River With No Bridge

by Karen Wills

  She learned to speak in a commanding voice to restore order when altercations broke out. Lillie addressed her in the tones of a businesswoman who didn’t intend to get close to the help. In many ways, she reminded Nora of the observant manager of the Parker House Hotel in Boston, at least until she opened her mouth. Nora worked not to flinch at Lillie’s language.

  One night she observed a different Lillie McGraw. From the hallway, Nora heard Josephine scream, a man yell, and then sounds of splintering wood and breaking glass. Jim rushed past her followed by Lillie. They opened the door and Nora, close behind, saw that Josephine lay against the wall, blood running from her nose and mouth. The red-faced man’s fists were still raised. The brothel owner didn’t wait for Jim, but grabbed the customer by his collar, swinging him against the wall. When he squared off at Lillie, she whipped a knife out so fast Nora hardly saw the movement, only the slash of red from the man’s ear to his nose.

  “Son of a bitch,” Lillie shouted. “You can fuck my girls if you pay the price, but you play no fucking games with me. Take him out,” she ordered Jim, who handed the bleeding drunk a towel and his pants and marched him away.

  “Take care of our girl,” Lillie ordered Nora, swishing the knife in the washbowl and drying it on the sheets before slipping it back into her pocket. “Put her to bed, and sit with her awhile.”

  As Nora washed Josephine’s face and straightened the bedclothes, she remembered how swift Lillie had been. If a man ever attacked her, she’d want her gruff employer on the premises. Lillie looked after her own. Not a bad trait, for certain.

  By May Nora began obsessing over the approaching birth. She had decisions to make. Everything had changed since Butte.

  One rainy night, alone with Jim Li in the kitchen, she ventured, “I have to admit the job you tricked me into has worked out well.” She lay down the pencil she used to make a list of kitchen supplies and food at the table, and straightened. Her back bothered her, especially that evening. “These girls have been good to keep house for. Easier than guests at the hotels. I didn’t realize they’re just poor ignorant souls in a man’s world. With no education and no family it could happen to any creature. I’d never have thought it, but I like them better than the society women I used to clean up after. These don’t pretend to be anything but what they are.”

  Jim continued unloading the wood he’d brought in for the stove, then turned and studied her. “Your baby will be born soon, Mrs. Larkin. What will you do then?”

  Nora rubbed her eyes. “I’m thinking this isn’t the place to raise a child, even if Lillie would agree to it.”

  “In my country it is not so unusual to place a child in a good home if circumstances show it to be best.”

  Nora looked hard into Jim’s eyes, then lowered hers. “God forgive me, I don’t love this child, and I didn’t love this child’s father. I don’t feel toward this one as I did Helen. I’ve no prospects. What if it’s a boy? What will he do with no father to teach him?” She stood up heavily and moved to the window.

  “What would be best for you and the child?” Jim studied her.

  Nora took in a long breath. “My baby must go to a decent family, not be given up to strangers. I have to know this one will be loved. My friends Bridget and Michael Doyle in Butte haven’t been blessed yet. I know Bridget would make a loving home for any baby. Michael should be working again by now. I’d write a note turning the house over to them to make sure they’ll always have property through their ups and downs as the child grows up.”

  She paced the length of the kitchen. “If I decide to give the little newcomer up, would you take it to them? I’ll write a letter promising never to interfere. They’ll have the house free and clear for raising my baby. Rose and Patrick Murphy will be the only people who might guess where the child came from, and they won’t tell. If Bridget won’t agree, bring the baby back, but I know she will. She wants a little one that much.” Nora took in a shaky breath and directed her gaze at Jim Li. “Would you do this for me?”

  He answered without hesitation. “Yes, Mrs. Larkin.”

  Nora nodded. She thought, how fast we who are desperate make decisions! My heart has broken, but I can save this child. “Mr. Li, they don’t treat you as they should here. No one does anywhere. You’ve come to my rescue twice. If you want to use my Christian name, it’s Nora.”

  Jim Li bowed. “Jim is my American name.” His smile turned wry. “You might say my Christian name, although I am what you would call a heathen.”

