To All Appearances a Lady

by Marilyn Bowering

  In the far room there were more stoves on which the opium was boiled into jelly form in giant copper vats. The walls ran with condensed vapour, and it was a labourer’s job to wash the walls down after each day’s work, and in the daytime to sweep the running rivulets from the floor down a drain. It was a busy scene, with workers hurrying to keep up with demands from the yard.

  Powdering, canning, and packing: all this went on in the second room, behind a screen, out of Haack’s view, but he felt as if he knew it by heart anyway, having listened to India discussing her work on their daily walks and having talked over with her a number of Tai June’s problems. Such as whether to fill orders for local brewers, although everyone knew that the opium went into the beer, which was against the law, but if Tai June didn’t supply the drug another manufacturer would; or how to handle the retail trade—to do more than they did, selling powdered opium in dried-out lemons mostly to seamen leaving on voyages, would require expansion of the premises. And it was a business of fashion to some extent: now thought by some to remedy tetanus, always popular for strengthening children, and used as a remedy for impotence. And Tai June’s greatest problem of all, to which Haack had given some thought, which was security.

  For it was easy to carry away some of the drug—in shoes or hatbands, knotted up in queues (although India said it was unheard of for a Chinese to smuggle)—at any stage of the manufacture; and even though preparation at home was tedious, it could be done by a person who knew how to shred and simmer, knead and skim.

  One of the security guards whom India had hired, at Haack’s recommendation, caught Robert’s eye at the window.

  Haack jumped down from the box on which he stood and dusted his hands.

  It was, all in all, nothing out of the ordinary. His friend, India, treated it much like any other business, like Sing Yuen’s restaurant, for instance, and tried to make it pay and yet make sure that no one was hurt by it. For she had grown up, in Hong Kong, with opium as part of her world and had seen its potential for harm and for good. For good in medicines to heal the body and mind; for ill in those who relied on it overmuch. Those like her sister, Lam Fan.

  Employees who were opium addicts did not keep their jobs at Tai June, and so there were few who took up the habit, since they were good jobs to have, reasonably well paid and with other benefits, including money for families during sickness and time off for festivals.

  Opium. An industry as old as mankind. A drug that began life in a flower, Papaver somniferum, and that seeped out of the incised poppy capsules, was collected with much labour, and ended up in laudanum, paregoric, Battley’s Sedative and Dover’s Powder, not to mention Cholorodyne and Godfrey’s Cordial and Street’s Infants Quietness. Not to mention in pigeon’s egg opium pipes. The kind of pipes my stepmother liked.

  Robert sighed. He had had more than a passing acquaintance with the drug, although that was long ago, in an unfortunate incident of transferring opium from bond at the San Francisco docks, raw opium meant to be shipped to Victoria but passed over the side to the Sacramento boats. Unfortunate because he had been caught. Although because he had been so young and scarcely to blame—he had hardly known what was happening; he had needed the money—the judge had been kind. Six months in jail was all, although it had cost him more than his pride, it had cost, he believed, a certain friendship. But now he was most of all grateful that it had not been read into his recent court record. That would have been all he’d needed, to have that brought up.

  Let bygones be bygones, he said to himself, still waiting for India. There was nothing in any of it for a man like himself, a man with talents. A man with potential, however unrealized.

  For it was hardly worth the trouble to cross the border, not after the supplier was paid, and the transporter, not to mention the local distributor.

  Still, customs took it seriously enough. With ten dollars duty paid or lost on each tin, it was nothing they could afford to sneeze at.

  But a business for dopes. A business for men at the end of their ropes. Haack picked up the flowers, which he’d rested on the steps. He checked his shoes’ appearance, and armed himself with patience.

  “I meant to tell you,” said Robert, following India across Government Street, where she had looked both ways for traffic, but not at him.

  “Somehow it just never came up.” As she waited for a dray to pass, he produced the flowers from behind his back.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “It was the wrong thing to do to you. But I didn’t want you to think badly of me.”

