Sarah Canary

by Karen Joy Fowler

  Lydia rose and stood at the porthole. Nothing could be seen but water and the horizon. Adelaide had already looked. Adelaide picked up the newspaper. She tore a long strip to rewrap her rag in, then noticed the words a Palm at the top. She placed the strip back on the little desk, matching the torn edges. Now it read a Palmer. Adelaide had to retrieve the bloody section on the floor to piece together the entire article. Lydia Palmer had been captured six days ago while attending a performance of Love’s Hidden Heart in Sacramento.

  Adelaide was surprised at how little surprise she felt. What were the odds, really, that she, Adelaide Dixon, would be so lucky as to find the fugitive no one else had been able to find? A woman who couldn’t hold an audience, was afraid to have children, was afraid to fall in love. A woman who didn’t even sleep with men often, although once was more than enough as far as most people were concerned. Still Adelaide had magnified it. She had found that people would come to be scandalized when they wouldn’t come to be instructed. So she had made a lie of her sexual past in the service of great truths, and the truths were still true and the truth was still great, but Adelaide herself was only one small lie.

  Adelaide looked at her fingertips, smeared with blood and newspaper ink. Adelaide might tell a lie, but she was a great believer in seeing the truth. And the truth was that she hadn’t done this only for her work. The truth was that Adelaide was afraid, and perhaps she was the only woman in the world who felt this particular fear. She had never heard another woman say it. Adelaide was afraid that if she ever once allowed herself to feel the full range of her sexual desires, that this would be a need too great for any man. That these desires, once allowed to come to life, would never be silenced or satisfied again. Adelaide had read Darwin’s The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex to find the answer to one question. Why were men’s sexual needs so easily accommodated, when women’s were so difficult? She knew what a minister would tell her, if she asked him. She had hoped for something new from Mr Darwin. But Darwin didn’t talk about women’s needs at all.

  Some tiny hold on reality had prevented Adelaide from telegraphing her triumph ahead to San Francisco, as would have been a more sensible course of action if she had really captured Lydia Palmer. So Adelaide wasn’t surprised and she wasn’t disappointed and she wasn’t angry. She was just tired. She had been emptied out like a bottle.

  The Alaskan Wild Woman had the hiccoughs. They were a noisy and arrhythmic variety. Who in the world was she? Poor crazy woman. What was Adelaide to do with her? She couldn’t return her to Harold, who had been clearly terrifying and mistreating her. Perhaps B.J. knew where she belonged. Hadn’t he been looking for her, too?

  Adelaide locked the door behind her and went back to the boiler room. Past the sheep with their black, heart-shaped faces, past the wardrobes, past the grandfather clock whose pendulum was wrapped in an Irish blue quilt and whose hands were frozen, one on top of the other, at midnight.

  The boiler room glowed. She knelt beside B.J. ‘Look,’ he said. He held his fist out to her, then withdrew it. ‘Well, I can’t show you. If I open my hand, it will get away. But my blanket has fleas. I’ve caught one.’

  ‘Where did you find the woman?’ Adelaide asked. ‘Who is she?’

  ‘Chin found her. In the forest. Her name is Sarah Canary. Have you ever seen a flea dressed up like a bride or a groom?’

  ‘No,’ said Adelaide. ‘Can you take her home?’

  ‘If you tell me where. Chin and I would do it.’

  ‘I would do it, too,’ said Adelaide. Of course she would. ‘I was hoping you would tell me where.’

  ‘Ask Chin,’ B.J. suggested. ‘And keep her away from Harold. Harold is looking for her. Have they found Harold?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Adelaide. ‘Not the last that I heard.’ She wanted sympathy suddenly. She had been alone such a long time. Or perhaps she was frightened by her own emptiness and wanted a respite from it. A friend, however temporary. To be taken medicinally. ‘The last I heard, they were accusing me of dressing Harold like a woman and hiding him in my cabin,’ she told B.J., thinking how very brave it was of him to come in a canoe through a storm only a lunatic would face to rescue an ugly woman who couldn’t even thank him. It was almost romantic.

  ‘Dressing him like a woman?’ B.J. repeated. ‘All in black? And then putting him with other women in black like yourself and Sarah Canary? So no one would notice him? I heard a story like that once. Only instead of women dressed in black, it was purloined letters. Except for that, it was the same story. Have you ever seen trained fleas? A flea circus? Like they have in England?’

