Deep River Night

by Patrick Lane

  Jaswant nodded, his gesture in deference to Art and his decision. He waited a moment and when Art didn’t reply, Jaswant said, “Thank you, sir.”

  Walking away his body seemed a slender stem of grass moving in a breeze come off the river, Jaswant Singh Gill, tall and thin in his worn work clothes and yellow turban on the path back to the dead end of the road, the tall grasses swirling as he passed into the pale beginning of night.

  He didn’t turn again.

  Art had known he wouldn’t. To turn would have been for him an even greater intrusion and Jaswant would not want that.

  He thought of the baby dying. What would the woman do if it died? If she died, the baby, the girl, and he tried not to name her and did, saying out loud the word, Beate. There was the church up past the store. It was still standing. It was just another unused space in the village, an empty box of boards and shingles in a square of dirt and weeds. Emil Kosky’s baby was buried in the cemetery out back. It was the only new grave in a long while. Last year. The child just died, Art didn’t know why. Lydia Kosky had gone over to the apple-crate crib one morning and picked her dead baby up. People said her screams were still alive in the forest around their cabin. No one had lived in it since they left.

  The humps and sinks in the graveyard were mostly mountain people who’d been buried over the years, old graves whose wooden crosses had weathered away or lay broken from the heavy snows. You couldn’t read the names on most of them. The perimeter was marked by a few rotten posts, rusted barbwire strung twisted through the grass and stunted trees. It was outside the fence he’d found the graves of babies in limbo, the unbaptized ones the Catholics wouldn’t bury in holy ground. Tiny crosses made from twisted welding rods, one was made of black rocks arranged in the grass and ever since first he’d seen the cross he’d wondered who in the village kept restoring it, the rocks so easily disturbed by animal or man. There was another old place of worship down the river a ways. People called it the Someday Church but as far as he knew they didn’t bury anyone there.

  He waited until the Sikh disappeared into the dark of the brush line below the village and then he went into his cabin. The cat was sitting on the windowsill finishing off the mouse she had caught in the field. The tiny bones crunching in her jaws were a distant clicking, an insect sound, the kind of tolling sticks might make in a land without bells.

  “Hey, cat,” Art said as he sat in his chair, the bottle of whisky beside him on the corner of the table, his empty glass beside it.

  The cat ignored him.

  He’d been chopping wood for hours and he had not had a drink all that time. No, he’d had one when Joel was there. No, and then one after. Two drinks.

  The cat moaned, the sharp bones in her belly turning.

  Art heard himself in her groan. There were nights in Paris, later, when Marie locked him in his room for fear he’d hurt someone or hurt himself, the muttered shouts, the guttural moans, the mangled monologues, the fear and the anger. She told him she was sure hearing him he was going to kill someone, or kill himself.

  The bottle of Ballantine’s gave off a glow, alive behind the glass. He stared at the swirls the whisky made, golden shimmers that withered as he watched. He picked the bottle up, the square glass familiar under his fingers. There was the night. There was at least that.

  WANG PO SAT AT THE SMALL TABLE in his room below the cookhouse and turned the ink-stick in the water drops on the stone. The sound made him think of a wet mouse crying and he smiled as he thought of the mouse he saved as he floated across the Qinhuai River, light from the fires glittering in its wet fur. It was the only time he looked back, his old Nanjing burning behind him.

  His hand moved in its circles, the ink-stick giving up its carbon, the ink darkening. The first stick he’d made was from raw carbon he’d scraped from charred fir slabs left in the sawmill’s beehive burner during spring breakup three years before. It was the third month after he began cooking for the mill. He had decided he would draw again the day he arranged for his bride in Shanghai, the first money sent, the arrangements with her family completed. It would be the first time he would finish a drawing since he left Nanjing all those years ago.

