THE ROAD AHEAD ALWAYS SLOPES UP (1885)THE ROAD AHEAD ALWAYS SLOPES UP (1885)
All night I fretted about paying Sam. Too little and he would brush me off or make only a half-hearted effort to find Mary. Too much and he would gloat over my dread of the wilderness, lack of common sense, fear of falling. Having money didn’t make things easier. Squeezing too tightly crushed the bird in hand, but too loose a grip let it escape.
The store clerks had advised going to Lytton and then hiring a guide, but I wanted to ask about Mary’s whereabouts before I got there. Her people moved around, from summer to winter camps, from hunting in the mountains to taking food by the river. They married into one village from another and travelled and traded between them. They weren’t like China men, stuck to one village like flies to honey, from the day they were born until they were buried.
Yang could advise me what to pay, but I wanted to avoid him. During dinner he had asked how long I had spent with Mary.
“A year.”
“Bullshit,” he crowed, making me a liar, “wasn’t more than six months.”
This cockhead knew nothing about me. “She left me!”
“Of course!” His eyes gleamed. “She saw you with a Chinese whore.”
To talk further with him would only invite more taunting. After railway work, I had stayed away from all China people, whores included. It was the only way to steer clear of the iron road and its unending noise: men coming, men fleeing, fights here, and blood everywhere, and all men cursing in foul and violent moods, trying with shit luck to make the best of an ugly situation. If the men were suddenly sullen and quiet, then someone had recently been killed, and no one wanted to discuss bad luck.
After dinner, Yang had shown me a photograph stuck to stiff cardboard. A middle-aged redbeard man sat in front of Yang and a young woman who held flowers and wore a white veil. Father and daughter peered with large eyes like doubtful servants into the camera while the groom’s pleased smile stretched over a mouthful of uneven teeth. The creases in Yang’s stiff Chinese jacket poked up in straight lines, unlike the redbeard’s suit, which was rumpled as a baby blanket. Yang demanded to know who was prettier, his daughter or my Mary.
“They could be sisters,” I said. “Mary was so pretty that I feared for her. I told her to run to our people in case of danger. I taught her to shout in Chinese, ‘Redbeard chases me. Help!’”
“Why would she come to us?”
“She ran to me all the time.”
“Did she go to school?” He pointed to a pile of books. “I sent Jane.”
“She taught you English?”
“I taught her!”
In the morning, I awoke at the sound of the front door. Yang led in Sam, who held out a brimming wooden bowl. The brat whooped with joy and started stuffing red and purple berries into his mouth. Mixed in a white mash, they slipped to the floor. He picked them up to eat.
I burrowed into my blankets. No doubt Sam’s grandmother had sent food to make peace.
He nudged me. “Do you want me to take you to Lytton?”
“No use. Mary doesn’t want the boy. She dumped him once already.”
Through half-shut eyes I watched him crown the boy with a furry hat. Two animal horns jutted from its sides; a thick brush of a tail looped down the back. The brat started singing in an old man’s quaver as his little body turned in circles, feet shuffling from one to the other.
I pictured villagers in China screeching in outrage, yanking away their children, covering their eyes and ears, and cursing the boy as a demon spawn who called up ghosts and evil spirits. Good thing he was going to his mother.
“The hat is for older boys,” Sam said, “but Yaya thinks Peter will like it.”
Yang pulled me to my feet. “I told Sam this morning that the boy needed his mother.”
I almost slapped his grinning idiot face. “I said I didn’t want Sam.”
“He’s the best.”
“Sam and his grandmother are right,” I declared. “The boy should go to China.”
Yang shook his head as Sam broke in. “My grandmother knows the boy’s mother; she told me where to find Mary. She’s near Cache Creek. Her husband is Secwepemc—a man called Louis.”
“You changed your mind.”
“Got to sell my goods.”
“Mary said Lytton,” I said.
“You think she wanted you to find her?” He paused and then added, “Lytton is on the way to Cache Creek.”
“By the clear river or the muddy one?”
“The clean one, Thompson.”
“If you have trouble before Lytton,” Yang said, “we have kin in North Bend.”
