by Paul Yee
People at birth, pure and kind.
Alike in nature, not in mind.
If not taught, one’s nature falls.
Get a master, learn to focus.
“He can’t learn that!” The men slapped their thighs, laughing. “He doesn’t understand.”
“That’s classical Chinese!” cried Seven. “No one speaks it!”
“His mother taught him Chinese,” I insisted. “He speaks Chinese. I heard him!”
But no matter how I pressed the boy, he refused to call me Baba and left me looking like a fool and a liar.
14
PROMISES OUGHT NOT TO BE DODGED (1885)
A loud thud caused the coach to lurch and tilt. Curses rang out as those facing the front crashed into a corner while those across the way slid at them on the floor. The horses galloped on, but the carriage had hit the ground and was scraping and bouncing along, causing them to whinny in fear. The car was slanted so steeply that no one could stand, no matter how we tried. I hugged Peter’s head and screamed for the driver to stop before the horses swung around a tight corner and flung us to the rocks below.
The horses thundered on. We heard the driver shouting and then the squeal of the brakes against the wheel rims.
Should have gone north to Mary, I scolded myself. I should have asked His Holiness which way to go.
The animals trotted to a stop that let us tumble out. One big rear wheel was gone, leaving the coach lopsided. The driver hurried to unharness the horses and lead them to the side of the road, which was little more than a narrow ledge chiseled out of the cliff. We stood at its edge, shaking our heads, watching the rapids below crash over rocks. That heaving river was still threatening me, Water to batter the sturdy Earth until it crumbled. Getting off the mainland wasn’t going to be easy. The passengers jabbered away as if only loud voices could keep them alive.
“Thank Heaven, thank Earth.”
“Survive a disaster, good luck comes faster.”
“His Holiness is robust, his power stretches far. Wait until Boss Joe hears.”
“I’m the saviour!” Seven raised his hands once they were freed. “My virtue saved us. If not for me, you’d all be dead.”
“You’re a stinking piece of dog shit,” I said.
“If not for you,” added the escort, “we’d be safe in Lytton.”
The boy clung to me and whimpered. I squeezed him to see if he winced, checking for broken parts. As I stood up, he grabbed my shirt and spewed vomit onto it. I backed off but he hung on, head bent. The slush contained cookies, apples, and rice porridge.
“On the ground!” I slapped his face away.
“He’s sick,” Seven said. “You want blood?”
The escorts were laughing. “He vomits the words you were stuffing into him,” said one. “They don’t suit his appetite.”
“I say Hok won’t take his boy home,” the other said. “He fears the wife!”
The boy wailed and stamped his feet, his face a smear of tears, vomit, and saliva.
“Can’t you stop the crying?” demanded one escort. “He weep-ruins us.”
I slapped him again.
Seven pulled the boy away. “Oxen don’t step on ants.”
“No spanking, no growing.” I was brushing slop from my shirt. The brat kept his clothes clean but left me stinking for the rest of the ride.
“For sure he’ll die in China,” said Seven.
“What, do dogs chase mice?” He should tend his own affairs. “I can protect him.”
“You couldn’t even pretend to be a scary ghost.”
The redbeard passenger went looking for the wheel but returned empty-handed. Boss Joe’s man spoke to the driver and reported to us, “The roadhouse at the bridge is a few miles away. We’ll walk there, stay the night, and wait for tomorrow’s coach. The driver needs a man to lead each horse.”
First we lifted the broken corner and half-carried, half-pushed the coach to the side of the road. Holes and cracks had punctured every surface of the carriage even before this accident. The unhitched horses refused to stand still, eyes bulging and muzzles swinging side to side. As we tried to calm them, the brat came running to help. I wanted to swat him away until he showed me some respect. The driver heaved a padlocked strongbox onto his shoulder and led the way. I recalled the convoys my bandit gang in China had attacked. Good horses always fetched fine prices.