  She turned to face him reluctantly.

  “Think badly of you?” she said. “But what did you believe would happen when the police came to get me? I didn’t know anything about it! I didn’t even know you were in trouble! If you had told me, asked me, of course I would have helped; you’ve done plenty of favours for me.”

  At some point during this speech, she wasn’t sure when or how, she had accepted the flowers. She looked at them with bewilderment.

  He took her arm, and they crossed the street together. “I didn’t think they’d make you testify,” he said. “I thought that giving your name was enough. I don’t know what I thought. I was upset.”

  Clouds, grey and snow-filled, lowered over the sea, and down the street ahead of them ran a file of quail, late migrants from some backyard brush.

  “I thought they’d get you to write something, maybe,” he went on. “I just didn’t want to get you involved.”

  “Then you shouldn’t have given my name,” she responded logically. “You could have asked somebody else.”

  “Somebody else?” he echoed. But who was there to help him but her? Mr. Redford, possibly. But Haack didn’t want to jeopardize his chances there. And it certainly wasn’t a matter for the Association. They were committed to lawfulness, at least publically. Although one of the attractions of the monthly meetings was the quantity of beer served.

  “I wanted it to be you,” he said stupidly.

  India, stopping in front of a fish peddler, preparing to buy, looked up quickly. “Robert,” she began, “I don’t want you to get the wrong idea.”

  Perhaps she had more to say: that he wasn’t her type, that she was a few years older than he, or that the kind of work she was committed to, reforming work, not the work that paid her bills but the work that was close to her heart, wouldn’t interest him, and that it was the most important thing in the world to her. Whatever, it had no chance to come out, for as she looked, and Robert Haack read the rest of the thought unsaid, in her eyes, his hand clutched at the piece of paper he carried in his pocket and had kept there since, as a boy of fifteen, he had met a poet.

  He brought the paper out and unfolded it. “Here,” he said to her, his action stopping her words, “this will tell you what I can’t.”

  Puzzled, India took the paper and read.

  Praise and Prayer

  I have been well, I have been ill,

  I have been rich and poor;

  I have set my back against the wall

  And fought it by the hour;

  I have been false, I have been true;

  And thoro’ grief and mirth,

  I have done all that man can do

  To be a man of worth;

  And now, when from an unknown shore,

  I dare an unknown wave,

  God, who has helped me heretofore,

  O help me wi’ the lave!

  It was signed, “Robert Louis Stevenson.”

  “Where did you get this?” she asked, puzzled. The name of the writer was known to her. Indeed, he was known to many English readers since the publication of Treasure Island, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Kidnapped, and other stories and poems.

  “He gave it to me,” said Robert, “I met him a long time ago.”

  “You know him?” she asked, quite taken aback. “You’ve met him?” she repeated, as if unable to believe it.

  Haack nodded twice. “I met him at home in California,” he said, as if that should
explain everything.

  It would be hard to express just how surprised India was. She had known of the writer since the appearance of Travels With a Donkey in the Cevennes—her father, the major, had kept in touch with developments in literature through Old Country friends, and she had tended to think of Stevenson as her own discovery. And yet Robert Haack, a man she knew and liked yet whom she now suspected she had underestimated, had not only met him but had a holograph copy of one of his early poems. “Do you like poetry?” she asked. “Do you read it?”

  “My mother was a schoolteacher,” Robert answered. “She kept all her books on a shelf in the house. She used to read from them at night.”

  Which wasn’t perhaps what India meant, exactly, but it was enough for the moment. She paid for three crabs from the fish peddlers, forgetting to haggle, and put them in her basket. One of them twisted itself around the handle and Robert, trying to free its claw, had his hand nipped. He sucked at his fingers, then took his poem back.

  “Why couldn’t you trust me?” said India, resuming their former conversation. “How do you expect me to be your friend if you won’t tell me the truth?”

  Robert, sensing a victory, although not quite sure how it had come about, said, “I appreciated what you said in court. It was good of you.”

  “I know.”

