Chou You took the stick from her, but his hands, they found, were too weak to hold it for long. India wrapped the line around his wrist, and Chou You bobbed his arm contentedly up and down as she’d shown him. Suddenly, the line went taut and You fell to his knees. Slowly, inexorably, he began to slide down the rocks towards the sea. Frantically, India grasped him around the waist, at the same time struggling to unwrap the line from his wrist. Blood flowed down Chou You’s arm where the line sawed at it, and his terrified eyes pled with her as the weight of the heavy, thrashing fish proved too much for his light, fragile body. He was on the last lip of the outcrop when someone splashed into the water near them and cut through the line with a knife.
It took both of them, Ng Chung who had come to their rescue, and India, to manoeuvre Chou You out of the water. His wrist had been opened to the bone by the bite of the line.
When he could speak, for the effort had cost him much and his contracted hands were bleeding from the way he had had to hold the knife, Ng Chung said, “You should have known what would happen. We never fish for this very reason. When will you understand that we are not strong men? The things that others can do are dangerous for us. You have almost cost Chou You his life, and me mine. It is only by chance that I saw you both and came to see what you were doing. You should not have stayed here. You should have gone when the supply boat came.
“Now I shall have to take Chou You and dress his wound. We are short of bandages, we have no medicines, and Sim Lee and I are the only ones who can bandage the others. When we become too ill, there will be no one.”
It was the longest speech she had ever heard him make.
“I will help you,” she said to him, helping to carry Chou You across the sand. “I will do everything I can.” But Ng Chung did not answer. In fact he did not speak to her again for three months.
—
Time on an island. Where there are no distractions from its basic message—that is, that lime lasts forever; for there are no distinctions between one day and another; there is no way to measure.
And time itself: a powdery, wind-blown ash spreading along magnetic lines to the rim of the universe. It stands still, with the faintest shimmer on its surface like a sugary spill of stars; it resists the centrifugal thrust that tears at mountains, oceans, horizons. It slides away, disappears in a blink.
There was the ritual of making tea in the morning. There was her walk. There were meetings with the lepers and talks. She helped them with their dressings when they let her; she assisted with the garden, digging when they couldn’t, hoeing and weeding, washing the blood from the tools after Sim Lee and Ng Chung—the only ones still with the strength—had finished their work.
It should have been perfect, shouldn’t it? For where else would a reformer find such a place to work? It was a model of things to be done: of vegetables to be harvested and stored against the winter; of wood to be cut and stacked; of lectures to be given on hygiene and sanitation—for India, if nothing else, was Major Thackery’s daughter.
And it was true that the lepers were cleaner, more settled: for it was hard to resist this woman who promised them hope. Impossible, at least for a season, not to believe in her magic.
Although the truth was that Ah Chee was now helpless, and Kong Ching Sing could take only liquids; that Chou You’s wrist had never healed, and that Nap Sing, who had remained in a depression, wrote for hours, forming the same few characters over and over again with his brush, and not showing his work to anyone.
Of the other two, Ng Chung and Sim Lee, only Sim Lee would communicate. And the truth was that between my mother and the lepers there was tremendous distance.
—
We have sailed out of Tahsis Inlet and into Nootka Sound, passing Marvinas Bay as we coast down the western shore. It was here that the weapons maker Jewitt was captured from the American ship Boston by Chief Maquinna, remaining as a slave in captivity for two years. His account, written originally in berry juice, was eventually published. Despite his sufferings and the murder of his companions, Jewitt and Maquinna eventually became friends.
“Friends!” says Fan, in astonishment. “But the chief treated him brutally! He was beaten and forced to work, wasn’t he?”
“Well, yes,” I say, “but in the end it was Maquinna who saved Jewitt’s life.”
“Oh, life,” says Fan dismissively. “You make too much fuss about it. You want to hang on to it at any cost. More wicked people have gone on to justify their bad deeds because they have survived and have written books about it than you can count. The good die young, truly, as it is said.”
“Really, Fan?”
“Yes,” she answers. “It is an old Chinese proverb.” And she smiles.
“Then why do you think you lived so long yourself?”
“To trouble you, Robert Lam,” she says.
We chug on south past Nootka wharves, where the cannery and pilchard-reduction plant are, and at which are also a post office and telegraph system. We are in Cook Channel.
“I’d like to stop at Friendly Cove, Fan,” I say. “There is something I want to take a look at there.”
“You don’t need my permission for anything you do,” she says primly. And then, after a minute, adds, curiously, “What is it?”
“You’ll see,” I tell her. And shut my lips.
—
My mother, on D’Arcy Island, as the summer passed and the weather worsened. As she saw the results of her labours come to nothing. For she could not do it all herself. Dig a new latrine, carry water, chop wood, mend the roof, sew clothes, cook, clean, act as nurse. She was only human, after all, and there was too much work. And the lepers, who had watched her closely and had seen her energy run out, learned a lesson that they had learned before and had only briefly forgotten. That you cannot change the way things are; you cannot redeem the past; that there was nothing left for them in life.
