by Carla Baku
If another man was waiting, Ya Zhen was allowed a few minutes to ready herself. She was expected to have washed, combed her hair, tied her gown and straightened the bed as each man came in. On nights when there were a lot of men, she rarely had time to do all of this, and washing was always her first concern. If Old Mol brought someone in and the bed was unmade, she reported it to Mrs. Salyer, who kept strict accounts for the four indentured women. Each infraction was jotted in a ledger, and if a half-dozen incidences were recorded, the woman had an extra day added to her contract of servitude.
“Mr. Salyer isn’t running some cheap peep-and-grab crib like they got in the city,” Old Mol had told her when she first arrived. “You girls are damned lucky. This is a quality place. You got your own room in off the street and meals besides. Best situation you could have fallen into, all things considered.”
After the boy, only two men came that night. The first was a gray-headed man from town. His clothes and body were dirty and he had still been holding her tightly from behind, his skin greasy with effort when Old Mol called time.
“I’ll pay extra,” he shouted. He held Ya Zhen’s face into the pillow, and she had to bend her neck painfully in order to catch a breath. “Two minutes,” Old Mol called back. Redoubling his effort, he twisted one of Ya Zhen’s breasts until she cried out. This was enough, finally.
Afterward, she quickly sponged her arms and back and belly, trying to purge some of the man’s sour stench, while he argued out in the hallway about having to pay another dollar for such a little time. Her neck ached and her nipple was crusted with a bit of blood. She dabbed at it, wincing.
It was almost half an hour before another man arrived. She used a small hand broom to sweep the dirt tracked in earlier, and shook out the bedclothes. There were gray smudges on the ground sheet where the man’s knees and elbows had been, so she tore the sheet off the mattress and turned it over. She could still see a ghost of the stains, but they were easier to ignore. She sat on the narrow, ladder-back chair and, as she did every night, combed her hair with the wooden comb her mother had packed during the last night with her family. After two years, she thought of them, her parents, as dead, and counted herself an orphan. Even Hong-Tai was a ghost to her now, although she often visited him in her dreams. In spring, when the wind blew in hard from the north and drove the usual low clouds off the coast, Ya Zhen thought of her little brother in his fine blue clothes, purchased with her life. Yù fēng dì di—her little brother, flying on the wind.
Rose woke in the night at some uncertain hour. She lay still and waited, hearing only the steady tock, tock of the pendulum in Hazel’s big clock downstairs. Despite the deep quiet that enveloped the house, an echo of something had followed her up into wakefulness, a sound she couldn’t place. Then it came again, a quiet moan from somewhere in the house. Worried that her aunt might be ill, Rose kicked back the covers and went to the head of the stairs, not bothering to put on a wrap. There it was again, the moan, coming from the back of the house. Tiptoeing through the parlor, she heard the sound, low and stifled, inside the narrow pantry that appended the kitchen. The windowless room stood open and Rose could barely see a slender figure sitting just inside the door.
“Mattie?”
There was a startled but somehow slow shuffle of feet and clothing, and when Mattie turned, Rose could see her face in the ambient light from the kitchen. “Oh, hello Rose,” she said, her voice coarse, as if she’d been asleep.
“What…Mattie, what are you doing in here? Are you ill?”
“Is it late?”
There was a strange odor in the confined space of the pantry, something sweet and burned, definitely coming from Mattie. “Yes, very late.” A cold vein seemed to open under Rose’s skin, smelling that smell, hearing the disorientation in her friend, who was normally so clever and razor-witted.
“I mought need to sleep a little, then.” The girl shifted as if to make herself more comfortable, seated as she was on Hazel’s molasses barrel. Her speech was so muzzy that Rose barely understood her.
“Why don’t you come upstairs with me now?”
A long pause, then she finally stirred. “I suppose I could catch a few winks before dawn.” She managed to stand, though it took two tries, and Rose had to snug her arm around Mattie’s waist.
The smell was in her hair and clothing. “Mattie,” Rose whispered as they walked to the stairs, “did you go out tonight? After the meeting? I thought you were going to bed.”