“I don’t need help,” I snapped.
“Today will be tough,” Sam said. “We climb four hundred feet. I warn you, in case you get scared.”
“Can’t be that high,” I said. The pack dug into my shoulders. “The trains would eat too much fuel going up.”
“Wah, aren’t you clever? Shouldn’t you be prime minister?”
Pompous ass, I thought. Then I asked, “Do we go past Ee Yook Moon?”
“What’s that? You mean Hell’s Gate?”
“I want to see it.”
“You haven’t? Didn’t you work on the railway? Everyone saw it.”
“Nobody pointed it out.”
“You were too stupid.”
“We didn’t want to step on horse shit.”
Dark clouds threatened rain as we hurried along. Mountains at the horizon, steep cliffs along the river, and dark forests were all overnight rice, served a second day. The river flowed in a steady thrust, glistening wherever it caught the light. Sparrows and blue jays chirped and flitted in the trees. Grandfather told me long ago that when birds sang in the woods, it meant safety, it meant that no wolves lurked nearby. The memory made me grin; it had never risen before. I went to tell Peter this lifesaving tip but stopped myself. If Sam translated it, then the boy would see him as the expert, not me.
“Ever hear of a China man taking his Native wife to China?” Sam claimed that his grandmother had asked this, but I reckoned it was his own question and did not reply until he put it to me again, louder.
“No.”
“Ever hear of a China man taking children from here to China?”
“Of course. He needed help raising his son.”
“What did people in China say?”
“How would I know? I wasn’t there.”
“Do men tell their wives in China about the women they meet here?”
“Do you tell your woman about Goddess?”
“I tell her that Goddess whispers playful words in my ears, puts me into her mouth, and says that having me is like bedding two men of two races at the same time.” He laughed.
“Screw you.”
“You should have yanked out your cock if you didn’t want mothers and children chasing you.”
“I always pulled out.”
“You couldn’t control yourself!”
I marched out of his range. Lewd talk was a manly pastime but not with this snot worm. It was common during railway work, especially after the rest day when men had gone to town.
“Look whose pants are wet and sticky!” They chuckled and made piggish snorts. “He’s dreaming of the sows at home!”
“Peony stopped bleeding. She’s open for trade now. Better go see her soon.”
“They fired Jade Face. The grass soups didn’t heal her down there.”
“Redbeards went to Old Chong’s place. His women said they had wee little birdies.”
We chortled about the women who were kind and gentle enough to temper our bluster. They reminded us that we weren’t at home with wives, doing our duty to assert clan strength with more children. They saw that we weren’t fully men here because even a redbeard drunk with a walnut brain was backed up by law books and rifles.
We tried to watch over our own. We rolled in and out of the beds of Chinese whores, after which we strolled to the brothels run by redbeards. We toured those noisy places only once, to bounce on the heavy mats holding coils of springy metal and to test ourselves against thick white flesh. At first we vowed to buy time only from China women so that everyone could go home rich. But they were costly. Doormen took a cut from each client. Owners poked noses to the sky and declared, “Goods from afar, pricey for sure.”
Then we noticed the mix-blood people. They stood out, with blue or grey eyes, and the big noses of redbeards. All, however, had black hair. Some appeared at first glance to be Chinese, and then not at all, depending on the shade of skin, cheekbone tilt, or brazen look in their eyes. Redbeard men had set up house with Native women, and these were their offspring, so China men thought we had discovered a custom of the land. Soon we beckoned to Native women too. But the redbeards stayed here while China men were forced to think of home.
During my washhouse days, Lotus was empress over a band of Chinese whores shipped over for the railway trade. Like Goddess, Lotus reigned effortlessly over a loyal crowd of men. She had quick wit and strong views, so clients found her funny and charming. She took all men, from crew bosses to rail hands, from cooks to tea boys, charging them what they could afford. Then, after seeing a China man get thrashed in the street by redbeards, she refused all their business.
“Help a person, do your best,” she recited, “Dispatch the Buddha, send him west.”
