The Boy with Blue Trousers

by Carol Jones

  New Gold Mountain. Little Cat inhaled the words. A faraway land. A land of untold riches known only through tales brought back by travellers. A land of strange people and even stranger animals, where the white ghosts ruled, and the animals nursed their babies in pouches like a woman cradling a babe in a sling upon her chest. Little Cat had seen a drawing of one of these creatures, standing upright on its long tail and powerful hind legs. If the animals carried their young like people, what other wonders might be found there?

  She sat up too, drenched clothing and damp spirits forgotten as she fixed her eyes on her twin. What did he have in mind? Once, she and her twin had been almost like one person. She always knew what he was thinking. But the time was long gone when they spent days plucking pests from the mulberry bushes, competing to see who could collect the most bugs. Or raced each other through narrow alleys to see who could reach the river first. He did not share his secrets with her any more. Just as he rarely invited her to train with him. He had abandoned her in spirit, if not in flesh.

  ‘It is said there is wealth for the taking. That the rivers run with gold and lumps of it can be plucked from the ground,’ he continued.

  ‘“Marry your daughter to the Gold Mountain guest. When his ship comes home he will bring a fortune.”’ She chanted the words to the popular song, but Elder Brother glared her to silence.

  ‘Like it was said there was work to be found in the south seas, so that the poor and the foolish were lured into slavery,’ he said. ‘Waa! If it were true, everyone would be crossing the seas.’

  ‘But this time it is true, Daaih Lou! I have seen it for myself when we took the fish to market. A man there was showing a souvenir from his journey, a nugget he had washed from a river. It gleamed on his palm, a pebble of pure gold. And the gold wasn’t his only prize. He had brought back enough money to build a two-storey house for his parents, refurbish the lineage temple, and open a dry-goods store.’

  They were all silent for a moment, entranced by this stranger’s good fortune. It was too dark for Little Cat to see her twin’s expression but she read his excitement in every muscle of his stance. He stood poised on his toes, as if ready to embark on adventure that very instant.

  Elder Brother tightened the arm that girded his beloved’s waist. ‘Even if it were true, how can I leave our family? I am the eldest son. Our father and mother depend upon me. They would never let me go.’

  ‘I could go,’ said Second Brother, ‘and the Mo elders could be persuaded to guarantee money for my passage.’

  Little Cat glared in her twin’s direction. How long had he been hatching this plot? Waiting for the right opportunity to raise it. Without breathing a word to her.

  Young Wu cleared his throat, saying, ‘It is true that my father sent Ferryman Wu and his brother to the Gold Mountain when we were children, remember.’

  Was he in on this secret plan of her brother’s? Had they hatched this plot together? Wu’s father was the most powerful man in the village, the head of his lineage, and one day, his son would inherit his role – if the old man ever decided to die. He had already survived a bout of typhoid and a drunken fall from a donkey.

  ‘That is true. And I also remember that his brother never returned home,’ Elder Brother reminded them. ‘He died in an opium den on old Gold Mountain, so they say.’

  But Little Cat also remembered that day when Ferryman Wu returned from Gold Mountain, sauntering through the village gate in a brand new suit of clothes of the finest silk. She remembered how she and the other children had followed him from the gate to the door of his parents’ house, chanting questions about where he had been and what treasures he had brought home (with not a little curiosity about any treats he might care to share). It turned out that he had returned with a lot of stories but not so much treasure.

  Now there was a New Gold Mountain, thousands of li to the south, rather than the east. There were new adventures and new opportunities for those who dared to claim them.

  ‘I could go with you, Goh Go.’ The words emerged from her mouth before she had time to censor them. Her brothers could be so dismissive of her ideas that she usually planned them well in advance, issuing her thoughts a few scraps at a time. Second Brother had developed a special look, which he reserved particularly for her suggestions – a frown and a smile that combined to make him appear constipated.

  Still, she had their attention now, though she could not make out their expressions in the dark. She could only hear the scorn in their voices.

  ‘Women don’t leave our shores!’ said Elder Brother.

