Sarah Canary (2 page)

In spite of the cold, the woman wore only a dress with crushed pannier and insubstantial leggings. This, too, was a mystery. Chin Ah Kin had been told that the Puyallup Indians could sleep in the woods at night without blankets or shelter, but he had never heard this ability attributed to a white woman. Initially, he mistook her for a ghost.

He had been hoping for a ghost. Ghost women often appeared to men of his age, luring them away, entrapping them in seductions that might last for centuries. Such men returned to bewildering and alien landscapes. The trees would be the same, though larger; there the apple tree that grew in the corner of the yard, there the almond that once shaded the doorway. Trees are as close to immortality as the rest of us ever come. But the house would be gone, the people transformed; granddaughters into old women, daughters into the grass on their graves. Popular wisdom held that these men were lucky to have escaped at all, but Chin had his own opinions about this. Chin was a philosopher, his uncle said. Philosophers and running water always sought the easy way out. No more mining. No more working on the railroad. No need to send explanations or apologies to your parents back in China. But I was
enchanted,
he could always say later. Who was going to argue with this? Who would still be alive?

The ghost lover was so beautiful, she broke your heart just to look at her. She wore the faint perfume of your sweetest memories, a perfume that would be different to every man, depending on his province, the foods he liked, what his mother had used to wash her hair. The ghost lover dressed in clothes that were no longer fashionable. She seldom appeared in broad daylight, preferring shadows, and seldom faced you directly. There was something strange about her eyes, a light-swallowing flatness that always seemed to be an illusion no matter how closely you looked at her. Chin looked more closely at his apparition. She was the ugliest woman he could imagine. He revised his opinion. His second guess was that she was a prostitute.

To the best of his knowledge, he had never seen a white prostitute before. It was always possible that he had and not known it, of course, since the white men called prostitutes
seamstresses
and they called seamstresses
seamstresses,
too, and occasionally, like the famous Betsy Ross, revered them. It could get tricky. He recalled briefly the prostitute he had seen last year in eastern Washington. He and his uncle had been sluicing on the Columbia when a big-footed woman from Canton was taken through the mining camps. She wore the checkered scarf, so there was no mistaking her, and also a rope, one end tied around her waist, the other in the hands of the turtle man. While the man talked, the woman’s head had drifted about her neck; her eyes rolled up in their sockets. She was ecstatic or she was very ill. She had a set of scars, little bird tracks, down the side of one cheek. Chin had wondered what would make such scars. ‘Very cheap,’ the turtle man assured them and then, to make her more alluring, ‘She has just been with your father.’

The woman in the forest gestured for Chin to come closer. Chin asked himself what could be gained by any intercourse with a white woman who had hair above her lip and also a nose that was long even by white standards. He looked away from her and into the trees, where his uncle was returning to camp holding two small birds that appeared to be domesticated doves. It was not at all clear that the woman had been gesturing to
him,
anyway.

‘There is a small white woman with a large nose here,’ his uncle pointed out. Of course, he said it in Cantonese in case she understood English; it would not be so rude. ‘She is very ugly.’ Chin’s uncle dropped one of the doves onto his blanket roll and shook the other; its head bobbed impotently on its neck. He took his knife from his boot and spread the bird on a tree stump fortuitously suited to this purpose. It was not a large stump, maybe two hands across, but it had many rings, each one fitting inside the next like a puzzle. People were like this too, Chin thought. A constant accumulation - each year, a little more experience, each year, another layer of wisdom. Old age was a state much to be envied.

Chin’s uncle severed the bird’s feet in a single motion. ‘So very sad. So tragic, really. The life of an ugly woman. If she does not leave soon, she will bring us all kinds of trouble. You must make her go away.’

‘She is looking for opium,’ Chin suggested, opium being the obvious antidote to the woman’s state of overexcitement and the only thing he could imagine that would bring a white woman into a camp of Chinese men. He had smoked opium himself on several occasions and drunk it once. At no time had it left him in anything like this agitated condition. Poor ugly woman. He was overcome with sorrow at the situation. He moved to the other side of a tree, out of sight, and shouted at the crazy lady to go home. Her voice rose in response, an unpleasant, exultant clacking. It was possible she did not know that he was talking to her.