She told her Chinese clients that if they bedded white whores, then they needn’t return to her. Of course, she couldn’t keep track of where her customers chose to poke their fleshy rods, but her threat made news everywhere.
Boss Lew had a hefty cock and bragged about it. Word reached Lotus that he’d been sporting with a white woman named Rosalind. The next time that he called on Lotus, she turned him away. Boss Lew stopped going to see her rival who, rumour said, had taken much pleasure from the China man’s time and gifts.
When Rosalind learned who had barred him, her face turned black as ink. She burst into Lotus’s place to punch and kick her. Lotus fought back with equal measure until some men pulled them apart. Weeks later, a fire at Rosalind’s place took her life.
The town’s men watched as her body was taken from the smoking ruins. Mary comforted a stricken compatriot who had worked for Rosalind. We China men expected to get blamed for the fire. A few merchants fled town. What a relief when the redbeards did not strike at us. House fires were common then, and no one could prove that we had been involved. Lotus refused to go into hiding and carried on her trade. The China men mused that Rosalind had lost much face among her own kind after owning up to a fondness for Boss Lew. This was a first-rate story to take home.
Not long afterward, I went to see Mary. We went to bed, and she clung to me long after we were spent. She left town soon after. I didn’t eat or sleep for days. In my mind, we had made each other content, even though we couldn’t say much to each other. We shared a quiet sorrow, nothing that was ever discussed or understood. Many of my own people also lived in that makeshift town that had sprung up around a railway depot, emptying the redbeards’ chamber pots, digging their latrines, and washing their clothes. Both Mary and I were alone and lonely, even though our own people and languages churned around us. Some mighty force had shaken us loose from all that, like apples falling from a high tree and rolling far downhill. The first time that I had called at the engineer’s house, Mary’s dark face brightened when she saw my hat and ironed clothes. Our leather shoes were equally shiny. Arm in arm, we strolled back and forth in front of the hotels and drinking houses where Native women gathered. Mary never spoke to them. But neither of us was free—excitable employers, an error in language, a runaway horse—any simple event could crush us.
A mile after Alexandra Bridge, Sam said, “Big Tunnel is near.”
The wagon road had crossed that bridge to the river’s east bank, but we kept following the railway on the west bank. “And Hell’s Gate?” I demanded.
“Further north, at least seven tunnels to pass. You afraid of the dark?”
I stalked ahead without answering.
The slopes of Canada’s forests and mountains climbed like pillars at a temple, like the walls of a city. In China, the landscape stretched the other way, flat and level. Our patchwork of fields flooded annually to extend the muddy rivers that slid wide and turgid under creaking barges and ferries. What little wild and useless land there was, was found on the graveyard hills, where only drunks and madmen lost their way. In Gold Mountain, a single misstep in the woods led an honest man astray for days.
At home, sunsets shot shimmering orange light from the horizon all the way to my feet at the dockside. Here, the Fraser River burst through its narrow channel like an enraged dragon, spewing steam and spray. The only thing its froth reflected was the broad sky, sometimes bright, sometimes dark. The land and water seethed with potent currents.
A smooth edge caught my eye. Something planned and man-made sliced down through the bushes and white stumps toward us. At first I thought of coffins on display, but this was too narrow, too shallow. It was a wooden trough, carrying mountain water downhill over crates and sawhorses to a large boarding hall. As long as two city blocks, the trough’s sections were bevelled for a tight fit. Bands of leather sealed looser joints. The brat jogged beside it, running his hand alongside as if it were a massive horse. Where one section had toppled, water sloshed onto a soggy marsh.
Nearby, sheds with toppled roofs and walls lay open to the sky. A saw blade, cracked and rusted, as tall as the boy, stood among blackened boilers and charred pallets.
Farther on, a man watered raised rows of greens from a big tin can that hung from his shoulder pole. He plodded along without looking up, deaf to my footsteps. His garden was no graveyard, but I wondered who would be stupid enough to grow crops in the frosty autumn.
“Three men live here,” Sam told me. “The old one, One Leg, is crippled and refuses to go home. Falling rocks softened the skull of his friend No Brain, and left him strange. He follows One Leg all over. The youngster, Fist, of course, wants to go home.”
