A Superior Man (21 page)

At the edge of the slide, two thick lines of gleaming silver thrust out, hems along a grand grey curtain. Redbeards had conquered cliffs and forests with the railway, lashing it like a belt over the seething ground. Even when angry gods let loose landslides, the Company pressed on.

“You like the railway?” said Sam.

“Never thought it could be built.”

“Didn't redbeards use black powder to blast China's forts and win the war?”

“We fight back,” I said. “Your people should do the same.

“We use guns now. Soon we drive train engines too.”

“Redbeards won't allow that.” I backed my pack onto some rock, groaned at the weight, and demanded, “Where's that Hell's Gate? Haven't passed it, have we?”

“Soon, soon.”

After a while, we saw men coming toward us, kicking at pebbles on the ground, like surly children. We had been climbing steadily on the wagon road. In some places the path was carved out of the mountain, packed hard and flattened by wheels and animal hooves. We looked up to our side and saw trees growing straight up against a steep slope. In other spots, to cross deep gullies, the road was a
wooden trail that bumped over layers of logs, trees crisscrossing each other in neat rows forty or fifty feet deep.

I frowned. The approaching men held the high ground. They could run at us, gain momentum, and shove us over the side.

One man with a walking pole dragged his right leg, thickly wrapped at the ankle. The fellows were spread out, looking in different directions, not talking, as though peeved with each other. They were China men in dirt-stiff clothes with bundles on their backs. Their dark faces were sulking and bitter as they passed around loaves of bread, tearing off chunks with hands and teeth.

They ignored Sam's greeting and his raised hand. He walked on with the boy, who turned to peer at them.

China men usually made minimal gestures of respect to Native people, aware that they were everywhere, armed and seething near boiling point, a huge mound of dry kindling about to be ignited. We took care not to offend them. Their poverty and suffering was everywhere, but what could we do? Redbeards, not China men, ruled here.

The lead fellow stopped me. “Where do you go?”

“Town ahead.”

“Don't go. All stinking bastards.” His blackened teeth were chipped; dried blood stuck to the corner of his cracked lips.

“Redbeards or China men?” I asked.

“We are railway men. The Company ate us up and spat out our bones. What do you carry?”

The men pressed in, reeking of stale urine and herbal oils. I tried to push my way through. “Is it better walking here, away from the railway?”

“Lend us some food,” Black Teeth said. “The shit-hole pricks gave us stale bread. They kicked us out of town, even though the day is ending.”

“No China men there?”

“Not even a shadow of their ghosts.”

Sam was heading back toward me, strolling without hurry. He should have grabbed a sturdy pole. I didn't see Peter, so he must have been told to lay low and stay still. Hopefully the worm would listen. If these oafs around me had any brains, they would grab the boy. Bandits had won great riches holding sons for ransom.

“These goods have been sold,” I said. “They are not mine to give away.”

“Don't give us anything,” Black Teeth said. “Just lend us a bit.”

“Do good, receive good,” his men called out. “Don't fear your good heart.”

“What, lend pigs to hungry tigers?” I tried to get them to laugh.

“Better to give a mouthful of food to a beggar than a bushel of grain to a rich man,” someone said.

“Screw his mother!” The men were suddenly aroused. “Grab his goods!”

They yanked apart my arms and dodged as I kicked at them.

“Stop!” Sam shouted. “Or this one dies!”

He held one railway man by the neck and pressed a shiny blade to his throat. It was the fellow who had hobbled with a walking stick.

“Leave those goods,” Sam barked. “Walk away.”

“Kill the cripple, go ahead,” Black Teeth said. “One less belly to feed.”

“Kill me,” said the hostage. “I can die standing up or lying down. If my friends get to eat, then I'm content.”

His friends shouted at him to shut his mouth.

“He wants to die for you stinking bastards,” Sam yelled. “I'm happy to help.”

The men fumbled in their clothes, seeking weapons, wanting to rush over.

“What are you?” I demanded. “Coffin makers praying for clients?”

“
Better a broken jade cup than a solid clay pot
,” said the hostage.

“Let him die.” Black Teeth clawed at the knots of my pack.

“You so-called friends will leave him?” I demanded. “Old clothes have more fleas tending them.”

One man stomped away. A moment later, the others followed him. Only Black Teeth was left.

I grabbed a teapot-sized rock and smashed it into his cheek. There was a crunch of breaking bone and bright red blood spurted from his face.

“Drink that, you bastard.”

Rocks slammed into my back as Sam and I ran away. Good thing I had quit the railway long ago. It would have been easy to fall into that nest of snakes and scorpions or turn into spineless worms like One Leg or No Brain. I could have clung to that fool dream about hours and days being the only blockage to earning money and going home rich.

The brat ran out from nearby bushes. Too bad he had been too far away to watch me do battle and draw blood.

“You hit him too hard,” said Sam.

“Damn your liquor bottles. I could have outrun them.”

“I saved your life again.”

“That man could have pulled a knife and stabbed you.”

“End of my self-respect.”

“End of your useless life.”

How often did a bandit get robbed the same way as his former victims? As often as you saw a chicken pee. I almost shouted at those thugs,
You think you're tough? You ever hear of Centipede Mountain? That was my gang's lair. You see me walking behind a mix-blood and reckon that I'm a broken stick of firewood? Think again! You don't want to fight me! You want to die?

