City of Glory (29 page)

Apparently Hannah had dug herself a well since he was last here. On that occasion Andrew had been summoned and brought Joyful with him. They were to tend a lad who had fallen out of a tree. The patient was stone dead by the time they arrived—he’d cracked his head wide open—but Joyful distinctly remembered one of Hannah’s other boys being sent to fetch water from a stream.

The bucket was full. Hannah hauled it up, straightened, then tipped the contents into a jug at her feet and dropped the bucket back down the well. “Whoever you be,” she called without turning around, “you don’t be doing yourself any good just looking. You want something, come and ask Hannah straight out.”

Everyone said she had second sight.

Joyful moved the mare forward a few paces. The nearest tree had a marble marker screwed into its trunk that said
FOURTEENTH STREET
, evidence of the Common Council’s determination to level the island’s hills and impose a grid of numbered streets and avenues on the wilderness. He swung out of the saddle. Fourteenth Street had a branch low enough for the reins, and he made them fast, then walked toward the woman. “Hello, Hannah. Do you remember me?”

She turned at last and squinted into the westering sun. “Joyful Patrick Turner. Course I remember you. They tell me you’re not doctoring these days, that you’re after making your fortune instead. Your Dr. Turner cousin never made himself a fortune. Storing up treasure in the heart of the Holy One, Blessed Be His Name, is Andrew Turner. He’s not a Hebrew, but he’s doing
mitzvot.
Don’t s’pose you know the meaning o’that, Joyful Patrick. Good deeds. Doin’ things way the law o’ the Almighty says they should be done. Treasure where it can’t be taken away.”

“I do the best I can, Hannah. And you, I hear, are still taking in every stray that comes along. Jesse Edwards told me there was an Indian as well.”

She shrugged and didn’t meet his glance. “Folks come and go at Hannah’s. Everyone knows that. I hear you be the one as turned Jesse into a pigeon with one wing.”

“I cleaned up what the British guns left behind.”

Hannah nodded toward his black glove. “That happened same time. Least that’s what Jesse said.”

“Told you the story, has he?”

“Only after he seen you on Greenwich Street. Came running back here soon as he could to tell me Bag-o’-Bones was a danger to us. Danger from an old Indian like Bag-o’-Bones, that don’t make no sense.”

“Bag-o’-Bones, that’s what you call him?”

“Aye. Can’t tell us what his real name is. Don’t speak no English.”

“Let me have a look at him, Hannah. Could be I know a bit about his language.”

Hannah cocked her head and looked straight at him. Joyful felt a need to stand taller. Her eyes were an extraordinary shade of blue and her gaze was the sort that looked right through a man. “Bag-o’-Bones is sleeping. Come back another time. He—”

“Diu lay lo mo hail. Leng gwai.”
The shout came from the direction of the shack.
“Ah si. Ah si.”
Cantonese. The roughest sort, the language of the streets. Fuck you all and I need to shit.

“He’s not sleeping now,” Joyful said. “He’s telling you he needs to relieve himself.”

“Is he now? Well, he knows where to go. All Indians know—”

“He’s not an Indian, Hannah. And I don’t for one moment believe you ever thought he was.”

“Aye,” she said, matter-of-fact about having lied to him. “At first I did. Then I got a better look at him.”

A man pushed aside the flap of oiled cloth that served as the cabin’s door and staggered out. Hunched over, and barely able to walk, he maneuvered himself around to the far side of the cabin. Moments later he returned. Joyful was waiting for him.

“Chi le fan meiyou?”
Joyful asked. Have you eaten rice today?

“Chi le. Chi le.”
Eaten. Eaten. But the man was staring at Joyful with eyes full of terror.

“Bu chi le. Bu chi le
,” Joyful muttered. “You haven’t eaten rice. not in some time from the look of you. And stop staring as if I’m a ghost. I’m a flesh-and-blood
yang gui zhi,
a foreign devil who happens to speak like a proper Middle Kingdom person.”

“Bu chi le,”
the man admitted softly.
“Bu chi le fan.”
No rice.

“Bu chi le fan,”
Joyful repeated. “That’s the problem, isn’t it? You’ve eaten no rice in God knows how long.” Bag-o’-Bones indeed. He was starving, nearly to the death. Joyful turned to Hannah. “What have you been feeding him?

“Whatever I can get, same as the rest o’ us. He don’t eat much, though. I keep trying to tell him he needs food more’n anything else, more’n being fanned for instance, for all that’s what he keeps saying. Fan. Fan. I say eat, eat. But he won’t listen.”

“He’s Chinese.
Fan
means rice in his language. It’s life’s blood to him. Nothing else is proper food.”

“Rice,” Hannah said with astonishment. “What am I to do about that then?”

It was dusk by the time Joyful reached the corner of Broadway and Barclay Street. This time he didn’t approach Astor’s imposing front door; he went round to the tradesman’s entrance. A young Chinese girl answered his ring. “Ah Wong,” Joyful said,
“tsai jia ma?”
Is he here?

The girl’s eyes opened wide in surprise, but she quickly regained her composure. No doubt the servants had all heard the tale of the New York foreign devil who spoke the language of the Middle Kingdom.
“Tsai. Tsai,”
she said.
“Qing nin deng yi deng.”
Ah Wong was at home. The honorable gentleman should wait a little wait.