Mattie didn’t say anything, just walked docilely beside Rose. When they made it upstairs, she went straight to her room. Rose followed her in this time, wanting to be sure Mattie got between the sheets. But instead of going to the bed, Mattie went to the window and touched her forehead to the glass, where her warm skin left a cloudy halo. She was crying.
“Matilda, sweetheart, what is it?
“God, Rose, I miss home. I miss it like I’m missing a limb off my body itself.” She closed her eyes. “Don’t you miss your home? And your da? I’ve been missing my people for years.”
What could Rose say? She missed her father, yes, like having a little splinter in the heart. Sometimes, when the summer was a low, gray ceiling of coastal overcast, she thought she might give up her whole life in California for five minutes of fireflies, and prairie grass tossing its baked smell into the night. But this was her life, here in this isolated place where the damp made mildew flourish on the inside walls of the house and made redwood trees grow so large that, when one was felled, a dozen or more people could stand on the stump and never once rub shoulders. Now love, unexpected and impossible, to tie her heart to this place. Her Latin was serviceable. Eureka: I have found it.
“Let’s get you to bed,” she told Mattie. “The wee hours are the worst time to think about hard things.” It sounded like the worst sort of cliché, but with Mattie so impaired it would have to do.
“Bed.” Mattie heaved a sigh that condensed on the glass. The smell (Rose couldn’t bring herself to actually think the word opium) was so strong that she expected to see a fine film stuck there. Mattie shuffled the few feet to her narrow single bed and sat on the coverlet fully dressed, leaning over slowly until she dropped to her side on the pillow. Rose squatted and unlaced the girl’s boots. She seemed asleep already, her breathing deep and steady. Rose lifted her legs onto the bed and pulled the comforter over her, not bothering to take off Mattie’s outer garments. Let her sleep. Rose, chilled in just her winter chemise, turned to leave.
“Don’t tell Hazel.”
It almost sounded like sleep-talk, and Rose hesitated, not wanting to rouse Mattie with an answer. “Shh,” she whispered faintly. “Don’t worry.”
She ran across the hall on tiptoe and burrowed back into the warmth of her bed, shivering, smelling of Mattie’s clothing. She had rinsed her hands at the washbowl, but must have gotten the smell on her chemise. Surely tonight was the first time Mattie had done such a thing. How could she have hidden it, otherwise? She pulled the quilt snug around her shoulders, right under her nose, where she could breathe in its clean, familiar scent. The clock downstairs chimed the hour: three o’clock. She yawned mightily, hearing the tendons in her jaw creak. There was no sound from Mattie’s room, so she must be asleep now.
Don’t tell.
All this time they’d lived under the same roof, and Rose had never suspected that Matilda was anything but content. No, more than content. Mattie seemed genuinely happy, lighthearted, even. She wouldn’t say anything to Hazel, not yet. But she’d have to talk to Mattie tomorrow, sometime. Don’t tell. Don’t tell. Now she was keeping two secrets —this, and the fact of Bai Lum’s sister— and she didn’t understand either of them.
She was warm now, and her mind ambled. Her own pilgrimage had not been so far as Mattie’s, to be sure, but Eureka had seemed like a world away from Paw Paw.
Hazel had put the idea in Rose’s head to begin with, in her letters. It was obvious that her aunt loved her life here. It’s one of th
e wild places left in the country, she had written, but I wouldn’t wonder if it becomes another San Francisco one day.
Rose had read that particular letter more times than she could count, and managed to wait three weeks —just so she could claim to have thought it over— before she announced to her father her intention to move to the Pacific coast. Charles Allen had looked at his daughter long and hard, convincing her that he would put his foot down. She needn’t have worried. “If I was a younger man,” he’d finally said, “I’d pack a bag and jump on the train with you.” That settled it. Rose’s rail ticket was purchased, and Charles saw her off in Chicago. He stood on the platform long after everyone else had gone. Rose put her head out the window as they pulled from the station, and watched as the train gathered speed, watched until he was a tiny lone figure waving the caboose farewell.
