To All Appearances a Lady

by Marilyn Bowering

  “What do you think is the matter?” said Ng Chung worriedly to his older friend. “She has not been like this before. She seems sad. I can’t put my finger on it.”

  Sim Lee indicated the Japanese fishing boats riding calmly at anchor. Their lines clinked gently against their masts. “She wants to leave us, and she doesn’t know how to say it,” he said. “She feels badly about it. She doesn’t understand it herself.”

  Ng Chung regarded the boats as if he had failed earlier to read their meaning and now saw what they threatened. “Do you really think so?” he asked. “Has she said anything about it to you privately?”

  Sim Lee shook his head. “No, but I am sure that I am right,” he said. “Ever since she saw the boats she has been restless. It is finished for her. And now that she wishes to go, we must help her. We don’t have to know why,” he said simply, “for she is our friend.”

  “But I can’t understand it,” Ng Chung persisted. “Haven’t we suffered together and given each other strength? Haven’t we, as much as can be, been happy, all of us?” He looked down at his hands, which were clenched in his lap. “It’s been almost like being a family,” he said.

  “Your family is in China,” said Sim Lee sharply. “Even if you have forgotten them, she hasn’t.” He looked away from his friend as if he had said too much.

  Ng Chung, willing the muscles of his fingers to open a fraction, picked up his hat, which lay in the sand beside him, and kneaded its brim. He said nothing.

  “Happiness is not an animal to be trapped and killed,” said Sim Lee quietly to him as India returned with the wood. “You cannot keep it in chains beside you while you decide what to do with it.”

  India placed the kindling on the embers, then blew until the flames caught. Carefully she laid on larger pieces of wood. She sat down stiffly between the two men. She blew on her hands to warm them.

  As to what had made the hole she felt in her heart—an emptiness that kept her from sleep at night—and as to what could fill it, whether poetry or love or art—or nothing at all on this earth—she was frightened to think. Sim Lee put his arm around her shoulder.

  “The cultivation of feelings,” he said thoughtfully, “is the greatest of human arts. It is of this you are speaking, I think. You have worked very hard for seven years. Hard work alone is not enough to nourish a life. I am sorry you have not found what else you need with us. Nap Sing, our poet friend, would have understood at once.”

  “Perhaps,” suggested Ng Chung, who had been listening attentively, “it is because you are a woman and have no children….” He seemed not to know how to continue this thought. He put his hat on the ground. He picked it up again and turned it by the brim, round and round.

  India, who had lifted her head at these words and had waited for more, said at last into the prolonged tense silence, “I feel tired. I think I will go to bed now.” And she walked away, with lowered eyes, into the darkness.

  The silver oblongs of the fishing boat lanterns along the water danced and dazzled. Sim Lee sighed. “Tomorrow,” he said to Ng Chung, with his eyes upon the lights, “we will talk to the fishermen. I think they will do what we want. They are kind men at heart.”

  “She will never come back,” said Ng Chung, gazing at the cold expanse of water he could never cross. “If she leaves she will forget all about us. We have forgotten the truth. We have forgotten the only thing that matters,” he said despairingly, “we are lepers and she is not.”

  —

  “Wake up, Robert Lam, wake up, I say!” My stepmother, Lam Fan, is shouting in my ear.

  “I can hear you, Fan, please speak more gently,” I say with a shudder. Suddenly, ice-cold water splashes into my face, and, like it or not, I am wide awake.

  “You didn’t have to be so brutal, Fan,” I splutter. But then my mouth flops open, and no more words come out. We are a hair’s breadth away from a sandspit. The Rose is running in circles, drawing ever closer to the shallows. We are just inside a light buoy, painted black, on which a green light should be flashing and isn’t, and which is moored, I see when I run to the chart, on the southern side of the eastern end of Heynen Channel. The sandspit forms the northeastern tip of Stubb’s Island.

  “That was close, Fan,” I say, wiping the sweat from my brow once we are safe. My heart is pounding and I am experiencing, from the stress, some moments of double vision.

  Fan, sallow-faced, refrains from comment until I bring the Rose round again right up to the buoy.

  “What’s wrong with you, Robert Lam! What are you doing now?”