  ‘I saw some fleas once who were dressed as little soldiers. They shot off a little cannon and raised a little Union flag,’ said Adelaide. ‘In a carnival. Of course, the fleas aren’t really trained. No one could train a flea. They’re just hopping about. They’re just trying desperately to escape. I thought it was too much like the real war to be entertaining. I thought it was too much like life.’ Something in her answer distressed B.J. Adelaide could see it in his face. She wanted to reassure him, but she didn’t know what she had said.

  ‘There she is, Tom,’ said the Chinese man. Adelaide turned. His breathing had normalized, his color improved. He looked less stiff. He was warmer; Adelaide felt his forehead.

  ‘Oh, he’s much better,’ said Adelaide, hoping to please B.J. with this news. But the look the Chinese man gave her was startling, a look perhaps of defenseless joy. A look as if, of all the faces in the world, hers was the one he had most wanted to open his eyes and see. Adelaide smiled at him involuntarily. ‘Mr Chin,’ she asked gently. ‘Who do you think I am?’

  ‘An enchantress,’ Chin answered. His voice was weak from fever and rough as a frog’s.

  ‘Delirium and shock,’ Captain Wescott opined sadly. Adelaide did not know when he had entered the boiler room. He was standing behind her, looking down on the Chinese man, shaking his head. ‘Absolutely starkers.’

  Adelaide removed her hand from Chin’s head. ‘Have you found Harold?’ she asked tartly.

  ‘Not yet,’ said the captain. ‘He’s been seen up by the pilothouse, but we haven’t actually caught up with him yet.’

  ‘B.J. says he’s looking for my companion,’ Adelaide told him. She turned to B.J. for confirmation. B.J.’s face was shadowed, but his hands were open and empty. Apparently he had allowed his captive to slip away.

  ix

  Below Nob Hill lay Tangrenbu, San Francisco’s Chinatown, an area comprising about ten city blocks and housing an expanding population. In 1871, the Sandlot Orator, Denis Kearney, told the city of San Francisco that the contest against the Chinese would not end until there was enough blood in Chinatown to float their bodies to the bay. He spoke, he said, for the working man. He represented the Workingmen’s Party.

  H.J. West printed and disseminated an influential pamphlet entitled ‘The Chinese Invasion: They are Coming, 900,000 More. The Twenty-three Years’ Invasion of the Chinese In California And The Establishment of a Heathen Despotism in San Francisco. Nations of the Earth Take Warning!’

  In 1869, one month before the completion of the transcontinental railroad, a Central Pacific crew of 848 Chinese had set the world track-laying record, ten miles of track laid in twelve hours. In 1871, the San Francisco medical community explained that the nerve endings in a typical Chinese man’s body were farther from the surface of the skin than those of the typical Caucasian. This made the Chinese inferior to the Caucasians since they were able to work longer hours and were less sensitive to pain. These findings were published in the California 1871 Biennial State Board of Health Report.

  In his inaugural address, Newton Booth, the governor of California, opposed the law that prevented the Chinese and Indians from giving testimony in court and succeeded in overturning it by statute in 1872. In 1872, a group of boys selected a Chinese man at random and stoned him to death in broad daylight while a large crowd of San Franciscans watched.

&nbs
p; In 1873, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors passed the Queue Ordinance, which required all prisoners in the city jails to have haircuts, established a special tax on laundries, and began to apply the Cubic Air Ordinance (which penalized crowded living conditions) to the Chinese only. The Cubic Air Ordinance was overturned on the grounds that it was beyond the jurisdiction of the Board, and the mayor, William Alvord, vetoed the Queue Ordinance and the tax. His action was applauded by the majority of newspapers, countrywide. Prejudice must not be allowed to become persecution, the New York Herald said. And from the Chicago Inter-Ocean, ‘They have a brave man for Mayor of San Francisco.’

  16

  The Story Of Caspar Hauser

  Stands the Sun so close and mighty

  That our Minds are hot.

