Sarah Canary (3 page)

A dusty column of sunlight slid between the trees. It came in at a slight angle, then righted itself, sheathing the woman. She looked up, struck silent, and Chin imagined her pupils constricting from circles to points. Chin knew men who could tell time by reading the pupils of a cat’s eyes. He knew that the ghost lover might have the eyes of a cat, which told you she was doomed to appear in the form of a tiger for part of every day until some man learned her awful secret and loved her in spite of it. The spell would break; your lover’s eyes, which had always been jade, were suddenly black. Then your own enchantment began.

Chin saw the woman’s dark, round eyes close, allowing him to stare at her rudely. The lines at her mouth and her forehead — this was not a young woman — disappeared in the dazzling sunlight. She was haloed. She was so bright, it hurt. She was wonderfully, wonderfully silent. ‘I will eat first,’ Chin told his uncle. He had been chosen. Such things were not to be resisted and nothing would be gained by regretting them. What Buddha sends, he sends.

Chin’s uncle had seasoned the dove with five spices purchased from Chin Gee Hee’s Emporium in Seattle. There was rice and there were turnips. The spices made Chin’s eyes run. He offered food to the woman in black. She put her head into the bowl to eat it, her hair falling forward. Chin gave her his chopsticks and ate with his fingers. The woman watched him, then put the chopsticks aside and ate with her fingers, too. She finished quickly, wiping her nose on the back of her black sleeve. Mucus glistened on the fabric like a snail’s slick. It was a rainbow of many colors. It killed what remained of Chin’s appetite. He turned his head aside, emptied his own nose onto the fir needles, then went to get his blanket roll.

He added a cooking pot, put on his coat. He wiped his Double Happiness porcelain bowl clean and set it inside the pot with the wok brush and his abacus. He checked his left boot for his knife. The boots were for mining, big and waterproof, purchased from a white man’s store in Seattle. Chin had almost bought pants as well — stiff, metallic pants made by Levi Strauss. He had tried them on, but they chafed the insides of his thighs when he walked, binding his testicles in a particularly constricting way, and his uncle had warned him against them. Repeated wear, his uncle had said, would affect his ability to father children. The Society for the Broadening of Human Life, according to his uncle, was working toward the day when every white demon on the West Coast would be wearing Strauss’s insidious pants. Generation by generation, they would tighten the fit. It should be no harder to accomplish than foot-binding.

Chin’s uncle was a farsighted man. ‘Ask the doctors,’ his uncle said, ‘in Steilacoom if they have powdered tiger’s teeth. Buy red pepper if you can.’

Chin returned to the woman for his chopsticks. She followed his gaze to them with some uncertainty, then picked them up and held them tightly. At last she offered Chin one back. She put the other into her own pocket. Chin looked at his single chopstick with the character for good fortune etched into it. What good is one chopstick? What good is one wing? What good is one man?

The woman did not want to accompany Chin. He had to take hold of her sleeve. She smelled soggy. He pulled her toward him. She nearly fell before consenting to move her feet, but she retained that transported look on her face. There were dark, indented circles under her eyes like moon shadows. Chin continued to pull. She did not look down and stumbled frequently. Occasionally she laughed. Nothing could have been more disconcerting.

The noises of the camp faded behind them, irritatingly commonplace noises, the noises of people who have no problems of their own and no reason to honor anyone else’s. Chin chose a path along the creek, keeping as close to the water as he could. Even as he picked his way, even though patches of bare earth were rare and brambles flourished at his feet and ankles, even though the walking was not thoughtless walking, there was an inertia involved. Once started, it was easier to continue than to stop. The woman must have felt it, too. Soon Chin was able to drop her sleeve and move farther ahead of her. The way was much easier single file. He could hear her trailing him; her breathing was congested but not labored. She hummed from time to time. She spoke occasionally, single, unconnected syllables full of joy. Syllables like
wark
and
shoop.
Her inflections rose or fell much like the intonations of Cantonese.

The creek sucked itself over rocks. The trees sawed in the wind. Waterweeds rubbed together, singing with friction like insects. Chin was a small ant, picking his way over the melodic body of the world.

