Chasing Down the Moon

by Carla Baku

  Finally they left, not bothering to clean her or pull the blankets up. Wu Lin sat on a chair next to the bed, looking out the window and humming. From time to time she looked at Li Lau and smiled, then continued her small song. Li Lau asked her for water, and Wu Lin gave it to her, slowly. She had made a small fire in the grate, too. Li Lau watched a fly bump the glass, making a little tap and buzz. She felt safe now. No one would hurt her again. Perhaps, then, it was not such a bad thing. To die.

  Cora Salyer locked herself into room 36 on the third floor, as far from Clarence’s mess as she could get. A few minutes ago he had burst into their parlor where she sat reading the paper, blood on his shirtsleeves, and hair hanging in a greasy clump on his forehead. In their bedroom he fetched his pistol, all the while babbling about the women. His whores. One of them was dead, he said, Garland Tupper did it, walked in off the street and tore her up, and that other girl, the one Cora had hired out to the ministers wife, still wasn’t back. His favorite whore. Cora stared at him, her thin smile frozen in place. She knew what he did with them in those rooms, especially the two young ones.

  Cora Salyer, the one-time Cora Hutchins, had been woefully uninformed about the trials of married life, her wedding night a terrifying blur of Clarence’s smothering weight and the bruising, burning pain of the marriage act. It was no wonder her mother had never enlightened her! Then, to add insult to injury, he had brought the sisters here. After countless nights when he would come back to her bed whistling and smelling of his own spent seed, she had put her foot down, told him he wouldn’t lay in their bed until the nasty women were gone. He’d laughed at her, laughed right in her face. That very night he moved a bed into the room he used as an office and seemed not to miss her company at all. For her part, Cora had been wonderfully relieved to be rid of him, done finally with the intermittent nights when he would grab her in her sleep and pull up her nightgown.

  Right now she didn’t care. She had the four dollars from Mrs. Huntington, and it was fine with her if that girl had put rocks in her pocket and walked straight off the pier. Down to the bottom of the bay with her. Cora would prefer it, actually—just to see the look on Clarence’s face.

  Thy Word commands our flesh to dust,

  ‘Return, ye sons of men’:

  All nations rose from earth at first,

  And turn to earth again.

  Thomas Walsh was a man certain of his place in the larger scheme of creation. He was a tenor in the choir at Christ Episcopal Church, and mayor of Eureka. Friday was rehearsal night for the choir, and in Thomas’s estimation, the group was in fine voice. Even Bethellen Stanhope, a lovely girl, a soprano who tended to warble up out of key with vigor, was blending with the other women. Their voices were reedy and robust, and Mayor Walsh felt his heart swell with emotion at the powerful sentiments of the hymn.

  Fifteen magnificent stained glass windows hung along both walls and over the altar. Thomas was particularly moved by the large central depiction of Christ, barefoot in the fields among His sheep, carrying a lamb across His shoulders, the shepherd’s crook in His arms. During his growing-up years, Thomas Walsh’s mother had instilled in him a deep love of the Twenty-third Psalm. On childhood nights he frequently woke from unpleasant dreams; his mother would sit by his bedside, repeating the old words over and over with him, He maketh me to lie down, and my cup runneth over, until young Thomas was finally able to fall back to sleep. The altar window embodied his most intimate feelings about the Savior, that He held Thomas in His tenderest regard, much as He did the lamb on His shoulders. From time to time, Mayor Walsh marveled at how personally he felt the care of Jesus, how gentle and how human the Good Shepherd seemed to him. He could not embrace a wrathful deity and secretly disdained much of the Old Testament.

