Sarah Canary

by Karen Joy Fowler

  Chin took hold of the woman’s wrist, but she resisted. She was looking out over the lake at some apparition of her own. Chin saw it, too. There was a dark shadow under the water, the size and shape of a woman. He held his breath. A spray of water appeared for a moment, just at the waterline, and was instantly followed by a black snout. Water rolled away and the entire head slid into the air, hairless, with a long nose and whiskers. He let his breath out. A seal stared at them. Its body twisted beneath the motionless face so that the seal now floated on its back, fanning the water into patterned waves with its flippers. Chin leaned down, scooping some of the lake water into his hand to taste it. There was no salt. He separated his fingers and let it drip through. The woman called to the seal. Her voice was happy, urgent. The seal stared at her impassively and then sank away. The ground at their feet trembled slightly. The waters of the lake rocked against the bank in waves.

  There was no time for safe, easy routes. Put your faith in your fate. See how it comes to you. Walk toward it. Walk away. See how it comes.

  They headed for the Sound and the landscape changed; the trees grew thinner and there were fewer of them. Suddenly it was hard to see. Not only had the sun vanished, but as they got closer to the ocean, there were patches of fog. One moment Chin would be there with the trees and the woman in black, the next he would be walking by himself in the clouds. He could have taken some comfort in his own blindness – if he couldn’t see, at least he also couldn’t be seen – but the woman continued her keening. Her speech was vowel-laden, one running into the next running into the next, like the noise at a hog slaughtering. The continual din obscured other noises so Chin was deaf as well as blind, but instead of cloaking them like the fog, the woman’s words exposed them. Chin could not be tranquil and accept his fate with this annoying vocal accompaniment. The thought of Indians panicked him; he could not control it. The noise was driving him mad. He felt the trees leaning in to listen to it. ‘Be quiet,’ Chin begged her. ‘Please be quiet,’ but she wasn’t.

  Chin stepped inside a drifting patch of fog and stopped. The world was shapeless and moved. The woman in black did not stop. See your fate come. See how it stumbles into you from behind, how it pushes you forward. Chin felt the woman’s teeth jar against his shoulder. Her mouth was loose, her jaw was slack. Her vowels continued. He turned around and hit her with his open hand. ‘Be quiet,’ he said and hit her again, across the mouth, slapping it closed. He was surprised and he was sorry to be hitting her; it was just the noise he couldn’t stand anymore. It was profoundly possible that she was just a crazy old woman, after all. That he was a fool to be taking her through the forest when railway work awaited every Chinese man in Tenino. That he would pay a fool’s price.

  Chin forced his hand shut and held it with the other hand against his chest. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said to the woman. ‘So sorry.’ She had moved away from him so he couldn’t see her in the fog and she was quiet now, but he thought he could still hear her, a fruity kind of breathing that suggested tears. The dress rustled slightly as though she might be shaking.

  ‘Sorry,’ Chin said again. ‘Forgive me.’ He felt a wave of self-pity. ‘I am so far from home,’ he told her. ‘You can’t know what that is like.’ She couldn’t know how hard his life was, how it tried him. In none of the languages he spoke was there a word as vivid as his loneliness, and she wouldn’t even understand the pale approximations he could offer. He stepped in her direction, but she wasn’t there. He didn’t hear her at all now, put out his hands and groped through handfuls of cloud and found nothing. Whirling around, he felt through the fog in the other direction. His hand hit stone, a large, flat slab, sticking up from the ground with letters carved into it. The fog dispersed so that he could read the words:

  Chas M. McDaniel

  Born in Iowa, 1834

  and died at the

  HANDS OF VIOLENCE

  Jan. 22, 1870

  aged 36 years.

  The fog was back. Chin felt something unseen brush against his hand. It was sticky and ghostlike. He jerked away, stumbled. Something or someone caught at his foot and threw him against the stone. Chin bit through his cheek as he hit. Blood drained into his throat. Putting his arms around the marker, he slid slowly down it to earth and on the way he passed through the gate into unconsciousness.

