Chasing Down the Moon

by Carla Baku

  Instead of handing over the money, Rose cocked her head to one side and tapped the coins on the counter as if trying to remember something. “Hm. You know, I think I may need—” She let her eyes roam across the shelves behind him, slowly scanning back and forth, up and down. Then she smacked the counter with one hand. “Firecrackers. Give me the big ones.”

  His expression was all surprise, and she laughed. A slow smile spread across his face, and he shook his head. “No firecrackers here,” he said, and she laughed harder, putting a hand to her mouth to keep from being heard out on the street. Then she tucked the tea and sugar into her bag. “We’ve had an interesting afternoon, Bai Lum.”

  “I think it will become less interesting now,” he told her. “I hope you’ll return soon, Rose Allen.”

  Rose felt herself flush, traitor skin broadcasting her emotions whether she liked it or not. “Maybe the next time I’ll decide about those bowls.”

  “Four flowers,” he said.

  “Four flowers.” She’d left the abacus on the counter and he held it out. She ran her hands over the wooden beads again. “Are you sure I can’t pay you something for this? It looks expensive.”

  “No, as I said, a gift.”

  “Then I definitely owe you a favor.”

  He nodded. “Favor.” He looked out the windows at the heavy sky. “Will you see Mrs. Huntington tonight?”

  Lucy Huntington was the wife of the Congregational minister, and Rose was sure she’d be at the Kendalls’ later. “I should see her, yes. Why?”

  “I have some seeds for her,” he said. “They came earlier than I expected, and she’ll want to pick them up as soon as possible. Will you tell her?”

  “Of course. Is that it? Seeds?”

  “That is the favor.”

  “That’s an awfully tiny favor,” she said. “I’ll tell her, though.” She shook her head. “I have to get back to Mrs. Kendall’s before Aunt comes searching for me.” Out she went. Passing the shop window, she smiled and lifted her hand in the smallest wave, knowing he’d be watching. He was.

  Bai Lum lifted his hand in return. Rose charged away, head up, square chin thrust forward as if daring the world to interfere with her. It was her earnest face that he loved most dearly, her green eyes so curious and open. He wondered how much the woman at the window had seen, staring in like a dimwitted chicken. Rose was correct, that her back to the window had probably blocked the woman from seeing exactly what was happening, but the woman’s expression had made it clear that whatever she had not seen, she had assumed. That he would take such a risk in the middle of the day, holding Rose’s hand that way, astonished him. Worse, he had been a breath away from leaning his face into her hair. So stupid.

  He had to assume that trouble would come with this, probably sooner rather than later, and Shu-Li couldn’t be here if that happened. Now he would not only need to arrange for the girl to leave as soon as possible (if such a thing could be arranged) but he would have to find a way to explain to Rose the disappearance of his “sister.” He locked the door to the mercantile, pulled the heavy oilcloth shades and climbed the stairs to his living quarters, hoping that Mrs. Huntington got his message.

  After the warm store, the chill outside made Rose pull up the collar of her coat. The sweeping old man was nowhere to be seen, had taken his broom inside, apparently. Many of the doors along the block were still open and she could hear desultory conversations, all in Chinese, mostly men. It sounded like the type of exchange that goes on at the end of any long day, quiet, unhurried, tired.

  She wondered what sorts of rumors about her were already circulating. It gave her a crawling sensation of being watched as she marched herself back to the Kendalls’. In less than two hours, a dozen women would be in Prudence Kendall’s front parlor, sipping the chrysanthemum tea and shooting little sidelong glances in Rose’s direction. She pictured herself standing in front of the group. You may have heard I was consorting with a Chinese man in broad daylight this afternoon. Yes, it’s true: I am in love with Bai Lum.

  Are there any questions?

  She could picture the women’s faces, how horrified, and thrilled with scandal. At the end of the block, before rounding the corner, she looked out over the bay. Two seagulls stood motionless on the pier as if waiting for sunset.

