Sarah Canary (38 page)

‘What is the value of a woman’s heart?’ Miss Dixon called desperately from her window. The woman on the stairs was still. But the man behind Chin was pointing at neither of them. ‘Back here!’ he called excitedly. ‘She’s back here!’ Chin stretched to see over the white men’s heads. He was too short. He jumped once and still saw nothing but the backs and necks of white men.

‘Chin,’ said B.J., seizing his shoulder. ‘It’s Sarah Canary.’

‘Are you sure?’ Chin asked B.J.

‘She’s bigger,’ said B.J. ‘Chin, she’s so big.’

The men were surging again, away from the hotel now, carrying Chin with them. ‘It’s not the right woman,’ Chin told the man on his left. The man turned to look at him. ‘It’s not Miss Palmer. Leave her alone.’

The white men would not let him stop moving. B.J.’s hand tightened on his shoulder, trying to stay with him. ‘B.J.!’ Chin called. It was an appeal for help. He twisted around.

There was a horrible look on B.J.’s face. Chin recognized the look, although it took him a moment. It made him think of the mermaid back in Burke’s cabin, but it was not the mermaid’s look. It was the look B.J. had worn when B.J. had seen the mermaid. Chin turned back, wondering why B.J. wore this face now, when he had just seen Sarah Canary. ‘He has a gun,’ B.J. said.

Chin saw it, too. A man near them was pointing a gun at the window of the Occidental Hotel. Chin followed the line of the barrel. He tried to reach for the gun but couldn’t. He could not get to the man.

‘Adelaide!’ Chin shouted her name so that everyone turned to him. He became visible all at once. ‘Adelaide! Get down!’ he cried. There was one shot, a sound like a branch snapping in two. Adelaide disappeared into her room. Chin looked back to the gun. The men around him moved away. The barrel was pointing at him. Chin could see straight into its empty mouth.

B.J.’s hand pulled him back as B.J. pushed past. ‘Don’t listen to it, Chin,’ said B.J., stepping in front of him. ‘Guns always say that.’ And Chin would swear, Chin would always remember it this way, that he heard the second gunshot only after B.J. fell.

B.J. lay in a heap at Chin’s feet. Chin knelt beside him, pulled B.J. into his lap. Blood fell out of B.J.’s chest. Chin pressed his hand over the hole. ‘Don’t die for me, B.J.,’ he said, but when had B.J. ever done what he was told?

‘It was an accident,’ he heard a man say. ‘I only meant to frighten the woman. I only meant to hit the Chinaman.’ The man’s voice was thick and liquored. Chin’s hand rose and fell with B.J.’s chest. His palm was filled with warm blood. Blood seeped out around Chin’s hand. He couldn’t stop it. He couldn’t hold B.J. together. B.J. stared at him.

‘The police are coming,’ someone told Chin. Chin did not look up to see who. The pant legs of white men were all about him, like a forest of trees. Chin wanted to ask B.J. if he could remember now the carp who became a dragon by leaping the Dragon’s Gate. Chin wanted to tell B.J. that this was what B.J. was doing. But he wasn’t sure it was true and he wouldn’t say good-bye to B.J. with a lie. Chin was crying too hard to speak anyway.

‘Chin,’ said B.J. He sounded surprised. ‘You’re getting so little, Chin.’ He stopped breathing. In the silence Chin could hear horses’ hooves on the pavement. The police had decided to come at last.

Two policemen lifted B.J. by the shoulders and the feet. Chin stood and followed as they carried him out of the crowd. Chin kept his head down; his eyes streamed with tears. He searched through the forest of pant legs for one black skirt. Was Harold right that Sarah Canary was a killer? Had Sarah Canary killed B.J.? Or had she saved Chin? Or had she never been there at all?

There was no sign of her. There was no one else to rescue. The police told Chin that the hotel room was empty. Apparently, while B.J. died, Adelaide and Lydia Palmer had escaped.

Chin stood at the police station and tried to answer their questions. ‘What is your name?’ they asked Chin. ‘What was his name?’ Hard questions. Chin found it hard to listen. So many ghosts he had to take care of now. The ones he could name and the ones he could not. But Chin knew what B.J.’s ghost would like.

