The Rock Child (29 page)

In retrospect he had given consideration to Gentleman Dan’s Caucasian
vis-à-vis
Creole renditions. He thought them both modestly eloquent, and preferred the wrigglesome Creole style. He heard Asie’s enthusiasm for them. The lad’s very spirit was music. Yet this music …

He looked around the room at the tinhorns, miners, businessmen, and whores. The more flamboyant whores were unmistakable, but the ones who teased his imagination were more difficult to identify—they wore the same San Francisco fashions (which was to say Paris fashions) as the respectable, wealthy women. The trick was to calculate by body language who had arrived alone, and might possibly be persuaded to depart in the company of the dashing Captain Burton.

His nerve endings tingled.

He took second thought. He felt the bitterness inside, and knew he must assuage it.

I am sorry, Isabel
.

The music stopped, and Asie and the Professor joined them at the table. Asie was excited as a kid.
A supreme sign of the jokester who made
the world,
Burton thought,
that any man’s lot should be to fall in love with a nun
. He fingered the edges of the newspaper.

“I am honor, Gentleman Dan,” she said. “Delight hear you play, Asie.”

Burton inspected her face. He suspected that American dance music was nothing to her. Yet her face looked sincere. He gave thought to the words she had actually said, and nodded to himself, admiring their discretion.

Burton ordered another whisky, a tea, and a sherbet.
The company of teetotalers,
he thought disgustedly.

When the Professor had enjoyed two deep drafts of his cigarillo, Burton judged the time ripe. He held up the newspaper.
Virginia City Territorial Enterprise,
the masthead said. Beneath that the bold, black headline, LINCOLN TO FREE SLAVES. The date was September 23, 1862.

The Professor accepted the proffered sheet and studied the columns of type. As he read, Burton saw no emotion in the man’s face. When he set the paper down, his face was still a mask.

Burton explained to Asie and Sun Moon. “The President of the United States yesterday issued a proclamation. On the first day of the new year all those persons held as slaves in the rebellious states are declared free. Despite this great gesture, slaves in other states are unaffected by the proclamation.”

He paused. “Evidently, Mr. Lincoln wishes to assure the continued loyalty of the border states not in rebellion. Thus he furthers his declared policy: He is fighting a war to preserve the Union, not to abolish slavery.”

As he studied his friends’ faces, he thought of Her Majesty’s government getting the news from their offices in Washington City. They would not be pleased. Lincoln was taking too clever a course. If the government asked his counsel, he would say that the South must lose the war, both physically and in the minds of men.

“What is your opinion?” he asked the Professor.

“It is a cowardly and hypocritical act.”
You do not mince words, Professor
. Burton liked that.

“Why so?”

“He is wrong both ways. Slavery must be abolished, without hesitation or equivocation, and forever. In
all
states.”

“And the Union?”

“No state has a right to impose its will on another, even when the other is wrong.”

Truly a Southerner,
thought Burton.

“How does this affect the American destiny? Race is ‘our destiny and our doom’—I believe those were your own words.”

The Professor looked askance at their companions. Before Burton could point out the aptness of the topic to these very companions, Asie leapt in.

I didn’t actually know what I wanted to say, just knew I was mad. “You know,” I started, “it feels right peculiar to listen to you, friends of mine, talk about people of color right in front of me like that. I don’t even know whether I’m a white man to you, or colored.”

Truth to tell, for the first time I found myself thinking of them not as “my friends” but as “these white men.”

I looked at them steady in their faces.

“I understand perfectly,” said Daniel, “and apologize sincerely.”

“Perhaps you may take it,” said Sir Richard, “that while your color may prejudice most people in this room and in this city, it does not affect us.”

Stars and cornicles, I wasn’t reasoning out how to take it, I was just mad.

“I don’t understand,” put in Sun Moon.

I looked at Sir Richard and read his thoughts.
By God, their disguise as servants is ruined—they’re so confounded independent
.

Daniel brought Sun Moon up to date. “Miss Moon,” he said, “when Captain Burton opened the door to a discussion of the relations of the races in this country earlier, I spoke with asperity on the subject, and revealed that I myself was betrothed to a woman of color. She’s now passed away, I regret to say.”