The win over the bandits gave us energy, and we made good time until Sam suddenly stopped and muttered, “Screw those bastards, we passed Hell's Gate.”

The river had taken a curve and now mountains on both sides dipped to the river, their jagged slopes cutting into each other like interlaced fingers. They cut off any extended view of the rushing waters behind us.

I shrugged. “I'll see it on my way back.”

He pointed downward, at the opposite bank. “That's China Bar, where your people took the gold.”

“Never heard of it,” I declared.

Even from our vantage point, we saw that the river was running low. A dark, ragged ribbon slithered over the rock face and giant boulders, marking the reach of springtime water when melting
snow and ice had raised its level. Now, a stretch of shoreline had emerged, cluttered with rocks and gravel. We had passed many such sand bars earlier, where miners had left behind lengthy pits as well as fields of overturned boulders. Those men had pushed their way inland too, tearing down bushes, trees, and Native buildings to get at the treasure underneath.

“'Course not, that's redbeard talk,” said Sam. “My people call that place by its real name.”

“We should have a name too,” I said. But what? At home, every spot was China. We lived throughout the Central Kingdom, where fitting names for sites and cities had been handed down through time and everyday use. On this river, China was that faraway place mocked by redbeard miners as backward and barbaric.

“See that waterfall?” Sam pointed further north, along the railway tracks. A steep waterfall crashed through a violent crack in the brown rock. “We call it Sq'azix. The redbeards used that name for the boat that China men pulled through Hell's Gate.”

I strode on. I knew about
Skuzzy
but refused to discuss it with Sam. He would only sneer at how we had been used as beasts of burden.

The road narrowed and then widened, broad enough to let delivery wagons pass each other. The grey and cracking telegraph poles would soon be removed from the wagon road in favour of the new ones along the railway. We flattened ourselves against the mountain wall when a stagecoach roared by. Six horses churned up clouds of dust over the twisting road. Finally, it opened into a clearing of farms and houses.

We set down our packs. Sam told me to wait while he took the
boy into the Native village. Its people would be more helpful to a stranger who had a child by his side, he said. But, to my delight, the boy at first refused to go. Maybe crossing the river had spooked him. The boy had sat with Sam until the boatmen asked him to grab the third oar and help get the boat across. Sam dumped Peter on me, and the brat refused to sit still, kept twisting and fidgeting to go to his hero. He'd cried out for Sam, but Sam ignored him.

Now Sam whispered something into the boy's ear to convince him to go along. Grandmother once told a neighbour who had a badly behaved boy, “Better a mischief maker than a simpleton.”

I looked down at the shoreline where children shouted and pointed to the foaming spray. With great patience, they squatted and watched for fish in the water. In the river's middle, fishermen stood braced on swaying boats, anchored by stiff ropes, waiting to swing their nets. When they succeeded, the fish dumped thrashing onto the shore must have weighed twenty or thirty pounds each.

Birds chirped in the nearby woods. In Victoria, sojourners about to return home were often asked what, if anything, they might miss about Gold Mountain. Many said, “Trees and forests.” They liked the convenience of having plenty of firewood on hand. The trees of Gold Mountain had been one of the few things that China men could take without offending the redbeards, who wanted the giants chopped down and burned. Tall trees with grey, furrowed trunks bore three-sided leaves. They filled the springtime air with seeds of fluffy white snow. Other trees with rounded crowns and smooth white trunks put out leaves in the shape of straw fans. They were yellowing and dropping. The evergreens were laden with brown cones of wooden fruit and bundles of sharp green needles. Such pine trees were a sign
of longevity in China. I had been away from there long enough that new trees, planted after the Guest Wars, were probably now taller than me.

Sam returned with two young men who unpacked the whisky. The bottles had been wrapped in grimy scraps of cloth. Peter munched on a cold boiled potato. Without a word, the visitors lugged away the liquor in gunny sacks.

I asked Sam if he had gotten a good price.

“They don't have any money,” he pointed out.

“You trust them?”

“Can't wait all day.”

“Isn't liquor bad for your people?”

“I don't sell to everyone.”

We crossed a creek spilling into the Fraser and saw the town ahead.

Boston Bar was small like Spuzzum but its buildings lined both sides of the wagon road. Carts and horses were tethered in front of a roadhouse, two storeys high over a long covered porch. There, men tilted back on the rear legs of wooden chairs, with hats and caps pulled over their eyes. Across from them, a dour-looking bunch stood around a hitching post, puffing on cigars and pipes, fiddling with coiled ropes as if ready to chase cattle. A little boy ran out to point at Peter, but an adult snatched him up and hurried away.

“It's drier here,” Sam said in his know-everything voice, “so watch for poison snakes. They rattle when attacking.”

“Tell the boy,” I replied. “He touches everything.”

“China has no snakes?”

“Plenty. The big ones squeeze piglets and children to death and swallow them whole.”

“They're dead by then, no?”

Then a burly redbeard stepped forward and shoved a rifle sideways into Sam's chest. Yellow splinters of tobacco were matted in the man's scruffy black beard. From behind darted a Native man, also armed but wearing a western hat with a long grey feather. His finger tapped the trigger of his gun while its barrel pointed at Sam.