They were waiting. For the slow exchange of cells in their bodies to come to a halt. For decay to set in. For spirits to sink and minds to turn inwards upon themselves. For nothing to happen.
However you looked at it, there were limitations.
Poor India. Who was doing what she had been taught to do, which was to work. Work that nourished, that was a reformer’s raison d’être and means to progress. And that wasn’t enough.
—
And so the summer went. In the garden, cabbages that had been planted too late began to shrivel, and carrots turned wormy; and in the sky ducks grouped up in vees and started to practise for the coming long journey. It was autumn, with its gathering storms and its rain clouds high and lowering. Alder and maple leaves skirled in the wind, and small animals began to prepare their burrows: it was time for change.
One morning, as a cold sun softened the early gloom, and after she’d built her fire and washed and dressed and set out on her walk along the shoreline, India spied a carcass washed in at the tideline. She thought, at first, that it was a deer, for these often drowned as they attempted to swim between islands. And she began to plan what she would do with it. For such a gift—meaning meat as well as a skin for tanning—was a welcome event on the island. And it would give her a chance to contribute something. She had learned enough, she thought, to skin it herself, and she could certainly butcher the meat. And it would give her an answer of a sort for Nap Sing, who had said to her the day before, “If it weren’t for you I would have died this summer. Now I shall have to suffer all winter.” For it was true that those who would have perished quickly of infection or malnutrition now, because of her interference, would die more slowly from their illness. It was up to her to make the time they had left as pleasant as possible.
And although no one else had said anything, she had begun to wonder if perhaps it wouldn’t have been better, and certainly easier for all concerned, if she’d never arrived on the island.
And so, plagued by doubts as to what she was doing, India drew near to the deer, which as she came up to it began to change i
ts aspect. It was the size and shape of a man, and it was clothed in rags the colour of driftwood. It lay on its side with its feet pulled close in to its body. Its hands covered its face, and as she bent over it she could hear its shallow breathing.
It was only when Sim Lee and Ng Chung, who had been watching from the veranda of their dwelling, came down to tell her to leave him alone, that she fully understood that what lay on the sand in front of her was a living man.
“How long has he been here? Why aren’t you doing anything?” she said to them as she struggled out of her jacket and tried to place it over him.
“Leave him alone,” Sim Lee repeated, putting out his hands to stop her. “You can do him no good.”
“But he needs help!” cried India. “Can’t you see that he’s dying?”
“We have already talked to him,” said Ng Chung, breaking his long silence to her. “He was put ashore last night by boat. He is a leper like us and wants to be left to die in peace. Please let him be.”
India looked at the two men who, although she felt she had come to know them a little, she could not comprehend. “I have to help him,” she said.
They regarded her coldly. “He has told us what he wished. He has begged us to let him drown when the tide comes in. It is his decision,” said Ng Chung.
“No,” she said firmly, “he is too ill to think for himself. We must do what we can to save him.”
“Who owns his life?” said Sim Lee angrily, glaring at her. “Is it me, is it you? I think it is the one thing he has left for himself. I think he knows what is best.”
But it is against all human instinct! she wanted to shout. It is as good as murder! But, in fact, she was not as sure of herself as she’d put out. Could doing nothing also be a form of love? Could helping someone actually be harmful if it went against that person’s desire? What about freedom of choice? What about someone’s right to direct his life for himself?
These questions, troubling in the extreme, beset her at this least opportune of moments. Work for progress, for evolution, for salvation: that’s what she had been taught. No one had ever suggested anything different.
And yet she hesitated. Watching the subtle rise of water over the land as the sea responded to the pull of the moon. Noting the dignified stillness of the dying man, the shift of light that made him take on the colouration of sand and appear to become part of it.
Ng Chung walked away from her. After a moment, so did Sim Lee. On the porch, Nap Sing was writing. Kong Ching Sing hummed a song. Chou You, nursing his wrist, rocked with his hatchet, and Ah Chee sat watching the horizon.
Never had she felt so alone, so tired of keeping the machinery going. What’s the point, she thought, if this is all there is to it, if doing nothing is the highlight.
The castaway, between dry, caked lips, murmured when she tried to give him a drink, “Go away. Please go away. In the name of Heaven, please leave me alone.”
And so the earth turned through its hours, and there was a slow cycling of temperature and weather as the lepers and India kept their vigil. As the sun tracked its secret path behind the clouds, and the magnet of gravity worked on the waters, as the waves rolled gently in, turning the dying man’s body round by quarters, lifting it, catching it, excluding it from the world of pain and suffering. And so, and so, he was drowned.
It was dusk. India sat alone in her cabin. The ducks had settled, the first owl cried. Although the embers of her fire still burned, India was cold. She shivered, but did not move to fetch her blanket.
She had let a man die when she could have intervened. That was the thought that tormented her. Although she was sure that, in the circumstances, what she’d done was right…. Although she could have held his hand (but he didn’t want to be touched!); or she could have insisted that the other lepers help her to move him (but they wouldn’t, they wouldn’t, and what then, anyway, except more time dying?). She could, at least, have found out his name. Round and round her thoughts went, sickening her. She could not eat. She could not sleep. Why? she asked, over and over. And then, even less helpfully, why me?
