Sarah Canary (10 page)

‘You look like you’ve seen a ghost,’ he said.

I’ve
been
a ghost, B.J. thought. It was much worse. He tried to push past the Chinaman; he was still light-headed with terror. The Chinaman stopped him with an arm.

‘Did you come to tell me something about the woman in black?’ the Chinaman asked. ‘Have you seen her?’

‘She’s running,’ said B.J. ‘Please let me by.’

‘Running? What does that mean?’

‘She was found in the corridor alone with a man, ‘B.J. told him. His voice caught. ‘What is this, a hospital or a bordello?’

‘What will be done to her?’ the Chinaman asked.

‘What did they do to Bergevain?’ B.J. slid by the Chinaman at last and crossed the kitchen to the water bucket, his eyes on the mark in the wall. He reached his fingers to it. The gash itself was slick, though the wall around it was rough and splintery. He felt relief moving like heat through his body. His heartbeat began to slow. Warmth filled every extremity and testified to his completeness. He had fingers. They were warm. He had toes.

‘Who are you talking about?’ the Chinaman asked.

‘Louis Bergevain.’ The Chinaman had so many questions, he had tricked B.J. into answering them. B.J. was beginning to not like him.

‘Who are you talking about?’ It was not the Chinaman asking. Ross, the cook, stood in the pantry doorway, chewing on a piece of raw turnip. ‘What are you saying, B.J.?’ His voice flattened with menace. ‘We never had a Louis Bergevain here. Now, did we?’ Ross turned to the Chinaman. ‘You have to forgive him. He’s crazy. You can’t listen to anything he says.’ He pivoted again, turnip dangling from his lips, looking at B.J., who could not look back. ‘You go to your room now, B.J. You’re in the way here.’

B.J. watched the ground as he left. He walked past the brown pants and the baggy black ones with the large boots. He thought there might be some message, some sign from the Chinaman, now that he had sacrificed himself to answer him, but there was nothing. He needed guidance. He needed to stay in those places where Houston was not for as long as he could. When he had last seen the warden, Houston had been heading in the direction of the old officers’ quarters. B.J. went the other way, toward the wash house and the old Laundry Row, but he circled it, doubling back along his own route to confuse his tracks. It took him perhaps fifteen minutes to come back out by the kitchen, where he had started.

There by the door stood the Chinaman and the woman in black. The Chinaman had Houston’s keys in one hand and the woman’s sleeve in the other. There was a large bedroll tucked under one arm. His expression was one of absolute misery. B.J. was surprised at how easily he could read it. Usually he found Oriental faces hard to decipher. The misery deepened when the Chinaman noticed B.J. ‘Go back to your room,’ he said. ‘Everything here is fine. The woman is helping me in the kitchen.’

‘The woman is not allowed in the kitchen,’ said B.J. ‘Dr Carr thinks she may be a poisoner.’

‘I will watch her. I will watch carefully,’ said the Chinaman. ‘You go back to your room now.’

B.J. looked at the keys that dangled from the Chinaman’s hand, winking in the sunlight at him. ‘You are escaping,’ said B.J. ‘You are kidnapping Sarah Canary.’

‘No,’ the Chinaman said. His voice was suddenly high. ‘Go back to your room or I will get the warden.’

B.J. stood for a moment indecisively. The keys clicked together in the Chinaman’s hand. B.J. looked into the Chinaman’s face.

‘Go!’ said the Chinaman. He and Sarah Canary backed into the kitchen. B.J. followed. ‘No,’ the Chinaman said. The hand with the keys shook violently. He closed his palm over them to silence them, but it was too late. They had already spoken to B.J. The Chinaman opened the kitchen door into last year’s vegetable garden. He stepped through and pulled Sarah Canary after him. B.J. followed.

‘I am saving the woman as I promised. But I cannot be responsible for another lunatic.’ The Chinaman might have been speaking to B.J. or he might have been speaking to no one - to the air, perhaps, or to the keys. Nothing answered him. He began to run with the woman, through the empty furrows of the garden, and B.J. ran after them. They stopped at the main gate. ‘It is too much to ask,’ the Chinaman said. ‘You know it is too much.’ He began to speak a language B.J. did not understand. The words were low and then high like big and small bells. They rang with pleading. ‘Don’t follow us,’ the Chinaman said to B.J. in despair. ‘They will only find us and bring us back. You will end up like Louis Bergefin.’

