To All Appearances a Lady

by Marilyn Bowering

  “You know what happened to your mother, Robert Lam?”

  The voice, deep under the water where I am falling, darkened by the shadow of the body of the whale above me, reaches me clearly. “Yes,” I whisper.

  “Tell me,” says Fan.

  “No, I cannot.”

  “Then look, Robert Lam, as the cord is stretched across her neck and he falls on top of her. She had nowhere to hide, Robert Lam. She had no chance. She could not even scream as the muscles of her struggling arms and legs gave way. As he spread his weight upon her, not out of lust, Robert Lam, but just like you, out of fear of death.

  “Do you think that she could be comforted, reasoned with, explained to? What did you say, Robert Lam, a husk? Yes, that’s it. There was nothing left.”

  “No, no, Fan,” I cry, fighting to get away from her, for she is holding me under, in the bloody swirling icy ocean. With the surface blacked out and the bottom a hundred and fifty metres below.

  “Oh, no, Fan,” I say, “but you still don’t understand what happened. There is more, I have to tell you!”

  “What,” she says, “more than the death of the spirit? For the spirit is what gives us choice, and without it we are nothing. Nothing at all.”

  “I know, I know. But, please, Fan, please don’t lecture, let me go before I die. I am begging you.”

  “No, Robert Lam, not yet. You have to see what she saw, feel what she felt, suffer her annihilation. And the pain, Robert Lam, we must not forget the pain.”

  Or Oung Moi Toy as he knelt on the dirt floor of my mother’s crude house with her woman’s body splayed out beneath him. As behind him there were steps, and two frail men joined hands on the knife that Oung Moi Toy had dropped as he fled, as they plunged it—Ng Chung and Sim Lee did—through the muscles and ribs of Moi Toy’s back.

  And the giant released his hold at last.

  Or how, when I had finished with that girl, and was smiling at her, imagining presents, a bolt of cloth to brighten up that dusty room furnished with beer crates; or maybe a set of combs to nest in her thick black hair; and money, of course, some money…a thin old woman entered that room.

  She looked at us. The girl rigid and bleeding on the floor, and me with my pants hanging down around my boots.

  She did not say a word, Fan. She went to the girl and kissed her while I grinned foolishly. Then she pulled a curtain aside from the closet. And all in one motion—I swear I couldn’t have stopped it—she brought out a gun, an old service revolver, I can’t think where she’d have got it, and shot the girl and then herself.

  And so there are some acts beyond forgiveness, that play themselves over as long as forever. There are some that can’t be faced without losing the world as we know it; all that’s worth it.

  My mother lying under the dead weight of Oung Moi Toy’s body. Myself, moving too late to stop the grandmother. Too late. For you cannot push time back even a step, Fan. It cannot end, and there is nothing I can do to amend it.

  She is holding onto my hand. “Time to swim for it, Robert Lam, you still can do it. You just might make it. But don’t breathe yet, look up, look up!”

  Yet, even now, holding on to my stepmother’s hand as she drags me to the surface of a blood-filled ocean, I hear the echo of an earlier judgement.

  And I want to die a thousand times for the shame of it. But can’t.

  TEN

  A light is exhibited at an elevation of seventy feet from a red lantern on a white pole set in a square concrete base, situated on the southeastern side of an island at the western side of the entrance of Refuge Cove.

  There is a wharf in a small bay situated on the eastern side of the cove, about a mile northward of Sharp Point, where there is a post office, known as Hot Springs Cove, and which is connected to the general telegraph and telephone systems. Diesel oil and gasoline are procurable. The local steamer calls regularly. There is an Indian Village on the western side of Refuge Cove, about half a cable north-northwestward of the light.

  Anchorage.—Good anchorage, well sheltered and secure from all winds, may be had in the position indicated on the chart, at from three-quarters to one mile within the entrance.

  BRITISH COLUMBIA PILOT, VOLUME 1

  “Did he give you anything to eat?” Lam Fan asks me as she helps me along the trail.

