A Moment in the Sun (94 page)

Feng shook his head sadly. “He is contracted to the
sheng-yuan
, and owes him money for food and shelter. A contract is a sacred obligation. However, I know people in the South,” and here he glanced at Mei, “who are looking for girls to work for them. People willing to pay a good price.”

She wanted Baba to say he would not sell her, that she was too good a worker, wanted at least to hear him say her name out loud, but he only nodded and said, “This flower-growing is not so easy as it looks.”

Later he filled his pipe with opium and sat on the
k’ang
and smoked, silent as always, staring at Ma’s altar while Mei tended the fire. It was beginning to be winter, wind moaning outside their hut, and Mei thought she heard barking and wondered, as she never had before, if dogs might have spirits and if Ling-Ling might come back to haunt her.

One day all the opium paste was gone and Baba came home drunk like he used to, singing to himself and jingling coins in a sack. Mei did not speak to him, did not even look at him. When he fell asleep he lay on top of the sack and Mei had to stay awake watching him, her breath showing in the cold hut as she waited. It was almost light when he stirred and rolled over and she eased the sack away and emptied it on the floor and counted the coins. She was worth less than thirty
tiao
.

My feet will save me again, Mei thought as she pulled all her clothes on, layer after layer, and started out into the village. Nobody was on the road. Nobody was awake in Yip’s hut, but the door was unbarred, and she stepped over the bodies of the sleeping
pu hao
until she found Eldest Brother in the arms of a wicked woman. He was not pleased to see her.

“Why would you want to stay with Baba when he treats you like a dog?” he said without sitting up. The wicked girl lying with him was named Ai and was only a year older than Mei, a third daughter who had been sold to Yip when no husband could be found for her. “Go with Feng—the people in the South aren’t so bad.”

As she left, Yip woke up and cursed her for leaving the door open.

Mei began to run as she passed their hut again, worried that Baba might wake and find his coins melting in the fire. The workers were just coming into Zhou’s fields as she passed, cutting the last of the
giaoliang
, which was twice as tall as Mei. She asked for Second Brother, who she had not seen since the burial, and when she found him he was on his knees chopping the stalks with his knife
.
He turned and smiled when she called his name and she saw that his teeth were blackened like the other workers’, blackened from chewing opium paste.

“Is something wrong with Baba?” he asked.

“I have only come to say goodbye.”

She ran down the road then, away from the village, away from the
sheng-yuan
’s fields, vowing that she would not stop until she was in a place she had never seen before, running even faster as she passed through the market. It was not market day but there was a caravan, the porters pulling down the tents where they had spent the night. Feng was with them.

“Ah,” he smiled when he saw Mei and caught hold of her arm, squeezing tight. “We were just coming for you.”

Niles says he is there to visit Private Burns and is waved through.

“He’s in isolation,” says the orderly, lowering his voice meaningfully. “Doesn’t look like he’ll see tomorrow.”

Burns and a half-dozen others from the company are in with the typhoid, no surprise in this pesthole, and the flux is ubiquitous within the volunteers, not to mention the growing number sidelined by the wages of sin. The life of a soldier. Niles checks to be sure the orderly is not watching after him and then cuts left toward the dispensary. The air is laced with ammonia and carbolic acid, stinging his eyes and the back of his throat. No telling in what manner the Spaniards, never the most hygienic of races, operated the hospital, but the Medical Corps have obviously given it a thorough scouring. Niles pauses at the doorway of one of the ambulatory wards, men chatting in groups or with playing cards laid out on the beds between them, the legs of the beds standing in small pans of liquid, kerosene most likely, to keep the marauding squadrons of biting ants from climbing up onto the patients as they sleep. Plain water had been used for this purpose in Cuba until it was found to breed mosquitoes, which proceeded to torment and re-infect the quarantined unfortunates. One of the ambulatories looks his way.

It is the hard-rock miner, late of Skaguay, dressed in Army-issue pajamas and slippers.

“Enjoying yourself, Private?”

The miner, who was Brackenridge and then McGinty and now something else, is not happy to see him.

