Gold Mountain Blues

by Ling Zhang

  He slowly crawled out of the tent. Outside it was a dull day, the sun so weak you could only tell where it was by looking at the shade. Before the snow on the trees had had time to melt, it froze again, forming icicles on the branches that swayed in the wind. They had exhausted the supply of firewood and the charcoal fire sputtered into extinction. No one had the energy to go and cut more fuel.

  Ah-Fat felt something nudge the small of his back and, turning round, he saw Ginger. The dog walked soundlessly, making as little disturbance as a puff of wind. Ah-Fat reached out and felt his belly. Ginger wearily raised a hind leg, pissed a few drops of urine, then stopped. When Ah-Fat had been at work in the camp, it was so unbearably cold he used to put his hands in the urine whenever Ginger pissed, to warm them up. The dog came to understand what Ah-Fat was doing and would hold back until Ah-Fat reached out his hands. But Ginger had not eaten for many days. The dog’s belly was empty and he hardly had any urine left. There were deep cracks all over Ah-Fat’s hands and the urine hurt like hell. Ah-Fat shook his hands dry and kicked the dog away with his foot. Ginger whimpered and shook the snow off his coat. Then he crept back to Ah-Fat and pushed his head against his chest.

  By now Ginger was nothing but skin and bones, and his sagging belly hung down to the ground like a wrung-out cloth bag. His ribs showed. Ah-Fat stroked her head, flattening a few stray hairs. Then his heart skipped a beat. He had an idea.

  He stood up and fetched the axe he used for chopping down trees.

  “Ginger, you’re gonna die anyway,” he said quietly, “you might as well save us.”

  As he raised the axe to strike, he saw a flicker of fear in Ginger’s eyes. But the dog made no move to run away. Instead, he made a slight movement and sank down on the ground, as if to sleep off a good dinner.

  Ah-Fat checked the axe for a moment, then struck the dog’s neck. The blood spurted out, spattering a line of drops over the snow. The dog’s eyes opened wide. In them Ah-Fat saw the mountains, the trees, the sky. He knelt down and pushed the lids down. The dog’s tongue quivered and he licked Ah-Fat’s hand one last time. The dog’s eyes had opened again but the image of the mountains, the trees and the sky gradually faded. Ah-Fat felt something prickling his face. He rubbed it with the back of his hand and was surprised to find it wet with tears.

  A couple of hours later, the forest was filled with the smell of cooked meat. Ah-Fat ladled out a bowlful of soup with two slices of lean meat floating on top and carried it to Red Hair. Red Hair’s wounds had not healed and still wept blood and pus. The flesh had begun to smell. Ah-Fat propped him up and helped him eat the soup. Unsalted and without any oil in it, it tasted rank. Red Hair forced himself to swallow a mouthful but, like a hydra-headed snake, it fought its way back up and spurted out of his nose, mouth and throat. He was shaken by a violent cough which pulled at the wound on the side of his face. The excruciating pain made him howl in agony. “Ah-Fat!” he shouted suddenly. “Why’s it got dark so quickly? Light the lamp!” “It’s broad daylight! What d’you want a lamp for?” The chopsticks fell from Red Hair’s hand. “It’s got dark. I can’t see anything…” Red Hair’s eyes had a glassy stare. Ah-Fat realized that he had just gone blind.

  Ah-Fat hurriedly helped Red Hair to lie back down again.

  Red Hair tried to cough but was so weak that the breath caught in his throat and he seemed about to choke. Ah-Fat thumped his chest hard a few times, and his breathing eased a little.

  Suddenly, Red Hair gripped Ah-Fat’s hand. “When my kid Loon gets married, will you see to the wedding as his uncle?” “You’re woozy with sleep, Uncle Red Hair,” said Ah-Fat with a smile. “Loon’s like my younger brother, he’s the same generation as me. He needs a real uncle to marry him off. Besides, he’s a little kid, just out of his nappies. Why are you worrying about getting him married?” Red Hair gave a sigh but said nothing. Ah-Fat freed his hand and noticed that all Red Hair’s fingers were swollen and club-like. He knew the reason why—the lack of fresh vegetables. What he did not know was whether Red Hair would make it through the winter.

