An uneasy air of expectation settled on the men in the mines. The euphoria of their “victorious ambush upstream” had given way to a sense of wariness and unease. Lee Peng Yam was worried. What if his young bulls had failed to pass themselves off as Malays during their attack on the Hakka women?
“Be prepared for those dogs! Keep a sharp lookout!”
In the opencast mines, the still air and the sweltering heat pressed heavily upon the men. The fierce rays of the sun and the constant chug-chug-chug of the water pumps dulled their minds. They moved with the silent mechanical energy of oxen in the field and plodded with sure-footed tread among the rocks. They hauled baskets of gravel up the slopes to the wooden channels of rushing water, where the gravel would be washed for ore.
Old Stick stood in the shadow of one of these raised wooden channels. The heat and the work were punishing. All that morning, he had been wheezing like a winded horse. With great effort, he lifted his hoe only to let it fall heavily to the ground again. The smallest movement of his limbs drained his fast-ebbing strength. He tried to raise his hoe again, but a sudden wave of darkness washed over him. He felt himself sinking into the earth and pulled himself up with an effort. His hoe dropped from his hands and hit the hard earth in a cloud of dust. He wheezed and gasped for air.
“Uncle Old Stick, are you all right?” Tuck Heng rushed up to him.
He pounded Old Stick’s back to ease his wheezing, but spasm after spasm of coughing shook his emaciated body.
“Sit over there. I’ll get you a drink.”
Tuck Heng left him leaning against the stakes which supported the wooden channels. Old Stick was shivering even though the day was unbearably hot. An afternoon storm, the kind that built up whenever the heat was intolerable, was brewing beyond the hills. Old Stick tied a dirty rag round his head to stop his temples from throbbing. His throat was parched and his eyes were bright with fever. He drank some of the water which Tuck Heng brought him. Another spasm shook his thin frame. His face was flushed a dull red when the uncomfortable wetness oozed down his legs, soiling his pants yet again.
Tuck Heng avoided Old Stick’s eyes. The stench from his pants was unmistakable. The man had lost control of his bowels, and the dysentery was gaining ground. But Old Stick had insisted on coming to the pit with his mining gang.
“Who’ll feed me if I don’t work? You think Lee Peng Yam will bother with me? He’s my punishment. Done too many vile things in my young days.”
Old Stick’s frame shook uncontrollably as yet another spasm coursed through him. Tuck Heng tried to shield him from the sun with his straw hat.
“Let me tell you. I killed my own daughter. She ruined her marriage, and I ruined her and the whole family. That’s my life. Full of vile useless deeds! Useless, useless, useless,” he moaned as the pain coursed through his twisted bowels.
“Back in Sum Hor, I lost my land. Land my family had farmed for fifteen generations. I couldn’t pay the rent. Years of drought! A wife and ten useless daughters! I buried the tenth when the piglet was born. What could I do? Tell me, you people, tell me!”
Ah Loy and one or two miners came over to see what was wrong with him. But when they heard him moaning about his useless life, they quickly returned to their work.
“Can you smell it on him?” Ah Loy hissed.
“His shit?”
“His death. The horse-headed guard is here for him.”
The superstitious miners moved away. When a man started to recall and confess his past misdeeds, it could only mean one thing—his time had come.
“Only those about to die remember their bad deeds and confess,” Ah Loy muttered. “You’d better get back to the pit.”
“Don’t go,” Old Stick held on to Tuck Heng’s hand. “I had to sell off some of them. Why should I slave like a water buffalo? So that other people’s sons can carry them off to work on their farms?”
Old Stick’s voice rose to fever pitch. He would not let go of his hand.
“Sold off three girls to the brothel keeper. You people out there! Don’t pretend you haven’t done the same. Why else would we call our daughters Thousand Taels of Gold? Because they’re for selling! Right or not? Right or not?”
None of the miners answered him. “To rant like Old Stick is to invite bad luck. He will be claimed by the Bandong spirits,” the miners whispered to one another and prayed that these spirits would not claim them too. But in their hearts they knew that Old Stick was not the first and would not be the last among them to go the way of the sick and desperate. Thousands had died in the Bandong earth without ever seeing their homeland again.
“Don’t go.”
“Uncle Old Stick, please, you must rest.”
