The Black Isle (11 page)

“Maybe he’s saving up for Mother and the twins.”

“Maybe.”

Three years passed. Three years during which our bodies went through bewildering changes. First I outgrew Li. Then he caught up and sprouted half a head taller. His voice broke. I started menstruating—an event that terrified me more than any ghost sighting. It was only from the kind women in my lobe that I learned I wouldn’t die from it. I developed curves, breasts, all of which made the St. Anne’s uniform harder and harder to squeeze into. And we both became captive to our many, ever-shifting moods.

After a childhood in the city where we seemed to live in two separate worlds, our shared sense of persecution reunited us in the jungle. To further estrange ourselves from Father, we began speaking to each other in English. Li even joined me at flag raising, singing his school anthem alongside mine:

I reveled in the fact that I was no longer the family black sheep. If anyone was the odd one out now, it was Father. He clashed with Li at every opportunity. Watching my brother explode was like watching a storm crackle or a wild horse break free, and it was especially exhilarating when the furor came without warning or provocation. Li would enact wickedly accurate impressions of Father fending off sunlight like a spineless vampire or take mocking stabs at his halting, unidiomatic English. Father called him
unfilial
—that most overused of Confucian damnations—and made feeble threats of expulsion that were met only with derisive laughter. “Who would run this plantation for you, then?” Li would sneer. “Your Four Treasures?”

One evening, the inevitable occurred.

Li came to the dinner table nursing scrapes from a bicycle accident.

“If only Mother could see what was happening to us,” he said, glowering at our mousy paterfamilias, who was stuffing his mouth with the rice our labor had earned. It had been months since either of us raised the subject of Mother to him. Her letters had dried up, and with the Japs rampaging all across China, neither of us dared to speculate out loud about the missing half of our clan, even though I was sure we were all haunted by those thoughts.

The veins on Father’s forehead quivered. “Your mother is no longer relevant to us. She stopped being relevant the day we left Shanghai.”

“What do you mean?” Li was livid. “How dare you write her off just because
you
failed to send money back to her?”

“Your mother banished us.”

“She banished
you
. You took us along because you were afraid of being alone.”

Father pursed his lips and thought for a few seconds, giving himself over to moral superiority. “Before we left, your mother and I had a divorce.”

A divorce? Was he being metaphorical? A pair of gray monkeys shrieked outside the window, but nobody moved.

“You’re lying,” Li finally said.

“What about her letters?” I asked. “If she really banished us, why did she bother to write us those letters?”

“
I
made her write them.” Father pounded a fist against his chest. “It was
me
!
I
begged her to write those letters, for the two of you. She may no longer be my wife but she’s still your mother. And you both read them, so you know. It was like wringing blood from a stone. Wasn’t it clear she had no interest in either of you?”

Li backed away from the table, his lips curled in a mixture of disgust and disbelief. “Go to hell!” he spat in English. “And I hope you burn!”

He raced outside, leaving the door wide open behind him—an invitation perhaps for me to follow. He was running toward Blood Hill.

My thoughts flew not to Mother, whose kisses had always felt insincere, but to the twins, the little baby girls I’d not thought about since our arrival at Melmoth except as abstract, sentimentalized symbols of purity. They’d become cooing ambassadors from a vanished way of life, forever frozen in midsong. But Xiaowen and Bao-Bao were not even babies anymore. They were now nine, older than I was when we left.

In that instant, I was hit with the guilt of abandoning them that fateful morning, sneaking out of the house like a common thief while they slept. Had I no heart? I was their beloved
jie jie
! Seven was never that innocent an age—I had to have known that losing them was the price of my freedom. Yes, yes, I did know, yet I’d still chosen flight.

I took off after Li, but two steps beyond the house, I felt a hand reach up my throat from within. I fell to my knees and vomited on the footpath until I was drained.

An hour later, from the living room window, I watched two monkeys dancing in my grotesque puddle. Then the rains came and washed everything away.

Our plantation wasn’t much haunted.

