To All Appearances a Lady

by Marilyn Bowering

  “Really, Fan?”

  “It’s true,” she insists. “Just because it’s new to you doesn’t make it a lie.” Which is a point.

  “There was also Chief John Moses,” she goes on. “He used to get ready for the hunt by fasting and praying, bathing in the sea, and rubbing himself with twigs. He also wore a headdress made of cedar bark and decorated with eagle feathers and wooden figures of whales. In the centre of it there was the harpoon head used in the hunt. He danced in imitation of the whale. He sang and prayed for power over the whale. And you know what?” she finishes, “he did it, he was able to kill it.”

  I look at her until she blushes. “I didn’t mean…” she says. “It’s not the same thing.”

  “That’s what it’s all about, Fan. That’s what I said in the first place.”

  She looks at me sadly. “You’ve still got it wrong, Robert Lam. You’ll always get it wrong. I was talking about a single person. I was telling you something important.”

  Well, and so we are at odds again. To try to make it up a little, I change course, as she’d suggested. Instead of Blackney Passage, the logical route into Queen Charlotte Strait on our way to Rose Harbour, I head for Broughton Strait, fiddling along the inside lane, passing Beaver Cove, Yellow Bluff, Haddington Island (avoiding the reefs), steering mid-channel with Yellow Bluff astern, and passing northward of Neil Rock. And coming out of the western end of Broughton Strait (where I didn’t want to be in the first place) southward of Kelp Patch with Pulteney Point lighthouse behind, bearing about one hundred twenty-four degrees.

  Tricky navigation, and time-consuming. When I have no time to spare, when the fact is I’m worried by the calendar. It may already be too late. We could get caught up north in bad weather. But why come this far if not to go on?

  Time. Time passing too quickly.

  Time that can’t be saved, that seems lost before you start.

  —

  Summer had gone, and Indian summer had come. Then that, too, had ended, and the rains had started. Court dates had arrived and been put back while Robert Haack lived on tenterhooks, stretched to the limit of patience, fearful of what was to happen.

  Watching (as it were) the weather.

  It rained and rained. Late October ran into early November. Storms altered the shoreline of the harbour and swamped the laundrymen’s shacks and left a high-tide wrack on the posts of the whiskey sellers’ houses where, above the pilings, the trap doors opened. Scavenging weather. Flu weather. In which the muddy streets were picked clean of refuse by coughing men, and every wood chip and stray length of grass was put on a fire and burned. In coal-oil tins or on cast-iron grates scarcely big enough to balance a cup.

  Pooled water overran rooftop gutters, and the horses struggled to lift their hooves from the sludge; and from the tin chimneys and half-open windows and doors of Chinatown came slipstreams of smoke, spiralling upwards into the smoke-coloured air.

  Then, as if having worn itself out, the rain stopped. The emptied clouds rose and fled high across the icy surface of the hard blue sky. Not the lazy leaden blue gaze of summer, in which Haack and India had walked, discussing business, but the arctic blue stare of approaching winter, which awakens horses at dawn and sends early risers to the window first thing to look out and question, as if something is wrong.

  The vegetables in the market gardens lay shrunken and stiff—bush potatoes, yellow lettuce, scraggled, collapsed vines, left in the ground too long. They were late plantings, the labour of farmers who wished the seasons would change to suit them. Farmers who used every bit of ground, including the space where Haack’s shack had been. For long since, before the rains had come, Haack had found a new home.

  And it was here, in his rented room in the Metropolitan Hotel and Roominghouse, presided over by the landlady, Mrs. Lush, that he laboured over a letter.

  With his jaw clenched, fist tight on the quill and nerves on edge after a day of avoiding Yong Sam’s debt collectors as he went about his errands for Sing Yuen’s restaurant, Robert Haack rubbed his eyes and started over. It was a small job for the “brotherhood,” keeping his hand in by composing an anonymous letter to send to the British Colonist. He had been given instructions personally by Alderman Shakespeare.

