The Catherine Lim Collection (5 page)

The Western coffin was returned to Singapore
Casket, a Chinese one procured. It came, hoisted by six men, massive curved
bridges of solid planed wood. Angela looked away.

$3,000 - Wee Tiong could not believe it. The
Western one was a fraction of the cost. $3,000 – the swindlers. It was at this
point that Wee Tiong threw down the calculator in a fit of vexation and said he
was washing his hands off the whole thing. Let Wee Boon or Wee Nam both manage
from now onwards.

It stood solidly in the hall, the dreadful
massive structure, associated in Angela’s mind with direful superstitions and
terrors.

“Keep pregnant cats away,” warned Ah Kum
Soh. “A pregnant cat jumping over a coffin would cause the corpse to sit up or
even walk out.” Someone went to tie up a black-and-white female cat that often
came over to rummage in the kitchen bin.

Please, for God’s sake – thought Angela.

The matter did not end with the coffin. Old
Mother wanted the priests from the temple to perform the various rites.

“But why so many priests, such elaborate
rites?” Wee Tiong’s voice rose to a very high pitch when he was exasperated.
“The swindlers. Do you know how much they are charging? $200 a night for all
those prayers and chantings. $200 a night per priest for four nights. Why three
priests? Why four nights?”

He said again, “I wash my hands off this
business,” but shortly after he relented. He even went to Old Mother and said
to her, ‘Whatever you wish, it is our duty as sons to give you.’

His wife was going to give birth: Who would
know what might happen? He longed for a son. Would the anger of his dead father
be visited upon him, bringing him the punishment of yet another girl-child, or
worse, a dead child?

There were forces at work that Wee Tiong
believed in; he could not afford, at such a time, to unleash these forces. He
apologised to his mother.

Oh, how I long for this whole wretched thing
to be over, thought Angela in distress, and it was not only because she wanted
to be able again to give her full attention to the children, to supervise
Mark’s progress, help Michael with his homework, prepare Michelle for her
training sessions at the pool, go out for lunch with Mee Kin and her other
colleagues, go through the marketing accounts with Mooi Lan, inquire about a
space in the newly opened Singapura Shopping Arcade to set up the boutique that
she and Mee Kin were always talking about.

She was so tired, so tired of the whole
thing. She must have lost at least five pounds in the last week. Mee Kin had
remarked about the black rings round her eyes. Old Mother’s continuous sobbing
troubled, irritated her. Why call him ‘Old Devil’ and ‘Coffin-face’ while he
was alive and then weep so piteously at his death? But she knew the tears were
not for the old man alone.

That heartless son, she thought bitterly,
suddenly feeling very sorry for her old mother-in-law. Couldn’t he have come
home at least for the funeral? First it was some stupid examination, and then
some accident that put him in hospital. I bet you they’re all excuses. He fools
his old mother right and left. He’s probably living it up this very minute with
his Australian woman. And the old fool weeps over his letters and messages and
declares that he’s the most filial of the four sons! Boon bears almost the
entire cost of the funeral, but the old one talks only of her Ah Siong, her
precious one. It’s always Ah Siong, Ah Siong. She longs for him to come back,
so that she can stay with him, as if all her other sons are ill-treating her.

And the most distressing question of all –
but Angela did not dare ask it, would not dare voice it, even after the
funeral, for she could foresee her husband’s reaction, good-natured though he
was. He was sure to be impatient with her, as he had been impatient many times
in the past when the matter cropped up.

Now that the old man was dead, who would Old
Mother move to live with?

Angela did not want to ask the question; she
dreaded the answer, the possible consequences.

The door creaked a little and Old Mother,
thinking it was Ah Kum Soh or Ah Bock returning home, asked, “Who is it?”

Having got up and ascertained that it was
neither, she stood still and waited expectantly.

“You have come back,” she said. “You have
come back so soon.”

The old man stood before her, thinner than
in life. He said nothing, and he looked at her, not with the look of
irascibility as in the last weeks before his death, but with sadness.

“You have come back,” said Old Mother again.
“You have something to ask of me. What is it?”

The old man still said nothing, and Old
Mother became impatient.

“When you were alive,” she said, “I called
you ‘The-one-with-gold-in-his-mouth’. Tight-lipped, as if opening your mouth
would mean gold falling out for others to pick up. What is it?”

The old man kept resolutely silent, not with
stubbornness, but with sadness. Old Mother heard a sigh, as from a burdened
heart.

“Is it about your sons?” she asked. And it
was at this point that the old man began to weep silently.

“Do not weep,” said Old Mother, but she did
not go up to him to comfort him. In life, she had never touched his shoulder,
his arm, to comfort. She referred to him as ‘Ah Boon’s father’ or ‘Ah Siong’s
father’, never ‘my husband’. ‘Husband’ embarrassed her.

“Do not weep,” said Old Mother again. “I
will be all right. The Almighty God in Heaven looks after the old. Now that you
are in Heaven, you will also take care of me and see that I come to no harm.”

Old Mother strained to hear. The words came
very faintly, with great effort: “Ah Siong.”

“Ah Siong will take care of me; you take
care of Ah Siong, too,” said Old Mother, beginning to weep herself. “You take
care of him in that far off country and give him success and happiness so that
he can come home soon and take care of me in my old age.”

The old man nodded, his wispy beard
quivering on his chin. He did not disappear in a puff of smoke or haze; he
simply walked away. Old Mother saw him close the door behind him. She went to
the window to watch him, and saw him walk away in the dimness of the moonlight.

“Who’s that?” called Angela.

It was strange – this place she was in.

“Who’s that?” she called again, and walked
into a room.

The old man was there, lying on the bed.
Beside him was a walking stick, the stout one with the brass head that he had,
in a fit of vexation in his illness, tried to hit Old Mother with.

