Chasing Down the Moon

by Carla Baku

  “Rose.”

  She looked, but he didn’t say anything, seemed to weigh his words. He was silent for so long she felt sure he was about to ask her to leave.

  “You were right. It was good to bring her here. YaZhen.”

  Rose felt the weight of the day drop into her then, all her limbs like wood. “Thank you,” she said. She lifted both hands and rubbed her eyes. “That’s what Reverend Huntington told me this morning.”

  Then his hand was on the small of her back. “Come and sit,” he said. “I’ll bring your tea.” She let him guide her into the small sitting room. The windows had gone deep blue behind the white curtains. “Did Reverend Huntington explain what he plans to do?” she said. “To take them north together?”

  He brought the candle along and tipped it to light incense, as he had the night before. “It is a very good idea.”

  Rose sank onto the divan and watched the smoke curl into the light of the candle. “You are so kind.” She closed her eyes.

  “You are so tired.” There was a small sound of dripping water on the outside sills as heavy condensation began to puddle and drip off the eaves.

  “Yes.”

  “Rose.”

  She opened her eyes. The candle was behind him, making his face hard to see in the last light from the window.

  “Lie down here and rest.”

  She fought a losing battle to keep her eyes open, and had a sensation of floating. “I should leave. I should go home now.”

  “Stay.”

  “I’m tired.”

  The last light faded from the room.

  “I never want to move from this spot,” she said.

  He worked open the laces of her shoes. She managed to open her eyes one last time and he was sitting next to her, holding both her feet in his hands. “Stay, Rose.”

  She lay over on her side with a deep sigh. “I don’t want tea.”

  As she fell asleep, he went into the kitchen and it was the last thing she knew until she woke to the sound of someone outside, screaming.

  Byron ran until he couldn’t breathe, had a deep stitch cramping his side, and even then he limped forward in a shambling jog. It took him ten minutes to get home. He could smell the acrid odor of the burned shed long before he could see it, black boards jutting from the old foundation like rotten teeth. In the fog, the charred bulk of it looked like something materializing out of a bad dream. The morning glory that had covered it lay in burned ropes all around and a black, trampled circle was pressed into the grass on every side. He ran right past it to the house, which was dark. Maybe the old man was inside, waiting for him. Maybe he had his hunting rifle aimed at Byron’s chest right now, just waiting for a clear shot. But Byron didn’t think so.

  He stumbled up the front steps and into the unlit kitchen, now almost completely dark. He went directly into his father’s room, shoved the sour-smelling bed away from the wall and pried open the floorboard closest to the wall. Underneath was a metal box, which Byron lifted out. Inside, wrapped in a greasy rag, was Garland Tupper’s Colt revolver, a .44 caliber sidearm that he had brought home from the war. Byron had taken it out and handled it many times when Garland was off on a drunk, always careful to wipe away smudges from the grip and barrel before replacing it. As long as Byron could remember, his father had been hauling the Colt out to clean it, snap the cylinder open and closed. He’d let Byron sight down the barrel while he told the boy grisly stories about the battles he had been in, skirmishes which inevitably ended with Garland standing over some sniveling Johnny Reb who pissed himself in fear. As far as Garland knew, Byron had no idea where he hid the gun, but it hadn’t been hard to find. Garland would stagger into his room and bash around, usually leaving his bedroom door wide open while he replaced the gun. Byron had known where it was since he was eight years old.

