”

“You sure?” Hapless sniffed. “Talk of your mum always makes you growly.”

“Please,” insisted Jenny.

“Well, now,” said Hapless, grinning his grin and clamping his hands ever tighter, “I first met your mum on a fine summer’s day in the port of Tooray. I’d come from the prairies, and she’d come from the islands. We were both looking to earn enough money for a new life. And we fell in love.” Hapless sighed happily. “Just like that.”

“Where did you meet her?” asked Jenny.

“She was tending counter in one of the supply shops next to the water. Prettiest girl I’d ever seen. I must have bought eight pounds of flour that day to have the pleasure of conversing with her.”

Absent of mind, Hapless slipped his hand from his seat and scratched at his neck. Jenny slapped his arm away.

“You’ll only make it worse. Wait.” She pulled two rags from the bucket next to her and wound them around her father’s fingers. “Keep these on for a while.”

Hapless gazed at his bandages. “I look like a crab wearing mittens.”

“Could be worse,” joked Jenny. She was softened to see him so helpless. “You could be a trout.”

The tops of her father’s words were tinged with longing. “Your mum used to talk about fish on her islands. ‘Creatures of every color of the rainbow,’ she said, ‘striped and spiny and bug-eyed and starry. Like a bed of living flowers.’” Hapless sniffed. “She had a way of picturing things that stuck in your mind.”

Jenny hesitated slightly before asking the next question. “Did she miss her family?”

“Seldom spoke about ’em,” mused Hapless. “When we got married, and she came to live with me here, in secret-like, I got the impression she was running away from something. But I didn’t want to ask.”

This was the point that Jenny had been working herself up to ever since the argument between Louis and Annie in the parlor. “But why didn’t you ask, Dad? Why didn’t you want to know about her family and her people and where she’d come from?”

Hapless stared at his daughter. “I loved her. What did it matter?”

What did it matter? Oh, lordy, lordy, how could Jenny make her dad understand? For how can you describe what it’s like being caught between heaven and hills? How do you explain what it means to be the daughter of a question mark?

And how could she ask someone to live in her skin? Jenny knew that one of the reasons folks ignored her was because her dad was pale and her mum was from the islands. She knew it and scorned it. She had the rocks and the rivers and the air.

Only how do you know who you are? That was the worry that was gnawing at her. Is it your blood and your parents that govern the person you’ll be? Or is it your longings and your loves that make the difference?

Or is it a mishmash of everything?

“You’ve got smoke coming out your ears,” said Hapless.

“Sorry, Dad, I was thinking.”

“You and your mum. Peas in a pod.”

Jenny threw the rod at the wall. “Oh, boil your own clothes! I’m going to bed.”

Life, I have learned, enjoys nothing more than a good joke. All Jenny wanted was to be alone and free from peas. And whom did she meet the next day on a bright Wednesday morning? Kam on his way toward the spot where her Cathedral tree stood.

“Hello, Jenny Girl.”

“Hello, Kam.” A fantail brushed past Jenny’s cheek and perched on a branch overhanging the Arrow. She could feel her cheeks start to burn, and she did her best to make her voice sound breezy. “Where you bound?”

“I thought I’d drown myself in the river.”

“Tough luck,” said Jenny. “It’s far too shallow.”

She wished she were joking. The Arrow was now only five to six inches deep and still falling. Kam would have had trouble drowning his toenails.

“You skipping school today?”

“Yes,” said Jenny. “You skipping work?”

Kam raised his eyes to the sharp blue sky. “Changing streams.”

That did it. Whatever Jenny felt—or didn’t feel—about Kam, she knew he was hurting something awful. A surge of human kindness swept through her, floating her hand toward his.

“Come and have lunch.”

It felt strange to invite a boy into the Cathedral, a bit like the first time you go sliding on a frozen pond. Jenny was torn between explaining the merits of her volcano code, rearranging Pandora’s ordered rocks, and fleeing for safety. She felt herself blushing again and tried not to smile.

Kam was ignorant of her troubles. On any given yesterday, he might have savored the rippled sand and the tangled threads that ran through the roots. Today he sat with his back against the riverbank and said nothing.

“I’ve got heaps of bread and jam,” explained Jenny, reaching for her bag. “Dad says we should use it up before we—”

She stopped. She hadn’t told Kam about leaving the valley.

“Before you have to go away,” finished Kam wearily.

Jenny rocked on her heels. “When did you hear?” she asked.

“Mr. Polk told me at the bank. He said a lot of folks were moving on.”

Jenny dropped down next to Kam and handed him a sandwich. “You went to the bank to ask Mr. Polk for a loan, didn’t you?”

Kam nodded. “For the garden. To keep us going until the rains. He wouldn’t give it to me. He said it was a matter of territory policy. We don’t have any savings. So the bank has taken Little Eden away.”

The strain of anguish in her friend’s voice was almost past bearing. Jenny wanted the old Kam back, the one who gave her lectures on tubers and fertilizing. “What happens now?”

