Sarah Canary

by Karen Joy Fowler

  ‘I don’t imagine the man who killed Jim Allen intended to implicate Blair,’ Purdy said. ‘I imagine he just didn’t have his own knife for some reason or other.’ Purdy looked straight at B.J. ‘I want to say something in defense of the men of Seabeck,’ he said.

  He was quiet then, long enough for B.J. to conclude that while Purdy wanted to say something in defense of the men of Seabeck, he couldn’t, in fact, think of anything to say.

  B.J. tried to help. ‘They seem to be very good shots,’ he suggested. ‘They got almost every window.’ Or maybe he didn’t say it, because Purdy cleared his throat and went on as if B.J. hadn’t spoken.

  ‘When the Indian Department issued their order for all the squaws to be taken from the white men and put onto the Indian reservations, except in those cases where the white men married them, I don’t know of a single man who put his faithful squaw away,’ Purdy said. ‘You hear these stories from other towns. Tragic stories. Tragic for the squaws. But not in Seabeck.’

  B.J. watched Chin paddle so as not to look back at Purdy. He was more and more certain what Purdy wanted. He could only pretend he wasn’t. He waved the handkerchief at Chin. There was no response. Chin was soaked with rain and shivering violently. His paddling was frenzied, completely unproductive. His mouth was still open as if he were out of breath. ‘Many half-breeds resulting from these unions, like Blair, have risen to positions of responsibility in the community and in the Company,’ Purdy said, dropping all pretense of subtlety. ‘But I cannot say that I have seen any full-blooded Indians rise in similar ways, and I think we must credit the success of the half-breed to the blood of the father rather than that of the mother.’

  That was all B.J. needed. Children. He tried to say something that would make his feelings about marriage clear. ‘Women are crazy.’

  Purdy pointed back down the canoe past Chin to where Old Patsy squatted in the rain working steadily with the bailer. ‘Take Old Patsy. Refuses to learn English. Refuses even to learn Chinook.’ He shook his head sadly and lay back against the bow, closing his eyes.

  B.J. had suddenly lost the thread of the conversation. Why were they talking about Old Patsy? She was already married. He didn’t know how to respond, so he repeated himself. ‘Women are crazy,’ he said again, but he put more stress on the last word so that maybe Purdy would think he’d said something new.

  ‘The Indians have a legend,’ Purdy told him, ‘about an earlier time when the white men and the Indians and the animals were all the same. Then Do-ki-batl, the Changer, came. And he changed flies into flies and minks into minks and blue jays into blue jays and he made Indians dark-skinned and ignorant, but he gave white men books and learning and a light skin, and that’s just the way things are.’

  ‘I know this story,’ said B.J.

  ‘There’s a lot of truth to these fanciful old legends,’ Purdy said. ‘Not on the surface maybe, but underneath.’

  B.J. looked over the surface of the water, avoiding any possible truths underneath. He wondered why Chin had not waved back at him. Had he done something to annoy Chin? B.J. walked without straightening his legs, down the belly of the boat to Chin, taking his mat along like an umbrella and holding the handkerchief balled up in his other hand. This prevented him from gripping the gunwale, and made him proceed sideways, cautiously balanced on the balls of his feet. ‘Chin,’ he whispered. ‘Chin. Are you mad at me?’

  ‘No,’ said Chin. ‘What’s that?’ Chin sprang to his feet so as to see over B.J. and his mat. The canoe rocked violently. B.J. dropped the mat and grabbed Chin’s sleeve to keep him from pitching over the side. Chin swung in a half-circle at the end of B.J.’s grip, shading his eyes from the rain with one hand.

  ‘Sit down,’ said Sam sharply, but Chin didn’t appear to notice.

  For a moment he had stopped shivering. B.J. looked where Chin was looking. A distant, dark shape rolled in the waves before the bow. ‘Is it Harold?’ Chin asked. ‘Paddle out that way.’

  ‘You don’t stand up in a canoe,’ Purdy said, turning to look ahead.

  Sam shifted course.

  ‘It’s just a log,’ Purdy told them. ‘It’s floating deep, like a log.’

  B.J. hoped it was a log. There was nothing upsetting about a log on the canal. There were lots of logs. No one could think a log was an evil omen.

  Chin began to shake again, uncontrollably. The movement of the canoe pitched him from side to side. ‘He’s about to fall in and take all of us with him,’ Purdy said. ‘Over a log.’