  The day he escaped he had hidden among stones behind a deserted temple on Stone Mountain. Lying there in the curl of the sleeping dragon he had looked at his trembling hands and known then that the war was taking his brushes away. He had tried only once to take up a brush during the first year he was in Vancouver, and it had hurt him that he drew so poorly. He’d placed the simple brushes and inks back in their box and gave them to a boy he found drawing in a park down the block from Li Wei’s little house on Gore Avenue. The picture he had tried to make was of the ferns along the Qinhuai River back home, a grey moth sleeping on a drooping blade. It was an image that had stayed in his mind from the old days when he was just a boy, but when he tried to make the first fine line the brush wobbled, his hand shaking.

  The war had been with him then, the years he’d survived in occupied Shanghai, the terror the Japanese brought with them, the casual killings along the docks, the women young and old hiding in attics and basements, the fear so much a part of life it became you. He had worked as a labourer loading freighters until the Liberation in 1949. Then the Communists began the executions in the Canidrome stadium, tens of thousands of Chinese slaughtered by Mao Zedong. A few months later he stowed away on a small fishing boat and made it down the coast to Hong Kong and then to Vancouver as a refugee.

  A month after he arrived in Canada he had been walking late one night on East Pender Street and Li Wei came out of the Dart Coon Club and stopped him, asking who he was. He took Wang Po to the Pearl, a small restaurant nearby, and bought him tea and a meal. They talked and he learned Li Wei was also from Nanjing though he had come to Canada earlier, in 1935. They had many stories to share and so became friends. Li Wei found him a job cooking in a little backstreet restaurant in the alley behind Pender Street just off Main. Li Wei’s opium parlour was in the rooms above and there were times Wang Po climbed the stairs to forget the war. He would rest on a thin mattress and chase the dragon with his new friend.

  Wang Po left the pain of Nanjing behind with the help of Li Wei. You have to leave the past behind, Li Wei said that night in the Pearl when Wang Po told him how he managed to escape the Japanese. Telling Li Wei the story had brought those days back and he had lamented the loss of his mother and father, their murder by the Japanese. Wang Po told Li Wei he had hidden in the narrow space above the attic in a stranger’s house. The soldiers had searched the house but didn’t find him.

  Wang Po had thought he had escaped the past, but he had just buried it deep inside him. It was from Li Wei he learned that the path he walked was his alone, that no one could save him but himself. Wang Po worked and saved his money so that he could have a family to honour his parents who had lost their lives.

  Li Wei listened to Wang Po’s stories of his life before the invasion and many times he encouraged him to draw. But Wang Po didn’t work with the brushes again. Just thinking of his hand moving ink on paper caused him pain. He could watch others create beautiful pictures and calligraphy. He loved to look at an artist’s hands, the lines forming behind the brush, fine paper coming alive with a single blossom on a gnarled branch, the wing of a swallow, a mountain in the mist.

  Two weeks after he arrived at the mill he received a photograph, his second, of the woman he would marry. Her name was Chunhua, spring flower. She lived in Shanghai. It was Li Wei who had introduced her family to him. They were not from wealth, but they were honest people who desired a better life for their daughter than the one she would have in China. The negotiations had gone on for months with a cousin of Li Wei’s conducting Wang Po’s humble offer. Three months before he took the job at the mill he had sent her the ring that bound their engagement. What he needed after that was enough money to pay the full dowry to her family, but also to bring her to Canada. It was Li Wei who had heard about the job at the sawmill. It pa
id double what Wang Po made cooking at the restaurant in Vancouver.

  He loved the image her family had sent him. The picture showed her sitting under a blossoming plum tree, her hands resting on her lap. The ring he had sent was on her finger. It was her modesty that made him want to draw again, but he had no ink and no brushes.

  A month after he received the photograph the mill shut down for spring breakup, the bush roads impassable from the snowmelt. There was only a skeleton crew working and in the new isolation he found the peace he had been seeking for so many years. It came to him one day when he saw an orb-weaver spider building her web outside the cookhouse window. He watched for hours as she created something that he’d learned the Shuswap people of the valley called a dream catcher. When the web was complete he saw the spider settle herself in the centre. The sun caught at her tawny skin and she shone like a gold pendant. At that moment of completion they became drawn together in a perfect moment, the spider and the cook from Nanjing.

