“Furthermore,” Fan went on, her need to unburden herself surmounting the effects of the opium, “no one, not a European or Chinese, will give you a job in this town. You need to make money, Mr. Haack, but there is no way you can do it.”
Robert felt his hands trembling. He put his cup down on the tea tray with a rattle. “I know all this, Mrs. Sing,” he said. “What you say doesn’t help. I can only do my best. I give you my word that I am trying. I don’t need any more criticism. Lum Kee would have understood. He, at least, was my friend.”
“Lum Kee was everyone’s friend,” said Lam Fan abruptly. Robert looked at his knees.
“I will give you a chance to prove yourself,” said my stepmother. “You will work for me, and I will pay you well. You see,” she said, her face softening, “you are not the only person ever to make a mistake. I, too, feel sorry for something I’ve done.”
Robert looked up at her in amazement. Fan nodded. “Yes,” she said, “it is true. Do you remember,” she continued, “a little girl that India and I looked after? We brought her here from a star house in the city. She was all by herself in the world. Her name was Gook Lang.”
Slowly Haack retrieved his teacup. His throat had constricted, and he needed desperately to drink. He could scarcely breathe. Not remember a child chained to a table leg at their first meeting in a tenement; not remember the advent of Henry McMullen, workingman, coming up behind them; not remember the heroics of that moment? And more than that…not remember the thin face above the thin body in a borrowed dress in this very house, and the adolescent laugh that had shattered his heart at the moment he was declaring his love for India? He only wished he could somehow forget.
“I think I remember her,” said Robert Haack cautiously. “Wasn’t she a little, you know, funny in the head?” he said, twirling his finger round at his temple.
“Oh, no,” said Fan. “That was not her. She was a bright girl, very smart. But the day that India vanished she ran away and did not come back. I think she believed my sister’s disappearance was all her fault. You know how children are,” said Fan, “they always blame themselves.
“I should have searched for her then, but I was too upset,” said Fan. “I thought she would come back home in a day or two. I didn’t think she was gone for good.” Fan made a helpless gesture, which made both of them consider how opium makes time appear no more than a moment. “I know I should have tried to find her before,” said Fan.
She slid her long red nails round the edge of her saucer, back and forth. “You will find Gook Lang for me, Mr. Haack,” said Fan. “You will bring her home, and I will pay your expenses plus a good deal extra. Out of this you can start to pay your debts. Two-thirds to Yong Sam, and one-third to us.”
“But it will take forever that way!” objected Robert.
Fan regarded him coldly. “What else are you going to do?” she said. “Do you have another benefactor?”
Robert didn’t answer. He thought of the gentleness of Lam Fan’s uncle, Lum Kee, now dead. He thought of Sing Yuen’s fairness in business. And he thought of my mother, India, and longed, more than ever, to find her. But he shrugged his shoulders and said to my stepmother, “I suppose you’re right. I have no choice. I will do what you want.”
Fan stood slowly and held out a package, which she had kept concealed in her sleeve. “Here is money to begin with. I don’t mind how long it takes or what it costs. You will, of course, give me a full accounting and provide me with receipts.”
“Of course,” said Robert Haack, also rising. He felt he had never been so overburdened. That he was stuck on a track and he couldn’t get off it. That each time he tried to free himself the past entangled him.
“Come and see me every week,” said Fan.
“Yes, Mrs. Sing.”
“Don’t worry, Robert Haack,” said my stepmother, “everything will be all right in the end, I can feel it.” She led him towards the door. For the grief-dimming effects of her pipe were wearing off, and she wanted to go upstairs to smoke before Sing Yuen returned.
“You’re not going to the cemetery yourself?” asked Robert Haack as he parted from her at the steps.
“No,” said Lam Fan. “My responsibilities lie in the house. I must return to them at once.”
TWELVE
The Broken Group is composed of a number of islands, islets, and rocks through which are several passages, and amongst which are a few anchorages. With the exception of those hereinafter described, none of the passages should be attempted without local knowledge.
BRITISH COLUMBIA PILOT, VOLUME I
Sechart Salad—3 cups cold roast whale, chopped coarsely; 2/3 to 1 cup cooked green beans, cut in pieces; ½ cup cooked green peas; 4 radishes, sliced. Moisten with salad dressing, mix lightly with a silver fork, serve on a crisp lettuce leaf, and garnish with slices of hard-boiled egg or tomatoes.
WHALE MEAT AS FOOD, TWENTY DELICIOUS WHALE MEAT RECIPES; TRIED AND TRUE
We race ahead of the storm, crossing Loudon Channel into Peacock Channel among the Broken Islands of Barkley Sound. As we reach the lee of Dodd Island and some protection from the wind and waves, a grey veil of fog begins to slip quickly between the islands, filling in sea, rock, and reefs, and then covering the land with a smothering hand. Here, as nowhere else I can think of, wind and fog make an insidious partnership.
The chart, open in front of me, is suddenly useless. I slow the Rose to a virtual halt. We are at the mercy of Fate.
