It was an act of chivalry, a test each man passed to his personal satisfaction.
Not another syllable was spoken, not another thought given to the head tax.
Fate had intervened at the critical moment. What an instance to inspire confidence! What a springboard to achievement!
—
Anchored in Blenkinsop Bay, thinking of time rushing by, of less and less chance to make it north to Rose Harbour, lying in my bunk, sneezing, too weak and stuffed up to make tea or squeeze a lemon. And Lam Fan, unaffected by virus, sitting at my table, looking over all my papers, says, “What did you want to be when you grew up, Robert Lam?”
“Be?” I say, incredulous. “What I am, a man. Nothing else.”
“Ah,” she says, impenetrably, “a man.”
“Yes.”
“Indeed.”
“So what’s wrong with that?”
We listen to the sea below us. The hiss and murmur of the tides around the Rose. The bump of creatures small as dimes against her sides. Or maybe it’s nothing more than inflamed ears and running sinuses.
“What’s wrong with that?” I ask again, beginning to think I need an answer.
Fan fiddles with the wick on the oil lamp, turning it up and down.
“Don’t, Fan. You’ll ruin it.”
“When I was a girl,” she says, ignoring my protest, “I wanted to do something, anything that no one had ever done before. I didn’t know what it was, I just wanted to be the first at something new.”
“And so instead you started smoking opium.”
She does not get angry, as I expect. She cocks her head as if listening again to what I’ve just said. “I suppose so,” she says. “I did it at first because the major didn’t like it.
“Then, too,” she continues, “I missed my family. When I lit my pipe I could think of them happily, without sadness, forgetting that they had left me behind. I even dreamed I would find them. Or that one day my mother and father would come to the door. Every time there was a visitor to the Queen’s Road house, I was sure it was them or a message from them.
“I’m sorry, Fan,” I say between sneezes. “I hadn’t thought about it. I didn’t know you felt so…”
“Abandoned,” she finishes for me.
Something knocks against the side of the Rose. A drifting log?
“I went to sea at first to get away, to make some money. I wanted adventure, too,” I say.
“You wanted your mother,” Fan tells me with a smile. “When you were a little boy you used to tell me when you’d go outside that you were watching for her. I don’t know where the idea came from. We wanted to be your family, Sing Yuen and I. I guess we failed.”
“Like the major did, Fan. Like my mother failed as your sister.”
“Yes,” she says, pulling out from the pile of papers a picture of India, “you are right in a way, but failure isn’t so important. Some of us start with a loss and never make it up.”
—
We cannot forecast consequences. We do not know how any act will turn out. They could not know, in the good old days along the coast, when they used to anchor at dark, particularly in winter, wherever the darkness overtook the ship, that one day all would change. We have seven grades of lights now, gas and electric, totalling three hundred; there are thirty-six diaphones, many lighted spar buoys, floats, and dolphins, together with buoys rigged with bell and whistle devices, some of which are operated with wave action. In addition, there are approximately four hundred fifty unlighted buoys, dolphins, spindles, and beacons. There are two lightships, too, one located on the Sandheads at the entrance to the Fraser River, and the other at Swiftsure Bank; plus radio beacons, which send out a signal once an hour in clear weather and continuously in foggy weather, some synchronized with the foghorn signals. And every channel leading to an important harbour is well defined. Aids to navigation. Yet still we make mistakes, still there are shipwrecks.
When I was small, sometimes I’d go with Fan into town, and we’d visit the temple in Chinatown to have our fortunes told. There was an altar—a gift from Canton—and a bell, banners, and fans donated by various families. On the offering table were three sets of semilunar fortune-telling blocks, two bamboo cylinders of fortune-telling sticks, one of them for medical advice. Fan would light incense, and I would take a stick from a cylinder and give it to the caretaker. He consulted the number on it and matched it to a piece of paper in a pigeonhole. There would be my answer. Though I can’t say I always understood it.
Generations of experience behind that ceremony. Yet were we enlightened by it? I don’t know. We always left cheered up, more confident.
