Heart of the West (38 page)

Clementine smiled up into her husband's laughing face and thought she could almost hear her heart tearing in two. He was all that she had said he was, good and honorable and noble, and she had just given him a son. She could never leave him. For so many reasons she could never leave him.

She handed their baby up into his awkward arms. Gus looked from the baby to her and then to his brother. "Zach... Lord, Zach, I don't know what to say..."

Rafferty lifted his shoulders in a careless shrug. "Shit, brother. It wasn't no different than pulling a calf."

She waited for his tawny eyes, which were at once beautiful and terrible, to find hers, and they did—briefly, before he wrenched them away and veiled them with his eyelids, since his hat wasn't handy. But for the length of a heartbeat, the tough shell he lived behind had cracked open and she had seen it.

For one flashing, burning moment, she had seen the heart-fire.

Part Two: 1883

CHAPTER 17

The stagecoach lurched over the rutted road. A gust of wind slammed against it, rattling the leather curtains and sending a cloud of dust billowing through the windows and onto the eight men and the Chinese girl crowded together on the hard horsehair seats.

The girl shut her eyes against the stinging dust. But she wrenched them open an instant later as the sharp tang of whiskey assaulted her nose. The foreign devil who sat across from her shook a brown glass bottle in her face and smiled, rudely showing his teeth. The whiskey sloshed into her lap and onto the bulging leather mailbags stashed beneath her feet.

"You thirsty, li'l China gal? Thirs-tee," he bellowed at her as if she were deaf.

Erlan, the favorite daughter of the House of Po, kept her face as blank as an opera mask, hiding her disgust. Like so many of the
fon-kwei,
this man was hairy and big-nosed like a baboon and smelled just as rank.

She dropped her gaze to her lap, saying nothing. But though she had been obedient, saying nothing, doing nothing, showing nothing, still the leash tightened around her throat in warning.

The leash was the worse thing that had been done to her.

It had begun with her mother, who had done a thing so terrible, so shameful and dishonorable, that she'd had to die for it. A thing so shameful and dishonorable that Erlan, her mother's daughter, had been made to suffer for it as well. And so her father, in his vengefulness and fury, had sold her to a Foochow slave trader for one hundred taels of silver.

The slave trader had raped Erlan, and when she fought him he had scored her breasts with long cerise fingernails that were curved and sharp like the talons of an eagle. But when he ripped the earrings of precious white jade out of her ears, the earrings her father had given her on the day she became a woman, only then did Erlan weep for the first time.

The slave trader had her put in the hold of a ship with other slaves and indentured laborers bound for Gum Sam, the land of the golden mountains. They had been packed onto tiers of wooden pallets like mah-jongg tiles in a box. Her pallet was on the bottom, and in foul weather vomit ran down the wall beside her head. The stinking whale-oil lanterns swayed and swayed with the rolling of the ship, and the rats were so bold they sat on her chest and looked at her with eyes that glimmered like spirit lights in the murky darkness. One of the sailors raped her, too, and when she fought him he broke her rice bowl so that she had to fight just for the few handfuls of mush left in the bottom of the community pot. That night she dreamed she was in her father's garden, sitting with her mother on the stone turtle bench in the shade of the banyan tree, sipping warm rice wine and nibbling on slices of candied ginger, and she wept for the second time.

When she finally left the ship and set her bound feet on the fon-kwei land, she tottered and swayed like a drunken fisherman, and she was nearly blinded by the pearly white light. The air tasted crisp and tangy, like a cold melon. And the mountains were indeed golden, though not made of gold as the stories had said. One of the sailors told her they were in a place called San Francisco, and there was a whole village of Chinese in this fon-kwei city.

She was taken to the house of the Hip Yee tong whose province was the slave girl trade. There she was bathed and the private parts of her woman's body examined so intimately that she burned hotter than a cook's brazier from the shame of it.

"That turtle dung of a Foochow slave trader has ruined you!" the tong man had raged at her, and he slapped her face as if the fault were hers. "I could have gotten four hundred fon-kwei dollars for your maiden-head." He peered at her closely, the wisps of his white beard quivering. "Aiya, I have been truly cheated! You are eighteen if you are a day, and your golden lilies are a disgrace. Big as boats, they are. Wei, bigger than imperial junks. You are not one in a thousand as he promised me, but one
of a
thousand. Better I sell you outright to a mining camp, ma? Those whore-cunts are so desperate for wives they will take anything, even a dishonored old woman with bullock feet."

