Approaches to Juan de Fuca Strait—Navigation is simple in clear weather; but, owing to the irregularity of the currents and tidal streams, every precaution must be taken in thick weather. The strait is liable to all those sudden vicissitudes of weather common to these latitudes, and in few parts of the world is the caution and vigilance of the navigator more called into action than when entering it from the Pacific Ocean.
BRITISH COLUMBIA PILOT, VOLUME 1
We leave Barkley Sound by Imperial Eagle Channel, then pass through Folger Passage between Folger Island and Hornby Rock. Off Cape Beale there is a sharp and choppy sea, but once around the cape we are carried along swiftly by the swells. Although the roller-coaster ride is exhilarating, and the strong northwest wind merely helps us on our way, I am far from forgetting that this is one of the most dangerous stretches of coastline that there is.
We sight Seabird Rocks, on which many a vessel has come to grief, at the entrance to Pachena Bay, with foul ground lying both southwest and southeast; then Pachena Point light. A distance-finding signal emanates from there, but we have no equipment to pick it up. If I ever sail this coast again, I will be better equipped.
I glance at Lam Fan, who sits pensively on a stool beside the exhaust shroud in the wheelhouse. She has been quiet for several hours, and in some inexplicable way seems to be absent. She looks windblown, sun-bleached, salt-stained, not the elegant Fan I’ve always known. And weary.
“Happy to be going home, Fan?” I ask her, for I am looking forward to our arrival. We could make port at Victoria, if all goes well, by the next midday. Or earlier, with favourable wind, tide, and currents. I am anxious, now that I can glimpse the end, to finish this journey, and to give myself and the Rose a well-deserved rest. We could both do with a tune-up.
Klanawa River and Tsusiat River—we can see the latter’s waterfall even at this distance; then we fly past Nitinat and Clo-oose. I keep a lookout for the local steamer, which calls there regularly.
Stretches of white beach and an unending framework of trees line the coast of Vancouver Island; and pockets of haze burn off as the sun climbs the rungs of its ladder. To the west is the Swiftsure Bank, where the fishing boats gather, and where the lightship flashes out its warnings and forecasts. To the northeast is Carmanah Point light.
“Landmarks, Fan!” I cry out happily as I mark these off on the chart. “Every one we pass brings us one step nearer home.”
Fan stirs at her post near the warmth of the shroud. Her subdued face, her travel-faded garments paint a hangdog picture. She decides, at last, to break her silence. “It’s all right for you, Robert Lam,” she says with a whine in her voice. “You’ve got a future to look forward to. But what about me? For me it’s all over.” She subsides again. Her head lolls weakly on her shoulders. Her spine—usually straight as a lodge pole—is curved.
“Why, Fan!” I say in an effort to raise her spirits. “It’s because of you that the future looks bright at this late date in my life. My conscience is clear at last, and I’m freed of the past. Can’t you see what that means? Anything is possible, anything at all!” I do a little dance to illustrate, although I stumble a bit as the feeling in my legs gives out. I sit down and rub and pinch them until the nerves respond.
“See, Fan,” I say to her, with my feet again under me, “I’m a new man. Reborn. I’ve got my family, my history, my sense of identity. Yes, it’s all due to you.”
She stirs again, sell-pity gaining ground on apathy. “But what about me?” she says again. “What will happen to me once you return, have you thought about that?”
I push my cap to the back of my head. It is stained, sweat-caked, and beginning to smell, but I’m proud of it. I’ve earned this captain’s headgear as I’ve earned no other. “Of course I’ve thought of it, Fan. You’ll rest in peace, presumably.”
She glares at me, her sharp black eyes sparking to life angrily. “Over and done with, is that it? Now it’s back on the garbage heap? I wouldn’t have thought it even of you, Robert Lam,” she says disgustedly.
“But Fan,” I say, “why is it up to me at all? It was your choice to come on board the Rose at D’Arcy Island. I’d already buried you. I’d said goodbye. You came to help me of your own free will. When I said ‘rest in peace,’ I meant it. For that’s what you deserve, at the very least.”