Her syllables began to connect again into whole nonsensical sentences, at first quietly and then gratingly. Her voice rose and followed after Chin. His queue bounced in the small of his back with each step. He thought about opium. He thought about the great silences of opium and the mysteries of the great silences opening like peeled fruit so that you could swallow them, segment by segment, until the mysteries and the silences were all inside you. He must never take opium again; he had recognized this the very first time he tried it. Chin craved tranquillity and clarity too much. Opium was a danger to a man like him. If only he had some opium now. Panta opium. Dangerously fine.

‘Seattle,’ he said to her once. ‘Did you come from Seattle?’ Her shoes were big and black and buttoned, heeled and caked with mud. She was limping a little; clearly she had already walked a long way. He slowed his own pace, in annoyance, in pity. They should have stayed in camp overnight and begun this journey in the morning. She should have washed her feet and wrapped them in rags dipped in water and just a little pulverized horny toad skin. They would never, never make Steilacoom before dark; she was already limping and he would spend a cold night with the indifferent, almost immortal trees and a woman who was, at best, very ugly and, at worst, some sort of demon spirit.

She smiled at him and her nose hooked toward her mouth. She hummed her answer. Her skin - he noticed this suddenly - was poreless and polished. It shone like Four Flowers porcelain. It was beautiful. He was a little bit frightened. Why was he seeing this? Why hadn’t he seen it before? Why was he seeing it now? Chin faced forward and walked again.

Perhaps three hours later they arrived at a lake. Chin paused beside it hesitantly. He had expected to follow the creek all the way into Steilacoom. He didn’t know the area well, saw no path, had only a vague sense that the Sound lay ahead of them. There should be no lake. He had come too far. They would need to cross the creek now and head directly west. Chin hated to leave the creek behind. He could lose his bearings so easily in the woods.

The woman shouldered past him and slid down the lake bank. The trees on the bank grew at a slant. Chin saw a stain on the back of her black skirt that might have been blood; he didn’t want to think about the implications of this. The stain did not look recent. She found a large, flat stone exactly one step into the water and dropped to her knees on it; her skirt collapsed around her like a shriveling flower. The stain vanished into a fold. Leaning forward, the woman thrust her face into the water where the creek joined the lake. The water parted around her mouth. The tips of her short hair floated and she drank with her tongue like a dog. When she sat up, her face was white where the icy creek had touched it. The excess water drained off her teeth.

She began to remove her shoes. Chin did not want to see her feet. ‘No,’ he told her hastily, sliding down into the creek after her. ‘We can’t stop. We don’t have time to stop.’ There was no room for him on the rock beside her. He stood in the creek itself where it was shallow and only washed over the toes of his boots. Leaning down, he forced her foot, halfway out of her shoe, back inside. He tried to fasten the buttons. An instrument was required; he knew this; he had seen such instruments, although he had certainly never used one. He had, in fact, never put a shoe on anyone’s foot but his own before. Even with the sort of shoe he was accustomed to, he would have been awkward. All his movements had to be done backward, like braiding your hair in a mirror. She kicked at him once, playfully, and then did not resist. Chin was able to fasten the top two buttons. The rest defeated him. He disguised this by knocking the shoe lightly against the stone to loosen some of the dirt. Her expression was alarmingly coquettish. He dropped her foot. ‘We want to be in Steilacoom before it gets dark. A few miles still to go. Please,’ he said, ‘Please. You come now.’

She came liquidly to her feet and stood on the rock with her hands out, forcing him to lift her over the water. Her dress was damp beneath her arms where his hands touched her. He wiped his palms on his pants.

Looking down at them, from the mud wall of the creek, were two Indian children. Chin hardly saw them. They were there, black-haired and black-eyed and solemn, and then they were gone. Chin’s legs buckled beneath him and he fell on his knees. Water slid inside his boots. His heart refused to return to his chest. Indians, it thumped. In-di-ans. The woman, who was looking at him and seeing nothing, lifted her voice in rapture.

Some years back the Indians along the Columbia River had murdered the first Chinese they saw simply because they did not recognize them as a viable natural category. They were not Indian. They were not white. They were like one-winged birds; they were wrong. They were dead. The Caucasians, according to the second Chief Steilacoom, had brought disease and war; they had killed Indians just to demonstrate the versatility of the bowie knife. They had injected a tartar emetic into their watermelons to teach the Indians not to steal, and very effectively, too. Still, the Caucasians clearly worked to a higher purpose. They had come to bring potatoes to the Indians. Much could be forgiven them. The second Chief Steilacoom weighed more than two hundred pounds. What had the Chinese brought? Nothing they were willing to share.