  Emily Dickinson, 1872

  Chin had only been in San Francisco once before. Unlike most of his compatriots, his original point of debarkation was New Orleans. An American clipper-ship company had advertised the Ville de St Louis with the following handbill:

  ALL CHINAMEN MAKE MUCH MONEY IN NEW ORLEANS, IF THEY WORK. CHINAMEN HAVE BECOME RICHER THAN MANDARINS THERE. PAY, FIRST YEAR, $300, BUT AFTERWARDS MAKE MORE THAN DOUBLE. ONE CAN DO AS LIKES IN THAT COUNTRY. NOBODY BETTER NOR GET MORE PAY THAN DOES HE. NICE RICE, VEGETABLES, AND WHEAT, ALL VERY CHEAP. THREE YEARS THERE WILL MAKE POOR WORKMAN VERY RICH, AND HE CAN COME HOME ANY TIME. ON THE SHIPS THAT GO THERE PASSENGERS WILL FIND NICE ROOMS AND VERY FINE FOOD. THEY CAN PLAY ALL SORTS OF GAMES AND HAVE NO WORK. EVERYTHING NICE TO MAKE MAN HAPPY. IT IS NICE COUNTRY. BETTER THAN THIS. NO SICKNESS THERE AND NO DANGER OF DEATH. COME! GO AT ONCE. YOU CANNOT AFFORD TO WAIT. DON’T HEED WIFE’S COUNSEL OR THE THREAT OF ENEMIES. BE CHINAMEN, BUT GO.

  Chin was carried aboard with a bag over his head. He had been out running an errand for his mother.

  Several of the Chinese men on board the Ville de St Louis jumped into the bay in Canton. Some of them drowned. More died during the long trip. It was a part of his life Chin tried never to think of, but these memories surfaced like bodies whenever he was forced to travel over water. He had been on boats for five days now. He was a haunted man.

  Three years ago, Chin had landed in New Orleans, seriously malnourished, desperately homesick, and covered with fleas. He escaped immediately and made his way across the country to San Francisco, where his uncle was working. His English was good when he started his journey. It was excellent by the time he arrived. And he had learned many other things: mysterious beliefs, strange customs, odd sayings. I am all ears, the white demons said, with typical Caucasian overstatement. I am all thumbs. You are all heart. You are all wet. But he had not really understood until Adelaide Dixon explained it to him that the issues of the Civil War had been largely sexual.

  In the slave system, she said, one group of men (white) had absolute power over one group of women (black). With nothing but their own sense of decency as a restraint, the white plantation owners had been, essentially, unrestrained. At a recent exhibition in Chicago, a statue entitled ‘The Slave’ was unveiled. This was a figure of a beautiful white woman in chains and despair. The response had been sensational. But no one, Miss Dixon said, wanted to examine too closely all the things the statue might mean. The sculptor seemed to be making a point about the condition of white women; the audience understood this simple statement. Only Miss Dixon wondered if something even more radical was being said. Don’t trust your eyes, the statue had told her. Now what do you see? In San Francisco, Miss Dixon said, she had seen many black people with so much white blood that they could pass either way.

  ‘And was it an accident that, just as women in the East were demanding equality and the vote, men in the South were employing the method of rape to create a new race of subjugated women?’ Miss Dixon asked, standing next to Sarah Canary, leaning against the rail on the deck of the large steamship she had bought them all tickets on in Tacoma. Miss Dixon knew of a women’s rescue mission on Kearny in San Francisco that might take Sarah Canary until her family could be found.

  ‘No,’ said B.J. ‘It was not.’ He stood on Miss Dixon’s other side, next to Chin, leaning his back against the rail in a glorious flood of sunlight. Chin had been sun-starved. He closed his eyes and let the sun bleach away the dark times in his memory.

  They passed another steamer headed north. B.J. turned to look. Whistles sounded on both boats; passengers shouted greetings from the decks. The man standing on Sarah Canary’s right cupped his hands and hallooed through them. Sarah Canary howled, only once, but the passengers standing around her fell immediately silent and edged away.

  Chin watched, waiting for the moment when the waves from the wake of the second boat would collide with their own wake. The surface was a chaos of glittering and shaded mountains, which rose and fell in an instant beside other mountains. A diorama of the history of the world. A statement made in the full light of day. If mountains were brief, then what were men?

  ‘. . . corruption,’ said Miss Dixon. ‘If slavery had been allowed to continue another three generations, the slaves would have become visually indistinguishable from the masters. The physical evidence of the white man’s corruption would no longer be possible to ignore.’ A flock of gray and white sea gulls whirled above them, screaming to be fed. Two small boys in sailor suits threw handfuls of bread and crackers into the air. Sarah Canary watched, opening and closing her mouth soundlessly. ‘How much white blood would it have taken until the white women in the South were forced to recognize the slave women in the South as their sisters?’ asked Miss Dixon. ‘Literally, their sisters.’