Chin stood by B.J.’s body and told his ghost a story. ‘One day an old woman had a dream,’ Chin said. ‘She dreamt that she took a pear and cut it in half. She and her husband shared it. She told her dream to Chou Kung. He was the most powerful fortune-teller in all China. “What does it mean?” she asked him. “It means that your son will die,” Chou Kung said.

‘The woman ran home, weeping. Her weeping was so loud, it was heard by T’ung Hsien Nu, the Holy Maiden who walks with immortals. “Chou Kung can foretell the future,” she said to herself. “But I can change it.” She took a rooster, called it by the old woman’s son’s name, and killed it quickly.

‘The old woman’s son was on his way home when he was caught in a rainstorm. He saw an old brick kiln and decided to shelter there until the storm passed. But when the wind was at its very strongest, he heard his mother’s voice in it. “Come to me, my son,” his mother called. He ran out of the kiln to find her, and just as he left it, the kiln collapsed. He would have died if he had been inside. He returned home and told this story to his mother.

‘She went back to Chou Kung. “My son is alive,” she said. “You made a mistake.” But Chou Kung knew that the Holy Maiden had meddled with fate again. He shook his head. He said nothing.’

Chin told this story to B.J. in Cantonese while the San Francisco police watched. He began to cry again. ‘Poor little rooster,’ he said to B.J.

~ * ~

He sat on the steps of the police station, bent over, and cried until he heard footsteps. Over the obstruction of his tears, from the space between his knees, he saw the black skirt. ‘Did you kill him?’ Chin asked, but when he raised his eyes, the face was Harold’s.

‘No,’ said Harold. ‘I didn’t. I’m not the man I was.’ Harold was standing in front of the San Francisco police department and he was wearing Sarah Canary’s old dress. The dress was slit up the center and Harold wore it over his other clothes, fastened at the neck like a cape. ‘I’m not the same man who left you in a cave in Woodward’s Gardens,’ Harold told him.

Chin got to his feet immediately and started for Tangrenbu. Harold followed along. Chin walked faster. So did Harold. They covered several blocks without a word.

‘Go away,’ said Chin. He had never been so tired.

‘I’m sorry,’ said Harold. ‘Another one dead. I am sorry. Who was it?’

Chin walked on. Harold was so very eye-catching. Did this mean Chin was invisible beside him? Or would he be part of the attention Harold was certain to attract? Would people say, ‘Look! A man in a dress’? Or would they say, ‘Look! A man in a dress following a Chinaman’? And wouldn’t it make B.J.’s death absolutely useless if Chin allowed himself to get killed outside the gates of Tangrenbu by Harold or any other white demon on the very same night?

‘Was it B.J.? I never had anything against B.J.’ Harold’s shoes snapped on the empty streets behind Chin. ‘I know what it’s like to lose someone.’

‘Did you find Sarah Canary?’ Chin asked.

‘No,’ said Harold. ‘Did you?’

‘No.’ Chin had a sudden suspicion. He voiced it without stopping, without looking back. ‘B.J. saw you outside the Occidental Hotel tonight.’

‘Did he? I wasn’t there,’ said Harold. ‘I’ve been up in Chico. There were sightings, but I was too late. I wonder who B.J. saw.’

‘Not Sarah Canary,’ Chin said hastily. ‘We never saw Sarah Canary again.’ It might even be true. It was not given to him to know. A man says something. Sometimes it turns out to be the truth, but this has nothing to do with the man who says it. What we say occupies a very thin surface, like the skin over a body of water. Beneath this, through the water itself, is what we see, sometimes clearly if the water is calm, sometimes vaguely if the water is troubled, and we imagine this vision to be the truth, clear or vague. But beneath this is yet another level. This is the level of what
is
and this level has nothing to do with what we say or what we see.

Harold caught up with Chin, stepping in front of him. He appeared a bit embarrassed. ‘If B.J. had been wearing this dress, he’d still be alive today,’ Harold said. ‘I shouldn’t have taken it. I don’t need it. Since I’m immortal already. It was selfish of me.’

Chin began to walk again.

‘The dress sheds bullets,’ Harold told him. ‘And fire. You can’t be drowned in it. It makes you immortal. Overkill in my case. To coin a phrase.’

‘Go away.’ Chin stopped at the gates of Tangrenbu.