  “Who, Fan? I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I say, grimacing with pain at the cramps in my stomach. I walk hunched over, with scarcely the strength to lift my feet over the edges of the rough boards, laid end to end, that form a path through the mud. The odour of skunk cabbage is pervasive. Giant ferns, devil’s club, and salal are tangled to head height, forming impenetrable walls on both sides of us. There is light somewhere high above, but it falls in fragments through the thick roof of rain forest.

  “The boy,” she says impatiently. “The one who brought you back to the Rose at Friendly Cove.”

  “I don’t know,” I say, wishing she would stop bothering me. Then faintness and pain bring me down to my knees, and I spend a miserable ten minutes vomiting over and over into a mess of fir needles, pine cones, and fallen branches that have wedged between tree rounds placed as stepping stones in a small, dribbling stream.

  When I feel better and can get to my feet, I try to answer her question. “I don’t see how it could have been him, Fan. We all ate the same food in the house, tea and biscuits. It tasted fine to me.”

  “Think, Robert Lam. Are you sure he gave you nothing else to eat or drink at all?”

  “Nothing else?” I try to concentrate, ignoring the nausea that promises to surface if I admit its existence. I lean my back against an ancient cedar and lift my face to the faint patches of light that mottle the shade. “After tea we visited the church,” I tell her, reciting our itinerary, “walked past the cemetery and beach, then arrived at the lake. The next thing I remember is that I was dancing.

  “You’re right, Fan,” I continue. “He could have given me something: I can’t remember anything after I first saw the lake until I heard him drumming. But why would he have given me poison?”

  “Not poison, Robert Lam,” she says, “but the drug the Indians took when they prepared to go whaling. Only they’d be used to it, or at least know how to deal with its effects. It might have been mushrooms, there are several kinds that produce the kind of visions you experienced.” She looks amused. “You must have said something to annoy him.”

  “I believe we reached an understanding, Fan,” I say frostily. “It’s not the sort of thing on which you’d be an expert.”

  She says nothing, but continues to smile like she knows what happened better than I do.

  We stumble ahead, splashing through mud and water when the trail breaks down, tripping over knots of roots and negotiating roadblocks set by fallen trees. They are enormous, some of them, and seem to be sleeping under a primitive spell like giants in a fairy tale; they put us in our places by their scale.

  “Keep walking,” Fan encourages me when I want to stop. “It’s not much further. We’re almost there.”

  I groan, crumple at the knees again, vomit for another interminable length of time, then, as she badgers me to move, once more stagger to my feet.

  This time I ask the question that has been on my mind for hours. “What did I actually do, Fan?” I say. “It couldn’t have been what I thought I was doing. You said yourself they were hallucinations, visions. But something must have happened.”

  “You mean on the Rose? Last night?”

  “Of course,” I say. “What else would I be talking about?”

  “You don’t remember?” she says, surprised.

  “It’s like I said. I remember, all right, but it doesn’t make sense. I don’t understand it.” I am about to say more when, like a wall of water rushing down a dry river bed, I find I am overwhelmed with feeling. My voice is choked with tears; and I stand there in the midst of the forest—with the faint sound of the sea thrumming in the air—and begin to weep. “I’m sorry, Fa
n,” I say, wondering why it is that my heart has broken open now, “I’m sorry, oh, so sorry.” And although I’m ashamed of my blubbering, of the animal wailing that bounces back and forth between the walls of bush and forest, there is nothing I can do to stop it. I am hugging myself as if I thought my bones might fly apart, and I am rocking. “Maa….” I sob. “No….” For I am a prisoner of two pictures vivid in my mind: two women, both innocent, both violated and blood-stained. One with the body of Oung Moi Toy stretched out on top of her, and the other with a dazed man looming nearby; a man who has shut his eyes to what he’s done, and so looks puzzled at all the blood and death he’s caused. Me. Robert Lam. Myself.

  Fan touches her long, cool fingers to my cheek. I feel the glass-smooth polish of her nails. “Come on, Robert Lam,” she says, softly, “come on. It is too late for crying.”