Seven and his horse came behind the boy and me. He called out to our fellow passengers, “This fool takes a mix-blood boy to China. Wouldn’t you say he’s crazy? Wouldn’t you say he lacks family teaching?”
To my surprise, the conversation ran away from Seven.
“Families at home are always adopting boys,” the ranch cook pointed out. “What difference is there? A boy is a boy.”
“Screw you, the difference is as big as Mount Tai,” Seven insisted. “No man adopts until it’s his last choice. If his wife cannot bear him a son, he can take a second wife, even a third.”
“What if those wives are barren too?” retorted the cook. “For the rest of their lives, they will still get fed by their husband. Wah, wouldn’t they revel in luxury with no children to raise!”
Seven pressed his case. “The man could marry his daughter to some beggar who will take his wife’s surname.”
The other rail hand said, “But the beggar can run off at any time and take the children. He’s still the trueborn father.”
“Best thing is for the man to take his brother’s son as his own,” said the cook.
“What if he has no brother?”
“Go to his grandfather’s family.”
“But remember, as long as the boy has trueborn family around, the new father’s claim can fail.”
“Buying a stranger’s son is best. You pay the cash and sever all ties to the birth family.”
I knew all these schemes. My pig brain never thought they had anything to do with Peter. He was my firstborn son, just as I was to my father. But Grandfather had picked my father’s wife, while nobody had chosen mine. I had a son but no mother for him. Stupidly, I had done things backward.
The two-storey roadhouse sat in the midst of a thick clutter of tree stumps. The ground at the front door had been worn into a rounded pit of hard earth, a sign of steady customers. A China man wearing an apron hurried out and introduced himself as the kitchen helper Fung. He was a small man, the size of Fist, so he was quite brave to be working here alone among the redbeards. When Boss Joe’s men described last night’s fire, right away he asked about His Holiness. When he heard about the loss of our wheel, he shook his head and remarked, “First comes a leaky roof, then heavy rains at night.”
In a low voice, he added, “Avoid the roadhouse. It’s full of redbeard rail hands. They look for work but get drunk and fight among themselves.”
“There are jobs?” I asked, surprised.
“A few. Ranchers need grazing cattle brought in. Farmers need crops harvested.” He advised us to go stay with the Native people. “You have money, no? The village is not far. They will cook rice and feed you. It’s not cold; you can sleep outside. No need for trouble just when you head home to China.”
He was a bit too timid, too helpful for my liking. I wouldn’t mind seeing a no-holds-barred battle between China men and redbeards.
We passed a mining site like many others that Sam and I had skirted along the river, a huge stretch of overturned land with pits deep enough to bury scores of corpses. Puddles of water reflected the sky. Clean and dirty sides of boulders showed they had been flipped over. Trees and bushes had fallen, exposing their roots. Except for the neat walls of rocks stacked by the ditch where they had been washed, it was an untidy mess, as if giant hands had seized the surface of the land and shaken it like a dirty rug. Many sites had been abandoned to weeds and ruin, but this one was still being worked.
“My people could grow crops here,” Sam had grumbled to me, “but your people washed away the topsoil and left the rocks.”
&n
bsp; “Redbeards did it too,” I had reminded him. “If you’re constipated, don’t blame the hard ground.”
One China man broke the ground with a pickaxe, thrusting his back and arms into every swing of the sharpened tip. A second fellow used a shoulder pole to carry pails of debris over the rough ground to dump into the sluice. A low wooden trough brought water from a distant stream to flush away the dirt and leave the gold. A third man chopped at a tree to expand the claim into the forest, where a ragged tent was pitched cockeyed under the trees. You could barely see the three miners, so well did their grimy presence blend into the woods.
“Have time to stroll?” The digger’s scornful tone labelled us as idlers who ought to be working instead.
“Redbeards evicted us from Lytton,” replied the escort, “so we go home.”
The miners frowned to hear about the fire, but only Spade Head spoke.
“Railway workers make trouble for everyone. The sooner you go home, the safer we will be.”