Then, long ago, before I was born, when my stepmother was a young woman newly arrived in town, it was Robert Haack who, leaning against the wall in that same building, built by a gold miner out of gratitude for his good fortune, watched as my mother and Lam Fan selected their sticks.
Whatever the answers, they are dust and ashes now. Dust and ashes and ghosts. Which mean less than nothing. Except here and now to me, anchored on the Rose.
FOUR
Johnstone Strait—The tidal streams turn everywhere from 1 ½ to 2 hours after high and low water by the shore. In the wider parts, the rates are from one to 4 knots; but in the narrower parts, they may attain a rate of 6 knots at times, and in places tide rips are formed.
BRITISH COLUMBIA PILOT, VOLUME I
Anchored in Blenkinsop Bay, westward of Blink Rock and Elf Shoal, with the light from the escape hatch, which I have raised for ventilation, dancing its watery way up and down the wall of my cabin. My fever has gone, and for the first time in three days I am strong enough to stand. But I am sitting, wrapped in a blanket, feet up on the lounge, leaning my back against a storage cupboard. My hands, gripping a cup of hot soup, are pale and nearly transparent. Soft hands, clean hands, but with the dirty, blunted nails of a working man. It is reassuring to see that the Rose has left her mark, that I am still myself.
Thank God we didn’t drag anchor. Thank God the wind stayed calm. “I have been wondering,” says Lam Fan, my shadow, a little thinner after the illness, like myself, “why you never married. You never brought home a girlfriend. Wouldn’t you like to have had children?”
I close my eyes. Through the lids, the dancing light still moves. I wish she would go away. At least until I’m better.
“Everyone likes children, Fan, even you. You never had them, either.”
Silence, while we both examine our pain.
“But no woman, Robert Lam? Nobody to give you comfort? I had Sing Yuen. I don’t know what I would have done without him.”
“You didn’t have him for long.”
“More than twenty years, Robert Lam, from the time we married until he died. And I had known him before that. He was my uncle’s friend.”
“How did you meet him?” I ask, interested, certainly, but anxious to turn the subject away from myself.
“My uncle, Lum Kee, introduced us, and he gave India a job in his restaurant, keeping the books. She also kept the accounts for his factory, Tai June, where they manufactured opium. She was good at it. She had done the major’s accounts, too, keeping him out of trouble for longer than he deserved.”
“Opium! He made it legally?” I ask.
“Oh, yes,” she answers. “It was not like it is now. There were eleven factories in the city at that time. Sing Yuen was very proud of his management. He knew where every tin they made was sent. He was not in league with smugglers like some of the others.”
“Pretty convenient for you, Fan,” I say. “I always wondered where you got your supply.”
She blushes, but she is also angry. “I had quit at that time,” she says, “Sing Yuen never liked my smoking opium. He said it was a habit for old men. But he also let me do what I liked.”
We sit in silence. I blow my nose and wonder if I can find the lemons. I could do with a toddy. I would have to heat water, find the whiskey bottle, scrounge in the bilge amongst all the
vegetables. I decide not to bother.
Fan is fidgeting with papers, uncurling edges, smoothing out with her palm, rearranging.
“What are you doing?” I ask, slightly annoyed. “I thought that was my job. You’ve had your chance.”
“You should take better care of them,” she says, “not leave them lying about like this, they could get damaged.
“Besides,” she says, having made her point willing to be friendly again, “there is something I want to show you. Ah, here it is!” she exclaims, pulling out a sheet of paper with a frame drawn around it. “This hung in Lum Kee’s shop. He was a herbalist, you know. I worked for him until he died, and later I ran the shop myself.”
“You, Fan? People trusted you to give them medicine?”
She smiles like the Cheshire cat. “I did many things long before you were born, Robert Lam.”
I take the sheet she hands me and read.
Us Chinese men greeting Thee Excellency in first degree, Thee in first Rank Country Name Vancouver with hangers to it.
All us here be dwellers at Victoria this island and Columbia British, much wish to shew mind of dutiful loyalty to this Kingdom Mother Victoria Queen, for much square and equal Kingdom rules of us.