“One Leg must love the rainy cold of Gold Mountain. Or, he has an ugly wife.”
“Shut your mouth. He’s a good customer.”
One Leg stood by a chair, hanging wet clothes on a line strung between rundown cabins. Crutches leaned against a chair. He shouted good morning and waved us on to do the rituals.
We clambered around stumps and boulders to a large graveyard. Someone had cut the wild grass and replaced the markers. Mounds and craters with different heights of weeds and overgrowth told of burials done over time. It looked like a redbeard graveyard, wide and flat, laid out in straight lines, a sturdy fence around it. One hand had brushed all the names on uniform markers.
Fools had died here. Fellow fools buried them. Newcomer fools tended to them. But no one would be left here to dig up the bones and send them to China. Had the brushwork man used an oily ink? If not, all his careful efforts were wasted; the sun and rain would triumph.
One Leg and No Brain approached. The crutches were homemade, sapling trunks with flaking skin, bound with wire. No Brain had only one arm; his shirt sleeve was pinned to his chest.
Sam hadn’t mentioned this flaw; he must have wanted to knock me off-balance, to leave me speechless. After introducing me, he asked, “Where’s Fist?”
“That bastard?” One Leg frowned. “Who knows?”
“That bastard? Who knows?” No Brain echoed him but grinned. “He sleeps.”
He had been in the garden, doing the watering with one arm. He must have had lots of practice.
When I honeyed my tongue and asked who had tended the graveyard, Sam stomped off to do the rituals, as if finally assured of my nice manners.
“Very dirty work.” One Leg’s crutches gave him heft and height, so he was almost my size. “Only I can read and write. We had no paper or pencil, only ink and brush. Fist stood at the graves while No Brain brought the markers to me. You could hardly read the names that had been written on lumps of rock. Insects crawled out. I gave a jump! I thought they were ghosts. I copied each word onto new wood and then No Brain took it back to Fist. He planted it in the exact same spot as before.”
“Did you count how many?” I sounded earnest.
“What, you are collecting taxes?”
“No, but—”
“What’s your surname?”
I knew that he would snort at my reply.
“Tiny name! We, we are Chan, so thirty of us came together, in one gang. We looked out for each other.”
“How many survived?” Lucky for me, he enjoyed the sound and volume of his words.
“First man left after two months. Mosquitoes bit him and nobody else. They sucked him dry.” He chuckled. “When he got nicked by a razor, no blood flowed, as if he were already salted fish. After the first cold, five men went south, sailed for home. That was three years ago.”
“I’ve been here four years,” I told him.
“All railway work?”
I changed topics. “Today, we brought excellent goods.”
“Time to start!” Sam beckoned One Leg and No Brain to join him.
Thankful to escape, I led the boy toward the cabin. Its chimney was a rolled sheet of tin, matted with orange-brown rust. At the wood-chopping site, I found stumps with flattened tops and laid blankets over them. When I unpacked tea leaves, two grades of rice, several kinds of dried beans, and pork sausage, it drew flies right away.
I made sure the scoops and scales stood out prominently, hoping for quick sales that would let us leave. Rail hands who were lucky enough to have quit the work with their bodies intact were less lucky on meeting their maimed comrades. Then they were obliged to listen and grunt kindly to all tales of missing limbs and gory injuries, even if some cockhead was spitting out stories laden with extra vinegar and salt.
One Leg wanted to stay here in Gold Mountain. To go home with only one eye, one arm, or one leg was to bend over and offer your naked rear end to everyone for a hefty kick. If you couldn’t work, you were a pot with a burned-out bottom, a hand lacking a thumb, an army without a general. Not only would your wife be forced to tend to you, as was her rightful duty, but she would also continue to hire workers to grow and sell the crops. Your friends and kin would turn away, seeing that you had fallen from the favour of gods and ancestors. Those powerful beings had, after all, let their shielding gaze wander away from you. And if you were bad luck, then everyone was safer to avoid you.
