The Journey Prize Stories 21 (16 page)

C
leaning his ear with a long stalk of grass, Ah Sing filled his wood stove with kindling. Alder leaves were fluttering in the trees, displaying their yellow undersides, which meant rain. Ah Sing shivered but did not light the fire; instead, he put a rough wool jacket over his cotton shirt. His room had no hooks but all his clothing was tidily folded and stacked on the wooden stool in the corner by the door. On top of the clothes he laid a few bone-white sticks. Sun-bleached, lighter than the pine branches he had originally whittled down for his kite, the driftwood would make a good frame. He sneezed and shivered again. He had lost his upper incisor yesterday.

The nerves of Ah Sing's arms and legs had grown hard as jade; he was turning into a mountain, solidifying. Even his face was like a palace statue. Smooth. Hairless. Varnished-looking. He had lost his eyelashes and three-quarters of his eyebrows; and lately, his ulcerated feet left tracks of blood on the wood floor. But he refused to wear the government-issue overshoes. His extremities felt no heat, no cold, no pain, anyway. In the
next life he would be a mountain, the mountain he was now turning into, eternal and hard.

He had wept at the official diagnosis of leprosy.

“They sick but I not,” Ah Sing would say in English to the doctors who accompanied the steamer
Alert
to the island and took flakes of skin from the backs of his hands. (Speaking English was masonry work, the words like bricks laid by hands; he spoke Cantonese with the other men on the colony, and the words flowed easily then, even when they had nothing to say.) His lost fingers, he explained to the doctors, “Coal mine in Nanaimo. Frostbite.” He had difficulty pronouncing the word and it came out sounding like “flossed bite.” Grunting once or twice, he would pry an oyster off a stone with his remaining fingers and hold it up.

“You send away Ah Sing,” he always said to the visiting doctors, “back to China.”

Today Ah Sing had fallen asleep on the beach next to his half-eaten lunch of sea urchins. Awoken by the sound of birds near his head, he had opened his eyes and was startled to see four black cormorants flying away. They reminded him of something: the cormorants he had felt sorry for when he was six years old and had laughed at by the age of nine, black birds circling the ancient uplifted seabeds in Chongwu Bay, catching fish they could taste but never swallow because of the white choke collars around their necks.

Three men left on D'Arcy Island now. They lived in the main building. Four cubicles side by side, each with its own door that opened onto a verandah facing Cordova Bay. Ge Shou hadn't been right in the head since a tree fell on him, and he spent his nights in the woods singing. Gold Tooth,
who had never told Ah Sing his real name, cried all day and then sat at the edge of the forest, dulled and deadened, refusing to move. He had a cough that possessed him like a malevolent spirit, wracking his body until he spat blood. He was the newest resident.

Gold Tooth had arrived at the colony three years ago with his bowler hat and a Swiss pocket watch on a chain. Slipping on patches of seagrass in leather shoes, over barnacle-covered stones still wet from the tide, refusing any attempts at help from the government official from Victoria. Ah Sing had laughed at his vanity, but the watch – the watch – was as round as an eye. He stared at it until he felt like he was staring into a thousand tiny suns.

When they had the energy, Ah Sing and Ge Shou said they would murder the filthy thief while he slept. But the daily chores sapped their passion, the harvesting of clams and mussels, the chopping of firewood, the collection of rainwater from below the eaves or in the summer from the bog. Most days, when Ah Sing had finished, he would sit on the boulders that ringed the bay and watch the waves, pondering Buddha's question:
How does one stop a drop of water from ever drying out?

Now, in his room, Ah Sing picked up his Buck knife and eyed the driftwood. He was searching for the most evenly balanced of sticks. He would carve the exact spaces needed to neatly wedge two smaller sticks into either side. He would wrap the joints with sewing thread. He would cut a tail to look like phoenix wings, or find some cormorant feathers on the beach to stand in their place.

As curly shavings collected around his feet, he remembered how, as a child, he had believed the most ornate kites could
talk to the spirits. His thoughts were interrupted by the sound of something heavy being dragged across a wooden floor. A sob. Another. He dropped his knife.