  The spider and the man, two creatures whose work was to create something so beautiful they could hang their lives from what they had made. It was on that day he got up from where he was sitting by the river and began the search for what he needed to make his ink. He spent days combing through the cold ash along the outside edge of the burner for wood that hadn’t completely burned, the cedar slabs that had charred slowly beyond the flames. The best pieces were crinkled like the scales of Chi, the hornless dragons that were the snakes of his childhood.

  He liked the fine char he made from the fir coals, but his best ink was made from a delicate soot he scraped from the chimney of an abandoned cabin a few miles up the river. The soot was thick with oil from poorly burned wood. The moisture in the charcoal was important. Travelling south along the river he gathered wet and dry pitch from pine trees near Little Fort and Kamloops, boiling the soft and hard clumps in water to loosen their oils. He made glue from the hooves of wild horses shot by a rancher up the Barrière River. He traded for the hooves, giving the man in exchange a quick pencil drawing he made of the ponderosa pine in front of their house. The rancher’s wife told him she’d never seen the like of it and nailed it to the wall in their living room next to the head of an eight-point mule deer. The ink Wang Po made was almost as good as the ones he had used in China all those years ago. Whenever he mixed the ink he always thought of how his drawings were made from horses in flight in the fields of heaven.

  Later Art Kenning would come to visit and after he arrived Joel sometimes followed. He remembered when Art had brought the boy to the cookhouse after they took him off the gondola car. Wang Po had placed a hot bowl of soup in front of him and Joel had held on to the bowl so long with his red hands that Wang Po had to heat it again before the boy drank it. Joel kept asking about an old man who had to be saved. Art told Wang Po the story when he came back after taking Joel to see Molly Samuels and then putting him to sleep in the bunkhouse, how Joel had stood in the snow beside the train tracks and begged them to save the man who had saved his life. That night Wang Po had dreamed of that old man in the gondola car as he crawled back into the storm. He imagined that aging face resting on the frozen iron railing as the train dragged him through the canyons to his death. Many times he had wondered if there was a way to draw such a face. The thought of it made him think of the faces of Shanghai, the old ones in the alleys, the slowly dying, bodies wasted away, bones with skin stretched over them thin as rice paper, their eyes huge as dark moons.

  The stick in his hand turned slowly, the black pool shining.

  The ink was ready.

  He sat quietly and rested himself. He did not want to stay in the Old World. Shanghai had become another Nanjing, people dying everywhere as the Communist cadres roamed the city looking for those they called collaborators. It was no different under Jiang Zhongzheng, the purges, the massacres. The wars in China never seemed to end. Now he lived and worked in a place the village people called the Interior. It was a strange word to use for where you lived. Here they called their land an inside-place. And perhaps that was what this land was, something hidden and not to be seen. He would never fit into the village or the mill and he did not try. He would go back to Vancouver in two more years. He would live in the place these people called Chinatown. Chunhua would be with him. They would have children, they would have a life.

  Old China moved through him, wisps, thin steam from a seething pot on the stove. He had let go of the old years the same way the river let go of the mist that rose from winter waters only to vanish in the air. He sat at his small table, the ink and brushes ready. The wet-on-wet drawing he wanted to finish was of a branch on a deodar cedar tree that had grown on the bank of the Qinhuai River a few blocks from his father’s home. He had watched the tree burn through the bamboo slats where he was hiding. But one image of the tree had been preserved from childhood. He could see the branch so clearly, the cone, the needles, the flakes of bark at the interstices of branchlets, a black ant that crawled across the face of the cone. He had called it up from memory many times over the years and now he would give it life again. This new work of his was a close-up, not a far-off scene. He had made many drawings of the things that lived in him, the present one to be done in the style of Ni Zan. The Yuan dynasty painter’s works had a spare simplicity he had tried to find in his own pieces.

