Chasing Down the Moon

by Carla Baku

  He felt the time rushing past.

  She stopped short in the middle of the floor. “The church.” Her face brightened. “There’s a room that leads off the sacristy, nothing in it but a couple of old bookcases with baptismal and confirmation records. No one can get to it from the outside, and no one would think to look there.”

  Bai Lum felt an exhausted wave of dread break over him. Even if they were able to hide for the night, they couldn’t stay hidden long. He felt desperate to get back to the store and stand watch, and even more desperate to get everyone into a safe place.

  Lucy must have seen the feelings on his face. “I know you’re worried,” she said. “I am too. But I think this can work. You’ll all be out of danger, at least until morning, and it will buy us some time to think.”

  The back door crashed open. It slammed backward against the wall so hard that the four small panes of glass in its top half shattered. Before either of them could react, three men pushed into the kitchen.

  “What the hell are you doing in here with this lady?” The speaker wore rough black work pants. His coat hung open and the buttons on his shirt strained over a huge gut. A small, slender man sporting a bowler hat stood beside the fat man and gripped what looked to be an old axe handle. The third man stood in front and had a big army pistol stuck in his pants. He rested one palm lightly on the butt of the gun.

  “How dare you break into this home.” Lucy Huntington, herself not much taller than a child, stepped squarely between Bai Lum and the intruders. “This is a church parsonage and this gentleman is my guest.” Her white head tipped back to look at the fat man, and she cocked it to one side, appraising him.

  Bai Lum stood quietly, but adrenaline made his muscles thrum and the dimly lit kitchen now seemed to vibrate with light and color. He noticed that the gaps between the fat man’s shirt buttons revealed not an undershirt, but patches of pasty skin and dark hair. He wished for Lucy’s gun, could almost feel its small weight in his hands, but it was behind the broken door, out of reach and useless to them with these three in the breach.

  The man with the gun spoke, his voice level and calm. “Mrs. Huntington, where is the girl?”

  “What girl?” Lucy managed to sound annoyed by the question.

  “Please don’t waste my time, Mrs. Huntington. Mr. Salyer’s girl. We’ve come to fetch her.”

  “For heaven’s sake, I sent Ya Zhen back to the hotel hours ago. You’ve broken my back door for nothing. You go tell Mr. Salyer he’d better send someone around to repair it first thing tomorrow.”

  “That’s a lie,” said the big man. “She’s lying, Clayton.”

  Lucy waved her hand as if shooing a fly. “That girl left my house this afternoon on foot, and that is the God’s truth—which Cora Salyer already knows, by the way. What happened to the girl after she left here I can’t imagine.”

  The fat man looked toward the parlor door. “Maybe we should have a look around.”

  “Where’s the Reverend?” asked Clayton.

  “He’s calling on a parishioner.” She turned her attention on the fat man again. “I know your mother, don’t I?” Lucy stared at him. “Yes, I do. Melinda Fickes. You’re Ronald? No, Randall. Randall Fickes, you ought to be ashamed.”

  Fickes’s pudgy face twitched and he looked from Lucy to Bai Lum. “Maybe you ought to be ashamed, old woman, having this sorry heathen in your kitchen when you’re home all alone.” He pointed at Bai Lum and his meaty hand shook. “There’s been a murder done, and for all we know, this one did it.” He started to move around Lucy. “You’re coming with us, boy, right here and now.”

  Lucy jockeyed to one side, trying to stay between them, but the man with the bowler hat caught her by the arm. Just before Fickes bore down on him, Lucy slapped the short man a hard shot across the face, knocking his hat off. Randall Fickes reached for one of Bai Lum’s arms and Bai Lum pistoned the heel of his hand forward into the man’s nose. He felt the cartilage give way with a muffled crunch, and then the man called Clayton leveled a pistol at his face.

  “I’ll shoot you right now,” Clayton said. “If you move you are a dead man.” His expression remained bland and composed, as if this scuffle were no more interesting to him than reading yesterday’s news. Fickes, meanwhile, bent at the waist and blared, holding a filthy bandanna to his bleeding nose. The bowler hat man had Lucy pressed against the wall, her white hair trailing askew, a red welt rising on her face. Bai Lum started to move, but she held one hand out toward him.

