A Superior Man Page 6

  Old North and I took down one tree and were halfway through another when we stopped to return to camp. There, crew members were in a panic.

  We had none of our women here, yet only they had power to dispel the corpse’s killing airs.

  Where could we find swatches of bright red to wear, to fend off Pig Boy’s ghost?

  How could a stranger not related to Pig Boy go and buy water from the river gods to wash the body? It defied common sense. If the body wasn’t washed, then Pig Boy couldn’t cross to the other world. He would stay to torment us.

  The fiercest debate was this: If we couldn’t manage the ritual properly, then should we try it at all? If we started the rites and then fumbled them, that would enrage the deceased and cast ruin onto everyone. We were already seeing too many accidents. No one wanted more blood or death. This was why we needed experts to conduct the funeral. Everyone cursed the brotherhood for acting rashly, for telling everyone what to do.

  “Didn’t stink before but now it does.”

  I was walking away when Bookman shoved his penknife and a block of wood at me.

  “Carve Pig Boy’s surname,” he said. “Scrape deep and make it pretty.”

  I thrust my hands behind my back.

  “Don’t worry, cockhead, you’ll get paid so you’ll be protected.” Then he added, “No one else here knows words.”

  The name contained six strokes, spaced well apart, so it was easy to scrape them into the wood and make the curves wide and smooth. I asked for oil to rub over the rough surface, but Head Cook refused.

  High Hat and the three others came back and ate dinner alone. They took turns that night stoking a campfire to keep wild animals away from the body.

  In our tent, men were keen to talk, shouting loudly to assert our will to live, recalling rituals gone wrong that ought not be repeated.

  In Up Creek village, Cho had no future because he was his father’s third son. But his two hardworking uncles lacked heirs. When one of them died, Cho went to the river, bought water, and washed the body. That let him take the funds his uncle had left for this. When the other uncle passed away, Cho offered to do the same. The grannies cried out, “No, don’t! You look greedy, not kindly.”

  But Cho was under the sway of Jesus men and said he wasn’t afraid. He came home from the funeral sweaty and hot, and filled his mouth with ripened fruit. A pit lodged in his throat, choking him. He died flailing on the floor.

  Next morning, High Hat announced, “The grave will be dug this morning. Bookman says we can return earlier this afternoon with no loss of pay. I will be Chief Mourner and buy water. Men with the surnames Chew, Jang, Gwan, and Liu must offer wine at the service. After the burial, we will burn the belongings of our friend. Each man can cleanse himself in the smoke. After that, seven days of mourning.”

  The rest of the crewmen took themselves as far away as possible from the funeral. They stayed in the forest and worked. I returned to camp with men who planned to nap.

  “Your friend does the right thing,” Shorty said to me, sneering. “He atones for his crimes. You should do the same.”

  “Who says he’s a bandit?”

  “He confesses by handling that dirty thing. Why else would a young man do that?”

  That idiot Poy should have told me about wanting to amend his ways. How in hell could a chicken know the duck’s conscience? I could have devised a way out. Now that shit-hole prick Shorty could pretend to be smarter than me.

  Old North walked by. “Your quiet friend,” he asked, “how do you know him?”

  “From the docks of Hong Kong.”

  He was decent enough not to ask about the bandit gang.

  “Your people know him?”

  “No. No one else wanted to come. I didn’t want to cross the ocean alone.”

  “You should have found someone closer, a kinsman. Look at that fool, touching everything. Only kinsmen won’t betray you.”

  I veered into the forest and slammed my axe into a tree. My father hadn’t been home in twelve years. Travellers saw him in Singapore where he tended a shop and raised children with a local woman. He was polite enough to answer to his name and home village but would not admit his true family. Visitors pressed him about money, duties to his father, and memories of his mother. No answer. It was the same with our many letters asking why he had left us and what it would take to get him home.

  But a son had to obey and respect his father no matter how vile the man. Even here, thousands of miles away and among strangers, I dared not denounce him. When Grandmother blamed Mother’s nagging for driving away my father, I ran from the house. When Mother hanged herself, the villagers happily took it as her confession of guilt. I had been glad to leave home.