For it wasn’t fair that she should be on this island, wasting her talents where no one appreciated her; and it wasn’t right that she had no home and no family, that no one cared about her; that she had no job, no husband to comfort her, no child, no future to look forward to. Even if it had been her own choice. It wasn’t fair that she had to endure this grief.
For that’s the truth of it. That’s what had made her sick. Death. The waste of it.
(“No, Fan,” I say. “I think she just feels sorry for herself.”
“And you,” says Fan, “can you not find pity in your heart for her? You who have had so much? Who have never lost anyone you loved, let alone shed a tear for a stranger?”
“That’s not true! How can you say that!” I cry angrily. “What do you know about it, anyway? You were never there when I needed you.”
“You never let me be,” she says.
“That’s not so.”
“Yes, it is.”
“Please, Fan, let’s not argue.”
“Then what, Robert Lam? Do you think because the man was a leper he didn’t deserve your mother’s sorrow?”
“No!”
“Then what? Do you think that because she cannot get her way your mother has given up?”
“I’m not sure,” I say.
“She is sad,” says my stepmother. “But she is also angry. That’s how it is. As well, she is frightened. She did not know what death was before. She had never seen it come like that: welcomed, but surrendered to with a terrible struggle. Now she has seen it and she does not like it. She will have to sleep and heal herself.”)
—
Which is what she does: a long sleep from which she awakened empty and dreamless; and after which nothing had changed except that time had passed, and that within herself was a vast burden of indifference. And weariness.
India lay awake for a long time with her mind sheltered in blankness. Eventually, feeling a little better and motivated by hunger, and thinking that she had heard a noise nearby, she lit a candle and stepped outside. On the doorstep someone had left a bowl of rice, plus tea and warm water. She took the gifts inside. On picking up the rice bowl, she found, folded beneath it and wrapped in a piece of oiled paper, several notes. There were words—Chinese characters—formed with a brush. She recognized Nap Sing’s ink.
She put the paper aside. Washed her hands and face, ate the rice, drank the tea, then went back to bed. Unable to sleep, once more she got up and lit the candle. Then she settled down—not out of curiosity, but out of a lingering sense of duty—to read what Nap Sing had written. It was a poem.
I am in prison because I covet riches.
Driven by poverty I sailed here over the choppy sea.
Had I not had to labour for money,
I would already have returned home to China.
India blinked her eyes in surprise. She reread the words, made up and strung together by a Chinese leper on an island at the edge of the Pacific—words that insisted that Nap Sing accepted his fate with reluctance, and that he wanted things to have meaning—with increasing pleasure.
Why, in this he was just like her! With his disappointment and looking backwards: but here there was also form and beauty.
India examined the next page, tears polishing her face as she read.
My Wife’s Admonishment
You go abroad to seek wealth because we are poor.
In your sojourn, do not sow your wild oats.
Before you departed, I enjoined you to remember
That you have a wife and children at home.
Please work diligently and be frugal with money.
Two years hence, return home to sweep your ancestor’s tomb.
Remember, our backs are bare;
Not half a cup of rice can be scooped from the pot;
All our houseware is worn and torn;
Our house is dilapidated.
/> Your gambling has driven us to poverty.
In tears, I beg you to repent.
You are fortunate to have an older brother to pay your head tax.
Always, remember your gratitude to him.
All the letters not sent, she thought. Conversations not had, love not experienced. Duty, admonition, pity. They were all here. It was a mystery: for the sadness of the poems brought her relief. They were a victory over time itself, since words repeated—forever—the patterns of existence. They were an answer—possibly the only one she would ever have—to the unsolvable problem of what had happened earlier.
Inadequate, perhaps. A clutching at straws. But it soothed my mother’s feelings that night as she sorrowed over her helplessness, and the fate of herself and others, the fate of the world. In which a man, even a nameless leper, could be left on an island with not a thought given as to his welfare.
She wept for hours. For Nap Sing, who had written the poems, and who had not the protection of ignorance; for his family, who would never know how he felt. For all that was lost in the realm of failures and triumphs. For the fact that no one outside would know of the poems’ existence.
They were grieving, healing tears. And they reminded her, at length, that there was nothing in all creation that couldn’t be reinterpreted and made into beauty if that was what one wanted, if one had the art: and that creation was impartial with its own implacable purpose. That there was more to life than progress, there was life itself.
—
We have arrived at Friendly Cove, near the entrance to Nootka Sound. It is situated “close north of Yuquot Point and sheltered from the sea by the San Miguel Islands,” as the pilot book says. It is not an especially good anchorage, being used by the Indians only during the summer (the name of their village, “Yuquot,” means exposed to the winds).
There is, situated at the north end of the village, which itself is on a small space of clear, cultivated, flat land at the head of the cove, a church and connection to the general telegraph and telephone systems. More importantly, it was not far from this village that the Nootka Indians (as Captain Cook mistakenly called them—they were actually Moach-ahts, or, people of the deer) prepared for the whale hunt. It is this place I have come to see.
To All Appearances a Lady Page 25