He had shown her the cribs in the alley of the whores, where girls like her thrust thin white arms through the window bars and made sad mewling sounds like lost kittens. A hundred men a day would have her, the tong man had said, if she did not accept her fate and become wife to a mining camp.

Surely, she thought, she must not be hearing him right. Surely she would not be given as wife to a whole
camp
of men. But she didn't ask for clarification. What the blind man doesn't see, so it was said, the blind man cannot fear.

The tong man gave her into the care of a
bock tow doy,
one of the hachetmen who enforced the tong's laws. If the
bock tow doy
had a name she did not know it. He told her she must call him Master.

The master raped her, and when she fought him he beat her with a stick of firewood. He put the leash on her so that she would learn obedience, and that was when she wept for the third time.

Oh, the gods did surely know the leash was the worst thing that had been done to her. It cut into her pride more painfully than it cut into the tender flesh of her neck, for it proclaimed to the world that which she wished to deny to herself: she was a slave.

Now Erlan sat as still as possible in the rocking coach, enduring the leash's bite. She knew the master must stop his torment eventually. The merchant Sam Woo of Rainbow Springs, Montana, had paid eight hundred fon-kwei dollars for her. The merchant Woo would have no use for a strangled bride.

The white demon who had offered her the whiskey pulled aside the leather curtain and for the hundredth time in as many minutes squirted a stream of black juice out the side of his mouth, which was but a small slit in the tangled hair on his face. The wind that blew through the window was hot and dry and smelled strange, like freshly lacquered wood. Erlan thought the smell came from the olive-gray bushes that grew on the hills and in the meadows of tall sere grass.

In the bays and rainy basins of her homeland of Foochow, this was the season of the monsoon. The air would be as hot as it was here, but steaming like a water pipe. The mists would hug the hills of tea shrubs and bamboo groves. Along the banks of the Min River, rice paddies would glimmer emerald and jade green beneath the haze-haloed sun.

But in this foreign land everything was brown and gray. The trees with their dark, clawed branches and sharp needles made her think of dragons. And others shed cottony tufts and roared in the constant wind. An angry river bubbled and spat as it ran through tall grass that was not green, but the pale straw color of a farmer's hat. This was a tormented land, lacking harmony. There were mountains near her home, but nothing like these great jagged and furious rocks that seemed to be trying to poke holes in the sky.

Suddenly her yearning for the scarlet pillars and green tiled roofs of her
lao chia
was so strong she had to press her lips together to stifle a cry. The master's grip tightened on the leash, pulling her head around.

His face was as expressionless as the stone guardians of her ancestors' tombs, but she caught the warning in his eyes:
Yield, Erlan,
She was to do nothing, say nothing, show nothing.

Erlan lifted her chin and gave the master a look that said he was like turtle dung beneath her feet. Her father was a great man. Other merchants bowed respectfully before the wealth of the Pos and their august ancestors. And she was her father's favorite daughter. She was...

She was a slave now. The favorite daughter of the House of Po was no different from a peasant child sold by her parents for a few strings of
cash.

In defiance of the leash that restrained her, Erlan turned her head and looked out the window. An enormous bird of rainbow plumage burst out of the brush and took to the air with a slapping flap of its great wings. The white demon with the hairy face pulled a revolver out of his belt and fired. The bird exploded, raining red, gold, and blue feathers.

The sound of the shot smacked against the wooden panels of the coach. The master jumped as if a scorpion had bitten him, and his face turned as pale as a carp's belly. He hated the foreign devils, but he also feared them. His spirit kowtowed to theirs, and Erlan took pleasure from knowing that the master who controlled the end of her leash had masters of his own.

The demon with the hairy face leaned toward her and smiled, again rudely exposing his teeth, which were stained brown and smelled foul and rotten. "Wild turkey," he said. "Makes good eatin'."

Who would eat the beautiful bird that he had left dead on the side of the road? Erlan wondered. She had seen no peasants living on this land. It lay empty and desolate, like a forgotten tomb.

The stagecoach rocked around a bend, and a strange sight met Erlan's eyes. A large hat-shaped hill barren of grass or trees thrust itself straight up out of the valley like a fat blister on the land. And on the hill a skeletal black edifice, like a burned-out pagoda, poked into the smoke-hazed sky.