Just now most humbly offer much joined minds of compliments to Thee Excellency Governor, on stepping to this land of Vancouver, that thee be no longer in danger of Typhoon, us much delighted. Us be here from 1858 and count over two thousand Chinese.
Chinese countrymen much like that so few of us have been chastised for breaking Kingdom rule.
This Kingdom rule very different from China. Chinese mind feel much devoted to Victoria Queen for protection and distributive rule of him Excellency old Governor Sir James Douglas, so reverse California when applied to us Chinese countrymen. Us believing success will come in obeying rulers, not breaking links, holding on to what is right and true.
Us like this no charge place, see it grow higher to highest; can see a Canton will be in Victoria of this Pacific.
The maritime enterprises will add up wonderfully and come quick. China has silks, tea, rice, sugar, &c. Here is lumber, coal, and minerals, in return, and fish in exhaustless supply, which no other land can surpass.
In ending, us confident in gracious hope in Thee, first degree and first rank, and first link, and trust our Californian neighbours may not exercise prejudice to our grief.
I put the paper aside. “What’s this supposed to mean to me?” I ask.
“It is part of your past, Robert Lam,” Fan says indignantly. “Lum Kee helped to draw it up. It was presented to the governor by all the Chinese merchants. It is a link to the very beginning of the city. And to me.”
Then she starts to sing the words of a numbering poem that catalogues the medicines, and that also tells the story of the creation of the earth.
“Let’s get going, Fan,” I say, throwing off my lethargy, for Fan’s singing is always off key. “I’m tired of hanging around. If we want to make Rose Harbour we had better get rolling.”
I drop my blanket, and, dressed in long johns, go up on deck to start the anchor winch. The chain rumbles through the roller. We will take a mid-channel course, which should lead us clear of all dangers to the western end of Johnstone Strait. After that, who knows, for there is Blackney Passage with its tidal streams and races. It will depend on the weather, it will depend on the tides, and there isn’t a thing I can do about those.
—
Boardwalks and dusty streets. Peddlers loading up with goods. Notice boards, advertisements, businessmen sweeping their premises. And a grid of Chinatown streets in the early morning light. The whiskey sellers in the ravine at Johnson Street rolled barrels of tangleleg into carts, and Indians set out in canoes from the canvas settlement across the harbour to meet the shipments.
Mussel gatherers filled their baskets, cutting the shells from the rocks by the bridge with sharp knives, and fishmongers met the fish boats, paying twenty-five cents for two baskets of fish, which they would sell that day at a two-hundred-percent profit.
The sun rose over Pandora, Cormorant, and Fisgard streets: streets banded north-south by Douglas, Government, and Store; streets fronted by poulterers, shippers, provisioners, and interpenetrated by the multitudinous alleys that ran, like so many cracks in stone, through the heart of this network of commerce. A maze where tenement piled on tenement like so much waste.
While Lam Fan, at her job with her uncle, the herbalist, Lum Kee, an elderly man who wore spectacles, rinsed herbs in the sink, taking care not to bruise the leaves, and placed them in the bamboo drying trays, and India got on with her work at Sing Yuen’s restaurant.
India was seated, wearing a green eyeshade, in her office at the back, copying out a list of the restaurant’s debtors that Sing Yuen had given her. Sing Yuen—who affected Western dress and who had already cut his queue; who approved of Lam Fan’s different ways, her education and experience; who would make speeches and support Doctor Sun Yet-sen (then finishing his education in Hong Kong—”It was the British who made me what I am,” he would later explain) in his program of reform, and who would invite that great man to Victoria for a visit…Sing Yuen, a man with connections and plans and morality but not prejudices, with whom India, the major’s daughter, felt at home.
But the list, slowly copied out in ink, presented difficulties. How was she to know who these people were? How on earth could she collect from them? These had been Sing Yuen’s first questions, but India had already solved the problem. Since she couldn’t do the collecting herself—she didn’t know the town well enough, she didn’t know whom to trust—she had asked, the night before, during their walk, her new friend Robert Haack if he would help.