I was amazed at Daniel’s coolness. I’d have bet he hadn’t volunteered this news thrice in his life.

“So, ‘destiny and doom,’” Sir Richard pressed on. “Our friends need to hear your thoughts. They have no experience of the rest of this country.”

“The fact of the slave trade,” said Daniel. He hesitated. “The fact that our people were willing for two hundred years …” His eyes looked haunted. “We have been captors, masters, overlords. We have hated people for the color of their skin alone. In the dark of night we have cultivated
and nurtured that hatred. We have persecuted them. We have destroyed lives, destroyed entire families.” He paused dramatically. “We know our guilt. Can you see what that
does
inside?”

Sun Moon was looking at him disgustedly. I judged she was too polite to say, “What do you think it does to the slaves?”

“Racialism exacts a terrible but less insidious toll on its indirect victims. That includes your, uh, ward, Miss Sun Moon,” said Daniel. “And our friend here,” angling his head toward me.

“Is that so?” says Sir Richard.

Daniel said yes with his thick eyelids. “Her skin color is her fate. In this country Asie’s skin color is his fate. Different from hers, and the same—fate in either case. Think what it is to be at the mercy of the lust of any white man you meet. Or his ill temper.”

“I believe the hue of Asie’s destiny is his spirit, nothing more or less.”

“Oh, frog jump,” says I, and only said that on account of I couldn’t think of anything else. They were both in the ether. Again—“Frog jump!”

Everybody looked at me like I was a pig that laid a egg.

I plunged ahead. “Every man of color in this country knows what it means. How could you feel it like us? I can play the piano in here, or tend the bar, or take care of white people any damn way. Half the places I try to buy a drink, I’d get kicked out of. The other half, I’d be twice as like to get cheated at cards, and ten times as like to get mugged on the way home.”

I tried to give Sir Richard as good an evil eye as ever he gave me. “The Mormons would have kept their white and delightsome women from me, or at least the pick of ’em. Here I might be able to go to a white brothel if I was very well dressed, or maybe not. Do you know they have white, brown, and yellow brothels? In the good district, the bad district, and Chinatown? Two dollars, one dollar, and seventy-five cents? Do you know there’s a law here against Chinese owning mining claims? Do you know they talk about ‘a Chinaman’s chance’? Which is the chance the Chinese have to find gold working the leftovers, the tailings?” My blood was right up, helped by stuff Daniel had told me, and I was ready to keep going.

Sir Richard jumped in, though. “Quite right, every word. I also know that it’s embarrassing for you and Sun Moon, my dear friends and mates on
safariy,
to go about town disguised as my servants.”

He looked us in the eye. It’s true, naming stuff straight on takes the sting out.

But I was still full of it. “I’ll make a hullabaloo not to be nobody else’s nothing. One hell of a hullabaloo.” I looked at Daniel and considered. “You don’t know my whole story. I near drowned and came out of the river different as I went in. I set out on this big ramble to find something, I don’t know what.” I thought of their kind of words. “To find my own personal American destiny and doom, I guess. If I go astray, come up lame, shipwrecked, or whatever, I’m going to keep right on going my way, not nobody else’s.

“What you be thinking? It’s damned hard. Hard for anyone to know where to go and what to do with your life. When I figger it out, if I do, might be whole lotta white men intend to keep me from my way. Well, they best keep their hands covering their balls. I’ll go where I want, do what I want, work at what I want.”

Now Daniel pricked at me. “And marry who you want?”

That made me so angry, plus I was embarrassed at saying that word in front of Sun Moon, so angry my devil jumped up big. “You bet,” I said. “You bet. If she’ll have me.” I fixed my eyes on the face of Sun Moon, which looked beautiful to me as a swan floating on sun-blasted water. “If you’ll have me.”

Sun Moon looked at Asie with her eyes carefully masked. She could scarcely let him know the truth, the truth she almost knew for sure:
I am bearing your child
.

She studied his face and knew how awful he felt, blundering out with it like that, right in front of everybody. She could also see he was waiting, waiting, hoping…
You can’t know how hopeless it is
.