‘Louis Bergevain,’ said B.J. He took the keys from the Chinaman’s unresisting fingers. He opened the gate and dropped the keys on the walkway. ‘We’d better run,’ said B.J. ‘Can you make her run?’

But Sarah Canary was already gone. She favored her right shoe slightly, like a dog that has picked up a thorn. Even so, B.J. had a hard time keeping up with her. Her black skirts fluttered ahead of him. She ran eastward, in and out of the shadows of trees, and away from the town of Steilacoom. B.J. was panting and had to stop often. Whenever he stopped he looked back, but no one was following, except the Chinaman in his awkward boots, his bedroll in his arms. The asylum gate remained open and empty behind them for as long as B.J. could see it.

~ * ~

iii

In 1870, an excessively introverted six-year-old boy named Benjamin MacDonald disappeared from his family’s farm near Winnipeg. He was found by his older brother two months later, emerging from a hole in the ground, filthy and thin, but unexpectedly alive. He had been fed and cared for by a female badger who followed him home, watched his tearful reunion with his parents somewhat protectively, and moved into his bedroom.

The experience left Benjamin with a sort of ambidexterity. He could function quite well on all fours as a badger, but he was a more successful human as well. Prior to this experience, his shyness had been so pronounced, his parents feared he was mentally retarded. Now he was companionable and outspoken.

In 1871, Champion Ira A. Paine and Captain A. H. Bogardus shot a match of one hundred birds each at the Long Island Pigeon-Shooting Club. Henry Bergh, president and founder of the SPCA, objected to the event. Why sacrifice a living creature to mere marksmanship? he asked. Were people aware that the birds were often tortured before they were released — stuck with pins or blinded with turpentine and cayenne pepper to make them whirl around and around before the gun? He was accused of sickly sentimentality. Roosevelt’s
Citizen and Round Table
said Bergh was ‘the best intentioned and least practical man in the community. The idea of cruelty in field sports has long been exploded, and now it is admitted that no persons are more tender in protecting and preserving game that they pursue, and small birds that they do not, than sportsmen.’

In 1872, an aquarium for the study and preservation of marine life was built in Brighton, opened to the public, and named the Crystal Palace. Octopuses were admired, dolphins adored. Southport was seized by a sudden rage for the baby alligators sold in the aquarium gift shop. The ladies in Brighton let them sleep on the parlor hearth like puppies, fed them table scraps, and it was absolutely unfashionable to be seen on the promenade without one.

The Victorians studied nature through the lens of morality. What is God’s purpose for animals? they asked themselves. Are animals good? Are some animals good and some not? Geese, for example, but not tigers? Earwigs, who were argued to be tender mothers, and pigeons, who were monogamous and missed their mates, but not foxes or carnivorous plants? Why would God create animals that were not good?

Are animals happy? they wondered. In George Johnston’s book,
Introduction to Conchology,
he says of oysters ‘in due season, love visits even these phlegmatic things, when icy bosoms feel the secret fire,’ but others in his field had doubts, the happiness of oysters being so hard to ascertain.

Despite such concern and controversy, the result for the animal seems to have been curiously invariable. Benjamin MacDonald’s badger mother was shot and killed by a hunter in the MacDonalds’ front yard. Champion Ira A. Paine won his match by eighty-eight pigeons to Bogardus’s eighty-five. And the great advantage of baby alligators, as Frank Buckland pointed out, was that when they died, usually within a few weeks of purchase, the pet could be stuffed, gilt, and put on a hat for an ornament.

‘I have just now killed a Large New Falcon, yes positively a new species of Hawk,’ Audubon exulted in a letter to Dr Richard Harlan. ‘. . . I will skin it!!!’

In 1873, the word
ecology
(spelled oecology) appeared in print for the first time.

~ * ~

5

The Story of Su Tung-P’o

We like March

His Shoes are Purple—

He is new and high—

Makes he Mud for Dog and Peddler,

Makes he Forests dry.