“North,” says Fan, appearing at my elbow. “That’s the route we want. I’ll go forward to keep a lookout.” I have no time to doubt her. I turn the wheel at once. Seconds later she appears at the stem.
Wind that flattens the waters; cold fog that ices the waves with a deceptive calm, and which obscures everything outside this cabin. Even Fan, only a few yards away, is hazy in outline. We are surrounded by islands, a maze of flooded mountains, and I might as well be blind. Yet the passage from Peacock Channel, up towards the Pinkertons and to the anchorage at Sechart, where we are headed, is wide and deep enough. And there are few dangers other than running aground. As if that weren’t enough…
Fan waves her arms, and I adjust my course accordingly. I can almost feel, as I watch her, the humps of land that she indicates. I am steering by instinct: that is, by the instincts of my fellow traveller. And trusting her as I would trust no one else. Not because I have no choice, but because I know her; that she wouldn’t let me down. Although I sound my whistle and study my charts intently as well.
The minutes fly by, then the hours. The wind has dropped to nothing in this sheltered network. The fog lies still and stiff as a shroud. We are in the Broken Islands, Inner Group. With Hand Island to the west as we bear northeast. On our way to the last old whaling station on the coast, at Sechart. That is, if the compass is correct; and the tide tables are accurate; and the heartbeat of the Rose, her elderly engine, keeps up. If we can thread our way through this pattern of islands on the right circuit. I can sense the storm massed all around us, like an arrangement of magnets with us at its centre, a circle of power, yet letting us pass.
Essential patterning. That guides us outside the dim grey outlines of the Pinkertons. That sweeps us along without thinking. That makes the hull of the Rose cleave a white split in the fog that closes up behind us.
Through it my stepmother helps me find my way. And through it my mother grows restless at her home on D’Arcy Island, as Robert Haack, fresh out of jail for the second time, takes steps to find her. Through it we find what we have to find.
And so we glide, Fan and I, onboard the Rose, through the milky shallows and onto the landing beach. A gentle slope in a gentle curve of a pristine bay, where once hundreds of whales were hauled out and processed. We stand on the deck of the Rose and peer like explorers into the close-knit muffler of white that surrounds us; as the Rose gives a minor shudder, shifts, then settles, as Lam Fan takes my hand and says, “Come with me, Robert Lam. I have something to show you.”
“How did you know how to find this place?” I ask her. “You could have got us here blindfolded. The fog made little difference. I watched you. You had your eyes closed. It was as if you had a direction finder.”
She raises a hand to hush me. “Speak more quietly, Robert Lam. You should show some respect. You’ll see soon enough for yourself.”
“Don’t do that, Fan,” I say peevishly, but lowering my voice as she asks. “You know how annoying it is to be put off like that. I asked you a question I have a right to have answered. It was my boat we risked.”
“Yes, of course,” she says quietly, brushing off my protest. “Now tell me what you know of this place.”
I sigh, but decide to answer. There is little else I can do, trapped as we are by this fog and with nowhere to go. “We’re at the old whaling station at Sechart. It is the last station there is to visit on this coast. The Tseshaht Indians used to camp here in the summers. The station itself was built in 1905, I think, although I’ve forgotten the names of the men who started it. My friend Captain Larson, whose father was a whaler, told me a little about it. They did well here at first and took hundreds of whales from these waters. One ship could capture several hundred by itself in a season. They only shut the station down when the herds were so depleted it wasn’t worth it to send out ships.”
“Ah,” said Fan. “Yes, that’s it.” She nods reflectively.
“And so?” I prompt her.
“Hm?” she says absently.
“What does where we are have to do with how we got here? I wanted to know how you were able to find your way so easily through the fog.”
“Did I say it was easy?” she says. A crow drops down from the ceiling of white above us to sit and peck at the grass on the hillside. Its caw, caw grates on my nerves.
“For Pete’s sake, just tell me, Fan!” I say.
“I followed the path the whalers took,” she answers.
“You did what?”
“Think about it, Robert Lam,” she says. “You’ll see it makes sense.” Doubtfully, but out of respect born of experience, I take her at her word. I think about it. As a light stirring of wind begins to tatter the fog.
—
Like the man on the lookout that he was, Robert Haack took note, as he scoured the city for word of Gook Lang, of changes in the city grid. There were more merchants, more tailors and shoemakers and pawnbrokers. There was a new jeweller, a tinware dealer, one more manufacturer of ladies’ silk underwear. There were eighty or more businesses on Cormorant Street alone, and seventeen new ones on Fisgard Street—five groceries, one butcher, one tin shop, and ten general stores. All in all it made for a prosperous picture.
Even at the windows of the upper storeys, where faces arrived and departed as if on schedule, there had been additions. Not just in new brickwork, or painted scrollwork, but in the faces themselves. For some of the women were white. Tired women, most of them, washed up in the wake of the Klondike gold rush. Who were out of money or time or looks, or who had simply travelled far enough west or north.
Haack called up to these windows—”Do you know a girl named Gook Lang?” But the faces were quickly withdrawn.