  Second Cook cut open a potato sack for High Hat to wear in place of the hempen clothes used at home for mourning. No piper blew a di-da horn to announce the burial. Instead, High Hat used Crew Boss’s shiny metal whistle. He smacked his lips and tried high and low tones to imitate the women’s wailing. He was wise to have chosen the men needed to offer wine. They were the only ones to go up to the makeshift altar with its meagre plates of food. As soon as the wine was offered, I heard High Hat blowing the whistle to ensure that Pig Boy’s spirit followed the men carrying the body. As the sound faded, the workers in the tent breathed with relief and slept.

  High Hat and his helpers built a smaller tent to shelter them for seven days. The thick clouds scattered. Sunshine and blue sky emerged, all good omens. When Poy came to fetch his belongings, all his tent mates, including me, hurried away.

  We didn’t say a word, but none of us felt any shame.

  4

  BETTER TO TRUST YOUR OWN? (1885)

  The cookhouse was poorly lit but noisy. Rowdy diners flung out fingers and chanted numbers in a drink-you-under-the-table match. When flames shot out from the stove, the cook splashed food into a wok and raked it with a metal scoop. At a stump of wood still wrapped in scabby bark, the helper chopped meat cake, a meditating monk drumming with two cleavers.

  The place was packed, a sign of decent if not cheap food. Men squatted in the low light of candles and small lamps, their knees up, and backs against the log walls. The cook yelled a dish name, a diner shouted his spot, and the helper rushed by, steamy dish in hand.

  Then he jabbed a broom at me. “Get out, you’re dirty and filthy.”

  “Screw you, you’re no boss.” He must have seen me wheeling away the corpse.

  “All seats are full.”

  I retorted with Grandmother’s words: “Sit on the floor, for sure you’re poor.”

  Our family always ate at the table, even when the dishes were meagre.

  “Mister, such luck to see you again!” someone called.

  Soohoo of Clouds Clear Tower pointed to the bench by him and spoke to the helper. “They paid him, didn’t they? He’s all free and clean, no?”

  They exchanged glances. Of course everyone in Yale kowtowed to the doorman to paradise, the one holding the key to Goddess’s room. Only a yam brain would refuse. The helper cursed and left.

  “Can we do more business?” Soohoo must have heard that I carried my life’s savings on me. Goddess had seen the cash when I was undressing; maybe they wanted to rob me.

  “Of course!” I swung the boy into the air and onto the bench. He giggled with delight, but the same brat had fled the store today. “Can you watch him?”

  “We have pencil and paper and stones for woy kee. He can watch himself.”

  “People play that?” Coolies played chess but never woy kee, which used two bags of pebbles, one for each side. Who needed more deadweight on his back while tramping through snags and swamps?

  The cook came by, hands at a grubby apron, cleaver tucked into a leather belt that gleamed like a strop. I named two dishes and then added a third.

  “Yes, build your strength for a night of bliss!” Soohoo was peering at the boy. “This one fell into the river?”

  I nodded and reached for a candle
in my bag but yelped at the touch of cold flesh. A dog with a wet nose sniffed at our legs. I kicked it hard.

  A man oozing whisky fumes patted the boy’s head with a grimy hand. “A Yin-chin doi eating rice! Didn’t I say that Chinese food is best of all?”

  “He’s no Yin-chin doi.” Soohoo’s voice rose. “He’s jaap jung, Chinese and Native. Call him Best-of-Two!”

  “That’s so, that’s so.” The drunk nodded to excess and poked at the boy’s face. “Be good, Best-of-Two, hear? Listen to your father. Always obey him.”

  When the drunk lurched away, Soohoo asked if Peter had been given a Chinese name.

  Who the hell had time to waste? Choosing a name required thought and study. What did the brat need with another name? Whenever I called him, he ignored me.

  Two men in overalls sauntered up. One removed his hat and dipped his head in respect. “Boss, need some wood chopped?”