  Thomas had as much reason —more, if truth were told— to feel a measure of earthly pride for this fine church. He had been the driving force behind its construction. Longing to worship in the tradition of his Anglican upbringing, he had pledged a thousand dollars toward construction. He made a trip home, back to Ireland, and successfully raised enough capital to allow building to commence. He modestly believed that he had been a faithful servant to Christ, and that God had thus seen fit to entrust the souls of this town to his oversight. It was a good place, Thomas thought. Rough around the edges, yes, but hadn’t San Francisco once been a rough-and-ready boomtown? Thomas Walsh firmly believed that with unflinching, yet caring leadership —the type of leadership any circumspect shepherd lavished on a beloved flock— a cosmopolitan city could be carved out of the redwood wilderness. Eventually, this coarse portion of the Pacific coast would be subdued in the manner prescribed by scripture. When it was, intemperate and profane loggers, miners, and fishermen would be replaced by the better classes, as seemed to be the natural order of things.

  If thoughts about the increasing hostilities between white citizens and the Chinese trembled at the periphery of Thomas Walsh’s consciousness on this evening, in this consecrated place he was able to keep them at bay. Thomas Walsh believed in the supremacy of noble intentions.

  The other men were gone for their evening meal. Dong Li Ha kept working at the largest washtub. He had taken in more laundry this week than any other he could remember. The recent rain had turned the streets sloppy; the hems of the women’s long dresses and men’s trouser cuffs smelled strongly of mud and horse offal. Tonight he would work far into the night to finish as much as he could before morning. He still took in some laundry from his neighbors, Chinese men living without wives, mostly. But the shirts and sheets and undergarments of the white people he would wash first. They enjoyed wearing their clean clothes on Sunday, would pay extra to pick everything up on Saturday. For six years, he had done the work. He started this place with next to nothing. His strong back and powerful arms, his ability to labor on very little sleep and not much food, had enabled him to build a reputation in the town. One of his first employees had recently started his own laundry at the opposite end of the street, but Dong Li Ha was unconcerned. Let him wear his hands away over the filthy clothes of laboring men who had no woman to wash for them. Dong Li Ha would wash the fine shirts and collars, petticoats, chemises and little girls’ pinafores. No white person, it seemed, wanted to confront the soil of the body, not if they could pay someone else to do it. So he continued to prosper, to help support his parents and younger brother in Shanghai, and the wife he had not seen for almost a decade.

  In China, laundry was work for women. But after he had arrived in San Francisco, it became clear that doing the work no white man would touch guaranteed not only survival, but also success. He cultivated an open mind and a blank expression. Over the years he had learned that laundry hid many secrets. Tablecloths, aprons, and boys’ shirtfronts told what meals had been shared. Trouser knees revealed carefully tended gardens. Perfumed handkerchiefs advertised how well a husband’s business was prospering. Pockets were filled with scribbled notes that Dong Li Ha could not read, seashells, eggshells, and pencil stubs. And blood. There was apparently no article of clothing or item of household use that did not meet with blood. Blood on shirts, coats, sheets and underdrawers, blood on hand towels, rags, and antimacassars. If he saw the blood he tried to clean it, but usually it was hidden. By the time it hit the hot water and soda crystals, it was already too late. Blood resisted him, and he did not fight it.

  He moved the lamps closer as the light drained from the evening. When the men returned from their meal, Dong Li Ha was already pounding out a second tub of steaming shirts.

  When Bai Lum took tea to Shu-Li and Ya Zhen, they were under the blankets, sitting close, whispering together. In her straightforward way, Shu-Li was all smiles, obviously delighted to have a companion. Ya Zhen looked done in, her face lined and eyes ringed with fatigue, but greatly changed from the person he had encountered last night. There was, underneath her mask of exhaustion and almost childlike posture in the bed with Shu-Li, something fiercely present, some essential thing that was rising
and running.

  He poured their tea, appalled again by what he had seen at Salyer’s, the abysmal old woman, the grim little room, Ya Zhen’s blank endurance. The most wretched thing, though, was his near-complicity.

  His wife had been dead for ten years, carrying their son away with her, still in the womb. Although he worked every day until he dropped, bone-weary, into his bed, although he had surrendered to this life as a widowed man, his heart had grown restive and hungry. When Rose had first arrived at the mercantile, dripping rain, it had gotten much worse.