Gold Tooth was on the verandah, dappled light sifting through the fir trees and falling in shadows across his back. It was hard to tell which were shadows and which were stains, for Ah Sing could not remember when Gold Tooth had last taken off the silk suit he wore. Gold Tooth's face was flushed with terror and his eyes darted like birds in the trees, afraid of being caught.

“Take it easy. What are you doing with your bed?”

Gold Tooth shook off Ah Sing's hand like a dog shakes off water. He heaved the cot against the doorframe, where it got stuck. “I can't breathe,” he said. “I can't breathe in there. The walls. They'll try to crush me if, if I go to sleep.” He yanked. He stumbled backward.

“Do you want me to hold up the walls while you pull your bed outside?”

Gold Tooth stopped.

Ah Sing squeezed over the straw mattress and into the room. Half-eaten plates of food had been scattered from one side to the other by raccoons. The air smelled like yeast.

Ah Sing, his legs shoulder-width apart, spread his arms wide against the two walls and held them with his clawed hands so they wouldn't crush Gold Tooth, who unhinged the bed from the doorway and wrestled it outside.

On the verandah, Gold Tooth nodded toward the forest. He motioned to Ah Sing. “Pick up that end,” he said.

The two men carried the wooden bed with the straw mattress past roaming chickens and beyond the storage shed with
the rice, sugar, flour, meal, gardening tools, and coffins. They carried the bed beyond the vegetable garden. Past three graves, each marked with a pile of stones – the resting places of the men who had arrived with Ah Sing when the provincial government had left them on this island four years ago with a load of construction supplies. They carried it past the bog and into the forest. Ge Shou followed them, chattering.

“Do you have any pigs' feet for me?” Ge Shou asked. Ah Sing shook his head.

“Can we fly your kite?”

“When it's ready, I promise.”

“Washing Matilda, washing Matilda,” Ge Shou sang, “who'll come a-washing Matilda with me?” He stopped and stretched his arms above his head. “Are you going swimming tonight, Sing, you going swimming in the ocean?”

“No, not tonight.”

“Swimming, swimming.” Ge Shou made breaststroke motions. “Swimming in the ocean. I feel happy. Washing Matilda, you'll come a-washing Matilda with me?”

Ah Sing and Gold Tooth set the bed down in a clearing among the ferns and salal, where the ground was soft with pine needles. Through the trees they could see the ditch system that ran from the bog to the garden, where they grew lettuce, potatoes, carrots, and onions; Ge Shou playing among the vegetables. Gold Tooth shuddered onto his bed and immediately rolled onto his side as if in a deep sleep.

Ah Sing shook his shoulder.

“Go away.”

After sitting near Gold Tooth for a time, Ah Sing came to a decision. He shuffled past the crops, spoiled before men with waning appetites had been able to eat them, and the pigs rooting in the waste. He nodded to Ge Shou, who sat among the pigs. He passed the site where they would soon start an orchard.

Back in his cabin, Ah Sing filled his shoulder basket with a Hudson's Bay blanket, a cast-iron kettle, a wok, a dead grouse, a handful of onions, some mint leaves, a cupful of cooking oil in a canning jar, and some government-issue opium. Returning to Gold Tooth, he touched his shoulder again. Gold Tooth grunted.

Ah Sing opened the blanket over him; then he placed stones in a circle on the ground around some kindling and lit a fire with the wooden matches in his pocket. He emptied his shoulder basket, picked up the kettle, and went to the woodshed, filling his shoulder basket again. The load weighed him down. He trod to the bog, sinking deep into the mud. He dipped his kettle, filling it with brown water. When he came back, neither of the men spoke, but Ah Sing didn't mind. He added more branches to the fire and set the kettle upon it.

A few minutes later, Gold Tooth said, “Why do you talk to me?”

Ah Sing shrugged. Before the disease had made his threats to beat up the other men laughable, Gold Tooth had hoarded the best rations, stashing second barrels of salt pork in his cubicle while the others looked on with mask-like eyes. But Ah Sing, at fifty-two, had himself hit a woman; had fondled the flesh of his brother's wife; had ignored the unemployed after the smelters closed; had beaten a man when he was
drunk while onlookers cheered. He sat cross-legged by the fire, poking the embers with a stick. He felt feverish, strange. Far away through the trees, he could hear Ge Shou singing.

