Haack closed his eyes. There was nothing more he wanted to see. Moreover, he had remembered the worst of the worst (or was it?). At Yong Sam’s gambling house, to which they had gone once released by the police, he had spent all his money. No, even worse. He had signed for his losses, placed pen to paper, written his name with his usual flourish after a sum of money owing. A large sum. An unbelievable amount.
How would he ever pay it back, he wondered in panic. He hadn’t seen that much money in all his life! And there were Yong Sam’s men to reckon with. Enforcers. Large men, belonging to a Tong. Determined men who would remember that debt the rest of his days.
He would have cried aloud if it hadn’t been for the passersby staring at him, wrapped in his blankets in the open air, curious.
And finally, and this must be the worst of the worst, there was what he had promised India: that he would help her out by collecting the money owing to Sing Yuen’s restaurant.
They had gone for a walk. He had told her the story about the Klootchmen, the Indian women, that he had heard at a Workingmen’s Protective Association meeting. (Not that he had told her where it had come from.) About how the two Indians had been sitting on the walk, selling clams and potatoes, and how a society member—a workingman—with some talent for magic had come along.
“Can I buy some clams?” he had asked.
“Certainly,” one had replied, and had given him a clam to try. He had taken out his knife, opened the bivalve, and produced from inside it a fifty-cent piece.
“Oh!” cried the woman, “I can’t sell you that one!” Then she had given him another clam to try, and the same thing had happened. The magician said, “I’ll take all of them.” And she had said, “Oh, no, I can’t sell these, no!”
He had left her there with her friend opening every one of the whole bag of clams. He had gone away laughing.
As Robert Haack had laughed. As India hadn’t. “I hope he went back and paid her for what she’d lost,” said India.
“But he’d already given her a dollar!” said Haack defensively.
India had let the subject drop, and they had continued on to the foot of Johnson Street, where the ex-miners lived and where there were buildings with trap doors set right over the water so the whiskey sellers could unload their goods into the canoes.
The bells had started tolling then, one after the other, from each of the six steeples. They had stopped to listen; everyone on the street had stopped—the unemployed men and the drunks, the women in their evening dresses looking for business. The sky had glowed pink over Deadman’s Island. Just then, when he was still smarting from her criticism of his humour, she had put her hand gently on his arm and had said, “Robert, could you help me out? Would you like a job?”
And of course he said yes.
And perhaps that was why he had gone out drinking, for it was only later, after he had said goodbye to India, that he had let himself think about what working for Sing Yuen’s restaurant really meant.
Blacklisting. No hope of future employment. Loss of friendship. Ruin now and forever.
How, how, how could he have done it?
For in Robert Haack’s world, in the world of all the workingmen who had joined with Noah Shakespeare, that aldermanic worthy, that political hair curler, it was conflict of interest. Worse than that, it was betrayal, suicide, breaking of an oath. For the one thing that Robert Louis Haack, charter member and informer for Alderman Shakespeare’s Workingmen’s Protective Association must not do was to help out a Chinese business. Even when asked by a woman. A young woman he liked and respected.
Haack struck his head with his fists, oblivious now to how he must appear to others. And even as he did, tracing in his mind those fatal steps, his lips moved silently, repeating the solemn oath he had sworn, which was recited at the beginning of every Association meeting.
I solemnly pledge my word as a man to neither aid or abet or patronize Chinamen in any way whatever or patronize those employing them, and I will pursue all legitimate means for their expulsion from the country; and this society shall be for the mutual protection of the working classes of British Columbia against the great influx of Chinese, and to devise means for the amelioration of the condition of the working classes of this Province in general.
Which was clear enough, wasn’t it?
“But why, Fan,” I ask, “why did he do it?”
“He didn’t like to be alone,” she says. “When he saw that all his mates were joining, he went along with them.”
While I ponder that she takes the wheel. “Stay in mid-channel,” I urge her. “We’re not that far from a reef.”
“I know what I’m doing,” she says, “there is a place I mean to take you. A special place.”
“I don’t have time, Fan. We’ve had too much delay already. I’ll never get where I want to if you keep on interfering.”
“So what, Robert Louis,” she says. “So what.”
And I am left with my question. How could my mother’s future husband be so foolish?
Well, I say to myself, keeping an eye on Fan as she steers away from Cracroft Island, crossing the strait to follow the southern shore, it was an age of innocence. There was no radio or television or cinema. No space journeys. People had to do something for companionship and adventure. And what was there for a single man, who had no money, to do, except drink? For then, as now, it was an age of couples. Of families. Of tight social circles.
There was the theatre—the Savoy with its dancing girls, the Negro theatre beneath Goodacre butchers, the Theatre Royal—but there reserved tickets cost three dollars, far too much for a man like Haack. And who cared what would happen to him anyway? He was just another poor man in a country full of them.
In the year 1890, in that city of double aspect where the races faced each other across a boundary and men were lost, directionless, milling hopelessly in unemployment; where overtures of friendship, messages of goodwill, such as the statement Fan has shown me, drawn up by the Chinese merchants, Lum Kee, among them, where such messages meant nothing because there was no one to interpret the gesture; and where small boys reversed the reins of the Chinese carter’s horse so that left meant right and vice versa….