  Her angular face had a wide-open quality as she gazed around his store, looking at the kites, asking questions about the herbs and medicines behind the counter. Time after time he chastised himself as the worst sort of fool when his heart leapt at her approach, but it did no good. Impossible, but month-by-month he allowed love to take root. Every time she came into his store, he reveled in her straightforward manner and the utterly certain timbre of her voice. The more often she visited, the closer he dared to stand, so that he knew the particular line where her neck curved into her jaw, knew the place near her temple where a curly wisp of hair always worked loose, a delicate ginger corkscrew. When she left, he felt worse than ever, ragged and worn thin. He was lonely, tired of taking himself in his own hand when his desire for a woman, this wrong woman, woke him in the night.

  So he had considered, over and over, walking to Salyer’s Hotel in the dark, his money in hand. He would soothe his conscience with a high-minded story about companionship. Last night, even after Rose had told him what was happening at Salyer’s, had begged him to help Ya Zhen; even when he saw how brutally the girl was living: when she had started to undress, that dark hunger had flared.

  And she had seen right through him.

  He had sheltered Shu-Li and the ones before her, hiding them so that they would be relieved from exactly that life, or worse. But he had also been willing to cause suffering—perhaps to Ya Zhen herself. He would have been another heavy body pressing her down.

  With a final goodnight, he closed the door to Shu-Li’s room. It was a dark thing, to know such things about oneself.

  He returned to the sitting room where Rose, like a found treasure, slept under his roof. He stood near the window, first watching the fog twining around the street lamps, then looking down at her, half in silhouette, half lit by the moving reflection of the candle across the room.

  He sat on the floor next to the divan and watched her sleep. Her eyelashes cast spiked shadows on her cheeks, and her mouth, relaxed, was partly open. He reached out a finger and, not quite touching her, traced all the angles of her handsome face—nose, eyelids, ear. Without warning, she opened her eyes. His hand hovered above her face like a bird caught on an updraft. She drew his palm to her cheek and pressed it there, kissed the cup of his palm, her face solemn and her breath warm.

  A series of loud pops like firecrackers made them both jump, and out in the street a young boy began to scream for help.

  By the time they had rushed downstairs, a gabble of voices came from the end of the block, shouting and upset.

  Then, over everything else, a woman’s voice keened, a wordless wail that made Bai Lum’s skin bunch into hard gooseflesh.

  One block from his home, between Christ Episcopal Church and a back alley, something slammed David Kendall hard under his right shoulder blade. His face hit the street. The iron taste of mud filled his mouth and gritted between his teeth. More shots were fired and he flinched hard, tried to curl into a ball. Men shouting, in Chinese he thought, then footsteps echoing away in every direction.

  “Mama, help me.” It was a boy, somewhere across the street. “I’m hurt bad.” His cries fell against the fog and sounded flat in Kendall’s ears.

  He tried to raise himself but could not. He felt as if a lance of ice was driven through him, and when he moved the blade turned to fire, radiating a nauseous, greasy pain through his belly. He vomited, and could smell the dinner he had recently eaten, and blood, and the living odor of the bay.

  The boy still screamed and wept, and now other voices approached. A warm pool seeped under Kendall. It’s my blood, he thought, but it seemed distant to him, a problem he couldn’t hold in his mind.

  “David?” Prudence, running toward him. She knelt and tried to roll him over. The pain glanced through his center again and he groaned.

  “Help me,” she screamed. “My husband, someone!” More running footsteps and a confusion of voices.

  “Holy Christ, it’s Dave Kendall.”

  “We got another one shot over here, the Baldschmidt kid.”

  “Easy Dave, easy does it. Watch his head.”

  Many hands were on him, turning him face up. A blanket came from somewhere and they wrapped it around him. Each time they moved him, another pain radiated through his gut, but it was less intense now, seemed farther away. His hands and feet had no feeling. His wife moaned high in her throat when they lifted him, and he knew that she could see the black stain of his blood on the street. He tried to speak, to tell her not to worry, but he couldn’t form the words. Strong hands bore him up the street to his home, there were dozens of voices now, and he could no longer make out what they said, it was like the sound of birds, melded into background noise. He looked up at the streetlights, diffuse in the fog. They were beautiful.