She looks sad. “I made you a promise and I kept it,” she says. There is a pause during which I try to guess what’s coming next, for it’s clear she’s not finished. “It wasn’t much of a funeral,” she says regretfully.
I look at her in surprise. “I did my best, you know. You never told me what you wanted.”
“It’s not what I wanted that matters,” she says, “it’s what I got that counts.” She wipes a tear from her eye.
“I don’t understand you, Fan,” I say. “We’ve been in this thing together all along. I can’t see why you’re unhappy all of a sudden. If there’s anything I can do to help, please let me know.” I am beginning to worry, for it’s not like Fan to be like this. I’d counted on her all these miles, and she hadn’t failed me yet.
We are now in Juan de Fuca Strait, on the homestretch. I can feel the pull of my life on land: the pilot station and the men I work with; the little house at Christmas Hill that I don’t think I’ll sell after all, at least not for a while; there are the boundless possibilities of travel after retirement, of other journeys in other company. Of friendship and companionship. Of knowing where I fit. For I’ve almost got the whole of it. There can’t be much more left.
Fan squirms and looks supremely uncomfortable. She twines her legs round the rungs of the stool. She leans forward, then tips back. She knocks down my wet socks, which were hung on the shroud gently steaming.
“Come on, Fan, out with it,” I say a little impatiently as I look for the flashing light on the buoy by Port San Juan. “I’m here for as long as you need me, but I want to get on with it.”
She gives me a bleak look. She drops her eyes. “There is something I haven’t told you yet, Robert Lam,” she says quietly. “I’m afraid it is very important. You see, we can’t go home just yet.”
To Robert Haack’s thinking India had changed very little since he’d last set eyes on her. Certainly she was badly dressed, in a man’s shirt, trousers, boots, coat, and hat; and there was a streak of grey in the brown hair under the derby; and the blue eyes were pale in her sun-browned face: but he would have known her anywhere. With a great sigh of relief he threw his arms around her.
“I can’t believe I’ve found you, I can’t believe it,” he cried over and over. Tears of release from all the years of worry streamed down his face as he sobbed against her shoulder. As for how he’d come to be there, and what had occurred to bring about the chance of their meeting, he did not think to tell her. It was enough, for the moment, that they were together.
India stood with her arms around him, comforting him as she would a troubled child. She could sense that he’d suffered—was it all because of her? Had he known she’d been on D’Arcy Island? And if not, what must he be thinking now? For the Japanese had told him at once where they’d come from. There were questions she had to ask, things she had to say to him; but she also needed time to think. For it was a shock to find Robert Haack back in her life. Not that she’d never given him a thought: for of course, she had, she had loved him once: but he was part of the world she had left behind on the day of the robbery, so long ago. But what now? What was to come?
Robert wiped his eyes and composed himself. “We’ve got to hurry,” he said suddenly, taking charge. “We must get up to the cabin before it’s dark. I’ve had no chance to fix it up. We can think what to do with you once we’ve got you safe.”
His sense of urgency was infectious. Still in a daze, still bewildered by this unexpected turn of events, unsure of herself, India let him lead her away from the circle of onlookers. He strapped her few belongings onto the saddle of a horse he had borrowed from the fishermen and helped her climb up. Then he took the reins and mounted the horse behind her.
It had happened so quickly: as when the moon eclipses a star, the star touching the edge of the moon then winking out: the star is there, then it isn’t. So it was that India exchanged one way of life for another. And all calculations, considerations, and second thoughts were blacked out. They left the past behind them as they rode away from the beachfront.
The sun began its magnificent descent behind Mount Douglas. The horse whinnied and twisted its neck for a last long sniff at the fishermen’s dinners, then horse and riders were encompassed by forest.
Fallen leaves slushed underfoot as the horse retraced its steps as far as the path that wound up Mount Douglas. Here they started to climb, with Haack clucking the animal round the turns and guiding it up gullies, through streams, across deer trails, up and up, to the top of the mountain where a half-ruined cabin slumped.