“We’ll go looking for gold.”

And that was the killer. After what Jenny had seen and heard of the Rush, she knew how hopeless things must be if the Lum brothers were thinking of taking up mining.

Kam threw down his sandwich. “Gam Saan!” he said bitterly.

“Pardon?”

“That’s what my father called the peak by the Longshank,” said Kam. “Gam Saan, the gold mountain. It’s where we are going, to the old Chinese settlement.”

“You think it’s worth the effort?”

“Many of the miners in the first years of the Rush were careless,” said Kam. “It is possible we might find something that others missed.”

Jenny had little hope for this. If any gold was lurking around the Longshank River, it would be more like flakes of dandruff than lumps of coal. She could see a time in the near future when Kam might be stuck on a ship bound for nowhere.

Or back to his roots.

“Kam”—Jenny hesitated—“do you remember anything about your country?”

“This is my country,” retorted Kam.

Jenny drew a hasty breath. In her quest to understand whether it was her passions or her bloodline that dictated her fate, she had never thought to consider that Kam might be having the same feelings. He, too, had been made to feel like an outsider in his own home. He, too, was rooted by a deep love to Eden. There and then, Jenny vowed to listen hard before she made assumptions about people.

“Sorry, I meant your father’s country.”

Thankfully, her apology seemed to come as a relief rather than an affront. With a nod to the Arrow, Kam clasped his hands together and rested them on his knees.

“I remember a little. I was very young when we left, but I recall the voice of my mother and the way the mist slept in the hollows of the fields. My father was fatherless, but he owned land and two shops in the village. We weren’t badly off.”

Jenny sneaked a peek at Kam’s face. She could imagine him, a serious little boy, crouched in the river sand, tracing the tracks of an ant.

“Why did you leave?”

“The rebellion came. My father said there was heavy fighting—soldiers camping on the floor and rotting corpses floating in the canals. Then the crops failed and my mother and her parents died and villagers took to eating grass.”

Kam paused. Jenny was sure he was remembering something he didn’t care to relate. A minute later, he began again.

“My father heard from his friend that ships were sailing men to the goldfields. ‘They need strong arms,’ his friend said. ‘The land is cheap, and they like honest workers.’ I guess my father could have left us with strangers, or tried to find another wife in the city, but he didn’t. He spent his last money on a ship’s passage and sailed for Gam Saan. Where he died by a mountain, broken and old.”

Jenny had seldom heard Kam speak with such sorrow. They had chatted many a time about frightening things, about lightning strikes and losing your path in the night. But this was different. This was tragedy.

“Well, at least you’ll still be near town,” said Jenny, doing her best to find stars in a cloudy night. “That’s something. I don’t know where my dad and I are headed next.”

Kam’s smile could have broken the heart of the ocean.

“I had a lot of plans for Little Eden, Jenny Girl. You would hardly believe them.”

Jenny had the uncomfortable sensation that Kam was talking about more than irrigation channels. “You mean your greenhouse?” she babbled. “And your tree nursery? Is that what you mean?”

“Yes, that’s what I mean,” said Kam, taking pity. “Plans for the nursery. I was hoping to try to grow maidenhair, the silver fruit. It has a very beautiful leaf—a fan.” Kam drew the shape in the sand. “In the autumn, it turns to gold.”

His eyes began to grow raw around the rims and Jenny searched for something to say.

“How about flowers?” she asked, a stubborn memory kicking at her head. “Weren’t you going to grow flowers, too?”

“Ladies like flowers,” conceded Kam.

“Especially roses,” said Jenny. “Though I suppose we’ve got enough of those with all the briar growing wild.”

Her diversion was having an effect. The color had returned to Kam’s face, and he was assuming his customary role of tutor.

“You’re wrong there, Jenny Girl. Briar roses aren’t wild. They were brought here by miners—I harvest their fruit every year.”

“Fruit from roses?” asked Jenny skeptically. “What can you make with that?”

“Tea, wine.” Kam picked up his sandwich and dusted off the dirt. “Jam, jelly, marmalade. I’m surprised you didn’t know that, seeing how much you roam around the mountains.”

Jenny was starting to regret her strategy. Kam looked far too loving for her liking. “Yes, well, I’m no cook.”

“Or doctor,” said Kam.

Jenny’s heart skipped. “Why did you say that?” she asked.

“What?”

“Doctor,” said Jenny.

“Oh,” said Kam, “I suppose I’m remembering the flower grove that Dr. Magee planted in the Crooked Man, up the Gorge on the road toward Troy. The syrup from rose hips is used for medicine to prevent colds, treat burns, improve digestion . . .”

Jenny was listening to Kam, but she was no longer hearing him. She was remembering the feel of a wooden chest in her hand and the scent of its petals and the triangular panels that crisscrossed to form a faint but unmistakable X.

“Kam, the place you’re talking about in the Gorge—does it have a name?”

Kam rubbed the scar on his eyebrow.

“I believe . . .” He paused and smiled. “Yes, I remember now. Rosewood.”