Thousand Pieces of Gold

by Ruthanne Lum McCunn

  The door swung open, and Charlie walked toward her, his footsteps loud and unnatural in the quiet. “When you didn’t come, I thought you’d gone down to Chinatown. Then I saw the lights and got worried.”

  She looked up at him, her eyes dark bruises of pain. “Why you not tell me I not slave, that I not belong Hong King?”

  The hesitation before Charlie spoke was fractional but Polly, her senses scraped raw, felt it.

  “Who said you’re not?”

  “Black man come to saloon tonight. He tell me his people come from Africa. Like me, stolen from village and bring here, but man name Lincoln make war and they free. He free, I free,” she said, her English deteriorating under the strain.

  “The Civil War was fought to free Negroes.”

  “You mean law for China people not the same?”

  Charlie pulled out a chair. “It’s more complicated than that.”

  He took out his tobacco pouch and pipe, stuffed the bowl, tamped it down, lit it, and took a deep drag. The smoke drifted between them.

  “Years ago, special laws were passed in California to forbid the kind of auctions and contracts that made you a slave, but the laws only raised the price of slave girls.”

  “How law make black man free and raise price for me?” Polly demanded.

  “Because girls started running away and it cost their masters a great deal of money to get them back.”

  She shook her head. “I not understand.”

  “I don’t understand it myself,” Charlie sighed.

  He puffed thoughtfully.

  “The system works something like this,” he said at last. “If you ran away from Hong King, he would trump up some charge that would force the sheriff to come after you. Then, when you were caught, Hong King would get a friend of his to bail you out, and once he got you back, he would drop the charges.”

  “You tell judge Hong King make me slave.”

  “I wish it were that simple, but judges and lawyers are not always indifferent to bribes, and there’s a problem with language and translators, and technicalities in the law. There are the highbinders from the tongs as well. They’ve been known to kill those who’ve tried to escape and those who’ve helped them too.”

  The words Charlie used were long and he spoke quickly, but Polly understood only too well what he was saying. Striving for control, she balled her hands into tight fists beneath the green felt table covering. “So you not tell judge.”

  Charlie walked over to the stove. He finished his pipe, knocked the ashes onto the grate, and sat down again. “I will if you ask me. But you should know that the majority of women who have braved the courts have lost, and of the few that have won, most have been deported. Do you want to take that chance?”

  “What ‘deported’ mean?”

  “Sent back to China.”

  Polly’s fists tightened, her nails dug into her palms. What would happen to her if she were sent back to China? Though she had told Jim she knew no letter would come, each New Year, under the pretext of illness, she had gone to Li Dick, the herbalist, and given him money to send home for her. Three New Years had come and gone without reply, and she could no longer avoid the truth. Either her mother and father were dead, or she was dead to them. Either way, she could not go home.

  But the gold she had saved would buy some land. Land she could farm like her father had taught her. If the villagers permitted. She thought of the widows’ struggles in her own village. The suspicion and hostility a single woman would arouse. And she knew if she went back to China, she would have to marry.

  All through her childhood she had believed what her mother had told her, that getting married and birthing children were a woman’s happiness. Even after she had begun working in the fields and doubts had seeped in like dust from a summer storm, she had not really questioned the truth of what her mother had said. Wasn’t marriage for a woman as inevitable as birth and death? That was why, when Chen had bought her, she had tried to offer herself to him, to be his wife, thinking that would make everything all right. And during the journey into Warrens she had hoped and even prayed that Jim would buy her for his wife. Now she was not sure. Her mother had said a woman belongs to the father of her sons. If she married, wouldn’t she be exchanging one master for another?

  She looked up at Charlie, saw his lips move.

  “The Negroes had terrible lives,” she heard him say. “They came to America in chains and were forced to work under conditions you can’t begin to imagine. Many of them barely had enough to eat. They were at the mercy of their masters and overseers. Whipped. Raped. Sold at will. Things aren’t so bad for you here.”