Lights, miniature as fireflies, flashed on in the plain below them, indicating dinners and card games and family recitals in a dozen farmhouses. India could only stare at them in wonder.
How had it happened? Where had she been? Her life on D’Arcy Island was like a dream. It was as if it had never been.
Robert helped her down and began to unpack their belongings and prepare the cabin. India stumbled over to a rock and sat upon it. She watched her old friend as he hurried to fix things up. He looked happy, full of hope. He kept turning to her and smiling as if he could hardly believe his good luck.
She turned to look over the edge of the mountain. Beyond the little lights of the Cedar Hill plain the city was haloed in gaslight. Shopping districts and government offices, ships riding at wharfside, telegraph and post offices: they were all spread out before her, indistinguishable from this distance, but evident, nonetheless, in the general outline of memory. Her sister, Lam Fan, was there, and her other friends. There was the work she had left behind. Her whole other life. All suddenly attainable, but impossible, yet, to realize.
“We’ll only stay here a few days,” said Robert Haack, coming up behind her and looking over her shoulder at the sprawling vista. He turned her towards him. “We’ll put this whole damned place behind us. I’ve got it all worked out.
“After we get married, of course,” he added, noting the flicker of doubt in her eyes. “I love you, India,” he said, tracing the bones of her face with his fingers. “I’ve thought of nothing but you for all these years. We’ll get married, I’ll buy the steamer tickets, then we’ll go to San Francisco.” He wrapped his arms around her and held her tightly.
She looked beyond him, blankly, feeling the warmth of his body seep into hers, not knowing quite what to say, suddenly full of longing for all she had missed: love and a home and family. Someone to look after her, for a change. She sighed, and Robert bent his head to kiss her.
“It doesn’t matter,” he whispered, a moment later. “Whatever has happened, wherever we’ve been, whatever we’ve done, it’s all over now. It’s at an end.”
Then it was all returning, as her memory, dormant from years of hard work, began to awaken: the long walks they had taken together; the talks about books; the rescue work; the sense of unhampered vision. They seemed, in retrospect, to have been so young. And now she felt young again.
The horse, left free to graze, whinnied as its nostrils picked up a dozen scents. In the circle of light from the lantern that Robert Haack lit, India watched their shadows dance and melt. Then she turned her face eastwards, searching in all the blackness for D’Arcy Island. As she watched, a light sprang up on the island’s southern tip.
“I’ll put some water on to boil if you want to wash,” said Robert, who had noted at what she looked. “Then I’ll cook us some dinner. The fishermen gave me a few fish.”
“I’d like that,” she said, turning to him with a smile. Once more he took her hands. “I thought I’d never see you again,” he said. “I thought I had lost you. Can you ever forgive me? If only I had known what Jimmy had done to you.”
She looked at him, puzzled. “Forgive you? But what for, Robert?” she asked. “It wasn’t anyone’s fault. It was an accident. There was a robbery at the factory, and I stumbled into it.” She shrugged her shoulders. “You mustn’t blame yourself for what wasn’t your fault.”
Robert dropped his eyes, weighed down by his burden of guilt. “I’ll explain it all later,” he said. He had forgotten how little she knew, how great the gaps would be, how much he would have to reveal. What should he tell, what leave out? Was there any point in risking their happiness when they had only just found it?
He boiled the water on the fire as he had promised, then left India alone in the cabin to tidy herself. He sat outside and took deep breaths. He examined the stars. A simple life with simple pleasures was all he wanted. And it seemed to be possible, here and now, at the top of the universe. Why bother about what had been? Why let the past destroy them?
He returned to the cabin and lay down beside her. He blew the lantern out. Once more he took her in his arms and kissed her. Once more they remembered what both of them had missed.
As for what followed, as for jackets and shirts and torn Chinese vests, as for the aurora borealis displayed on closed eyelids…
“As for sex,” says Lam Fan bluntly.
“As for that, Fan,” I say with annoyance, “it is none of my business, as you’ve often told me.”