  ‘Waa! Girls can’t go to the Gold Mountain, Old or New!’ said her twin.

  ‘No one would send you!’ said Young Wu.

  ‘Why wouldn’t they send me? I am strong. I am brave. I am clever. I can fight. And I can work day and night.’

  Her question was greeted with a chorus of laughter. ‘That is no answer!’ she snarled.

  ‘Your question doesn’t deserve an answer,’ said Elder Brother, shaking his head in disbelief. ‘One girl crowded into a stinking ship’s hold with hundreds of men? One girl sharing a leaky tent in a strange new world with a dozen men? One girl from the Middle Kingdom, alone in the land of the outside barbarians? How could my parents have sprouted such a melon head?’

  Her twin was kinder but equally dismissive. ‘You are eighteen now, little sister. Our parents will be talking to the matchmaker soon. You cannot go to the New Gold Mountain.’

  She could see that they would never let her cross the seas. She would be lucky to go further than the next village. And then she would be tied to her new husband’s hearth, and her growing brood of children, and then grandchildren, until the day she died. And even then her spirit would likely be shackled to her husband’s ancestral altar. She would have no adventure. She would find no fortune.

  ‘But I want to help Daaih Lou too,’ she said, not knowing how to express what she really wanted. Not even to herself. It was beyond her imagining.

  ‘I might know a way.’ Young Wu thrust out his chin and set his hands on his hips. ‘Not for this girl to go to New Gold Mountain. That is clearly absurd. But to help earn money for the Mo family,’ he clarified.

  ‘How could this be done?’ asked Elder Brother, turning to face him.

  Wu appeared to take a moment to savour their anticipation before saying, ‘The Wu clan needs more silk reelers for our new silk filature. We have brought five treadle-machines down from the north. The market for silk is growing so fast that we cannot find enough skilled reelers amongst the Wu women and my father pays his workers well.’

  So… her twin could sail across the world to dig up a future on New Gold Mountain. And she could trudge through the mulberry groves each day to spin a future at the Wu filature. It wasn’t exactly a glittering prospect and yet… perhaps she was being offered an opportunity. A path that diverged from the future set before her like a bowl of cold rice. Who knew what it might bring? Perhaps this was not something she should fight. Perhaps she should trust in the tao and allow opportunity to show her the way.

  The tao and the intolerable Young Wu.

  9

  The silkworms had an entire house to themselves. It nestled in the midst of the Mo family mulberry groves, almost two li from the village, where the worms would not be discomforted by the sounds and smells of human life. Unlike Little Cat, whose daily chore it was to collect the night soil to feed the fish, the silkworms were too delicate for such odours. Although with only eighteen days from egg to cocoon, their lives were bittersweet. They would eat and eat and eat. Then they would spin their cocoons and die. Little Cat supposed she should be glad that eating wasn’t her only pleasure.

  Day and night for the eight months of the breeding season, Elder Brother catered to the worms’ needs. He chopped fresh leaves and cleaned the baskets of silkworm dirt and dry leaf litter, saving it for the fish. And when the worms were at their largest and most ravenous, he stayed awake feeding them every two hours throughout the n
ight. For all her complaints about picking leaves and reeling silk, Little Cat did not envy him these tasks. She might be subject to her mother’s whims, but Elder Brother was a slave to worms.

  He was cutting up leaves when she arrived. Wide shallow baskets crammed the open shelves that lined the walls of the wormhouse. The baskets teemed with small white worms, gnawing their way through mounds of tender, chopped leaves. Their chomping resounded like the smacking of a thousand pairs of tiny lips.

  ‘Are you good, Daaih Lou?’ she asked as she entered the cool, airy shed.

  ‘Not bad,’ he shrugged, not looking up from the swiftly moving chopper. ‘Ah Yong will be here with Father soon. Then we shall see.’

