Erlan smiled. The Chinese always called a boy baby disparaging names, for the same reason that they put thin gold hoops in his ears and tied ribbons of the female color blue in his hair— to fool the jealous gods into thinking he was a girl so they wouldn't steal him for their spirit world.
Erlan spent a few more minutes drinking tea and chatting with Ah Toy, and then she pushed back her chair and stood up, wincing as pain shot through her feet. They were already raw, although the day was not yet half over.
"Ching! Ching!" Ah Toy exclaimed. "Please eat before you go." She gestured at the stove where a pot of congee sat steaming. The smell of the sweetened rice was tempting, but Erlan politely declined.
Outside, the snow was coming down harder now and the temperature had fallen. An icy glaze covered everything, making the footing even more treacherous. She groaned as she lifted the yoke. It was so heavy it often left weals and bruises on her shoulders after a long day. All of her body hurt after hours bent over the washtub and ironing board. But it was her heart that ached the most. She had never thought she would miss the merchant Woo so much. She missed his gentle ways and his many kindnesses and even his odd eccentricities—like his desire to make himself over into a one hundred percent American. A Yankee Doodle dandy.
Oh, she had wailed loudly at his coffin for three days and three nights, as was proper. And though she'd had no money to spend on his funeral, she had done what she could to show him honor, burning red paper money to provide for his journey in the afterlife, and sweet incense sticks to propitiate the gods. And then, two months later, fortune had given them a son. A son who would live to feed his father's spirit in the shadow world.
But the one thousand one hundred and sixty dollars American that she had kept in the shoebox beneath her bed was gone. Blown out into the prairie, or stolen by those sons of turtles, may their ancestors be cursed ten thousand times. Now she must begin all over again to earn the money for her passage home, and she must do it in this place where the Chinese people were despised and tormented. This empty land with room enough for everyone but them.
Opening a laundry was one of the few businesses allowed to Chinese, and it required little capital. One needed only soap, tubs, a washboard, an iron, and an ironing board. But last year the town council had passed an ordinance that all laundries had to pay a licensing fee of fifteen dollars a quarter. They called it the Chinese tax, because few whites were in the laundry business. At two dollars the dozen, Erlan had to boil and iron ninety shirts just to pay the tax. She understood now whence came that American expression: a Chinaman's chance.
She lay awake at night doing sums in her head to determine how long it would take her to make enough profit to buy passage home for herself and her son. At least she no longer had to repay Sam Woo her bride-price. She would repay her debt to him in another way, by taking his bones with her to be buried in the soil of China where they belonged.
A gust of bitter wind buffeted Erlan and sent her slipping along the troughs of snow. There had already been so many storms this winter that she had lost count. No sooner would the snow start to melt than it would freeze again, so that all was covered with a thick, crusty ice.
A snowball caught her flush on the neck, sending ice crystals shivering down inside the collar of her quilted jacket. She spun around so fast she nearly slipped again. A shadow flitted around the corner of one of the miners' shacks, and then she heard a child's mocking chant: "Chinaman, Chinaman, rode 'im out on a rail..."
She had left the Chinese part of town and was now in Dublin Patch. The smells were different here—sowbelly beans and coffee. But the shacks were the same, made from old shoring timbers and planks that had been thrown onto the trash piles near the mine.
She stopped now before one such shack and this time, too, the door opened wide before she could knock.
Drew Scully stood on the threshold, facing her. He stared at her a moment, then nodded and motioned for her to enter. His left arm was in a sling. But he had the strength in his right hand to lift the heavy yoke off her shoulders and set it carefully on the floor.
"How is he?" she whispered.
"Drunk."
"Already?"
"Already isn't the way of it, Mrs. Woo. He hasn't been sober since it happened. But then, you can't blame the man for not wanting to shout hallelujahs because he's been left stone blind." Drew rubbed a hand over his mouth as if he could wipe away the bitter taste of the words. "He wants the world dead, and himself first."
"Drew!" bellowed a voice from the back room, dark and bitter with rage. "You tell her to get herself lost, d'ye hear me, brother? I don't want to see her... See her." He laughed, a sound that was like a rag tearing. "Bloody, bloody hell."