  “Don’t worry, Fan, I’m about to perform a public service. Someone else will get in trouble if that light isn’t fixed. Whoever should be looking after it has fallen down on the job. You stay here, and I’ll just have a look.”

  “The light had nothing to do with it!” she shouts as I jump from the deck of the Rose, which is idling in neutral, onto the buoy. “You fell asleep! For heaven’s sake, what’s wrong with you! How will you get back on?”

  “Don’t worry, Fan,” I say. “I know what I’m doing.” I flourish the rope, tied to the Rose, that I’m holding. “When I need to get back on-board, I’ll pull her in.” I knot the rope to a crossbrace and begin to examine the fixture. A wire has come loose. It should take me a short time to fix it.

  When the light is flashing satisfactorily, I turn around. The rope, still tied securely at this end, has fallen slack. The Rose, drifting into the channel with the current, is about a hundred feet away. “Fan, come back!” I shout. “You can’t go without me!” She waves, a small, bleak figure in the bow, a solemn farewell.

  Cursing, angrier than I can remember being in years at whatever carelessness has let that rope work loose, I dive into the frigid waters. It is summer, or I wouldn’t take the chance of swimming at all. In winter the cold water can kill you in less than ten minutes. As it is, with the current carrying me in the direction I want, I should be able to catch up to the Rose.

  Stroke, stroke, stroke, stroke, puff. I can almost hear the nasal voice—from years of infected sinuses—of my swimming instructor in my ears. “Rhythm, Lam. If you can sing to yourself, sing. It will help your endurance.” Swimming relay laps in the Crystal Gardens in Victoria during my childhood. While overhead the gymnasts swung out on trapezes and somersaulted through the air, catching each other by the tips of their fingers. Or missing and plummeting into the water on top of us. Swimming in the oil-slick waters of the Atlantic Ocean after the Silverbell went down. And swimming in my dreams, half drowning as I tried to hunt a whale.

  “Endurance, Lam! Don’t be a sissy!”

  Summer or not, the ocean cold is tugging at my heart. I glance up to see how much further the Rose has drifted, and view a scene my brain can scarcely credit.

  While I have been considering my swimming history, and counting out beats, a speedboat, with an outboard engine, has popped out from the Indian village of Opitsat, just south of Mission Point, and has placed a tow on the Rose. Just as I shout at him—a bellow of rage that couldn’t fail to reach him—the salvager guns his engine and shanghais my boat, departing in the direction of Tofino. I am so sick at heart that I almost panic. But getting a hold on myself, I tread water instead, tipping my head back to look at the sky, which is a benign, pacific blue. I watch the sky until a wave from the wake of the pirate boat splashes into my mouth, then I turn around and swim the long, cold way back to the buoy.

  It is not a very big purchase for a man of any size. Moreover I am wet, and not in the best of shape. My fingers and feet grow numb as I wait for someone to see me. Luckily, when they modernized the buoy they kept the original wooden float. Otherwise I’d be embracing this light from the water instead of balancing on it as if on a soap box.

  Clouds, which obscure the sun and increase my shivering to tremors, arrive in numbers. Sounds, which I think at first are powerboat engines, but which must be chain saws from the shoreline logging, wail in chorus. Vague grey shapes underwater circle the buoy to
which I am clinging. They say that the Japanese current used to come into the sound. They say that, not thirty years ago, there used to be sharks.

  Hours pass. The sun is on its afternoon descent when I hear the gruff alarm of the lifeboat engine. My clothes are dry, but now I am shaking from sunburn. The underside of my lips sticks to my teeth, and I taste blood when I open my mouth to cry, “Help! Please help me!”

  Strong hands lift me from the platform and into the boat. The hands wrap a blanket around me and give me water to drink. They put a wet cloth over my eyelids, which are swollen and caked with salt.

  “I thought it might be you, Lamb,” says a man as he tips a little more water into my mouth. “I heard you’d bought an old sea bucket and were somewhere around the coast. When I phoned in the registration the salvager brought in and they gave me your name, I couldn’t believe it. I thought you were going up north. Well, I said to myself, old Lamb must be out there swimming. So I called out the troops.”

  “Brian?” I said, lifting the cloth from my eyes. “Brian Chapman?”

