The Rock Child

by Win Blevins

  The rat made a second entry. Slowly, ceremonially, it repeated the whole dance. Forward. Back. Forward and back again. The dash for the eats and the skiddledeedoo retreat.

  The man looked up at us and gave an easy smile. “Napoleon,” he said in an Irish brogue. “That’s is name.”

  “He’s just learning?” I asked.

  “God love ya, no,” says he. “We’re mates. Been feeding Napoleon every shift for weeks. He’s followed me right down this shaft, foot by foot. He’s just shy.”

  The rat stuck its head back out and waddled back onto the ledge. “Almost erotic, that walk, is it not?” says Sir Richard. Which made me feel odd.

  “Let’s go ahead toward the bridal chamber,” says Sam. We trudged and clambered down into the tunnel some more. “We’re back onto the vein now,” says Sam. We followed along where they’d dug and torn up until we came to where we could see another crew taking a lunch break. “We can’t go any closer,” says Sam, “they don’t permit any outsiders to see this, even good friends like members of the press.” Sam grinned. “Especially members of the press. Management is particular friendly to us, except where it counts. In the bridal chamber the digging is in new ground, what you might call it virgin territory—the point where country rock isn’t being taken out for a look-see but actual ore is being excavated. I don’t know how valuable this ore is. Afternoon, boys,” he called out to the crew, “you in bonanza or borrasca here?” They just sort of snickered.

  Sam led the way back up the tunnel and off into a side shaft. “They won’t answer,” says Sam. “That is a trusted outfit, any bridal-chamber crew is. Investors would pay many a buck to know whether they’re into bonanza or borrasca.” He took a sidetrack to explain that borrasca means the opposite of bonanza. He had a big interest in words, which is one of the ways writers is crazier than musicians, who know that words are mainly lame. “If the men in these outfits talk, they either do it very, very carefully, and make sure they get some of the stock profit, or they get fired. If word gets out and management can’t figure which man talked, they all get fired.

  “Them’s the boys do the high-grading. Most of that ore they load onto the cars and hoist it out in the right and proper way. Now, it may assay three or four hundred dollars a ton, or three or four thousand, or more’n that. When they luck into high-grade ore, in the thousands, they cache it in their pockets or lunch pails or wherever. A man earning four dollars a day on some shifts may be able to high-grade a hundred. Nobody thinks of high-grading as stealing. Except the mine owners.”

  “Why don’t they put a stop to it?” Sir Richard asked.

  “No way to do it,” says Sam. “No way.”

  He led us back up the shaft where we could get a lift out.

  “So they just fly blind in here?” says I. “Digging in every direction?.”

  “It is not that haphazard,” says Sam, “but they do have their blunders. For instance, last year two underground companies drifted into each other’s works, which happens now and then. Right quick they tried to smoke each other out—the Chinese stink-pot plan, we called it in the paper. A pitch-pine bonfire was set by one, and the other nearly suffocated. The afflicted then turned the smoke back by covering the mouths of their shafts with boards and wet blankets, and flooded water down. It was a right little war, good as Pukes and Mormons.”

  Sir Richard nodded his approval.

  We were coming into the light above. “So how do you like the mine?” says Sam.

  “Splendid,” says Sir Richard.

  Me, I said, “I don’t like me no giant holes in the ground.”

  Burton watched Sun Moon make the very contrary of an entrance. For one born a sovereign nomad, she caught on quickly to bearing herself like a servant. She was right—a low demeanor, shy, eagerness half-concealed by hesitation, and true servant’s dress, modest, drab, self-effacing. She followed Burton to a table near the piano. He set the newspaper, carefully folded, on the table. At the waitress’s solicitation he ordered whisky for himself and tea for the lady. Or rather, the servant.

  He gazed admiringly at Sun Moon. Though the chief procurer of Chinatown knew of her presence, and the Heritage was full of whores, she was willing to walk about, protected by her guise. Burton loved audacity.