"I told him you were coming," Drew said, keeping his voice low. "I thought it best. He's apt to get... violent when he's surprised. The physician finally took the bandages off for good and all a few weeks ago—" Something caught in his throat and he had to stop and swallow it down. "'Tesn't a pretty sight." He turned his face away, blinking hard. "Are you sure you'll be all right doing this alone, then?"
"It was your suggestion, Mr. Scully."
He sighed deeply. "Right. I'll be leaving, then. If he tries to murder you..."
"He won't," Erlan said. She was sure of that, though she was sure of nothing else. He was her anjing juren, her gentle giant, and he would never try to hurt her.
The one time she had seen Jere since the accident, he had been unconscious, the whole upper half of his head swathed in bandages. Afterward he had begged his brother to keep her away. Now she and Drew Scully had concocted this plan together. She only hoped it wasn't a mistake, for she couldn't bear to bring him any more pain after all he had already endured.
She waited until the door shut behind Drew. Then she called out a polite greeting to the man in the back room. But she didn't go to him right away. She had brought some herbal tea with her, made of jasmine, wild cherry bark, and wahoo root, and she set about brewing it on the shack's small cookstove. While she waited for the water to boil, she talked to him. She talked of Samuel, of how he could roll over now and how just last week he'd laughed out loud. She told him about the gift of a red jade necklace that One-Eyed Jack had given Ah Toy. She related a funny story about Pogey and Nash, who had gotten drunk at the Gandy Dancer last week and tried to rope a skunk.
He said nothing. But every time she paused for breath he made a rude noise, like the sucking sounds a horse made while trotting in mud.
She strained the tea and poured it into a big handleless cup, and then she could postpone the moment no longer.
With the shade pulled down over the window and no lamp lit, it was dark in the room. Jere sat in a willow rocking chair with his back to the door. His ragged hair hung down to his shoulders. A rank smell soured the air, and his blue chambray shirt was grease-marked, and stained with old sweat. As she approached him, she wished she had an opera mask to hide her face. Then she remembered: he couldn't see her.
Once he'd had a smile as broad as a moon bridge, but no longer. Once he'd had the strength of ten tigers. Now he sat in a chair all day and allowed his muscles to grow wasted and flabby. Once he had been brave, now he drowned his spirit in whiskey.
One of the bare pine floorboards squeaked beneath her feet, and he whipped his head around. And she saw his eyes.
Once his eyes had been beautiful, like rain-drenched skies. Now they were ugly weals of raw flesh.
She tried to make her lips and tongue work, to say something to him, but she couldn't. She imagined that she could see his heart working in his chest and his breath sucking in and out, and she knew the bitterness was like vinegar in his belly. She stared at his compressed lips because she couldn't bear to look at his ruined eyes.
She took a step toward him and then another. She held the teacup out to him, waiting for him to take it, and when she remembered that he couldn't see what she had done, she almost sobbed aloud.
She lifted the clenched hand off his la
p, the one that wasn't wrapped around the whiskey bottle. She pressed the cup against his knuckles.
"Get out!" he snarled, and knocked the cup out of her hand. It shattered against the wall, splashing the tea in a dark stain over the white washed boards. "Get out of here, you Chink bitch, and leave me the bloody hell alone!"
Drew Scully cradled his left arm against his chest as he slogged down the snow-choked road. In weather like this the bone ached like a rotten tooth. The break hadn't healed straight the first time so his arm had been re-broken and set again. He didn't want to think about what would happen if it still didn't come out right. At least it was his left arm.
Yellow light spilled from the windows of the Gandy Dancer saloon, along with the giddy strains of banjo music. He was no more than a flea's leap away from going in there and buying himself a drink, and then another and another. Joining his brother in the sweet, dulling comfort of the bottle.
When he passed by the butcher shop, he had to turn his head away from the sight of the bloody slabs of meat hanging off iron hooks in the window. One of the other miners had told him the drift where the sleeper had blown had had to be dusted with quicklime before work could be resumed down there.