  “No, Bai Lum,” she said, breathing hard. “Don’t do it.”

  “That’s excellent advice,” said Clayton. “Listen to the lady now, and don’t be rash.” He smiled at Bai Lum. “Ready?”

  Bai Lum said nothing. He and Lucy held each other’s eyes, and she nodded at him, a hard, decisive little nod. She would take care of Rose and Ya Zhen and Shu-Li.

  Fickes groaned again. “Mongolian bastard broke my nose.” He looked at the gore on his hanky and touched his nose delicately with one finger. “How bad is it?”

  “Did I tell you to let me deal with this, Randall?” said Clayton. “Now shut up and let’s get him downtown. Walk, Chinaman. Lonny, let go of the lady.”

  Lonny did as he was told and Lucy moved away from him, smoothing the front of her dress with both hands, as if dusting herself off after working in the garden. Clayton gestured Bai Lum toward the door.

  “We need to tie him, Clay,” Fickes said in a clogged voice.

  “Not a bad idea. Lonny, run out to the carriage house and fetch a bit of rope.”

  Lonny spat on the kitchen floor at Lucy’s feet. “Chink lover,” he said, and trotted out the back door.

  “Let’s go,” Clayton said, again motioning to the door with his pistol. Fickes went out, keeping a wide berth between himself and Bai Lum, and Bai Lum followed. He could feel the muzzle of the gun resting lightly at the small of his back, a ghost of feeling that made all the nerves under his skin crawl. As he went, he looked back at Lucy and gave her the same hard nod she had given him.

  “Turn around, Chinaman,” said Clayton. “You have no business looking at a white lady. And you,” he said to Lucy “had better hope that Salyer’s girl turns up in one piece.”

  Lonny came back with the rope and Clayton let Fickes hold Bai Lum’s hands behind him while Lonny cinched his wrists. His pulse hammered in his fingertips and the stiff piece of hemp immediately began to rub his skin raw. Fickes pulled him down the porch steps. He stumbled and went hard on one knee against a stone, cried out at the steep pain that shot up his leg.

  “Don’t you hurt this man,” Lucy shouted from behind them. “This is an innocent man, do you hear me? Bai Lum, I’ll find Reverend Huntington. We’ll get you out of this.”

  “Rose,” he called back to her.

  “I understand.” She sounded on the verge of tears. They were out in the alley now, moving toward town. He risked a single glance back. She stood on the porch, hair wild around her shoulders.

  Rose roamed back and forth through the dark mercantile, holding the broken shovel handle and watching first at the front, then listening at the back. After Bai Lum left, she had bolted the front door and checked the windows, even upstairs.

  Byron Tupper’s face, so stricken, kept rising in her mind’s eye, the way he had turned on Bai Lum, accused him. Shu-Li was asleep again, still wearing Lucy’s apron. She had looked alarmed when she realized Bai Lum had gone out. Rose and Ya Zhen explained that he was going to get the Huntingtons, and this seemed to satisfy her. She curled on her bed and fell asleep immediately.

  But Ya Zhen was wide awake. She sat on the divan, watching through a slit in the curtains at the street below. The room was so dark and Ya Zhen so still, that all Rose could see was a slender stripe of dim light falling over the girl’s cheek, and one watchful eye.

  “Have you seen anything?” Rose asked. She stood next to the arm of the divan and looked out the opening in the curtain, too. Other than an occasional shout downtown, t
he evening had gone almost silent.

  “Two men came out of the building across the street,” Ya Zhen said, pointing, “and a little boy ran by.” Her voice was quiet. Since the encounter with Byron, she had seemed extraordinarily calm. For her part, Rose felt as if she was going to fly apart, waiting for hell to break loose. When a small clock across the room chimed the quarter-hour, she jumped, her pulse galloping in a thready rush. Bai Lum had been gone only twenty minutes.

  “Sit down, Rose,” Ya Zhen said. “This is a good place to wait.”

  Rose dropped onto the scratchy sofa and put her head in her hands. “I wish he hadn’t gone out. It’s so quiet now.”

  “Not the little boy. He was pulling a stick across the fence. They love to make noise.”