And he, a man-about-town with his ears to the ground, in need of work, unable to return to his former job with Mr. Redford, now running errands for that gentleman (which wasn’t enough to keep him, even in the manner to which he had become accustomed), had said that he would.
And so India noted names and figures and added up the total of unpaid bills, which came to a little more than five hundred dollars, an important sum to Sing Yuen’s business.
Butcher $18.00
Captain of Schooner $50.00
Cook in Ship’s Galley $8.00
Red Shirt Man $27.00
Man Come Late $10.00
Cap Man $8.50
Lean Man White Man $20.00
Fat Frenchman $30.62
Captain Tall Man $8.00
Whiskey Man $18.37
Blacksmith $39.00
Barkeeper $5.00
Workman $10.00
Workman Friend $6.50
Little Shirt Man $10.00
Double Blanket Man First $15.00
Lame Leg Man $40.00
Fat Man $9.25
Old Workman $7.50
Red Whiskers $18.50
Indian Joe $10.00
Lick Make Coal Shovel $25.00
Ya Yip Earring $25.00
Flour Pantaloon Man $16.00
Shoemaker, Gone to California $15.00
A Man Butcher’s Friend $39.00
Stable Man $15.00
Get Tight Man $7.50
When she had finished, she gave the list to the cook’s helper and sent him off in the direction of the Chatham Street shack where Robert Haack—that man in whom so many pathways converged, engineer and future husband, who once, Fan tells me, had met the poet Robert Louis Stevenson, and who carried as talisman a poem in the poet’s handwriting; that complex, simple man who, by stumbling beneath a falling coal bucket, had joined himself to my mother’s destiny and thus to mine—where Robert Haack lived and was waking up, shivering, with a headache.
—
Headaches: some caused by colds (like that I’ve got myself), others caused by weather as the blood vessels respond to the change in barometric pressure; some due to tension, difficult circumstances, unusual work. And some due to drink.
Intending to stop but not. Trying to forget, or hopin
g to become someone else. In sorrow, in loneliness, in company, and in order to celebrate—emptying the bottle. Which was exactly what had happened to Robert Haack.
Who had met his friends at the Colonial after leaving India, and who had happened to say that it was his birthday coming up, and that he had had a letter from his mother in California, who had asked him how it felt to be twenty-eight.
Which question had worried him. Did he feel any different? Was life passing him by as his mother meant to suggest? For he was past the full flower of his youth. What, after all, had he made of himself? It is a question to make a man think—not just at twenty-eight, but in later years, at fifty-seven, say, a few years from retirement, with no attachments, no children, dogs, or a garden to keep (“I mean it, Fan,” I say, as we pass the kelp-covered entrance to Port Neville Inlet, “I am still selling the house.”). And so, as if to prove, after a few more drinks, that he was still a youth, Haack, accepting a dare, went round the back of the hotel where the proprietor kept a chained bear and let it loose. A mistake that compounded itself, for as the bear shambled into the street it attracted the attention of the police. Who arrested the celebrants and charged them with mischief. Which meant a court date coming up. More bad news for Robert Haack, for there were details concerning his past that he desired to suppress. There was more, but for the moment Robert Haack stopped himself thinking about it.
For something else had claimed his attention as he lay on his back, eyes closed, on a soaking wet mattress: there was the damp itself, there was the movement of air over his body, and the play of bright light across his closed eyelids. Slowly he dared to look, squinting against the sunlight. In the distance were the floating tops of the hills, Mount Tolmie and Mount Douglas, a trembling deep green above the meringue of fog that filled the valley; there were the bent backs of the labourers working in the market-garden fields across the road; there were peddlers filling their baskets at the sheds. None of this, of course, was visible normally from inside his house, the four flimsy walls made from packing cases, the curtained doorway and window. But the fact was that, while he slept, after he had been carried home by his friends after more to drink and after an extended visit to Yong Sam’s gambling house, his house had been dismembered. And there its remains lay, neatly stacked nearby, as if to add injury to insult: a most deliberate and cruel practical joke.
To All Appearances a Lady Page 10