Consider, Fan: a man who had left his family in China to make his way in the New World; who had done his best but who’d been struck down in his prime by an illness; a man who had lived for years within the limits this illness set, now found himself free of it.
And with the return of the strength of his body came renewal of spirit. And with that, the restraint he had laid upon himself regarding my mother fell away. That is, he spoke to her of his feelings for her as a woman. Of the fact that they knew each other as well as any two people could; that they’d worked together, sorrowed, laughed, shared all there was to share in this world except for…
Love, Fan. It was of love that he spoke. Of how it grows in stages, and has nowhere to go but up; how it can be harmed by fear and loneliness or take wings to rise above it. Of possibilities. Of the future. Of happiness.
And my mother, Fan. Who had watched the fire on D’Arcy Island spread, from her helpless position on a mountaintop. Who had wondered why she’d married that day when all she loved in the world was in danger of being lost. Who had known even then what had happened. That Fate had bound her to a place and a man. Who had known that she had to see that love, in whatever form it could take, through to the end.
Consider this, too, Fan. When two people who love each other, and who have not dared to talk about it; when these two people believe their reason for caution has vanished. Consider how it must be when they sit together on a grassy cliff above the sea, and survey the ocean vista, holding hands, feeling the pulse of life between them. What vows they make and looks they give and take. What sweetness it is not to have to explain, but to whisper, “I know, I know.” To weep together. To laugh at their clumsiness as they begin to explore and touch. To feel the difference that the union of bodies makes. Especially for my mother, who had so recently been the lover of Robert Haack.
For this was not love out of lack and bewilderment. But love out of time-tempered wisdom; love out of thoughtless hope.
And so it was that Ng Chung and my mother took the step that gave me my life.
—
We emerge from the tangle of underbrush into a meadow. Lam Fan, her silks torn by the clawing branches, looks around carefully. She takes her bearing on a solitary rock that sits like a sentinel in the middle.
“You’ve been here before,” I say to her.
“Many times,” she answers shortly, then adds, “but it’s been awhile, and the trees have grown up considerably.” She makes a foray in one direction, then turns about and returns to the rock. She examines its surface carefully, finds a mark on it she likes, and paces straight westward towards the forest. And, of course, I follow her.
—
A new year had begun. The year 1899. The year in which I would be born. It was a period in which to look ahead, to believe in the advance of mankind. To catch a glimpse of a future that would encompass aeroplanes, and the automobile, the talking pictures, and television. Not a time to consider wars. Not a time to imagine a weapon like the atomic bomb. Not a time to think of the truth.
It was also the last time that people could live on an island and not consider the world around them. And when the world outside would be content to forget about them. When a leper could be healed of his wounds; when prayers could be answered; when a woman who had been brought up to believe in consequences could let the barriers of discipline down. And so it was that India and Ng Chung thought of nothing but themselves.
Ng Chung and India. Full of amazement that they had found each other at last, that Fate had brought them together on an island for a purpose; that the scourge of disease that had kept them apart had apparently vanished. That the life that had been so difficult had suddenly transformed into paradise. For so it seemed to them as they went about the work that had once been so tedious: looking after the others, changing their bandages, helping them to wash and dress; doing household tasks, cooking, gathering firewood. They talked late into the night, going over and over the chance that had brought them together. Rejoicing in the odds they had overcome. Rehearsing the parts they had played, as if it were not themselves who had suffered. Hardly daring to believe it could last. Yet believing as well. For surely they, in their innocence, deserved it.
Ng Chung and India. Rising above the world of nature to the world of spirit. Blinded by love.
For it was clear to all but the lovers that the colony was in some trouble. A stranger had come to the island. Someone was watching their movements. Rice, dishes, and blankets had disappeared. And several of the colonists had glimpsed the intruder’s face between a parting of the bushes. Yet nothing was said. Even when his footprints—larger than any of the lepers’—were found in the mud by the spring. For what could be done about it? What resistance could be made to whatever chose to menace them?