‘I don’t blame you for not liking me,’ Harold said. ‘Immortality was a burden. I wore it gracelessly. I’m learning to handle it better. Take the dress.’

Chin stared at him. ‘No.’

‘Please. You earned it. Wear it and no one will ever hurt you again.’

‘No,’ said Chin. He did not believe Harold. He did not disbelieve. It did seem possible, finally, that this dress was Sarah Canary’s gift to him, her reward for all his patience and peril. He could just picture himself, a Chinese man dressed as a white woman. He could just picture no one hurting him. ‘I’m not brave enough for immortality.’ Hadn’t he once said this very thing to B.J.?

‘I know I’ve made mistakes,’ said Harold. ‘Things I wish I could undo. I must have been crazy. She made me so crazy. You remember?’ There was a wistfulness in his voice.

‘I didn’t notice.’

‘I don’t mind telling you, I see things quite differently now. I see things quite differently since I’ve been wearing this dress.’

Harold stood behind Chin and did not follow him through the gates of Tangrenbu. Chin turned around once. Harold was still standing there, staring after him. Chin had a moment of inspiration. ‘Half woman, half man,’ he said. And Harold answered:

‘ “All look and likeness caught from earth

All accident of kin and birth,

Had passed away.”

‘That’s poetry, Mr Chin. That’s Coleridge.’ Harold unhooked the dress from his neck and slid it from his shoulders. He held it out to Chin.

‘ “She, she herself, and only she,

Shone through her body visibly.” ‘

The street lamp behind Harold flickered so that the shadows, the dark shapes stretching over the street, vanished for a moment and then reappeared as if Chin had blinked. ‘I have to go now,’ said Chin. ‘I have to go home.’

~ * ~

x

The Taiping Rebellion ended with the death of the Heavenly King in 1864. The Heavenly King’s other name was Hung Hsiu-ch’uan. He was a failed candidate for the civil service examinations and a Hakka convert to Christianity.

The foreign, Christian elements of the rebellion may have cost Hung Hsiu-ch’iian the local support he needed. Ironically, it may also have cost him the support of the foreign communities in China. The missionaries certainly found him difficult. He had read the Bible, which was to his credit, but then he had visions and this could not be encouraged. He claimed to be a prophet, to have direct inspiration from God. He purchased a fire engine and baptized his troops with it. The imperialist powers joined forces with the imperial powers to crush the movement. The victorious commander of the Imperial Army reported that, at the end, Hung betrayed his religion and killed himself. Much later, new evidence surfaced that proved he died instead, conveniently, just before the collapse of his rebellion, of natural causes, at the hand of his God.

In all important respects, the dynasty was defeated as well. The foreign powers imposed conditions that made China helpless. In 1873, the Ministers of the United States, Britain, France, Russia, and the Netherlands stopped performing the
ta-li
or
kowtow
at the foot of the Dragon Throne. The Manchus became a puppet regime, unable to inconvenience the imperialists, but permitted to continue to wreak havoc on their own people.

The unpopular regency of the Dowager Empress, Tz’u-hsi, ended in 1873. It was hoped that the young Emperor, although currently debauched by the palace eunuchs, would in time develop into a forward-thinking leader. Time was not given him. The reign of the new Emperor lasted only two years and ended with his death from smallpox. His Empress, much disliked by her mother-in-law, died soon after, murdered by persons unknown.

Tz’u-hsi chose as new Emperor an infant named Kuang-hsϋ. With this choice, Tz’u-hsi prolonged her regency by another twenty years. It was a brazen violation of the laws of succession. One official felt compelled to commit suicide over it.

~ * ~

19

Chin’s Theories on Fate and Chance

It will not harm her magic pace

That we so far behind—

Her Distances propitiate

As Forests touch the Wind

Emily Dickinson, 1872

In 1875, Chin was given a quotation from the story of Chou Kung, from the very story he had last told B.J., as part of the civil service examinations. Chin had fresh paper before him and a beautiful brush that was a gift from his mother. He was thinking of Adelaide. She had ceased to be a regret to him and became instead a sort of perfume that hung about his years in Golden Mountain, sweetening every other memory. He thought of her often, daily, almost ritually. He remembered that she talked too much, that she always knew everything, that she had often been tactless and disapproving. He woke up every morning and remembered that, whatever else the day brought, it would not bring Adelaide.