  Nora ran a linen napkin through her fingers. “I had a brother back in Ireland, rest his soul. I can’t help but think if he were here, Seamus would act toward me as you have.”

  “I am honored. Ah, but I do have a motive, Nora. You have seen and remarked on how it is for the Chinese, how we—I—am treated. People are different with you. Doors open for you whatever your circumstance. You still need my help, and I need to walk through the doors behind you before they slam shut.”

  Nora dropped the napkin in astonishment. “You want what exactly?”

  He smiled. “I want us to be partners, an alliance. I am not certain yet in what precise way, but we can help each other in work, in business.”

  He’d ambushed her again. She’d only just settled the fate of Bat Moriarty’s baby. She could hardly think of making another decision so soon. She still hovered around that decision. How far have I fallen to give away my child? Will I be able to? Of course, I will. I have to.

  She brushed a shaky hand across her eyes. “Let me consider this. I’ll need to know more and think longer. All I’ve wanted, all my life, is just a home and family of my own and to escape this poverty, this being looked down on like trash. Right now, I have to check on the customers.”

  Nora moved down the hall to the saloon. At the doorway, she started. A man she knew at once sat at the poker table. She recognized the shape of his head, the line of his cheekbone turned three-quarters away from her. A diamond ring glinted as if lit from within on one of his long, tapering fingers as he shuffled the deck and laughed at another player’s remark, the sound like water over hard, smooth stones.

  Nora backed into the hallway against a wall that seemed to bend. The memory of their night of passion and its aftermath struck. She remembered the desire those hands brought to life, then the betrayal. Anger slashed like a knife. Fifteen minutes later Josephine found her gasping, folded over. She supported Nora up the stairs to her room. “Send Jim Li for the doctor,” Nora begged. “Please. It has to be Jim Li.”

  Lillie took over Nora’s duties, protesting in loud, profane resentment that Nora could hear echoing down the hall even as she labored. Hours later, Lillie visited Nora’s room where the doctor worked as his patient groaned and endured. Lillie returned to her business matters.

  Giving birth to Helen had been uncomplicated. But this child, born of foolishness and disgrace, fought her, fought to avoid the world, fought his fatherless entry into it. Nora struggled. There was too much blood, too much. At last, torn and shattered, she felt her body split, rip, and empty. The curt doctor, whiskey on his breath, tended to the afterbirth.

  Washed and in clean sheets thanks to Josephine, Nora finally reached for her son. Josephine placed a sweetly puzzled, puckered, frowning baby boy with pale, downy hair into her arms. Invaded by an unexpected rush of love, Nora stroked him and rubbed her cheek over his soft scalp. “Well, for certain you’d make anyone proud,” she whispered.

  The jaded doctor, weary and gruff, but fortified by Lillie’s gratuitous gift of three shots of whiskey, spoke to her before leaving. “This birth was difficult. Your boy’s a fighter or he wouldn’t have made it. You won’t ever be the same, young woman. I hope you’ll be relieved at what I have to tell you. There can be no more babies. Too much damage to your nether regions. You can live a normal life, but no more babies.”

  Nora stared at him, both stunned and relieved. No more children. None of the joy of giving life, but none of the unbearable anguish of loss eithe
r. She realized she’d not once thought about her own future. She’d not thought of men, except to be finished with them. She hadn’t thought beyond this child going to Bridget. She’d been intent on getting through his birth and settling him elsewhere.

  “Now there’s the matter of my bill,” the doctor announced after cleaning and putting away his medical instruments.

  Nora sighed. She gestured to her old satchel in the darkened corner. “See if what’s there will cover it.”

  After rummaging through its meager contents, he sneered. “No.”

  Lillie stopped in the doorway. She studied the baby for a few moments in a detached, almost meditative way, then appraised the doctor holding the few bills from Nora’s satchel. “Come on with me, you heartless bastard of a sawbones. This girl doesn’t have enough to cover your damned remittance, but that looks like most of it. You can take the rest out in trade if you can still get it up. Hell, I’ll even give you more of Lillie McGraw’s fine Scotch. From my private selection.”

  Stuffing the few bills into his coat pocket, the medical hack turned without so much as a nod to Nora, and dogtrotted down the hallway after Lillie.