  Burton enjoyed the surprise on Asie’s face when the lad glanced up. He nearly missed a note there. It even made the odd Gentleman Dan look about. The expression on his face seemed rather more complicated. So would mine do if a woman of color had been murdered for loving me.

  Burton quickly shut the door on the memory of the woman of color he himself had loved, the Persian … Living in the past, no, that will never do.

  The music clinked through the single large room of the Heritage, from the bar with the footrail to the window tables to the dance floor to the gambling layouts, men everywhere. Burton had listened with care to the native music of half the world. At first he felt impatient of all of it, even the sacred songs of India when he studied Hinduism so deeply he became a Naga Brahmin. The first time any appealed to him was after he embraced the Moslem faith. Those calls to the spirit entered the heart. They converted him to a seeker of the doors of sound everywhere he went, a true listener to music.

  In retrospect he had given consideration to Gentleman Dan’s Caucasian vis-à-vis Creole renditions. He thought them both modestly eloquent, and preferred the wrigglesome Creole style. He heard Asie’s enthusiasm for them. The lad’s very spirit was music. Yet this music …

  He looked around the room at the tinhorns, miners, businessmen, and whores. The more flamboyant whores were unmistakable, but the ones who teased his imagination were more difficult to identify—they wore the same San Francisco fashions (which was to say Paris fashions) as the respectable, wealthy women. The trick was to calculate by body language who had arrived alone, and might possibly be persuaded to depart in the company of the dashing Captain Burton.

  His nerve endings tingled.

  He took second thought. He felt the bitterness inside, and knew he must assuage it.

  I am sorry, Isabel.

  The music stopped, and Asie and the Professor joined them at the table. Asie was excited as a kid. A supreme sign of the jokester who made the world, Burton thought, that any man’s lot should be to fall in love with a nun. He fingered the edges of the newspaper.

  “I am honor, Gentleman Dan,” she said. “Delight hear you play, Asie.”

  Burton inspected her face. He suspected that American dance music was nothing to her. Yet her face looked sincere. He gave thought to the words she had actually said, and nodded to himself, admiring their discretion.

  Burton ordered another whisky, a tea, and a sherbet. The company of teetotalers, he thought disgustedly.

  When the Professor had enjoyed two deep drafts of his cigarillo, Burton judged the time ripe. He held up the newspaper. Virginia City Territorial Enterprise, the masthead said. Beneath that the bold, black headline, LINCOLN TO FREE SLAVES. The date was September 23, 1862.

  The Professor accepted the proffered sheet and studied the columns of type. As he read, Burton saw no emotion in the man’s face. When he set the paper down, his face was still a mask.

  Burton explained to Asie and Sun Moon. “The President of the United States yesterday issued a proclamation. On the first day of the new year all those persons held as slaves in the rebellious states are declared free. Despite this great gesture, slaves in other states are unaffected by the proclamation.”

  He paused. “Evidently, Mr. Lincoln wishes to assure the continued loyalty of the border states not in rebellion. Thus he furthers his declared policy: He is fighting a war to preserve the Union, not to abolish slavery.”

  As he studied his friends’ faces, he thought of Her Majesty’s government getting the news from their offices in Washington City. They would not be pleased. Lincoln was taking too clever a course. If the government asked his counsel, he would say that the South must lose the war, both physically and in the minds of men. />
  “What is your opinion?” he asked the Professor.

  “It is a cowardly and hypocritical act.” You do not mince words, Professor. Burton liked that.

  “Why so?”

  “He is wrong both ways. Slavery must be abolished, without hesitation or equivocation, and forever. In all states.”

  “And the Union?”

  “No state has a right to impose its will on another, even when the other is wrong.”

  Truly a Southerner, thought Burton.

  “How does this affect the American destiny? Race is ‘our destiny and our doom’—I believe those were your own words.”

  The Professor looked askance at their companions. Before Burton could point out the aptness of the topic to these very companions, Asie leapt in.

  I didn’t actually know what I wanted to say, just knew I was mad. “You know,” I started, “it feels right peculiar to listen to you, friends of mine, talk about people of color right in front of me like that. I don’t even know whether I’m a white man to you, or colored.”