  “Well, Mama,” she muttered, “tell the ladies of Paw Paw I’ve come to ruin after all.” This made her smile. When she was much younger, right after her mother’s death, Rose had imagined that her mother now possessed a calm and even-handed understanding of the world. This newly-magnanimous mother listened to her daughter’s foibles with utmost patience and humor, despite the fact that, in life, Clarissa Allen had been a fussbudgety nitpicker who worried herself silly over the opinion of others. As Rose reached adulthood, though, and grief was tempered by memory, Rose was able to hold her actual mother in her heart, to love and miss that person in all her imperfect singularity. She knew that, alive, her mother would have been more scandalized than anyone, would have taken to her bed at the very idea of her daughter with the Chinese shopkeep.

  Her mother’s death had been sudden, a brain storm, the doctor said. One morning, before twelve-year-old Rose was even out of bed, her father had found Clarissa trying to walk out the back door with a bucket of table scraps for the chickens. But instead of going out, she kept knocking into the left side of the doorway, bumping, backing up, trying again, and looking as placid as milk all the while. Charles had no sooner gotten her settled into a kitchen chair than she had pitched forward onto the floor and curled into a ball, trembling all over. “The last thing she said was ‘snap beans,’” Rose’s father had told her after the funeral. “Snap beans. I wish I knew what that meant.”

  She fingered the satiny beads of the abacus with one hand and crossed 5th Street. The sun now rested directly on the horizon, its last, level rays finally lending some color to the end of the day, turning the incoming fog into a veil of pink and gold. Where it hit the unpainted boards of a neighbor’s pump house, tendrils of steam rose in lazy curlicues. She passed the Kendalls’ steep front porch, rounding instead to the side yard, and let herself into the rear of the house, knocking the mud from her boots first, and hung her coat next to a row of others. The kitchen was warm, the windows filmed with steam, and there was her aunt at the stove, seeming to do six things at once in a blur of supremely competent motion. Rose leaned into the smell of hot coffee, baking cookies, an iron heating on the stove, and something brown and meaty simmering for supper.

  “Will wonders never cease!” Hazel said. Her hands didn’t stop for an instant, but she fixed Rose in her brilliant blue stare. “I thought perhaps you’d had to actually go to China for that tea.” Tay, she pronounced it, her brogue at its heaviest when she made a salient point.

  “Hm. Not quite that far,” Rose said. “I have to tell you something, though.”

  “Talk while you help. I only have two hands here. Prudence’s good tablecloth needs a press. See to that first, will you? It’s in the cupboard.”

  “What about supper?”

  “Captain Kendall is taking his meal upstairs. Says he plans to hide there until the meeting is finished tonight. And Prudence tells me she doesn’t care for anything until later. I told her she should eat, I tried, heaven knows I did, but she insisted she wasn’t hungry. The darling is so thin you could read a newspaper through her, but her mind is made up.” Hazel spoke the way she worked, in a blur of motion. “You and I will have a bite pretty quick. It’s a good stew.” She threw another quick glance at Rose. “Lord knows you need it, too. You look cold. Are you? Your fingers are white.”

  Rose took an apron off the hook behind the door. “I’m fine, Aunt. It’s so hot in here I don’t know how you stand it.”

  “Never mind me. Here, now, these irons are plenty hot, get the tablecloth.”

  Fetching the linen from the dining room sideboard, Rose could see in her mind’s eye Elsie Dampler’s face, gawking through the mercantile window, g
oggle-eyed. She thought, too, about the scar on Bai Lum’s chin, the warm cup of his palm, and she wondered just what it was she would tell Hazel.

  At Salyer’s Hotel, Ya Zhen lowered herself into the bath, slowly. She pressed her lips together when the bruised flesh between her legs touched the hot water. She had carried buckets up two flights of stairs from the hotel kitchen, one in each hand, needing to make several trips to half fill the deep galvanized tin tub. She used the steep, inside stairwell, which prevented her from being seen in the parts of the hotel used by guests: the lobby, the dining room, the men’s reading lounge.

  There were two cookstoves at Salyer’s, a large one for preparing food and a mammoth one —constantly in use, it seemed— for heating water: hot water for washing dishes, for guest baths, for laundry, and for the weekly baths of the hotel’s full-time inhabitants. The white girl who worked downstairs, Mattie, already had two enormous pots warming when Ya Zhen came with her buckets. No one else lingered around the kitchen, not even the cook, Ivo, who spoke only German and glared at his work as though every task was his mortal enemy.

