Chapter Ten

Charity stood on the sun-bleached boardwalk and stared up at the sign above the entrance to the wood-frame shop. On it written in large letters she read the words ‘General Mercantile Store’. Nervously nibbling her lip, and frantically hoping that Chen Fai wouldn’t be in the store, she lowered her eyes to the entrance, drew in a deep breath and took a step forward.

The flurry of air caused the slender wind chimes hanging above the doorway to jingle, and she winced.

She took another step forward and found herself inside the store. The wind chimes jangled furiously behind her. In a sudden panic at being in a place where whites seldom went, she turned and ran out of the shop and back to the dusty track, and stopped.

Her heart beating fast, she anxiously glanced along Main Street in both directions.

The only person close to her was a Chinaman wearing a coarse cotton knee-length jacket over baggy blue pants, and a peaked straw hat on his head. His eyes on the ground, he was coming from the direction of the railroad, a large piece of raw meat hanging from one end of a long branch balanced across his right shoulder, and a sack from the other.

There was no one else around.

With a sigh of relief that she hadn’t been seen going in or out of the Chinese store by any of the Carter townsfolk, and that Chen Fai hadn’t come out to see who’d disturbed the wind chimes, she turned and went back to the entrance.

She stared at the doorway. She was going to have to go through it again if she wanted that letter. And she did.

A scroll hung from either side of the doorway, with Chinese letters on each and words under them written in English. ‘Ten thousand customers constantly arriving’, she read on one scroll. ‘Profit coming in like rushing waters’, she read on the other.

Swallowing the sudden desire to giggle, she peered through the open doorway into the dimly lit interior. The wind chimes lightly tinkled. She took a step back.

‘You not go,’ she heard a voice say from within. ‘Please honour my father’s unworthy store with your presence.’

Frowning slightly, Charity stared into the store, squinting as she did so.

The Chinese girl emerged from the gloom and stood facing her, her hands flat together in front of her as if in prayer, her neck bent in a slight bow.

Charity stared at her. ‘How can I?’ she asked, a smile playing across her lips. ‘This is a small shop and there are already ten thousand customers in it.’

The girl unfolded her hands, put them in front of her mouth and giggled. ‘Unworthy self can welcome ten thousand and one customers to humble mercantile. You come in.’ She backed into the shop, her eyes inviting Charity to enter.

Charity slowly followed her, the sound of her boots on the wooden planks echoing loudly in her ears; then she stopped and looked around.

A small potbellied stove stood to her right, just inside the store. A number of wooden barrels and kegs were clustered between the stove and a long sawn-plank counter that ran from the front of the shop to the rear, parallel with the sidewall. A similar counter ran the length of the store on the opposite side.

Halfway along the right-hand counter stood a small pair of scales. She’d seen scales like that before. Joe had once pointed some out to her when they’d been in a store in the whites’ section of town, and she knew they were for weighing gold dust. At the far end of the counter, there was a boxed area marked out with a grille. A chair had been placed behind the grille.

In the middle of both of the counters, a coal-oil lamp threw out a pungent cloud of oily smoke that almost hid from sight the items piled at the far end of the shelves that lined the walls on both sides of the store.

All of the shelves looked as if they were about to collapse beneath the weight of the goods on them, Charity thought. She’d never seen such a jumble of items for sale – groceries of every kind, cured fish, wheels of cheese, canned goods, soap, coal oil, hairpins, lengths of cloth, bundles of Goodwin’s miners’ candles, and far more things than she could take in at a single glance.

She sniffed the air. A strange, aromatic smell seemed to be coming from the counter on the left-hand side of the store. Curious, she went across and stared at the assortment of small bags and boxes spread out across the top of the counter. The smell was definitely coming from the packages, but she couldn’t read the unfamiliar squiggles on them so she didn’t know what was inside them.

She picked up two of the bags closest to her, sniffed them, pulled an expression of distaste and put them down again, then she turned back to the store, and to Su Lin, who was hovering nearby, watching her.

