To All Appearances a Lady

by Marilyn Bowering

  Robert Haack, who had stopped in front of a store window to pull down his hat—as if that would help!—and who lifted the lapels of his jacket to hide his neck, and who brushed the last of the dust of the country off his jacket, was watched with interest by one of Yong Sam’s entourage.

  Haack peered about him—the thunderclouds were dissolving like smoke, and the sun had come out—then strolled down Johnson Street (with a quick backwards glance) past grocers and outfitters (with their snowshoes and blankets), past clothiers and hatters, all the way to Wharf Street.

  Here he jogged south to the Canadian Pacific Navigation Company wharves, sidled down the ramp to the ticket office, and went inside. Where—as seen through the window by Yong Sam’s observer—he paid for two tickets to San Francisco from a large wad of cash, which he took from his pocket.

  Tendrils of steam rose from the decks of the docked paddlewheelers as the sun dried the wood; schooners and steamers unloaded their goods, the stevedores rolling barrels and carrying pallets into a warehouse; and a rainbow struck the cupola on top of the post office. Haack surveyed the scene with pleasure, for his job was half done.

  It was a world of light, of optimism that unrolled before him. Men at work, and ships from all nations, and the promise of the rainbow, that sign that God gave Noah at the end of his suffering. He was gazing upwards at this phenomenon, in an unwatchful moment of self-satisfaction, when the two men came up behind him: for Yong Sam’s observer had found a friend. One held Robert’s arms while the other turned out his pockets. And found a shopping list, a pencil, a damp handkerchief, a marriage certificate, a poem on an old piece of paper, the two steamer tickets with receipt, and, of course, all Haack’s money.

  Ah, pity Robert Haack, my mother’s new husband, as he stood amazed at the trick Fate had played on him; pity him as all his planning and his sacrifice—his sale of himself for the customs best price—came to nothing. And as he thought of the wife who was waiting on Mount Douglas, who was counting on him for her future; pity him as Yong Sam’s men took the money and tore up the steamer tickets in front of him.

  He stood there, a man with the noose of accident tight on his neck, until the two men had finished. He watched them walk away, laughing. Then he tried to think. He had to, he absolutely had to find a way. The steamer left in the morning: if only he and India could still be on it. He was sure Sam’s men wouldn’t bother to check the passenger list—they thought they had done for him. But how could he get the money it would take?

  It was not a new question for poor Robert Haack. It was one he’d asked himself, in a thousand ways, almost all his life; and it was one, alas, that so recently he’d thought he’d finished with.

  Perhaps it was the press of the moment, or perhaps because the visit to the docks had revived old memories of his work on a coal barge in these same waters, or perhaps it was the thought of former kindnesses, that brought his former employer, Mr. Redford, to his mind. Mr. Redford. A man who had tried to help him, who had visited him in hospital after his injury and had given him the job that had led him to India. And who had invited him to his house several times for dinner.

  A house whose whereabouts, and floor plan, Haack well remembered. There was its artwork and fine furniture and silverware, not to mention the jewellery and wardrobes of its owners. There was bound to be money. It was an inspiration and temptation together; it was an answer to his need. But could he do it? Was it any way to repay a benefactor, to treat a friend?

  But, on the other hand, looking at the circumstances in which he found himself, did he have any choice?

  Haack turned the thought over, then he made up his mind. He couldn’t waste any more time.

  —

  “Why, Robert!” exclaimed Mr. Redford as he met Robert Haack outside the door to his house, “it’s been a long time, hasn’t it? How have you been? Were you coming to see me?”

  Strangely to Mr. Redford, who liked Robert Haack, Robert did not appear pleased to see him. He lowered his head and tried to brush past him. But Redford, concerned, caught at his arm. “Is anything wrong? Are you in trouble? Can I help?” Robert tried to pull away, and Mr. Redford took a firmer grip on his elbow. For his hands had encountered familiar material. Still keeping hold, he took a step back.