  He loaded the cylinder, six shots in all, and dropped several more cartridges in his jacket pocket. In the woods beyond the bedroom window a bird called, the ascending trill of a Swainson’s thrush. He closed his eyes for a moment, waiting for the next run of climbing notes. It was early in the year and late in the day for this bird’s song, and it seemed like a proper omen. When he opened his eyes, tears tracked his stubbled cheek, feeling hot against his cool skin. He wiped his ruined nose on his sleeve and went out with the big revolver and extra cartridges weighing down his jacket pocket. In the kitchen, he opened a cupboard and broke a piece of stale cornbread off a pone he had baked over a week ago and stored in the Dutch oven. A little bit of mold dusted one edge and Byron crumbled it away. Chewing, he looked around the dark kitchen, looked into his own room, where the window was still propped open with his old storybook. He yanked the book out; the glass came down with a bang that shattered the lower pane and threw long shards onto the floorboards. Byron pressed the little book, which had swollen in the damp air, flattened it between his palms and tucked it under his belt at the small of his back. He walked out of the house, chewing his cornbread, feeling the Colt swing back and forth against his thigh while he walked. It was almost entirely dark now, and as he walked away from the house, Byron could see the bated glow of gas lamps, already lit in town, reflecting a faint yellow against the cloud cover.

  Once he got to the waterfront, it took him less than a quarter-hour to track Garland back to the poppy palace. He found a spot in the alley, a dozen long paces from the door, and he crouched with the Colt in his hands to wait behind a stack of crates.

  It was nearly an hour. From time to time he set the gun between his feet and stood to slap the circulation back into his legs with his uninjured right hand. He was cold and wanted more supper. The book tucked into his belt felt like a board against his back. But for all his discomfort, he seemed to be floating outside of time. The lights were on in the Episcopal Church a block over, and the stained glass picture of Jesus holding a lamb on his shoulders threw a red and yellow glare into the fog. He could hear people singing inside. He had a strange sense of floating on the sound.

  Finally, the door he was watching opened. Smoke curled out into the low light. Two men appeared, moving slowly, talking. Garland. Suddenly, Byron was not cold or hungry. He lifted the gun and aimed, wanting him to come closer. The sound of his heart rushed through his head. The point of the gun barrel trembled minutely in time to his pulse, and he breathed through his mouth, knowing the plume of his breath was invisible in the fog.

  Then there was a moment. Bastard, he thought, and fired. The sound of the revolver was enormous. Before he could fire again, a muzzle flash lit the fog. A corner shattered off the top crate, showering splinters into his hair and swollen left eye. He jerked, clapped a hand to his face. His head roared and he could barely see, but he fired again.

  Someone was right there, had stepped into the street from nowhere, someone who dropped to his knees and fell face down in the wet dirt of the road.

  Byron leapt up and ran through the alley, away from the street and into the dark, away from the man he had shot and the voices coming from the church. More shots were fired behind him and a boy began to scream.

  When the worst things happen, most of us scarcely know it. The world does not hold its breath—not for the joys, nor for the terrors.

  Beyond the narrow inlet of Humboldt Bay, past the breakwater, in the deep meters of cold ocean along the continental shelf, a sperm whale hunted. She had been moving through the lightless fathoms, more than a thousand feet down and sightless in these depths, feeding on giant squid that lived near the ocean floor. At twenty years, she was in the prime of her life, a mother for the third time. All over her massive head, circular tentacle scars overlapped in rings, evidence of her proficiency as a hunter. So far down, she used sound, rhythmic clicking that bounced through the water, to navigate and to find her prey.

  It had been almost an hour and she began to move up, ready to breathe, to rest with her family. Near the surface, her calf floated with a pod of other females and juveniles. The water warmed as she surfaced. There was dim light
now, and she could see again. With her huge fluke, she gave a massive heave and propelled herself, arching her broad back through the evening air, taking it in, sliding back under and gliding toward her infant daughter, unique and particular among all the others. One of her sisters trumpeted mildly, a greeting, and the calf moved under her belly to nurse. The night came down and a half moon broke through, rippling light over the surface of the water. This was her life. This was joy.

  It was always so quiet after supper, when the Illinois winter had dropped its late loads of snow and it was too cold to work in the shop, too cold even to step out for a look at the hard night sky. Rose’s father, Robert Allen, missed his wife. Each of them had always had strange dichotomies in their basic natures; he was quiet with a love of adventure, Clarissa gregarious and bound to the home place. But they complemented each other and her death had left him feeling as though some vital element, some indispensable constituent was missing in his heart. The hearth log broke into embers, startling Homer, who had been dozing on top of the kindling box. Now the cat stared around the room, eyes wide.