‘You must be forceful,’ his uncle said. He had an unusually mobile face and one mole to the left side of his nose, which quivered distractingly when he spoke. He himself held forceful opinions, which he hinted had brought him powerful friends as well as potent enemies. He lived life inside the fist, belonging, or so he claimed, to the secret Society for the Broadening of Human Life and the Chinese Empire Reform Association as well. He hated the Dowager Empress, Tz’u-hsi, with a particularly forceful passion. ‘Overthrow the Ch’ing and restore the Ming,’ he might say, instead of ‘Good day,’ or ‘The Manchu Dowager contains twelve stinkpots that are inexplicable,’ but only if there were no strangers present.

He disapproved of Chin, whose philosophy of life was more flexible. Chin didn’t care anymore who was Emperor in China. Chin could read American newspapers and would say anything anybody wanted to hear, even when no strangers were listening. It was a shocking attitude.

‘You must make a place for yourself in the world,’ Chin’s uncle told him. ‘And not always shrink to fit the place that is made for you. You must make the big-nosed woman go away. I am cooking.’ He picked up one of the dove’s severed feet and curled its toes around the index finger of his left hand, sliding it up and down like a coin on a string. ‘This is not a good time for opium-eating white women to be found inside our camp.’

When would have been a good time? The gold was gone and the first feverish speculations in transcontinental railroads had ended in disaster for the investors. The economy was depressed and so were the white men. The American Congress had just announced its intention, given the alternatives, to depend in the future on
Nordic fiber.
Nordic fiber had settled the Midwest. Nordic fiber could win the West as well. The Chinese, according to this thinking, while well suited to railway work, were not otherwise needed. They had no families and were absolutely indifferent to human suffering; wore their hair in long pigtails, which they prized above all other possessions; and relished a dish called chopsooey, whose main ingredients were rats and snakes. They had been massacred in Los Angeles’s Nigger Alley and in Martinez, and they were picked off one at a time, like fleas, in Union Square in San Francisco and, like fleas, they just kept coming. Chin understood quite well, his uncle did, too, though he didn’t always admit it, that it was best to be invisible and, when that could not be achieved, then quiet, at least. All the alternatives in this current dilemma were noisy ones.

Chin came out from behind his tree. The woman stood before him, spine straight as a hanged man’s, face transfigured, tongue fluttering in a strange, noisy speech of clicks and bangs. ‘Go away,’ Chin told her. ‘Go home.’ He said it in English. He said it in German.
‘Gehen Sie nach House!’
He said it with his hands and facial expression. She fixed her eyes upon him. Were the pupils curiously flat? Or was that just a drugged dilation? She answered him with a steady and joyful stream of nonsense. Chin gave up.

‘You are not being forceful enough,’ his uncle said. The mole on his cheek quivered.

Chin tried to change the subject. ‘Why doves?’ he asked. ‘Was there no rat?’ It was a joke. His uncle did not laugh. His uncle began to remove the dove’s feathers with one hand, a repetitive up-and-down motion at which he was very accomplished. He was ignoring Chin. A snow of feathers fell at his feet.

‘When I first saw her,’ Chin said, ‘I thought she might be the ghost lover.’ This was even funnier than the rat joke. His uncle did not pause in his plucking. Chin said something serious. ‘Sometimes,’ he said, ‘the immortals send someone in disguise to test us. Where did this woman come from? I have never seen this woman before.’

If she were an immortal, merely feeding her would not be sufficient. She would have to be given the very best parts of the bird - the soft meat of the breast, the dark meat of the heart. His uncle resisted this explanation. In Tacoma, maybe, he said to Chin, they had seen everybody. But in Seattle there were some three thousand people and Chin had seen almost none of them. Was it so hard to believe a crazy woman could have traveled here from Seattle? Hadn’t they just traveled here from Seattle themselves? Or Steilacoom? Wasn’t there a hospital for crazy people in Steilacoom? ‘She is not immortal,’ his uncle said. ‘She is just lost. We cannot arrive in Tenino, ready for railway work, dragging a crazy white woman behind us. There would be questions. If you cannot convince her to leave on her own, then you will have to go to Steilacoom and ask someone to fetch her.’ The disadvantages to this plan did not even have to be stated.

