He caught her hand, then felt both her hands gripping his, pulling him up. She called for help, called for someone to bring the doctor.
There was no out-of-body experience; she dumped him on the bed and pulled his shirt up. He panicked when she walked off, but she came back with his toolbox. When she unscrewed his chestplate and pulled it off, he felt a breeze touching his fleshly organs.
He couldn’t see, but he felt her thin fingers reaching in, pushing aside rubber and flesh, looking for missing pieces.
“San Yan-" but he didn’t know what else to say.
Of course he knew San Yan knew, at least in theory, what he looked like on the inside. Her voice had carried him through the surgery back to life. Yet now he felt overexposed, a dirty secret stumbling into the open.
She found the dislocated pieces and carefully nudged them back into place. Her eyebrows knit the same way they did whenever she sewed. No, earlier—when she washed the wounds of the alley boys who picked fights with him. He didn’t know why the memory came back now.
He thought his hearing came back first. Then his breathing, though he knew he never stopped. The feeling in his fingers and toes. His stomach took the opportunity to growl.
“Ha! Not hungry, your head.” She finished tightening a bolt and put the spanner down. “Juk is all right?”
Heong nodded.
She brought to him a bowl of cooling juk and began to shove liberal spoonfuls into his mouth. He took the opportunity to reflect on what just happened.
“I could have killed you," he blurted in foul recognition.
“You have always been able to do that," she replied. “But you never have.” She kept feeding him, until the bowl was empty. Then she set aside the bowl, and touched his chest plate. “You've always been able to break me," she said softly, “and now, I can break you too.”
He covered her hand with his. That did not sound unfair.
* * *
As it happened, of course he had an aunt in Binlang, working for the towkay soh. He had never expected to meet his Tua Ee again after she had left with the merchant’s daughter she worked for. He had been in awe of her: a world-traveller, who had cooked on ships both on the water and in the sky. Ching Seow Fen had promptly taken him on as a god-son, and San Yan as god-daughter. It was not long before she began nagging them to properly marry.
“What does she know? How much?” San Yan had asked him.
He'd shrugged. “Whatever she knows, we'll still get married soon.”
They had kept putting it off. There was always so much work to do.
* * *
She got the full story after Subramaniam sin-sang came to see Heong. The doctor was deeply impressed by San Yan’s skill and lamented his assistants’ lack of talent compared to hers. Heong told her his side, then with Subramaniam sin-sang translating, she asked around and pieced it together. When she came home, Heong was staring listlessly at the ceiling, having refused to see everyone who came to check on him, even his aunt.
She made them dinner, cutting down his portions significantly. As they ate, she told him about how the builders were very sorry, and the doctor wanted to see him again. He didn’t say anything, just nodded.
When they lay down for bedtime, San Yan snuggled up against him happily. Surely, now that everyone saw how his surgery had been so hard on him, they would be more sympathetic and treat him better, and he would return to his cheerful self soon enough.
“Do you ever think about going back to Malakap?” he suddenly asked, and she knew he wasn’t talking to the darkness.
“What?”
“I can’t stay here. I don’t trust my strength anymore.”
“What else would you do?”
He shrugged. “I could go back to Lau sin-sang and finish my studies. Then I could find a job as a clerk.”
“But where?”
“Anywhere.”
Anywhere but here, she heard. “I can’t go back. You know I can’t.”
He stroked her arm. “I can’t stay here," he repeated. “I need to get away.”
“I like it here. I’m finally starting to attract better customers. I like our neighbours. I like your aunt. Please, don’t ask me to go back.”
“All right. I won’t ask.”
He left before the dawn, before she woke up. He didn’t take much, just a few clothes and a toolkit. She also discovered he'd cut off a lock of her hair.
She went through the motions of frantic queries and wailing in friends' arms. They checked the schedules of ships leaving the jetties, both sea and air. She burned joss paper and prayed for his safe return. She heard conflicting rumours of where he was. Even Subramaniam sin-sang came to look in on her out of concern. At night, she pulled herself into a tight ball, trying to contain the pain in her chest.
When she was born, she was so tiny, her parents thought she would die. So the fortune-teller told them to give her a name that would give her more strength. So they gave her a name that meant “three people" in hopes that three of her within the one body would suffice to help her survive.
She did not need three of herself, and while she was sure she did not actually need the love of her life, she was also sure she did not want to be without him, either. If he could live with her secret shame, she could live with his, too.
* * *
He had written her a poem once, a little after they had settled into a comfortable rhythm in Binlang. It took her a while to find someone who could read it, but when she did, she was tickled to hear that it was only three lines:
The sea waves lap under our bed,
The room smells like your unwashed pots and pans,
This is my true home.
It was, she had decided, very bad poetry, but she embroidered it anyway and hung it up over the kitchen stove.
* * *
San Yan was finishing the final touches on the towkay soh’s new dress, feeling very satisfied with the result. It was pleasurable to work for a generous client, surrounded by supportive friends and substitutes for relatives. It was almost enough to fill the hole inside her chest.