She looks sheepish. “But the point is, Robert Lam,” she begins in her own defence….
“The point is,” I tell her, “that it is the autumn of 1898, almost a year before my birth. Whatever happened that night between Haack and my mother, it had nothing to do with me.”
She sighs, as if life has passed her by and is sorely regretted. “You have so much, and I have so little,” she says resentfully.
“For God’s sake, Fan,” I say, “you lived to be a hundred years old!”
“It’s not the same,” she says.
“The same as what?” I ask her.
“What’s gone is gone,” she says, “it doesn’t make up for anything.” I look at Fan again. My stepmother with emotions and feelings? As a woman? My stepmother with a private life?
Bliss. To be released from the claims of creditors, on the one hand, and from isolation on a lepers’ island, on the other. And free, for the moment, of convention, of civilized mores, of the judgements of others. Of responsibilities and the hard facts of illness. Why shouldn’t my mother and Robert Haack have been lovers, even if he wasn’t my father? Why should I begrudge my mother her pleasure after all she’s been through?
Because she is my mother, and to condemn her for what I’d do myself is only traditional….
Yet my heart isn’t in it. Rather, I envy them their respite, of whatever it consisted. I envy them their innocence.
And so Robert Haack lay awake for hours with India’s head on his arm. He considered the future; he did his best to forget the past. He watched the face that he had loved so long in its absence. She lay serenely beside him as if that’s where she truly belonged, calm as a child, never doubting. She slept until the sun crept into the cabin.
It was not much of a wedding in the normal scale of these things: there were no banns posted, there was no wedding dress for my mother, no high neck and long train or lace veil to cover emotions; no jewelled hairpins or orange blossoms, no choir to sing “Praise Ye the Lord all Ye Heathen,” and no organ playing Mendelssohn. No bridesmaids or weeping spectators; no groom in frock coat faced with silk, and wearing cashmere trousers and boots of patent leather…. There was only my mother and Robert Haack, plus the minister, and his wife for witness.
They were married outdoors beside the Cedar Hill church. Leaves fell from the oak trees as the wind blew in gusts; and crows scattered from branches as the minister read the text. The minister joined their hands, closed his Bible, then had them sign a paper. And their two separate lives were joined together forever.
Robert walked a little distance with India on the way back to the cabin, where she was to wait for him. He was going to the city to purchase their tickets: for they had no time to waste, since the past that he’d outdistanced for a couple of days could quickly catch up with him. There were Yong Sam’s men, for example, and Sing Yuen’s friends, plus the customs officers, who would be on their way home from Deep Bay empty-handed and eager to find him.
He had told her as little about his problems as he could. But it was obvious, in any case, that it would be best if their movements were kept quiet. Moreover, India was still in a daze, stunned by her sudden change from one life to another; and they would have to find a way to account for her long disappearance. That she had ever set foot on D’Arcy Island was a secret they would have to keep hidden.
And so they stood for a moment and talked as the sun steamed moisture from the wet wood of the forest. And they forgot, in the obliterating joy of their marriage, about loneliness and unhappiness and plans gone wrong; they lost the very knowledge that these things could happen as they indulged in the language of hand touch and lip touch, in the everyday intimacies of love. They were at a fulcrum, a point of balance, suspended in time between city and cabin. There was one final kiss—with teeth clinks and inner lips, surfaces tickled and underpinnings undone, with tongue on top of tongue in advance and retreat…. It was like hunger and thirst.
That is, they kissed for the last time, time and again, then they parted.
My mother on top of a granite monolith, flea-sized in proportion to its mass and surface, as the sun sets into the saucer of the ocean and the stars blink open their cold all-seeing eyes; and the black bowl of the sky turns until she is dizzy with it. My mother, with her arms clasped around herself, alone on a mountain on her wedding night.
With the city to the west and the island to the east like perfect opposites. Waiting, while time, like time in space, elongates.