  “None other,” he answers proudly. He gives me a slap on the back, which shakes my ribs. “Ha, ha, ha,” he guffaws, “that Indian bought himself nothing but trouble when he found your boat drifting. Ha, ha, ha. What the hell were you doing out there, anyway?”

  “The light,” I say, “it was broken and I stopped to fix it.”

  “Nobody bothers with that damned old thing. It always goes out. They say it’s haunted. Years ago a light attendant died out here from exposure. His boat drifted off while he was repairing it.” Chapman eyes me oddly. “Say,” he says suddenly, “the sun’s taken off your eyebrows, did you know that?”

  “Has it?” I say as fingers of fear count the bones of my spine. “But what about you? The last I heard of you, you were chief engineer for Imperial Oil. It must be some drop in pay, working the lifeboat.”

  Chapman’s large, florid face suddenly looks grim, as if a particular but well-known horror has appeared in front of him. “You know my boy,” he said, “the one who wanted to go to sea, just like me?”

  “I remember him,” I say. “We took him out once or twice in the pilot boat.”

  “He got on in the galley of the Petrel. They never should have taken him on, he was far too young. He didn’t tell me about it. He knew I’d object. I didn’t know he was on that ship until the police were at my door.”

  Chapman spits over the side of the lifeboat, now running through Deadman Passage on the way to Tofino. “Bloody steel hulls,” he says.

  The Petrel had gone down with all hands in a storm off Cape Mudge.

  Well,” says Brian, as if he could put the tragedy behind him, “it was another time and place. The wife wanted a change after that, and so we came up north. It’s not a bad life when you get right down to it.”

  We are close to the village now. I can see the public floats ahead.

  “Your lady’s anchored at the fish dock about a quarter mile from here,” says Chapman. “We’re not taking you there just yet.” The steersman is drawing up to the smaller of the public floats near the village.

  “Why not?” I ask. “Unless you’re volunteering to buy me a drink.”

  “I might,” says Chapman, grinning, “although I’d say it’s you that owes me one. First, though, we have to get you checked out.”

  “For Christ’s sake, you can see that I’m all right.”

  “I know, I know,” says Chapman, holding up his hand to silence me, then stepping onto the dock to secure the line. “Rules and regulations, Lamb. You know how it is. I gotta follow them. Once the doc at the hospital signs the sheet, we can do what we want.”

  —

  Seven years is a very long time. Not just for a woman on an island, but for a man in jail. For Robert Haack, to be exact, who had languished there since 1891 and who was about to be let out. Robert Haack: a man who had made a mistake and paid for it; who was sorry for what he had done; who was determined to recover what there remained of his life and to live it as a wiser, more reflective, less selfish-kind-of-person. A man who could learn from experience, and yet who was full of contradictions: guilty and yet innocent, naive and also cynical. A man who had determined what was important. A man who would never forget the woman he loved.

  Haack blinked in the dim light of the Victoria city jail cell—to which he’d been transferred from the red house on the hill—as he read over the papers that would shortly let him go. All seemed in order, as far as he could tell. What was more crucial, he told himself, was to remember the sequence of events that had brought about his downfall: the betrayal of the Workingmen’s Protective Association by his involvement with Chinese; the ensuing blacklist proclaimed by Noah Shakespeare; his gambling debt, still unsettled with Yong Sam; his partnership with Jimmy Carroll; Jimmy’s subsequent treason over the Tai June robbery; and, most important of all, the disappearance of India Thackery. Not a day had gone by of the long years in jail but that he had thought of her.

  “I must not do it again,” he told himself, folding up the release papers. “I’m a better man than I was.” But even he could sense the uncertainty in his thoughts. But what could one expect when he’d been so long by himself? For he had refused, as much as possible, to mix with the other inmates of the provincial jail—murderers and scoundrels that they were. Except for Starkey, a fellow American, who had been his friend until he escaped, climbing up onto the roof in his stocking feet, jumping to a lower roof, and leaping the twenty feet to the ground. Starkey, last seen by Haack as he dashed into the woods, and last seen by anyone as he had passed through Cloverdale Farm. Although it was said that he had turned up in Portland and committed a robbery.

