Not that there wasn’t still whaling going on—on the northwest coast of the island at Coal Harbour, the air force station during the war—but the east coast had been fished out years before, and the great herds that had always schooled off the west coast were vastly reduced in numbers. I’d heard that Western Canada Whaling was in trouble and might not last out the season. It made no difference to me. I had no desire to see the actual killing, nor to voyage the west coast—the graveyard of the Pacific—in my untried Rose even at this time of year.
When I returned from what had turned out to be a fairly typical twenty-four hours—the two-hundred-fifty-horsepower gas engine on the launch had broken down on the way to Race Rocks, the captain of the Galafkos hadn’t seen the need to provide me with a lee to board his ship and had proven reluctant to take his vessel in to William Head to clear quarantine (he was afraid that one of the crew had polio), and there had been too many fishing boats in Active Pass—Fan was sitting in her chair in the kitchen. I could tell that she hadn’t slept. She was wearing the same nightgown as when I’d left, and there were greyish circles on top of the deep yellow ones that had lately appeared beneath her eyes.
“I can see you have had a bad time, Robert Lam,” she said.
I threw my bag onto the kitchen table. Where I had left a clean cleared surface was now a mound of string, seed packets, and so on. Fan had retrieved all the articles I’d discarded, smoothed and folded them, and mixed them together in a jumble as close as she could approximate to the original. I took off my jacket, loosened my tie, and unbuttoned my vest.
“I had to wait outside in the rain while the other two pilots reported in,” I said. It was an old complaint. The Pilot House was a little shack that had originally been a construction office during the building of the breakwater. It sat just off Dallas Road facing the water. It was cold in winter and hot in summer, and had room for no more than three people at a time, including the dispatcher. I was shivering. I had picked up a cold on the Greek ship, and the long wait outside hadn’t helped.
“When I was a young woman,” said Fan, “there was one famous pilot in the city. His name was Henry Glide. He used to climb to the lookout in back of his house to watch for ships.”
“Do you mean you knew him, Fan?” I asked. Glide had had the first licence on the coast. His picture hung in the Vancouver office of the superintendent. “I didn’t know you knew him,” I said, “why didn’t you tell me?”
“Everybody knew Henry,” she said dismissively. “He lived on Erie Street.” Fan sat back in her chair and folded her hands together. She never talked about the past. She said it made her sad. She opened her hands, folded and opened them again, then said, “There were many many people here in those days. I wish I had told you about them.”
I was stunned. For years I had tried to get Fan to talk to me about the old days. About her and Sing Yuen and Sing Yuen’s restaurant, the Place of Ten Thousand Occasions, about her uncle, Lum Kee, and his herbalist shop—I remembered visiting there, long after Lum Kee had died, of course, when I was a child. About my mother, and about my father.
“It’s not too late, Fan,” I said, squatting down so that I could look into her face. She kept her eyes lowered, peering into the opening and closing bowl of her hands. “I’d like you to tell me about it, anything at all.”
“There is not enough time, Robert Lam,” she said. “I could not make you understand.”
“About what, Fan? I don’t even know what you mean.”
She was silent after that and seemed to forget that I was there. Finally I stood up, put my things away, and busied myself preparing Fan’s supper. I had eaten earlier, on the ferry boat back from Vancouver. It was a trip I always enjoyed, with time for a good meal, a visit to the barber, and a nap in the stateroom kept for pilots. I liked the lack of responsibility, although I couldn’t help but tick off the hazards as we steamed slowly into harbour: Brotchie Ledge, where the pilots were dropped off after taking ships out of Victoria, the breakwater at Ogden Point, Berens Island light, Shoal Point, Laurel Point, Songhees. We tied up at the inner wharves, between Shoal Point and the Johnson Street Bridge, looking straight at the new cathedral and, below it, on the waterfront, the dome, with the gilded figure of Captain Vancouver, on the provincial Parliament building.