Time elastic. As when a spaceship (as scientists speculate) approaches a star at the speed of light, and time, relative to earth time, slows down. So that when the ship reaches its destination, thousands of light-years from home, the crew is no older than when it started out….
And then the return, where they land on earth and wander like ghosts in the future they’ve arrived in, in exile, out of time in the world that produced them.
My mother, India, on the brink of reentering the world she’d been torn from. Can it really be done? And what about the names she must never mention? What about those men who had been her friends, Sim Lee, Ah Sam, and Ng Chung, plus the others now gone?
And where does love fit in? And was it love that she felt? And how can she put the halves of her life together inside a marriage to Robert Haack?
“But why can’t we go home, Fan?” I ask my stepmother, having turned her pronouncement over in my mind. “I can’t think of anything we haven’t done that we should have, and we can be there in a matter of hours.”
“You can do what you want,” she says as we coast by the Sheringham Point light on as gentle a passage as I’ve ever had in these waters—it seems as if we are blessed: all obstacles melt before us—”but I’ll have to go on by myself.”
“But why, Fan?” I ask her again, exasperated. “You know we’re in this together, and I won’t leave you alone with whatever it is; but I do think I deserve an explanation.”
Fan looks unhappy but stubborn. “I can’t tell you before we get there,” she says. “You know I wouldn’t ask if it wasn’t important.” I sigh. Banks of cloud, low and enveloping, have softened the sky. Yet the sharp edges of the sea are aglitter with light. A troller passes us on its way to the harbour at Sooke, filled to the gunwales with fish.
“It’s important to whom, Fan?” I ask her. “To you or to both of us?”
“I can’t say any more,” she answers evasively. “It will become clear to you once we get there.”
“Where is there, Fan? I do have my limits. I’m not travelling around this island again, whatever you say. Let us have done with it.”
“Oh, no, Robert Lam,” says Fan instantly, “I wasn’t thinking of that. I just want you to take me back to where we started. To where I came on board,” she amends.
“To D’Arcy Island?” I ask in surprise. “Why go back there? We’ve just got my mother off it. Why should we want to return?”
She continues implacably. “That’s how it has to be.”
“It’s not good enough, Fan. You’ve got to give me a reason. I’m not a child to be ordered about at your whim.”
The mask of defiance drops, and I see on my stepmother’s face tight lines of fear. “Please, Robert Lam,” she whispers. “I beg of you. I shall never be at peace until we both go there and do what must be done.” She wrings her hands pathetically.
The cliffs of Beechy Head come into view, and I prepare to run Race Passage. For here, and in the vicinity of Race Rocks, the tidal streams can reach six knots. We must keep Bentinck Island shore aboard, that is, at a distance of about a quarter of a mile, or just outside the kelp, for the outermost danger on the southern side of the channel is covered at high water, and the strongest eddies are found near it.
Tide rips that have sucked men down within twenty feet of land. And with Bentinck Island on the port hand. Bentinck Island. Where the leper colony was moved from D’Arcy Island in the 1920s, and where one man, a Chinese who has been there from the age of seventeen, still lives. I have seen him myself as he stood on shore to watch the pilot boat go by on its way to meet ships. There is a doctor who visits him regularly, and a nurse who lives on the island. I wonder, suddenly, if he has ever heard of my mother.
It is only a second of inattention, but in that instant the wheel of the Rose slips through my hands and spins wildly. We are caught by a surge of the tide. The engine coughs as I push the throttle forward and try to power her through the whirlpool.
“Can’t you read the tides!” shouts Lam Fan sharply, her voice choked with fear. “I thought you knew your job!” I do not bother to answer. The Rose shudders and skids sideways as the engine misses. “No, Robert Lam!” cries my stepmother in despair as we draw nearer and nearer to the rocks. “Now it will never be finished!”
There is panic in her voice and in my heart as I fight to keep us afloat. We hold our ground, the Crown engine performing nobly, and then, just as I feel the Rose giving up this fight that is far too hard on her aging timbers, her boards shuddering and groaning as if they will split apart any moment, the tide slackens. I feel it in my bones half a second before the engine responds, then, as if it were nothing, the Rose leaps free of the eddy.