  2

  A Full Moon in Steilacoom

  Not a Tomorrow to know its Name

  Nor a Past to Stare—

  Ditches for Realms and a Trip to Jail

  For a Souvenir—

  Emily Dickinson, 1872

  ‘Groggeries. Unspeakable revels. Drunken dancing. Dancing without partners.’ The voice was female and Caucasian. Chin lifted his head painfully and let it drop again. The blow resonated through his skull. He located his hands, sprouting limply from the ends of his arms, and pressed them into his temples to keep his head from splitting into several pieces. He was on a stone floor. There was a small window with bars. He could see the moon through it, a great white plate on the outside. He smelled urine. Closing his eyes, he searched for unconsciousness again. The woman’s voice prevented him from finding it. ‘We know what goes on here, Jeb Chambers. Don’t think that we don’t. The noise you and your friends make. We heard Dash Away Boys last Saturday night. We heard the Fireman’s Dance. We heard the Portland Fancy. Satan’s own music. Real inconvenient for you to have actual occupants in the jail, isn’t it? Unless they’re your own good friends.’

  On the floor directly opposite Chin’s face stood a heavy pair of boots with creases across the toes. Chin followed them upward with his eyes. An Indian sat on a folding cot against the opposite wall. He watched the moon out the window and he didn’t move.

  There was the webby sound of someone clearing his throat and then spitting. ‘You just behave yourself, Jeb,’ the woman said. ‘You’re in the presence of ladies.’

  Chin sat up slowly. His head pulsed. A patch of moonlight lay on the ground between him and the Indian, patterned with the shadows of bars. Outside the cell door, a white man perched on a chair tipped on the back two legs. He rocked slightly, smiling at Chin. ‘If this was San Francisco,’ he said, ‘we’d be cutting your hair already.’ He opened his first and second fingers and then shut them like a scissors.

  Two women dressed in black stood behind him. Neither was Chin’s woman; these were cleaner and larger. Their cheeks were flushed with resolution. ‘Tom. Tom Mays,’ the older of the women said. She was looking at the Indian. ‘Trust the Lord. The Lord is your shepherd.’

  The Indian gave no response. He sat and watched the moon.

  ‘Repent, Tom. Rejoice. You’re going somewhere beautiful.’

  ‘You go,’ the Indian said.

  The woman swung her head to look at Chin. ‘I’m Mrs Taylor,’ she told him. ‘I run a Sunday school for the Chinese here in Steilacoom. Are you a Christian?’

  ‘I don’t think you want this one,’ Jeb said. ‘Attacked a white woman. Lured her out into the graveyard right behind the hospital and then beat her when she resisted. Nasty business. Greene had to take her right into the asylum. Driven mad by the experience. Any decent woman would be.’

  Chin’s forehead was suddenly slick with sweat. ‘I found her in the woods,’ Chin said. ‘I was trying to help her. She was already mad. She was lost. I thought she came from the asylum. I was taking her back.’

  Jeb shook his head. ‘ ’Course I believe you,’ he said. ‘But you see how it looks. It don’t look good.’

  Chin tasted the dove with the five spices again. It happened so quickly he couldn’t even try to stop it. His dinner lay in the patch of moonlight. His queue fell over his shoulder and into the mess. His head spun. He stretched out on the floor again.

  ‘Now, that’s nasty,’ said Jeb. ‘Someone’s going to have to clean that up. A nasty thing for ladies to have seen.’ Chin heard the front legs of the chair slam down on stone as Jeb got heavily to his feet. His footsteps came toward the cell. ‘Mewling and puking. Sh
akespeare said it, but that don’t make it art when it happens. Mrs Taylor, Mrs Godfrey, I’m going to have to ask you to leave now. We’ve got some cleaning to do, and I can’t open the cell door with two such decorative women on the outside. Old Tom here, he might want one last look at the earthly pleasures he’s leaving behind. And the Chinaman has already ruined one white woman.’

  The two women conferred in whispers. Chin heard the sibilants in the intervals when his head was not pounding. He had a desperate inspiration. ‘The Lord is my shepherd, Mrs Taylor,’ he said. He kept his eyes closed and did not raise his head for fear of throwing up again.

  There was a brief silence. ‘We’re going then, Jeb. Because it’s late, not for any of your nonsense,’ Mrs Taylor said stiffly. ‘But we will be back. Tom, you think about what I told you, I’ll bring psalms in the morning. Comfort and cheer. The Lord will never desert you.’

  ‘The Lord will never desert me,’ said Chin. He heard the heels of the women’s shoes as they left, a sharp sound that faded on the street outside. He heard the keys clank together and then the scraping of one key in the lock. The door opened. Chin looked up. Jeb had a mop and a bucket.