“I married off my Thousand Taels of Gold to the old pawnbroker. My number four was his fifth concubine, and the pawnbroker offered me a very good sum for her. Enough to pay the rent on the farm for that year. But my number four was an ass! A stubborn mule! Do you hear me, Number Four? Even if your ghost haunts me, I’ll still say you’re a stubborn ass!” Old Stick spat. “If you’d stayed with your husband, you could’ve saved all your sisters and your parents! But you had to run away. He beat you so you ran away. What’s a few beatings to a woman? Which woman has never been beaten? Go away, Number Four! Don’t stare at me!”
Old Stick coughed and sputtered. Tuck Heng signalled to the miners for help. But no one came.
“Listen to me! Not her!” Old Stick was tugging at his hand. “‘Return to your husband!’ I yelled at her. But her voice was even louder than mine. ‘Pa, he bites me like a dog! He wants me to be a dog in bed!’ She screeched like a she-devil. I locked the door and refused to let her in. She drank poison and died in my pigsty.”
Old Stick broke into a cold sweat and his teeth started to chatter. He pulled his ragged tunic tightly across his chest. Then he glanced miserably at the mess between his legs and turned to Tuck Heng.
“She died with her eyes open. And blood oozing out of every hole in her body. Her eyes, her ears, her nose. She cursed me with her death! She’s after me!”
“Tuck Heng! Back to work!” Big Rat hollered from the pit below.
“Go, go!” Old Stick seemed to have returned to his senses.
“I’ll bring you some food later.”
He left Old Stick seated in the shade of the wooden channel and hurried back to his digging in the pit below. Moments later, there was a roar like the crack of a thunderbolt.
An avalanche of gravel and water gushed out from the collapsed channel above Old Stick. The more he tried to claw through the debris, the more he fell and sank into the mud. His body lay inert. Then it moved feebly, his head lolling from side to side as the merciless mud and gravel poured all over him, filling his gaping mouth, his distended nostrils, and his eyes wide with fear and shock. Powered by the water pumps above, the gravel rushed down the wooden channel and ran in rivulets between the legs of the coolies who had rushed up from the pits. They saw Old Stick’s arm, brown and bony, shoot up an instant. It clutched at the empty air, then fell limp and prone. In another minute, the grey sludge had covered it.
“Uncle Old Stick!”
Tuck Heng was the first to reach him. The coolies pried his body free from under the rocks and pulled it out from the wreck.
“Stop the water pumps!” Lee Peng Yam shouted.
“Hurry, hurry! Over this way!”
“More poles! Over here!”
Old Stick’s body was pushed to the side as the miners worked feverishly to shore up the collapsed channel.
The coolies have a saying, “The richer the man, the more elaborate his funeral.” Since Old Stick was very poor, his funeral was very simple. He had no family and no friends. His only official mourner was Tuck Heng. Wong-soh was hastily summoned to perform the last rites on behalf of Old Stick’s wife and daughters. She burned incense and joss papers at the site of his death to ease his journey into the Underworld. That over, Old Stick’s body was prepared for burial the same day.
“Wong-soh, so sorry to rush you,” Big Rat apologised. “But Lee Peng Yam said we got to bury him quickly, and let the others get back to their digging. No sense in losing our wages.”
“I understand.”
“Big Rat, I’ll go with Old Stick to the grave.”
“Choy, Tuck Heng! Say you’ll be the mourner! Not go to the grave with him!” Wong-soh chided him. Then she turned to Big Rat. “Luckily you ordered him back to the pit. If not, he too would’ve joined the ancestors. You saved Tuck Heng’s life today. May the gods bless you, Big Rat.”
“Thank you, Big Rat,” Tuck Heng muttered dutifully.
But he was really in no mood to thank anyone. Everybody appeared callous in their unseemly haste to bury poor Old Stick. Didn’t Sum Hor’s traditions and customs demand some sort of mourning for the dead? Especially if the dead was a White Crane warrior? He looked at the coolies who had returned to their digging in the pits. He was disgusted. The White Cranes followed tradition only when it suited them—when dealing with adulterous women. But tradition was cast aside for money and wages.
“Young dog, if you want to be foolish and give up your day’s wage, that’s all right with me. And you don’t get free food tonight, you hear me?”
“Tuck Heng, come to my hut for dinner.”
“Wong-soh, I don’t want to be hard on the boy, but I’ve got to see that everybody obeys the rules.”