  ‘Make him sit down,’ Sam told B.J. in a hard, important voice. B.J. pulled on Chin’s wet sleeve until Chin sank to his knees. Not once did Chin look away from the object as the canoe approached it.

  ‘It’s a log,’ Purdy called back. B.J. took three deep breaths to celebrate his relief. He gave the checkered handkerchief to Chin, who used it to wipe rainwater from his face. Then Chin tied it low around his forehead, just above his eyes. His teeth were clicking together. He picked up his paddle.

  B.J. rejoined Purdy in the bow. ‘Excuse me,’ he said.

  ‘Not at all,’ said Purdy. ‘I was wandering anyway. I didn’t mean to go on and on about Jenny. I didn’t think you knew about Jim. I just wanted to make sure you understood that you can’t go back to Seabeck. Not with your Chinaman.’

  So he didn’t want B.J. to marry Jenny. B.J. had misunderstood. He was relieved but not surprised. B.J. misunderstood things too often to be surprised. ‘What’s Chin done?’ B.J. asked.

  ‘Nothing. As far as I know. It’s unfortunate that Chin’s sudden flight looks so suspicious. But if he’d stayed, they would still have lynched him.’

  ‘He didn’t stab Harold. It wasn’t even his chopstick,’ B.J. said. ‘And he didn’t kill Jim Allen. There would have been blood in the bread.’

  ‘Look,’ said Purdy. ‘When a murder takes place in a small community, everyone is happier to think that the murderer is someone from the outside. Could have been Harold. That would have been fine. But your Chinaman is even more outside. Your Chinaman is perfect.’

  ‘I don’t think that Harold killed Jim Allen either,’ said B.J. He might have, though, B.J. supposed. He might have snuck out into the hallway while Chin and B.J. were trying not to look at the woman’s clothes. All those undergarments laid out on the bed. B.J. had heard someone in the hall when he was trying not to look. So then Harold could have stabbed Jim Allen and hurried back into Sarah Canary’s room and slumped against the bed so as to be there when Chin and B.J. came through the window. Except that the knife had been in the kitchen with Purdy. So Harold could have snuck out into the hallway and gone down the stairs and past Purdy and snuck into and out of the kitchen and past Purdy and climbed back up the stairs and stabbed Jim Allen and hurried back into Sarah Canary’s room and slumped against the bed so as to be there when Chin and B.J. came through the window. It could have happened that way.

  The canoe tipped sideways. This time no one was moving around. It didn’t feel like the wind or like a wave. It felt like a hand had come up underneath the canoe and was steadily pushing it over. B.J.’s heart squeezed into a little ball between his lungs. Sam hit the water with his paddle. The hand released them. B.J.’s heart pumped slowly back to normal size.

  ‘He had money,’ Purdy said. ‘Suddenly. Jim Allen. He had lots of money.’ B.J. looked over the side of the canoe. No shadow. He leaned forward, around Purdy, and looked over the other side. No shadow. He sat back against the bow again, under the drumming of the rain on the mats.

  ‘I shouldn’t tell you this,’ Purdy said, which, of all the ways to begin a sentence, was B.J.’s absolute favorite, ‘but last year in San Francisco the Hood Canal lumbering interests entered into an agreement to keep up the price of lumber.’ Purdy was biting with his top teeth beneath his bottom lip into the sparse hairs that began his beard. He counted on his fingers. ‘Port Gamble,’ he said. ‘Port Ludlow, Port Discovery, Tacoma.’ He came to his thumb. ‘And the Washington Mill Company, too, of course.
Seabeck. Only’ – Purdy closed his fingers into a fist with the thumb on the outside – ‘the Washington Mill Company has been discounting its bills. The books look regular, the initial price charged is according to agreement, but then adjustments are made. Very profitable for Seabeck, of course. Disastrous, though, if it should become known throughout the rest of the Concern.’ Purdy opened his fist and reached into Old Patsy’s basket for another potato. ‘Jim Allen sold the Company out,’ he said. ‘Everyone thought so. Straws were drawn to see who would kill him. You couldn’t shirk the short straw, now could you? Even if you’d known him a long time? It’s a Company town and we all live there together.’

  Purdy skinned the potato with his teeth, bit into the white flesh. ‘I don’t suppose the original agreement was strictly legal. Still, it was nasty to break it. And nasty to tell for money.’