  And so I unlock my arms from around myself, wipe my eyes, and follow after her, until the path dries out and the walls of bush and forest diminish in height and depth, and the thrum of the sea divides itself into the regular stroke of waves flooding ashore. Until Fan, gingerly pushing aside a spike of blackberry canes, announces, “Here we are.”

  The ground falls away at our feet to a ragged, grassy edge of beach. To our left, a slight greasy stream disgorges into a scummed rock basin. Fumes, sulphurous and thick, roil above the surface of the greenish water.

  “Come on,” says Fan again, “you can’t really see it from here.” She steps across the basin to a rocky ledge. Once through the curtain of steam we look out at clear blue water and to the deep green islands of Clayoquot Sound. The serrated silhouette of their forests is laid like paint over the washed-out blue of the sky. The little stream runs clear, showering down into a deep ravine that, at the bottom of three pools, is open to the sea.

  “Clothes off,” says Fan.

  “What’s that?” I say.

  “Your clothes,” she repeats. “Take them off and get into the water.” Obediently, although reluctantly, I begin to strip.

  “Are you coming in?” I ask her. But she does not answer, keeping her head turned away out of decency.

  “One thing I want to know, Fan,” I say as I am lowering my pants and exposing my hairless legs and voyaged-in underwear to the critical view of Nature, “were there actually whales in that ocean? There must have been some level of reality to the visions, mustn’t there? I couldn’t have made them up out of air.”

  “Yes,” she says briefly.

  “Yes, what? They were real or I made them up?”

  “There were whales in the ocean, many of them. Now it’s time to get into the pool.”

  “But even if the whales were there,” I persist, “I couldn’t have killed one, could I?”

  “No,” she says, urging me, shivering, forward to the lip of the rock, and over. There is a pause, just long enough for me to commit myself to the descent, before she adds, “That is, not exactly.”

  I stop, one foot gripping a fractional ledge, the other waving unsupported in air. “Either I did or I didn’t, which is it?”

  “Why must everything be spelled out for you,” Lam Fan complains wearily as she has before. “That’s the trouble with you pilots. You think that facts are all that matter. You never know what’s really going on.” She sighs.

  “You raped a girl, and her grandmother killed that girl and herself out of grief,” she says without regard for my freshly wakened feelings, pressing on my arms to force me down the face of that cliff. “The girl didn’t matter to you at all, except as something you had done to hurt yourself,” she says. “She was real enough—but what about you? Were you? Are you? That’s the question I ask myself. What kind of man can do a thing like that and cover it up?”

  She says this academically. As I slip and slide and scrape my chest down that rock.

  “An ignorant man; a foolish one,” I answer. “One who is ashamed of himself.” I say it as if she has the key to the heart of the matter. She tries these on in her mind.

  “Perhaps,” she admits. “Your mother was a sensitive woman, and your father was…”

  “My father?”

  She smiles at me shyly and shuts up.

  “Well,” she says, after a moment’s thought, “we won’t go through all that again. What counts is what happens next. And shame is the strongest emotion.”

  “Stronger than love?”

  She looks sad and nods.

  “But what about the whales, Fan?” I ask again, inching my way into the pool under her spurring. “You haven’t answered my questions.”

  “Did you believe in them?” she asks.

  “More than anything before in my life,” I say fervently, thinking of the great, dark forms that had filled me with terror as I fought for my life in the blood-coloured ocean.

  “And the girl? Do you see what you must have been to her? You’d have made as much sense to her as a nightmare. Less, in fact.”

  I think about this as I gather my courage to sink my buttocks in the steaming-hot water. “Yes,” I say finally, “I wish I had gone to her funeral, or knew where she was buried. I wish I’d had the courage to face up to it. I’d still like to do something. Although I don’t know quite what it could be, after all this time,” I finish lamely. I stare at my feet, the toes bobbing up and down in the jet from the spill of hot water.

  “You should have gone to jail, you know,” says Fan. “Instead you carried your prison inside you. But from now on, every time you think of one—the whales or the girl or her grandmother—you will think of the other. You will see the blood on your hands for what it is. You will know that it is you, Robert Lam, who throws the harpoon head at the whales and puts the gun in the old women’s hand.

