The Blue-Eyed Shan (9 page)

Again the bright-eyed man chuckled. This was indeed a green man, with a large belly and fat shiny lips. The belly quivered as he laughed. “And your name?”

“Ming-tzu,” the boy said.

“Well, Ming-tzu, my name is Shang, and I will help you when I can. Here in Kochiu we must help one another in all things. Do you understand?”

The boy nodded many times, full of love.

“You may loiter outside,” Shang said, “but no more than a step or two from the house.” And then he rubbed the boy's head and walked off.

If there was food here the boy saw none that night. At dawn he was awakened by coughing. Many of the men and boys were coughing. One man retched endlessly. The stench of manure and human waste was fierce. Outside someone was beating on a pan. Men and boys rose groaning and filed through the doorway. Ming-tzu hurried to join them. “New boys here!” They were marched to another building. In this building was a table, and behind the table on chairs sat three men who were neither green nor red but the color of men. Each was speaking to a boy. When Ming-tzu's turn came he quaked. “Your name?”

“Ming-tzu.”

“Ming-tzu.” The man held a small stick and pressed it against the table. “Your age?”

“Nine years.”

“
What
?”

Ming-tzu covered his mouth; terror drove sleep from his head and hunger from his belly. “Fifteen!” he cried.

“Yes, better.” The man pressed the stick again. He handed the boy a small rectangle of paper. “Listen to me, Ming-tzu. You are now a member of the Miners' Guild and this is your card. You will keep it with you at all times. Your number is two seven two seven nine, and you are registered in this book.”

The boy did not know what a miner was, or a guild, or a card, though he had more than once seen a book. Now he knew what a book was for. He could count to ten, but a series of numbers was meaningless.

His lips trembled in a servile smile. He wondered where he should keep this new thing, this card. He clutched it and fell into line. Soon the line moved. Outside the low house that was his home, another green man, potbellied and bright-eyed, stood behind a steaming vat and bellowed, “Shrimp! Fried pork! Egg soup! Mandarin fish!” The boy was overcome and stumbled dizzily forward, snatching up, as the others did, a wooden bowl from a jumbled heap. The fat green man filled it, and the boy, glancing furtively about for enemies, hugged it to himself and scurried for the shelter of the wall, where others were squatting.

The shrimp, pork, egg and fish proved to be soggy millet in hot water. It was delectable. The rich savory taste of it brought tears of gratitude to the boy's eyes. He belched. Warmth invaded his chest and belly.

When the millet was gone and the bowls were collected, when men and boys had shat, when the sun broke above the rolling horizon, a stern wiry green man strutted down the path and addressed them. “New boys! You are now miners! Yours is a proud trade. Your contracts bind you for ten months, and your wages are three dollars each day, and if you work well you will be given a bonus.”

What was a miner? A contract? A bonus? The boy had no idea. But three dollars a day! That he understood! Three Yunnanese dollars each day! That would buy a ball of steamed dough and cup of real tea!

The crowd of boys was trotted up the path, toward the hills. He found that he was still clutching his card. The hills were red, pitted and gouged. Some looked like squares of paddy, but all were red, some sandy red and some blood-red. Through these hills wound narrow lanes, and on the lanes were many red men with their red donkeys.

At length the boys were told to halt and rest, by a hole in the mountain. Ming-tzu looked back and caught his breath: behind him, far below, lay a vast valley. He had risen. He stared upward, being now so close to the heavens. He saw one fluffy cloud, no gods, no dragons. The stern wiry man, who had been all green but was now mottled pink, issued instructions. Ming-tzu understood very little. In the evening he would ask Shang to make all things clear.

The hole in the mountain was square and propped by timbers. “You will follow your captain,” the stern wiry man said, and gestured. A boy somewhat older than Ming-tzu, and wearing a shirt with pockets, rose and said, “Your cards.” The boys filed before him; he collected the cards and slipped them into a pocket, which he carefully buttoned. This was like no button Ming-tzu had ever seen. It was flat and round and made of bone or stone or wood, and it slipped through a slit in the flap of the pocket. Ming-tzu considered this ingenious. He had seen buttons before, but they were knots of cloth that one forced through loops. “Now follow.”