I scrambled some eggs and mixed them with a handful of dried field mushrooms that Fan had picked the previous autumn. I poured a glass of milk for myself and a dry sherry for Fan. And all the time I was thinking: how can I get her to tell me what I want to know? I knew that Fan had emigrated with my mother, India Thackery, from Hong Kong colony in 1890. I knew that they were half-sisters—Fan had been adopted by India’s English parents when she was a small child. The two women had been involved in business in Victoria after they had arrived, and eventually my mother had given birth to me and Lam Fan had married Sing Yuen. I knew nothing at all about my father.
I was still thinking when I felt Fan’s cool touch on my hand. She was leaning forward in her chair. Her sherry glass was empty and the eggs untouched. “Help me take this off, Robert Lam,” she said. I saw that she meant the chain that she wore beneath her garments. I undid the clasp and lifted out the chain and a key. It was shiny and thin, as if it had been worn next to her skin for many years.
“There is a metal box in my room,” said Fan. “You may open it whenever you like. My will is inside, and some other papers. As for the rest, I promise you that I will find some way to help you. I am tired now. I do not want to talk. Please help me into bed.”
I put the key and chain in my pocket and carried Fan upstairs. I might have been carrying my job bag up the pilot’s ladder, for Fan was no heavier. I tucked her in, looked around surreptitiously for her pipe, saw it peeping out from a rolled-up stocking beneath her pillow, and sat down to keep her company.
“You may go now, if you like, Robert Lam,” she said. “You have many things to do. You do not have to stay with your stepmother. I am old now. I am not interesting. You go and visit your friends.” Although she spoke sweetly, she could not stop her eyes from shifting in the direction of her opium. I was not being cruel, I was afraid of fire in that wooden house, and had no intention of leaving her alone to strike matches. There were scorch marks on her blankets, and a melted look to the nylon curtain that hung from the window above her bed. The normally fastidious Fan would not have put the house in danger with her habit. But these were not normal times, and her physical powers had failed to the point that I could not trust her. As for where she got the opium—she seemed to have an endless supply packed in one-and-a-half-pound tins marked “Tai June” and stamped with a rooster emblem. I only saw them when they were empty and had never tracked them to their source. It was one of Fan’s many secrets. I did not mind her having them. I wanted her to keep them. I did not really mind her opium smoking—it had never harmed anyone—or that she dyed her hair and used cosmetics and pretended not to. I liked Fan as she was. She was the only family I’d known, and on the whole, she had always been kind. I could not forget about our earlier argument, however: it had left a sour taste in my mouth; it had bothered me more than I can say that she’d called me “Dirty Robert.”
—
We spent the evening talking, and I asked her questions, some of which she would not answer. Such as why Sing Yuen, at age sixty, had volunteered to dig trenches for the army, disappearing into the ranks of unremarked Chinese who had died in France at that thankless task. But there were one or two questions to which she did respond.
“Why did you let me leave home when Sing Yuen died?” I asked her. “I was only a boy. Why didn’t you try to stop me?”
“Many boys leave home at that age,” she said. “You did not want to stay with me. You were afraid you would have to live here forever because I was on my own. Besides,” she said, looking slyly over the bed covers, “I knew where you were all the time. I have friends who watched out for you.”
“I had an accident on the very first job I took. I w
as in hospital for three months,” I said with an anger that took me by surprise. I had not known that I had kept that old bitterness. “You never came to see me even once.”
“How could I have helped?” she asked, surprised. “Would you have come home? Would you have let me take care of you? Would you have gone back to school?”
I looked away from her—at the closet that housed the silks I had always loved to touch, at the neat row of photographs of herself and Sing Yuen that were ranked across the dressing table. For now I had no answers. She was right: it was I who had turned my back on her, not the other way round.