Where disease wore a foreign appearance, as ships arrived from the east flying the yellow quarantine flag, and a dress sent out from one of these to be mended led to an epidemic, and the doctors inoculated arm to arm as fast as they could but couldn’t catch up with the deaths; where, when a storm destroyed the earthworks of the Chinese cemetery on the waterfront, there were bones from hundreds of casualties….
A man like Noah Shakespeare made sense. Bringing order to confusion, bringing purpose. It was, he explained, the immigrants’ fault; the Chinese were taking jobs from the whites; they had to be stopped.
For sometimes it does not matter what a man believes so long as it takes him to brotherhood, to escape from despair and loneliness, and gives him a family of sorts. Which was exactly the case with the Workingmen’s Protective Association for poor Robert Haack.
—
“I can’t believe this,” says Fan disgustedly. “Maybe we should turn back. I cannot believe that you are defending him. You are half Chinese yourself!”
“But Haack was my mother’s husband, Fan,” I remind her. “My mother named me after him. Surely my mother knew what she was doing.”
“Of course she did,” Fan responds, “but it wasn’t that she wanted carried on, not Robert Haack’s prejudice.”
“But you have told me yourself he did not believe in it, he did not actually act.”
“Yes,” she admits despairingly. “But he belonged to a group that persecuted men, women, and children. He reported on what he heard in Chinatown. He spied on the people who befriended him!”
“Aha!” I cry. “So it’s something personal you have against him.”
“No more than you have,” she says quietly. Which shakes me up.
Still, I feel compelled to go on. “You have n
o proof. You are making it up. You never liked him. You never wanted my mother to have friends other than you.”
“Am I so jealous, Robert Lam?” she asks gently. “Can you honestly say that?”
And so I stop for a moment and think. And am ashamed of myself. I was the one who wouldn’t bring friends home. I was the one who had no confidence in myself, who thought that if folk knew who I really was, they would turn away.
But did I know yet? Had anything changed? Had I acquired more trust?
Coolly, Fan, who has indicated that we are almost there, wherever she is taking us, puts down the glass through which she has been examining the shoreline and gives me the benefit of her most critical stare. Not that I want it.
“In fact, you are just like him,” she says icily. “You think you can do anything you want and it won’t cause harm because it is you who do it. You think that any price is worth your comfort, as long as someone else is paying it.
“You think you need friendship,” she says, “when what you need is to be a friend to yourself. Not that you have much to offer. But you should not be afraid to do what you know is right.”
“But Robert Haack…”
“I know, I know,” she says, putting up her hand to stop me saying anything further. “You want to admire him. You bear his name. There is nothing wrong with that. Just don’t close your eyes to the truth. He was wrong to sign such a document; he shouldn’t have taken that oath. He should have had more courage. Let me assure you, he would have been much better off.”
So ends the argument. Although I still see his side of it. I know what it means to be on a ship with men and officers, to be part of a team, to belong. And I know what it’s like without.
—
Robert Haack: who had crossed a border, unwittingly at first; who had walked out with my mother one night when the air was as soft and potent as laudanum; who had listened to her troubles, who had told her his, along with a tasteless joke; who had wanted her to like him, and who had felt the electrical current that ran from her hand on his elbow, and that flowed out, in turn, from his fingertips. A current that promised—what? A future, perhaps. And so he had said yes.
Keeping his secret. Hoping it could be kept and everything would turn out all right.
And here on the Rose, a boat full of secrets, too, there are atoms of paper spinning, colliding, coalescing like splitting and joining tides; long lines of memory scored and crosshatched with streets and buildings: Lum Kee’s herbalist shop, Sing Yuen’s restaurant, the Fisgard Street house where my mother and Lam Fan lived. Cigar factories, breweries, butchers, opium houses, the electric arc light at Johnson and Douglas, the red-light district at Herald and Chatham; streets where the balconies joined in endless procession up and down at the second and third levels; streets full of women, of men and children, dogs, rats, mice and other vermin.
Streets where I walked with my stepmother, and where, a young child, I watched Sing Yuen, my stepmother’s husband, stand on a platform outside the Chinese Nationalist office, and where there were the sounds of breaking glass and the screams of women, and the thick, muffled sound of wood striking bone as the police waded in. It was the day of the arrival of the news of the revolution in China. It was the day that the men cut the queue, the symbol of the Manchu rulers, from their heads.
And it was the day that I, a boy, neither yellow nor white, cut myself off from my Chinese self, turned my back on it.
Cut away the past, freed myself from it and the mysterious burden I bore in my blood. That could not be talked of. That set me apart from those I knew and loved.
—
“We’re here!” Fan shouts suddenly. “This is what I was hoping to see!”