So the newer colonists—those who had not lived through the lessons that the earlier lepers had—so they, in their weakness, thought. And so out of kindness, or apathy, or indifference, they let my mother and her lover, the former leper, Ng Chung, remain in ignorance of the threat.
And so it was that India went by herself one afternoon to work in the garden. There was weeding and mulching to do for the few winter greens, and compost to spread to rot before spring. Ng Chung had gone far down the beach to gather driftwood for burning, and the other lepers were ill in their rooms or were sleeping.
He appeared out of nowhere, standing still a few yards away from her, as if he had grown there along with the trees. She raised her hand to her eyes so as to refute the vision, but this didn’t change anything. It was Oung Moi Toy, the man mountain from years ago, who had raped her and had been killed by her rescuers, Sim Lee and Ng Chung. He was dead, she was sure of it, and yet he was here, too, as large as life and certainly living.
India tried to speak, but no sound would come forth from her lips. “Toy,” my mother finally whispered, “Oung Moi Toy!” At these words, pleased that she knew him and even more pleased at her fear, the man mountain advanced. Closer and closer he came, while the hoe, with which she might have driven him off, slipped from her hands. For logic told her that she was wrong, that the man she saw crossing the short space between the woods and the garden couldn’t be him. But her senses—the bristling at the nape of her neck, the weakness of her limbs—told otherwise. She knew that weight and shape. She knew the sick taste of despair as it welled up from her stomach. And his smell: that stench of lust and anger was all too familiar.
Oh, it had been long ago that it had happened, but she had not forgotten any of it. He reached out to touch her, as if this was a moment he had imagined and practised over and over. She saw the rope looped round his hand and knew it was almost too late: that logic had made her delay when she should have tried to escape. But she ducked under his arm anyway and grabbed the hoe where it lay on the ground, swung it round without looking, and struck him a strong blow with the blade beneath the curve of his jawbone. Blood spurted onto the ground, but he was only stunned for an instant, then he was after her.
“Ng Chung!” my mother screamed as she ran towards the beach. Toy caught her by the legs and brought her down just as she reached the sand. He thrust his arm across her throat, choking her, and with the loop of rope bound up her hands. He lay on top of her and began to tear at her clothing, while my mother struggled and fought for her life. But then he went slack, as if he were suddenly tired. He yawned and tried to sit up as the blood poured from the wound in his neck. He rubbed at his eyes like a puzzled child, then his head dropped, and this time, truly, he was dead.
My mother, with Toy’s blood soaking her breast and hair, rolled away from him and all the way down the beach.
Which was where Ng Chung found her.
—
Fan’s face is scratched by brambles, her hands are dirty, and the remnants of her nails are torn and bleeding. She has been, for the last few minutes, unwilling to speak to me; scrabbling through a heap of stones, while I sit nearby and weep. I weep for my mother, for the horror that came upon her at
the happiest point in her life. For the resurrection, which I still don’t understand, of Oung Moi Toy. And I cry for myself, for the man I once was, and for the girl and the old woman who died because of it. And for the good in the world, which is so often destroyed by the bad. Fan takes a deep breath and lets it out.
“Well, Robert Lam?” she says, sitting back on her heels on the floor of the forest. “There is always one more surprise, isn’t there.”
“That’s one way of putting it, I guess,” I say wiping my eyes. “But I suppose that’s the end of it.”
“There are a few loose threads,” she says. She changes position and begins to poke her hands into the pile of stones again. She shifts some of them over.
“But where did he come from, Fan?” I ask her. “I thought Ng Chung and Sim Lee had killed Moi Toy at the time of the rape of my mother.”
“They thought they had,” she says as she moves some pieces of wood, “but you may recall that when they went back to bury him, his body had vanished.”
“But even if Toy was alive when they left him, he couldn’t have survived on the island without anyone noticing. And he couldn’t have escaped by himself—it’s not possible, because of the tides and the currents and so forth. We’ve been all through that.”