“You know what happened, don’t you?” I asked her. “We’d been towing hoggers—sawdust barges—across to Port Angeles in December, and I slipped on ice and fell into the hold. They thought I had broken my back. I had no working papers, and they were going to put me in the immigration prison until the Old Man intervened. He said it was my own damn fault, though, he’d told me to stay out of the way. The cook said it was because I’d opened a can of milk upside down when I made the tea. Everyone knew that was bad luck. But instead of throwing it overboard as I should have, I’d torn the label off so that no one else would see.
“After the hospital I stayed at the Sailor’s Club until I was back on my feet.”
“With Mother Beans, Robert Lam. Yes, I know.”
That stopped me cold. How did Fan know that? Had I mentioned Mother Beans before, or had Fan actually had me under surveillance as she claimed? But I was not to be held up for long in my saga of self-pity.
“I was fifteen, Fan, fifteen years old! In the bed next to me there was a boy with rheumatic fever. I had to listen to him die.”
“Poor Robert Lam,” said Fan.
“I had no one to look out for me. I might have been shanghaied and sold—it used to happen, Fan. The crimps ran the boardinghouses and controlled the supply of labour. They used to drug the loggers and seamen on the waterfront and sell them to the ships for up to ninety dollars. Then the captains deducted the fees from the seamen’s wages. You could work for months and not make it up, come home broke and out of pocket.”
“Did that happen to you, Robert Lam?” she asked.
“Well, no, not exactly.”
Fan smiled a gentle smile. “You were a nice young boy,” she said, “that is why Mother Beans took such good care of you. You used to help her in the garden, I think.”
I blushed. I had recovered from my childish anger and was remembering the facts. The club had been comfortable and friendly. There was a piano, a billiard room, a library, and I’d had a room to myself. Mother Beans had let me help her in the kitchen. We’d put up hundreds of quarts of preserves that autumn: pickles, jams, marmalade, green peas and string beans, asparagus and tomatoes, endless jars of salmon, venison and pheasant, and all kinds of jellies. I had been her small helper, safe and cozy, while all the real sailors were at war. The night the boys from the Lancaster had come in (they’d been torpedoed in the North Sea and had travelled across Canada by rail) it was pouring with rain. I had gone with her to meet them off the trams—six carloads of them—with hot coffee. “Mother, don’t you remember me?” one youth had called. “Of course I do,” she’d said. “I thought you were drowned.” “They can’t kill me, Mother,” the sailor had answered, “I’ve been torpedoed three times since I saw you last.” I’d never forgotten that. Nor the sailors’ talk of the red dinghy that meant a sinking. They were a superstitious lot, and I’d thought less of them for that at the time. You made your own life, you took your chances. I still wanted to go to sea, though, and I got the captain of a fisheries boat to take me on as mess boy.
Fan closed her eyes and drifted off to sleep. I sat with her a while longer, holding her hand and listening to her fragile breathing.
—
After the funeral, which was a modest affair at graveside, I drove back to the house with Lam Fan’s lawyer. There’d been no problem about the service. I’d found an accommodating minister just down the road who hadn’t cared that Fan was not a church-goer, nor that I hadn’t had the faintest idea of what her wishes had been in this regard. I knew only that she’d wanted to be buried next to Sing Yuen, and since whatever remained of him was still somewhere in France, it had been a simple matter of moving the stone marker with his name on it from the old Chinese cemetery on the waterfront to the Royal Lawns nearer our house. The Chinese cemetery was an unkempt place, often flooded during storms, and, with its large altar with capacious furnace, to my eye far from restful. The flooding happened in other cemeteries as well. The island was known for its high water table, and there were tales told of coffins held down with shovels while earth was piled on. I did my duty by Fan, however, and her plot was high and dry.
The lawyer was an old man, not as old as Fan had been, but old enough to get away with saying, “What! No chickens, wine, and cakes, Lam? My father always said that if a Chinese ghost wasn’t fed, it’d come back to haunt you.” He guffawed in that unpleasant way that lawyers have. The father, whom I remembered slightly, had been a friend of Fan’s in the old days.