  “Why, isn’t that my overcoat you’re wearing?” he said in surprise. Then he caught sight of an object clutched in Robert’s hand. He pried Haack’s fingers apart. “My watch chain!” he cried in horror, as Haack hung his head.

  “My pocketbook,” said Mr. Redford unhappily inside the police station. “Yes, that’s my money and my case, my Sons of Hermann badge, my trousers, and my jacket.” The rest of Robert’s pockets for the second time that day were emptied, and Redford continued the catalogue in mounting sadness: “My wife’s jewellery, her watch, her pocketbook. And yes, her undergarments, too.”

  “What have you to say for yourself?” asked the policeman disgustedly. But what was there to say? And what did it matter at this late date? Robert, stripped of Redford’s belongings, stood, naked but for his shoes and socks and underwear, and said nothing. Slowly, as if his neck bore a terrible weight, he raised his eyes to meet Redford’s. His eyes begged forgiveness and understanding, another chance. But they met disheartened puzzlement.

  —

  Ice formed on the inside corners of the glass (behind bars) in Robert Haack’s jail cell. He cleared the window of condensation with his fingers and tried to peer out. The city was in darkness; but from life on the outside, in whatever state, Robert Haack was forevermore shut out.

  Robert Haack: a man who had a wife, and who once had money with which to make a future with her, but who now had lost it; a man who had no future at all, at least in this country. For despite the fact that Mr. Redford had dropped the charges, Robert Haack was to be deported.

  “Men like you we can do without,” said the magistrate. The policeman had nodded, the customs officer had agreed, even Mr. Redford, still bewildered and hurt, had acquiesced. “It’s the best thing for you, Robert,” he’d said. The papers had been signed. The United States escort was on its way. Haack would sail away on the steamer in the morning.

  Going home at last. But not as he’d planned. With no means of ever coming back; no way to send for India. For at least he had that—he had not betrayed her. For what would these men, and the rest of the city, think if they knew where she’d been? Among lepers? The marriage certificate was safely in his socks.

  As for the Tong, with the deportation order made public, they would never give up. Yong Sam had come to tell him so himself. Robert Haack would be deported along with his debts.

  He sighed. The snipped-off threads of his life dangled. It felt as though his heart had abandoned his chest. There was more ice on the window: no question but that it was cold outside. How would India manage? What would she eat, how would she survive? How long would she wait before going for help? And what must she think of him, her new husband, Robert Haack?

  A static charge crackled his hair as he ran his fingers through it. There was the nip of shock as he touched the iron bars over the window. He was gathering his courage. He bent down and took out the two pieces of paper he had inserted into his socks at Redford’s house. He read through his marriage certificate, folded it and replaced it in its hiding place. Then he stood on tiptoe and squeezed as much of his hand as he could between the bars of the window. And pushed, and pushed, until his fingers, behind which he had focused his entire weight and will, broke through the glass. It was not much of a hole in size, and it made his hand bleed badly. But it was just large enough.

  Ignoring the tears that watered his face, Robert tore up the poem that Robert Louis Stevenson had given him so long ago—“Praise and Prayer.” He pushed the pieces through the break in the window, then watched the wind take them. Fragments of the past. Prospects of hope. Pieces of light that lifted, then dropped and drifted in the darkness. They glittered like snow; they stirred in a dance of atoms and caught a current. Then
were gone.

  Through a switchboard of streets and into the country. Over farmyards and cattle pens, through forest, then climbing high on the wind to the top of a mountain—Mount Douglas. Swirling, dancing, eddying. And reaching my mother.

  Or so Haack intended. And so it seemed to him.

  —

  India watched and waited on top of the mountain. She kept the fire going. She heated water and made tea. She forgot to drink it. She folded blankets and talked to the horse that Haack had left behind with her. She watched the gaslights flare in the city, and the flicker of lanterns on D’Arcy Island as they sparked on and then, one by one, as the hours passed, went out.

  The moon rose, and under its gaze the rippling dark skin of the strait came alive. All was as it should be. Except that Robert had not returned.