  He lifted a corner of her silk skirt, rubbed it between his fingers meaningfully, pointed to the snow white petticoats beneath. “You have beautiful clothes and plenty to eat. I keep the men in line and Hong King . . .” He paused.

  “You’re better off than a lot of free people,” he finished abruptly.

  Polly stared at the man who sat before her. Was this the man she had allowed herself to love? This man who did not seem to care that he had to share her with another. This man who dared look her in the eye and say she should be content with her lot.

  She turned from him and walked to the window. For more than two years now, they had shared the same bed. But what did he know of her life beyond his bed and cabin and Hong King’s saloon? She had never told him about the long weeks crammed into the hold of the ship, scarcely able to breathe the stale, stinking air. The humiliation of standing naked on an auction block. The way her gorge rose each time Hong King mounted her. Her fears that if she did not obey she would be sold to a bagnio or sent to a “hospital.” She had not told him because she had thought he could understand without words. She had been wrong.

  Polly laid her forehead against the cold pane of glass. Outside a meadowlark sang, its haunting melody reminding her of the three robins she had saved after Mr. Grostein’s cat had killed the birds’ mother.

  At first, they were content to fly around her room, but soon they began pecking at the window, demanding to be let out. So Charlie built a cage for them, and she hung the cage on a tree outside. But their cries tore at her, and finally she opened the door, letting them fly where they pleased. Then one day Mr. Benson, the butcher, came to the saloon and handed her a cigar box with three stiff bodies crusted with blood.

  He was sorry, he said. He knew how much the birds meant to her, and he had reprimanded his clerk severely. But the way they hovered, demanding scraps, had been annoying, and if she had kept them in the cage Charlie had made for them, his clerk would not have killed them.

  Charlie had told her the same thing, and she had tried to explain why, even though she mourned the birds’ deaths, she did not regret leaving them uncaged. But he had not understood. Then how could she make him understand her own need to escape the cage that held her?

  Slowly, Polly turned and walked back to the table. “Charlie, your father doctor, and you have fine education and beautiful home in Connecticut. But you run away because your father try make you surgeon and you not want. You work as deck hand on ship, and when you reach San Francisco, you hear about gold rush, and you try mining. Now you saloon keeper and gambler. But if you want change again tomorrow, nothing stop you. You free.

  “I only daughter of farmer who cannot read or write. But I too want be free.”

  Charlie took Polly’s hands in both his own. “Do you think I want anything less for you?” he asked sadly. “But it just doesn’t seem possible.”

  She pulled away. “Maybe not now, but I will be free. Now, please leave. I must lock up.”

  Charlie started walking toward the door, then wheeled about sharply. “Polly, I know you’re skimming off gold from Hong King, that you’re saving it so you can buy your freedom like Jim did, but it won’t work.”

  “You need not worry,” she said coldly. “I not ask you to help.”

  He ran his fingers through his beard, tearing at it. “Listen to me. Jim tri
ed to buy you. Not once, but three times. At first, Hong King said Jim could have you for ten thousand dollars, four times what he had paid for you. But at the end of the summer when Jim went to him with the money he had borrowed and saved, Hong King laughed in his face. So Jim came to me and borrowed three thousand more. Still he refused. Then Jim asked me to try. That’s when Hong King said he would never sell you, not at any price.”

  Too late, she understood the dark sadness in Jim’s eyes, the reason for the angry words. And yet she could not believe it. “Why Jim not tell me? Why you not tell me?”

  “Jim made me swear I wouldn’t. He said hope was all you had to live for, and he couldn’t rob you of that.”

  SIXTEEN

  They talked until dawn, but it changed nothing. Jim was still dead, the gold Polly had labored so hard to save simply so much dust.

  As they walked back to Charlie’s cabin, Polly pieced together bits and pieces of conversation she had overheard about Hong King. He had come to the Gold Mountains more than twenty years ago when gold was more plentiful, the laws against Chinese less severe, and it had taken only seven years for him to mine enough to go home a rich man. But on his way back to San Francisco to buy his passage, he was persuaded to join a game of fan-tan, and he had lost everything. Twice more he had saved enough for a comfortable retirement, and twice more he had gambled it away, the last time on renting the saloon in Warrens and buying her.