Fan’s face is ashen. The rocks that were so nearly our downfall have dropped far behind. “How could you be so careless, Robert Lam?” she asks as if she can hardly credit it. “We were almost shipwrecked.” She shakes her head in wonderment.
“I don’t know, Fan,” I say to her, badly shaken. “The tides in the passage are very irregular, but you can usually hit them right by reference to those at Turn Point. This has never happened to me before.”
We pass the quarantine station at William Head, the fixed red light at the end of the breakwater in Quarantine Cove, Mary Hill, Constance Bank, and Albert Head before I’ve regained my confidence enough to leave the wheel for a moment. I tick the points of our passage off on the chart.
Then I bear north-northeast for Baynes Channel, and the inside coast of Vancouver Island, once again.
Robert Haack had made record time on the walk from the scene of his wedding on the Cedar Hill plain into the city of Victoria. Anvil-shaped thunderclouds, unusual for the season, hung over the city with dark foreboding. The air pressed down on him, and his joints ached. Yet his buoyed-up heart was full of hope, and he touched, now and again for reassurance, the money in his pocket. He turned from Hillside Avenue south of Government Street, and the pace of his heartbeat picked up. For now all was up to chance. If he could avoid meeting Lam Fan or Sing Yuen or any of Yong Sam’s men—for they would all be wondering what had become of him—he’d achieve what he’d sworn to accomplish. Even if they came upon him, he thought he could parry their questions, at least for a time. All he needed was an hour of freedom in which to buy the steamer tickets and get out of the city. Then, under cover of darkness, he and his new wife, India, would return to the docks and, as soon as the steamer came in, board it and be on their way to a happier life.
All he needed was a little luck.
But a man with an unquiet conscience, who doesn’t want to be noticed, is at a disadvantage. A man who owes a great deal of money, who had been blacklisted by the Workingmen’s Protective Association, who had taken part in a failed robbery and spent time in jail; a man who had deceived the customs officers of his adopted country and who had taken their money; a man who had just been married labours under a heavy burden of guilt. And such a man, in his attempt to mimic unconcern, could only succeed in conveying the reverse. His hands twisted in his pockets, and his attempt at a casual smile resulted in a grimace. There was, in fact, a general unease in his movements, which broadcast itself in a ripple effect throughout the streets until, not surprisingly (for he had garnered the attention of the most incurious), he was noticed by someone who mattered.
Robert Haack, who had stopped in front of a store window to pull down his hat—as if that would help!—and who lifted the lapels of his jacket to hide his neck, and who brushed the last of the dust of the country off his jacket, was watched with interest by one of Yong Sam’s entourage.
Haack peered about him—the thunderclouds were dissolving like smoke, and the sun had come out—then strolled down Johnson Street (with a quick backwards glance) past grocers and outfitters (with their snowshoes and blankets), past clothiers and hatters, all the way to Wharf Street.
Here he jogged south to the Canadian Pacific Navigation Company wharves, sidled down the ramp to the ticket office, and went inside. Where—as seen through the window by Yong Sam’s observer—he paid for two tickets to San Francisco from a large wad of cash, which he took from his pocket.
Tendrils of steam rose from the decks of the docked paddlewheelers as the sun dried the wood; schooners and steamers unloaded their goods, the stevedores rolling barrels and carrying pallets into a warehouse; and a rainbow struck the cupola on top of the post office. Haack surveyed the scene with pleasure, for his job was half done.
It was a world of light, of optimism that unrolled before him. Men at work, and ships from all nations, and the promise of the rainbow, that sign that God gave Noah at the end of his suffering. He was gazing upwards at this phenomenon, in an unwatchful moment of self-satisfaction, when the two men came up behind him: for Yong Sam’s observer had found a friend. One held Robert’s arms while the other turned out his pockets. And found a shopping list, a pencil, a damp handkerchief, a marriage certificate, a poem on an old piece of paper, the two steamer tickets with receipt, and, of course, all Haack’s money.