  When Soohoo shook his head, the man planted a foot on my bench and pointed. “Too bad the redbeards saved your son. You’d be laughing if he had gone under.”

  “I take him to his mother.”

  “Won’t anyone else spread her legs for you?”

  “She’s a married woman.” I raised my fist at him. “She has land and a house.”

  “Can’t dump the boy now, can you?” The man chortled. “Heaven protects him.”

  The cook shoved him aside and slammed my food onto the table. “We chop meat cake here. Want to add something to the stump?”

  One hand hung over his cleaver. Firewood in his stove popped and crackled. The diners fell quiet as the pair crept away.

  “Those monkeys enjoy yanking their own tails,” said the cook. “Are you really taking the boy to his mother?”

  I filled my mouth with rice to avoid talk, wary that this one wanted to impress Soohoo by acting nice to me.

  “What if the mother doesn’t want him?” the cook asked. “You’ll have wasted time.”

  “Won’t matter.” Soohoo spoke for me and gave the worst of answers. “This one, he’s a superior man.”

  “Superior man?” The cook’s bellow of doubt caused his customers to snicker. “Superior men stay in China. They don’t come here!”

  “That railway worm heard wrong,” I said to Soohoo.

  “It’d be quicker to find a needle in the ocean than to track down someone in that wilderness.” The cook smirked. “Maybe she doesn’t want to be found.”

  “No woman turns away from her own son.”

  “There’s trouble up north. Redbeards are angry, looking for work.”

  Soohoo raised his bowl. “Better to have a beggar mother than a magistrate father, isn’t that what they say?”

  The proverb silenced the cook and sent him scurrying. No doubt he had crossed the ocean in a tight little group, a pot of mice and ants. If one of those men made a move of his own, his friends were sure to scoff. Back home, a fellow in a nearby village decided to take candles and sell them where prices were higher, across mountains and bandit territory. Everyone, even his wife and brothers, called him a fool, pointing to his arthritis and reminding him that no profit was guaranteed. And, the rains were coming. On the day he set out, he gruffly reminded his critics that this was a very taxing trip. They had laughed in his face. “If it was easy, why, then everyone would do it!”

  I asked Soohoo who might help me.

  “Lew Bing Sam, the mix-blood, he tracks down lost kin for people. He speaks all dialects, knows how to lead the way. People from China come to us first. But when a man truly goes missing, he’s a runaway monkey that can’t be found.”

  “People trust Sam?”

  “He drinks a bit, but what can you do?”

  The brat was feeding the dog. I rapped his skull. “I’m still eating!”

  Soohoo later insisted on carrying my bag to Clouds Clear Tower.

  “No need,” I said. “Your place is thriving.”

  “People are leaving Gold Mountain.”

  “You’ll go home a rich man. No dogs will bully you.”

  “I sweep floors and empty shit buckets, same as my workers.”

  The door of his shop swung open and out stepped the mix-blood.

  “Sam!” cried the boy.

  I jerked him back. A father spawned him but no mother taught him.

  “Sam, your name just arose,” said Soohoo.

  “I told Goddess to keep quiet!” He grinned. “That woman, she pants and scratches like an animal. She says there’s no other man as straight and strong as me.”

  “This man needs a guide.” The brothel keeper pushed me forward.

  Sam frowned, as if recalling our scuffle on the beach and my insult.

  “I look for this boy’s mother,” I said. “She lives near Lytton.”

  “Why not take him to China?”

  “He belongs with his mother.”

  “Who’s that?”

  “Mary.”

  “Mary who?”

  “Don’t know.”

  “That’s how you treat the mother?”

  Soohoo steered us inside, away from another fight. “Sam, your woman is about to give birth. Save some money here; use this one to porter.”

  “What? Did I ask you for advice?” he demanded.

  Meanwhile, the door guard led a dazed, dreamy-eyed client to the exit and greeted his boss. The lamps threw round shadows and yellow light onto wall scrolls containing single words, seven-term quatrains, and long couplets. I hadn’t noticed them the first time I was here.

  “Pretty, eh?” Soohoo strutted before them. “My handwork! I’m a read-books man!”