So I look out from the Rose, out from the midst of my memories. And there, along the smooth rock shoreline called Robson Bight, named after a seaman who died in a fall from his horse, the whales have gathered. Hundreds of them, it looks like. Roiling and boiling, sounding and diving. Grey, blue, black, and white: wart-backed and smooth, blowing, splashing, feeding, playing, and rubbing the barnacles from their skins on the rocks. Families of them. Families and friends and relations. Tears spring to my eyes, and I feel like I’ve come home.
“Thank you, Fan,” I say, not sure what my gratitude is for. And she smiles. “We’ll anchor here for now,” she says.
FIVE
What strange fatality envelops nearly every enterprise set on foot in this colony and paralyzes the efforts of our most public-spirited men? Look at the Roys’ Whaling Expedition. The party start for the West Coast and kill a few whales—the oil from any one of which would have defrayed two months’ expenses of the expedition—but no sooner do they make fast to the monsters than fierce storms arise and the animals, cut adrift, float ashore and are taken in hand and claimed by the savages. Next, despairing of a lull, the party repair to Deep Bay, a sheltered locality and famed for visits from the oleaginous tribes; but not a whale enters the bay during the stay of the party. Next, they strike off to Knight’s Canal, where shoals of whale are reported to be; but not a fish appears after their arrival. Then they return to Nanaimo, coal and come on to Victoria abandoning the expedition—when, the very day succeeding the one on which they leave the locality of black diamonds, into the harbour dart a dozen great whales, spouting, sporting, and fighting like mad all day long; and, to make the case all the more provoking if possible, one of the big fish impudently runs aground at low water and actually lies upon the beach over one tide—as much as to say, come and catch me, if you can!—before he floats off. Too bad. Too bad!
THE VICTORIA BRITISH COLONIST
“The sperm whale is the only one with teeth,” I say, to my stepmother. “It’s the one that produces ambergris. The humpback is similar to the sperm. Its spout is short and thick, and it can stay down for fifteen to thirty minutes. The sulphur bottom or blue whale is larger. It has no teeth, but in their place are gill bones from eight to twelve feet long. Then there is the finback…”
“Don’t tell me things I already know,” says Fan. The surface of the bight is quiet now. The whales, possibly tiring of our presence, have moved off, but the air seems to hold their radiance: there are rainbows everywhere. Even the lapping of the water against the sides of the Rose has a charged quality, as if still resonating with the whales’ calls.
Leviathan. Monarch of the oceans that ships tread with caution. Sailors’ saviour or nightmare: for while some whales have ferried seamen to land, others have swallowed them. There is Jonah, of course, both swallowed and vomited up, unlucky man, whom his shipmates threw into the sea to calm a storm. Because it was all his fault: he had dared to disobey his orders from Fate, had tried to outrun it. Jonah, who gave his name to all bad luck at sea.
On our ship, the Silverbell, that night we were struck by torpedoes, there had been things said among the men: “Thirteen ships in a convoy that sails on a Friday, and carrying him.” They had fixed their looks on the bo’s’n, an innocent man if ever there was one, but who had survived without harm three earlier sinkings. And whose crewmen had sustained several injuries while working with him, repairing the gun deck. A Jonah, they called him, and tried not to be near him.
Whereas they should have picked on me. I don’t know why they couldn’t see it, I wore my guilt like a colour, and I could not stop myself from thinking about it. I never stopped working, and when I didn’t work, I had to hide my shaking, although now I see they would have thought it because of my illness: they knew I had nearly gone blind.
“The sei whale stays down three to seven minutes,” says my stepmother, taking up my lecture, “and the right whale is the only whale with a double spout. Oh, yes, Robert Lam, I know all about it. They do not hunt the bottle nose and grey whales any more, although the killing of the right is the only one prevented by law.” She smiles at me, having given proof of intelligence.
“Do you know how they kill them, Fan?” I ask (but don’t wait for an answer). “They shoot a harpoon with barbs in it, and
with a bomb attached. When the bomb goes off the barbs spread open.”
“We are very different people,” Lam Fan says bitterly, looking away from me, “I would never have thought about killing after what we’ve seen.” A slight wind has come up. The waves, under this freshening, wear the stiff, brushed look of a mat.
Because there’s no way to explain what I was thinking, I say, “It’s how men have made their living for hundreds of years. Even the Indians hunted the whales. In fact, those who did so were thought to be heroes.”
“But they didn’t use a gun and a bomb!” she says.
“No,” I agree.
“No.”
We stand quietly together, Fan a dark presence in her black and grey silks on this grey, damp day, and I think about moments like this. How they pass. The good and the bad. How life goes on and on, without respite, until it ends.
“Sometimes they had to leap onto the back of a whale to deal the death blow,” Fan says.
“Pardon, Fan, I’m afraid I’ve lost track….”
“The Indians,” she says. “Like Jonah in the Bible.”
“Fan, I don’t think that’s quite right,” I say, trying to correct her gently. “That’s not the way they told it at the Chinese Christian School for Boys.”
“I know what I’m talking about, Robert Lam,” she says. “I knew some of the whalers long before you were born. Chief Atlin practised holding his breath under water so that he could stay with the whale when it dived.”
To All Appearances a Lady Page 11