  ‘You get up now, Chinaman,’ he said. ‘If you think I’m cleaning up your puke, you’re crazier than you look.’

  ‘I’m dizzy,’ said Chin. ‘I don’t know if I am able to stand.’

  ‘Makes my heart break,’ said Jeb. ‘Tom here has already killed one Chinaman and is going to glory for it tomorrow. Shall I ask Indian Tom to clean up your stink?’

  Chin looked at the Indian, who looked at the moon. He was seated on the mattress with his back against the wall, yet his feet were flat on the floor. It occurred to Chin that this was probably a very big man. Chin stood up heavily. When Jeb handed him the mop, he leaned on it like a crutch, swaying slightly, forward and backward. Jeb set the bucket next to the vomit. ‘Do it proper,’ he said, ‘or you’re the one who’ll have to sleep in it.’

  Chin had never used a mop before. The strings went in a dozen different directions; the water splashed over his boots. ‘Nothing to stop Tom from killing another Chinaman, neither,’ said Jeb. ‘Can’t hang him twice.’ A puddle of water replaced the mess on the floor. Chin was going to even it out, but Jeb took the mop. Chin stumbled slightly without it. ‘I’ll just leave the two of you now. The Chinese lecher and the homicidal Indian. Last time Tom had a knife. This time, nothing but his bare hands. What can a man do with nothing but his bare hands?’ He thrust the mop into the bucket, pumped it up and down to rinse it off. ‘Well, I’m off to my own sweet bed. Whatever happens, I won’t hear of it till morning. You go to sleep now, too, John Chinaman. Perchance to dream. Or you stay up and watch the Indian all night long. That’s what I’d do. If I was Chinese.’

  A cloud floated across the moon. The edges of the cloud remained dark, but its heart was round and luminous. The light in the cell diminished. Jeb threw Chin’s blanket into the cell, just missing the water. He disappeared through the door. Chin heard Jeb cough and spit onto the ground outside. The Indian’s face was all shadow. ‘I’m not going to kill you,’ Tom said. ‘I never set out to kill the other one. I just needed money. You people always have money.’

  ‘I have no money,’ said Chin. He reached inside his boot in the dark. He had no knife either.

  ‘I don’t need money now,’ said Tom. ‘That’s one thing I won’t miss. Always needing money.’ The cloud passed. Chin could see him again. What he saw in Tom’s face did not calm him. He watched Tom and tried to think of things to say.

  ‘Do you believe in omens?’ Chin asked. He was speaking very rapidly. ‘Tonight I stood on the shore of a lake and a seal appeared. In a lake. And the ground shook. I thought it meant something.’

  ‘Steilacoom Lake,’ said Tom. ‘There’s an island in it that sinks and rises.’ He turned his face back to the window. His nose was large and hooked. ‘The ground has been trembling for weeks. Trees falling. I haven’t seen a bird in forty days. They all left when the mountains began to smoke.’ His voice softened and smoothed. ‘The earth talks to us, but we don’t speak its language. Why should it not mean something just because you don’t understand?’

  ‘The woman I was with,’ said Chin, ‘she was a goddess.’

  ‘Indians call that lake Whe-atchee. It means underhanded or deceitful. Because the shoreline changes like the ocean. Because sometimes there is an island and sometimes not. Why were you beating up a goddess in the graveyard?’

  Chin seated himself again on the floor with his back to the wall. There was a wooden shutter outside the window and the cell would probably have been warmer if they closed it. Chin reached for his blanket instead. Only half the moon showed through the window now, the bar bisecting it. Lines and rings. Chin repressed the thought. He had seen the unities and he had awakened in jail. He dealt with Tom’s question carefully, one piece at a time. ‘I didn’t beat her up,’ he said. ‘She might be a goddess. I didn’t know I was in the graveyard. There was a lot of fog. I couldn’t see.’

  ‘They want you to kill me,’ said Tom.

  This struck Chin as a particularly awkward turn in the conversation. He could think of no polite response. He spent a long time looking for one.

  ‘Sportals,’ said Tom, ‘is a deceitful lake. It narrows in the direction of the sunrise. Sometimes a great hunter will swim the narrow part, chasing a herd of deer. Suddenly the water will turn out of its customary currents, round and around itself. The hunter will hear music and will see something never seen in this world – a beautiful striped horse. If you see the striped horse, you are destined for greatness.’