No power on earth would get Drew back down the shafts. The fear was so strong in him that he could taste it all the time now. It was the taste of dynamite and blood, and a black hole in the ground.
Drew Scully took a deep breath and tried to get ahold of himself. His self-respect, his pride, was breaking to bitter pieces inside him.
He trudged up the butte through the falling snow. As he turned down the path to the office of the superintendent of mines, he passed the men on the rustling line applying for work. The line was long. The Four Jacks had been doing more laying off than hiring lately. Rumor had it the silver was playing out.
The mine office occupied a small shack next to the changing house. Drew asked the secretary, who was sitting behind a desk made out of empty dynamite boxes, if he could see the superintendent. He was told to take a load off and wait.
He sat down and looked around a room cluttered with rock samples, canvas bags, map cases, a broken time clock, and a gold nugget press. The walls were covered with drawings of the works below, geological charts, and risque Police Gazette calendars. The room was cold but he could feel a runnel of sweat run down his side.
After about a half an hour the secretary got up and left through the front door. Drew got up and went through the back door, which he assumed led to the super's office. He didn't bother to knock.
The superintendent sat in a hooded leather chair behind a mahogany desk. A six-point rack of antlers hung on the wall at his back. A long case clock, its painted face orbited by moons and stars and comets, filled the room with a steady, sonorous ticking.
It was said the super owned the bulk share of the mine he was now running for the consortium. It was said he'd won it in a poker game. It was also said the man had once been a traveling parson. The black eye patch gave him the air of a pirate, but he'd always put Drew in mind of those slick drummers who wandered the countryside selling consumption-killer.
He was a sleek-looking man with a sharp face and long, oily boot-black hair that hung straight to his shoulders. His belly swelled against an expensive sealskin waistcoat, worn hairy side out.
The long case clock struck two o'clock. The super drew a dollar-sized stem-winder from his vest pocket and checked the time. He looked up and saw Drew. "Who the devil are you?"
"Drew Scully." He thought about adding "sir," then didn't.
"Scully?" The super puckered his mouth, as if thinking required some effort. But Drew saw a gambler's wits behind that single pale, flat eye: assessing, analyzing, calculating. It was as if life to him was one big poker game involving strategy, bluffing, risk, and reward.
He flashed a sudden charming smile. "You're the tough Cousin Jack who had the balls to demand a full day's pay after breaking an arm and putting in less than an hour on shift." On the desk sat a miniature gallus frame made of silver. He stroked it almost lovingly with his finger while he stared at Drew. "If you're worried about having a job once that sling comes off, you can tap her light. So long as you can still swing a sledge, you can do it at the Four Jacks."
Drew helped himself to a chair and produced a be-damned-to-you smile of his own. "We'll talk about what you'll be giving me later. After you take a look at this." And he tossed the ore sample at the super so fast the man had either to snatch it out of the air or allow it to smash his face.
He caught the rock one-handed without even blinking. He frowned at it. "What am I supposed to do with a piece of gangue—use it to weight papers?"
"That's no piece of worthless quartz. 'Tes the red metal."
The super's face took on a look that was half bored, half patronizing. "Copper? And you expect me to dance a jig and ooze delight from every pore over this? I'm afraid the fact that you found the green blight in my workings is hardly news and it isn't welcome." Copper was considered the bane of any silver-mining operation because it was a mineral that had to be extracted and dumped from the profit-producing ore.
Drew stretched out his legs, crossed his feet, and hooked a thumb in his vest pocket. "Aye, there's copper down there, all right. Big ruddy green veins of it."
Jack McQueen's mouth pulled into a wry smile. "Whoopee."
"Let me tell you about copper, Super." The older man lifted a haughty brow at this effrontery, and Drew smiled again. "Right now it sells for twelve cents a pound. Maybe 'tedn't a big market for it out here yet. But back in your eastern states, they're putting in electric cables and telephone wires all over the place. They're calling this the age of electricity. All those telephones and Edison's electric lights require miles' worth of the red metal. One, two years from now I figure copper'll be going for twenty cents a pound, maybe more."