  “You didn’t have to.”

  “I know!”

  They continued walking to the bottom of the street. A butcher’s van and a baker’s cart raced by in dangerous competition. Robert put his arm protectively in front of India as she was about to start across Store Street.

  She turned to him. “Would you tell me about it sometime?” she asked hesitantly, almost shyly.

  “About what?” he said.

  “How you met him, the poet Stevenson.”

  Robert took a deep breath. “Of course I will. But you have to remember I was very young. There isn’t much to tell.”

  Although there was, of course, more than he wanted to think of.

  “Promise?”

  He smiled at her as they drew near to the conglomeration of dwellings that had grown up around the abandoned wharves where India was due to meet Sing Yuen.

  “I promise,” he said. “We’ll find the right moment.”

  —

  Perhaps the truth was that my mother was not without her own literary ambitions. Consider the diaries she kept. It could be that she, as a girl in Hong Kong, had once hoped to live a literary life, or at least move in those circles, but that circumstance (her father’s deterioration and death) had prevented it. If so, then Robert Haack, who had brushed shoulders, at least, with a poet, might be seen as a window, a glimpse into a world she had thought she had lost forever. And how unexpected it was: that a man like Haack, with his frontier talents, should be a person whose mother had been a teacher, a man who carried a poem in his pocket for reference. Well, didn’t people often hide who they were for fear of rejection? And what else could a sensitive man be expected to do in a town and a time like this?

  So India reasoned. And had a lot to think about.

  “It is the small things that interest a woman in a man,” says Lam Fan sagely. “How he puts his hands in his pockets, how he wears his hat or uses his fork. These tell her more than his words do. Everything else she learns of him is seen through that perspective. Much is excused, much is forgiven if in these small things he is truly, originally himself.”

  “And Sing Yuen, Fan, what was it that he did that you liked?” I ask.

  She stops to think as we come abreast of Hope Island, heading straight for the swell of Nahwitti Bar. The bar extends right across the western entrance of Goletas Channel, and on its southern part are the Tatnell Reefs. The waves aren’t breaking there yet, and I think it will be safe to cross. We are keeping Hope Island at a distance of half a mile.

  “There were many things,” she says at last with a smile. “He dressed beautifully, he would do his shirts himself if the laundry didn’t get them right, but his arms were short: he wore armbands to keep the sleeves up, and he always carried a toothbrush. He had the nicest teeth of any man I’ve known. He was proud of his strength, and he could run very fast. He liked to run barefoot, and he used to race me home when we had the farm.”

  She thinks for a moment. “Yes,” she says, “the first time I saw him, saw him to notice him, I mean, he was running towards me barefoot in snow.”

  Sing Yuen: my stepmother’s husband, who too soon went out of my life, who had come this late afternoon to meet my mother on the water side of Store Street, where men in permanent hibernation lived in shacks made of packing cases, closed off, with the humiliation of their lives, from the rest of the world by a few strips of old blankets. The wind fluttered the blankets like tattered flags, and let out pale fibres of dust.

  India and Sing Yuen, trailed by Robert Haack, who had attached himself to them, entered one of these makeshift lodgings and found a group of men sitting on an ice-covered floor around a small pile of leaves, which one man was attempting to blow alight. Another man was being shaved by a companion, and another lay on straw, smoking a pipe. They nodded politely to Sing Yuen, but had eyes for the food in his hands. In a corner, a man wrapped in rags and newspapers tried to hide the rat he’d been skinning with his fingers. His limbs were swollen with dropsy.

  India had been here before, but it was Robert Haack’s first time, and he could not control his revulsion. How close he had come, he thought, living in the Chatham Street shack, to this. How little there was now, in fact, to keep up the difference. It was a fine line. And the question was—as he looked around remembering his troubles: the overwhelming debt, the thin string of income he counted on, plus Yong Sam’s collectors, and the potential of the Association to do him harm—how long would he have, if disaster struck, before he crossed it?