  Another light appeared on D’Arcy Island, and even as, in his jail cell, Robert Haack tore up his poem and sent the blood-stained words on a whirl of wind towards her, my mother watched the tiny flame on D’Arcy Island grow larger.

  From pinprick to glowworm it expanded, from glowworm to many-armed monster, sending out tributaries, streams, ribbons, and oceans of fire all over the island. All night India watched as the fire extended itself then slowly, ever so slowly, burned itself out.

  There has been a brush fire [reported the medical officer] on the last day of November, 1898, on D’Arcy Island. I did not learn of it for three days. The building and some of the surrounding bushland burned. What was lost—food, etc.—has been supplied again. The survivors have not suffered undue hardships. One man was badly burned on the face and hands. Only one patient, Sim Lee, one of the original inhabitants, was burned to death.

  So many factors, Fan, had gone into it. My mother between her choices, sitting up on a mountain, wondering why she’d scarcely thought of Robert Haack when she lived on D’Arcy Island; wondering why he hadn’t come back. And Robert Haack, in the city, finally out of luck. So many signals going out. As a hand, misshapen and helpless with leprosy, failed to retrieve a live coal that had fallen from a stove front onto the wooden floor of a cabin. As a fire flared up and ravaged the surface of D’Arcy Island. And as my mother watched and trembled for the lives of her friends, and saw she could not bear to be without them. As she wrote her farewell in a note to her brand-new husband.

  And in the morning, that morning of the first of December, in the year before my birth, a Japanese fisherman left his shack to check his boat at the Cordova Bay landing. And he found, near the boat, a woman.

  “Oh, Miss,” he said, his voice tinged with sadness, to my mother, India Thackery, who now knew where her life and her heart belonged, “you’ve come back so soon!”

  FOURTEEN

  A light is exhibited, at an elevation of twenty-three feet from a red lantern on a white pole set in a concrete base, erected on the western side of D’Arcy Island.

  A black can buoy is moored close eastward of the easternmost of the D’Arcy Shoals.

  BRITISH COLUMBIA PILOT, VOLUME I

  There is no fog, this time, to mar our passage, and no killer whales, either, to guide us. And this time we know where we’re going: not to the southern shore of D’Arcy Island, where the lepers had their colony, but—at Lam Fan’s direction—up the west coast of the island, inside the D’Arcy Shoals, and to a beach at the northern end.

  “Isn’t this where Smiling Jimmy left my mother after the robbery?” I ask my stepmother as we carefully guide the keel of the Rose onto the sand.

  “Yes, I suppose it is,” she says nervously, looking around. Her hand returns to her mouth: she has been biting her nails for hours. Two fingers are bleeding at the quick, and the other nails—once long and polished red—are in ruins.

  I jump over the side into knee-deep water. “Come on, Fan,” I say, “I’ll give you a hand.” I wait for her: she moves ever so slowly, sits on the bulwarks, and tentatively puts her legs over the side. Now that we’re here she’s lost her compulsion to hurry. I hold out my arms.

  “Come on, Fan, jump.”

  “Don’t rush me, Robert Lam,” she says, tucking her toes out the scuppers. “I’m not young like I was.” I stand patiently, with seawater filling my boots and with the lines in my hands unsecured. It is a hot, clear afternoon. I can smell seaweed crisping and drying on the beach. Sand fleas leap in the air, and the trees are filling with birds too dazed by the heat to move.

  The snap of pods exploding; the buzz in the grasses above the tide line; the head of a seal, further out in the water, bobbing up for a peek at us: we could be the first to have set foot on this island. And I, suddenly in love with the peace of this place, don’t care if I ever leave it.

  “Well,” calls out Lam Fan crossly, disturbing my reverie, now that my attention has strayed from her, “I’m waiting.”

  I lift her down and carry her, like a parcel of dry sticks and swansdown, to the beach. I leave her sitting on a log with a shy raccoon for company, and return to make fast the lines. “There,” I say, going back to her, “that should hold us for a couple of hours until the tide turns. Now tell me what’s so urgent about us coming here.”