  *

  A powerful odour of fish announced her father and brother’s arrival. They appeared in the doorway of the wormhouse, their faces still shaded by wide-brimmed hats, trousers rolled to the knee from their labours in the silt-laden bottoms of the fishponds. In the shadowed interior, Little Cat had to look twice to tell them apart for Second Brother was almost a twin to their father. Both sported a thick brush of hair, a wide-mouthed grin, and long fish-shaped eyes that flashed in the light. Their faces were tanned to a shining dark brown from working outdoors: pruning mulberry bushes, caring for fish and poling the leaves to market along the region’s web of creeks and canals.

  Elder Brother, however, was half a head taller again, and more like their mother in appearance, if not in character. His face was longer with a cherry mouth and wide, oval eyes. He always looked as if he was deep in thought, even when he was only deciding if the next batch of eggs were ready to be hatched. Little Cat had the same long face and bouncy hair as her mother and elder brother, but wore her father’s wide smile and quick eyes. When they were young, she had been taller than her twin but he had outpaced her several years ago, much to his delight and constant reminders. Now the top of her head was level with his eyebrows.

  ‘Little Cat, what are you doing here this late?’ asked her father.

  ‘Elder Brother had a task for me, Ba.’

  Her father looked at her sceptically, for they all knew she had a thousand excuses for avoiding extra tasks.

  ‘Have you seen Mr Yee lately?’ she asked absently, while studying the nearest basket of worms with great interest.

  ‘I see him every day, daughter, as you well know, since his fields are next to ours.’

  ‘Mm. I wonder then if he has spoken to you of his daughter’s betrothal.’

  Their father glanced at each of his children in turn, his mouth fixed in a hard, straight line, except for the slight quirk at the corner. ‘So… you have confided in your brother and sister then, Ah Keong.’

  ‘I have, Ba.’

  None of them had told of Siu Wan’s desperate act on the night of the Seven Sisters Festival. And Elder Brother did not mention it now. It would remain the siblings’ secret, except for Young Wu, who dogged her brother like a shadow, learning all their secrets. Sometimes she caught the strangest expression on his face, as if his eyes warred with his mouth, his eyes conveying one message while his mouth spoke another. He was a strange fish, that boy.

  ‘And Siu Wan has confided in our sister,’ Elder Brother continued, glancing in her direction.

  ‘Mmm, I expect you hope I can do something about that. I feel for you, son, I know what it is like to be married to a woman you have not chosen,’ he said, then hurriedly added, ‘But it has turned out well for me and it will for you too.’

  ‘Daaih Lou is very sad, Ba,’ she ventured, summoning a pathetic look, one that she had been practising for days.

  ‘That may be so but I have already spoken with the girl’s father and we could not come to an agreement. This situation has not changed. The Yee family haven’t prospered recently. Yee has made some foolish decisions and taken on too much debt. Now he has sold his last plot of land to the Wu lineage and must lease it back. He needs cash, ropes of cash.’

  Little Cat had a sudden image of Mr Yee weighed down by jingling strings of the square-holed coins known as cash, all looped in a noose around his neck.

  ‘Ah Yong has a plan for acquiring cash,’ said Elder Brother.

  ‘Waa! Cash is not so easy to acquire, boy. You cannot pluck it from trees or dig it up from fields.’

  ‘You can on New Gold Mountain.’

  Their father turned to stare at Second Brother who until now had remained silent. ‘What kind of unfilial children have I raised? You think I do not see what is happening here?’

  Little Cat felt an elbow to her ribs and looked up to find Elder Brother making faces at her, his eyebrows waggling meaningfully.

  ‘As always, we respect your wishes,’ he said. He placed his palms together – the signal for Little Cat and Second Brother to follow him – and the three siblings bowed to their father the requisite three times.

  ‘Some other, more gullible fathers would be reassured by this gesture, Ah Keong.’

  ‘Honourable Father, we only wish to set before you a possibility.’

  ‘A possibility, is it?’

  ‘It is. Only a possibility,’ nodded Second Brother.

  ‘And you, daughter, are you part of this possibility? You have your nose in everything, it seems.’

  ‘If you think it possible, Ba, then it is possible I may be part of this possibility,’ Little Cat said, keeping her face blank, except for an excited twitch at the corner of her mouth which could not be tamed.

  ‘So… what is this possibility?’