The men protested that they were not all rail hands, and Seven retorted, “Screw you. You miners make plenty of your own trouble. Whose land is this?”
“We paid money for this,” exclaimed Spade Head. “Redbeards were mining here when we saw a ditch in good shape. We have papers.”
“Were they real?” Seven snorted. “You can read English?”
This stir-shit-stick picked fights with everyone, no matter what they stood for.
“These men are working hard,” I said. “Leave them alone. They don’t bother you.”
“They bother the peace and the Native people.”
I asked the miners, “How far will you dig?”
“As far as it takes to find gold.”
“Water is low.” Seven pointed to the flume. “Redbeards sold you piss and shit.”
“Come spring, it will rise.”
“Did you find much?” I asked.
“Nothing.”
Every miner I had ever met answered that question the same way as if one holy sutra could protect everyone.
“Go home,” Seven said. “There’s no gold left here.”
“Go bother the redbeards,” Spade Head replied. “You take the road while we cross the bridge.”
He cursed us and turned away. We walked on.
“In Lytton you wanted to go beat the redbeards,” I said to Seven, “but here you have three mouths and two tongues. If China men don’t help China men, then who will?”
“Heaven, if they are good men.”
At the Native village, we were sent into the forest to cut pine boughs for bedding. Our beds were on the ground, under lean-tos made of woven mats. Giggling children called out to Peter, and they raced into one of the great round houses built into the ground. Each structure had a wooden ladder emerging from the cone-shaped roof. The village looked clean, and its people were well fed. They tended dusty fields of potatoes. I wished Mary lived in these forests rather than the desert lands of Lytton. Big meaty animals fed among the trees and could be hunted for food. After we came back, we started a fire in a pit of rocks. An elderly woman brought over tea leaves. We sniffed and found them to be a superior grade to what was served in teahouses. To have China men accepting tea from a Native woman was to be eating shit and excreting rice: the ways of the world were reversed.
Then the brat ran by, with Sam chasing him. What was that? I shook my head, thinking that my eyes had gone flowery from lack of sleep. Sam was with his woman and his child, back in Lytton. But the mix-blood guide scooped up Peter and hurried over.
“Yang Hok, we sail to China together!” He gave me a wide smile, and his voice was real.
“What are you doing here?” I felt my bones shrink. Bad luck was snaking up my shit-hole. The last thing I wanted now was to go to China with him and the boy. I may as well bring an entire village of eager Natives. “Was your child born?”
“A girl. The mother insists I am not the father.” He did not mind my fellow travellers hearing all his shame. “You won’t go to Mary?”
“Didn’t you see the fire?” I poured him some tea.
“I was ahead of you! The mother’s people didn’t want me there. They wouldn’t even let me see the baby. I left yesterday, boarded Skuzzy, and reached Boston Bar last night. I didn’t hear about the fire until I saw Fung at the roadhouse. He mentioned a China man with a mix-blood boy from Lytton, so I came to see if it was you. It’s the right thing, changing your mind.”
“I need money to buy his passage.” I waved at the brat. “You have money for your own ticket?” Surely this would thwart his plans for China.
“Those two boys sold my bootleg.” He laced his fingers around the mug and sipped the tea. “And I gambled last night. In China I can help you watch the boy. I can translate for your boy, make his life easier. He won’t be so scared.”
“Did you stop in Boston Bar and get my money back?” I reminded him that he too had once been too weak to piss.
“I caught a ride on a wagon. I planned to wait for you in Yale.”
“People in China will tell you to limp off with your rotted corpse,” I said.
“I promised my father I’d go home.”
“Kinsmen will smother you and bury you and no one will look for you. The countryside has its own laws.”
“My father’s ghost and mine would haunt them.”
“Village people don’t trust strangers.” I spat out some tea leaves.
“You wanted to see me recite the family tree to my relatives.”
