by S. L. Stoner
“After eight, you say? Loke Tung will be there?”
“Yes. You come back after eight o’clock.” With that, the man strode into the gloom of the cannery without a backward glance.
The silence was the first thing Sage noticed when he returned to the wharf at 8:00 o’clock. The only sounds were the faint swish of water as a solitary Chinese man washed down the cannery floor and the distant cry of the gulls wheeling above discarded fish bits scumming the river.
Sage stepped onto the porch of the worker’s bunkhouse and knocked on the door. The China boss answered and gestured for Sage to enter. Inside, the ordinary hubbub of men at the end of their workday ceased the moment he crossed the threshold. Garlic, ginger and other exotic smells wafted through the air of the ramshackle building–the mixture familiar, strange and poignant. Fong’s provision shop smells like this, Sage thought. Another stab of loss hit him. He valued the fact that he’d been accepted into that strange other world. Was that connection lost as well?
“Please, take seat.” The China boss directed him toward a straight-backed wooden chair next to a plank table that was situated in the cooking area of the large whitewashed room. Another man, an apron tied around his waist, placed a tin teapot and small white porcelain cup at Sage’s elbow. The man turned away to stir a simmering slant-sided pan on the wood cook stove. The pan rested in the hole left by the removal of a stove top lid. Sage found that the tea was mildly sweet and needed no sugar. Just like the tea Mrs. Fong served. That stab again. Fong was supposed to be here.
Conversation around him resumed, although much more subdued than before. Sage examined his surroundings, curious about the difference between the bunkhouses where he’d lived and this one. The first thing that struck him was that there were no mattresses on the iron cots. Instead, a pile of folded blankets covered their rope webbing. Here and there a man lay stretched out on the blankets. One of them appeared to be in distress. Two men hovered over him, one with a sharp knife in his hand.
Sage watched as the knife holder slit the man’s rubber boots apart and gently pulled them off making the man’s face scrunch in pain. Sage was close enough to see the angry red swelling and sores covering the man’s feet and ankles. A painful rush of blood must have hit the injuries because the man moaned softly. The second man, after darting a glance at Sage, touched a match to the bowl of a water pipe. He handed the hose tip to the man on the cot who sucked hungrily until his head fell back onto his pillow, smoke streaming upward from his nostrils. Opium’s cloying scent drifted across the room. Sage looked away, careful to keep his face expressionless. With feet like that, oblivion was the logical choice. Besides, opium was sold legally to whites in the form of patent medicines, despite increased efforts to ban its use.
“Here he is.” The China boss appeared at Sage’s elbow. Beside him stood a heavy squat man whose narrowed eyes and jutting chin telegraphed his unwillingness to be there. “This is Loke Tung,” the China boss told Sage before turning to bark something in Chinese at Loke.
Sage stood, realized he was towering over Loke, and quickly sat down again. He pulled Kincaid’s wedding photo from his pocket and held it out toward the man.
Loke barely glanced at the photo. Sullenness lacing his halting words, he said, “Don’t know if this is man who die. Man without face. Too many days in ocean and in boat. Right age.”
Aggravation washed through Sage. He spoke rapidly to control it. “Please, the man in the photo has a wife and a baby . . .” Loke’s lower lip jutted forward before he shook his head and backed away.
Sage watched Loke cross the room to lie down on a cot. In the silence that followed, Sage became aware that all eyes were again fixed on him, more than one pair surrounded by wrinkles of amusement. Embarrassed, he waited a beat or two before rising from the table. Absolute silence accompanied his steps from table to door.
Outside, Sage punched the porch railing hard with his fist. He would not wait around for Hong Ah Kay. There was no way to tell when the fisherman might return to shore. Besides, there was no guarantee that Hong would be any more helpful than the rest of the Chinese. A wasted trip. He was no closer to finding out whether the body was Kincaid’s than when he’d boarded the sternwheeler in Portland. All this time and all this way and all he knew was that the body was that of a man about Kincaid’s age. And that’s what Franklin had already told him. The face of Kincaid’s grieving wife was as sharp in his mind as when he’d sat on her stoop, waiting for her sobs to stop. He hated the idea that he’d learned nothing to tell her, not a single thing to ease her mind.