I turned around and found the brat gone. I ran through garden plots, piles of rubbish, and log cabins with fallen roofs. The buildings had not been shingled, only covered by tree branches and long grass. In the cabin that was occupied, faint opium smoke greeted me. Of course: One Leg and No Brain needed help with their pain. I let my eyes adjust to the dark. The cavern had beds, crates, and tools cringing by its walls, its centre as open and empty as a recently harvested field. At the far end, firewood was crackling in a stove by a window.
The brat sat at a big table with wooden legs like smooth sanded balls or the thighs of a giant lady. The table was split down its centre by a crack, but the two halves had been pulled together by struts, nails, and wire looped tightly around the edge. The boy hummed and stacked low walls of domino tiles, peering at the red and black dots painted on the wood.
I yanked him away. He whined. Gleaming metal caught my eye. A rifle sat on a shelf.
A stern voice in a slow deliberate tone cut through the dark. “At last someone scolds the stupid thing.”
I waited, but the man in the shadows did not come forward.
“Doesn’t your boy know not to touch?” he demanded. “He’s filthy and our tiles must stay clean.”
“You know what they say.” I tried to laugh it off. “At game halls, fathers know no sons.”
“Haven’t you any shame, being a coolie to that mix-blood?”
I tilted my head toward the graveyard. “Don’t you pay respects?”
“Don’t know any names there.”
“You keep it neat and tidy.”
“One Leg dreams up chores each day.”
“Shouldn’t you help him? He was hanging clothes.”
“He insists. I don’t argue.”
I snapped, “Don’t know how to write the word ‘diligent,’ do you?”
Outside, I flapped a cloth to menace the insects again. The men strolled toward us, slowly, for the sake of One Leg, whose crutches poked for solid ground. Behind me, Fist came to the door.
He was small, with the furtive look of an opium addict, keen only on his latest stupor. Now I saw why he kept to the shadows. He had survived smallpox so nicks and gouges covered his face and hands. A ruthless blotch by his nose twisted his face sideways. His baggy pants and loose shirt made him a child in grown-up’s clothes. Skimpy whiskers dripped from a sunken chin, but his eyes were widely set, a good sign. All his limbs and fingers were intact, yet beside him, One Leg and No Brain looked clean and neat, with buttoned shirts, and handsome, with dark eyebrows and wide chins. This could not be a happy place.
“One Leg cooked rice porridge,” called Sam. “He invites us!”
“We have customers ahead,” I pointed out.
Sam was busy touting his goods to No Brain. When One Leg went inside, I recalled the domino tiles. If he saw the brat’s little walls, we might get scolded again.
He was balancing on one foot to shove wood into the stove.
“Let me help set the table.” I pushed aside the tiles.
He tossed me a cigar box.
“Not afraid, living so far from town?” I asked. “Remember Yee Fook?”
“Yee Fook needed a gun.”
Two years ago, redbeards sought revenge over a perceived slight and raided a railway camp late one night, setting fire to it. Workers poured out of cabins but got pummeled with poles and heavy tools. Yee Fook was one of two deaths. Every China man in Gold Mountain knew his name, one that would be taken home and sighed over.
No Brain grabbed pots, clutched cloths in his armpit, and ran outside again.
One Leg stirred the food, tasted it, and slammed the pot lid. “Watch that Sam doesn’t cheat your wages. Once the trains start running, the price of goods will drop. He’ll lose money, starve to death.”
“Stand aside!” No Brain lugged in a laden pot. Sam followed with bulging loads in the carrying cloths.
When I went to fetch the last goods, Fist leaned against the door jamb, smoking a lumpy roll of tobacco.
“Good thing you know how to write the word diligent,” he said.
One Leg ladled the porridge into bowls and put out bits of flavouring: dried fish and pickles, sausages and salted egg, ginger and green onions.
“Let’s all eat.” He waved for us to start.
“Let’s all eat.” We echoed him but waited for the eldest to begin.
Only Fist failed to repeat the invitation. Yet, as the youngest one present, he was the one most expected to do so. Nor did he pick up his metal spoon.