Ah, pity Robert Haack, my mother’s new husband, as he stood amazed at the trick Fate had played on him; pity him as all his planning and his sacrifice—his sale of himself for the customs best price—came to nothing. And as he thought of the wife who was waiting on Mount Douglas, who was counting on him for her future; pity him as Yong Sam’s men took the money and tore up the steamer tickets in front of him.
He stood there, a man with the noose of accident tight on his neck, until the two men had finished. He watched them walk away, laughing. Then he tried to think. He had to, he absolutely had to find a way. The steamer left in the morning: if only he and India could still be on it. He was sure Sam’s men wouldn’t bother to check the passenger list—they thought they had done for him. But how could he get the money it would take?
It was not a new question for poor Robert Haack. It was one he’d asked himself, in a thousand ways, almost all his life; and it was one, alas, that so recently he’d thought he’d finished with.
Perhaps it was the press of the moment, or perhaps because the visit to the docks had revived old memories of his work on a coal barge in these same waters, or perhaps it was the thought of former kindnesses, that brought his former employer, Mr. Redford, to his mind. Mr. Redford. A man who had tried to help him, who had visited him in hospital after his injury and had given him the job that had led him to India. And who had invited him to his house several times for dinner.
A house whose whereabouts, and floor plan, Haack well remembered. There was its artwork and fine furniture and silverware, not to mention the jewellery and wardrobes of its owners. There was bound to be money. It was an inspiration and temptation together; it was an answer to his need. But could he do it? Was it any way to repay a benefactor, to treat a friend?
But, on the other hand, looking at the circumstances in which he found himself, did he have any choice?
Haack turned the thought over, then he made up his mind. He couldn’t waste any more time.
“Why, Robert!” exclaimed Mr. Redford as he met Robert Haack outside the door to his house, “it’s been a long time, hasn’t it? How have you been? Were you coming to see me?”
Strangely to Mr. Redford, who liked Robert Haack, Robert did not appear pleased to see him. He lowered his head and tried to brush past him. But Redford, concerned, caught at his arm. “Is anything wrong? Are you in trouble? Can I help?” Robert tried to pull away, and Mr. Redford took a firmer grip on his elbow. For his hands had encountered familiar material. Still keeping hold, he took a step back.
“Why, isn’t that my overcoat you’re wearing?” he said in surprise. Then he caught sight of an object clutched in Robert’s hand. He pried Haack’s fingers apart. “My watch chain!” he cried in horror, as Haack hung his head.
“My pocketbook,” said Mr. Redford unhappily inside the police station. “Yes, that’s my money and my case, my Sons of Hermann badge, my trousers, and my jacket.” The rest of Robert’s pockets for the second time that day were emptied, and Redford continued the catalogue in mounting sadness: “My wife’s jewellery, her watch, her pocketbook. And yes, her undergarments, too.”
“What have you to say for yourself?” asked the policeman disgustedly. But what was there to say? And what did it matter at this late date? Robert, stripped of Redford’s belongings, stood, naked but for his shoes and socks and underwear, and said nothing. Slowly, as if his neck bore a terrible weight, he raised his eyes to meet Redford’s. His eyes begged forgiveness and understanding, another chance. But they met disheartened puzzlement.
Ice formed on the inside corners of the glass (behind bars) in Robert Haack’s jail cell. He cleared the window of condensation with his fingers and tried to peer out. The city was in darkness; but from life on the outside, in whatever state, Robert Haack was forevermore shut out.
Robert Haack: a man who had a wife, and who once had money with which to make a future with her, but who now had lost it; a man who had no future at all, at least in this country. For despite the fact that Mr. Redford had dropped the charges, Robert Haack was to be deported.
“Men like you we can do without,” said the magistrate. The policeman had nodded, the customs officer had agreed, even Mr. Redford, still bewildered and hurt, had acquiesced. “It’s the best thing for you, Robert,” he’d said. The papers had been signed. The United States escort was on its way. Haack would sail away on the steamer in the morning.