  Truth to tell, for the first time I found myself thinking of them not as “my friends” but as “these white men.”

  I looked at them steady in their faces.

  “I understand perfectly,” said Daniel, “and apologize sincerely.”

  “Perhaps you may take it,” said Sir Richard, “that while your color may prejudice most people in this room and in this city, it does not affect us.”

  Stars and cornicles, I wasn’t reasoning out how to take it, I was just mad.

  “I don’t understand,” put in Sun Moon.

  I looked at Sir Richard and read his thoughts. By God, their disguise as servants is ruined—they’re so confounded independent.

  Daniel brought Sun Moon up to date. “Miss Moon,” he said, “when Captain Burton opened the door to a discussion of the relations of the races in this country earlier, I spoke with asperity on the subject, and revealed that I myself was betrothed to a woman of color. She’s now passed away, I regret to say.”

  I was amazed at Daniel’s coolness. I’d have bet he hadn’t volunteered this news thrice in his life.

  “So, ‘destiny and doom,’” Sir Richard pressed on. “Our friends need to hear your thoughts. They have no experience of the rest of this country.”

  “The fact of the slave trade,” said Daniel. He hesitated. “The fact that our people were willing for two hundred years …” His eyes looked haunted. “We have been captors, masters, overlords. We have hated people for the color of their skin alone. In the dark of night we have cultivated and nurtured that hatred. We have persecuted them. We have destroyed lives, destroyed entire families.” He paused dramatically. “We know our guilt. Can you see what that does inside?”

  Sun Moon was looking at him disgustedly. I judged she was too polite to say, “What do you think it does to the slaves?”

  “Racialism exacts a terrible but less insidious toll on its indirect victims. That includes your, uh, ward, Miss Sun Moon,” said Daniel. “And our friend here,” angling his head toward me.

  “Is that so?” says Sir Richard.

  Daniel said yes with his thick eyelids. “Her skin color is her fate. In this country Asie’s skin color is his fate. Different from hers, and the same—fate in either case. Think what it is to be at the mercy of the lust of any white man you meet. Or his ill temper.”

  “I believe the hue of Asie’s destiny is his spirit, nothing more or less.”

  “Oh, frog jump,” says I, and only said that on account of I couldn’t think of anything else. They were both in the ether. Again—“Frog jump!”

  Everybody looked at me like I was a pig that laid a egg.

  I plunged ahead. “Every man of color in this country knows what it means. How could you feel it like us? I can play the piano in here, or tend the bar, or take care of white people any damn way. Half the places I try to buy a drink, I’d get kicked out of. The other half, I’d be twice as like to get cheated at cards, and ten times as like to get mugged on the way home.”

  I tried to give Sir Richard as good an evil eye as ever he gave me. “The Mormons would have kept their white and delightsome women from me, or at least the pick of ’em. Here I might be able to go to a white brothel if I was very well dressed, or maybe not. Do you know they have white, brown, and yellow brothels? In the good district, the bad district, and Chinatown? Two dollars, one dollar, and seventy-five cents? Do you know there’s a law here against Chinese owning mining claims? Do you know they talk about ‘a Chinaman’s chance’? Which is the chance the Chinese have to find gold working the leftovers, the tailings?” My blood was right up, helped by stuff Daniel had told me, and I was ready to keep going.

  Sir Richard jumped in, though. “Quite right, every word. I also know that it’s embarrassing for you and Sun Moon, my dear friends and mates on safariy, to go about town disguised as my servants.”

  He looked us in the eye. It’s true, naming stuff straight on takes the sting out.

  But I was still full of it. “I’ll make a hullabaloo not to be nobody else’s nothing. One hell of a hullabaloo.” I looked at Daniel and considered. “You don’t know my whole story. I near drowned and came out of the river different as I went in. I set out on this big ramble to find something, I don’t know what.” I thought of their kind of words. “To find my own personal American destiny and doom, I guess. If I go astray, come up lame, shipwrecked, or whatever, I’m going to keep right on going my way, not nobody else’s.