A hissing sound came from the building’s corner. When Sage looked in that direction, he saw the scrawny Chinese man with the wandering eye who’d handed him the rag in the cannery. The man was leaning around the outside corner of the China house, his hand beckoning. When Sage moved closer, he saw the man’s hand was cracked and scarred by work. After a moment, Sage realized the man wanted to see the Kincaids’ wedding photo, so he handed it over.
The man stepped forward and tilted the photo until the twilight illuminated its surface. “Your friend wife?” he asked softly, his accent much less noticeable than when they’d talked in the cannery.
“Yes, his wife. Now, they have a baby.”
The man’s face saddened. “I have wife and two sons in China,” he told Sage.
“Two sons? That is most lucky. How old are they?”
Sage’s question brought a smile to the man’s face. “They are seven and nine. Soon I have enough money to return to them.” The man’s face sobered once again as his thumb gently stroked the surface of the photo. “Best you come back. Talk to Hong Ah Kay. He will help you. He unhappy about finding man in water. He worry nameless man’s spirit is wandering because he kept body too long on boat. And because man buried without name. You come back few days.”
“Maybe he’ll be like Loke Tung and not want to help.”
The man shook his head. “No, Loke Tung always cranky. He not like anyone, not like to help anyone–not even China man. Hong Ah Kay different. He write poetry. A learned man. My wife’s brother. I promise, he will help.”
Sage thanked him and tried to give him some coins only to be rebuffed by the man raising his palms in refusal, bowing his head and disappearing back around the corner.
The next day, as light rimmed far off jagged mountains and brightened the forested hills along the river, the little sternwheeler paddled eastward atop the tidal surge. Sage had spent a sleepless night above a saloon, his pillow pancaking flatter with each passing minute even as the sprung bed coils poked into him. Not an experience to improve his mood. In the deserted area below the wheelhouse, on the flat roof of the passenger promenade, Sage lowered himself down onto metal beginning to warm in the morning sun. With the warmth came the faint aroma of fish that spot washing by the saloon keeper’s wife hadn’t eliminated from his clothes. Ahead of the blunt bow, tendrils of mist curled and skittered across the water. Its wispy essence seemed akin to the illusive “chi” substance that Fong’s snake and crane exercise allowed him to sometimes feel. When it flowed unimpeded, it had substance. Try to grasp it in any way and it vanished.
What the hell was wrong with Fong? A growing complicated knot of exasperation and anxiety was taking up residence in Sage’s gut. In Fong’s presence, the surly Loke Tung might have cooperated. As it was, Mrs. Kincaid still would not know whether she was wife or widow. Swirling thoughts, the warm breeze on his face, and the steady vibration of the boat, at last combined to tip him into a doze made restless by visions of musty subterranean passages, where the only light was an evasive pinprick bobbing in the distance.
Sage stomped from the wharf to Mozart’s with long, angry strides. He’d lost a day, learned nothing of value and was damn sure out of patience with Fong. His surly mood evidently showed because his mother’s eyebrows shot up as soon as he entered his third floor room and threw himself into the chair across from where she sat filling out a provision list. Supper in the restau
rant below wouldn’t start for a couple of hours.
“No luck?” she asked.
“They wouldn’t talk to me. Dammit! Apparently, cannery people talk to white men only through their Chinese foreman and he wasn’t eager to expend much effort to help.”
“Did you learn enough to eliminate the possibility it was Kincaid?”
“No, instead I learned just enough to strengthen my suspicion that it was his body that the Chinese fisherman pulled from the water. But I don’t know enough to tell Mrs. Kincaid that. Do you know how she’s doing?”
His mother laid her pencil on the table, took a swallow of coffee and carefully replaced the cup in the saucer before saying, “Sage, she just doesn’t seem to be doing well. She’s wearing the same dress. I’m certain she hasn’t taken it off since last we saw her a few days ago.”
“When did you find time to visit her again?”