  To the editor [Haack had written]: Passing down Cadboro Bay Road this morning I was attracted by the sound of hammering from the other side of the road. Looking across I saw a Chinese carpenter engaged in putting up a fence. I made inquiries and ascertained that the land that was being enclosed is the property of Mr. Grant, town councillor, and a large shareholder in the Times newspaper. I should like to be informed whether there are not among Mr. Grant’s constituents and subscribers several carpenters who would have been glad of the job, which has been given by him to a heathen.

  Yours very truly,

  A Citizen

  Haack wiped his forehead with a handkerchief and leaned back in his chair. Not a bad letter if he did say so himself. Surely it would help if (God forbid) worse came to worst and his treachery were found out. Surely they would remember useful acts like this. And, thank God, he said to himself, as he often did, that his mother, an ex-schoolteacher, had taught him to read and write. Not that in the everyday sense he made much use of it, but still it came in handy.

  He stood and went to the window of his room. It looked out at a red brick wall and down onto an alleyway. There, in the shadows on the ground, catching sight of him and wagging his tail, stood Charlie, a scabby, long-haired dog that had adopted Haack when he lived in the shack on Chatham Street. The dog had moved with him, too, trotting along beside the wheelbarrow that Haack had borrowed to transport his goods, and refusing to be discouraged although Mrs. Lush would not allow the dog inside her premises. And Charlie had remained loyal, waiting all day and all night, if necessary, for Haack to make an appearance. Haack did his part, when he could, by dropping Charlie scraps from the inedible breakfasts Mrs. Lush cooked. He liked the dog. They had a straightforward and comforting relationship, better than most people did, and it was all the more consoling in its simplicity considering the mesh of other complexities in which Robert Haack lived.

  Such as this. In the midst of composing this letter (a task that had taken him several weeks to complete, for he had wanted to get it right), Haack had gone with India to lay a complaint with the police against the white employer of the small son of Kung Fong, a vegetable peddler. Robert pulling down his hat, hoping not to be recognized, hoping against hope that the long-put-off court date would not suddenly be announced in front of India by the constable on duty, yet feeling good about what he was doing. How could he have turned away when he had found the boy himself, by the roadside where his employer had left him, with black bruises striped across his legs as if they’d been painted there with the cane, a deep cut on one thigh, and a knee swollen large as a bowl? It was all right for a man to suffer, but a child!

  And there was more to it. With India beside him, taking time out from her work for Sing Yuen at the restaurant and the opium factory, which indeed kept her busy, and with the child in his arms as they hurried along, Haack had felt quite peculiar. As if the pieces of his life were coming together. As if the walk to the police station, just the three of them, meant something special. Although it was hard to put a finger on it exactly, it meant something…different.

  Haack knocked his fingers against the window in greeting to Charlie. “Two minutes, boy,” he mouthed, “I’ll be right down.”

  That feeling, that sense of floating free but being firmly held to earth as well, had stayed with him, and he had found that it tended to reoccur in India’s company. Although what he could do about it, considering his financial and other circumstances, he had no idea.

  Moreover he had more immediate difficulties with Miss Thackery to concern himself with, important ones, for the court appearance had come and gone—at last—with surprising swiftness, and, to his dismay, although he was the one who had given her name, they had summoned India as a character
witness. It wouldn’t have been so bad if he had prepared her for it, but he hadn’t said anything at all. He really hadn’t thought it would go so far. Although her testimony had helped, certainly, in reducing the sentence to a fine from a jail term. He had to be grateful for that. But she hadn’t spoken to him afterwards, and he was fearful of what she thought. A woman like that.

  Haack picked up his hat and jacket from the bed. He was managing, barely, to get by on the generosity of some of his workingmen friends. That plus the small amount he earned as Sing Yuen’s debt collector and running Redford’s errands. He needed new clothes. He needed shoes, a warmer jacket. He’d have no trouble making a list. These were hard times, there was no getting around it.

  Before he left his room Haack glanced in the mirror, pulled his hat to an angle of jauntiness over his dark brown hair, tested the length of his beard as to need for a barber, brushed off his trousers, and spat on his boots for polish. He was ready, he thought, for whatever came next.