  ‘And nasty to kill the man who told,’ suggested B.J. ‘And nasty to blame Chin.’

  ‘This way, nobody else gets hurt. As long as you keep your Chinaman away from Seabeck, nobody else gets hurt.’

  ‘What’s that?’ Chin shouted.

  ‘Nobody else gets hurt!’ B.J. called back, but Chin was pointing again with his paddle out over the canal. B.J. turned. A dark, loglike shape rolled in the wind and waves and the rain far ahead of them. ‘There!’ said Chin. ‘Take the canoe that way.’

  ‘It’s a log,’ said Purdy, not looking, not taking his eyes off B.J. He lowered his voice. ‘Now. We never had this conversation.’

  B.J. was alarmed to hear it. Who had had this conversation and what had he been doing while they had it?

  Sam turned the canoe away from shore. ‘More,’ said Chin, taking four long, deep strokes himself. ‘Turn us more.’ They paddled farther and farther out. The trees shrank in the distance behind them. The loglike object grew.

  ‘It’s a canoe,’ said Purdy. ‘By God. It’s Harold’s canoe. He’s capsized.’ Purdy crossed himself. ‘Can he swim? Can he swim in rough waters? How close to the shoreline do you suppose he was? Look for a body,’ Purdy said quietly.

  ‘Look there,’ said Chin. A small object glittered suddenly in the sunless water by their dugout, but it wasn’t nearly large enough to be a body. B.J. was sure. The rain struck the object, making it bob first this way and then that. Chin reached for it with his paddle, trapping the object underneath the blade, pushing it down into the water, and then losing it. It popped back to the surface, where it began to float past Chin. He reached again. He cut into the water with the paddle blade about a half-foot behind the object and batted it clumsily closer. It was Harold’s whiskey flask. Still capped, and filled with air, it bounced just out of arm’s reach. Chin leaned. The dugout leaned with him.

  ‘Don’t,’ said Sam loudly, pounding with his paddle. The side of the canoe continued to drop until B.J. lay stretched out over the waterline. He still held the mat on his head, but what was up and what was down had shifted faster than B.J. could shift his thinking to compensate. The rain fell on him sideways. Sometimes the waterline was beneath him and he was in the air. Sometimes the waterline rose up to meet him. Purdy landed on him from behind.

  ‘Lean!’ Sam shouted. ‘Lean against it.’ But B.J. was pinned beneath Purdy and couldn’t.

  B.J.’s face was on a plane with Chin’s face, which was on a plane with Chin’s fingers as they opened and closed over the air, under the water, around Harold’s flask. He saw Chin’s hand. He saw the reflection of Chin’s hand in the dark water. Five fingers reached down to the surface; five fingers reached up. In another moment they would have met, joining Chin to his other self, like Siamese twins, but the water rose instead, eating Chin’s hand away to the first knuckles. The water dropped. Chin’s fingers were whole again.

  B.J. looked down to find his own reflection. The proof of him. Sometimes bigger than he was, but sometimes smaller. Reaching for him when he reached. Leaving when he left. But never leaving him first. Never.

  The water was too agitated to hold an image. The sky was too dark for reflections. Puzzled, B.J. looked back toward Chin’s hand. Nature was fond of pairs and partial to symmetry, Burke had told him that night in the little cabin, but the Wild Woman did not see herself in mirrors. What a sad way for Sarah Canary to live. All by herself.

  Purdy struggled to right himself. He pushed B.J.’s shoulder. He kicked B.J.’s knee. His elbow went between B.J.’s ribs, removing all the air from B.J.’s lungs. As B.J. drowned there just above the waterline, his eyes dark with breathlessness, he thought he saw the hand beneath the water break through. It groped for Chin’s hand and missed, grabbing the gunwale instead. The canoe went over completely.

  B.J. fell deep into the canal. It was shockingly cold, but windless beneath the surface. It was quiet. There were other legs and arms about him, kicking gracefully in the black water. He saw a curtain of dark hair, which made him think frantically of the mermaid, although it was only Purdy’s beard, floating in all directions, his cheeks above it puffed with air. B.J. felt something scrape by his back as he fell. He twisted around. There was nothing, only Chin, blurred in the distance and too far away to touch him. B.J. squinted. Chin’s braid stretched up in the water behind his head, above the checkered scarf, like a snake rising from a basket. Old Patsy shed her cattail coat like last year’s skin and swam away from it. B.J. saw the overturned canoe receding from him in the ceiling of water with the blades of the paddles floating around it. He saw the bottoms of Sam’s two boots, together beside the canoe in the water above him. B.J.’s empty lungs burned in his chest. They tried to make him open his mouth.