  During the night, Ah-Fat awoke to find Red Hair sitting up holding on to one of the tent struts, his eyes glittering brightly. “What’s up?” he asked in surprise. “Do you want to take a piss? Do you want me to help you outside?” Red Hair shook his head. He turned towards Ah-Fat and said something into his ear. His voice was so weak that Ah-Fat did not understand at first. Red Hair said it again: “Fiddle.” “What do you want the fiddle for?” asked Ah-Fat. “It’s the middle of the night.” “I’m giving it to you, the fiddle…” Red Hair started coughing weakly again and said nothing more.

  Red Hair died that night. When they woke up the next morning, the tent stank. Red Hair had pissed on his mat. When they tried to shake him awake, they found his body was stiff.

  They hurriedly wrapped Red Hair in one of the sleeping mats and carried him outside. It was snowing so heavily the sky seemed to be falling on them. Great, fat snowflakes hit them silently in their faces, almost blinding them so that they could not make out each other’s features. It was impossible to dig a hole to bury Red Hair, so they tied the bundle up with twine and laid it down under a tree, weighted down with stones.

  They stumbled back to the tent. “It’s cold enough to freeze your piss today,” said someone. “Red Hair won’t start to rot in this weather for couple of weeks or more.” Ah-Lam gathered up Red Hair’s soiled clothes. “Who knows how many of us’ll live,” he said with a sigh. “Better wait a few days and bury all the bodies together. It’ll save digging a hole for each one.” This possibility had occurred to all of them but only vaguely. By speaking the thought out loud, Ah-Lam gave it a terrible clarity. It faced them squarely, and there was no getting away from it. When they lay down again, the tent felt strangely roomy. The space Red Hair’s body had been crammed into was tiny, but now that he was gone, it seemed like a yawning gap. As they listened to the thunderous drumming noise from the trees above the tent, they trembled in fear.

  Their hunger had numbed them. But the dog meat soup they had gulped down yesterday aroused the hunger pangs again, acute and fierce. When they lay down to sleep, they felt terrible gnawing pains. They did not dare close their eyes for fear they would never wake up again, like Red Hair. The cook, who had lain down for a moment suddenly sat up again. “I’m going to eat snow!” he said. “I’ve heard just drinking water can keep you alive for two weeks.”

  There were desperate shouts and they all sat up and crawled outside. They scraped up the snow with their bare hands and ate it. They stuffed themselves with it until they felt they would burst, stood up to piss and ate again. After three rounds of eating snow and pissing, they staggered back to the tent and lay down again, still hungry but this time with full bellies.

  Finally they could not stay awake any longer and drifted into a lethargic sleep.

  Ah-Fat was the first to hear it—he was awakened by a strange noise from neighbouring tents. It was a little like the wind rustling in bamboos or a rope dancing in mid-air. It was the sound of someone whistling, he realized.

  “The pack horses! The pack horses!” someone screamed.

  When the snow stopped, Ah-Fat took them to bury Red Hair.

  When they scraped away the snow, they discovered that the twine had been gnawed through. The mat had come undone and Red Hair was missing two fingers. Another finger was broken at the joint but still attached by the skin.

  Ah-Fat re-wrapped the body, bound it up tightly and told the others to start digging the grave. The ground was frozen hard as iron and their pickaxes pinged against it. The men dug until they were covered with sweat, but all they made was a shallow hole. They tipped the matting bundle in and covered it with a few clods of earth. Suddenly Ah-Fat dug the body out again and rearranged it. He pointed it in a different direction and started burying it again. The men were puzzled but Ah-Lam could see what he was doing: “It points East now, towards Tang Mountain.”

  To stop wild animals digging up the
body, they piled stones on top of the earthen mound and stuck a tree branch in as a marker. Ah-Fat thought the branch would blow down at the first gust of wind, so decided to carve Red Hair’s name on the trunk of a nearby fir.

  He took the axe to the tree but then realized that he only knew Red Hair’s surname—Fong—but not his formal given names. No one else knew either. Finally he just carved “Red Hair Fong” in crooked characters on the tree trunk.

  Ah-Fat stood looking at his handiwork in a daze. After a while he said: “Uncle Red Hair, wait seven years and I’ll be back to collect your bones.” He suddenly remembered what Red Hair had said that day when they helped Ah-Sing collect his cousin’s bones in Victoria: “I brought you out here, you send me home, then we’re quits.” Red Hair’s words had been prophetic.