There had been another ugly incident when the Indians back in the eastern part of the state had driven a camp of Chinese miners over a cliff, herding them up the slope and into the air. They were stars against the sky; they were stones against the earth. Chin wanted to see no more Indians. He wanted this badly. His pants were wet up to the knees. They would not dry by nightfall; they would never dry in this weather; they would make a cold night that much colder. The crazy woman had no blanket and might die of exposure if she was not inside after the sun went down. Who, exactly, would the immortals hold responsible for that?

Chin took hold of the woman’s wrist, but she resisted. She was looking out over the lake at some apparition of her own. Chin saw it, too. There was a dark shadow under the water, the size and shape of a woman. He held his breath. A spray of water appeared for a moment, just at the waterline, and was instantly followed by a black snout. Water rolled away and the entire head slid into the air, hairless, with a long nose and whiskers. He let his breath out. A seal stared at them. Its body twisted beneath the motionless face so that the seal now floated on its back, fanning the water into patterned waves with its flippers. Chin leaned down, scooping some of the lake water into his hand to taste it. There was no salt. He separated his fingers and let it drip through. The woman called to the seal. Her voice was happy, urgent. The seal stared at her impassively and then sank away. The ground at their feet trembled slightly. The waters of the lake rocked against the bank in waves.

There was no time for safe, easy routes. Put your faith in your fate. See how it comes to you. Walk toward it. Walk away. See how it comes.

They headed for the Sound and the landscape changed; the trees grew thinner and there were fewer of them. Suddenly it was hard to see. Not only had the sun vanished, but as they got closer to the ocean, there were patches of fog. One moment Chin would be there with the trees and the woman in black, the next he would be walking by himself in the clouds. He could have taken some comfort in his own blindness — if he couldn’t see, at least he also couldn’t be seen - but the woman continued her keening. Her speech was vowel-laden, one running into the next running into the next, like the noise at a hog slaughtering. The continual din obscured other noises so Chin was deaf as well as blind, but instead of cloaking them like the fog, the woman’s words exposed them. Chin could not be tranquil and accept his fate with this annoying vocal accompaniment. The thought of Indians panicked him; he could not control it. The noise was driving him mad. He felt the trees leaning in to listen to it. ‘Be quiet,’ Chin begged her. ‘Please be quiet,’ but she wasn’t.

Chin stepped inside a drifting patch of fog and stopped. The world was shapeless and moved. The woman in black did not stop. See your fate come. See how it stumbles into you from behind, how it pushes you forward. Chin felt the woman’s teeth jar against his shoulder. Her mouth was loose, her jaw was slack. Her vowels continued. He turned around and hit her with his open hand. ‘Be quiet,’ he said and hit her again, across the mouth, slapping it closed. He was surprised and he was sorry to be hitting her; it was just the noise he couldn’t stand anymore. It was profoundly possible that she was just a crazy old woman, after all. That he was a fool to be taking her through the forest when railway work awaited every Chinese man in Tenino. That he would pay a fool’s price.

Chin forced his hand shut and held it with the other hand against his chest. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said to the woman. ‘So sorry.’ She had moved away from him so he couldn’t see her in the fog and she was quiet now, but he thought he could still hear her, a fruity kind of breathing that suggested tears. The dress rustled slightly as though she might be shaking.

‘Sorry,’ Chin said again. ‘Forgive me.’ He felt a wave of self-pity. ‘I am so far from home,’ he told her. ‘You can’t know what that is like.’ She couldn’t know how hard his life was, how it tried him. In none of the languages he spoke was there a word as vivid as his loneliness, and she wouldn’t even understand the pale approximations he could offer. He stepped in her direction, but she wasn’t there. He didn’t hear her at all now, put out his hands and groped through handfuls of cloud and found nothing. Whirling around, he felt through the fog in the other direction. His hand hit stone, a large, flat slab, sticking up from the ground with letters carved into it. The fog dispersed so that he could read the words: