The Sand Pebbles (36 page)

“He’s right, Frenchy,” Maily said. “It just isn’t meant to be.”

“Well, how
do
Chinese people get married?” Holman asked.

With Maily’s help, Po-han tried to explain. Burgoyne had his head in his hands and did not seem to be listening. Neither gods nor law had much to do with a Chinese marriage, Holman gathered. You worried about stars and lucky days and there were special presents and ceremonies between the families, and the ancestors on both sides
came into it too. Po-han seemed to think you could not be married unless you had a family to do the special things.

“What I want to know is what
does
it?” Holman said. “What’s the precise second you change from being single to being married?”

“It doesn’t happen in any precise second,” Maily said.

“Then there’d have to be a time when you was a quarter-married or half-married, and that don’t make sense,” Holman objected. “I mean, what’s the point of no return? Like when you hold up your hand and swear, when you join the navy.”

Maily had to confer with Po-han in Chinese. The idea was new to both of them. Po-han’s broad, honest face wrestled with the thought the way it did with a new engineering idea. You could leave any part of it out and you would still be married, Po-han said. What you left out just made it less lucky for both families, and you needed all the luck you could get when you were married. He finally got the idea through to Holman. It was like grafting between fruit trees. They cut the girl off from her own family and grafted her onto her husband’s family. But you could not graft one loose twig to another loose twig. Po-han was delighted with Holman’s final comprehension.

“So mus’ have olo mama, olo papa, too much all fashion people belong he.” Po-han grasped in widely with his arms.

It saddened Holman. “Well, I guess you really are whipped, Frenchy,” he said soberly.

Burgoyne raised his head. “No, I ain’t whipped,” he said. “I been studying out what it means while you was arguing. Marrying is mixing two lives together, like creeks joining up.”

Holman did not expect that kind of talk from Frenchy Burgoyne.

“Can you mix people’s lives like running water?” he asked.

“You run between high banks, Jake. Maily and me don’t. The time’s come for us.”

He had a light in his gaunt face and his voice and manner were strangely solemn. They were all a bit afraid of him. He pulled the concealing handkerchief from Maily’s left hand and folded both her hands between his own large, hairy hands on the table top. He looked down at her.

“We’re mixing our lives together, Maily. We’ll never be able to unmix them again, and we’ll never want to.” His voice was strong but tender, and he was smiling down at her. “I take you for what you are and all that you are and mix you with all of me and I don’t hold back nothing. Nothing! When you’re cold and hungry and afraid, so am I. When you’re happy, so am I. I’m going to stay with you all I can and take the very best care of you I can and love you every minute until I die.” He took a deep, slow breath. “Now you say it.”

“I will always love and honor and serve you, Frenchy, and stay as near to you as I can, and do everything I can for you, and live for you, and I won’t have any life except our life together….” Tears welled out of her eyes but she smiled steadily up without blinking. “I will just love you, Frenchy, all of me there is just loving you forever.”

Burgoyne bent his head. They kissed. Holman looked at Po-han. Po-han looked awe-struck.

“Now we’re married,” Burgoyne said. “You guys want to each put one hand on top of ours? For luck?”

Holman and Po-han stood up and did so. “I hope you have luck,” Holman said. “I hope it goes smooth and easy for you.”

He looked at Po-han and they both went out silently into the courtyard and closed the door behind them. They looked at each other again in the darkness. They both knew something terribly important had just happened in there.

“I burn joss stick,” Po-han said.

“Yes,” Holman said. “I wish I knew something to do.”

He walked back to the ship alone in the cold, quiet night. The last time along those streets Burgoyne had been with him. He felt sad and alone and it was a feeling he knew well but seldom as strongly as he felt it now. He crossed the bund and saw the ship bulking darkly out on the dark water. Light glowed warm at its windows and he knew it was warm and dry inside the ship. The men on duty were there. He did not want to go back to the ship. But he was barred from the Red Candle and there was no place else for him to go.

The Sand Pebbles considered that Burgoyne was just shacked up. He went to request mast and asked that Maily be named as his next-of-kin in his service record. When a man died, his next-of-kin got his personal effects and back pay and also a death gratuity equal to six months’ pay. Both Bordelles and Lt. Collins told Burgoyne that he was not officially married and it was impossible.

“Can I just call her a friend, then?” Burgoyne asked.

“As long as you have any blood kin, you can’t have a friend,” Bordelles said.

Burgoyne’s next-of-kin was an uncle. “He’s a hell-shoutin’ Baptist preacher and he thinks I’m dirt,” Burgoyne told Holman. “I hope I never see him again.”

The only official acknowledgment he could get of Maily’s existence was a safe-conduct pass. These were primarily for the ship’s coolies, to protect them from forced labor for warlord soldiers, but long ago a form had also been worked out for shack women. It was known that Lt. Collins did not approve of shacks, because in an emergency it was much easier to get the men aboard if they were all in the Red Candle, but he abided by the old custom. Red Dog made up the
paper. Yen-ta put the Chinese writing down the left side and Red Dog typed the English crowded over on the right. The English text read:

All the passes had a colored U.S. flag on gummed paper pasted at the top and Lt. Collins’ signature with the ship’s seal over it at the bottom. They were mainly looksee pidgin, meant to impress ignorant warlord soldiers. Red Dog made a special addition to Maily’s pass. At the bottom he typed in: “This woman is married to the favorite nephew of Calvin Coolidge, Supreme Warlord of the United States of America. For every finger that touches her, one thousand heads must roll. Tremble and Obey!” He signed underneath in great, leaping letters, “Red Dog Shanahan,” and sealed red wax over a twist of red ribbon. With a pair of scissors he delicately forked the ends of the ribbon.

“There! That’s my wedding present to you and Maily,” he told Burgoyne.

Maily laughed when she saw it. “Our marriage certificate,” she told Burgoyne. She could not have a wedding ring, because she had no finger for it. She was very happy in those first days and she would lean up against Burgoyne and look at him in a way no woman had ever looked at Jake Holman.

Holman made all his liberties in Po-han’s courtyard, because he was barred from the Red Candle. He would bring candy for the children and they learned to climb over him and search his pockets for it. He became acquainted with the three tenant families across the courtyard and the children from that side would search him for candy too. All the children called him
Uncajehk
, for
Uncle Jake
. Little Su-li remained his favorite, and she knew it. She was a princess, when Uncajehk came visiting.

With Po-han’s help Holman worked out a wedding present. They had the dry pond under the single tree cleaned out and Holman contracted with one of the tenants, a water coolie, to keep it filled. Then he bought the two most expensive goldfish he could find in Changsha, graceful black ones with long, lacy fins, and put them in the pool. It was only about four feet across and two feet deep, with a border of rough, natural rocks. Maily was delighted with the fish.

The tree in the courtyard began to leaf out in delicate yellow-green. When it was not raining, they would put a table and chairs under it and drink beer there. They did not get drunk and yet, to Holman, there was a drunken, happy feeling about just being there. The goldfish learned to come when Maily trilled at them. She would kneel, dimpling the water with a piece of rice cake, and the fish would nibble at it. She was very pretty kneeling by the rough rocks and when the fish curved their bodies gracefully in sunlight they were purplish-red on the curves.

Holman bought cheaper, golden goldfish, one for each child, and the children clustered around the pool to watch them. One time Su-li fell in and Mei-yu and Po-han’s mother chattered and fussed. They always had a smile and a bow for Jake Holman, however, and he was happy there. He considered the pool was really his present to the whole courtyard, because he was so happy with them. It was something very new in his life. The tree kept leafing out and the flower buds on it were swelling.

“Pretty soon it’ll be time to start the summer cruising,” Burgoyne said one evening. “Jake, I wish I didn’t have to go.”

Unexpectedly, in March, Changsha got a new warlord. There was some shooting in the hills south of town, to save face, but General Chao was outgunned and he knew it, so he took a bribe and pulled out peacefully. That was called fighting with silver bullets, and most warlord battles were fought that way. Everyone knew that Chinese soldiers couldn’t really fight. At the mess table they talked about the last time a rival warlord had challenged General Chao, two years earlier. His men had trenches on the sand flats across the river and
they wanted to cross over to Changsha. For weeks they potshot at Chao’s positions on the big sandbar while the Sand Pebbles guarded the big treaty houses, which were also on the big sandbar. Then one day the attacking soldiers just got up and walked across the sand into Chao’s machine guns. They went down in heaps and windrows and in a few minutes the challenging warlord no longer had an army.