‘She will soon grow tired and go,’ Chin suggested. She will take her gifts of long life and many sons and excessive prosperity and give them to someone else.

They waited. Her words continued, frenzied, high-pitched gibberish delivered in a cat-gut voice. The other railway workers arrived with water and wood for the fire. ‘There is an ugly, noisy, long-nosed white woman,’ they said. ‘Right there. By the tree.’ They seemed to think it was Chin’s problem. Chin had seen her first. ‘Make her be quiet. Make her go away.’

Chin’s uncle reached inside his heavy right boot and scratched his ankle. ‘She has come for opium,’ he assured them. ‘And we have none. She will soon grow tired and leave.’

‘She is a crazy woman,’ Wong Woon said. ‘Crazy people never grow tired.’

All the crazy people were supposed to live together at Fort Steilacoom, where the asylum had enough opium and opium tinctures for everyone. They were not supposed to wander the country alone, turning up in Tacoma or Squak or who knew where else. Neither were prostitutes. Neither were women of any other kind. Chin lowered his voice. ‘She is an immortal,’ he said. ‘The ugliest woman in the world has been created as a test for us.’ There was no response to this theory. Chin waited a long time for one. ‘Where did she come from?’ he asked. ‘Seattle? Then she has been walking for days. With no food. With no blanket. Tacoma? Steilacoom? She would still have had to walk all night. And wouldn’t she have frozen, dressed as she is dressed?’ Chin wished the woman in black would be quiet for a moment. Her constant noise obscured the complex point he was trying to make.

‘Not if she kept walking,’ his uncle said, but the woman’s voice had risen so Chin was able to pretend he hadn’t heard.

‘A woman appears out of nowhere. We should feed her. We should give her a blanket.’

Wong Woon began to make the fire. He sat on the ground and stripped bark away from dead wood. He put the bark in one pile and the wood in another. ‘The person with two blankets can give her one,’ Wong said. He had to raise his voice suddenly on the word
one
so as to be heard over the woman. It was a disingenuous suggestion. The person with two blankets did not exist.

Wong Woon lit the pile of bark and Chin’s nose filled suddenly with the sweet, smoky smell of transformation. He envied the bark, which had been, in the course of one lifetime, both forest and fire. One endured; one destroyed. Chin said it aloud. ‘One is one,’ he said. ‘All is all.’ Could Wong Woon deny it?

Wong Woon looked at him with irritation. Wong Woon had purchased
Sam Tee’s English Phrasebook
in Seattle and had been leading them in a chorus of useful phrases as they walked:
I have been cheated of my wages. I have been attacked and robbed. Where is it permissible for me to eat?
They depended on Chin for the correct pronunciations. Apparently it brought no gratitude.

Chin’s uncle spread a naked wing to its full extension and severed it cleanly. ‘She cannot stay here. Even for one night. Even if we had a blanket. Even though she is ugly. Opium addicts are like cats. Once we have fed her, she will never go home.’ He raised his knife again.

Chin looked at the body on the stump. A bird with wings was a star in the sky. Wingless, a stone on the ground. Star. Stone. One was one. But a bird with one wing, Chin thought, would be something beyond the inescapable unities. A bird with one wing would require an entirely different world to support it.
Chop.
The second severed wing closed like a fan on the tree stump.

Chin’s uncle’s knife thudded into the wood of the tree. When he lifted it, he had made a new line, which bisected the two inner rings. There were many of these lines. His uncle was speaking in straight lines. Chin was hearing in rings. Circles. Lines. People. Trees. Chin’s mind completed this ring in the time it took his uncle to clear his throat and continue. ‘If she will not go home, someone will have to marry her eventually.’
Chop.
Chin had no doubts as to who that would be. Though surely even the immortals would not demand this. ‘Or you can take her now to Steilacoom.’
Chop.
‘Maybe you will lose her on the trail. Regrettable, certainly, and not something you would want to have happen, but then you could rejoin us in time to get some sleep before morning. We will try for Fort Lewis.’