  “I’m sorry you’re missing a bone or two, Uncle Red Hair,” said Ah-Fat as he knelt with all the ceremony he could muster before the makeshift grave.

  The Pacific Railroad wound first northward, then eastward, snaking its way along the Fraser Valley and biting a great hole in the belly of the Rocky Mountains. As this great dark snake crept forwards, inch by inch, the camps kept pace, moving along in its trail until, before Ah-Fat knew it, he had sewn more than sixty crosses in the corner of the tarpaulin.

  One day, just as Ah-Fat had sewn the sixty-eighth cross, he saw the record-keeper hurrying over. “The foreman’s called a meeting,” he said. The men were squatting on the ground, slurping at their bowls of porridge. They did not move. “Could be the Lord in Heaven above, but you gotta fill your belly first,” said one. The record-keeper glanced at them. “He doesn’t want any of you, he wants him,” he said, indicating Ah-Fat. “So he wants you to make another trip with the Yellow Water bottle, does he?” said someone. “A hundred-dollar bank draft won’t be enough this time. Times have changed…” “You dickhead, there’ll be no carrying Yellow Water anywhere,” Ah-Lam retorted. “All the tunnels are finished and they’re waiting for the tracks to be joined up. There’s fuck-all blasting to do now.” “Oh, but the boss thinks Ah-Fat carried the bottle so nicely, maybe he’s going to let him enjoy his wife as a reward,” put in another man. “You’re still a virgin, Ah-Fat, aren’t you? Lucky you to have a hell of a woman for your first time around!”

  Ah-Fat walked away with the men’s mocking laughter ringing in his ears, prickling him like a sticky burr clinging to his back.

  The foremen’s tent was about a hundred paces away up the slope. As he looked up, Ah-Fat could see horses, already saddled and bridled, tied to trees far in the distance. He watched the horses, heads lowered, drinking from the water buckets as the record-keeper went in and reported his arrival. He recognized his foreman’s horse, a skittish black pony two to three years old, kicking out and swishing its tail. It snorted playfully as it drank from its bucket. Ah-Fat walked over to it and began making plaits all the way down its mane. The pony looked round at him. It seemed to enjoy the attention, and rubbed its neck against Ah-Fat’s hand, whinnying softly.

  The record-keeper called Ah-Fat inside.

  The tent was exactly the same as the one Ah-Fat lived in, except that his was shared between ten men, and this one housed only three. They were all foremen, each in charge of their own horses and men. The lamp had been turned up to its brightest and the men were playing cards in intense silence. They had no table, so two bedrolls, one on top of the other, served as a card table. The floor was littered with empty liquor bottles. Back when he lived at Ah-Sing’s store, Ah-Sing had told him that the yeung fan drank something with a strange name, “wee-skee,” and a peculiar smell. Now that Ah-Fat could smell it for himself, he thought it had a smell like mouldy cloth shoes. It tickled right inside his nostrils and nearly made him sneeze. It was still early in the morning, and the sun had only just started to brighten the tops of the trees. But the foremen had already drunk enough to turn the tips of their noses bulbous and red, and the sleeping mats were not rolled out. Ah-Fat guessed they had been up all night drinking. He knew that camp rules prohibited alcohol, so it was odd that they were flouting them today. Then his foreman brought the fanned cards in his hand together with a swish and waved at the record-keeper to get out. The record-keeper and Ah-Fat were both startled—the foreman normally communicated through the record-keeper and had never spoken directly to a navvy before.

  The record-keeper made a respectful bow and exited through the tent flap, leaving Ah-Fat alone. The three foremen finished their card game. Ah-Fat’s boss appeared to have lost—he grimaced and frowned grimly. Then he stood up, brought a sack out from a corner of the tent and said something. His face formed complicated creases as he spoke and Ah-Fat was puzzled. Were they an expression of annoyance or of sadness? But he had worked for almost five years with this foreman and, if the man spoke slowly, Ah-Fat could understand about half of what he said without needing the record-keeper’s help.

  “This is for you.”