  What he wanted to capture was the sound of early evening, the faint click and scrape of the deodar’s needles when the wind rose along the river just before dark. He wanted to be able to hear the drawing when he was done. He could see the fine lines he’d make when he used the point of the wolf hair to draw the needles. The brush rested on the brass butterfly Li Wei had given him when Wang Po slept in the basement room he had offered him. Gore Avenue, the little house where he lived the year he arrived in Vancouver.

  The spring breakup the year after he made the ink and brushes he went down to Vancouver and stayed with his old friend. One of the first things he did was to buy paper to take back north. He brought Li Wei drawings he had made on lesser paper, modest gifts given to repay the kindness his friend had shown him since that day when they’d met on East Pender and Li Wei had bought him tea. Wang Po was happy that Li Wei could help Art get the medicines he needed to do his work, happy too that he sent the opium.

  He knew close studies of deodars were rarely drawn, the needles too short to display the flare other pines had. The deodar’s was a minimal spray from a single twig. It was not the Mount Hua pine with its long needles. He prepared the paper with a light ink wash and while it was still wet picked up a brush, dipped it in the fresh ink and without thinking drew three needles and beside them a pine cone. Four times he did this, the last needles more heavily inked, the lines sharp and clear above the ones below, the branch fading deep into the picture. Three small moves with the tip of the wolf-hair brush gave him the ant on the side of the cone.

  It would do.

  Satisfied, he cleaned his brushes and his ink stone. He held up the paper and looked carefully at what he’d done. It was not the work of Ni Zan. It was the work of Wang Po and he was content. He looked up from the inkstand at the wall and the drawing of Chunhua waiting in Shanghai. Soon he would send for her. Two years more and he would have enough to finish paying the bride price. The customs would not be the same as in China. He was also saving to send gift money to the bride’s family. The matchmaker lived in Vancouver and she was very careful that traditions be followed as best Wang Po could. When Chunhua arrived Li Wei’s wife would look after her until the ceremony could take place. Two years more. He would be patient.

  He looked around his small room. Nothing much had changed in the years since he first arrived in Canada. He was still living in a basement. But Li Wei had helped him buy rooms in a small place close to where he lived. Wang Po had rented the rooms out to a family. When Chunhua came and they were married it would be where they lived.

  He was far from Vancouver now, far from China. He was the Chinese cook and many of the men didn’t kn
ow his name. They called him Hey You or Cookie or the Chinaman. He was much alone, but he had been that way ever since the war. Living in the Interior in the mountains was to be separate from everyone until the night Art Kenning came to the cookhouse with a bottle of whisky and offered him a drink. When Wang Po asked him why he had come Art told him he had been out walking in the night and saw a light in the narrow window of the cookhouse. Art had looked down into the basement room and saw Wang Po making a picture with a brush. He thought a man who could do that might like a drink, he said. Wang Po hesitated a moment and then invited Art into his room. They shared the whisky, just as later they shared Wang Po’s opium. They spoke carefully of their lives. There were silences, but both were comfortable with them. That was the night they discovered they both had a war, his in China and Art’s in Europe. Over the following months Wang Po understood more and more how Art could not let go of his war. Art could not forgive himself what he’d seen and done. The war was trapped inside him and he wouldn’t let it go.

  Wang Po placed the wolf-hair brush back on the butterfly’s back. He looked again at the picture. The pine needles were very fine, he thought. The drawing one of his best. The brush’s tip was perfect for the finest of lines, the swelling of the barrel right for holding the precise amount of ink. The brush would last him a long time as long as he cared for it. Wolf hair was hard to come by. The wolves had been driven into the backcountry by the farmers and ranchers. Their prey were caribou, the wolves following their yearly journey north to south and back again. They wintered up the Clearwater River, eating the hanging moss off the trees. The brush he used came from hair he found caught in the barbs of an old wire fence near White Horse Bluff. He was lucky to get the long hairs with the black tips. He gave thanks to the wolf for leaving such a gift for him.