“That wasn’t fighting, that was just being crazy,” Farren said.

“Well, weren’t Chao’s men fighting?” Holman said.

“They didn’t know what else to do.”

Lt. Collins stopped liberty for several days during the change-over. The city was all shuttered up and the bund almost clear of coolies. A warlord change-over was always a time of looting and killing. The
San Pablo
coolies either stayed aboard or ashore inside their homes, because their safe-conduct passes were not much good at those times. Burgoyne had to stay aboard and Po-han stayed home in the courtyard. Holman and Burgoyne worried about them, but there was nothing that they could do.

There was very little looting. Chao’s men had to get out too fast, and the new men did not loot, which was almost unheard-of. They wore tan instead of gray uniforms and their general was named Tang. The gunboat captains and the consuls all exchanged calls with him and the city unshuttered itself and Lt. Collins granted liberty again. Everyone said it was a very peaceful change-over.

Everything was all right in the courtyard. Po-han had pasted paper American flags above all the doors on his side of the courtyard. On the other side they still had tigers above their doors. Po-han said everybody thought the new warlord was better than the old one.

“New sojah man, any time he takee, he pay,” Po-han said.

Life in the courtyard was even better and happier than before. Holman made up a new game for the children one day, when Ah Pao dropped a fragment of rice cake in the pool and the goldfish began to nuzzle at it, pushing it this way and that. He laid goal threads floating on the water on either side of the pool. When the fragment bumped a thread, it was a score for that side of the courtyard. Each child knew his own goldfish and they screamed with excitement when
their fish were pushing the wrong way. All the grownups came out to watch the children and the bright little fish and to laugh at the game. Po-han bet with the water coolie. Su-li’s fish scored the first goal for her side, and she was almost frantic with joy.

“The children love you, Jake,” Maily said. “They’ll miss you when you go cruising.”

Maily’s two black ones did not join in the game. They were aristocrats and would only eat from her fingers. They knew her by sight now, and she did not have to trill at them any more.

Spring was all over both banks of the river in a yellow-green mist of new leaves and spotty patches of pink and white flowers on the mountain. When the wind was right, it smelled of flowers. The warming weather raised nasty smells and swarms of flies from the winter’s garbage along the foot of the embankment. Then one morning the river was suddenly rising as they watched it, rolling powerfully muddy brown with yellow foam on top, eating away the sandbars and the piles of rubbish. Now and then a junk along the bank would carry away its moorings and go careening downriver while all hands aboard it yelled and screamed and tried to get it back to the bank. Pappy Tung had to keep veering out more chain as the water rose. The anchor dragged and Holman and Po-han warmed up the main engine and steamed ahead slowly, just enough to ease the strain. The engine worked beautifully. The smell and sight of the steaming engine room excited Holman. He had almost forgotten about the engine.

In a few days the water dropped again, almost as low as before, but the river bed was clean with fresh white sand. It had been what the Sand Pebbles called the false flood, the Siang’s personal flood, which all ran away in a few days into Tungting Lake and hardly wet the bottom. The real flood would come later, when the mighty Yangtze flooded and backed up into Tungting Lake. The false flood was a signal to get coal and stores aboard and prepare for summer cruising. The ship came alert. There were more drills, and military tension picked up noticeably.

General Tang was much easier on the students than General Chao
had been. They held more parades along the bund, with more life and spirit in them. Buglers always headed the parades, sounding reveille over and over, very off-key and squawky. The students, cued by section leaders, shouted slogans in unison, like cheering sections at a football game. They had thin, screechy voices, even for Chinese, because they were so young. They were bolder with their signs. Some read:
DOWN WITH IMPERIALISM
! and
CANCEL UNEQUAL TREATIES!
The Sand Pebbles laughed at one placard which read:
GUNBOATS, GO HOME
! For more than twenty years Changsha had been official home port for the U.S.S.
San Pablo
. The Sand Pebbles considered that they were home.