  Part III

  Convergence

  Just as we were going to press last night a serious riot broke out in the Chinese quarters just opposite our office. Some ten or twelve shots were fired, and noise enough made to shake the bones of Confucius. We do not know the extent of damage, but saw one Chinaman laid out with a bullet through his lung. Dr. Davis took the ball out of his back. He is a gone Chinaman.

  —Daily Humboldt Times, February 1, 1885

  If ever such an event does occur—if ever an unoffending white man is thus offered up on the altar of paganism, we fear it will be goodbye to Chinatown.

  Editorial: WIPE OUT THE PLAGUE SPOTS

  —Daily Humboldt Times, February 5, 1885

  Before you embark on a journey of revenge, dig two graves. —Confucius

  Chapter 8

  At least a dozen people milled at the corner, everyone agitated and talking at once. Several knelt around a crying boy, tending some wound, his leg or foot by the look of it. His cap was off, his face streaked with dirt and tears. The doors of the Episcopal Church stood open, throwing light on a ghastly puddle of blood and vomit in the street. Rose started to shudder and realized she had come outside without her coat. People appeared from all directions, everyone shouting, asking what had happened. At the far end of the street another group, big men, carried a body, rushing away. Hazel followed with her arm around Prudence Kendall. Rose hurried after them.

  Before she could catch up, they were inside the Kendall house. The injured man was David Kendall. Dark blood, smeared by many feet, preceded her up the steps and across the parlor floor, and she tried to avoid it, horrified. They were laying him on the dining room table when Rose caught her aunt by the sleeve. “What’s happened?” she whispered. Her chin trembled, and it was hard to talk.

  Hazel looked at Rose and her face seemed slapped clean of expression. She backed against the parlor wall and closed her eyes.

  “Aunt Hazel, what is it? What happened to him?”

  “He’s shot,” she breathed. “God help us, he’s been shot by the Chinese.”

  Rose stared at the doctor and Prudence, who hunched over the table, the doctor’s hands at work, Prudence looking into her husband’s face. Mayor Tom Walsh was there, too, and two or three others. All she could see of David Kendall were his boots and the cuffs of his trousers. Phoebe stood wide-eyed at the end of the table, her face blotched with crying. She clutched a hank of her own hair to her lips, sobbing into it. Two women stood at her elbows, murmuring to her, averting their eyes from the wounded man. She reached out and grasped the toe of her father’s right boot, then crumpled into the arms of those around her. Rose looked away, l
ooked at her aunt, whose lips moved silently.

  “They caught someone?”

  “I don’t know.” Hazel crossed herself and kissed her fingertips.

  “But you said it was the Chinese.”

  “They’ve been shooting each other to pieces down there. Now this.”

  The front door stood open and a crowd formed around the porch. As more people came, the volume of the voices swelled into an unintelligible backwash of sound. The men who had carried Kendall in from the street filled the room, hats in hand, craning to see. She looked at their faces, most of whom she recognized, now rigid with the terrible thing happening on the dining room table.

  Rose drew her aunt into an empty corner.

  “There are two young girls,” she said. She looked at David Kendall’s feet again, thought about his boisterous dance with Hazel and his tumble to the greasy floor, and him smiling all the while. The room began to smell rank, of blood and sweat. “It’s the girl Bai Lum and the Huntingtons are helping, and another, from Salyer’s. They’re at the mercantile right now, with Bai Lum, but it’s not safe. I want to take them home.” She searched Hazel’s face. “To your house,” she whispered. “If they stay in Chinatown—”

  Hazel said nothing, watched the table where a crowd of lamps was held high for the doctor. Then she looked hard at Rose, who stood shaking, her teeth chattering. She took her niece by one arm and pushed through the people now packed in the entry. At the hall tree she took a heavy woolen scarf, one of Mr. Kendall’s, and twined it around Rose, pulling it over her head and around her shoulders.