The colour rises in my stepmother’s face, then quickly recedes, leaving her as pale as I’ve ever seen her. “I took him off the island,” she says, looking at the ground. “He must have gone back on his own, years after, for reasons of revenge. I knew nothing about it.”
“You, Fan?” I say, stunned. “But how, why? What could you have had to do with Oung Moi Toy on D’Arcy Island?”
She holds out an object she has retrieved from amongst the wood and stones. What she holds is unspeakable, and instantly recognizable. It is the forearm and hand of a human. A few scraps of blue cloth are attached to the bones, and the fingers are spread in entreaty. “Whose is it, Fan?” I ask her, scarcely breathing, watching the finger bones curl as my stepmother moves them.
“Don’t you know?” she asks, surprised. “I thought you’d have guessed it all by now, Robert Lam.”
—
All winter long, through the spring and the hot days of summer my mother went about her work like a sleepwalker. For to be with child at this time in her life was taking its toll. She felt well, for the most part, although occasionally her dreams were bad, but she was always tired. Ng Chung took special care of her, he searched out herbs and cooked her favourite dishes. Most of all, he stayed with her, not leaving her alone for a minute unless she asked him to. Talking to her about the child—their child. Who the child would be, what it would mean for their lives. Once or twice they spoke about Oung Moi Toy, then did their best to forget him.
And the other lepers—once the pregnancy was evident—began to behave like uncles.
Giving advice, counselling walks or rest, arguing over names and sex of the child, watching, waiting, sewing scraps of shirts and trousers into baby’s clothing.
And once the child began to kick in the womb, to make its opinions felt, all were eager to listen and to touch.
For a child speaks in the womb, Fan. It cries out to the world that awaits it. It protests and asks questions, it requires answers and brings messages. It gathers its courage and grows impatient; or becomes reluctant.
And can be miscarried or stillborn; or develop too slowly ever to function. Or, quickly birthed, arrive too weak for the shock of the world that it meets. And some children, Fan, never emerge at all. They sink back on their cushion of fluids; too discouraged or too pleased with themselves to take any risk, they gradually turn to stone in their mother’s abdomen. The lithopedion, Fan, the stone children, too wise or too stubborn to ask to be born.
But not I, Fan. I listened and heard and took note…and despite all of it, I swam out from my mother as all children should, and howled.
A birth on an island. Not a simple matter for a woman as old as my mother, but not too difficult, either. For there were the medicines that Ng Chung had prepared, plus a little opium to mute the pain.
And after it all, after the great surge of energy that had carried her through the event, she slept. While Ng Chung cleaned me up and wrapped me in the warm cloths that were ready. And held me in his arms.
I was placed in a coal scuttle lined with a blanket, and kept warm in front of the stove. I was given red string and ginger and fern to protect me from all sorts of harm, and I was hefted, tickled, and generally inspected and approved by my uncles, the lepers, while my father prepared tea and vinegar to aid my mother’s recovery.
It was a happy time, by all accounts—that is, according to my mother’s diary and to what she later told her sister—with the child, me, safely launched, and Ng Chung a man in full strength and vigour.
Time on an island. Where a group of exiles became a family; where a dread disease faded into a memory. And even the ghosts of violence, of friends loved and lost, were finally laid to rest. It was time with a happy ending.
Except that time kept on running. And soon, within a few scant months of my birth, Ng Chung and India had to face facts.
For the fact was that Ng Chung was no longer getting better: the clean new skin was showing signs of the return of leprosy, and he was weakening daily. And the fact was that my mother could no longer act as anyone’s nurse—far from it, she needed looking after herself while she rebuilt her strength. And one final fact, which they’d pushed to the backs of their minds for these first few months: they had to get me off the island. For a newborn is safe from leprosy as long as it has its mother’s milk. But not after that, Fan; it’s not safe at all. And both my father and mother had seen, in China, the tragic results.
