AS PAPA DROVE THE WAGON up the wide main street, Hanna rose from her seat at the back and peeked around the edge of the canvas cover. She saw packed-dirt streets and buildings of raw lumber identified by hand-lettered signs: a dry-goods store, a hardware store, a saloon, a feed store. There was even a furniture shop, a rarity in these hinterlands.
It seems like a nice enough place.
Wishful thinking, maybe. LaForge was little different from the other frontier towns she had seen: the railroad at the north end, with Main Street at a right angle to it, leading to the livery at the south end. A brand-new town, equal measures of promise and uncertainty, like the thin April sunshine in which it stood.
The hotel was near the depot. Papa got them a room for the night. Hanna climbed the stairs along the outside of the building carrying a valise and a sack atop a wooden box. With her bonnet tied on firmly and the load piled high in her arms, her face was mostly hidden from view.
Papa followed her into the room with his own valise. “All right?” he asked.
She set her belongings down and nodded.
He went to the window and pulled the curtain across. “Livery next,” he said. “I won’t be long.” He would take their horses, Chester the roan and Cherry the sorrel mare, to be boarded at the livery, and park the wagon there too.
He didn’t have to tell her to stay away from the window, out of sight. She knew what to do, after so many months and so many towns. Papa always thought it best that he acquaint himself with a few folks and set up either a dry-goods or a tailoring business before people found out about her.
And same as always, she couldn’t stop herself from hoping: Maybe this would be the last move for her and Papa, the last time she would have to hide her face on arriving in a new town.
She closed the door behind him and turned the key in the lock. Then she crossed the room and put the wooden box on the bed. Work would make the time go faster.
Mama’s button box was one of the few things from the shop in Los Angeles that had made the long journey with them. During the trip, the box had been joggled and jostled and overturned completely more than once. She unlatched the little hook, lifted the lid, and saw what she had suspected: buttons all jumbled together willy-nilly.
“Rotten eggs,” she muttered, using Mama’s favorite curse.
Papa had made the box to Mama’s design. It was a rectangular tray covered with a hinged lid and fitted with a wooden grid that divided the space inside into dozens of compartments. The largest button box Hanna had ever seen, it held the hundreds of buttons that Mama had collected for years.
Hanna cherished the button box because it had belonged to Mama. Every inch of space in the wagon was needed for traveling essentials, so most of Mama’s things had been left behind. And her most prized possession—an enormous mirror fixed to the wall—could not be moved at all. Hanna had managed to rescue the button box and Mama’s favorite woolen shawl, brown with a red plaid pattern.
Hanna emptied the buttons onto the bed. She began by digging through the pile and putting one button into each compartment. Rows by size. Columns by color. The square in the lower left corner contained the smallest white button. Above it, she put the next size, also white. Each square held a bigger button until she reached the top left, which held the largest white button.
In the next column she put cream-colored buttons. Then beige, shades of brown, gray, black. After that came the rainbow colors, red, orange, yellow, shades of green and blue, and finally violet. Several more columns and rows held novelty buttons, shaped like animals or stars or cherries.
The buttons were pretty to look at and pleasantly smooth under her fingertips. The orderliness of each button in its proper place was soothing. Best of all, sorting the buttons kept her occupied.
She put the last few buttons in their compartments, then closed the lid and latched it. She ran her finger over the carving on the lid, a simple five-petaled lotus. Mama’s favorite flower. It was her trademark: She would use tiny lazy-daisy stitches to embroider a lotus in the lining of every garment she made, and she had taught Hanna to do the same. Hanna had never actually seen a lotus plant, but Mama had shown it to her in Chinese paintings and on ceramic vases.
Hanna still had the first little lotus flower she had ever embroidered. Pressed carefully into the Bible Miss Lorna had given her when they left Los Angeles was a square of plain muslin with two lotuses: one done by Mama as an example, and the other by seven-year-old Hanna. Mama’s stitches were even, symmetrical, with perfect tension. Those by Hanna were wobbly and uncertain. But Mama had praised her effort, and since then, Hanna had embroidered a lotus countless times, always striving to make hers as even and graceful as Mama’s.
Hanna was putting away the button box when Papa’s boots thudded on the stairs.
“Is there a school?” Hanna asked.
It was always her first question. Some of the towns they had passed through didn’t have a school yet. Those that did, they hadn’t stayed in long enough for her to enroll.
Papa took off his hat and hung it on a nail near the door. He was tall and lean, and his knees and elbows jutted out when he sat on the room’s only chair. “Forgot to ask,” he said. “I had more important things on my mind. I’ll give you the bad news first. There are already two dry-goods stores, a tailor, and a shirtmaker here in town.”
She knew why it was bad news. No town this size needed three dry-goods stores. Or two shirtmakers.
Now Papa was almost-not-quite smiling. “Two dry-goods stores plus a furniture store? That tells me there are already plenty of women here.”
During the endless months of travel from Los Angeles to LaForge, Hanna and Papa had passed through town after town populated largely by menfolk. The farther west on the frontier, the fewer the women. In traveling east, Hanna and Papa had finally reached country where more women were living.
Hanna realized what Papa was saying. “There’s no dressmaker!” she exclaimed.
“I signed a one-month lease for a building on Second Street, and I bought the last vacant lot on Main. We’ll get a shop built and set up to sell dress goods.”
“And make dresses,” she said, her voice edged with defiance.
They had argued about this before. It had been fine when she was just a helper, at the shop in Los Angeles, but Papa thought that at fourteen, she was too young for the full responsibility of making dresses for grown women.