“Today we have guests.” One Leg looked at Fist. “Can’t we be grateful for this?”
“Very sweet.” I took several sips. “What broth is this?”
Fist refused to reply. We ate in silence for a while until One Leg pointed to the antlers drying by the stove. “Fist shot a deer.”
I had mistaken them for tree branches because they lay in the shadow. “You three ate a deer?” I asked. “How did you carry it?”
“Butchered it in the woods and took pieces to town to sell.”
“Some days we sit there until dark,” said No Brain. “Nothing comes near, not even a squirrel.”
“Look at him,” said One Leg. “Won’t talk, won’t eat, won’t do a thing, all to show his contempt.”
I ate as fast as the hot porridge allowed, but Fist turned to me. “Uncle, can you ask at the Lytton temple for us?”
“Get Sam to do it,” I said.
“He’s not our kind.” Fist pointed to a tatty print of Ghost Subjugator, ripped from an almanac and pinned to the wall. “He doesn’t even know what that is.”
Sam took a moment before speaking in a drawl. “I’ve been in temples. I can toss the charms.”
“Ask His Holiness if One Leg should go home, yes or no,” said Fist. “Ask if I should stay here or not.”
One Leg slurped his food and muttered, “Pay him no heed.”
“I won’t come back this way,” I said. “My ship to China leaves in six days.”
“All China men go home, except this ox head,” Fist said. “Tell him to be reasonable.”
“The older the ginger, the hotter its bite,” I said, resenting the sting of One Leg’s tongue from earlier.
“You’re no different from One Leg,” said Fist, “leaving your boy here for the same reason he stays: fear of people laughing at you.”
“Mares need a stud, sons must be true-blood,” I retorted.
Fist slammed the table and then ran outside.
Sam fetched more porridge as the brat chewed with false vigour, mocking my itch to leave. When Sam emptied the plate of sausages into Peter’s bowl, the boy grinned at him.
“Go to Fist,” One Leg said to me. “Tell him to go home. He can say our injuries will kill us soon.”
“He won’t listen. He hates me,” I said.
“He hates proverbs. Tell him not to buy extra ship tickets.”
“Why doesn’t he just go?” I threw down my spoon. My bowl was empty, and I didn’t want any more.
“He promised his father to tend his uncle, No Brain, who won’t leave without me.”
“His father waits at home?”
“He died here. But people in China know about the vow.”
“Go talk to Fist,” Sam said. “Aren’t you a superior man?”
I cursed them all.
The sun had broken through the grey clouds, and the faces of tree stumps were bright yellow basins, adding light to a gloomy day. They floated above the broken ground. I skirted them, suddenly fearful that they were a part of the graveyard. Across the river, cloud shadows hung like giant blankets over the cliffs, broken by airy shafts of white light. The distance reassured me. We needed to get back to the road, to find Mary. My family was waiting. Grandfather wouldn’t live forever.
By the graveyard, Fist had lit another roll of tobacco.
“Didn’t learn much from the railway, did you?” I asked.
He exhaled smoke and looked away.
“Trust the mountain, but mountains slide,” I said, forgetting One Leg’s warning.
“What did the old man say?”
“That you should leave him and No Brain here. That you should not waste money.”
The afternoon light caught bright and dark shades of green stirring among the trees. Just as I wondered if a deer might be watching us, a sudden movement crashed through the bushes behind us. We turned but saw nothing.
Fist needed to be an animal with sharp claws and fearsome growl. He needed to sprint through the forest like a hunted deer. Canada was a dense forest, with stiff branches and prickly bramble blocking your every step. The longer he stayed, the more this place would drain him, until he cracked and fell apart like that overlong wooden trough.
He shook his head. “That cockhead One Leg thinks I can make a life here.”
“He should kill himself. Then No Brain can go with you.”
“Tell him!”
“Those two are fragrant already.”
“You don’t need to enter the temple,” Fist wheedled. “Just come back and tell that shit-hole prick to go home. Tell him you asked and His Holiness said he must go.”
“Lies are no good.” These cockheads were all liars. Fist claimed he was told to make a life here, yet One Leg said he told him to go home.