  “Take your rest old man,” Robert said, and wondered if he was speaking to the cat or to himself. His pipe had gone cold in his hand and he set it aside. He stood, stretched, felt the chill working on his joints, a sour, muttering pain like a faint toothache in his knees and shoulders. Homer stood too, arched into a stretch, then hopped off the kindling box and into the warm seat Robert had just vacated. Robert scratched him behind the ears and under the chin. The cat’s purr was rickety and uncertain in his old age.

  He put out the lamp and took the stairs by the light of the half-moon reflecting off the snow and in through the windows. It was bright as a lantern. When he reached the landing, he looked out at the stand of naked walnut trees behind the house. Their black branches spread in a delicate lacework high above the place where their trunks divided, and they grew close enough that it was impossible to see where one set of branches ended and another began. Their shadows, thin and indistinct in the moonlight, laid a net on the snowy ground. Closer to the house was a lone maple, old and spreading. When Rose was little, Robert had hung a swing in its branches. Over the course of years, the tree had grown bark around the stout hemp lashing, like skin growing over a wound. The swing was gone now, but in the moonlight Robert could make out the gnarled place where the tree had healed itself, two short tails of hemp still protruding from the stout, lumpy branch. His breath fogged a circle on the glass; he wished he could see all of this with someone else, to explain about the swing and the tree.

  He climbed the remaining stairs and went into his cold bedroom, undressed and slid under the woolen quilts. Made from old coats and blankets that had gone to seed, they were heavy things in dark colors, black and brown and ocher. Clarissa’s work. The faint, chilly smell of mothballs wafted out as he settled himself, a smell he had liked since childhood, when it meant sledding with his brothers, popped corn after supper, delicata squashes piled in the root cellar. As the bed warmed, Robert Allen’s thoughts traveled out to Rosie, out across the broad expanse of snow-bound prairies and cold barren desert, over the Rocky Mountains and up the Pacific coast to his girl, probably eating supper now. He sent the same small tiding each night as he journeyed into the dream world, a push against an unfathomable universe, a delicate shield of hope for himself and his beloveds: all is well.

  On the outskirts of Eureka’s Chinatown, Wei Chang filled his watering can a final time, a tin bucket pierced with small holes. He made sure the soil around all the pea plants was uniformly damp. It had been a beautiful day, so much sun, and it seemed to him that the pale yellow blossoms of the peas had popped out on the vines in a single afternoon. Despite the recent storms, his garden was producing well. Radishes and broccoli were up, looking sturdy, and the kale, purple and gray-green, was already heavy and ruffled. He had made a burlap frame to protect the young plants from hail or hard rain, and it had worked well. The new year, just nine days away, should be a successful one. It would be the rooster year, and Wei Chang knew this was an auspicious year for farmers.

  His real concern was that there would be no full moon this month. This had happened two other times in his life, always around the time of the new year: once it had been when he was a boy of eighteen, and again when he was grown into full manhood. Now the dark month had come around again, and he had taken extra pains to prepare. In the northeast corner of his garden, Wei Chang had constructed a moon gate, bending thin saplings of green alder and weaving them into a circular arch. The lattice was braced by heavy redwood posts, wood that was nearly impervious to rot or insects. He had worked on his gate during the wet winter and finished it just last month. Already he was raising wisteria cuttings, sweetened with potash from his woodstove. These he would plant all along the moon gate, and in the course of time the garden entrance would become a flowering circle in the spring, a sturdy net of bare branches in the winter. The next time the full moon was lost at the new year, Wei Chang would be a very old man of eighty-five. But his moon gate would come back around over and over, young with purple flowers each time the earth tilted toward the sun.