Haack kicked along the cobblestones of Fan Tan Alley. Through vegetable peelings and coffee grounds, past men squatting over games of dice, and others eating their breakfast. Through the noise, like a massing of insects behind the walls of the tenements, of gambling chips and dominoes. There were twenty-five fan-tan houses in this alley alone, plus numerous opium dens, smoking cupboards, and star houses.
But Robert Haack’s mind was not only on his quest for the missing girl, whom he doubted he would find. He was also thinking about his prospects: for there was no point in dwelling on the past, he had better look ahead and make his plans, and assume, as Lum Kee would have, that all would turn out well in the end.
This boom, he was thinking, this wealth he had observed in the city, how long could it last? There were notices for men to work in canneries and in the coal mines, and for brick makers and lime burners: but what did it mean? Was it going to last? Could he start a business for himself and be assured of making a profit? Or was it the same old routine he’d seen time and again: gold miners coming first, and leading dancing girls and merchants in a long, thin line, and all of them after the same few nuggets. And the working man at the bottom, and the Chinese, with no work at all, at the bottom of that.
It made a man cautious. It made him look more than once at the provision sleighs that sat unsold on the sidewalks, and caused him to notice that there were fewer boats in the harbour than he might have expected.
Was it a beginning? Or was the boom at an end? Or was this simply a lull in between?
Economics. Investment. Multiplication factors. There was over half a million dollars in capital investment in Chinatown alone, Sing Yuen had told him; over a million dollars in business turnovers, and revenues to the city government of some fifteen thousand dollars annually in water and sewer rents, property and road taxes, and licences. There was enough, surely, for everyone. But how to get at it? This was the problem. For every penny that went into his pocket was already marked for Sing Yuen or Yong Sam.
No, Haack thought to himself. Even if he shared a room with three other men, ate little, and had no unforeseen expenses, he wouldn’t live long enough to pay his creditors back. And what if he should get sick? And what if he should find India and marry her, what about the family they might have? Was it fair to them to begin with such a burden of debt?
No, no, he said to himself. Even if he should start a business, let’s say a tailor’s shop, employing five men from 9:00 A.M. to 8:00 P.M. seven days a week, he couldn’t do it. There were wages, plus the building rent and taxes, plus his merchandise. And if he did make a profit, even more than he might have expected, would he get to keep any of it? Would Sing Yuen allow it? Would Yong Sam accept it? Hardly likely. Yong Sam, in particular, would send the Tong to collect it at once.
It was a thoughtful, sombre-faced Robert Haack who turned his steps in the direction of his day’s appointment. Even if he worked as a business agent, hiring men out to the lumber camps and fisheries at ten percent, making sure that they were soon laid off so that he could hire them out again, destiny had him by the scruff of the neck. There was no escaping it. All he could do was to oppose mathematics with good intentions and hope that the ledger would somehow balance.
For that’s what it came down to: trust that the signs of the season—wasps in the garbage heaps, a wedge of ducks honking and squawking as they gathered in vees to fly south—that these pointed to a conclusion worth having, not just another winter of pointless suffering.
Faith. Hope. Dreams. Intuition. The words of a poem and a poet in a vision; debts paid to society, the desire to change: these were his assets. And whether he found Gook Lang, or whether India was well and ready to marry him, he had these to count on.
For what is hope, after all, but the sense that the world we move through must be just.
And so Robert Haack, feeling a little more cheer
ful as he put the logic of economics behind him, mounted the steps of the Oriental Mission and Rescue Home on Cormorant Street.
It was a modern brick building, raised entirely by subscription and unencumbered by debt, which housed not only a women’s day school and home, but a night school for boys and a kindergarten plus a mission band. And it had grown out of India’s small beginnings in the Fisgard Street house: a dream that had had its origins in Hong Kong with schooling by the major in reform, had been carried across the ocean, and had blossomed, after India’s disappearance—for there were those who did not want the work she had started to come to nothing—into sewing classes and learning English; into a substantial refuge for slave girls and crib girl runaways.
For once a dream is born it seeks out avenues, supporters, ways and means, budgets, an agenda, and a program. It turns into business.
Robert Haack followed the girl who had opened the door into the black pool of the mission’s parlour and shook hands with the directress, Miss Powell. He looked curiously around him in the heavily curtained gloom. The girls, children most of them, were ranged round on chairs, staring at him.
Miss Powell, reading Haack’s expression of concern, said, “You may speak freely in front of them. None of them know English well enough to understand you, but they are used to men.”
She led Robert to an armchair in the centre of the room and continued. “Please try to feel comfortable. These racial boundaries, Mr. Haack, they are nothing in God’s scheme; it is we who make too much of them.” She smiled at him, got him seated, and poured his tea. He balanced his cup on his lap and tried to speak. But he found the presence of the children too unnerving.
“We’ve taken in far too many immigrants in my opinion,” said Miss Powell, waiting for Robert to find his voice, “but this is home to them now, and it is up to us to assist them, in the light of the Gospel, however we can. Wouldn’t you agree?”
To All Appearances a Lady Page 35