He went on as if she hadn’t spoken. “The drugstore’s on one side and a general store on the other. There’ll be plenty of traffic on that part of the street.”
“That sounds fine, Papa,” she said.
She would keep quiet for now, but she was already scheming to change his mind.
“You bought the lot?” she asked, trying to make her words sound like simple curiosity.
“You questioning my decision?” His voice rose in querulousness that she knew could easily become anger.
“No, Papa,” she said firmly, looking him in the eye. It was true: Papa had his faults, but he was a shrewd businessman. “I’m just wondering, why now? Why this place?” Since selling the shop in Los Angeles, they had always lived and worked in rented buildings.
He nodded; the glint of anger in his eyes faded slowly. “A couple of reasons. First, because of Harris.”
A man named Philip Harris was the reason that Hanna and Papa had come to Dakota. Papa had met him years earlier, in Kansas. At the end of last winter, when they decided to leave Cheyenne, Papa heard that Mr. Harris was justice of the peace in LaForge. “A good man,” Papa had said. “A fair man. Might as well go there as anywhere else.”
“He’ll do his best to see that we get a fair shake here,” he went on. “I’m figuring on giving it until fall. If the shop doesn’t do well, we can sell up and move on. There’ll be plenty of buyers, town right on the railroad and growing fast.”
Hanna nodded, more than satisfied. Until fall. That’s time enough for at least one, maybe even two terms of school.
As a young man, barely out of his teens, Papa had left his home in Tennessee to travel west, and eventually ended up in Colorado Territory during the Gold Rush near Pike’s Peak. He had worked hard and been lucky, doing very well for himself. When the rush was over, he took a job as a supplier for the railroad. He kept moving, finally reaching Los Angeles, where he couldn’t go any farther west, and set up as a trader dealing mostly in dry goods.
A year or so later, he met Mama, and they fell in love.
It should have been a simple story. But it wasn’t.
Because Mama was Chinese.
Orphaned as a toddler in China, Mama had been taken in by American missionaries. Her Chinese name was Mei Li; the missionaries called her May. They taught her to sew, and to read and write as well. She grew up entranced by their books and the stories of their homeland. When she was eighteen, she convinced them to let her make the journey to the land that was by then known as Gam Saan—Gold Mountain.
One of the missionaries had a sister who ran a boardinghouse in Los Angeles. That was where May stayed when she first arrived in America, with Miss Lorna. She cleaned house, helped with the meals, took in sewing.
Then a young man came to board at Miss Lorna’s place. He was setting up a dry-goods shop just outside Chinatown, and he needed a seamstress.
May went to work for the young man, whose name was Ben.
Papa.
The riots in Los Angeles happened when Hanna was five years old. By then they were living above the shop. She wasn’t old enough to understand, but she was plenty old enough to remember.
Shouts in the street.
Someone pounding on the door.
More shouting.
“Take her. To Miss Lorna’s,” Mama said to Papa.
“You go—you can both stay there,” Papa said.
“No. You. Safer with you.”
Papa held Hanna’s hand and pulled her through streets filled with people running, shouting, screaming. The air smelled strongly of smoke. Sometimes Papa picked her up and ran, dodging crowds of people who looked angry or frightened or both.
He left her with Miss Lorna. “I’ll be back for her as soon as I can,” he said, over Hanna’s head.
“I’ll keep her as long as you need,” Miss Lorna said. “You’re not to worry about her.”
Hanna stayed at Miss Lorna’s for what felt like forever. But it was really only a few days before Papa returned.
The news was bad. At least fifteen Chinese men had been lynched. Chinese-owned houses and businesses had been ransacked, looted, burned. While Papa stood guard at his shop, Mama had gone to check on her friends. In trying to help them save their noodle shop, she had been overcome by smoke and collapsed.
Papa brought her home. He and Hanna nursed her as best they could, but her lungs were badly damaged. The sounds of her coughing, wheezing, and gasping filled the house every hour, day and night. Each cough made Hanna flinch, imagining the pain her mother was feeling, the constant desperate strain for something as simple as air.
Mama struggled for six years after that. On a cold rainy morning in February, a few months before Hanna’s twelfth birthday, a thick silence woke her. She got out of bed and saw that the door to her parents’ room was ajar. She peeked around the edge of the door.
Mama was lying on a quilt on the floor. She was curled up on her side, and Hanna could see her face, so calm and sweet that she was almost smiling.
Sitting on the edge of the bed in his nightshirt, Papa cleared his throat, then looked up and saw Hanna. “She must have gotten out of bed in the middle of the night,” he said. “She didn’t wake me—I never felt or heard a thing.”
Hanna tiptoed into the room and sat down at the foot of the bed.
“Where your mama came from, a lot of people sleep on the floor,” he said. “Only rich people have beds.”
Hanna’s eyes were watering; she wiped away the tears with the sleeve of her nightgown. “Is that what she was doing, Papa? Sleeping the way she used to?”
“Partly. Maybe. But I think she knew somehow that the end was coming, and she didn’t want . . . She knew that no one likes to sleep in a bed where someone has died.” He shook his head. “Always had to be thinking of someone else. And look where it got her.”
Hanna hoped that the anger in his voice was just his way of sorrowing. She concentrated on looking at Mama’s face. So peaceful. Her last present to me, to know she was at peace when—when the end came. The wave of grief that swept over Hanna receded a little when she realized that the terrible wheezing sounds had stopped at last.
Three weeks later, Papa sold the shop and bought a wagon. They packed up and left to search for a place to live that would be free of Mama’s ghost, the memory of her sickness, her death, and the riot that had eventually killed her.