  ‘Have you seen the horse?’ Chin asked.

  ‘Have I become great?’ Tom’s voice was flat and unfriendly. ‘Does this look like greatness to you? In China, would this be greatness?’

  ‘You said the lake was deceitful,’ Chin reminded him. ‘In Africa there are striped horses,’ he added. ‘Herds of them. Sometimes so many you can’t see the ground beneath them. But I never met anyone from Africa who has become great.’

  ‘You’ve met many people from Africa,’ Tom said. Impossible to know if it was a question or a statement, if it expressed derision and disbelief or admiration and faith. Tom’s voice was flat and unhelpful.

  ‘Many,’ said Chin. ‘In the South.’ Tom had probably never heard of the Memphis Plan, an attempt by white plantation owners to replace their Negro slaves with cheap Chinese labor. Tom had probably never heard of Cornelius Koopmanschap, the notorious slaver from San Francisco who was hired to provide the Chinese. Tom had probably never heard of the Ville de St Louis, the infamous ship on which Chin had been an unwilling passenger. Tom said nothing to invite these details. Chin returned from the personal to the philosophical. ‘Do you know what would really never be seen in this world? A one-winged bird. I mean, not a bird that has been damaged, but a bird that was supposed to have only one wing. Who wants me to kill you?’ Chin asked. ‘Not that I would.’

  ‘Jeb Chambers. Hank Webber. The judge. The doctor. Maybe even those good Christian women, though you’d never hear it from them. That’s why you’re in jail. I heard Jeb talking about it when he carried you in. “A live Chinaman in the graveyard,” he said. He said you were the answer to a prayer. And a damned peculiar answer. Nobody really thinks you beat that woman.’

  The sudden loosening in Chin’s stomach was almost more than he could bear. Was there really a way out of this? Was the woman in black still protecting him in spite of what he’d done? No human, not even a crazy human, would be so forgiving. Only the immortals were capable of such charity. And Chin would be worthy of it. If he got out of this jail, if he was alive and free to go where he wanted, he would head straight for the hospital and make sure she was all right. This was a promise. His honor attached to it. In his relief he had allowed himself to forget some of the details of Tom’s statement.

  Tom cleared his throat, which helped Chin remember.

  ‘Why do they want me to kill you?’
Chin asked.

  ‘They probably wouldn’t mind if I killed you,’ Tom said. ‘I mean, it wouldn’t solve the problem, but it wouldn’t be a great loss either. There it goes, the moon.’ His voice flattened again. To Chin, who was used to the six tones of Cantonese, all English was expressionless. But he had never heard a voice as empty as the Indian’s. ‘I’m not going to see it again,’ Tom added. ‘I suppose I should be grateful there was a full moon on my last night. Could have been moonless.’

  ‘You said you weren’t going to kill me,’ Chin reminded him. Chin had not forgotten; it would be a shame if Tom had.

  ‘I don’t plan to,’ Tom said. ‘You show me how I gain by it.’

  ‘You don’t,’ said Chin. ‘I don’t see how it benefits you at all.’

  Tom closed his eyes. ‘Don’t hurt me much either. And keeps you from killing me. I’ll tell you what, Chinaman. I have only this one night left. Half a night now, and I want to see something never seen in this world. You show me something like that and I won’t kill you. You Chinese are supposed to be so damned clever. You do that. You do that for me.’

  ‘I will,’ said Chin, thinking desperately and futilely. What did he have? His abacus? His wok brush? ‘But you have to trust me a little. I can’t do it right now. I’ve got to have just a little time.’

  ‘I got just a little time,’ said Tom.

  ‘I bet you didn’t know that the Chinese came here before the Caucasians,’ Chin said divertingly. ‘Came, looked around, and went home again. Never tried to move in. Came as guests. Hui Shen, a Buddhist priest, returned to China from a land he called Fu-Sang. He said the people there drank deer milk, lived in wooden houses, owned oxen and cattle, had copper but not iron. This was thirteen hundred years ago.’

  ‘He didn’t come here,’ said Tom. ‘My people would have remembered.’

  ‘He may have been farther south,’ Chin conceded.

  Tom slid a heavy boot along the stone floor. It made a scraping noise. Was he getting up? Chin spoke rapidly again. ‘Where do you think they’re going to end the railroad?’ he asked. ‘You think Steilacoom has a chance? The terminus will be an important city. I bet Steilacoom is hoping for it.’