  His gamble had paid off. She had made him rich, more than rich enough to retire. Yet he never talked of going home. And why should he? Home meant a wife as old as himself, household responsibilities, a siege of requests for help from poor relatives. Warrens meant gold, an enviable life of self-indulgence. So long as he had his slave.

  She should have seen that long ago. But she had not wanted to. Wasn’t that why she had not confronted Jim during their last night together? That night he had accused, “You’re as much a slave to your own falsehoods as you are to Hong King.” And she had been. All through her years in Warrens. How else could she have endured Hong King’s sour breath and clawing hands, his blind rages when he lost at gambling, his pleasure when he caused her pain. But now there could be no more turning away from the truth.

  She would never be free. Not until Hong King was dead.

  With that realization, Polly became silent. Then, while Charlie slept, she slid out of bed, dressed, and took his Winchester off its rack.

  She had never learned to shoot. Jim would not teach her, and she had never asked Charlie. But she had gone with Charlie on hunts, and she knew from the trampled brush and grass, small sunken rocks, and bushes stripped of leaves and berries, that the trail she was following had been made by bears. Large rocks overturned in search of insects, a dead tree trunk clawed wide open in play, and long streaks of plowed up ground where cubs had romped confirmed her suspicions. Then, in the distance, she saw a brown she-bear streaking along, her cub not far behind.

  She did not follow them. Neither did she attempt to shoot the deer stealing silent and ghostlike through the brush. Nor the wild goats, some as big as ponies. For this, her first attempt to shoot, she had decided on a fool hen, a bird too stupid to fly from danger.

  She knew the birds’ brownish gray feathers blended so skillfully with the texture and color of bark that they were almost impossible to spot. But she also knew that the cock liked to beat its wings against its breast and that the noise would betray its location. She stopped to listen.

  Squirrels, mere flashes of red against moss green trunks, chattered as they ran from tree to tree. Bees from a nearby hive hummed as they competed with yellow butterflies for the little blossoms that flowered between the gnarled roots of giant pines. But there was no sound of wings beating against breast.

  Wishing more sunlight penetrated the hoary weave of firs, larches, cedars, and pines, Polly searched the branches methodically, the closest ones first, then farther and farther. Nothing. Disappointed, she turned to go, then froze. There, on a branch not thirty feet from where she stood, a fool hen’s gray brown tail feathers drooped over pine needles.

  Pulse quickening, Polly lifted the rifle and pushed ten long, soft nosed shells into its magazine. She sighted her target and fired.

  The explosion split her head into a thousand brittle fragments of pain. The smell of burned powder, bitter and acrid, filled her nostrils. She lowered the rifle. Squirrels scolded alarm. Wings flapped as birds, sounding shrill warnings, made good their escapes. But the fool hen sat on the same branch. Unaware of danger, it blinked stupidly, as though annoyed by the sudden noise.

  Its tiny beadlike eyes made Polly think of Hong King and his refusal to let her go. Abruptly, she lifted Charlie’s rifle. Just as abruptly, she lowered it, swallowing, her mouth suddenly dry. Hong King was not a bird, but a man. An old man who would surely die before many years passed, leaving her free, without blood on her hands.

  Insects hummed, distracting, and she thought of the dragonflies her brothers used to catch and tie with thread then force to fly from one boy to the next. After a while, their gossamer wings would fall off but, captives still, they could not stop. So they crawled from one master to the other until, exhausted, they died.

  Polly’s hold on the rifle tightened. Hong King was not just any old man. He was her master. And if she wanted her freedom, she would have to kill.

  For the third time, she lifted the rifle. She blinked, willing the myriad of red dots that clouded her eyes to disappear. Concentrate. She must concentrate. And steady herself.

  She breathed deeply. The soft, damp, loamy smell of the wild filled Polly’s nostrils. She sighted the bird and fired.