  At the southeast corner of Pandora and Government streets, where Pandora joined Cormorant Street in a vee, and across from where the government liquor store is now, the only place in the length and breadth of the city where you can buy a bottle of rum or a case of beer; not noted for its decor but for the brutes wearing armbands who patrol its counter…. (“Enough, Robert Lam,” says Fan, as we make our way past Masterman Island and into Goletas Channel, where we must keep in mid-channel until nearing Nahwitti Bar, which itself protects the channel from heavy swells during westerly gales, a fact for which I’m grateful as the Rose, for some reason, is labouring.) At this corner, in the layering of time natural to cities, stood Sing Yuen’s Tai June opium factory, India’s other place of employment.

  It was a modest two-story building, made of red brick like its neighbours, but with a white-painted balcony and carved white wooden posts supporting the veranda. With smoking chimneys, and a flag flying bearing the Tai June emblem, a crowing rooster. Down the street were Van Volkenburgh’s butcher shop, Fullerton’s shoes and the St. Nicholas baths, the latter often of service in the toilet of Robert Haack—buildings that, by the way, would endure, along with Delmonicos Hotel and Restaurant, long after the Tai June and other opium factories were no more.

  For before the rafts of overhead wires strung on telegraph poles, marking the streets as channels, had ceased to be remarked, when theatregoers still flocked after performances to the oyster bars on Government Street, while vendors cried their competing virtues—”Fries, roast, stews, everything you chews in the way of eating Peter’ll be repeating, oysters (halo clams), tidbits broiled in hams, everything just right, both by day and night, one and all, give me a call—Peter—at Charley’s, on the corner”—that is, before the Great War, which put so much of the world I had known out of existence, including my childhood; even before then, the opium factories had been demolished.

  Although I could just remember them; and they might have gone on for decades, importing, processing, exporting, paying their annual licence fee, making the Dominon government about $150,000 annually, all quite legally, if it hadn’t been for a pudgy, straitlaced bachelor sent out by the federal government in 1907 to investigate the anti-Oriental riots on the coast. (Yes, Fan, even I admit that bachelors have their blind spots.)

  This emissary, from far across the mountains and plains, from the other side of the continent, this man named Mackenzie King, who would one day be prime minister, who loved his mother and his country as no one had before him, had not known that opium was legally manufactured, sold, and smoked in his native land. No one else—no one who counted in politics, that is—appeared to have known, either. Despite the large sums paid and collected. And didn’t know (they claimed) about the smuggling of the drug from Canada to the United States, although it was obvious to anyone who cared to think about it that, one way or another, there was a great deal of money to be made on the sixty to sixty-five tons of opium produced in Victoria annually. It was a great deal of opium for a small town to absorb by itself.

  And so Mackenzie King, alerted by the damage compensation lists submitted after the riots, with claims for six hundred dollars each by two Vancouver opium manufacturers for the loss of six days of their business (while the rioters smashed windows and threw rocks and held rabblerousing street meetings), was nonetheless startled to find on the front page of the Victoria British Colonist an advertisement that ran, “For Sale: Olives, onions and opium. Choice grades of opium direct from British plantations in India and processed at our own warehouse.” He was more than dismayed, he was hopping mad. “This is not only a source of human degradation but a destructive factor in our national life,” King reported to Ottawa, and as quick as could be drew up the new “Opium and Drug Act,” which prohibited the importation, manufacture, and sale of opium for other than medicinal purposes.”

  His report was presented to Parliament on June twenty-sixth, 1908. And the law erasing the opium industry from Canada was passed in Parliament less than three weeks later.

  A black day for my stepmother, Lam Fan. Although I can’t recall it affecting her much. But then she had connections and contacts, a life of which I was ignorant.

  “Keep trying, Robert Lam,” says Fan, eyes glued to the binoculars, “but don’t imagine I will respond to your baiting. You’re no good at it. You never were.” I watch what she’s watching—Miles Cone on Doyle Island now behind us, an oddly regular drinking-cup shape set against the high, wild shorelines north and south of the channel. We have passed the Noble Islets light, riding a tidal stream of about three knots. And now Fan swivels the glasses to focus on Mount Lemon, on Nigei Island, with its steepto and cliffy shore. “Why mountains, Fan? Why always the land?”