The girl hurried away with the painful, small, and unsteady steps that bespoke her bound feet—her golden lilies, as they were called in China. A young man came into the kitchen, the butler’s son perhaps, dressed in a traditional gray cotton
sam
and
fu,
and tall for a Chinese, with exceptionally broad shoulders. He bowed respectfully and hurried away without speaking, but Joyful suspected the young man too knew about the
yang gwei zhi
who had a civilized tongue in his head. Moments later Ah Wong appeared. He also wore a loose gray cotton jacket and trousers, not the embroidered silk of the previous night. He asked politely if Joyful had eaten rice that day. Joyful said he had. And that he hoped Ah Wong had done the same.

“Chi le. Chi le.”
Eaten. Eaten.

In his case, Joyful was sure, it was true. “There is another,” Joyful said, “also a man of the Middle Kingdom, who has not eaten. They offer him only foreign food. He is starving.” There was no rice to be found in the city these days. It was grown in the Carolinas, and coastal shipping was as prey to the patrols of the Royal Navy’s blockade as was everything else.

Joyful was convinced the man who had brought Chinese to serve him had to understand that for these people to be without rice was to die; a man of Astor’s prescience was bound to have laid in an ample supply. If not, Ah Wong and his brood would be wasting away, but there was plenty of flesh on the bones of the butler and the little serving girl and the young man. More than there probably would be had they stayed in China.
“Bu fan. Bu fan,”
Joyful repeated. No rice.

“Hen chuo. Hen chuo,”
Ah Wong said. Very bad, repeated twice to show how bad he thought it. “Swallowing the bitter sea.”

“Bitter indeed.” There was no real reason the man should give him rice in this time of scarcity, but Joyful was counting on what he knew of the Chinese character.

Ah Wong would give him rice for the sake of
guanxi,
to bind their alliance. In China good
guanxi
made all business—indeed, all survival—possible. Joyful had to be the first and only foreigner the butler had met in New York who spoke his language, a fluent Mandarin that could only have been learned as a child. Joyful knew that for Ah Wong he was a link to this foreign place which might prove as useful as being employed by a man of Jacob Astor’s wealth.

“Eh. Deng yi deng.”
Wong hurried off. He had told Joyful to wait a little wait, and something would be forthcoming. And he’d spoken in ordinary terms, not the flowery honorifics of his first meeting with the butler, or of the little servant girl swaying on her golden lilies. He and Ah Wong had become equals of a sort, conspiring to do something that one way or another might someday further both their interests.

The butler returned, followed by the young man Joyful had seen earlier.
“Ta jiao Wong Hai.”
His son’s name was Hai.
“Ta de shenti hen zhuang.”
The honorable gentleman should note that the son was in good health and of a superior size to most men.

Hai carried a burlap bag of rice—about two or three pounds of it, Joyful guessed. A substantial quantity under the circumstances, but nothing that required the impressive breadth of the lad’s shoulders, not even considering he carried a small iron cooking pot as well. Nonetheless, Ah Wong kept pointing to the rippling muscles to be seen beneath Hai’s
sam. “Liqi hen da. Hen da.”
Very strong. Very strong.

“Very strong,” Joyful agreed. The rice was clearly local, the burlap stamped
CAROLINA
—probably shipped from the South before the blockade was put in place—but the pot looked to have come from China. The family Wong would not have trusted the foreign devils to have proper utensils to prepare the food that kept them alive and would have brought a supply of rice cookers with them.

Ah Wong issued instructions to Hai Wong, and the son carried the rice and the pot out to where Joyful’s horse waited. Joyful turned to follow, but Ah Wong put out a hand to stop him. “This too,” he said in his singsong English. Then, in Chinese: “For my brother from the Middle Kingdom.” Joyful wasn’t quite sure if his story had been believed, or if Ah Wong thought he had some other reason for wanting rice. It didn’t matter. Only
guanxi
mattered. The something else was a set of chopsticks, and a twist of paper containing a spoonful of tea.
“Chi . Chi,”
Ah Wong murmured. Eat. Eat.

“Chi. Chi.”
Joyful agreed. “Tomorrow and a few days after as well. Your brother from the Middle Kingdom thanks you. So do I.”

“
Fan
is the Mandarin word for food as well as for rice,” Joyful told Hannah. “Rice is life.” They were watching her latest stray use Ah Wong’s gift of chopsticks to push the grains straight from the cooker into his mouth. The rice was hot and steaming, cooked by Joyful over a small fire Hannah built out of doors, beside what Joyful had mistakenly thought to be a well; it was actually a brick-lined cistern ten feet deep, designed to catch rainwater. About half full thanks to the summer storms.

“And do all China peoples have no thumbs, like this one?”

“No. He may have angered the wrong person. He says he’s called Thumbless Wu. I reckon he’s been like that for some time.” Despite the missing digits, the man handled the chopsticks with ease; it was an adaptive skill he’d have needed years to perfect.

Joyful thought he saw the man’s eyes turn in his direction, but only for a moment. Wu’s attention quickly returned to the cooker of rice. He ate half of it, then stopped, saving some for another meal.
“Tsi bao,”
Joyful said.
“Tsi bao.”
Eat your fill. He held up the bag of rice. “You need to get your strength back. I will leave this for you when I go. You can cook yourself more when you like.”

“Make him do it for himself,” he told Hannah later as he prepared to leave. “You’ll never get it right. And don’t say anything around him you don’t want overheard. He may not speak English, but I suspect he understands it.”

“How does that come to be? If he’s a China man like you say, how did he get here?” “I’m not sure, but I’d venture he came on
Canton Star.
I can’t think of any other explanation.”

“Gornt Blakeman’s ship as ran the blockade?”

Joyful nodded agreement.

“And you think Bag o’ Bones learned English on that passage?”

“No, I doubt that. He’s a Cantonese. Canton’s a trading colony, China’s window to the West. He’ll have had plenty of opportunities to learn English.”