Jack McQueen lifted the cover off a sandalwood humidor and took out a cigar. He examined it, bit off the end, and spat in the direction of a brass cuspidor. He lit up and sucked greedily on its smoke. Only then did he take a jeweler's loupe out of one of the desk's numerous drawers. He stood up and went to a cracked, dirty window, taking the ore sample with him.
He fitted the glass to his one good eye. "Where did this come from?"
"The west stope of the four-hundred-foot level. I already had it assayed over in Butte, but you can let your own man have a look. It'll prove so pure you could ship it to China and back for smelting and still make a profit. And this hill is full of copper. I'd stake my rep as champion double-jacker on it."
"Would you? But then, you won't be winning any more double-jacking championships, will you? Not with your brother as blind as a mole in a blizzard."
"You bloody bastard—" Drew leaped out of the chair and lunged for the man, only to be brought up short by the pocket derringer aimed at his middle.
"Sit down," the super said.
Drew put a finger under the gun's short barrel and lifted it until it was pointing between his own eyes. He smiled. "You going to shoot me, then? After half the morning shift has just seen me come calling?"
One-Eyed Jack tried to stare him down, and when he couldn't, he laughed. "You do have some sand in your craw, don't you, Drew Scully? Sit down, please. And notice I'm even saying it with a smile."
He slipped the gun back in his coat pocket and studied the ore sample again, turning it over and over in his hand. "Normally I abhor violence, especially when it's aimed at me. But it's unsettling to jump at a man's back like that, Drew Scully. It makes him jumpy, and then accidents are liable to happen."
He resumed his seat behind the mahogany desk and rested his chin on his steepled fingers. He studied Drew with the hot, intense stare of a conjurer. "A few months from now, when copper is discovered here at the Four Jacks, you will act as surprised as a nun with a bellyful of baby. That will be your play."
"And what's yours, then?"
"'Thou shalt not curse the deaf, nor put a stumbling block before the blind,
but shalt fear thy God: I am thy Lord.' Five dollars a week to your brother—we'll call it a pension, shall we?
This way he will never have to beg for pennies on a street corner. He'll have enough to keep him in whiskey and leave him with just enough pride not to put a gun in his mouth."
Drew pretended he hadn't just been given what he'd wanted most to come of this visit. "That's all well and good for poor Jere," he said. "Now what about me?" He had no intention of being greedy or a fool. If he demanded a percentage of the claim, he'd only wind up getting dry-gulched, shot in the back, and dumped in some brush-tangled coulee. But he was getting himself out of the mines. One way or the other he was getting out of the bloody mines.
One-Eyed Jack got slowly to his feet. "The Lord raises up the virtuous and casts down the wicked," he intoned in a preacher's voice, but his eye was smiling with mischief. "It so happens one of my gaffers—a fellow by the name of O'Brian— was jumped on and beat up by persons unknown a couple of weeks back. He was worked over so badly there isn't much of the man left in him, I'm afraid. Indeed, talk is, he can't even crawl out to the shithouse now without whimpering with fear."
Drew stood up as well. "Aye, Rainbow Springs is truly a wicked town," he said with mocking solemnity. "I don't want the gaffer's job."
"I had no intention of offering it to you, Drew Scully." A smile pulled at the super's mouth, and his eye narrowed with a mixture of amusement and guile. "What would you say to being town marshal of Rainbow Springs?"
Drew leaned over the desk. He lifted the top off the humidor and helped himself to a cigar. "Mr. Dobbs's thinking of retiring, is he?"
The super laughed. "I do so like a man who can see where I'm going and who tries to get there ahead of me. It keeps me on my toes. Yes, indeed, Drew Scully. The good marshal wants to buy himself a nice piece of property somewhere and raise chickens. I and some of the other businessmen in this town have been thinking things have gotten a bit too lax around here lately. Too many men have been had for breakfast, and that's apt to make those with money to invest in... in certain projects a bit leery, if you get my drift. We need a town marshal who's not afraid to lay down the law a bit, someone young and tough. A real scrapper."
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