Down to a Soundless Sea (23 page)

After an hour of slow rowing with occasional listening stops, O’Brian relaxed. The vapor cocoon was densely still and the slap of water almost akin to his pulse. He tested his signal lantern, but the light barely traveled the breadth of the oars. There were long moments when he lost sight of the stern of his own boat and all sound diminished to muted echoes or remote reverberations of distant surf.

O’Brian sat quietly in his fog-bound dory, content for the moment to let his brandy flask hold up its own end of the conversation. A thinning of the veil channeled echoes from indeterminable directions. Suddenly surprised, O’Brian coughed on his foul pipe as two heavy splashes erupted, seemingly nearby.

Then came the ghostly tones of men speaking almost in-audibly. O’Brian jumped to his lantern and made his signal in every possible direction, but the light refused to travel. It returned as a billowing specter of itself.

Out of frustration, O’Brian called out. “Is that your anchors, Portugee? Ahoy, ahoy there! Is that you, Portugee? Damn your eyes, masthead! Sing out there! It’s me, O’Brian!” But there was no response. His voice seemed to travel no farther than his light. He didn’t call again for fear that it wasn’t his captain’s ship. Revenue cutters used the fog to catch smugglers in the act sometimes. He had no wish to attract their attention.

Resigned to long hours of waiting, O’Brian decided to let the ill wind blow his way for a change. He rebaited his hand lines with small squid and stationed the rigs over either thwart. The sinkers dropped almost sixty feet before being spooled off the bottom a short span to entice the big flounder. Marking the line with a drop knot, O’Brian would use this measurement to gauge his progress inshore when the tide turned.

Unbeknownst to O’Brian, the Portuguese captain had ghosted under reduced sail for almost six hours. The unseasonably heavy fog banks had overtaken his schooner off Point Ano Nuevo in the early afternoon, and though there were infrequent sunlit breaks, it had proved a menacing run across the top of Monterey Bay with all vessels as fog-blind as himself.

Once south of Point Lobos the fog lifted briefly and it appeared that summer stars would govern the night’s run down the coast, but five miles west-southwest off Yankee Point the ship was engulfed and fog-blind once more.

The dense ocean mists blotted out all visual references and stifled all but the loudest sounds. Within seconds the stars were
gone and only the glow from the ship’s binnacle remained to illuminate the tendrils of fog drifting through the rigging and curling about the decks.

The Portuguese listened for all warning horns, but refused to betray his position by sounding any of his own. He shrouded or extinguished his brightest lights, determined to sail on under wraps until his logs brought him off his estimated point of rendezvous with O’Brian.

While the schooner stood off and on in the vicinity of her destination, waiting for the impenetrable soup to clear, an incident of sinister distinction drew a pall of apprehension over the entire ship. Halfway through the starboard watch a lascar came to the Portuguese to report that two of the Chinese in the hold had died of some kind of pox and that the rest were in a state of great agitation.

The Portuguese fumed, but gave his orders instinctively. He called for the bodies to be brought on deck at once, but only the Chinese were allowed to touch the corpses. Once his lascar had herded the anxious Chinese porters back to their hold, the captain approached and inspected the dead coolies. Though he refused to touch the cadavers with anything but a rope’s end, he detected the telltale skin blotches that forecast a profitless journey or worse. The Portuguese ordered a lascar to eviscerate the bodies to prevent bloating and rising and then had the corpses rolled unceremoniously over the side with a boat hook. A sad moaning arose from the Chinese in the hold when the sound of the splashes echoed through the ship.

As the Portuguese cursed the fog before, now he blessed the veil concealing his presence. With luck, he might depart without ever being seen in the area. The Portuguese quietly ordered the schooner to a new course, west-northwest, so as to
raise a position convenient for hailing China Cove the following evening. He was passably sorry about missing O’Brian, but the fragile condition of the cargo demanded a quick sale, and the only paying customer within a day’s sail was the Carmelo Land and Coal Company.

The Carmel Highlands boasted a number of working mines, and they exhibited a normal craving for cheap labor. Fatalities were to be expected anywhere men dug into the earth, but there always remained the dilemma posed by surviving widows and orphans. Very sad and very expensive if a whole shift perished at once. The Chinese were far less burdensome when it came to accidental extinction. Under the shadowy circumstances of their labor, families, if they existed, rarely came forward to request compensation.

The Portuguese cast his thoughts back to his stray goat, O’Brian, and wondered what had happened to the duplicitous brigand. It wasn’t like O’Brian to bungle a rendezvous worth hard cash, but then no one had foreseen the fog or the dying Chinese. Being a naturally superstitious creature, the captain preferred to believe it was all a portent of impending misfortune. Discretion, therefore, dictated a need for an immediate departure from these phantom-burdened shores. In particular, he wanted to put a fair stretch of water between his ship and those dead Chinese.

Standing at the taffrail looking back into the fog, the captain contemplated granting O’Brian a small share of the Highlands commission for this night’s aborted efforts, but he ultimately decided against it. He had already lost two Chinese, and that was enough expense. The Portuguese always decided against generosity in the end. It hadn’t come up often as an alternative. The Portuguese crossed himself out
of habit and called for more sail in the hope of a freshening breeze.

Five minutes later the fog bank parted and fell away behind the ship. The sky again became a stunning congregation of reassuring stars. A cold hand lifted from the hearts of captain and crew. They felt the broken spirits of the dead drift away with the fog in the wake of the ship. The captain called for liquor rations all round to celebrate their deliverance. He insisted the bosun pour a measure of rum into the waves in the Saint’s name, and then crossed himself again.