  “Wish I could help you carry these,” Mattie whispered. Ya Zhen nodded but didn’t stay. Her weekly bath was one of the rare times she was allowed off the third floor, and even though no one else was around the kitchen, she didn’t want to risk losing the privilege if she was seen talking to Mattie. She understood, too, that Mattie took a risk, had often done so, in fact, with her many small, secret kindnesses: a piece of sheer yellow fabric to hang in the bedroom window, a trio of violets pressed between tissue paper, illicit bits of food stolen from the kitchen: a biscuit spread with butter and honey or small lard tin filled with freshly-picked blackberries, sprinkled with sugar and a little cream. These gifts only happened on the day Ya Zhen came downstairs —Mattie and all the rest of the hotel’s small staff were strictly forbidden from the third floor— and Ya Zhen was meticulous about not doing anything to endanger this strand of connection, however tenuous it might be. Mattie would offer small, conspiratorial smiles or give Ya Zhen’s shoulder a little pat, and those moments of simple good will were often the only things that kept her spirit inside her body from week to week. It was a vast grace, and all she could give in return was a nod or a brush of their elbows so brief that not even hawk-eyed Cora Salyer would notice. Ya Zhen hoped it was enough, that Mattie could feel the pressure of Ya Zhen’s heart, still alive under her skin.

  Back in her room, the tub was long and narrow, coffin-shaped, and barely fit into the bit of open floor space. The edges of the tub were sharply angled, cold under her palms, but already her body was adjusting to the heat. She sank down, gooseflesh jumping up on her neck and scalp. She pulled her arms down to her sides and dropped until her chin and earlobes were submerged. She breathed slowly. In the fading afternoon light she watched her breasts, marred with small bruises, break the surface of her bath, disappear when she exhaled. There would be men tonight, but perhaps not many. Often, when it was this cold, they stayed huddled around their games of chance, or followed the opium down into dreams. She exhaled again and allowed herself to drop completely under the hot water. With her elbows wedged against the sides of the tub, she could lie perfectly still and stare through the wavering bathwater at the patterns on the high, pressed-tin ceiling. When she could hold her breath no longer, she came up for air, tiny beads of water clinging to her eyelashes and glimmering in the dim light like tears.

  She reached between her legs, gingerly parted the flesh there, allowing the hot water to enter her. There was still a laceration from the night before, when the man had cursed her for being dry, cursed her mother for bearing a daughter, held her long hair in his fist so that she was unable to raise her head or turn away. Not all the men were this way, so brutal. A few were soft-spoken and tried to be affectionate, and one had tried to smuggle in a kitten.

  She hated them all.

  When she had arrived two years ago, she’d gathered her nerve and asked the two older women serving the hotel what to do about the pain. They looked at each other and laughed. These were sisters, Wu Lin and Wu Song, indentured to Clarence Salyer for over six years at that point. Wu Lin had opened her mouth to answer, but Wu Song whispered something to her in a nasal lowland dialect that Ya Zhen couldn’t quite catch. Wu Lin looked away and began to hum a tune under her breath. There were small sores crusted across her upper lip, and she touched them gingerly while she hummed. Wu Song turned to Ya Zhen, her face placid and her eyes flat and dark, like stones burned in a furnace. “Don’t worry, little sister,” she said. “You will be old and ugly soon, like Wu Lin. Then it will not hurt so much.”