  Again she felt the rifle recoil, the explosion shatter the peace. Heart pounding as savagely as her head, she forced herself to look at the branch, the bird she had aimed for. Empty.

  For a moment, she thought the bird had flown. And then she saw it. Caught in a bush where it had dropped. Dead.

  And Hong King would be next.

  SEVENTEEN

  Polly hid the rifle under her bed. She wished she had a smaller, less obtrusive gun like the hurdy gurdy girl’s derringer or Charlie’s pistol, but she would not be able to get one without attracting attention and the key to her success would be surprise.

  As she washed and changed, Polly planned her strategy. It should not be difficult, for like the fool hen, Hong King had grown complacent, leaving her to run the saloon while he played fan-tan or poker. If she waited until he came to pick up the night’s earnings, she could shoot him without witnesses, and he would be dead before he realized that behind his slave’s placid mask lay a woman scheming for freedom. Fixing a bright smile across her face, Polly opened the door to the saloon.

  It was crowded, but strangely silent. Except for a tremulous, pulsating murmuring. Had Charlie discovered his rifle missing? Had he guessed her intention to shoot Hong King and come to give warning? No, he would never give her away. Not after all they had said and shared only that morning. Then what? Grimly maintaining her fixed smile, she jostled through the press of bodies.

  From the way the men surged near the windows, she thought perhaps the attraction was in the street, but when she finally squeezed her way through to where she could see, she realized they were jammed around the gaming tables. One gaming table. The gaming table where Hong King and Charlie sat hunched over cards.

  The lamp above the table flickered, then flashed suddenly bright, and she saw that Hong King’s skin, usually dry and cold as a snake’s, gleamed with perspiration as he spread his cards on the table.

  “Two pair,” he said.

  Charlie exposed his last card. “Three aces.”

  The men packed around them breathed a collective sigh of release. “That a way, Charlie.” “Go to it.” “Show the chink!” they shouted as Charlie scooped up the pokes of gold dust from the middle of the table, adding them to the extraordinary pile already in front of him.

  Dismayed, Polly watched Charlie gather the cards and shuffle for another
hand. Her plan required Hong King to stay out of the saloon until closing and then to come in feeling amiable and self-satisfied, not agitated over heavy losses. Somehow she must signal Charlie to stop.

  “Drinks,” she called, her voice unnaturally high and shrill. “Tangleleg, beer, champagne, brandy, forty-rod! You call, I get.”

  “Here’s two sacks on Bemis.”

  “Put my bet on Hong King.”

  “Don’t be crazy chink. Poker’s an American game.”

  “Put mine on the Chinaman too.”

  “Yeah, Hong King’s shrewd.”

  “But Charlie’s the best.”

  “His luck can’t hold much longer.”

  Charlie slapped the deck down. “Cut.”

  The men quieted. From within the wide sleeve of his dark blue robe, Hong King reached out his long, bony hand. His nails scraped across the green felt cloth, straightening the cards into a neat stack, then cut the deck precisely. Charlie licked his thumb and dealt. One card each, face down. One card each, face up.

  As Hong King and Charlie tipped the edges of the hidden cards, the men pushed closer, their breath hot and damp against Polly’s neck and shoulders. Anxious as they were for a glimpse, she craned forward. But already Hong King was tossing a poke from his pile of three, Charlie matching it and flicking two more cards off the deck.

  Hong King’s hooded eyes barely flickered as he studied the cards: his three and ace of hearts, Charlie’s two of diamonds and four of clubs. But Polly knew from the way his fingers were stroking the hairs sprouting from the mole on his chin that he was well pleased by the ace, the turn in his luck.

  He pushed another poke into the pot. Again, Charlie matched it and dealt: a five of spades for Hong King, a four of hearts for himself, making one pair.

  All eyes turned to Charlie. He tapped the deck lightly on the tabletop, set it down, and pondered his cards, his fingers drumming silently on the mound of gold he had already won. The battered piano from Al Ripson’s saloon tinkled and someone sang in a drunken quaver. The flumes by the river moaned. A lamp gurgled.