Emily Dickinson, 1872

Nature was everywhere Chin looked. He was trapped with no knife in an oecology of Douglas fir and hemlock. A dead squirrel lay beside a boulder on the path, its tail stiffened in a final gesture of alarm. Its body had become a village for ants, who settled in thickly, building roads over its back, bridges and homes in its cavernous eyes. Chin stopped, staring for a moment until the ants blurred into black lines that tightened and loosened and tightened over the squirrel. ‘Honorable ant,’ said Chin. ‘Unselfish ant. You build a dream on a dream.’ The trees might have said this same thing to the railway workers. The stones might have said this same thing to the transient trees. Chin looked upward, following the line of a trunk past the small isolated mistakes of lower branches into the full opening of higher ones and beyond, into the sky. The sudden movement of his head made him dizzy and the sky went black. He stumbled over his next step.

He was a young man and his physical condition was very good. He had worked the rivers as a miner; he had driven steel. He could put in ten hard hours and he could do it on very little food. But in the past two days he had eaten almost nothing and thrown part of that up again; he had sustained a nasty head wound; he had killed a man and he had kidnapped a woman. He was tired. He told B.J. it was time to slow down. There were Indians before them and Indians behind. What did it matter how quickly they got to the nowhere they were going? Sarah Canary was so far ahead, he could no longer see her. B.J. responded with an ambiguous wave.

Chin shifted his bedroll from one side of his body to the other, wishing he had two of them. With two, weight could be distributed evenly across the shoulders. Especially if you had baskets and a pole. Your balance was better. And, also, if he had two, then three people would not have to share one blanket when night came.

‘B.J.!’ Chin called out again softly. ‘Wait for me. Wait there for me.’

B.J. turned around, smiling. ‘It’s sunny!’ he shouted back to Chin. His voice rang and echoed in the stillness. Anyone could hear him. ‘I smell moss. I smell a stream. It’s never going to rain again!’ B.J. brushed his limp, colorless hair back from his forehead and stood still inside a patch of yellow light. Closing his eyes, he extended his arms out from his sides, palms up. He began to turn slowly like a top. The light made his face even paler; it shone like a small moon as it spun by Chin. This was the color of lunacy. Chin had seen this color before. The Chinese faded in this same way when they lost their minds. Probably even the Indians became this bleached, bloodless color. Maybe even the black demons, the Negroes.

He walked slowly up the path toward B.J. ‘I am hoping,’ he said, catching one of B.J.’s hands with a clap to stop him spinning, ‘that you have a suggestion as to where we can go now. Someplace where we can spend a night inside. I have the only blanket between us. I have the only coat.’

‘You can’t be certain they’re yours, all the same.’ B.J. was cheerful and matter-of-fact. ‘Just because you brought them. You learn that when you’ve been in a hospital as long as I have. Any time you start to think you own something, you should remember. Someone can always take it away from you.’ He hid his right hand behind his own back suddenly. ‘Then it’s theirs,’ he said. He laughed. ‘Not that I would. Take your blanket, I mean. Though if it were my blanket, I’d share it. But Sarah Canary doesn’t care. She’s got no scruples. She’s crazy.’ His voice dropped to a whisper as he looked from left to right for Sarah Canary, who was nowhere. ‘You probably shouldn’t let Sarah Canary even see that you have a blanket,’ he suggested. ‘You don’t tell her. I won’t tell her.’

‘B.J.,’ said Chin tiredly. ‘Do you know someplace we can go tonight? Someplace we can be safe and inside?’

‘No.’

Chin stared at B.J., who smiled more broadly. His back teeth were stained with something greenish. Boxty, Chin supposed. Boiled boxty. If Chin had stayed on at the asylum, he would have tried steaming it. Or frying it quickly in very little oil. Cooking food in this manner intensified the color. Chin imagined rows of inmates sitting down to the brilliant green of stir-fried boxty. ‘Where did you come from before the hospital?’ he asked.

‘Squak.’ B.J. said the word without moving his lips. ‘Squak, Squak. We’re going in the wrong direction. We couldn’t get there tonight anyway.’

‘We couldn’t get there tonight anyway,’ Chin agreed. He knew Squak. There were lots of Indians in Squak. Hop-pickers for the German farmers. Wrong season, of course. They were probably somewhere else now. They could be anywhere. A soft sound might have been the wind through a hundred leaves if it wasn’t a hundred voices whispering behind them on the path.