Going home at last. But not as he’d planned. With no means of ever coming back; no way to send for India. For at least he had that—he had not betrayed her. For what would these men, and the rest of the city, think if they knew where she’d been? Among lepers? The marriage certificate was safely in his socks.
As for the Tong, with the deportation order made public, they would never give up. Yong Sam had come to tell him so himself. Robert Haack would be deported along with his debts.
He sighed. The snipped-off threads of his life dangled. It felt as though his heart had abandoned his chest. There was more ice on the window: no question but that it was cold outside. How would India manage? What would she eat, how would she survive? How long would she wait before going for help? And what must she think of him, her new husband, Robert Haack?
A static charge crackled his hair as he ran his fingers through it. There was the nip of shock as he touched the iron bars over the window. He was gathering his courage. He bent down and took out the two pieces of paper he had inserted into his socks at Redford’s house. He read through his marriage certificate, folded it and replaced it in its hiding place. Then he stood on tiptoe and squeezed as much of his hand as he could between the bars of the window. And pushed, and pushed, until his fingers, behind which he had focused his entire weight and will, broke through the glass. It was not much of a hole in size, and it made his hand bleed badly. But it was just large enough.
Ignoring the tears that watered his face, Robert tore up the poem that Robert Louis Stevenson had given him so long ago—“Praise and Prayer.” He pushed the pieces through the break in the window, then watched the wind take them. Fragments of the past. Prospects of hope. Pieces of light that lifted, then dropped and drifted in the darkness. They glittered like snow; they stirred in a dance of atoms and caught a current. Then were gone.
Through a switchboard of streets and into the country. Over farmyards and cattle pens, through forest, then climbing high on the wind to the top of a mountain—Mount Douglas. Swirling, dancing, eddying. And reaching my mother.
Or so Haack intended. And so it seemed to him.
India watched and waited on top of the mountain. She kept the fire going. She heated water and made tea. She forgot to drink it. She folded blankets and talked to the horse that Haack had left behind with her. She watched the gaslights flare in the city, and the flicker of lanterns on D’Arcy Island as they sparked on and then, one by one, as the hours passed, went out.
The moon rose, and under its gaze the rippling dark skin of the strait came alive. All was as it should be. Except that Robert had not returned.
Another light appeared on D’Arcy Island, and even as, in his jail cell, Robert Haack tore up his poem and sent the blood-stained words on a whirl of wind towards her, my mother watched the tiny flame on D’Arcy Island grow larger.
From pinprick to glowworm it expanded, from glowworm to many-armed monster, sending out tributaries, streams, ribbons, and oceans of fire all over the island. All night India watched as the fire extended itself then slowly, ever so slowly, burned itself out.
There has been a brush fire [reported the medical officer] on the last day of November, 1898, on D’Arcy Island. I did not learn of it for three days. The building and some of the surrounding bushland burned. What was lost—food, etc.—has been supplied again. The survivors have not suffered undue hardships. One man was badly burned on the face and hands. Only one patient, Sim Lee, one of the original inhabitants, was burned to death.
So many factors, Fan, had gone into it. My mother between her choices, sitting up on a mountain, wondering why she’d scarcely thought of Robert Haack when she lived on D’Arcy Island; wondering why he hadn’t come back. And Robert Haack, in the city, finally out of luck. So many signals going out. As a hand, misshapen and helpless with leprosy, failed to retrieve a live coal that had fallen from a stove front onto the wooden floor of a cabin. As a fire flared up and ravaged the surface of D’Arcy Island. And as my mother watched and trembled for the lives of her friends, and saw she could not bear to be without them. As she wrote her farewell in a note to her brand-new husband.
And in the morning, that morning of the first of December, in the year before my birth, a Japanese fisherman left his shack to check his boat at the Cordova Bay landing. And he found, near the boat, a woman.
“Oh, Miss,” he said, his voice tinged with sadness, to my mother, India Thackery, who now knew where her life and her heart belonged, “you’ve come back so soon!”