“The chuck’s no better in here,” he says with an insolent tone, “but I prefer the company.”

He is a chronic kicker, this one, not so much in words as with his attitude—the way he looks at you and moves his body a challenge to every order. Harboring some grudge, perhaps, or just incorrigible. Niles looks beyond him into the wardroom. “So this is where they house the slackers.”

“Venereals,” says the private, turning to walk away from him. “Watch out you don’t catch something.”

Supply Sergeant Slocum is in the solarium, talking with a mopey-looking artilleryman who slumps in a rattan-backed rocker. Slocum sees Niles, nods almost imperceptibly. The sergeant is something of a wizard with figures, and like many similarly afflicted, believes this increases his ability to fill an inside straight. A fantasist, doomed to be mulcted even without Niles’s dexterous mastery of pasteboard royals.

“In the morgue,” the man mutters as he brushes past. “Give me five minutes.”

Slocum’s camera, an old Turner Bull’s-Eye forfeited in the same poker game, hangs from a strap around Niles’s shoulder. There is a handsome slant of sun coming into the high-ceilinged room from the east windows—he pulls the device out and kodaks the long row of convalescents in their rockers, hoping the light will be sufficient. A Chinaman he’s found in Binondo makes prints most reasonably, and the Judge has written that he is eager for views of “the Pearl of the Orient” and the American boys who have liberated it. Harry was always the photo bug, even learning to develop his own snaps, but never goes anywhere interesting enough to record.

Corporal Grissom, who shilled for Niles in the game, was rewarded with Slocum’s pocket watch.

The morgue is at the rear of the building, cool and windowless, with its own peculiar smell. There is a body on a draining table, rigid beneath a rubber sheet.

“Passed this morning,” says Sergeant Slocum when Niles arrives, his voice echoing under the vaulted ceiling. “Infection. He was shot through the lungs the day we took the city.”

“War is hell,” Niles intones. To be killed in a mock battle engineered to salvage the honor of some peacock Dago general—a dismal hand to be dealt. Slocum lays a heavy wooden box on the table next to the dead soldier, snaps open the brass fastenings and lifts the lid.

“They accidentally shipped a double order,” he says, fixing Niles with a look. “Which I have not made record of.”

The box is segmented into dozens of compartments, each containing a vial cushioned with cotton wadding. Niles pulls several bottles out to examine them. Mostly quinine, with some tincture of chloroform, laudanum, ipecac syrup, and a quantity of strychnine.

“No medical supplies besides ours have entered the city since the Filipinos began their siege months ago,” says Slocum. “This might as well be gold.”

He is eyeing the camera. If he had been a gracious loser, a gentleman, Niles might entertain the idea of returning it as part of the present transaction. But no, the man is a boor. An egotist, a yankee, and a boor.

“You should be able to sell these for far more than the amount I owe you,” he continues. “The anti-malarial alone—”

“But I shall be the one incurring the risk,” says Niles, and closes the case.

Slocum hands Niles a form in three pages, white copy duplicated in yellow and pink.

“In that case you are transporting these to Brigade in Cavite,” he says. “In the event anybody inquires.”

The supply sergeant opens a somewhat battered leather satchel, carefully places the wooden box into it.

“The luggage belonged to a missionary gentleman from Nebraska, a Presbyterian, I believe. Sampled a bit too much of the local water.” He closes and fastens the satchel, placing it at Niles’s feet. “Gentle with this,” he says. “And give me the whole five minutes this time.”

Slocum leaves Niles in the morgue. They’ve only had a few fatalities in the regiment so far, and unless the natives learn to shoot, disease will be the greatest enemy. If Burns succumbs Niles will be forced to write his first letter of condolence. He lifts the rubber sheet to view the dead soldier’s face. His skin is blue-gray, and they have tied a bandage from the top of his head under his chin to hold his jaw closed. Niles does not recognize the boy, not from his outfit, and wonders if his mates have begun the collection to send the body home. He has visited Paco, the most celebrated of the local mausoleums, viewed the circular wall of cement with niches for the deceased one atop the other, rentable for five-year residencies. Cracked skulls and jumbled bones of the evicted lay heaped in one area, while domesticated turkeys and a small, bristly pig patrolled the grounds. The dead rest here, but only if they can make the rent.