  She bows her head, she starts to bite her nails but thinks better of it. She sighs as if the woes of the world are weighing upon her. “I don’t know what to say,” she says. “I’m so ashamed of myself. I know there’s no excuse.”

  I sit down beside her. This Fan—defeated, embarrassed, and anxious—is a new facet to my stepmother. I put my arm around her shoulders and draw her closer. “Never mind, Fan,” I say, “whatever it is, I love you.”

  She looks up at me, astonished. I smile. I can’t help myself. Then I pick up stones and skid them across the water. One, two, three, four skips. A thin, cold hand covers mine.

  “I should have told you before, Robert Lam,” she says quietly.

  “Take your time, Fan,” I say to her. I throw another stone. Three skips only. But it startles a heron who had just come in for a landing. He flaps his great wings, and his reedlike legs pencil two lines in the water before he lifts off. I feel a tug on my fingers.

  “It’s not so much what I have to say,” Lam Fan says to me, pulling me up to follow her, “as what I have to show you.

  “Come on, Robert Lam,” she cries over her shoulder, as if, whatever it is, she’s decided to get it over with. “It’s now or never.” And she crosses the beach at speed and heads into the depths of the forest.

  So it was that on the first day of December 1898, my mother returned to D’Arcy Island with the Japanese fishermen, and found that Sim Lee had burned to death in the fire, and that several of the other lepers, including Ng Chung, had been badly injured.

  There was no particular joy or surprise at her reappearance: there was far too much to do for that, although it was clear that the surviving lepers were relieved to see her. There were burns to clean and bandage, there was food to prepare from the meagre stores that remained, there was a shelter to make to protect the sick men from the worst of the weather. At night she stayed awake to feed the bonfire, for it was hard to keep the injured men warm in the damp of the winter. In the daytime she combed the wreckage for salvage: every scrap of clothing or blankets, every tool or implement she could find, was of vital importance.

  When there was time, and when Ng Chung had recovered enough to help her, she buried Sim Lee in the little graveyard unmarked by headstones, whose occupants only she and Ng Chung could now name. There were no files in government offices, no notes anywhere as to who had lived and who had died on that island, except in their memories.

  It was nearly a week before the supply boat came with a work crew and the doctor. The doctor changed the injured men’s dressings and noted Sim Lee’s gravesite. The work crew erected a cabin in one afternoon: six rooms beneath a single roof, plus a shed for a storeroom, on the old plan.

  Then the supply boat hurried away.

  The British Colonist, December 14, 1898

  They wanted spoons: The distress flag at the D’Arcy Island
lazaretto displayed on Saturday and Sunday last gave the impression to a number of passing mariners that something serious was amiss at the home of the exiles. It appears, however, that they merely wanted a few teaspoons, everything else required for their comfort having been taken out the previous Friday when Dr. Fraser and his associate workers learned details of the fatal fire of November thirtieth. The new buildings were then erected, a great improvement on the old, and each leper provided with an ample store of provisions; two complete shifts of clothing, “from the skin out,” and even coffins for use should death release any of the colony. The teaspoons were taken out from Sidney on Monday.

  And so life went on, with little change except for the day-to-day recovery of the lepers from their burns, and except for the new measure of grief they had stored up in their hearts.

  And except for the miracle in which I am concerned.

  For my mother, who had left the island thinking she wasn’t needed, and who had acquired a husband and left him behind, and who had returned to D’Arcy Island after the fire, knowing it was her true home, found that something new and wonderful was happening right under her eyes. Ng Chung, her old friend, with whom she had shared more than seven years of her life; who, along with Sim Lee, had rescued her from the rapist, Moi Toy; who had saved her sanity with his stories; Ng Chung, who had lived tide time, sun and moon time, death and life time on the island with her, and who was the last of the original lepers of D’Arcy Island left alive, was not only healing from his burns, but was healing with no signs of leprosy.

  The new skin was smooth and clean. And although he could hardly believe it himself, day by day, the evidence of the miracle remained.