  ‘How much,’ B.J. echoed, shaking his head in an ambiguous gesture of agreement or disagreement, depending on which was appropriate. Chin had frequently seen him employ this strategy when he had been asked a question and didn’t have a clue as to the answer.

  ‘Now the only slaves in this country are Chinese women,’ Miss Dixon said pointedly. She didn’t look at Chin, but he suspected she wanted him to do something about this. What did she think he could do? Miss Dixon was probably unaware of it, but once every seven years on the Festival of the Good Lady, Chinese women were permitted to walk the streets freely, just as if they were men. Chin made a decision not to tell her.

  Miss Dixon already recognized the Negro women as sisters and the Chinese women and the Indian women as well. Miss Dixon didn’t have a racist bone in her body, she told Chin quite frequently, and she proved it by bringing Sarah Canary all the way down to steerage every day to see him.

  So Chin thought she might notice that she did all the talking when they were together. She was the first white woman he had ever talked to. So much yang to her yin. She had something to say about everything. This was not an attractive female quality, probably not even in the white culture. In fact, there was something sexless in the unrestrained way she confided in him, not that he wanted it any other way. Speaking with white women was always a dangerous activity for Chinese men, but the danger did not go both ways, so perhaps it was unfair to expect Miss Dixon to see this.

  Still he felt that Miss Dixon did like him, although he didn’t know why. It was a whimsical approval at best and he knew better than to count on it. B.J. said that Miss Dixon had nursed him very tenderly on board the Pumpkin, and that Chin had been near death. Chin thought he must be right, because Chin remembered spending the time with Tom, remembered that he and Tom had finally settled some things between them, and death was certainly where Tom would be. Chin didn’t remember Miss Dixon at all until the time Sarah Canary was brought in to the boiler room to see him just before their arrival in Tacoma. Sarah Canary had recognized him. Not that there was any show of happiness. Sarah Canary had simply held out her hand, palm up, until Chin fished through his clothes for one of his chopsticks. He was resigned. Nature was partial to pairs, B.J. kept reminding him, but Chin seemed doomed to own a single chopstick. He hadn’t really wanted to eat with something that had been in Harold’s heart, anyway. Sarah Canary had immediately put the round end into
her mouth.

  ‘Don’t let her swallow it,’ B.J. said anxiously, but she had already withdrawn it and stuck it into her nose. ‘Just like Dr Carr said,’ B.J. told Chin, shaking his head. ‘“Every orifice,” he said. “Women are so prone to this,” he said.’ B.J. whispered so that Miss Dixon, who had accompanied Sarah Canary, wouldn’t hear. She heard anyway.

  ‘And just who is this Dr Carr?’ she asked nastily, making Sarah Canary take the chopstick out of her nose. ‘When he is at home?’

  ‘The doctor at the Steilacoom asylum.’ B.J.’s tone was careful. ‘I didn’t say it.’

  ‘I should think not.’

  ‘I did say that maybe women who liked to ride horses wanted’ – he stopped suddenly, blushing – ‘wanted to be men. The kind of woman who won’t ride sidesaddle. You know.’

  Miss Dixon shook her head. ‘I’m not sure I do. A sidesaddle is a lot harder to stay on. Have you ever ridden with one?’

  ‘I didn’t mean that.’ B.J. tried again. ‘I just thought maybe these women wanted to have what men have. So they ride horses. Without the sidesaddle.’

  Miss Dixon looked bewildered. She turned to Chin for an explanation. Chin didn’t know what B.J. was talking about.

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ said B.J. nervously. ‘Forget it. Dr Carr set me straight.’

  Miss Dixon stared at B.J. ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘No. You can go somewhere on a horse.’ She laughed suddenly. ‘Calamity Jane likes to ride her horse standing on her head,’ she said.

  Bringing Sarah Canary out of her cabin and down a deck had been Captain Wescott’s idea, a daring stratagem to entice Harold out in the open. It hadn’t worked. Harold continued to haunt the Pumpkin like a ghost: the child Emmaline saw him everywhere – in the porthole, on the poop deck – but the sightings grew more and more outlandish. Chin thought Harold must have gone back over the side. In a just world, he would be washed up on the beach near Steilacoom and interned under Dr Carr and Houston’s anxious care. Presumably security had been tightened since Chin, Sarah Canary, and B.J. had made their escape. Harold could just stay there eating boxty until he got better.