  At 3:00 a.m. Lillie McGraw saw the mollified doctor, full of and in good spirits, out the door. She headed to the saloon muttering, “What a hell of a night.”

  She reached it in time to see the fight that would change the lives of all under her roof.

  A frequent player named Walter Malone stood pointing at Bat. “You son of a bitch, Moriarty. I saw you. Fork over my money, you cheating bastard.”

  Bat drew for his boot knife as Malone reached inside his coat. Before Bat touched his throwing knife, Malone’s pistol fired. The bullet hit Bat in the chest. As he fell, the drunken Malone stumbled against the wall, knocking down an ensconced lamp, which rolled to the curtains. Flames climbed and devoured the fabric with rapacious speed. At the same moment, Bat’s cigar landed on a discarded newspaper. Two fires ignited to become one. Lillie raced for water as Malone rushed out the door into obscurity. With a glance at the leaping flames, she changed course, heading for her wall safe.

  Jim Li peered into acrid, smoke-filled chaos as men and women screamed obscenities, shoving and pushing to escape. Bat Moriarty lay still, eyes closed, blood pooling around him. One hand extended as though reaching away from the approach of searing heat. Jim went to the motionless man, gave a second’s glance to his blood-soaked shirtfront, then bent over that hand, touching the diamond ring. Its facets sparkled back the flames, but there were other, richer colors there, flares of purple, blue, and green like the colors of the Chungnan Range of Jim’s home. He felt a jolt of yearning for the beauty of his lost past.

  Unnoticed, Jim pulled the ring from the gambler’s finger with a deft twist, the movement with which he pocketed the bright circle smooth and discrete. He didn’t look at the prostrate figure’s face, didn’t see the slight flexing of its wrist. He fled the room, smoke burning his eyes. Wiping at tears, he raced toward Nora’s room and met her on the stairs, supported by two scared girls.

  “The baby?” he asked.

  “Josephine has him,” Nora gasped.

  The group stumbled outside and laid Nora on a sooty blanket in front of the building, now a conflagration that mocked the puny figures of firefighters and their horsedrawn wagons.

  Nora blinked at the inferno. “Sure and I’ve been brought all the way to hell this time,” she murmured.

  The girls stood wrapped in blankets beside men in various states of undress, some excited, some sullen, but all exhibiting similar disbelieving expressions.

  Josephine brought Nora’s son to her. Nora held him, unaware of tears tracking down soot on her cheeks. She beckoned Jim. “Do what you promised. I’ve no strength to write. Just tell Bridget I’ve sworn not to interfere.”

  Jim spoke with gentle insistence. “I need a letter.”

  Nora didn’t hear him. She’d retreated within where smoke veiled the terror and emptiness of the world.

  Jim Li took the baby, hunching his shoulders against the searing waves that made the burning house ripple to onlookers’ eyes. He knelt on one knee and shouted over the conflagration, “I need a letter to show I did not steal your son.” He pulled a notebook out of his pocket and handed it to Nora with a pencil. “Please. I might be killed without it.”

  In her fatigue and pain Nora barely registered that pages of the notebook contained lines of picture-like writing. Without speaking, she found a blank page and wrote in a shaky hand:

  Bridget,

  Jim Li is bringing my son. I’m sending him to you and Michael to raise as your own. I’ll never interfere. I give you the house for him to live in. I beg you to love him and care for him as I would have if things had been different. Do not seek me out.

  My love to you,

  Nora Larkin

  At Jim’s suggestion, on a separate sheet she wrote that she gave her house in Dublin Gulch to Michael and Bridget Doyle and considered them paid in full. She dated and signed it.

  Silhouetted against the flames, Jim retrieved the notebook as it slipped from her hand. “I promise to come back in five days. Stay in Helena. Leave word with Lillie where you’ll be.”

  Jim Li disappeared, swooping gracefully away even with the baby wrapped in a full-size blanket from Nora’s bed.

  “Where I’ll be,” Nora murmured, closing her eyes against the apocalyptic scene.