He was dead already – or was he? She thought
she heard a rattle from his throat, a kind of rasping sound, as she heard at
the birthday dinner.

She walked up, slowly, deferentially, and he
opened his eyes and looked at her.

“Are you all right, Father?” she said, a
little timidly, for the old man never stopped staring at her. “Can I get you
anything, Father? A cup of hot water?”

“He can’t hear! He can’t hear! He’s dead!”

The idiot was suddenly beside the bed;
strange that his words came through so clearly, usually he slobbered
unintelligibly. He was carrying Michael on his shoulders; he began to prance
around the room and the boy laughed with joy.

“Mikey – Mikey, please get down,” pleaded
Angela, stretching out her arms. “Come to Mummy, Mikey.”

“Not dead yet, but you want him dead!”

This from Old Mother. The room suddenly
filled with people. She could see Ah Kum Soh and the old servant Ah Kheem Chae
and another very old servant, Ah Siew Chae who had died so very long ago.

“This can be easily managed,” said Old Mother
with asperity. “Ah Kum Soh,” she said in an imperious voice. “Knock on that
coffin. Keep knocking, with your knuckles, like this. That means he will die
soon. That means the coffin is saying, ‘Come, come. I invite you. Come!’”

The knockings on the coffin began. The
massive, solid curved surfaces resounded with knocks. It sounded as if several
people were knocking on the coffin at once.

“Knock, knock, knock, knock,” said Old
Mother, laughing. “See, the coffin is saying, ‘Come! Come! It’s time!’ Soon he
will be dead. ‘The-one-accursed-with-a-short-life’ will be dead.”

The body was now on a white-draped bier.

“Put his body into the coffin now,”
commanded Old Mother, and two swarthy Indians lifted the fragile white corpse
and laid it in the coffin.

Knock, knock.

“See, the knockings continue,” said Old
Mother. “I will join him soon!”

The idiot, still carrying Michael on his
shoulders, began to howl and to pull her away from the coffin.

“Oh my God” – gasped Angela.

“I tell you the child’s a girl,” whispered
Old Mother. They stood outside the door, listening for the first cries of the
child. They heard the moans of labour inside, soft low moans.

“How do you know? The child’s not born yet,”
said Wee Tiong.

“It’s a boy, and it’s dead,” said the old
man.

“How can you both talk like that while Choo
is inside giving birth?” cried Wee Tiong in anger. Then he said, “Please,
Father, please, Mother, do not talk like this.”

“There, I told you!” cried the old man
triumphantly as a child was brought out, dead. “A male-child, quite dead. He
can lie in the coffin beside me.”

“Make sure you have a proper coffin when you
die,” said Old Mother.

Wee Tiong closed his eyes tight, pressed his
hands against his ears. He was crying, and the tears collected inside his
glasses, making him perceive things only dimly.

He chased her round the garden with his
walking stick. He was in his death-clothes; he must have just got up from his
coffin.

“You did not do your duty as a
daughter-in-law!” he shouted in anger at her, waving the walking stick wildly
in the air.

“You did not come near my coffin to pay last
respects. What sort of daughter-in-law are you?”

He spoke in English, he who was always shy
of words outside his own dialect. Gloria ran and hid behind a bush. It was no
use. He caught up with her, and then she eluded his grasp and ran into a
building, an old Chinese temple with many carved pillars and priests in yellow
robes walking about and chanting.

“Jesus, Mary, Joseph – ” she panted, and out
of the shadows emerged the idiot, grinning, to catch her and deliver her to the
old man.

“You unfilial daughter-in-law,” he rasped,
his beard moving stiffly on his chin.

“Oh, Blessed Mother of God – ” she had a
rosary in her hand. She gripped it, to protect her from the evil.

Angela
parked her Toyota Corolla
by the roadside
,
making sure it was not too near the
ditch, overgrown with thorny bushes perilous to a new car. She took out the
tiffin carrier of food, still hot and steaming, locked the car and carefully
threaded her way along planks thrown over the muddy ground.

What a way to reach the old one’s place –
all those thorns and now these planks with the rusty nails sticking out of
them, threatening with tetanus those poor little barefoot children playing
noisily around.

But the old one’s house was at least an
improvement on the one in Changi, the one near that dreadful muddy pond,
devil-haunted. It was a large wooden house and was presentable if kept clean
and tidy. But the old ones – both of them – had been extremely untidy: she had
spent the better part of many a visit sweeping, wiping the dust off table-tops,
putting things in order that they had left in a mess. The careless Ah Kum Soh
and the idiot one contributed to the mess; Angela had seen soiled clothes in
heaps on the bathroom floor, soiled kitchen rags lying under chairs and had
severely scolded the irresponsible woman.

The house was no tidier now. Angela winced
to find, as she walked in, a jumble of urns, joss-stick containers with the ash
spilling over, torn prayer paper – obviously remnants from the funeral, now
months past. But the altar table for the old man had been newly cleaned; the
old man’s framed photograph hung above it, and on the table, in neat symmetry,
were little cups of tea, plates of oranges and small jars for the joss-sticks.
The cups and jars were in pretty blue-and-white porcelain. Angela looked
closer: they interested her, for they were very much like the antique pottery
pieces that Mee Kin was collecting. Where had her mother-in-law got them from?
Then she remembered. There was a great deal of pottery and old furniture that
the old one had been given by her mother who must have got them from her own
mother. Some of them must be at least a hundred years old. Angela remembered a
dark musty room in which they lay untended, covered by gunny sacks and masses
of cobwebs. Once when the children were small and on a visit to the
grandparents, they had gone into the room to play and had run out screaming,
having disturbed an enormous nest of cockroaches which ran with them out of the
room.