“Big Rat, I understand. Tuck Heng, come for dinner.”
He nodded, too surprised for words. One minute he was assaulted with urine and the next he was invited for a meal.
“Aunt Loh told me everything,” Wong-soh whispered, keeping her voice low so that no one else heard her. “No one else knows about it. Just us two old women.” Then raising her voice, she said, “It’s going to rain. I’ve got to go.”
The sky had indeed darkened suddenly. Tuck Heng’s thoughts were in a whirl. All he could think of was what Wong-soh had told him, and he was relieved. At last Wong-soh believed that he was an honourable young man, and that was more important to him than anything else at that moment.
“Young Tuck, over here! We’re tying up the body!”
Two men returned with Old Stick’s bedding. They wrapped his mud-covered body in a blanket and straw mat. The mat was folded over the body from one side to the other, and the whole bundle was tied and secured with cord, ready for removal to the burial ground. Old Stick’s shoulders were tied to one bamboo pole and his feet to another. Then the four bearers hoisted the carrying poles onto their shoulders, two men to a pole.
“Make way! Make way!”
Tuck Heng ran ahead of the men as they trotted up a slope with the corpse swinging between them. In his right hand, he held three lighted joss sticks to lead Old Stick’s spirit to the burial ground. When they reached a junction where the mud track split into two paths, he stopped to burn some gold and silver joss papers, to bribe the jungle jinns and other spirits to let Old Stick’s soul pass through their territory.
The burial ground was on a hill reached by a cart track. The track was hemmed in on both sides by thick bush and jungle. The bearers, with the corpse swinging between them, laboured in the still air under an overcast sky. Not a leaf stirred among the trees. The heavy silence of death swung between them, and thoughts of the Other World were not far from their minds. Tuck Heng stopped to burn more joss papers under an ancient tree.
Rumbling dark clouds, heavy with rain, came over the Bandong Hills. A sudden blinding flash split the overcast sky, followed the next instant by a thunderous clap. The sun was eclipsed, and in the sudden gloom, a windy blast tore down the cart track. It ripped the leaves from the trees. The change was so sudden that the coolies shuddered even though they knew that this was the nature of tropical storms in Bandong Valley. A second flash of lightning split the heavens. Another crack of thunder. Then the storm broke over their heads. Pallbearers and corpse were pelted with the full force of the rain. Water poured down in torrents, accompanied by strong gusts that blew sudden and furious, flinging gravel and stones before their faces. Tuck Heng and the pallbearers bent their bodies as successive flashes of lightning raced across the darkened sky and thunder cracked the heavens above. The pallbearers dropped their burden in the middle of the cart track and raced for the protection of an overhanging rock which housed a shrine to the Earth God.
“Come back! You can’t leave Old Stick here!” Tuck Heng yelled. He was completely drenched in the sudden deluge, but he could not and would not leave Old Stick’s body to the mercy of the storm. The horror of the ragged bundle lying in the middle of the flooded track brought hot angry tears to his eyes. He tried to drag the poor corpse onto higher ground, but the entire track had turned into a stream of rushing water. There was not a piece of dry ground anywhere. The flood waters ran up against the dead man’s head, veered and divided into two streams that swirled round his sides, sweeping leaves, twigs, pebbles and sand in their path. Old Stick’s body lay stiff as a rod in its wet shroud, exposed to the full force of the thunderstorm with its electrifying flashes of lightning. Then a sudden flash rent the gloom. Old Stick’s body sat bolt upright!
Tuck Heng let out a yelp and fled in the direction of the pallbearers. He was shivering with shock and fear as he crouched close to the shrine of the Earth God.
“Old Stick’s spirit is unhappy! His body sat up!”
“Lord Buddha protect us! God of the Earth protect us! Forgive us, Old Stick! We didn’t mean to drop you!”
Tuck Heng and the four coolies chanted over and over again a prayer to the Lord Buddha as the thunderstorm unleashed its fury upon the earth.
“Old Stick, please forgive us,” Tuck Heng prayed. “We don’t mean any disrespect. We’ll bury your body when the storm stops. I promise.”
Tuck Heng peered through the thick sheet of rain and caught a sudden gleam of metal. His heart stopped. Men with knives and guns were hiding in the bushes. Hakka Black Flags! He had to warn the others.
“Old Stick, protect me!” he yelled and sprinted towards the corpse.