  ‘I would ask the Mo elders to sponsor me to seek our fortune on New Gold Mountain. To find enough gold so that Siu Wan’s betrothal might be set aside and she and my brother could be married.’

  ‘And you, daughter? You expect to go with him?’ Ba asked, an expression of horror widening his eyes.

  ‘If you allow—’ she began excitedly, only to be quelled by a swift kick in the shins from Elder Brother.

  ‘Certainly not. There are no women from the Middle Flowery Kingdom on New Gold Mountain,’ said her twin. ‘The idea is ridiculous.’

  For a moment, Little Cat thought that her brothers would betray her and leave her out of their plans. She began devising subtle and suitable reprisals, with various scenarios involving dead fish.

  ‘But,’ he continued after some thought, ‘our sister also has a possibility to help Daaih Lou.’

  Little Cat forgot herself long enough to flash a grin at her twin before settling her face back into solemn repose. Her father would be swayed by good sense rather than feeling. ‘The new Wu filature needs more silk reelers. They will pay three times what I can earn reeling silk at home,’ she said.

  Her father closed his eyes and shook his head several times slowly before asking with a sigh, ‘Then who would help your mother?’

  Little Cat was ready for this question, having argued silently to herself half the night in preparation. ‘Mui Mui wants to learn from our mother.’ Indeed, her twelve-year-old cousin had squealed in delight at the suggestion. Their aunt had died of a snakebite three years ago and her daughter had no one to teach her the art of reeling silk.

  ‘Your mother will not like it. She will make us all suffer.’

  Little Cat bowed her head in apology.

  ‘And what about you, Ah Yong? Who do you think your mother will blame if you cross the seas to the land of the foreign devils and are lost to us? She will curse me for the rest of our days.’

  ‘You will not lose me.’

  ‘And what if you return with a blue-eyed ghost child and present him as my grandson? Like that pale-haired boy we saw on market day? What would the ancestors say? What would your mother say?’

  ‘I will return with nothing but gold. I promise this.’

  Their father clasped his hands behind his back, strode to the door, and stepped out into the long evening shadows, cast by row upon row of neatly pruned mulberry bushes. They stretched like a marching army to the horizon, where distant mountains encircled the plain. The sun glimmered low upon the mountai
ns, shading the hills a deep purple. Little Cat watched as her father lifted his face to the sky, considering possibilities. Like her brothers, she waited in silence for his decision. There was nothing more she could say. She could only offer up a silent prayer to Weaver Girl that his answer would be the one for which they all longed.

  10

  Robetown, South Australia, 1856

  Several days after her first visit to the Chinese camp, Violet arrived at the entrance to the makeshift hospital in a rustle of silk. Slipping beneath the canvas shelter, she was met by a wall of serviceable wool in the persons of Mrs Brewer, the Resident’s wife, and another lady, who stood with their backs to her tending a patient. Neither woman appeared to have heard her above the sound of the man’s whimpering.

  ‘It would help if we knew what he is saying,’ said Mrs Brewer, who Violet recognised from her excursions about town. ‘I would ask the headman to interpret but I’m embarrassed to admit that I cannot tell him from the others when they are largely dressed the same.’

  ‘Lewis Thomas seems to have befriended the man.’

  ‘Then perhaps I shall seek out Mr Thomas, or judging from his distress, this poor fellow is like to die.’

  ‘Luckily, we don’t need to ask what ails most of them. What comes out of their buttocks tells us,’ said the other lady.

  ‘Margaret!’ Mrs Brewer said with a giggle.

  ‘Well, it’s true, Eleanor. They are either vomiting from one end or excreting from the other. But this one… there’s some fever but…’ A slight wobble of bonnets told Violet that the women were shaking their heads in dismay over the man’s symptoms.

  ‘And he’s amazingly loud for one so ill.’

  ‘Good morning, ladies.’ Violet announced her presence, so that the bonnets turned as one in her direction, revealing two women of middle years, one plump, the other thin, their greying hair parted at the centre and pulled into tight buns. At the sight of Violet they stifled any further giggling to present a united front of matronly competence.