  “What you be thinking? It’s damned hard. Hard for anyone to know where to go and what to do with your life. When I figger it out, if I do, might be whole lotta white men intend to keep me from my way. Well, they best keep their hands covering their balls. I’ll go where I want, do what I want, work at what I want.”

  Now Daniel pricked at me. “And marry who you want?”

  That made me so angry, plus I was embarrassed at saying that word in front of Sun Moon, so angry my devil jumped up big. “You bet,” I said. “You bet. If she’ll have me.” I fixed my eyes on the face of Sun Moon, which looked beautiful to me as a swan floating on sun-blasted water. “If you’ll have me.”

  Sun Moon looked at Asie with her eyes carefully masked. She could scarcely let him know the truth, the truth she almost knew for sure: I am bearing your child.

  She studied his face and knew how awful he felt, blundering out with it like that, right in front of everybody. She could also see he was waiting, waiting, hoping… You can’t know how hopeless it is.

  “I am a nun,” she said softly and gently, and stopped. Buddhist, scholar, teacher, chaste nun—I can give none of these up. Never could, and still less now. I will raise our child to dedicate his life to the moksha of all sentient beings.

  She met his eyes and saw him trying to read hers, but she kept the mask up. So much I cannot say to you. In her mind rose again, against her will, his touch, the time they lay entwined in each other’s arms beside the river, legs entwined, too, and lips, and lingam and yoni. Intertwined it felt like then. Now she knew it was entangled. Nothing that has happened has been a danger, except you. Not abduction, not slavery, only you. The danger is love.

  Now their gazes intertwined. She felt their lookings coming together gently and sensuously, like tendrils, delicately grasping. “I cannot,” she said distinctly, and only to Asie.

  Suddenly next to her Sir Richard was standing up and extending a hand toward …

  “Mr. Kirk,” said Sir Richard. “Thank you for coming.”

  Sun Moon forced her eyes away from Asie’s, an act of violence. She swallowed hard.

  Such terrible timing. Such a self-assured, predatory-looking Chinaman. She shivered. Perhaps my fever is returning. Then she acknowledged his deep bow with a small inclination of her head. He murmured, “I am honored.”

  She watched Tommy Kirk and not Asie while the courtesies were exchanged—she could not bear to look at Asie. Sir Richard brought a chair for the newcomer. He was costumed i
n a handsome suit of light blue silk, a man of impeccable appearance. Appearance only, of course.

  Out of a corner of her eye she saw Q Mark standing against the wall, and acknowledged him with a nod. She had confidence in this man for hire, as long as he was on the payroll. Tommy Kirk was another matter.

  As everyone began to chat (that’s what those social sorts call it), I looked directly at Sun Moon until I got her eyes back. They grew soft and said to me, “I do care for you, and I’m sorry.” Then they looked away.

  My insides felt like twisting snakes. I didn’t hear any of the conversation. Sun Moon wouldn’t look at me again.

  After a while Sir Richard prodded the talk toward where he wanted. “Mr. Kirk, we were discussing slavery. Do the Chinese practice slavery?”

  “Who does not?”

  “Based on race?”

  “Not what Europeans and Americans call race,” said Tommy Kirk, looking amused.

  I brought my attention to Tommy Kirk. Again I felt that come-hither-get-thither split. Truth was, I’d been pondering on Tommy Kirk. Whole truth was, I’d been fantasizing. A man who owns women. (I’d actually been pondering on just what lecherous forms this ownership might take.) A man who owns half of Chinatown and means to own all. A man who corrupts others with vices and takes their money for himself, sometimes leaves them ruined.

  Sir Richard kept chasing. “Based on notions of racial superiority?”

  “That’s a singularly American vice,” said Tommy.

  “How do people come into such misfortune?”

  Tommy shrugged. “Often they are given by their families as guarantees against a debt. Then the debt goes unpaid.”

  “Or conquered by soldiers?”

  “Sometimes.” He smiled ironically. “Once upon a time.”

  My fantasies were churning. My fingers wanted to touch the silk of his coat, but my feet wanted to run.