There were a few wayward spirits, of course—every place has them, no matter how “clean”—but far fewer than one would imagine from a cursory inspection of the surroundings, what with rapacious jungle and the macabre shrines the natives maintained. I learned that how a place looks has little to do with how much supernatural activity it actually hosts.

My guess was that the people who worked here never had much chance to be alone. The tappers slept in overcrowded barracks, segregated by sex. We had a hundred workers living in three such hives, each about the size of the caretaker’s bungalow, and many of the workers even had their families with them. They slept in cycles. The first shift rose at four and by five were already out and about, collecting and transporting sap; the second shift rose at noon to make fresh cuts in the bark or to press sap into sheets in the factory. When not working, the workers sang, ate, bathed, and worshipped together—living for them was very much communal.

Ghosts, in contrast, are mostly solitary. As a woman of some experience, I have a theory as to why this is so: Those emotions powerful enough to transcend death tend to be ones experienced
alone
. Only when alone do we truly open ourselves to fear, lust, hatred, regret, and desolation in their most tenacious forms.

Having little privacy, and therefore little opportunity for such deeply personal emotions to fester, the workers were not a haunted people. This was not to say that they were slaphappy simpletons, easily appeased with white rice and a clean bunk, just that there was no time for introspection.

In plainer words: Li and I worked our men and women to the bone.

We could tell the Malays on the plantation were not like the Islamized Malays we had known in the city. They adhered more closely to the beliefs of their ancestors than to the teachings of Mohammed, although orthodoxy did inform their practice of circumcision—and polygamy. Instead of mosques, they built makeshift shrines to gods whose names we didn’t know and knew we’d never be told. On these woebegone altars we saw unusual items of devotion, including the umbilical cords of babies left to rot on black stone cubes.

“Malays are aimless by nature,” Father always said, “so we might as well let them worship something. As long as it doesn’t interfere with their work…”

Where our Tamil workers were like Tamils elsewhere on the Black Isle—highly adaptive and highly motivated—our Malays were ruled by superstition. Their chief grievance was Blood Hill, which they took great pains to avoid, often walking an extra half mile so as not to even see it. They had their own name for the mound: Tomb of the Dead Girls. The older workers believed no crop would grow on it because unwanted baby girls had been buried alive there generations before. Others said it housed the corpses of unfaithful wives.

I looked for signs of haunting on Blood Hill but never saw anything, not that I would have shared my findings with anyone. As for the blood bananas that grew on the hill, Rani, my most trusted Tamil girl, told me why the Malays feared them. Rural Malays believed that banana groves harbored the vengeful she-demons they called
pontianak
.

“They are women who die giving baby,” she said. “That’s why they like to kill pregnant girl. They jealous!” During full moon, the pontianak emerged from the space between two adjacent banana trees and went in search of prey—that is, very pregnant women. They drove their long claws into the mothers’ bellies and drank the fetal blood, although during desperate times, they were known to eat even men. If a woman died in labor, the Malays took extreme measures to prevent her from becoming a pontianak. They stuffed glass beads into her mouth, placed an egg under each of her arms, and stuck needles into her palms so the corpse could not open her mouth to shriek, spread her arms as wings, or flex her hands in flight. “But the number one way to stop pontianak,” Rani said firmly, “is do not grow banana tree.”

I told this to Li repeatedly, and he took offense each time. Blood Hill was his monument. If the Malays could just see what marvelous fruit the trees produced, he insisted, they would stop fearing. “Then they can plant bananas all over the place!”

It was this willful arrogance that led Li to take a heavy, freshly plucked phalanx of blood bananas as a gift to Mina, one of his Javanese Milkmaids, on the day she was to give birth. I tried to talk him out of it and felt a shiver of déjà vu at his stubbornness: He’d been like this at the park in Shanghai. Ever since Father mentioned the divorce, this callous streak in him, subdued for years, had been reemerging. Perhaps proving to himself that he wasn’t a weakling like his father, he was constantly priming himself for a brawl.