  After the roof collapsed in an explosion of smoke and sparks, Lillie approached and sat down, legs crossed at the ankles under her sooty skirts. The excitement all but over, she leaned back on her elbows, impassive, watching her house smolder. “I’ll rebuild the damned whorehouse,” she said matter-of-factly. “In the meantime, I have to make money.” To Nora’s unresponsive silence she added, “Don’t sulk. I’ll put you up in one of my other houses, but you understand things can’t go on like that forever.” Then her voice dropped. “I saw you send the kid with the Celestial. I did that once. Gave one up. It’s the right thing.”

  One of the men began complaining that he wanted his money back or a poke, one or the other. “Oh hell, will you listen to that horny animal over there.” Lillie tilted her head, surrounded by wild tufts of undone hair. “Shut up, you mindless piece of meat,” she yelled. “You can see us at my other establishment, the Purple Palace, in two hours. I won’t forget a face as ugly as yours. You can have what you paid for there. All of you can.” She clambered to her feet and left Nora lying on the ground, watching fire reduce the big old house to charred ruins.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Jim stopped in an alleyway to rebundle the baby. A cat yowled and the infant jerked his hands and legs in tiny spasms. He needed food for Nora’s son, perhaps goat’s milk or sheep’s milk. He made his way south to an area still riddled with patches of dirty snow where Chinese work gangs and prostitutes lived. Even with Nora’s note, he could find real safety only in Chinatown. No one questioned him, and the baby slept. When he reached Wood and Main Streets, he knew the residences would be those of Chinese from Canton. Jim didn’t speak their dialect with perfection, but well enough.

  He took long strides, hurrying to the home of Joe Sun where four men lived with a prostitute named Mai Wing. Jim knocked on its red door. Mai opened it, eyes widening in her broad Mongolian features when she saw the baby. She took him from Jim with the confidence, he guessed, of a large family’s oldest daughter. Usually a Chinese woman living as Mai did would be submissive, but galvanized by the baby’s arrival she ordered one of the men to get bottles, nipples, goat’s milk, and nappies from a neighborhood merchant even if he had to wake him.

  While Mai prepared the flat glass bottles and goat’s milk, giving the baby his first food, Jim bargained with Sun for a horse and tack. Negotiations concluded, Jim tied a calico sling around his neck, the baby cocooned in it against his chest, and started out of Helena. Walking the horse, he tucked his queue into the black slouch hat pulled low over his eyes. No one stopped him or looked at him. He rode south
, blending into the vast, lonely night.

  After a few hours, the baby stirred. “Little one, she did not give you a name, did she?” Jim asked in Chinese. “It is not my place to do so, except on this journey.”

  A shooting star soared across their path. “Ah. Did you see? I should call you Taipai, the evening star. In my country there are important stories about the evening star.” The baby quieted at the sound of Jim’s voice. “You like the name Taipai? I like it, too. None of these white ghosts have knowledge of my country. Now that you have a name from it, I should tell you about my life there.”

  The baby sighed. One open eye peeked at Jim from the sling.

  “I will tell you my story since your mother’s and my wanderings have brought us here together. It is a story about change. Life changes all the time, you know. We remake ourselves to its demands.” Accompanied by the soft thud of his horse’s hooves and its occasional blowing and snorting, Jim Li, for the first time, told his whole history to another human being in America.

  Traveling between Butte and Helena through the starry night, Jim murmured to the baby slumbering on his chest. He recounted what his aunt White Plum had related to him.

  Jim Li was born the son of a Scottish Presbyterian minister. He’d pondered his father’s character enough to guess at how his own unlikely conception came about. Jim imagined that Douglas James McIntosh chose to become a missionary out of Christian duty mixed with a compelling hunger for adventure. McIntosh found Sian, in the Chungnan Mountains, a place of leopards, bears, wild pigs, monkeys, and intrigue. He discovered a place steeped in the ancient ways of Taoist and Buddhist nuns and monks.

  Douglas McIntosh would certainly have heard with bemused interest of two brothers who, protesting the behavior of the founder of a ruling dynasty, attempted to subsist on a diet of doe’s milk and ferns. They starved. Unimpressed, Douglas McIntosh continued his lifelong diet of hearty porridge for breakfast. However, his needs transcended porridge.