  “Can you live with that?” she asks me.

  Can I? I wonder. I have avoided it for over fifteen years. I can never forget it now, Lam Fan has made sure of that. But to live with it? I cannot take the heat of the topmost pool for very long, and so I slide down into the relative coolness of the next basin. Where, as the water loses its relativity, I’m still not comfortable. Self-consciously, apologetically, I ease my way to the coolest of pools. As Lam Fan laughs.

  I lie back with the hot mineral water soothing my spine and neck and the cool ocean currents washing against my legs. Lift and drop, hot and cold. As the hot water floods to the ocean and the ocean surges in. And all the knots of pain and sickness flow out of my body as if they could never return. And I think of absolutely nothing.

  “Ready?” says Fan quietly.

  “Hm?” I murmur. “For what?”

  “I’ve a story to tell you,” she says.

  “Oh, no, Fan,” I cry at once, my eyes flying open in alarm and my muscles tightening up. I feel the sobs, deep in my belly, beginning to gather again. “Not now, please, I couldn’t take it. Please, not yet!” I look around wildly as if for an exit.

  She grins, stretching the parchment skin tight across her cheekbones. “It has nothing to do with you, Robert Lam,” she says. “It is an old, old story, it is just to relax you.”

  “What’s it about, then?” I say mistrustfully, fluttering my toes up and down nervously.

  “You have heard the first part before, many years ago, when you first came home from the war. I told it to you then, though I’m not sure you were listening. It is the story of Lo Bing, the Chinese warrior. But it is the end of the story, after he gets to be an old fellow like you, that I want to tell you now. He feels the same inside him as when he was a young man. Only his body has changed, nothing else about him.”

  “I’m still not sure, Fan,” I say with a hint of whining. “I’m doing just fine. It’s nice to be quiet for once.” My voice is quavering. Fan, afraid of nothing, finds my fearfulness amusing.

  “Please don’t tell me anything that will upset me,” I plead. “Let me enjoy this place in peace. Later, perhaps, when I feel more ready.”

  “Hush,” says Fan. “Don’t be such a weakling. I am not going to frighten you, I promise. Haven’t I alw
ays been your friend?”

  And so she begins.

  Although I lose the first part of the story because I am thinking. A friend. Which is certainly what I need. A friend who will not probe or question. Who neither accuses nor is overly sympathetic. A friend who will help me find my way myself. For I will have to find a path around the name calling and recriminations, the punishment I’ve been giving myself, to recover the world of alternate possibilities I have long done without; to uncover truth and expose lies, to float my mind on a sea of ideas and find a home in them; to know that I have been on the wrong side of evil, and that life is not a fairy tale with a happy ending round the corner, but still to make a contribution, to be forgiven, to forgive myself and put it in the past.

  For it does no good to think about it. To weigh up costs and consequences time after time—for these take their toll regardless; or to make resolutions and determine to endure—for what else is there?

  And I see, as I lie in that hot and cold water, watching the thin wisps of cloud melt from the sky, and with a ghost at my elbow droning on and on, that all the time I have ignored what happened, have refused to consider it or let it touch my life, I have been thinking of nothing else. That everything I have done since the day I saw that woman, and since the Silverbell went down, has been done because of that single event, the mistake of my life.

  Ashamed of who I am. Of my name. Of what I am capable of doing. Of getting to know another human being. Of giving up secrets. Of telling the truth.

  And so it is time, past time, to make plans and be cured of this self-indulgence. Not to pretend it didn’t happen, no, just the reverse. To change. So Lo Bing will do for a start.

  “What’s that, Fan, what is it you’re saying?” I interrupt her.

  Patiently, more patiently than I recall her ever having been with me before, she begins the story over. And I say goodbye to that youthful self who has stood so long in my way, and that young man cries, as he’s leaving, knowing he can never come back, “There’s no telling what might come up, now you’ve left yourself open, now you’ve lost your protection.”