‘What’s that?’ she asked Su Lin, indicating the grille at the end of the right-hand counter.

‘People who likee send letter, give letter and money to honourable brother. Honourable brother pay man to take letter to train or stagecoach. Another people send letter back here to unworthy store.’

Charity nodded. She glanced around the store again, and then looked back at the girl. Her eyes now more accustomed to the lack of light, she saw that the girl was wearing a short dark blue quilted jacket over loose pale blue cotton trousers. Joe was right – the Chinese girl looked about ten, too, when you got up close to her.

Su Lin wriggled uncomfortably under Charity’s stare. ‘Name of this unworthy girl is Su Lin,’ she said.

Charity frowned. ‘I know your name, but I don’t know why you keep sayin’ that you’re unworthy and your store’s unworthy? Why don’t you just say, My name is Su Lin, and just say store, not unworthy store?’

Su Lin looked at her in surprise. She slipped each hand into the opposite sleeve and shrugged slightly. ‘Is Chinese way,’ she said. ‘I Chinese.’ She hesitated. ‘You also Chinese.’

‘I’m an American girl,’ Charity said firmly.

Su Lin shrugged her shoulders again, and smiled. ‘You not likee, but you Chinese girl. You got Chinese face. You got Chinese mama and baba.’

Charity glared at her. ‘You’ve got a letter for me,’ she said sharply. ‘Ah Lee told me so last night when I was leavin’ the bakery. Your brother told him it was here. Give me my letter, please, so I can go.’

Su Lin didn’t move. ‘Big brother not want us be friends. But I want us be friends. I learn good English so we able to talk,’ she said, a shy smile on her face. ‘Big Brother teach me so I able to help in shop.’

‘Well, I don’t want us to be friends. My letter, please.’

Su Lin’s face fell. She went across to the far end of the right-hand counter, took something from the pile of papers in the area behind the grille and brought it back to Charity.

‘I likee us be friends. If you also likee, you come see me again,’ she said, holding out the letter.

‘I said I don’t wanna be friends. I didn’t come to see you – I came for my letter,’ Charity said curtly, and she snatched it from Su Lin.

She looked down at the letter, and excitement welled up inside her. For a long moment, she stared hard at it, unable to move.

Then she ran her fingers across the words directing the letter to General Mercantile Store, Carter Town, and looked up at Su Lin with wonder in her eyes. ‘This is the first letter I’ve ever had,’ she found herself saying, impelled by something outside her to share the moment.

Su Lin nodded her understanding, and smiled. ‘I not yet have letter. But honourable parents soon go home to China. When they in China, they send letter and I send letter back. You bring letter here and I send letter back.’ She indicated Charity’s letter. ‘Letter come from who?’

‘From Joe. He went away three weeks ago.’

‘Joe is man in livery stable? Is big like Chen Fai. But man Joe is not big brother. He not have Chinese face.’

Charity shook her head. ‘Joe’s my friend. He found me.’

‘He found you? I not understand.’ Su Lin looked at her in friendly curiosity.

The warmth of the friendship on offer reached out to Charity and touched her. A tightness grew in her throat, and she swallowed hard. She opened her mouth to explain what had happened ten years earlier, and then she stopped. She was an American girl, not Chinese; she shouldn’t be talking to a Chinese person. Carter townsfolk weren’t friends with the Chinese.

She shook her head and took a step back from Su Lin. ‘I don’t wanna talk to you. I’m an American girl. I’m gonna go home and read my letter now. Thank you.’

Trying not to see the disappointment that filled the eyes that were the same shape as her own, she turned away and went quickly to the door.

‘M goi,’ she heard Su Lin call after her. ‘Zoi jin.’

She stopped and turned round.

Su Lin was standing in the middle of the empty shop, a lonely figure. Silence hung in the air around her.

‘What do those words mean?’ Charity asked, feeling the need to say something to remove the sadness from Su Lin’s eyes, and the loneliness.

‘M goi mean thank you. And zoi jin mean goodbye,’ Su Lin said quietly.

