The Journey Prize Stories 21 (17 page)

Ah Sing drew his knees up to his chest. “Memory is a funny thing.”

“I wonder what it said. Was it a love letter from some guy? Who knows? I don't remember.” Ah Sing didn't answer.

“I remember lots of other things. Swimming in the Zhu Jiang
River. Ducks and geese. I ate lily roots. I loved water chestnuts and dates. Have you been to the hills of Guangxi? Limestone towers. I would visit my uncle and play in the fish ponds.”

Gold Tooth turned on his side, away from Ah Sing, and curled up in the fetal position. Ah Sing's mother had turned on her side and died facing the wall. She had first lain in bed talking about her childhood, but when the sun rose, she had turned inward and fallen silent.

“In Canton the laundry waved like flags. We threw cats into the fetid canals. I had no parents. Stole food from the seething mass living on boats along the waterfront. Ran through the alleys making cutthroat signs at people and they feared me. I grew up to be a Tong, never did any grunt work. Laundry, houseboy, gardener. Never did any of that. I'm in extortion.”

An hour or so later, Gold Tooth started to cry, softly, under his breath. He mumbled something inaudible.

“What?”

“Will you send my bones back to China?” Ah Sing sat up.

“You know the worst thing about it?”

“What?”

“I never knew her real name.”

“Who?”

“First it was the cotton balls, I couldn't feel them. Then I couldn't feel the suit against my skin. This is my best suit. My best suit.”

“I called her Zao,” he said. He started sobbing.

Ah Sing dozed in the forest to the sound of Gold Tooth's laboured breathing. The stretches between his exhalations
grew longer, as if each breath was becoming too precious to release. Another and another. He clutched the life within him and refused to unleash it, greedily holding the air for ten seconds at a time, fifteen, twenty.

Ah Sing dreamed a man with a roomful of rice was trying to make him swallow it all, and awoke choking. Gold Tooth's eyes appeared fixed on an immature bald eagle circling overhead, and in the dawn light he almost looked alive. Ah Sing rubbed his clawed hands vigorously over his own cheeks. He closed Gold Tooth's eyelids and touched the man's chest. He felt along the body, found the Swiss pocket watch and slipped it into his own pocket. An object valuable enough to buy passage off the island, maybe even to pay the deportation costs back to China. Ah Sing couldn't see clearly and stumbled toward the ocean, moving branches away from his face through the brush.

He ran to the beach, to the emergency flag on the hill.

The Victoria Tug Company steamer
Alert
delivered quarterly supplies: tea, dried fish, axes, razors, handkerchiefs, and, in the last load, a looking glass. It was surprising to see the tug so soon; often they would raise the flag and no one would show up for weeks.

Ah Sing had fought to bury Gold Tooth in his silk suit, but Ge Shou had slipped away with the jacket. So when the boat came, Ah Sing was digging alone, near the bog, past the vegetable garden where the ground was soft, and far enough away from Ah Sing's cabin that even a spirit as restless as Gold Tooth's couldn't haunt him.

As the steamer cut through the chop, Ah Sing flung a last shovel of soil onto the coffin. Then, brushing his hands
together, he scrambled down the gravelled slope to the shore, pebbles tumbling away from the edges of his footsteps. He watched as a dory was lowered from the boat, loaded with supplies, and rowed toward the shore.

Ah Sing grabbed hold of the wooden dory with two men aboard, helping to pull it onto the beach. A man with a red moustache that hid his upper lip got out of it with the doctor.

The doctor straightened his back.

“Good, sir. Still strong, see?” Ah Sing said, lifting a barrel from the bottom of the boat.

Ah Sing recounted what had happened the night before. The doctor pulled a bag from the dory and withdrew a ledger of dates, names, and other notes. He looked down his spectacles.

“The one you call … Go Chou?”

“No, sir.”

“Fong Wah Yuen.”

Ah Sing nodded.

The doctor wrote something on his ledger and turned toward the main building. When he was halfway up the slope, Ah Sing tilted his head toward a termite-filigreed log to indicate he wished a word with the other man, whom the doctor had introduced as a reporter. The man's pants were cinched high upon his waist. He took two steps toward the log and stood, smoothing his hands over his thighs.