  B.J. was kicking back up to the dugout when a cooked potato fell past him like a thrown stone. He was rebounding to the surface himself at such a speed that the potato shot by. B.J. was going too fast. Rebounding into the air, he struck his head on the carved, upside-down nose of the frog on the canoe’s bow. He heard the sounds of the wind and the rain come back, but only for a second. He took one breath before he sank again, his ears filling with water.

  Then he was being pulled like taffy in two directions. Something had a grip on his ankles. Something else had him by the wrist. He was stretched out between the two, one grip drowning him, one grip rescuing him, but he was too disoriented to know which grip was which.

  He began to be dizzy, almost giddy. He began to blame his reflection, or Chin’s. Perhaps these other selves were not so benign. Perhaps they had tired of swimming along underneath the dugout. Perhaps they had overturned it so that they could ride inside for a while. Or perhaps his reflection had leapt up into the air as he had fallen and taken his place. How would anyone know the difference? Would B.J. even be missed? If B.J. drowned, wouldn’t his reflection wander about in his world in much the same artless, untethered, unconnected way Sarah Canary did?

  Why couldn’t the Wild Woman see her own reflection?

  B.J. kicked frantically. The grip on his legs came loose, but he was still attached at the wrist to a second figure, which floated out from him, above him, like an angel in a mirror, kicking the same way he was kicking, looking back at him the whole time he looked. The second figure pulled him closer. B.J. resisted. The grip tightened. Closer. It was Chin or Chin’s reflection. How was B.J. to know one from the other, under water in the dark? B.J. saw Chin’s face just for a moment, then it passed through the waterline and disappeared, pulling B.J. with it to the surface and air and rain.

  B.J. lay on his back in Chin’s arms, breathing. A salty wave broke over his mouth. B.J. coughed. Out of the corner of one eye he could see Purdy, Old Patsy, and Sam clinging to the sides of the large, upside-down canoe. Chin dragged B.J. by the armpits through the water to join them. He clutched along the wood for a handhold. B.J. did the same.

  ‘We could probably make it to shore!’ Purdy shouted. The trees were distant ghosts, gauzed behind the rain.

  ‘Probably,’ said Sam.

  ‘The longer we wait, the farther out we drift,’ Purdy said.

  B.J. had no intention of going back
into the canal. He tried instead to pull his legs completely out of the water. He couldn’t. He was too tired. The canoe rode too low. ‘Chin,’ he said. He coughed. ‘Chin?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Why can’t the Wild Woman see herself in the mirror?’

  ‘Can we all swim?’ Purdy asked.

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Chin.

  Their paddles, Sam’s pole, Sam’s spear, the basket, the mats, and Chin’s boots bobbed about them, dispersing in a wider and wider circle. The bedroll sank. Something thin and white floated by. Chin picked it out of the water. It was a chopstick. Chin put it in his pocket.

  ‘We’ll freeze if we stay like this,’ said Purdy.

  Chin’s teeth were clicking like the telegraph. B.J. shook with cold. He continued to cough, but in between he tried to listen. Chin’s teeth said that the Puyallup Indians could sleep in the woods at night without a blanket or shelter. Stop.

  ‘Some of us faster than others,’ said Sam.

  An enormous wave covered and uncovered the entire canoe. Sam put his hand on Old Patsy’s shoulder and spoke to her. The two Indians slipped into the water, first Old Patsy and then Sam. They swam off in the direction of the tiny ghostly trees. On the way, Sam retrieved his seal spear.

  Purdy took a deep breath, removed his shoes and dove, kicking against the canoe. His head resurfaced immediately. His beard floated out beneath his chin, his hands paddled furiously. ‘Come on,’ he said to B.J. ‘Come on! We’ll build a fire. We’ll get dry. We’ll find something to eat. Oysters! Clams!’ He offered another inducement, which the water swallowed. A wave moved him farther from the canoe. ‘Come on!’ he called insistently. B.J. didn’t hear him again. B.J. watched Sam and Old Patsy and Purdy’s progress for as long as he could. When he thought that they had probably made it to shore, he told Chin so.