The overland trip from Chicago to San Francisco was hot and dirty, and Rose had loved it. Seatmates on the train were carefully arranged by the conductor and Rose ended up sitting with a young woman from Finland. Her name was Sophia and she spoke no English. Sophia had a note pinned to her coat with her destination written on it for the conductor’s sake —Cozad, Nebraska— and a name: Hiram Belknap. Rose could not imagine being left to such circumstances, a refugee entrusting herself so utterly to the scruples of strangers. The two women took turns sitting by the window and managed to communicate by gesture and facial expression. When she wasn’t looking out the window, Sophia spent a lot of time gazing at a tintype photo set in a little gilt frame. It was a woman, an older version of Sophia, with her hair pulled back severely from her face.
“Your mother?” Rose asked. “Mother?” She pointed at Sophia and then mimed rocking a baby in her arms. Sophia smiled and nodded. “Äitini.” She brushed absently at a tear. Rose made a circular gesture around Sophia’s face and tapped the photo. “You look like her,” she said. She wished she had a photograph of her own mother, something to show Sophia in return, then tuck away for safekeeping.
The train made hurried stops in places that looked so scruffy and slapped-together Rose wondered that they could even be considered towns. At a place in Eastern Nebraska, passengers rushed into a makeshift restaurant, which consisted of a large, dirty tent with a false front built around the door. The only food served was a small boiled potato and a gristly piece of steak topped with an egg. As all the passengers packed into the tent, the chaos reached a crescendo, people calling for food and coffee, several small children crying or running between the jostling adults. The floor was wretched with spilled food and dirt from the street. In one corner a big girl sat watching the crowd, mouth open, holding a ragged valise on her lap from which the damaged head of a doll protruded, its painted eyes chipped and blind. No boarding call was issued at any of the scores of stops made, so the passengers bolted their food, keeping one eye on the train lest it start without them.
Back on board, the conductor showed the passengers who needed his help how to pull their seats forward and lay the backs down, creating a small sleeping platform. Rose and Sophia spread out their shawls and coats to create rough bedding. The sound of the train’s wheels on the tracks vibrated through the wooden bench, but Rose was exhausted and fell asleep in minutes, despite the continuous noise of the other passengers trying to settle for the night. All night long the train stopped, for water, for passengers embarking and disembarking. At some point, the conductor woke Sophia to tell her that her stop was coming. Rose wanted to sit up and say goodbye, but she could hardly open her eyes. By the time she managed to rouse herself, Sophia was gone. The window was fogged over. She wiped it with her sleeve, but could only see two men pushing a trunk across the platform. Sophia was nowhere in sight. Rose lay back, feeling the engine building steam. Once they were underway again, she settled into the sounds of her fellow passengers coughing, snoring, moaning in their sleep. Sparks flew past the window from the massive diamond-shaped stack, each one like a meteor tearing through the flat Nebraska night.
Right after the chiming of the quarter-hour, Rose fell back to sleep in her clean, plain room. As she went, she could almost feel the sensation of that train moving under her, bearing her into the unknown future.
Byron Tupper and Billy Kellogg hunched into their coats, collars turned up against the wet. Several blocks from the hotel, Billy stopped. He stood in the fine drench, morosely shaking his head. They were among neighborhood houses now, and a gnarled apple tree crouched in the yard beside them, naked branches black in the rain. A number of moldering windfalls poked out of the grass at the base of the tree. Billy grabbed one and hurled it at the street, where it exploded into pulp. He stared dully at the mash, looking miserable.
“What’s wrong with you?” Byron asked, although he didn’t care what Billy’s problem was right now. He was cold and just wanted to get in out of the wet. When he lifted his hands to his mouth to try and warm them, he could smell the girl, an odor like warm grass. He thrust them deep into his pockets, wanting not to wash that smell away in the rain.
“It was the whiskey,” Billy said. He kept his eyes on the street. “I had to use her chamber pot before we did it, and then I…I couldn’t.” When Byron said nothing, Billy finally looked at him. “What about you?”
Byron shrugged. He found he didn’t want to tell Billy anything about the girl, so he kept his mouth shut. Billy took a long look at his face, and a black expression settled over his face.