Ah Sing stepped over to the log and sat down. His mouth was dry. The man was smiling, but his gaze jumped from Ah Sing to a spot beyond his head, then back to Ah Sing, then to the doctor stumbling up the gravel slope. The man did not sit.

Ah Sing cleared his throat. “I favour you … no, me … no, you favour me.” The disease in his larynx made his voice no
more than a loud whisper. “I, I have something.” He stood up and pulled the Swiss watch from his pocket, where he had been clutching it so tightly that it was slick with sweat. He wiped it against the leg of his pants. He dangled it between them, letting it catch the sun. “This is for you,” Ah Sing said.

“Look at that.” The man scratched his head and smiled.

“Nice, yes?”

The man nodded. “This is a nice island,” he said, rubbing the back of his neck. He looked from the boulders that ringed one side of the bay to the mud flats on the other. He glanced at the doctor, who was talking to Ge Shou at the main building. “I hear you men hunt, and fish, too.”

“You take.”

“No.” The man's moustache brushed his bottom lip when he smiled. “I don't think I should.”

“No,” Ah Sing nodded his head. “For you.”

The man looked down at the watch.

“But is gift.”

The man fingered his eyebrows.

“Gift,” Ah Sing repeated. “A gift for you. Your wife?”

On the verandah of the cabin, Ge Shou danced, circling the doctor, his long black ponytail bouncing on his back.

A sudden gust of wind blew the reporter's hat off his head. It rolled a few feet, snagged on a log, then rolled again with the next gust. The man chased it but Ah Sing bounded ahead, stopping the hat with his bare foot. Ah Sing dusted off the sand and shards of clamshell. He held the hat toward the man.

“Oh. Well, then.” The man inched his fingertips forward. “Thank you.”

The man took his hat between his thumb and forefinger and walked to the dory. Leaning into the boat, he dropped the hat onto one of its wooden benches. He grabbed a heavy sack. Ah Sing did the same. Sack after sack, barrel after barrel, crate after crate, the two men, Ah Sing and the reporter, worked in this way until they were done unloading. When the man began rolling a barrel up the beach toward the slope, his shoes slapping on the gravel, Ah Sing rushed after him.

“Gift, you help me. Gift,” he said, his throat tightening so he could not swallow. “Please, please, you take.” He pushed out a laugh. It felt like choking on a ball of rice. “You remember Ah Sing to the
OPR.”

The man stopped, his eyes focused on Ah Sing for the first time, clear blue eyes the colour of frozen ponds in the spring when the ice cracks. Ah Sing was sure he heard the man sigh. The man shifted his weight from one foot to the other and rubbed his wiry eyebrows that shot straight up. Ah Sing held the watch in his open palm.

He imagined slapping it into the man's hand. The man would laugh and throw it over his shoulder; it would shatter into a thousand golden pieces.

“It
is
a beautiful timepiece,” the man said.

“Yes, beautiful,” Ah Sing answered. His throat was a bird's throat, filled with small stones.

“A gift, you take.”

The man smiled. “Right, then. Thank you.” The man dropped it almost without touching it into his jacket pocket.

Then he said, “Look, man, look what I have here.” He undid the buttons of his tweed jacket and fished around in the breast pocket of his blue shirt, the same colour as his eyes.
“Here, look at this. This is a Kruger coin. It's all the way from the South African Republic.”

Ah Sing raised what was left of his eyebrows.

“I've got some others at home, a pocketful, in fact. But they're rare, quite rare, in spite of that. You'd have to go all the way to the South African Republic; I came back with them after the Boer War.” The man stopped and buffed the coin against his chest. “If you would take this to show my appreciation.”

Ah Sing stared at it. He felt an ache in the bottom of his stomach. It grew worse. He would vomit. He knew it. His legs tensed, waiting for it. He imagined running. Running. The man would start chasing him. Would throw handfuls of Kruger coins. They would hit him on the back, handful after handful. Stinging, like golden hail. What a silly, infuriating man. Ah Sing could decorate his cabin. He could use them as sinkers when he fished.

Ah Sing held the coin between his thumb and forefinger. He spat on its tarnished surface.

The man widened his eyes.

“Superstition. It bring more money when spit. Bring good luck.”

“Oh,” the man said. He clapped his hands together. “Well,

then.”

Far from shore, the steamer bobbed in the chop. A crow cawed. The waves tumbled.