“You can save them both,” Fist pleaded.
“Fools came for the iron road,” I said, turning away. “The only bigger fools are those who don’t know how to go home.”
Back at the cabin, Sam had loaded up our packs with new goods, making them heavier than before. I cursed on hearing the solid clink of bottles.
“Good trading is ahead,” Sam explained with a rueful grin. “I had goods stored here.”
“Well-hidden?” Of course liquor was involved.
“A horse brings the stock. Otherwise the bottles are too heavy.”
No wonder he had raged when we sold Moy nothing. Sam was a far smarter businessman than I had thought.
One Leg limped out to say farewell. “Fist listen to you?”
“Uncle, go home,” I said loudly. “It’s better for everyone, here and in China.”
“I told him many times to go home.”
“Fools came for the iron road,” I said again. “The only bigger fools are those who don’t know how to go home.”
“Do you fight your kind everywhere?” Sam demanded. “That shit mouth of yours won’t sell anything.”
“Stupid donkeys.”
“Want to be a superior man?” He matched my pace step for step. “Then clear them out. Push your China men onto those big boats and send them home.”
“You evict the China men but keep the redbeards?”
“China men are weak.”
“Then so are you.”
“Native blood makes me strong.”
I stomped ahead.
He shouted, “You cockheads come with no money but kneel to the redbeards. They give you the shit jobs that even my people won’t take. China men have no honour.”
I walked even faster.
We China men had been plenty brave to cross the black ocean. We had rules for safety and politeness: “Enter a house, greet your hosts; enter a temple, worship ghosts.”
China had lost its honour to foreign armies and navies, but we knew that life went on. “Family at ease, nation at peace.”
Sojourners were not yam brains. We talked wisdom all the time: “Don’t beat a dog until you know its master.”
Clearly, Sam’s father had not taught him much.
As the path sloped upward, the load tugged at my shoulders. Sam had been right about the steep climb. At Big Tunnel, Sam called a halt, lowered his pack, and dusted himself off. Then he shut his eyes, raised his arms, palms to the sky, and started to chant. Turning slow circles, he tossed crushed dry leaves into the air. The brat watched with solemn eyes.
As we unpacked lanterns, Sam said, “This mountain suffered greatly. Redbeards packed in black powder and blasted its head, chest, and arms into the river. Fish were blocked from going upstream. Native crewmen urged the Company to take action, but it refused. We cleared the rubble on our own. Finally the Company sent some China men to help.”
Big Tunnel curved and cut off the entrance light. I hurried into its cool darkness to show my courage.
“Baba!” Peter called. “Ung mai ngoi.”
He called me father, asked me to wait! I spun around. “Sam, ask how he learned that!”
“His mother, who else?”
I spoke to the boy in Chinese. “Have you eaten rice?”
Nothing.
“Good morning.”
“Eat sweets?”
“Want to go back to China?”
Nothing.
“Doesn’t matter if he speaks Chinese or not.” Sam had strolled ahead. “You’re not taking him to China.”
“He has Chinese blood. He should speak Chinese.”
“He has Native blood too.”
The boy pulled me to Sam and took his hand, so the three of us walked together, trying to hurry but not stumble. The darkness didn’t bother the boy, who hummed and skipped along. I breathed with relief: Peter would do well, no matter where he went. He would make his mother proud.
“And you?” I asked. “Will you teach your child Chinese words?”
“Won’t be there. The mother doesn’t want me. At first she said I was the father, but then she said no. Now she says the father is a Native man.”
“You let her take claim?” I was astounded. “But it was your seed that made the child.”
“Child is inside her.”
“Will her family raise it?”
“Of course.”
“The mother fears you are poor,” I said. “Many women think that way.”
“I can care for them, but she prefers her people.”
“Funny,” I said. “Mary came to Victoria and dumped a child on me. Your woman took the child away from you, even before birth. Yet the two are the same kind of children.”
“Not so,” Sam declared. “Mine has more Native blood.”
“That’s good?” Of course I was doubtful.
“Of course.”
“Bullshit.”