  She turns and looks at me blankly, and for an instant I see through those eyes to the sea. Nothing but weather. Nothing but foreordained pattern and movement. I blink, and Fan is solid again.

  “Why?” she answers. “You are in charge of the ocean. I am only a passenger. You are in charge, Robert Lam,” she says, smiling, but with emphasis. “It is your story.”

  The earth, the earth all around us, encircling. The high mountains, the broken shoreline, the litter of woods on the islets; the life of the ocean surging beneath the bow of the Rose. As permanent as anything I can envisage, and as yet untouched. Snow on the mountain peaks, the plunging waterfalls and stony beaches. It unrolls before us, as if Fan and I both are ghosts on this voyage; as if space has come down to earth, and we are its witnesses.

  —

  And so Robert Haack arrived at the Tai June offices on the corner of Pandora and Government streets, where Cormorant made its vee, looking for India.

  He carried flowers, borrowed from Mrs. Lush’s lobby; he carried his hopes, waiting outside for India to be finished with business, wandering into the yard where men worked, unloading the raw materials and readying the processed tins of opium for shipment. Men at work. Men with regular jobs. Men who had money.

  Overseers and labourers, with sweat-stained handkerchiefs tied around their heads, who had been down to the docks and met a ship; who had lifted the crates of unrefined opium gum (from Malwa and Benares) into the carts; who had whipped the horses up the hill; who had unloaded in the yard and filled up the warehouse while, from the other side of the lot, men were carrying the crates of processed opium to other carts to tally up the Tai June orders; and other men moved tins to the factory itself; and still others answered calls for more and more of the unprocessed drug from a factory window. Perpetual motion. What came in going out, only at so many times the original cost. For each tin of one and a half pounds sold for $3.50, and was about a month’s supply for a user. And there were thousands and thousands of tins.

  Robert Haack returned to the front of the factory and cooled his heels on the porch. Inside, he knew, for she had told him, India was conducting an audit. Sixteen hundred pounds of crude opium shipped to make one thousand pounds of refined drug. Tins at wholesale, tins at retail. Minus the annual licence fee of fi
ve hundred dollars, and the duty of one hundred sixty dollars per case. Counting up costs, reckoning profits. Haack drummed his feet on the porch, then edged round the side to the windows.

  Besides the receiving rooms and warehouse at the rear, there were, as well as the office, two large processing rooms. In these, as he saw, having wiped away the dirt and steam from the glass, there were about thirty employees. The room in full view (the other he could see part of through an archway) was much like a kitchen. A long table stood against one wall. Here the workers scraped the crude opium from the coconut shells in which they had been shipped. At intervals, the material was checked by an overseer for quality. India had told Robert how it was done: the inspector checked for colour (blackish), odour (strong and fetid), and texture (hard and viscous, heavy). Robert watched as the final test was done—a rubbing between the fingers to feel for the roughness or grittiness that meant the opium had been adulterated—which it occasionally had, sometimes with cow dung or the stalks and dry leaves of the poppy. As Robert watched the overseer nodded his satisfaction: the material, at this stage at least, was pure.

  It was because of the danger of adulteration that Tai June did its own grinding. India had told Haack what had happened when they had tried sending the material out to be ground on contract: it had come back the same weight as it had left, an impossibility, of course, because of the moisture inevitably lost in the grinding process. When they had checked, they had found, among other added substances, stones and gravel, wheat flour, and the residue left from preparing tincture of opium.

  Along another wall there was a set of stoves, one great stove, actually, which one man was employed to keep fed with fuel, and on which other workers, with their hair tied up in white cloths, fried great balls of opium in huge pans. The balls, Haack estimated, were twice the size of his hat. Even standing where he was, Haack could feel the odour of the cooking opium seeping into his pores. It made his eyes water, and he rubbed his hand under his nose.