Joy and anguish, Fan. And the facts were bitter every which way they looked.
—
In the meantime, a thousand miles to the south…
My mother’s husband, Robert Haack, surfacing for a moment from the swamp of crime in which he had established himself at the New Swanston boardinghouse on the San Francisco waterfront, wrote two letters. One was to a Victoria lawyer, and to accompany it there was another, addressed to India in care of Lam Fan.
For Robert, in ignorance of the fire that had devastated D’Arcy Island and of my mother’s return to the lepers and of all that took place thereafter, including my birth, had assumed that India, when he had not come back for her, would have gone to find Lam Fan—for who else had she to turn to? Moreover, being in fear for his life because of the company he kept, and worried that all he would leave to India, in the case of his death, would be enormous debts, he had determined to give my mother a divorce at once.
Robert Haack: overweight, sallow-faced, drinking too much, but capable of one last decent act, struggled with pen and paper. In the lawyer’s envelope he placed his marriage certificate and a statement concerning his desertion and adultery. To my mother he wrote:
My dearest, my dear dear wife,
I know you’ll forgive me for not coming back that night. You’ll have seen the notice, or Lam Fan will have told you that I was deported and could do nothing to reach you. I have waited this time to write to you, in hopes that we’d find each other again. But I fear, my darling, that all hope of that is gone. I can’t change what has happened to us. It is best if you try to forget. You could find a new husband—no one need ever know that you were married to Robert Haack, except for the lawyer; and I have told no one at all about the years you lived with the lepers on D’Arcy Island. So there is nothing to stand in the way of your chances of happiness.
I did love you, and I love you still, more than I can say, but God has kept us apart. Please do what the lawyer says: I know it is for the best. I can pay for whatever it costs. Tell Lam Fan and Sing Yuen I am sorry, and make sure that they care for Gook Lang. Tell them to speak to the Japanese fishermen.
Don’t forget the mountaintop and our short time together. I keep you in my heart forever. Goodbye for now, and no regrets from the man who only wished to b
e
Your husband,
Robert Haack
As for tear stains on the paper; as for a pen held so tightly between thumb and forefinger that the letters quavered; as for broken hearts and broken promises, and untold sorrows. As for truth and consequences…
Lam Fan read the two letters over in the lawyer’s office. Sing Yuen, sitting beside her, saw her blanch. “Now,” said the lawyer, who had observed her reaction, “do you believe that the papers are genuine?” Lam Fan nodded. “Then you’ll undertake to deliver them as the writer requests?” She nodded again. And the lawyer showed Lam Fan and her husband out into the early winter light of mid-December of the last year of the nineteenth century.
—
Drawing her scarf more closely around her as the wind whirled the falling snow into her face, and as her husband drove the sleigh along the flat, winding road of the Cedar Hill plain, Lam Fan thought how time reverses; how one is abandoned then is rescued, or acquires a family only to lose it; how husbands arrive and sisters vanish then reappear on islands in letters; how tides alternate and the wheel of fortune turns; how one swims in the river of change, or drowns.
The horse’s nostrils blew steam into the atmosphere, forming a torn white ribbon of moisture. Sing Yuen, next to Fan, snapped the reins as they emerged from the woods below Mount Douglas and sighted the Japanese fishermen’s cabins.
It was too late for the laying of blame. Fan knew what had done the damage; what had numbed a corner of her heart and impaired her thinking. It was the haunting suspicion that her sister had left her behind on purpose. Not that it made any sense or followed any logic but that of an orphan’s experience.
This was the root of it. And of this, as much as anything else, Lam Fan was deeply ashamed.
—
“And so,” I say to Fan, as we crouch in the middle of the forest on D’Arcy Island, “I think we are getting close to the truth at last. Although I see you’ve been careful to leave some things out. You’ve still not told me what you had to do with Oung Moi Toy, for one.”
To All Appearances a Lady Page 40