  “I sell goods along the railway,” Sam said to me. “You carry my goods; I’ll find your woman. We don’t pay each other.”

  “Go hire a hungry China man,” I replied.

  “China men don’t want the job,” said Soohoo. “They fear graveyards.”

  “Me too.”

  “Not so!” exclaimed Soohoo. “We saw you bury that thing. Our Council pays Sam to stop at those places and pay respect.”

  “He shouldn’t take the job if he’s scared.”

  “He needs a helper.”

  “Let him hire one of his own.”

  “They’re busy fishing. He needs a man to talk pretty with customers. Isn’t that so, Sam?”

  “All China men call us stupid pigs,” he said. “You say we mix-bloods have no brains. The railway snot worms are beggars yet they look down on me. ‘Those aren’t clear beans,’ they say, ‘those are green beans. That’s not pickled turnip, that’s cabbage.’ They sneer and call me a dirty mongrel, half a loaf of bread. But if a China man brings them supplies, they smile and buy large amounts.”

  “A man with self-respect doesn’t porter for a mix-blood,” I told Soohoo.

  “You want to find the mother? Then you need Sam.”

  “I have money; I know how to do things.”

  “I’m a superior man too,” Soohoo said. “So I help you.”

  The guard opened the door too quickly, trying to get rid of Sam. He noticed and stopped to look back at Soohoo and me. A rush of cool air caused the oil lamps to flicker, caused the shadows on the walls to jerk back and forth.

  “You two fools go the same way,” Soohoo said. “Why not travel together?”

  “That one prefers his own kind,” Sam said. “Even when they don’t know east from west. He doesn’t know how much horse shit covers the road.”

  A morning later, Sam tied a brick onto this mouse’s back. Lurching drunkenly, I acted as if the weight of the pack was nothing and tried to walk alongside Sam, even march ahead. Anything was better than being seen trudging behind him. The Native people by the river would see me as the beast of burden, the plodding ass being led, or the master’s loyal dog even though our packs were alike in size and weight. We were both long-legged, but my clothes were better made and cleaner so I looked like a boss. My hat was newer too. But Sam had the surer foot and pulled ahead without effort.

  At first I hung bac
k to let the distance declare that we were strangers. Then I wanted safety, wanted Sam within shouting range. I thought of returning to Yale, but its China men would cackle like grannies. “We warned him not to go! City men totter on bound feet.”

  This morning I hadn’t touched my breakfast. Sam asked, grinning, if I was sick or having second thoughts. I rushed off and squatted in the latrine to clear my head. To go with the mix-blood would be like dragging a cow up a tree.

  Late last evening, the boy and I had followed him to a house, far from the raucous noise and flickering lights of the saloons, to save a night’s rent. Sam didn’t live in Yale. And on his visits here, he stayed away from Chinatown and the Native village.

  “Summers, I go to mountain caves,” he told me. “Cover myself with tree branches and sleep on rock.”

  “Wild animals don’t eat you?”

  “They’re smart and stay away.” Whenever Sam spoke to the boy, it took longer than when he spoke Chinese with me. Of course he was giving him more details. I heard the boy laugh, but nothing that Sam said to me ever made me smile.

  Then, when three redbeards came toward us, I hushed the boy, who was dancing and singing by my side, testing his new shoes on the sidewalk. Sam ignored my call for quiet and for lowering the lantern. I held the brat as he squirmed. Luckily, our two parties passed each other with no trouble.

  “What, you wanted to fight them?” I asked Sam. Not much was needed to provoke a redbeard to violence, especially when China men were far from Chinatown.

  “Fight who?”

  After this, my son clung to Sam the brave warrior, not his nervous father.

  In the empty house, Sam lit candles and lay blankets on the floor. The doors had no locks. “What if someone comes to slit our throats?” I asked.

  “Then we make sure to slit theirs first.”

  He and the boy laughed and went hand-in-hand to tour the house.

  “The boy asked how I came to own this house,” Sam said, “without the fuss and noise of a big family. He wants a home just like this!”