“Yesterday, between the dinner and supper hours. It was a quick trip. I didn’t sleep the night before for all my worrying about her. Figured I might as well go see how she was doing.”
Sage told her the details of his visit to Astoria and at first she commiserated. Her sympathy was short-lived, overcome by Sage’s description of his pratfall onto the fish guts. Her laughter rang out and Sage joined her, saying, “Oh, you go ahead and laugh. It wasn’t you lying there in stinking slime in front of an audience trying not to show their delight!”
Then his faced sobered abruptly. “So, where is our Mr. Fong? Eluding his responsibilities once again?”
“Now, Sage . . .”
“Don’t ‘now Sage’ me. It’s time Mr. Fong and I straightened out whatever has him acting this way. I am out of patience. Either we settle this right now, or we’d better start planning how we’re going to continue St. Alban’s work without him.”
She surprised him by simply nodding and saying carefully, “I think his burden, whatever it is, may be breaking him. If you’re his friend, you will figure out how to help him carry it.” She stood up. “He’s up in the attic, I think.”
The attic space was empty. A hatchet, one Sage had never seen before, lay on the grass mat in the center of the room. Its steel blade shimmered in the light streaming downward from the skylight. The trap door to the roof stood open.
TWELVE
FONG SAT ON THE BENCH, his profile toward Sage. Any residual anger Sage felt drained away the instant he saw his friend. Fong’s face was long and thin with prominent cheekbones. He claimed his angular facial features were inherited from his northern Chinese ancestors. Now, those cheekbones jutted sharply beneath sunken eye sockets, making him look ill and years older. Sage could hardly believe this was the man who’d stood on this roof just a week ago, mischievous humor lighting his eyes, while he instructed his Occidental friend on the inner workings of the universe. Today, those eyes were flat pebbles lying deep inside black shadows. Sage wanted to leap to his friend’s side and touch him reassuringly.
Instead, he joined Fong on the bench and kept silent, just like when he’d sat next to Kincaid’s inconsolable wife. It somehow felt the same here on this rooftop in the middle of the city. For long minutes, both men sat while birds swooped overhead and Fong’s carrier pigeons burbled in their coop. The smells of river, wharf and horse dung hitched rides on the breezes that stirred the rosebush leaves and mingled with the flowers’ sweet scent.
Fong finally spoke, his voice wistful, his eyes fixed on the far distance.“It is China music I miss the most, the bamboo harp, the semisen, the moon fiddle.” He raised the smooth bamboo tube he’d been holding loosely in his hand. “And flute, played by monks who make much better music than me.”
Sage, lacking positive thoughts about Chinese music, remained silent. He found Fong’s efforts on the flute painful despite knowing that the local Chinese considered Fong a most accomplished musician.
Fong continued.“I am from good family in China. I trained with temple priests and brought much honor to my father. Very sudden father die and my only uncle and his sons came here to ‘Gold Mountain’ as we Chinese called America. Later my uncle ask me to join him. I think, why not? America door closed to Chinese men, so I travel to Mexico and sneak across border. It was hard journey. Many people died.
“I find my uncle in San Francisco where Chinatown is controlled by tongs. Like I told you before, tong is like white man’s club, a China man’s ‘Knights of Columbus.’ So, I join a tong and my fighting skills make me esteemed soldier, valuable boo how doy. Many times the boo how doy of different tongs meet in battle. I show that I am good fighter. My tong pays me well, people respect me on street, and sing-song girls fight to be seen with me in noodle houses.” His tone carried no pleasure at the memory. “My uncle is different. He ashamed of what his brother’s son has become in America. Other China men are also angry at the power of tongs. My uncle try to talk to me. I don’t listen. Instead, I make fun of him. I tell him I am successful. I say that he and my cousins are jealous of my success.” Fong leaned toward Sage to make a point. “My blood cousins, not my tong cousins.”
Fong looked down, staring into an internal abyss. He swallowed audibly as if forcing a lump back down his throat. “My uncle just shake head and pat arm.” Fong rubbed his forearm as if recreating the touch.