  Ah-Fat undid the twine tied around the sack and opened it. It held crispy rice cakes. Ever since the time when the team nearly died from starvation, food supplies consisted mostly of rice sheets imported from Hong Kong, with only small amounts of loose rice. The rice was cooked in a dry wok till crispy on the bottom, then compressed and cut into sheets a foot square. Once they were dried out, they were much lighter than rice so the supply teams could bring more supplies in one trip. Plus the rice in the rice sheets was already cooked and, at a pinch, could be eaten without further cooking. Once the men had pitched camp, the sheets could also be soaked in water and boiled up into rice or rice porridge.

  Ah-Fat reckoned at a rough glance that the sack held about a hundred sheets. Generally, the supply teams would hand over supplies to the cook in each work team. They had never given them directly to the navvies. Ah-Fat thought he must have heard wrong. He pointed to the sack and then to himself. “Give … me?”

  The foreman nodded. “The railroad’s soon going to be finished. We’re letting you all go. Understand? Let go. I mean…” The foreman flapped his hands dismissively and Ah-Fat suddenly understood.

  “What time?”

  “Now.”

  The saddled horses, the card table, the liquor. Ah-Fat’s head was spinning but all these disparate fragments gradually began to make up complete picture. Like a thunderbolt, the realization came to him that all the men in the camp were being abandoned in the wilderness.

  “This … each person?” he asked, pointing at the sack.

  “No, just you.” The foreman pointed at Ah-Fat’s chest.

  “Contract, contract…” Ah-Fat was trying to say, “What about the compensation stipulated in the contract?” but his English was not up to it. All he could do was repeat the word “contract.”

  The foreman understood anyway. He started to speak, but the only words that came out were a repeated “Sorry, sorry.”

  Ah-Fat ran out of the tent and said to the record-keeper, who was standing at the entrance: “Call the men, all of them, quick!”

  The record-keeper looked at the foreman who had followed Ah-Fat out and dared not move.

  “You afraid of that dickhead? They’re trying to dismiss us on the spot! If you don’t go, the whole camp will starve. Quick!” Ah-Fat gave the record-keeper a savage kick and the man stumbled off down the mountain.

  A fierce argument broke out among the three foremen and although Ah-Fat could not understand, he hazarded a guess that the other two were pinning the blame for this new trouble on his foreman. After the shouting had continued for a bit, the three men went into the tent, rolled up the bed mats and slung them across the horses’ backs. They were about to mount, when Ah-Fat pulled a bottle from his pocket and blocked their way. “You dare make one move,” he said, “and I’ll smash this. I’ll take your three lives with my one life. Fair’s fair.”

  The foremen could not understand a word Ah-Fat said, but they did not need to. Their eyes were drawn to the bottle in Ah-Fat’s hand and the yellow liquid that glinted in the early morning sunlight
. They suddenly looked ashen, as if a receding tide had sucked all the blood from their faces, exposing a network of livid lines and wrinkles.

  A dense black cloud started to roll up the mountainside. It was a black cloud of men, several hundred Chinese men, all from the dozen or so tents that made up the camp. They came brandishing shovels, hammers, pickaxes, rock drills, axes and sticks. They brought the brazier shovels and the ladles too. Anything that could be moved, they brought with them. The black cloud coalesced from scattered puffs of vapour, gathering speed and momentum as it surged up the slope and arrived at the foremen’s tent.

  Ah-Lam was first on the scene. He was holding a knife which he had grabbed from the cook—one used for peeling potatoes and cutting up cabbage. He had torn his trousers running here and the tatters flapped in the wind like the wings of a sparrow hawk.

  “You motherfucker,” he raged at the foreman. “We gave years of our lives for you, and now you think you can get rid of us just like that.” Ah-Lam grabbed hold of the foreman’s jacket and lunged at him with the knife. The foreman dodged and Ah-Lam deflected, missed his footing and tumbled down the slope, coming to rest against a sapling. The tears in Ah-Lam’s trousers caught on the branches and he had to make several attempts to stand upright. A trouser leg ripped off in the process, leaving him with one bare leg. His hair stood up like wire bristles and, his eyes blazing and almost starting from his head, he launched himself into a new attack.

  Just as he was raising his knife to bring it down on the foreman’s head, he glimpsed, out of the corner of his eye, something which leapt, pantherlike, from the crowd of men. It seized his arm. Ah-Lam saw it was Ah-Fat, and his aim faltered—but too late to stop the knife on its ferocious plunge downwards.