“I am a nun,” she said softly and gently, and stopped.
Buddhist, scholar, teacher, chaste nun—I can give none of these up. Never could, and still less now. I will raise our child to dedicate his life to the
moksha
of all sentient beings
.

She met his eyes and saw him trying to read hers, but she kept the mask up.
So much I cannot say to you
. In her mind rose again, against her will, his touch, the time they lay entwined in each other’s arms beside the river, legs entwined, too, and lips, and
lingam
and
yoni
. Intertwined it felt like then. Now she knew it was entangled.
Nothing that has happened has been a danger, except you. Not abduction, not slavery, only you. The danger is love
.

Now their gazes intertwined. She felt their lookings coming together gently and sensuously, like tendrils, delicately grasping. “I cannot,” she said distinctly, and only to Asie.

Suddenly next to her Sir Richard was standing up and extending a hand toward …

“Mr. Kirk,” said Sir Richard. “Thank you for coming.”

Sun Moon forced her eyes away from Asie’s, an act of violence. She swallowed hard.

Such terrible timing. Such a self-assured, predatory-looking Chinaman. She shivered.
Perhaps my fever is returning
. Then she acknowledged his deep bow with a small inclination of her head. He murmured, “I am honored.”

She watched Tommy Kirk and not Asie while the courtesies were exchanged—she could not bear to look at Asie. Sir Richard brought a chair for the newcomer. He was costumed in a handsome suit of light blue silk, a man of impeccable appearance.
Appearance only,
of course.

Out of a corner of her eye she saw Q Mark standing against the wall, and acknowledged him with a nod. She had confidence in this man for hire, as long as he was on the payroll. Tommy Kirk was another matter.

As everyone began to chat (that’s what those social sorts call it), I looked directly at Sun Moon until I got her eyes back. They grew soft and said to me, “I do care for you, and I’m sorry.” Then they looked away.

My insides felt like twisting snakes. I didn’t hear any of the conversation. Sun Moon wouldn’t look at me again.

After a while Sir Richard prodded the talk toward where he wanted. “Mr. Kirk, we were discussing slavery. Do the Chinese practice slavery?”

“Who does not?”

“Based on race?”

“Not what Europeans and Americans call race,” said Tommy Kirk, looking amused.

I brought my attention to Tommy Kirk. Again I felt that come-hither-get-thither split. Truth was, I’d been pondering on Tommy Kirk. Whole truth was, I’d been fantasizing. A man who owns women. (I’d actually been pondering on just what lecherous forms this ownership might take.) A man who owns half of Chinatown and means to own all. A man who corrupts others with vices and takes their money for himself, sometimes leaves them ruined.

Sir Richard kept chasing. “Based on notions of racial superiority?”

“That’s a singularly American vice,” said Tommy.

“How do people come into such misfortune?”

Tommy shrugged. “Often they are given by their families as guarantees against a debt. Then the debt goes unpaid.”

“Or conquered by soldiers?”

“Sometimes.” He smiled ironically. “Once upon a time.”

My fantasies were churning. My fingers wanted to touch the silk of his coat, but my feet wanted to run.

“What sort of people hold slaves?” asked Sir Richard.

Now Tommy beamed all his teeth into a brilliant smile. “Whoever has the power,” he said.

All the cajoolies in the world attacked me at once.

“Daniel!” came the cry. It was the mixologist. “Asie!” He gave a jerk of his head toward the piano.

Saved from Tommy Kirk. We went back at it.

Since we’d been hoping Sun Moon would hear us tonight, Daniel and I were ready to put our best foot forward, all our favorites done the way we liked ’em best together, plus something new—we were going to be a trio instead of a duet, because I was going to whistle.

It’s tricky business, combining a pair of lips with eighty-eight piano keys and five banjo strings—the five and eighty-eight are a lot stronger. Lips go high, though, and high carries. I got in some sweet and lovely echoing and high harmony on several spirituals, particularly, I thought, on “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot.”

Halfway through the playing I saw Tommy Kirk head out, Q Mark behind him. I thought the room felt warmer.

We jumped back into it, and went more for some driving rhythms. The drinkers in the Heritage like to dance, and that’s sure what the courtesans want. So we gave ’em a lot of schottisches, quadrilles, and reels, stuff to make the feet jumping beans.