The Portuguese reigned over a polyglot crew of lascars, Mexicans, Madras Indians, and sundry local wharf rats no less superstitious than himself, so it did nothing to settle their collective nerves when from out of the tunnel of fog created by the ship’s passage, some distant tormented soul screamed a strangulated cry so laced with fear and despair that every man on deck drained off his rum ration with one swallow. Again the Portuguese crossed himself and silently prayed for protection from the murky, vengeful shades of the sea.

He also prayed that O’Brian hadn’t been taken by the sheriff’s men. The captain knew O’Brian for what he was and justifiably feared being sold out for leniency if things went badly for his pet goat. It was exactly what the Portuguese would do in O’Brian’s place. Still, the captain found O’Brian a profitable man to know and hoped providence would not squander such an asset. Mystery would have to attend his speculations indefinitely, for he never saw or heard from O’Brian again. Indeed, no one ever saw O’Brian again.

There was the standard conjecture from the locals when O’Brian and the dory had not returned, but most thoughts rested upon the whereabouts of the boat rather than on the
possible fate of its occupant. O’Brian had never sought out or cultivated friendships of any kind. In fact, he disdained even passing familiarity, so naturally little time was spent pondering his destiny. Most people just assumed he tumbled over the side and would eventually wash up if the sharks didn’t find him first.

One heaven-sent appeal was acknowledged, however. Four days after its disappearance, the dory was discovered floating free and intact. There was scant sign of O’Brian anywhere in the vicinity. His slop box of fish was relatively intact, barring the predations of gulls, and his hand lines were still cast off on either side of the boat. All looked as normal as any ocean-borne mystery may, but there was one disquieting apparition that cast a passing shadow over the dory owner’s delight at repossession.

When the port hand line was hauled up, it brought with it the head and half-eaten carcass of a prodigious great flounder that might have weighed in at eighty-five pounds before the dogfish discovered it. But the other line, which was not paid out more than twenty feet, brought up the disemboweled and grimacing corpse of a Chinese man. The hook was snagged neatly under the left arm so that the corpse rose gaping from the waters pointing directly at the person hauling in the line. The dogfish had inevitably discovered the Chinese gentleman as well. Both lines were instantly cut free and the dory was towed back to shore.

The Portuguese proved to be a man blessed with considerable good fortune. He managed to unload his tainted cargo on a rapacious mine owner in the Carmel Highlands before
anyone should be the wiser. He then sailed off with the intention of working a different shore until events cooled down. Except for one documented sighting off San Francisco, the first week in September, neither the Portuguese nor his greasy schooner were ever seen again this side of the Pacific.

A few denizens of the big sur were now and then molded by events into locally celebrated figures, while still others, by design, focused all their native genius on remaining unobtrusive, if not invisible. There was one such enigmatic character who chose the latter course with such studied diligence that no one ever guessed his true purpose or identity. How and why this mysterious figure came to accept the Big Sur as his asylum, the following narrative will attempt to explain.

The pilgrim’s name was Sing Fat. He was born in central China to a powerful family that could trace its ancestry back to the sublime creation of the Middle Kingdom. His forefathers, so it was said, had mustered great legions against the barbarian hosts that surrounded the celestial perfection of the Empire.
The whole clan aspired to continue in this honorable endeavor until the end of the Tenth World.

Like most male children from his station in life, Sing Fat began his education early and with intensity. In this regard he showed exceptional promise, especially with languages and mathematics. He demonstrated a studied ear for perplexing dialects. Even as a child, Sing Fat easily conversed with household servants from remote provinces in their own tongues.

A renowned Taoist abbot who had traveled extensively throughout the kingdom assured Sing Fat’s proud father that the boy would certainly grow to be a pillar of wisdom and prudence on which the Empire would come to depend and venerate.

But when he was thirteen, Sing Fat’s entitled world tumbled from its ordered axis. Bloody civil war crested like a terrifying wave over much of the Middle Kingdom, and when it was over, Sing Fat was the only member of his immediate family left alive.

Within days of the final destruction, the promising seed of a great patrician tree had become little more than a wretched plowboy, a peasant slave fettered to his own inheritance.

When he was sixteen, Sing Fat decided to adopt a perilous subterfuge by changing places with a recently deceased field coolie who had been sold by the new landlord to an Imperial labor contractor. This broker, in turn, fed his impoverished countrymen to the ravenous mines and railroads of the Americas. The dead man had chosen suicide rather than depart China. He had no wish to die under the “gold mountain,” far from his ancestors and lost in the savage lands to the East. With this sad event the degraded orphan found an opportunity to escape a humiliating bondage in service to his family’s enemies. As a unit
of contract labor he would be packed into a cargo ship like a chest of illicit opium and transported to a place his people called “the mouth of the mountain”—in fact, San Francisco. From that fearful destination, he had often heard, few souls ever returned to mother China.

Having judged the bleak alternatives, the boy reasoned that the prospect of laboring for the barbarous roundeyes, with the ever-present possibility of escape, could be no less abominable than the certainty of a slow, excruciating death at the hands of his own people. It was thus ordained by the fates that Sing Fat should come to San Francisco (Tai Fau), California.

From the dark, fetid holds of nameless ships, the numberless Chinese laborers were transferred to straw-bedded cattle cars and deposited like weary livestock at the foothill placer mines northeast of Sacramento (Yi Fau). For five years Sing Fat labored like a canal mule in the mud of the gold fields. Like most Chinese, his pitiful salary never seemed quite enough to cover his debts at the company-controlled concessions.

Sing Fat soon forgot what it was like to be dry and clean, or to wear garments that had not been patched by previous owners. Most of the donors had died at their picks from exhaustion, been blown to bits by faulty blasting charges, or had fallen afoul of some terrible Western disease. Sing Fat draped his hungry frame in the last bequests of the dead, and he honored their generosity every time he patched a seam or tear.