“There are one or two things in the vault I must look up for you,” the lawyer said as we trudged up the stairs to Fan’s room. “When your stepmother first came in to make her will some years ago, she left some papers with us. They were to go to you after her death. Once we get this will business straightened out, I’ll bring them to you.”
“I’m leaving in a week and I’ll be gone for a month,” I told him as I knelt down and pulled Fan’s tin box from under the bed. I took the key out of my pocket, where I had kept it since Fan had given it to me, and unlocked and lifted the lid. The scents of joss and opium came first, and with them other scents in memory that made the tears well in my eyes: rice cooking on a hot day in the greenhouses, the cooks handing me hot fried cakes; the strong strawy odour of the labourers’ clothes as they came in from the fields to wash at lunchtime. I blinked the blur away, blew dust from the top papers, and quickly found what I wanted.
“I don’t want to read it now,” I told the lawyer, whose eyes were evaluating the contents of Fan’s open cupboard. The silks were antiques and would fetch some money at auction. I handed him the will.
“You can let me know what I need to know when you bring the other papers.”
“Aren’t you going to look at the rest?” he asked, curious.
“I’ll be away on my boat,” I said, resenting his interest. “I’ll have time enough then for reading.” I locked the box and led the lawyer downstairs where I put the box with my kit bag before making him tea.
—
If I hadn’t had to be on duty right to the end, if the Rose hadn’t needed work on her engine the day before I was to leave so that I had no spare time, and if the lawyer had brought me the other papers earlier, I might never have gone to sea. As it was, he turned up at the last moment at the Upper Harbour Wharves where I’d moored the Rose, with a briefcase stuffed with paper. He heaved it aboard, shouted “Bon Voyage,” and waved as I steered the Rose away. It was a calm, clear morning, and I wanted to take advantage of it. As anyone who sails the coast knows, the wind rises by noon.
“Goodbye, goodbye,” shouted the lawyer, his shoes taking on water on the half-submerged dock. On his face was the smile that landlubbers reserve for sailors.
I lifted my hand in farewell, chugged the Rose beneath the Johnson Street Bridge, and aimed for the harbour entrance.
I was headed north, through the Inside Passage between Vancouver Island and the mainland. It was just possible, if nothing went wrong, to make it past the tip of the island, up through Queen Charlotte Sound to Rose Harbour, on the most southerly of the Queen Charlotte Islands, and back again in one month.
Trial Island, Seabird Point, and on into Haro Strait. I was already thinking ahead to the riptides at Turn Point, at the end of the strait, which I had to round in order to enter Boundary Pass, when I glanced up from the chart. My head had been down for ten or fifteen seconds, no more, and y
et the vista ahead of me had changed utterly. The wind, which had been moderate since we’d passed Trial Island, had dropped. The Rose was gliding forward over a flat silvery sea, although moments before she had creaked and rocked her way across the steady chop. I looked behind me. A bank of fog had rolled up from the south obscuring all the nearby land. Vancouver Island had vanished. Her forested hills, the little communities on the shore that I’d watched sending out fishing boats and sailing vessels as I’d idly steered the Rose, might have existed only in my imagination. The fog was real enough, though, and I sounded the whistle at once and looked out for the Kelp Reefs light.
It flashed through the thick air, much closer than I’d expected, and I sounded the whistle again. I looked at the second hand of my watch, listening, but no echo returned, and when I checked the instruments, the depth sounder and direction finder, they were beaded inside with condensation, and useless. I slowed the engine. The Rose continued her slide across the mirror-like water, and I began to think about the freighter I’d seen coming up behind me, and the steamers that plied this channel, the border between the United States and Canada, with scheduled frequency. Where were they, and why didn’t I hear their whistles in answer to mine? I slowed the engine another notch, and the engine began to miss. We were just off D’Arcy Island, where there was a line of rocks scattered outside the eastern shoreline, making my position dangerous, yet I hesitated to move out further into the channel with no information about the other traffic and not enough experience with the Rose to trust her spluttering engine.
To All Appearances a Lady Page 2