And to Ming-tzu's horror, the boy with pockets stooped and entered the hole in the mountain. This hole was less high than Ming-tzu. He struggled to shout, but fear took firm hold of his tongue. As the line of boys shuffled forward he shuffled with them. He passed into the hole, and into darkness; far ahead a spark flickered.

Now the boys descended, in single file. They descended by proceeding downward step by step, their feet seeking and gripping ledges to either side. Down the center of this descent hung a taut rope; to this rope the hands clung. After a time the space widened; this seemed to be a room; faint light again flickered. Ming-tzu stared wildly into the murk. He was quite warm now. He was even hot. Yet he shivered. Caverns were the haunt of phantoms, leopard spirits, ghosts, ancestors. In caverns were found bones and dead men. Had he died?

He was sweating when the troop was ordered to halt. Here a lantern hung on a spike driven into the wall. The boy saw men with picks attacking the walls. He saw stout cloth bags in stacks. These were homely objects and reassuring. He breathed easier:
work
was being done here. Work he understood. His father, if father that had been, was constantly seeking
work
. And Ming-tzu had found it!

Someone thrust a sack at him. He followed the boy before him and dragged the sack to a pile of earth that had been chopped from the walls by the men with picks. Bare-handed, Ming-tzu stuffed a sack. “Quickly, quickly!” cried a voice. Ming-tzu found that he could not carry the full sack. He scooped out a handful of rock and was flung violently forward by a lash as sharp as hunger. “Full sack!” the voice called.

The boy wailed. This he understood. One was whipped for impossibilities. “Cannot!” he cried. “Cannot, cannot!”

“Then do what you can,” the voice said, echoing, and the boy understood: this was a lesson for the others as well. “And you will learn to do more each day, do you hear?”

“I hear! I hear!” Ming-tzu strained, heaved; his knees buckled.

“Not so, you fool!” Someone, perhaps the older boy, was wrenching at his arm. “So, and so, with the arms through the straps. Thus the legs bear the weight and the hands are free. Do you understand this, little pig?”

“Understand,” Ming-tzu sobbed. “Understand.”

“Then up you go to the sunlight.”

Ming-tzu was streaming sweat. He stumbled blindly, crying, “Where, sir? And how, sir?” He found the hole and the ascending ledges and the anchored rope; he grasped the rope and forced his foot to fumble for a ledge.

He was knocked flat, and the breath whooshed out of him, and he lay wanting death.

“Not this one, turtle-egg! This one is for coming down. For going up, that one. You see there is first a slope, hey? You will go up that sloping shaft; you will come down the straight shaft.”

The boy struggled to his feet. He had not before heard the term “shaft” but he knew it now. He lurched toward the sloping shaft and toiled forward. He stumbled. He rose. He toiled forward. He trembled in agony, the straps bit his shoulders like fire, in the dark demons lurked, bats, serpents, bloodsuckers, assassins. He proceeded by feel and by fear. How long this journey took he could not have said; but in the end he saw light. He stepped into daylight and fell flat. “A new boy.” Someone laughed. The sack was removed from him. “Over there,” someone said. Ming-tzu saw the hole in the mountain and recognized this spot. “Cannot,” he said. The clout caught him on the nape and tumbled him hard. He lay gulping air. “Water,” he gasped.

“Water! In the rainy season you will have water. For now you have the runoff at the concentrators. After work.”

Ming-tzu understood “runoff.” He would not try to understand more. Perhaps he would slip in his descent and come to a merciful end.

He did slip, but the body always wins these contests; he clutched the rope, found footing, proceeded downward, filled a sack, bore it to the surface. He repeated these actions for days. When at last he was told to rest, to return to the stone house, he asked how many days had passed.

“Not one day,” someone said. “It is only afternoon.”

Someone else said, “Cheer up, new boy. Only ten months to go, less one day,” and there was a general chuckle.

Ming-tzu noticed that he was coated with a film of red dust.

Shang befriended him, and a grateful Ming-tzu performed painless sexual services in return. Shang was a wise man, so the boy asked him, “Why am I red?”

“It is the dust of the mines only,” Shang said.

“And why are you green?”