I was cleaning a catfish for dinner when Li stormed into our house with the bananas intact and threw the lot onto the foyer rug.

“Mina’s father had the gall to tell me to leave! And all those women—his
wives
— standing around him—not one stopped him! He’s got a strange hold over them. I’ve heard he fancies himself some kind of magician or witch doctor. But if he really knows magic”—he smirked—“why’s he working on a plantation?”

“He probably doesn’t work. He probably makes his children do the work instead.” I retrieved the bananas before their red juice could stain the carpet. “Anyway, I’ve told you how much the Malays loathe bananas.”

“But I want them to know they’re
wrong
! What makes these bananas special is that they thrive where nothing else will grow. I want them to stop being such primitives.”

I laughed dryly. “It’s not our place to change anyone.”

“Isn’t it?” He snatched the bananas from me and cradled them to the kitchen. “Aren’t we here to manage this bloody place? Aren’t we here to civilize them?”

“
Us
? Civilize them?” I laughed again. “We’re as trapped as they are!”

“You saw this place when we first got here. We’ve saved it.”

He had a point, but the argument led nowhere. We’d cut back the vines so our house was now filled with light. But were
we
any more enlightened? “I hope Mina wasn’t too upset.”

“I wouldn’t know. I let them all go. The whole goddamn harem.”

Father, who had been quietly listening to our conversation, rushed in from the study. His glasses slid down his nose. “What do you mean, ‘let them go’?”

“I told them to pack their things. I told them all to go to hell.”

“How many of them?” Father asked, his voice tremulous.

“How should I know? Ten, twelve.”

“Even the girl?” I asked.

“Even that bloody ingrate, Mina!”

“But, Li, she’s about to have a baby! You know she can’t go anywhere!”

“That’s her own problem, isn’t it! Besides, I think there’s something unnatural going on there. She’s got no husband, you know?”

Father looked sick. Not because he bore the workers any affection but because he dreaded losing their labor. He scurried to the locked drawer in the study where he kept our cash and coaxed out a bundle of ten Island dollar bills, each the equivalent of a worker’s weekly pay. I was thankful that for once, he was doing the smart thing. I knew how unforgiving our quota was; we couldn’t afford to lose any workers. Father stuffed the money into his pocket and went to put on his shoes.

“Where do you think you’re going?” Li leapt to the front door, his eyes electric. “Why are you trying to undermine me? They’re
my
workers—they listen to
me
!”

When he and Father stood face-to-face, I suddenly grasped that Li at fifteen was now taller than our old man—taller, stronger, and fiercer. Father now appeared limp and wizened; there was no way he would dare fight his son. With lowered eyes, he walked silently to the kitchen and disappeared out the back door.

Li ran after him, shouting, “You make me do your dirty work and then you undermine me! Undermining me when
you’re
the goddamned cheat and the goddamned coward!” He turned to me. “He can go all he likes. They’re
our
workers. They won’t even know who the hell he is. They’ll just laugh at him.”

It was true. Father had no clue which tapper was pregnant, let alone which hive she lived in. He held no sway. I had to go after him.

“Ling!” Li snatched my arm as I started for the door. “Don’t you dare! Are you trying to make me look bad? Why must you always be the hero?”

Our eyes met. His anger turned to pleading in a flicker, but my stare let him know that I wasn’t giving in. Out of nowhere, I was knocked backward, the base of my cranium slamming against the door. From the horror in Li’s eyes, I knew that he had struck me, even before the burn settled on the left side of my face.

“I’m sorry…” He reached for my cheek but I smacked his hand away.

“You’re a bloody idiot, you know?”

I raced out the door and leapt onto my bicycle. I didn’t let myself slow down until I passed Blood Hill and was sure that Li wasn’t shadowing me. Then I pedaled hard all the way north to the hives.

Through the open doorway of hive 2, I could see my father surrounded by a crowd of workers and their scruffy children—all of them female except for an athletic, white-haired Malay who conducted himself like some sort of a village elder. Mina’s father, clearly. His hands rested on the waist of his batik sarong in righteous indignation.