Charity stared at her, hesitating, wondering whether she ought to say something else out of kindness. Then she shook herself inwardly. I’m an American girl, she told herself firmly, and she started to go out through the doorway.

‘Goodbye,’ she called over her shoulder as she left the store.

The moment she was in the street, she started to run as fast as she could down Main Street to Second Street, and along Second Street, past the row of miners’ houses, and out across the open ground to the place by the river where she and Joe used to sit.

But no matter how fast she ran, she couldn’t outrun the expression in Su Lin’s eyes as once again her offer of friendship had been thrown back in her face. It was there at her side, keeping pace with her every step.

Dear Charity, she read, sitting on the edge of the gully.

It’s lucky for me that you’re a smart girl who knows her letters as it means I can write to you. The further I got from home, the bigger the lump in my throat whenever I thought of you all. And then it hit me that with you being able to read so well, I could write to you from wherever I was and keep in touch with you all while I’m gone.

If you pass on my news to Ma, Pa and Sam, then none of you will need to wonder what I’m doing because you’ll know. And I’ll feel close to you all, even though I’m far away.

So, Charity, I’m guessing you finally did what I’ve long been asking you to do – gone into the mercantile and spoken to the girl there. If you hadn’t, you wouldn’t be reading this. Maybe it was her brother you spoke to, but I hope it was Su Lin.

In the rush of setting out for Cheyenne, I forgot to tell you that Mr Culpepper told me that Su Lin’s folks are going back to China for a visit. I reckon I’ve been gone from Carter long enough now for you to have started to understand what real loneliness feels like, and you’ll be able to imagine how Su Lin will feel when her folks have left. If for no other reason than kindness, I hope you’ll give yourself a chance to get to know her. That would make me mighty pleased.

I’m wondering if you’d like to know a bit about the outfit I’m with. In case you do, I thought I’d tell you. We’ve around three thousand head of cattle, and four mules for the chuck wagon. The chuck wagon carries our flour, bacon, beans, medical supplies and just about everything else. We’ve also got a well-stocked remuda. That’s the name for the spare horses. When our horse is tired, we change to another.

The actual drive begins tomorrow – yup, that’s excitement you can feel rising up from the paper. We’ll be aiming for about twenty miles each day for the first couple of days. That’s going some, but you’ve got to get cows far from their home as fast as you can. They’ve got a homing instinct, and you don’t want them trying to get back to their ranch. After a couple of days, they’ll have got into the rhythm of the drive and should handle well, so we’ll be dropping to fifteen miles a day. We have to go slowly and give them time to graze well else they’ll be worn out and skinny by the time we get to Montana and they won’t fetch much of a price.

I hope you’re impressed by what I’ve already learnt, and we haven’t even left the delivery point south of Cheyenne yet.

One last thing before I sign off. I heard tell it’s possible to get letters while you’re on the trail. I’d very much like to hear from you, Charity, and to learn how they are at home. You don’t have to write if you’re busy, though. I know Ma keeps adding to your chores and you’ve got schoolwork to do, and the bakery. It’s just if you do have a moment, I’d sure appreciate a letter from time to time.

In case you want to write, if we’re heading towards a town where we’ll be stocking up on supplies and I’ll be able to pick up any mail, I’ll let you know in advance.

Our first stop will be Casper, but we’ll have left Casper before you’ve got this letter and had time to reply, so the first place to write to would be Buffalo. It’ll take eight or nine days to get to Buffalo from Casper because of the cows. If you just write to me care of Monty Taylor’s drive, it’ll find me. If you want to, that is.

Your friend,

Joe

Clutching the letter to her chest in excitement, Charity jumped up and ran as fast as she could back to the house.

‘I got a letter from Joe,’ she screamed as she bolted through the doorway. She came to a halt in the middle of the room, panting hard. She stared at Martha with joy in her eyes.

Clutching a serving spoon to her chest, Martha took a step towards her, a sense of wonder spreading over her face.

‘I’ll read it to you,’ Charity said. ‘And then I’m gonna write to him.’