“One day, my uncle, cousins and other neighbor men from my district in Canton decide to go to river of the Snake in Oregon. They say government mineral department permit Chinese men to sift river sand for gold. White miner’s always let tiny gold flakes escape down sluices into river. It is so little gold they won’t do hard work to take from sand. My uncle ask me to come to Snake River with them, for protection and to find the gold. I tell him ‘No.’ I want to stay in city.”
Fong closed his eyes and said nothing. Sage saw a tear glint and fall. Fong continued, uncaring of Sage’s scrutiny, “My uncle begged me many times to go with him. He pleaded, saying I was falling from priest’s way. He warned me that way of the boo how doy, killing other tong’s men for money and prestige, was bringing death to my soul and grave misfortune to my life. When I not listen, he become angry. He tell me that my life dishonored and shamed my father’s memory. I told him to go away. To strike me off the list of family names. That I was American now.” Fong’s sigh issued from deep in his lungs, as if he were venting an excessive pressure.
“Thirty-two Chinese men travel with my uncle, in one party, for protection. Among them is no trained fighter. When they reached the Snake River, the party split in two. One group of twenty-five men made camp at base of cliff, by wide sandbar. Other six haul two rowboats farther up Snake. They go explore for other places along river where gold maybe trapped. They plan to float back down to first group. My uncle and all cousins, but one, stay with first group on sandbar. There was little gold, but we Chinese are patient. Work very hard.”
Here Sage nodded, thinking back to the old man of the day before, endlessly labeling the fish cans with exacting precision.
Fong continued. “Many hours spent crouched over gravel in pan yield some little gold. Not enough gold for white men. Still, it is enough for men like us.
“I hear nothing from my uncle. I continue to advance as boo how doy, even become tong’s boo how doy leader. One day, a messenger comes to take me to Chinese General Consul of San Francisco. I cannot think why esteemed man want to see me. I dress in best suit and go to him.”
Another deep sigh made Sage’s hand twitch with the desire to cover Fong’s hand with his own. He restrained himself. Sage somehow knew that this story was revealing a sorrow that lay at the core of his friend’s essential being. He feared doing anything to interrupt the telling. Besides, his friend’s obviously deep and abiding sorrow was beyond a touch’s power to comfort at this point. Better to let him get it out, uninterrupted.
Fong’s voice was near a whisper now. “General Consul tells me that word has come from Lewiston, Idaho. My uncle and every man with him, every single one, was murdered for gold.”
Sage felt no surpris
e at hearing these words. Somehow he’d known this was the inevitable outcome of Fong’s story.
“So, I travel to Lewiston to kill the men who’d done this terrible thing to my uncle and my cousins, all of whom followed the Way, never giving injury to another man, except to defend self or others.
“I stood on that cliff with sheriff and look down on sandbar. The sheriff told me six white men rode up from a small ranch where they’d been camping. They tie horses back from edge of cliff. They crawl forward and lay in bunch grass along its edge. Very quiet they load rifles. Next they shoot every Chinese man below on sandbar. No place for Chinese men to run away. Once everyone dead, they ride down to rob bodies. After that, they take axes and hack bodies into bits. They throw bits into river. Why, I don’t know. Maybe blood thirst take them or maybe they think to make victims disappear.
“Two rowboats came around river bend when killers chopping at bodies. White men shoot Chinese men in rowboats. That when last surviving cousin also die. I know this because I find uncle’s journal saying cousin go with second group to explore.
“No one knew this happen until parts of bodies wash on riverbank near Lewiston, Idaho. Sheriff rode upriver to investigate. When he visit small ranch house, rancher tell him everything that happen. Rancher not help murderers. He sorry they kill my uncle and others. He was good man.”
Sage stirred to ask, “The sheriff knew the names of the murderers?”
“Yes, he knew their names, and even before I arrive five of them in jail: younger one of five confess. So, all of them in jail except one. Man named Homer LaRue. They all say he was leader. Killing of China men LaRue’s idea.” Fong raised his black blouse and extracted a photograph from a long pouch around his waist. He held it so that Sage saw the image of a big man with a heavily bearded face, leering into the camera, his arm draped across the bare shoulders of what was certainly a prostitute.