  Since the basis of starvation is no money, and even worse than no money is overwhelming debt. He saw for the hundredth time in memory the paper he had signed in the gambling house. He heard the judge in the courtroom pronounce his fine. He had no idea how he’d pay it. Not that any of this was news, but he was seeing the probable future in front of his eyes.

  It was a tableau he bitterly feared, and excusing himself with a lie—some matter to do with Mr. Redford—he eased himself out of the room. And once outdoors stood immobilized with his head in his hands.

  But since, in this world at least, it is up to every man to help himself, and since Robert Haack was desperate, casting about for any way out of the straits he foresaw for himself, in the shock of seeing men his own age bent double and toothless, a door of possibilities that he had firmly kept shut, now opened a crack.

  It wasn’t much. It was the tiniest shift of emphasis, but suddenly every experience he’d had that day began to add up.

  The anonymous letter he’d had to write for Noah Shakespeare; his excuses to India; even the flowers he’d stolen from Mrs. Lush. Humiliations forced upon him one after the other. And what was the answer? How could he be free of this prison of poverty that was hindering his movements?

  He wasn’t positive, but he believed he might have glimpsed it through the window of the Tai June opium factory a few hours earlier.

  Opium, Fan. And we should know about that.

  —

  We have crossed Nahwitti Bar without incident, emerging from the shelter of the east coast of Vancouver Island to feel the full thrust of the open Pacific Ocean on our bows. I am steering northwest, into Queen Charlotte Sound, for the long crossing to the Queen Charlotte Islands and our destination, Rose Harbour. Although I am wary of this stretch of sea, for in a storm the big ocean swells roll in through the gap between northern Vancouver Island and the Charlottes, strike the ocean shelf, and rise up in tremendous steep seas, fifty feet high. But I am glad to be free of coastal navigation, out in the clear, watching the weather, which is blowing in from the northwest, and riding the edge of the tidal stream, which flows north-northeastward into the sound.

  “Wh
at next, Robert Lam?” asks Fan, with her hand on the red dinghy, which is tied to the boom. Several Leach’s storm petrels are gliding and swooping, following our pointed stern.

  Hearing her question but not bothering to reply, since she knows the answer, my eyes tracking the petrels, I say, “Brings back old times, Fan. We used to see these same birds in the South Pacific, but they were darker there, I think. See the forked tail?”

  As I speak, the darkness of the birds that I remember becomes real and fills my eyes. There are pricks of light in this darkness, but they are not pleasant. Each is like a tiny electric shock. For minutes I am not sure of where I am, although I think I am still on my feet near the door of the wheelhouse. But my sense of balance is gone, and my stomach feels sick. Both these sensations feel strangely distant. And then the wings of the petrels brush my face. But how could that be?

  “Fan? Fan? Help me!” It is no dream I am dreaming, for I can feel the thrum of the Rose’s engine hum through my body, and I have the sense that, pilotless, we are turning in circles. The wings brush my cheeks again, and, blind and helpless, I am afraid the birds will go for my eyes.

  “Fan? Fan?” As my vision slowly clears I see the solid fir planking of the Rose below my nose. I don’t know where on the boat I am, for I cannot turn my head. “Fan?” I call again, but I am aware of how useless this is. I am alone on the ocean. No ghost can help me. And I am suddenly not a man in his prime but elderly, full of physical frailties and dreadfully afraid. What if I don’t recover, or what if I don’t recover in time? There are rocks and reefs, there is the ocean itself which forgives neither innocence nor accident, and we are not far enough from land to escape the risk of running aground. We could be minutes from help, or weeks.

  —

  The deck of the Rose is comforting, smooth as skin and warm from the cloud-filtered sunlight, and so, because I have no choice, I rest, feeling my body on the warm planking turn as cold as though I had fallen overboard. Stinging cold; an abrasive cold that only the cold sea brings. And then there is a voice, quiet at first, but soon loud enough to stir my blood and thaw the icicles in my veins. My ghost hasn’t left me at all; she is doing what she can. She sings to me.