Ah Sing poured the oil into the wok and dried the canning jar with the hem of his shirt. He put two stalks of mint inside it and some of the opium. The mint grew wild near the bog. Ah Sing usually hung it from his cabin's ceiling. He poured the boiling water into the canning jar. He wrapped a green maple leaf around it and passed the jar to Gold Tooth, but Gold Tooth pushed it away.

Ah Sing put the jar on the ground. The steam rose and scented the air with mint. He fussed over the flames, moving the kettle to make room for the wok. He busied himself with the onions and the grouse he had killed just that morning with his shotgun until the aroma rose into the air, overpowering the mint.

“I used to be a cook, you know,” Ah Sing said. “I worked for Mr. and Mrs. Edward Price in Victoria.”

“Shit work.”

Ah Sing moved coals and added more kindling to adjust the heat. He rotated the wok and stirred its contents with a stick, testing the mixture frequently and inhaling its scent with his eyes closed.

Gold Tooth turned to him and snorted. “Look down. Your hand.”

“Oh,” Ah Sing said. “I've burned myself.”

A patch of flesh two inches wide was stuck to the outside of the wok.

“No one will notice. Look at your face. Have you looked in a mirror lately?”

When the food was ready, Ah Sing placed the wok down between them. Gold Tooth eyed the food with a strange appetite Ah Sing had not seen in weeks. Ah Sing chewed in silence, watching Gold Tooth eat; his clawed fingers, scooping the mixture into his mouth, were like fingers made of tree bark or elephant's hooves – strange but beautiful.

“It gets easier,” Ah Sing said.

“I'm not a leper.”

“No one wants to believe they are. I'll tell you something. I'm going to escape. I've got to go back to China. To my son and wife.”

Gold Tooth gave a disgusted grunt. “Has anyone escaped before?”

Ah Sing didn't answer. He told Gold Tooth he'd heard that two lepers had been shipped in a crate by the
OPR
as far west as Saskatchewan, and he thought they'd been deported. “My son,” Ah Sing said, changing the subject, “my son would be eighteen years old now. He was five the last time I saw him. It would be good if he could come to Gold Mountain. He would find work.”

They sat looking at each other while dusk fell. Neither one said a word. Ah Sing cracked open grouse bones and sucked out the marrow. Gold Tooth lay on his back and smoked tobacco from the supply ship. The fire had turned to coals and the coals had turned ashy before Gold Tooth spoke.

“I used to get all the girls. Best one's name was Zao. I called her ‘Zao,'
chirp
, because of the sound she made when we had sex. On hot nights she ran ice cubes up and down my spine, and on cold nights she tickled me with cotton balls. When I couldn't sleep, she massaged my feet while humming Strauss.
She polished my shoes and every morning brought me my gambling spreadsheets. The way she pencilled in her eyebrows. I'm going to give you a piece of advice. Only hit a woman when she needs it, and only with an open hand. You got to keep them in their place because they want it. You have to answer their questions for them, that's love.”

“Did she turn you in?” Ah Sing asked.

“No!” Then after a moment he said, “They raided the Kwong Wo & Company Store; we were in the back, gambling.”

It was pitch-black now. Ah Sing drew a stick through the ashes. The bark caught an ember and he blew at the small flame. He threw on more kindling until the wood crackled. The only light came from the small campfire; its shadows highlighted the heavy ridges of Gold Tooth's overgrown brow.

“When I was a kid I found this bottle with a note inside,” Gold Tooth continued. “It'd washed up from Taiwan,” he said. “Funny thing is, I don't remember what the letter said. It was a wide, fat bottle, like a medicine bottle. It was dull, scratched up by the rocks. I remember grabbing it and trying to open it while the older boys were gambling by the fishboats, and then it started to rain and I ran under an overturned dory. I tried to untwist the lid but it was rusted closed. Then I tried to get it off with a broken clam. I ended up smashing the neck off. I remember the bottle, but not the message. Strange, huh?”