“Because I do not go below, but tend the concentrators; in days gone by I went below, and the poison is in me.”

Another day it occurred to the boy to ask, “What do we mine?”

“We mine tin.”

And another day, “Then the tin is poison?”

Shang said, “No. The poison is called arsenic, and it lives with the tin as moss lives with a tree. It enters the skin, and it enters the lungs, and it makes the lips fat and shiny.”

“What are lungs?”

So over the weeks Shang told him much. That there were perhaps one hundred thousand workers here at Kochiu. That the least legal age was fifteen but that half were younger. This tin was something like iron and was used for pots, wires, cups perhaps, knives and spoons perhaps, objects made of metal. Ming-tzu had seen the foreign foods in containers?

No. And who took this tin? Ming-tzu had seen the concentrators now, and had drunk the metallic water for many weeks; but where did the tin go then?

“Well, it goes to foreigners. Englishmen and Frenchmen.”

“What are those?”

“Those are men from far places. The Big Noses.”

“Then I do not like the Big Noses from far places.”

“There are good men in far places. Russiamen are not bad men, I have heard. You remember that. Russiamen have warred on the rich.”

“I will remember.”

“And remember too that there are Chinese like us, Yunnanese like us, who also take this tin, and who sell it everywhere under heaven, and are very rich, and eat what they like, and never work.”

“Never work! When they can if they want to?”

Shang was pleased with this boy. “You have rice every evening.”

“It is so.”

“And a scrap of meat once in ten days.”

“It is so.”

“And how if you could eat rice and pork and beef and lamb and fish and little pink shrimp three times every day without working?”

The boy found this bewildering.

Every morning and every evening he scraped himself. Each boy carried a slat of bone in his belt, and with this he scraped away dung, simple dirt and whatever of the red dust, muddied by sweat, could be scoured away. When a boy died and his body was removed by the death-servants, his bone was kept in the house, and the flimsiest were bestowed upon new boys, so that a good strong thick bone was a sign of seniority, as was a sleeping space far from the donkeys.

What Ming-tzu learned, he remembered. He saw now that little boys were required because the shafts and tunnels were too small for grown men. This knowledge imparted a sense of worth, and of pride. When Squirrel—a truly little fellow, smaller even than Ming-tzu—commenced to vomit daily, Ming-tzu and some others joined to force upon him a few extra grains of rice, a few extra drops of water. Most of the boys suffered diarrhea. Ming-tzu suffered more from headache, and often dragged himself through a day when pain flickered and flashed like lightning.

Only the pipe relieved the pain. Yunnan was a province rich in opium. In some regions poppies rippled red to the horizon. Good black yen was cheap and plentiful, and that much the Englishmen and Frenchmen and their Chinese satraps would allow the miners: the bowl of millet, the bowl of rice, the strip of meat once a week or so, and pipes, stylets and yen in each house, for only pennies a day. Ming-tzu shoveled down his rice in late afternoon and awaited his turn at the pipe. Slowly peace replaced his pain. Often he and Shang shared a pipe, and then another, and drifted into sleep holding hands.

Most of the boys were soon bright-eyed like Shang. Some trembled constantly and jerked convulsively in their sleep. Squirrel did not wake one morning, but lay staring at nothing; he was alive but uncertainly so, and died on the third day. As the weather changed, other boys died; Ming-tzu noticed that his household had altered. With the donkeys was now one water buffalo, and new boys had moved in to replace the dead.

One day he said to Shang, boasting, “I think I am green now too, beneath the red.”

“Come along,” said Shang, and they strolled to the concentrators. These were troughs in which the ore was cleansed by water. They first drank. Shang then took a square of cloth and rubbed at Ming-tzu's red skin. The red vanished; green sprang forth. With much mirth the boy and the man created a checkerboard of red and green.

“Are my eyes shiny too?”

“Yes,” said Shang, “and your lips bloated. A real miner, you are.”

“I was in the lower pit today,” the boys said.

“Oh, that is hot!”

“I have never been so hot.”

“Listen, boy: when you come up from the lower pit, rub yourself dry with your loincloth. You remember Two-teeth?”

“I remember him.”

“He came up wet and the chill settled on his lungs.”