The man walked to the dory and Ah Sing followed. Reaching in, the man picked up his hat from where it lay. It was a green plaid cheese cutter, wool, with yellow and orange stripes. Under the leather strap at the back he had tucked some heron feathers, and for an instant Ah Sing was reminded of the ladies
of Victoria who had worn hats adorned with enough feathers to drive certain birds to extinction. These wealthy of Victoria who had called men like Ah Sing their “Celestials.” Romanticizing their roast duck, their porcelain figurines for sale in every Chinatown store, their opium pipes.

The man held his hat out to Ah Sing. “Do you like this hat?”

“It's fine hat.”

“Take it.”

Ah Sing walked with the coin in his pocket where the watch had been and the hat on his head, counting his footsteps as he rolled the barrel up the slope. He fought against quick breaths, trying not to hyperventilate. He stacked the barrel in the storage shed next to the coffins and the axes.

He was walking toward the cabin, looking at the ground, when something hit his shoulder. He looked up. A heron in the fir tree. He looked at the ground. Frog bones. And he noticed a drop of red blood that had fallen onto a green alder leaf.

In his cabin, he packed an empty burlap bag, his driftwood pieces, his Buck knife, his cast-iron kettle, and his tin cup. He looked around the cabin, at the clothes folded on the stool by the door, the walls papered with the
Daily Colonist
and Chinese New Year's decorations, their glossy black characters jumping off the red background. Then he went back to the beach.

He sat in the loose shale by the boulders. He dug for his Buck knife in his bag. Waiting, he whittled eight sticks and two larger ones. He carved grooves into the two big sticks and then he fitted in the small ones, trying them each in turn. If he finished in time, he could leave the kite for Ge Shou.

Leaning against a boulder, watching the ocean, Ah Sing was reminded of his thirty-ninth year. With his back against
the rock wall of Kwangtung and the South China Sea spread out wide before him – trapped by famines in Anhui across the border, and by the dirt and drought of Jing Gang on the eastern border with Hunan – he had paid a
OPR
labour broker and hopped a freighter bound for Canada. He smiled now, remembering. As the journey progressed, his excitement had been replaced by tense muscles. He had felt trapped, with no breath, no arms to fight; the mountains of black waves spanned for miles in any direction. How he had trembled on the deck! How he had been convinced the waves would swallow him, the same way Gold Tooth had trembled on the verandah as he heaved his bed outside, convinced the walls would crush him – solid walls that Ah Sing himself had built. And how, on the freighter, another man from Fujien had touched Ah Sing on the shoulder. The man had said, “There's nothing to be afraid of.”

The sun shifted; the boulders cooled. In the distance, he saw the reporter and the doctor. They were taking off their shoes and wading out to the dory.

“Hallo! Hallo!” Ah Sing yelled.

They nodded to him and waved.

He stood up. He threw his bag around his shoulder.

They plunged their oars into the water. They were rowing back to the
Alert
that pitched offshore. Ah Sing narrowed his eyes at the doctor and reporter and could feel the hot sun falling onto his back.

He bent down and dropped his knife back into his bag. He could hear the waves, and Ge Shou singing in the background. He touched the coin in his pocket. His jaw tightened. He undressed so quickly his shirt got caught on his ears. He pulled
down his pants and dropped his wool shirt onto the rock next to his bag.

“Hallo! Hallo!”

He dove. His breath froze inside his lungs, and his limbs froze, too: he was a stone, armless and legless. He began to sink, watching the bubbles rising past his face.

Fear made a body heavy; fear made a person sink and drown. Dead bodies floated because all the fear was gone. Once, a leper had swum toward the lights of Cordova Bay. His body had floated with the grace of a lotus flower back to the gravel slope. Then Ah Sing and Ge Shou had buried him, silently, beyond the goldenrods. If only he had let the water flow through him as if he were made of it, he could have floated to freedom. Another leper had once escaped D'Arcy Island by swallowing a vial of poison. He swallowed it on board the steamer, had died before even arriving at the colony.

Ah Sing thought he would never stop sinking, but then his arms and legs sprang to life. He kicked as fast as he could while whitecaps crashed around his ears. The doctor and the reporter were not stopping. He slapped the water. He cried into the wind, his eyes open against the salt and the horrifying green.