  “Yes, they do. Little boys and big boys—they’re all pretty noisy.” Just then a male voice yee-hawed from some distance. Rose tensed, but Ya Zhen laughed.

  “I have a little brother.”

  It took Rose a moment to process. “A brother. Where is he?” She tried to see Ya Zhen’s face, but she had dropped the curtain and was now just a dark shape beside Rose.

  “With his mother. Our mother. I see him in dreams.” She paused. “He sees me, too, I think.” Her voice was light, easy.

  “Maybe you’ll—” Rose faltered. “Maybe you can see him someday. In life, I mean.”

  Ya Zhen made no reply and Rose wished she could take the words back. She leaned forward and peeked out again. Nothing.

  “I think Bai Lum will come back.” Ya Zhen said.

  Her voice was so soft, like something Rose might hear inside her own head. She swallowed hard. “I’m afraid to say that.”

  “Why?”

  “Something very bad happened tonight. A man was shot. A wonderful, kind man, with a lovely wife and—” She swallowed a terrible lump in her throat. “He was killed, and it’s dangerous for Bai Lum to be outside.”

  “It is always dangerous.” Ya Zhen leaned toward the window again, and Rose watched the faint bar of light cross her features. She was smiling. “Look,” she said, pointing up. “The moon.”

  She looked. Even behind the fog, the half-moon had just cleared the opposite roofline, throwing indistinct shadows across the sidewalk, silvering everything.

  Ya Zhen rested her cheek on the back of the divan. “This is a wonderful night, Rose.”

  The deep shadows around Ya Zhen’s eyes and the genuine pleasure in her statement made gooseflesh ripple over the back of Rose’s neck. “Wonderful?”

  “I make my own choices.”

  Rose felt as if her own choices were narrowing to a fine point. “You aren’t frightened? I’m so afraid, Ya Zhen.”

  Ya Zhen shook her head. “I can stay here, or I can leave. I can lock the door—” she paused and looked across the road, “or I can run outside and climb into that tree.” She smiled again, and Rose was stunned by the relaxed expression on her face. “Right now I am just sitting in this dark room, looking at the moon, and it is wonderful.” She sat quietly. “If they try to take me, I will not go.”

  Rose had no idea how Ya Zhen meant to make good on this vow, but the electric flesh ran up her spine again. She believed her.

  In the street, a figure moved out of the fog, directly toward the store. Rose jumped up and raced down the stairs, heart pounding in her throat. She moved as silently as she could to the front windows, gripping the shovel handle so tightly her hand seemed welded to it. Before she could look out, someone rapped on the bolted door, a loud and frantic sound in the high-ceilinged room. Rose dropped the piece of wood with a clatter, but managed not to cry out. She inched toward the window, even as the hard rapping came again. It wasn’t Bai Lum.

  “Rose, are you in there?” A woman’s voice, out of breath. “There’s trouble, you have to come!”

  Mattie.

  Rose threw open the door. In the street, the fog looked almost solid now, the stifled light from the moon illuminating a dense, blank surface. The shifting gray curtain of it obscured everything.

  Mattie clutched Rose’s arm in a pincer grip. “Thank Christ you’re here, I didn’t know,” she panted. “Rose, they have him—Bai Lum. I think they’re going to kill him.”

  Charles Huntington and Jacob Weimer found Lucy in the carriage house, struggling to hitch Buster to the buggy. Lucy barely paused in her efforts, fumbling with the harness, all the while telling them what had happened with Bai Lum in the kitchen.

  “We have to help them,” she said, working to adjust a buckle.

  Charles took her arm, alarmed by how undone she seemed. When she turned her face up to him, the red mark showed. “What happened to you?”

  She shook her head furiously. “I’m fine. It’s nothing. But we have to hurry.” Her hair was all the way down now and pulled roughly back in a horsetail. He could see that there would be no telling her to stay home.

  “Yes,” he said, taking the harness from her. “I’ll finish this. Get a wrap.”

  She ran to the house, and Jacob helped Charles hitch Buster, who acted skittish and balky.

  “Jacob,” Charles said, “I want home now. This thing has gone off the rails and you should be with your wife and children.”

