All That Matters (38 page)

I remembered his last words to her.
When you are ready, I come back for you
.

“She thinks the white cat—?”

“Yes.” Father put down his fountain pen. “The problem, Kiam-Kim, is that she cursed that cat and thinks she has cursed her own fate by chasing it away.”

“What kind of curse?”

“A very wicked Toishan curse to send it away.”

“How wicked?”

“The powerful kind she claims killed—you remember?—Mistress Mean-Mouth. She didn’t want the garbage spilled again.”

“It’s not logical, Father.”

“These things never are, Kiam-Kim, but they have power over Poh-Poh.”

Two glowing eyes pierced through the dark caves of my brain. I thought of Poh-Poh and Sekky upstairs behind the closed door. I took in a deep, deep breath and asked “Should Sekky be helping Poh-Poh with her last windchime?”

“It’s good for Sek-Lung to know about death, don’t you think?”

I thought of the times Stepmother, with two fingers, had held Baby Sekky’s mouth open when he could barely breathe; and Poh-Poh bent over the crib and with her own mouth forced air into his twelve-month-old lungs. I thought of the hours the two women cradled him and rocked him back to life, again and again. I thought of all the talk-stories Poh-Poh breathed into each one of her grandchildren, as if they were the air she herself depended upon. And I thought of that day when I turned fifteen and scorned to be at her side to listen to one more silly story.

“You listen again one day, Kiam-Kim,” Poh-Poh had said to me. “I no be here then.”

When I went upstairs, I could hear the sharp crunch of pieces of glass being cut in the Old One’s room.

Poh-Poh began coughing badly, worse than when it had started six or seven months before. But this time she refused any medicine from Dr. Chu. “No use,” she said. Even Mrs. Lim could not persuade her to swallow the special herbal tea she had concocted. The mahjong ladies came and saw how hopeless things were. They patted Father’s hand, and Mrs. Chong urged him to send Grandmother to the Catholic Home for Chinese on Campbell Avenue. But Poh-Poh refused to leave her bedroom, and Sekky, who sat by her bed every night, refused to let her go. Father asked Third Uncle what else could be done.

“I ask Sister Fung,” he said.

Teresa Fung was one of the nuns who operated a dispensary and home for the Chinese on Pender Street. Sister Teresa often went around to the local gambling houses and stores, shaking a tin can and asking for donations. Once, Father and I ran into her at the Lucky Fortune Club when I was doing the same thing for the Free China effort.

“Wherever help is needed,” Sister Teresa said to me in excellent Cantonese, “that is where good people must go.”

One afternoon, I found the small woman in her nun’s black habit sitting beside the Old One. Before she arrived, Sekky had been sent over to Mrs. Lim’s house to fetch some herbal soup. The nun, nodding her caped head, and Poh-Poh, sitting against her pillows, spoke quietly and thoughtfully with each other, in a dialect that I did not understand.

Sister Teresa handed me a piece of paper with
Chinese and English writing and, rubber-stamped in English, “Please Admit to St. Paul’s.” Then she prayed for a few minutes over the Old One. Poh-Poh shut her eyes and said nothing more. Sister made the sign of the cross and smiled at me. I watched her go soundlessly down the stairs, where Father opened the front door for her. The elders thought of nuns as crows or black ghosts. As she stepped out, she lifted her habit and seemed, quickly, to fly away.

When Father came upstairs, I handed him the sister’s note. Stepmother asked what it said.

“There’s no room left at the Catholic Home,” Father explained. “This note will allow us to take Poh-Poh to the basement shelter at St. Paul’s Hospital. They have a doctor there.”

Sekky arrived back with the soup and asked the Old One what was going on.

“Not much,” Poh-Poh told him. Father raised her pillow so she could talk more clearly. Sekky held the soup spoon inches from her mouth until she relented.

“A good spirit in the dress of a black crow came to pray for me,” she told him.

“What happened, Grandmama?”

“We talked, Little One, then I sent her away.”

Sekky looked up at me.

“Dai-goh, did you see a black crow?”

Against my better judgment, I nodded.

Neither Father nor Stepmother could make a difference. Jenny told me her mother said it was probably
hopeless. No one could dissuade someone from dying if the person believed the time had come. Jenny brought the Old One some candy and kissed her forehead and held her hand.

Poh-Poh’s wrinkled complexion grew paler, her hacking and coughing at night more violent. Third Uncle sent over a herbalist, who told Father the illness was pneumonia. She had caught some very bad
feng shui
, he explained, and the house was too drafty. “Best to go to St. Paul’s,” the herbalist instructed.

Around two that morning, Father, with Sister Teresa’s note clutched in his hand, woke me up to help him carry Poh-Poh down the steps and into a taxi. I put on my kimono. Between us, her small body swayed on our crossed arms like a bundled sack. She was so light, so small in stature, I thought we were carrying only a wisp of her spirit.

“You tall as Father, Kiam-Kim.”

Sticking out from a shroud of blankets, strands of the Old One’s white hair lifted in the night wind. She was not coughing any more; with each descending step, she wheezed, half-in, half-out. Before the taxi pulled away, her trembling hand touched my arm. I wondered what she was thinking about. I had been thinking of Jenny, wishing she was here with me. A light turned on at the O’Connors’. I could see Jack’s silhouette in the upstairs window. I had forgotten to thank his mother for the vase of flowers she had sent over. I waved at the shadow looking down at me; the shadow waved back.