“Damnation!” he yelled. He took up another apple and this time hurled it at the house. This apple was not as badly rotted and made a resonant thud when it smashed next to the front door. As if someone had been standing inside waiting for the noise, the door opened and uncertain yellow light fell onto the porch. Billy took off at a dead run, leaving Byron standing there, stupidly staring, with a thin stream of rain running off the brim of his hat. It was a girl he knew, Frances Jane Beebe, wearing heavy nightclothes, holding a guttering candle in one hand and a huge orange cat under her other arm.
“Byron Tupper, did you throw that apple?” she asked. She was thin, thin as a March wind, his grandmother would say, and Frances Jane had been bossy even when he stood next to her in Miss Stanley’s classroom trying to recite some poem about an old woman who hung out a flag during the war.
“No. Sorry.”
“I suffer from insomnia,” she said, as if he’d asked why she was awake so late. “I find that warm milk can be soothing.”
Billy said nothing.
Frances Jane glared at him. “Are you just going to stand there dripping?”
“No.” But he didn’t move.
“So? What are you waiting for?” She clamped her skinny arm tighter around the cat, who tried to worm out of her grasp.
Byron smiled. He had a beautiful, guileless smile. It changed him utterly, though he would have been surprised to know it. “On that pleasant morn of the early fall when Lee marched over the mountain wall,” he said in a singsong. It was the only part of the long recitation he had ever been able to remember.
Frances Jane’s scowl softened and she smiled a little, too. “Over the mountains winding down, horse and foot, into Frederick town.” She stepped inside. “Byron Tupper, you’re a wet fool,” she said, and closed the door.
A knock brought Ya Zhen out of deep sleep, a bright jolt of confusion lighting her mind. Was it the door? Another man? She lay still, sensing the late quiet of the hotel and gathering back her racing heart. Then the knock again. It was Li Lau rapping on the wall, a signal that she needed help. The girls were not supposed to leave their rooms at night and visiting each other was strictly forbidden, but Ya Zhen threw off her blanket and tiptoed out anyway. The girl was curled on her bed, biting her pillow to stifle a moan.
“Bad fish,” she said. “I’m sick with it.”
“Have you vomited?”
“No, just the pain in my belly,” she said, her face pinched and drawn. She sweated profusely. Another cramp hit and Li Lau writhed on the bed.
Ya Zhen rubbed the gi
rl’s back, then slipped one hand over her lower belly. It was firm as a melon and rigid.
“Li Lau,” she whispered when the contraction had passed. “When did your blood stop?”
“Right after I came here,” she said. “Jiŭ yuè, before the full moon.”
Ya Zhen counted on her fingers—almost four months.
It took most of the night. For two hours, Ya Zhen did what she could to make the girl comfortable, but finally the contractions wrenched screams from Li Lau and Ya Zhen had to go downstairs for Old Mol.
The big woman rolled Li Lau onto her back. “Hold her,” she said to Ya Zhen. “I have to see how far gone she is.” She pushed up the sleeve of her flannel robe and thrust two fingers deep inside Li Lau, who bucked under Ya Zhen’s grip and made a guttural sound. “She’s opening,” Old Mol said, and crossed to the washstand. “I think she’s further along than she says, though. Maybe five months.”
While Ya Zhen wiped a wet towel on Li Lau’s forehead, Old Mol went to the kitchen for hot water and rags. When she came back, she and Ya Zhen spread the rags under the girl’s bottom and Old Mol put a compress on Li Lau’s belly. Then she poured tea.
“Got something stronger, too,” she said. She pulled a dark, corked bottle from her pocket and filled one of the teacups. “Help me lift her head a little.” Ya Zhen got behind Li Lau and propped her up. She struggled and tried to turn her face away. Old Mol grabbed her chin, hard, and gave her face a shake. “You take a big swallow of this, or I’ll tie you down,” she said. Ya Zhen whispered in her ear, begging the girl to drink. Li Lau did. After two cups full to the brim, Li Lau laid back, her eyes open but glassy, her legs thrown apart. When the next contraction came she moaned and lifted her head off the bed but did not scream. Old Mol nodded and took a nip from the bottle herself. “Only a wee sip for me,” she said, “or I’ll be on the floor.”