  Jacob was silent for a moment, stroking Buster’s big head, trying to quiet him. “Reverend, I’m going to get Addy and the children and bring them to the church. The kiddies can sleep anywhere. Addy will make a nest for them.” He leaned down and brushed at a streak of dried mud on one pant leg. “Someone might show up, looking for help. It’s going to be a long night, I think.”

  Charles nodded, studying Jacob’s tired face. “We’ll join you just as soon as we can. Thank you, Jacob.”

  Lucy hurried in wearing her winter coat, holding a muffler for her husband. Jacob helped her in, and a minute later they were aimed for town again, Charles urging Buster into a trot. The fog made it dangerous to travel fast, but they had to risk it. In the open carriage, they were exposed to the weather. Tiny beads of precipitation clung to Lucy’s hair and she seemed to shimmer there next to him. Between the parsonage and downtown, most houses were fully lit, as if every room was occupied and on guard. But the streets were empty —no foot traffic, no carriage traffic— until they reached the Chinatown block.

  Here it was chaos. As they passed, a man hurled a brick through the window of Dong Li Ha’s laundry and when the proprietor ran to the door, several men shouted at him to hand over whatever laundry he had on hand. The street crawled with men, most in groups of five or six. They roamed back and forth, entering shops and houses, shouting orders to pack up. Several merchants tried to bar entrance to their establishments. Wei Chang was backed against a wall, shaking his head, while a man dressed in a fine topcoat and tie made his point by pushing his finger repeatedly into Mr. Wei’s sternum. Some of the Chinese had already begun to pile belongings on the walk, and halfway down the street three young boys, no more than ten years old, had taken someone’s household dishes and were throwing them into the road. As the carriage moved through the street, a word echoed forward in Charles’s mind, one he had read the year before in relation to problems in Russia. Pogrom.

  Lucy reached over and grasped his wrist. Her fingers were ice cold.

  “Charles, look.”

  At the far end of the street, a rough gallows. The hemp noose hung in a heavy line from the center beam, swaying slightly. A group of people stood in a horseshoe around the front of the crude construction. Someone let out a raucous shout.

  “Do for him, boys!”

  There was a murmured response from the spectators, their necks craned to look at three men on the platform. In the center, hands bound before him, was Bai Lum.

  Chapter 9

  Rose ran. Somewhere behind, Mattie called her name, but she did not stop, did not look back. Bai Lum’s strong and gracious face filled her mind, the touch of his hands on her feet, the enveloping sensation of his kiss last night. Please please please. The words poured through her as her heels pounded the street.
She could not even think the rest: please be alive, and I will do anything. Two more blocks and she was gasping the words aloud. She rounded the corner and the scaffold was right there, people standing three deep around its base. Bai Lum’s mouth bled and one eye was swollen almost shut. He stood motionless, the tip of the noose grazing one shoulder. Rose tripped and fell to her hands and knees in the wet dirt of the road.

  “No!” She got up, mud streaking the front of her striped dress, palms burning with small abrasions. Heads swiveled in her direction as she tried to push her way through to the front of the scaffold. “Stop this,” she shouted. When she got to the steps of the platform, someone grabbed her by the arm and held her. Garland Tupper.

  “Let go of me.” She tried to jerk free of him, but Tupper held her like a vise.

  “That’s a dead Chinaman,” he said. A weirdly beatific smile spread across his features. “Aw. You love him?”

  Coming from Tupper’s mouth, the question was grotesque. “I said let go of me,” Rose shouted. When she struck at him with her free hand, he caught hold of her wrist. The harder she pulled, the deeper he dug his fingers into her flesh, cutting off her circulation, until she cried out.

  Bai Lum made a furious sound through his clenched teeth and one of the men holding him, a fat man with blood on his shirt and what looked to be a freshly broken nose, grabbed Bai Lum’s braid and yanked his head back until he was looking straight up.

  “Don’t look at the white lady,” Garland shouted, and the fat man pulled backward until Bai Lum’s head cocked at an extreme angle, his mouth open.

  “Stop it!” Rose tried to hurl herself toward the steps, but Tupper held her.

  “He shot Captain Kendall,” Tupper shouted. “My boy saw him. He said so.”

  “That’s a lie,” said Rose. “Bai Lum was in the mercantile when Mr. Kendall was shot. I was with him.”