“People in China kill each other over land. They slaughter entire families. No one has enough. That’s why we work abroad, to buy more land at home.”
“A fellow with a wagon is waiting for me.” He handed me the empty tea mug. “You can come with me now.”
“I go to see Fist.” My mouth saved me before I could think. In truth, the fire had devoured One Leg and his troubles and cast them out of my mind.
Sam’s eyes narrowed and his voice was accusing. “You weren’t planning that.”
I looked away. “In jail, I asked Heaven to help me escape. I promised to help Fist, so I went to the temple.”
“You change your mind all the time. Ever stand on both feet?”
“It’s the truth.”
Sam stalked off, shaking his head. The boy ran after him, calling his name. Sam spun him around, spoke a few words, and sent him stumbling back to me. By the time he arrived, he was wailing again, and the men blamed me for getting weep-ruined.
How dare that Sam presume that I would go with him to China? Yesterday’s fire in Lytton had changed everything. How could that stupid cockhead not see that? I had to look after my son now, the same way he was caring for himself, pushing his way into China.
Seven spoke up. “If you don’t want that mix-blood man in China, then why take your boy there?”
Luckily for me, the rail hand threw out a handful of dice and started a game for all the men. I said the boy needed to nap and took him away with my cup of tea.
When we returned to the roadhouse next day, the stagecoach had arrived and the horses were being replaced with a new team. The boy ran toward them. Fung stood chatting with Boss Joe, who held a large bundle in his arms. A thick knot showed several layers of stiff new cloth rolled together. Sharp corners poked out to indicate a box.
“Is that His Holiness?” Seven demanded.
Boss Joe nodded.
“You got nothing from Red Tie,” Seven went on, frowning and shaking his head, “and now you leave Lytton for good.”
“A homesick heart is a speeding arrow.”
“You should have let me stay there,” snapped Seven.
The lead escort stepped up and greeted his employer.
“Couldn’t sleep last night and kept thinking about the temple,” said Boss Joe. “Good thing I didn’t let you take His Holiness yesterday. What if you dropped the statue?”
“If His Holiness was on the stagecoach, we would have reached Yale yesterday. The wheel wouldn’t have gott
en loose.”
When I told Boss Joe about my plans to go see Fist, he cried out, “Don’t waste time with those fool pigs. They will never leave. What His Holiness said won’t make any difference to One Leg.”
“I cannot not go.”
“Then you should have told me earlier, in Lytton,” he snapped. “Don’t play me for a fool. I would have paid your way just to this bridge. We get no refunds here.”
“Hey, Boss.” The other escort had spoken to Fung. “So you revenged yourself against Red Tie.”
“Where’s that fool Seven?” Boss Joe looked around. “He should hear this.”
They dragged him over and the story started. “Yesterday I went nosing around my store, looking for melted gold dust. I heard a squealing, very faint, like the mewing of kittens. I stood still and listened. It came from a corner of the floor that had escaped the fire, where water from the overturned barrels had seeped in. Under the boards was a nest of baby mice, just big enough to start running on their own. I scooped them into a bag. Then I went to Red Tie’s store and asked for him. When his clerk went to fetch him, I opened the bag and released the mice, ten or so of them. They scampered under the counter. When Red Tie came, I gave him the keys to my safe, which was sitting on the street, and said, ‘It’s yours.’”
I pictured Red Tie’s store stretching long and narrow so the light from the front windows weakened at the back. The mice vanished, wriggling, into narrow cracks in the wall, their tails whipping behind them. A clerk’s eyes widened. He chased them, his long apron flapping, with a broom. A woman flung a brown-paper packet of raisins onto the counter. When an oil lamp was lit, it showed black pellets of mouse shit nestled amidst the dried fruit. The woman and her friends marched from the store in a huff. My stomach was suddenly warm with fresh-cooked rice.
“So, only you can take revenge, is that it?” asked Seven. “You’re the big hero?”
Boss Joe arched an eyebrow. “My deed harmed no China man.”