"What you're lookin' at there is the gallus frame of the Four Jacks silver mine. Four years ago this place wasn't nothing but a burp in the road. Now look at her—silver's done turned Rainbow Springs into a regular li'l boom town."

In spite of the leash that restrained her, Erlan leaned over for a better look. The hairy-faced man's speech was so different from the dulcet rhythms of the mission school English her mother had taught her that she had difficulty understanding him. But her ears had picked out the words "silver mine."

It was an ugly hill, scarred and gray. In its shadow, on the raw barren ground, were weathered wooden houses more wretched than beggars' huts.

A wagon heavily laden with rock passed them on the road, obscuring her view. The driver shouted and cracked his long whip across the backs of the mules. Over the rattle of the wheels on the hard and rutted ground, her ears picked out a dull, rhythmical thudding.

"That thumping noise you hear is the stamp mill crushing silver ore," the hairy-faced demon said, patting her knee.

The shock of him touching her jerked Erlan's attention back inside the coach. Beside her the master emitted a low hissing noise like an angry goose. The fon-kwei were odd ones in this way, Erlan thought, always rudely touching one another, even strangers, shaking hands, clapping one another on the back, taking women's arms and pressing their palms into the women's backs. It was a terrible invasion of one's private self, this touching.

The demon grinned at her, oblivious of his hideous breach of manners. "No speakee American, huh?" His gaze shifted over to the master. "How 'bout you, you speakee American, China boy? Tell me what bawdy house you're takin' her to and maybe I'll pay it a visit. I heard tell yer Chinese gals're built different than ours. That their slit runs sideways and is as tight as a sparrow's gullet."

The master flattered the hairy-faced man with the nervous smile he reserved for the fon-kwei. "She be married," he said in his badly accented English.

"Damn." The hairy-faced man sucked on his rotting teeth. "What a waste."

A horrible smell wafted into the window with the wind, a stink so rank it nearly made Erlan gag. The stagecoach had slowed and was entering a town where dogs and pigs rooted in piles of empty tins, animal bones, and rotting garbage. The baked mud of a road was lumped with discarded objects: an old boot, a kettle with a hole in the bottom, a stool missing one leg. They rolled past a row of log buildings, all with swinging louvered doors. Tinny music and laughter burst from them in loud claps of sound.

How strange it all was, strange and frightening. When she was a child she had longed to see more of the world than the view from the high garden walls of her lao chia. She had yearned for the sort of adventures told by the soup sellers in the market square. And how often her mother had warned her then: "Be careful what you wish of the gods, else they might grant it to you."

The stage stopped with a squeal of its axle, a billow of dust, and a bawling shout from the driver, "Whoa, you sons of bitches. Whoa!"

The master handed her a red veil. When she didn't take it, he pulled her head around by the leash so that she was forced to look into his eyes and see again the warning there:
Yield,

Erlan. Yield as the bamboo yields to the wind and thus is never broken.

She took the veil and draped it over her head. Red was supposed to be a happy color, a wedding color. Once she had looked forward with a child's innocent joy to this day. In her dreams she had journeyed from her father's house in a red-lacquered litter, seated on a throne surrounded by red silk curtains. Her bridegroom, handsome and young, had waited for her at the moon gate of his lao chia, in his hand the key that would unlock her chair and perhaps... oh, yes, perhaps her heart. Her only worry would be whether she would quickly bless her husband's illustrious ancestors with a son.

She rubbed her palms over the rough blue cotton of the chang-fu the tong man had given her to wear. In her dreams she had worn a bridal robe of red silk, heavy with embroidery, and a headdress of gold, lapis, and jade. In her dreams...

Yield, Erlan.

She sat in a deep inner stillness, shrouded by the red veil. The master tugged on the leash. She heard the thump of the leather mail sacks hitting the ground, felt the sway of the coach as it emptied and lightened. It was time to meet the man who had bought her for his wife.

After so many hours in the cramped coach, she tottered on her tiny bound feet. Dizziness assailed her and a blackness dimmed the red veil before her eyes. She dug her nails into her palms, hoping the pain would keep her from fainting. She must be a credit to her ancestors; she must display no weakness before the man who was to be her husband.

"Honorable lord," the master said with a smirk in his voice, for the merchant Sam Woo was certainly no lord. "I bring this worthless girl to be your wife."