  One morning as they worked together over the washtub, Wu Lin had told Ya Zhen about coming to Eureka. The sisters were more than twenty years old when Salyer purchased their servitude from one of the Chinese tongs in San Francisco. He had visited Wu Song and Wu Lin as a paying customer in a tiny curtained alcove right on the street in Chinatown. Terrified of contracting disease, Salyer paid a half-dollar for the two women to stand naked while he handled himself. Childhood malnutrition had contributed to their exceptionally small stature, and once Salyer had gotten the young women to Eureka, he had claimed them to be 13-year-old twins. This double lie had allowed him to charge exorbitant rates to any man wealthy enough to pay for the novelty. Now in their mid-twenties, the sisters were both in poor health from untreated illness and injury. They seldom had to lie on their backs now, but worked out their obligation to Salyer by hard labor, helping Mattie with the hotel laundry, performing the lowest scullery work in the kitchen, occasionally cleaning rooms after the proper guests departed. They usually cooked for themselves as well as Ya Zhen and another bound girl, Li Lau, using whatever wilted vegetables and fatty bits of meat they could glean from Ivo. Just as Ya Zhen had done, they had put their thumbprint to a contract of five years with Salyer. Just like hers, the contract stipulated that one day was added to their time served for every day of illness—which included their monthly cycles. An actual fulfillment of such a contract was a fairy tale; they would be bound to Salyer for as long as he chose to keep them.

  Wu Lin had always seemed less antagonistic toward Ya Zhen, but she was cowed by her sister and never displayed any outward sign that might be construed as friendliness. But on the day Ya Zhen asked the question about the men, about the pain, Wu Lin came later to her room. She set in front of the girl an old, cracked teacup covered with a faded scrap of tea towel. Inside was a hardened, yellowy lump of lard. Wu Lin told her she should warm a bit of fat between her fingers and smear it between her legs before the men came to her room. She told Ya Zhen how to use her hand to guide the men, to try and avert some of the physical battery. “You must help him,” she said quietly,

  Ya Zhen set her jaw. “Help? They take what they want. Do they need my help for this?” She wanted to hurl the china cup at the wall, but she had learned the hard way what happened if she indulged her anger. Salyer employed a tough middle-aged woman, Old Mol, to manage his ‘back business,’ and with small indulgences she had cultivated the Wu sisters as her extra eyes and ears. A fit of temper could earn Ya Zhen a smack across the face, or worse. When the men lined up at night, Old Mol decided where to send them; if crossed, she chose the worst of them for the girl who had rubbed her the wrong way.

  Wu Lin leaned close and shook her head in short, angry jerks. “Not for them, for you. You will do it to help yourself, unless you are xǐng zǐ. But I don’t think you are a fool, are you?”

  Ya Zhen had swallowed her rage and taken the cup of lard.

  She stood, hating to leave the comfort of the bath. The fire in the tiny grate threw only a little heat. She rubbed her skin briskly with the piece of rough toweling that hung by her washstand and pulled on her daytime clothes. She needed to get rid of the tub and dry her hair in front of the fire before slipping on the dressing gown that was all she wore in the evening.

  She opened her door and looked into the dark hallway.

  “Old Mol?”
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br />   No answer. The tub was supposed to be dragged into Li Lau’s room next. Ya Zhen always carried up the pails of bathwater, but they alternated each week who would bathe first. However, they were not to leave their rooms without specific permission and were absolutely not allowed to enter each other’s rooms.

  “Li Lau,” Ya Zhen called. The door next to hers opened and Li Lau peeked out. She was young, fifteen, but looked much younger, arms and legs thin as sticks.

  “Help me,” Ya Zhen said. “Come out here and help get the bath from my room.”

  Li Lau said nothing, just stood at her partially opened door watching Ya Zhen.

  Deciding she would have to pull the tub out into the hallway by herself, Ya Zhen started to slide it across the bare wood floor. Every few inches she rested before tugging again. When she had the tub half in and half out of the room, Old Mol came up the inside stairway.

  “What do you think you’re doing out of that room?” the woman bawled.

  It seemed obvious to Ya Zhen that her intention was to move the bathtub, but she kept her mouth shut. She had learned to speak English quite well since the steamship had deposited her here. She had learned from the Wu sisters, from Old Mol, from Clarence and Cora Salyer. She had learned from listening to Mattie and she had learned from the men who came to her room. But the better lesson, the one she had learned most stringently, had been when to speak and when to keep quiet.

  “You know damned well you aren’t supposed to be out here without my say-so.” An expression of foul amusement settled on her doughy features. “Guess that’s a day for bad behavior.”

  In the beginning, Ya Zhen had tried to track the extra time as it mounted, calculating the eventual time she would be released. She couldn’t remember exactly when it had dawned on her that there would never be a last day.