  Starkey, who had known Smiling Jimmy, and who had sworn that Jimmy had told him about a woman, a woman he had kidnapped and who he’d certainly not killed—”I’ve never murdered a woman yet!” Jimmy had cried, offended at the very idea of it. “He had something to tell you,” Starkey told Haack. “He was going to send you a message in jail. He said it would make you suffer terribly, and that you deserved it.” Starkey, a small, well-built man who liked to dress neatly, blew his nose discreetly into his handkerchief. “He was a wicked one, that Jimmy,” he said, shaking his head over the memory of Jimmy. That was all. There were no further hints, that Starkey could recall, as to where the woman might be, but the message meant—Robert knew it in his heart—that India, at least up until the time Jimmy had died, had been alive.

  Once Starkey had vanished Haack had asked to be put on the chain gang that worked the streets of Victoria so he could at least keep acquaintance with the city to which he planned to return. He had seen too many men over the years no sooner out of jail than right back in because the world they reentered had left them behind. It would not happen to him. He would be prepared for whatever was out there. He would meet it on his terms.

  It was an early morning in the summer of 1898. Through the open, barred window Robert could hear the noise of shops unlatching their shutters. For close to the square in which the police station resided there were cigar stores, trunk shops, and gentlemen’s clothiers. And not far away was the customs house; from the field next to that there came the cacophony of barking dogs—hundreds of them, as he had seen during his work on the road gang, chained up or running loose or being trained by the men who had gathered to wait for the issuing of mining licences.

  Dogs to carry packs, dogs as companions; plus the forlorn wailing of pack mules braying.

  The outfitter’s goods had overflowed onto the boardwalks. B. Williams, Simon Leiser, Lenz and Leiser sold snowshoes and fur-lined parkas; and Pither and Leiser were the wholesale liquor dealers.

  Men—even at this time of the day, who had stumbled from tents pitched hastily by the harbour—crowded the streets. They piled onto the paddle wheelers and side-wheelers that were tied up at the Wharf Street docks; they wore high leather boots despite the heat, for they had invested all they had in the feverish enterprise that had racked the city ev
er since the news was first received of the Klondike gold strikes.

  Gold fever. That took sons away from parents, husbands from wives and children. That turned good men, churchgoing men, into gamblers and drinkers and frequenters of brothels.

  From his position of enforced abstinence in the city jail (even though soon to be released), Haack shook his head over these evildoers. First steps, as he had had the leisure to perceive in the last few years, were all-important. As soon as he got out, he would look for a job; and as soon as he had made some money he would search for India. Since the foundation of stability was work with regular hours, and the family was the fundamental element in making society bearable. He wanted to be part of these worlds. He wanted to be on the inside, not on the outside of all-important matters, as before, and always odd man out.

  Robert Haack, turning away from the window, took a fresh if somewhat vague grip on his newfound principles. He touched the oft-read poem in his pocket, presented to him by Robert Louis Stevenson, an author who had become more famous with each of his books: Treasure Island, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Kidnapped, The Master of Ballantrae, and so on; a very model of a man who had died, unfortunately, far too young, yet who had grown, year by year, in Robert Haack’s mind, to take the place of the friend and adviser he had never had. “If only we hadn’t lost touch,” Robert Haack often thought. As if more wise words from a poet would have changed his life.

  He was fatter, and his muscles had grown a little slack. His hair was not quite so bushy. But, as the jailer turned the key in the lock and ushered him out, Robert Haack’s broad, pale face was suffused with hope.

  He left the square and walked south down Government Street staring straight ahead, not allowing himself even a glance at the Garrick’s Head or the Grotto or the Central, where drinks were two for a quarter and there was no such thing as a measure. Drunks rolled out of one bar and into another; Haack stepped over and around them without taking thought. But as he continued, and grew gradually accustomed to the idea of freedom, he felt his neck muscles loosen. Soon his head was swivelling from side to side, taking in the life around him, the gentlemen out for a stroll or on their way to their offices; the women walking their children. He tipped his head back and gazed up at the opaque white sky of the hot summer’s morning. He emptied his lungs; he breathed air in. He did this again and again until he felt his blood to be purified of the prison atmosphere he had too long lived in.