Father, Stepmother, and I took turns staying with Poh-Poh in the basement clinic of St. Paul’s. She lay in one of the emergency cots, in a segregated area with three other women, separated from the men’s side by drawn grey curtains. The fold-away sat directly under a long rectangle of window. Indians and blacks, Asians of every variety—all those who were not permitted entry into regular hospitals—ended up, if there were any spaces available, at the segregated Home for Chinese, or at St. Joseph’s Oriental Hospital, or in the grey-painted basement of St. Paul’s.

In the October light, pouring down from a bank of basement windows, the tall trees growing along the sidewalk threw fragments of shadow across the cement floor. After I relieved Father, my nose quickly adjusted to the antiseptic smell—a chlorine smell like the chemistry lab at school—and my ears soon grew deaf to the loud hacking and constant coughing throughout the ward.

On the second day, Poh-Poh told Father that Stepmother and I must go to her. “It is time,” she said.

I sat in the wooden chair with my homework on my lap. Hoping for the best, I called, not too loudly, “I’m here by your side, Poh-Poh.”

She stirred. One of the nuns came over to me.

“Rub her hands, son. Get her blood circulating.”

I did, gently.

Just when I had almost given up believing that she had enough energy to stay awake on my shift, the Old One opened her eyes. Her hand felt so fragile and
bony, but the smile was familiar, encouraging. I smoothed the wrinkles on her brow.

“That cat with the pink eyes came back to the house, Poh-Poh.”

“How so?”

“He came back three times. Sekky even told the cat you were at the hospital.”

“Not … not possible.”

“Third Uncle said he saw it, too, when he came to find out how you were doing.”

I wasn’t making it up. Third Uncle had seen the cat hop off our front porch and run down Keefer Street. I knew Poh-Poh was thinking of the curses she had spewed in rage upon the white cat. Foul curses she knew she could not take back. I kept telling her how clearly I, too, had seen its pink eyes.

“My juggler …,” she said.

“Perhaps your curses do not work in Gold Mountain.”

“Perhaps …,” she said, as if she did not hear the lightness in my tone, “perhaps for me, Kiam-Kim,
he has come back
 …”

A wetness brightened her eyes. Her head seemed to lift from the pillow, then slowly fall back. I had not the heart to tell her how foolish she was to think about such things. She caught my doubting look.

“You wait,” she said, and her voice sounded stronger. She pointed at my textbook. “Work,” she said and closed her eyes to nap.

I rustled the pages of my biology book and loudly shuffled my notes so Poh-Poh could hear how hard I
was working as she fell asleep. After a few minutes, when I happened to catch the shadows dancing from the window above us, a white cat pushed its face against the pane. Of course, I said nothing. Its eyes were clearly not pink.

After an hour, Stepmother showed up, wearing her factory smock. An oversized envelope stuck out of her handbag. My mind went back to the time she arrived to be with us and pulled out a similar envelope to hand over to the Old One. I recalled the tiny silver butterfly she had given me that day. Stepmother still looked the same to me, her delicate features unblemished by the years.

Poh-Poh gestured for Stepmother to help her sit up. I pushed the cot close to the wall and placed the Old One’s pillow at an angle so she could lean against me as well. The grey hospital gown heightened the lack of colour in her cheeks, but I was happy to see her effort and the way the cloudiness in her eyes seemed to diminish.

“Let First Son see,” Poh-Poh said.

Stepmother hesitated. I wondered what was going on. Reluctantly, Stepmother slipped out from the large envelope a photograph I had never seen before. Stepmother held it up. It was a formal picture of a middle-aged man dressed in a mandarin coat. The picture was cracked with age, but every feature was clear. Stepmother handed me the photograph.

“Look at that face,” Poh-Poh said.

The man looked like Father, but was not him.

“Who is this?”

Stepmother said, “Your grandfather.”

I laughed. Impossible. The full-length portrait showed a wealthy man dressed in a fine robe embroidered with dragons, with carved jade pendants hanging from his neck. He sat posed in front of a carved ebony screen. Even in the black-and-white photo one could see that the panels of painted flying cranes were inlaid with ivory and gold. The elegant long nails on his hands suggested he had never had to work a day in his life.

“Who is he really?”

“Look again at the face.”

The high forehead, the wide nostrils and broad cheeks … the way the hair beneath the mandarin cap seemed to slightly curl … I was looking at Father’s twin. The rich clothing had distracted me.

“Patriarch Chen,” Poh-Poh said. She leaned back to study my expression. “I was a grown woman in his service when he forced himself on me.” She sensed my disbelief. “Do you understand?”

Stepmother quietly said, “That was how things were in Old China, Kiam-Kim.”

“Then Patriarch found Lord Jesus,” Poh-Poh said. “Or Lord Jesus found him.”

Stepmother tried to help me make sense of things: “Kiam-Kim, how do you think Poh-Poh come to Gold Mountain with you? Old and poor house-servants like her do not leave China.”

The Old One smiled. “Your father a smarter boy
than the Patriarch’s two ox-brained sons. He send your father to school. But the family of Patriarch Chen,” Poh-Poh said, “his two sons and three daughters, his two wives and his concubine, they all hate us, Kiam-Kim. Heart-bitter that slave woman and her bastard son favoured by the Patriarch. They say his new Christian ways make him crazy. They say it is madness to treat a slave and her bastard as if they deserved kindness.”

Poh-Poh half shut her eyes. Stepmother urged her to rest, but the Old One persisted, the front of her grey gown rising and falling with the effort.

“And so, when Third Uncle ask for a family, for peace in his own household, Master Chen send us all away to Gold Mountain.”

The Old One’s tone revealed neither regret nor sorrow, but her voice grew raspy, her energy a low tide slipping away: “Such things I tell … Now, no more talk.”