She smelled the roast pork first, and felt a stab of envy for the neighbour who was obviously having a feast that night. If Heong had been home, she mused, he probably would have had the gall to track the smell with his nose and casually call on the neighbour for some favour, thus earning an invitation to dinner.
But the smell was coming closer and she heard the key rattle in the door lock. Heong tried to push the door open with aplomb but the dignity of the gesture was cut short since San Yan had the door hook in.
San Yan accidentally pricked her finger as she hastily put aside the dress. She unhooked the door and threw it open to the sight of Heong smiling shyly with a hock of roast pork in one hand. “I’m home,” he said with an air of embarrassment at having been gone so long.
In a moment, they both knew, she would burst into a tearful tantrum, but before that, she grabbed him tight, and smelled the sweat on his neck and back, the gear oil in his chest, the pork in his hand.
What a fragrance!
Promised
Nisi Shawl
Kamina, January 1904
“Bury him.” A true Christian would not have pronounced that sentence so easily. The Reverend Lieutenant Thomas Jefferson Wilson pressed his forehead with the heel of one hand, leaned back in the throne they had made him assume, and closed his eyes.
He couldn’t close his ears, though. There was no escape from the prisoner’s pleading as the ushers dragged him to the pit they’d previously dug. Blessedly, Yoka refrained from further translation, but the captive’s wailing cries were obvious in their meaning. As was the hiss and slap of gravel being poured over his legs, body, and arms.
He comforted himself with knowledge born of earlier trials: the prisoner’s head would remain aboveground.
One of Wilson’s new African congregants helped him rise so the folding throne could be moved to a better vantage point. He had to open his eyes again to wa
lk to the fast filling pit. Shadows cloaked the cavern’s walls. Currents of damp air bent the smallest lamp’s naked flame, and made the tiny golden points cast by the larger, shielded lamps shiver.
How had his noble-hearted intentions come to this? His and those of the other Negro missionaries.
Behind him, muffled clucking announced the coming of a speckled hen. Its handler gave it to him to hold while priests—other priests—his colleagues—traced symbols in the packed earth now spread round about the prisoner’s neck and head. Over this the youngest of them, a mere boy, threw kernels of dried corn.
Wilson resumed his seat. Best for all to begin and end this as quickly as possible. Afterwards he would pray for God’s forgiveness. Again. Perhaps someday he would receive an answer.
Surely he was yet deserving of one, despite the priests’ entreaties to commit himself to their heathenish cult.
He returned the hen to its handler, rolled back the cuffs of his sleeves and removed a clinging feather from the red sash they had insisted he wear.
“What were you doing on the slopes above Mwilambwe?” he asked. Yoka rendered the question into Bah-Sangah and then Lingala. Then the prisoner’s response into Bah-Sangah and English. The young man was good at his task.
The buried captive claimed he had been doing nothing, nothing, he had simply become lost and was wandering innocently when King Mwenda’s men found him near their camp. With a nod Wilson signaled that the hen should be allowed to peck. The captive regarded it with dread, his words failing. It freely chose the corn nearest the character for “big lie.”
The buried man began to shout, repeating the same phrase over and over.
“‘Don’t kill me! Don’t kill me!’ he is saying,” Yoka told Wilson. “Some peoples do similar ceremonies to accuse a person of practicing magic. Then they execute him. Shall I tell the prisoner he’s safe?”
“No.” For, in fact, he was in danger. Perhaps even a Christian court would have treated him no better. King Mwenda was an important ally of Everfair. Much of the land the colony had settled had originally belonged to him.
The handler picked up the bird. No witch could keep such an animal as a familiar—all history, all church tradition ran counter to the idea. Cats, dogs, toads, rats, lizards, yes. But not roosters. Not hens. They were too cleanly, too righteous, too irretrievably associated with the Lord.
“Who do you work for?”
Checking with Wilson, the handler set the bird back down. According to Yoka, the captive said he worked for no one, no one, unless they would hire him, of course, in which case—but Wilson stopped attending to the man’s words, for the hen had resumed its feeding. With three precise movements of its head it indicated that the prisoner was in the Belgian tyrant Leopold’s employ.
As they had naturally suspected when he was found creeping through the army’s perimeter guard. Validation, the first step, had taken place. The Urim and Thummim, so to speak.
Now for the difficult part. Wilson preferred a white cock for the latter portion of these interrogations. The handler took the hen away and relief filled the buried man’s face.
“What services do you offer us? What will you do?”
A torrent of eager words poured out of him. “He will work hard for us in any way we require,” Yoka told Wilson and the Bah-Sangah priests. “Digging in the mines, gathering rubber, paddling a boat, even cooking like a woman.”
As the response and Yoka’s translations continued, the handler returned with a rooster. It was the right color. The buried man talked faster, seeming eager to say everything at once. As it was set down the rooster flapped its wings, disarranging the careful, even distribution of dried corn.
But not the symbols incised in the packed soil. Calming down, it pecked this area, that area, another, another, watched carefully by the Bah-Sangah priests. Two made notes on lengths of bark. Apparently finished with its meal, the cock left the corn to climb the little pile of stones left from the pit’s excavation.
Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live, Wilson remembered. Exodus 22:18. But what of Endor? Hadn’t she, though of course cursed, revealed Jehovah’s will? What if his association with the Bah-Sangah religion was foreordained?
“What does the oracle teach us?”
The recording priests consulted with their apprentice, Yoka, who said, “The most likely outcome is for him to betray us to Leopold.”
Executing the prisoner would be a mercy, then. Would save innocent lives. Yet Wilson couldn’t bring himself to condone killing him in cold blood.
He thought a moment more. Doubtless Leopold had threatened the spy with a family member’s death in order to get him to act in the tyrant’s interests. To turn that monster’s tool against him—that was what would hurt him most; not to let him sacrifice his pawn.
“The final question.” Which according to the instructions he followed was never directed at the prisoner. Wilson lifted his eyes and held out his hands, palms up, to receive the righteous knowledge of heaven. Though he wasn’t sure it would come.
All other eyes, he noticed, were lowered.
The handler retrieved the rooster and tucked it under one arm. A knife glinted in the opposite hand. Yoka faced him, holding a large gourd.
“How can we further the highest good of all involved?”
The cock died swiftly, silently. Only the knife’s flash and the hiss of life pouring into the bowl told what had happened. A few kicks contained by the handler’s hold and the bird was meat.
A different gourd, covered, was carried forward by a different young apprentice. Wilson had seen its contents before: rounded stones, brass implements, figures of wood and glass and gems. Yoka spilled into it a measure of the hot liquid—the blood—within his own gourd. Then he approached Wilson.
He had twice already drunk such offerings. On the first occasion Wilson had—much to his shame—done so out of fear of death at his congregants’ hands. On the second he’d feared to offend them. A third instance would, he thought, impel him that much closer to his fate. If this trend continued he’d soon be a full-blown heathen—worse, an apostate.
Wanting to rescue these brands from the burning, Wilson had caught fire himself.
He took the gourd from Yoka. Guiltily, he sipped. Salt ran over his tongue, down his throat, like a thin gravy. As he passed the bowl to the eldest of the Bah-Sangah priests the remembered vertigo assailed him.
He meant to stay seated, but the world whirled and he was on his feet, dancing. Glimpses of his surroundings penetrated the glowing fog of his ecstasy: swirling stars—or were those the myriad little lights the lamps cast through their shades? Wise faces—his friends, his brothers—went and came, bobbed up before him and twisted away. Out of an opening leading deeper into the caves poured music, waves of horns and harps and bells and drums. Stamping down! Down! He gloried in the strength of metal, the knife and the hammer he’d been given spinning in his nimble grip. Round and round and round and round and then he reached the place just right.
The center. A vision. He could see….
See them sweeping over the forests like a scythe, blazing above the river surface, fire reflected in the waters’ steel, going there! There! In chains, iron’s perversion, children stooped to tend rubber plants, the vines-that-weep. Whipped and starved—they must not die. Attack! Attack!
Then he was back on the folding stool Yoka called his throne. No music. He couldn’t remember when it had stopped. Now he heard only the soft murmurs of the priests discussing what he had told them in Bah-Sangah. What he had told them using a language he didn’t in the least understand.
Sickness filled his stomach and threatened to overflow it. Yoka gave him a cup of water. Four women entered. They often arrived after such ceremonies, though how they knew the proper time he had no idea.
Two of the women squatted before him and patted his feet with a white powder like talcum. The first time this happened he had balked. Then he’d remembered how, initially, Peter had refused to let
the Lord perform a like service. Jesus had rebuked Peter Simon, and the disciple had come to accept the Christ’s anointing.
It was obvious by now, though, that that was not what he, Wilson, had accepted.
He wished he could be alone and think about what he was doing. He wished he could lie down and sleep. But Yoka reminded him there was no time. The Mote, he said, was scheduled that very evening. It was the Socialist colony’s central government, accepted by all Everfair’s diverse settlers.
He let Yoka guide him to the Mote’s tall-ceilinged cave, let the apprentice “light” the already-burning wick with their shared lamp’s flame. As always, they were among the earliest arrivals. Only Alfred, Tink, and Winthrop preceded them, though Mrs. Albin’s stool awaited her. Beyond it stood another, higher and more elaborate.
Lately Wilson had been leaving the space on Mrs. Albin’s right for Old Kanna to take. And the space on her left—with the better stool—was filled these days by beautiful Queen Josina, who had replaced her cousin Alonzo as Yoka had replaced Loyiki. These substitutions were for the same reason: the work Alonzo and Loyiki did away from Everfair. The work of war, which he was to join in again on the morrow. Wilson had fought in the American Civil War, though far too young at the time. Age made him less certain of his skills, more sure of the need to use them.
Yoka sank onto the central mat, out of the way of the entrance, and Wilson knelt beside him. His attempt to pray silently was interrupted by plump Mrs. Albin’s bustling advent; her too-young husband accompanied her, and though Wilson tried to ignore the man’s solicitous stare he felt it even with his eyes reverently closed.
Queen Josina came in next, with Old Kanna and Nenzima in her wake. The new chair was, of course, hers. As usual the poet, Daisy Albin—George’s mother—was last.
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