Niles does not plan on dying in the Philippines.

In Hongkong Mei lived in a house on the steep hill behind the Victoria Barracks. Madame Qing was in charge of the house and the first thing she did, before learning their names or giving them new clothes, was to have each new girl demonstrate how to use the water closet. The house was made of wood, with wooden floors and stairs leading to a second set of rooms with windows that looked over past the Victoria Barracks to the harbor. Mei had not eaten much on the road and was sick on the steamboat ride, so it was a long time sitting on the hole in one of the three water closets before she could shout to Madame Qing and show her what she had done.

“Pull the chain,” said Madame Qing, and they both watched. It seemed like a waste of both dung and water. “Now pull your pants down.”

Mei was afraid because Ma had always done everything in the household while she had worked in the field and soon they would discover how useless she was. She turned and pulled her pants down.

“What did I tell you the paper was for?”

There was white paper rolled up beside the hole, softer, but the same width as the paper on which she had written the characters Second Brother showed her, the paper she had hung as a banner outside their hut when Ma died.

“You are a stupid, dirty girl,” said Madame Qing. “Now show me how you clean yourself with the paper.”

Mei reached into the hole for water to wet herself and Madame Qing slapped her and said she had to do it only with the paper and then wash her hands in the basin with the slippery cake.

“You girls from the North are not worth the trouble,” said Madame Qing.

There were girls in the house who weren’t new, mostly Southerners, and three Dwarf Bandit girls, who woke up late in the day to look over Mei and the other arrivals. Mei couldn’t understand most of what they said but a lot of them pointed at her feet and laughed and that was more shameful than Madame Qing watching her clean herself.

When it began to get dark each of the new girls was given a ball of rice and then locked in a room with mattresses laid on the floor. Mei thought the rice was very sweet compared to millet and it made her feel a little sick. After the candles were put out they lay and listened to the music on the other side of the door, and to the laughing and men’s voices braying in another language Mei could not understand.

“These are wicked women who live here,” said one of the girls from the boat, who was from near Jinan. “They lie with
yang gweizi
, and we are going to be their servants.”

They were there nearly a week, Madame Qing teaching them more about cleaning themselves and not eating with their hands, until late one afternoon they were ordered to take all their clothes off and pile them in the middle of the room. A servant woman—all the servants in the house were older men and women—gathered the pile and carried it away and it was too late when Mei remembered that her half of Ma’s comb was still in her pants. Basins filled with a sharp-smelling liquid were brought in and they were told to wash their hair in it and then sit while the servants picked the bugs from their scalps. Their hair was dried after that, servants rubbing it with towels, and then the wicked girls came in with a trunkful of beautiful clothes and began to dress them up like dolls, chattering and laughing the whole time. The silk felt slippery against Mei’s skin and when the old girls began to powder and paint her face she understood, finally, that it didn’t matter if she could not cook or sew. It took a long time for the Southern girls to find a pair of slippers that would fit her feet.

The old girls went out then and Madame Qing came in to explain that Mr. Wu, who owned the house, was coming tonight to entertain some of his friends and that they were to do whatever they were told or they would certainly be beaten and possibly thrown into the harbor for the sharks to eat. The girl from near Jinan began to cry then and Madame Qing slapped her for making ugly tracks in the powder on her face.

“If they ask your name,” said Madame Qing, “you must tell them something beautiful.”

“I will be Jade Lily,” said one of the girls, quickly.

“I will be Morning Dew,” said another.

Mei thought of Poppy Blossom, but it only brought pictures of Baba smoking his pipe and Ma dying on the
k’ang
.

Mr. Wu was an older man with eyes that watched everything, and his friends were all very rough men from the South. The new girls were supposed to serve them rice wine and then sit with them and answer questions if they were asked. The man next to Mei, who had drawings inked into the skin on the backs of his hands, kept shouting the same words at her till she decided he was asking for her name and she said Ling-Ling.