  Old Mol kept sneezing, making her nose bleed again. After five years sitting in the attic crawlspace next to her room, her two threadbare carpetbags were covered with dust and cobwebs. Another small spider made a run for it across the bedclothes, and she mashed it with her thumb. She looked at the crushed thing on the gray blanket, still waving a single leg around from the middle of its broken guts. Could just as well have let it ramble, she thought. Old Molly Blevins wasn’t going to sleep in this bed tonight anyway, nor ever again.

  The whole mess had gone over bad, and she was going cross-lots tonight before somebody brought in the sheriff. That little girl was just about dead in there, and she knew Clarence Salyer well enough to know that he’d point blame in her direction as soon as he opened his mouth. Right now Clarence was behind the hotel front desk and overseeing the kitchen while Cora, that stick of kindling he was married to, hid out in her room with an account book to keep herself company. One of the Wu sisters —the one with whore blossoms around her mouth, Molly could never keep their names straight— was sitting death watch on Li Lau. The other one was helping the German with dinner. Men had been showing up at the back door, business as usual, but Molly told them to come back after six o’clock, when the other girl got brought back from the preacher’s house. It was now six now, and they milled around at the foot of the stairs outside. Those fellows would be Clarence’s to deal with, though, because Molly was leaving.

  Over these five years, she had managed to hold back quite a plush little bankroll. Just over four hundred dollars was tucked into an old wool stocking in one of her bags. If Clarence knew, he would give her a bloody lip to go with her bloody nose. If Cora knew, she would probably shoot her. It was plenty to get started on somewhere else. She was taking the old Wu sisters with her. They weren’t much use for whoring anymore, but they knew how to work, and when she promised them a piece of the profit wherever she landed, they ran off to pack their things and wait for her signal.

  One of her regulars, Jack Ball —so quickly done with his business that she called him jack rabbit balls— had come around earlier in the afternoon. He’d been half in love with Wu Song since her first days at Salyer’s. After explaining to him the situation upstairs, Molly had slipped Jack five dollars to meet her on the next block with his buggy shortly before six o’clock. He had an old sister, half blind, up the road in Arcata where they could stay for a couple of days and make arrangements to head north and east, up into Trinity County, maybe Weaverville. The mining operations were not what they once were, but with the money she’d saved, Molly knew she could start a little business, a tavern with rooms to rent by the half-hour. After the row upstairs with Li Lau, she had waited until Clarence went downstairs, then she sent the Wu sisters out the back, telling them to wait with Jack Ball until she got there.

  Old Mol clapped her bags shut and went out without
a second glance. She took the side passage that opened onto the second-floor landing and walked right down the wide front staircase, and out the front doors of Salyer’s Hotel.

  It didn’t hurt anymore. Now Li Lau felt weightless, like the downy silk from an open milkweed pod, ready to lift off. She could feel her spirit pulling away from her body, and it made her heart light. She knew that once her spirit broke loose from her flesh, all the suffering of this life would be less than a memory. Even now, the leaden agonies of the past two days were passing, as if she had dreamed them.

  When her little baby had come through her, she felt that her heart could not bear anything more. But she had been wrong. She had tempted fate by believing she had already faced the greatest suffering. Then the laughing man, the worst of all the men who had used her badly, had come and shown her that suffering had no outer boundaries. Pain could always grow, like counting numbers, always there could be more. She tried to stop him, to tell him she was torn already from the birth, but he wrapped her shirt around her mouth, grinding her lips against her teeth. He was a strong man, a large man. The last thing she remembered was his fist drawn back.

  She knew something happened after that. Who found her, she did not know. All she remembered was a room filled with people, all talking at once, someone pressing rags between her legs, probing the wounds, sewing something, washing her breast with a foul brown liquid that burned. And she remembered hearing herself scream again and again, but it was like hearing someone else screaming, something her body needed to do while her consciousness stood in a far corner of the room, waiting for them to finish.