Heart of the West (42 page)

Jere handed him a cup of tea as he rejoined the others, using a roll of fuse cord for a seat. "Where you been?" Jere asked too casually.

"Taking a piss," he lied. He bit into his letter-from-home, a Cornish pie made of beef, onion, and potatoes. "I didn't think I needed you to be holding my hand whilst I did it."

The brothers sat apart from the others, eating by the flickering light of a single candle set into a niche hacked out of the rock. Drew thought of Pansy the mule, who would probably die down here without ever seeing the sun again or feeling the wind ruffle her tail. He thought of the way the mountains had looked earlier, where silence and loneliness were the creation not of the darkness and heavy earth but of the light and the sun and the wind. He wondered what it would be like to get on a horse and ride out into the hills and the plains and keep on riding until he reached the edge of the sky.

He wished he didn't have these hankerings and frets. He wished he were more like Jere, who worked hard, drank hard, fought hard, and laughed hard, and looked for nothing else out of life.

He felt his brother's eyes on him and he looked up. "I've been thinking..." Jere said, the last word breaking as he coughed up the rock dust he'd been breathing all afternoon.

"You've been thinking, have you?" he said, forcing a smile. "And should I be worrying now?"

"I've been thinking we should try our hand at homesteading. There's all that free land here just for the taking. We should get ourselves out of the mines and become farmers."

Drew wondered where his brother thought they would get the money to work a homestead. They made three dollars a day in the shafts. A dollar of it went for room and board at the flophouse, and they kept out a few bits for themselves for whiskey and whores. The rest went back to Cornwall for Mam and the girls. Every month they got a letter from her—written by the vicar, although the words were her own—calling the blessings of God down upon their heads for saving the Scully family from the poorhouse.

And besides, they knew damn all about farming.

"You really have gone daft," Drew said harshly. "First you get a notion in your noggin to court a Celestial and now you're makin' clack about being a sodbuster. Where's the blunt going to come for seed and a plow and a harrow and a team and a stoneboat and a seeder and a binder, huh?"

"Since when do you know so much about it? 'Less you've been thinking on it same as I have."

Drew slammed the lid down on their supper pail with a loud clatter. "When a man goes down into the mines, he stays there."

"You sound like the da."

Drew's lip curled into a mean smile. "I reckon the da knew what he was talking about, because where is he now, my handsome? Buried under a ton of rubble in the seventh level of Wheal Ruthe."

A silence settled over the stope as the others stretched out on a timber pile for a half hour's nap. Jere pulled a penknife and a block of wood out of his pocket and began to whittles— he was always making little toys that he gave away to the other miners' kids. Drew sat and watched blisters of grease follow each other down the side of the candle. Above his head the cribbing creaked. The eyes of the rats gleamed in the dusky penumbra of the candlelight.

When a man goes down into the mines, he stays there.

The Scully brothers put on dry shirts against the chill of a Montana summer night as they waited their turn to go up the shaft. The other men were all laughing and making loud talk about the beer they were going to put away at the Gandy Dancer. But all Drew Scully could think of was that he'd made it through another shift without any of the others glomming on to what a coward he really was.

Rolfe Davies sat on top of a load of rock in the hoisting cage, a box of dull drill bits in his lap. Drew caught the boy's worshipful gaze on him and they shared a smile just as the cage jerked into motion—

And the hoist cable broke with a crack like a rifle shot.

The loose cable whipped at the rock and timber as it went up the shaft, and the loose car smacked against the rock and timber as it went down. The nipper screamed and went on screaming until he hit the boiling hot sump with a splash. And then there were only the echoes of his screams, going on and on and on until they were swallowed at last by the thick black earth.

The white-faced hoistman jerked nine times on the bell rope. Above ground the disaster whistle would be piercing the night.

Tears burned in Drew's eyes. His chest jerked hard as he drew at the thin air. Ashamed, he turned his face toward the earth and rocks where only the darkness was there to see his weakness.

CHAPTER 18

Earlier that afternoon a thick, warm wind had caressed Erlan's face as she stepped out of the hotel's double doors at the side of the merchant Sam Woo, who was now her husband.

She took mincing steps on the warped and spit-slimed boardwalk. One of her tiny carved wooden shoes caught on an uneven board, and she stumbled. The merchant Woo steadied her with a hand beneath her elbow, then withdrew it.

He had yet to speak a single word to her.

She thought he was probably taking her to his house. She had no expectations. The buildings of this Rainbow Springs were all of gray and weathered logs or freshly peeled ones. Certainly there would be no green tiled roofs and scarlet pillars to remind her of her lao chia and all that she had lost.

The road they walked along led straight and flat as a rice mat out into the wide land and big sky. She wondered if perhaps the evil spirits were less powerful here than in China, so that the roads didn't have to be laid crooked to fool them. She wanted to ask the merchant Woo about this and many other things. But until her husband opened his mouth to her, she wasn't allowed to speak to him.

The merchant Woo stopped before a squat log building with a tin roof, but Erlan barely glanced at it. a group of Chinese men had gathered in a tight, tense knot in the street. a few were barefoot and others wore only straw sandals on their dusty feet. Their baggy
schmo
were
rolled up to their knees, and their legs were sun-browned and as skinny as chopsticks.

None was so rude as to stare directly, but they all cast furtive looks,
hungry
looks, at her from beneath their conical straw hats. They shifted on their feet and whispered behind their hands, making a sound like mice feeding in a rice bin. "A beauty! A beauty! A beauty with lily feet!"

"Better I sell you outright to a mining camp, ma?" the slave trader had said. "Those whore-cunts are so desperate for wives they will take anything, even a dishonored old woman with bullock feet."

She stood in utter stillness, her hands stuffed up her sleeves, gripping her arms. The
ping-pang
of
a hammer on steel echoed from a large, cavernous building across the street. The pounding seemed to resound in the pit of her stomach. She trapped a moan of fear behind her teeth.

The door behind her creaked open, setting off a jangle of bells. The merchant Woo stepped back for her to cross the threshold first. She had to hop on her golden lilies to climb the two sagging steps. She entered a room filled with so many things that it made her dizzy just looking at the jumble.

Candlesticks and boxes of candles. A barrel filled with straw brooms and another one full of onions. Tobacco twists and twisted coils of rope. Tin buckets and tin spoons. Familiar things, like a set of mah-jongg tiles and a red silk lantern. And things she'd never seen before, such as a coat made out of a slick yellow material and a box of something called toothache gum.

Shelves sagged under precariously stacked tin cans. The warped floor was covered with wooden kegs and bales of animal furs. The small-paned window cast bars of dusty sunlight over the front of the shop. But the back corners were shrouded in darkness and looked as if they hadn't been explored in years.

A rank odor came from one of the barrels just inside the door. Erlan leaned over for a closer look. It appeared to be filled with great bloody chunks of meat packed in brine. A hand-lettered sign pasted on the outside of the barrel identified it: Bear Shot Fresh Last Week.

The merchant Woo cleared his throat. Startled, Erlan whirled so quickly she swayed on her golden lilies. He held aside a tattered brown blanket that hung over the doorway into another room. She passed by him into darkness.

A match whisked and flared. He put the flame to a lamp and adjusted the wick, then nearly dropped the chimney when he went to put it back on its base.

They were in a kitchen with a table, two chairs, and a round iron stove with a vent pipe that ran out through a circle of tin in the roof. The room, which had no window, was close and crowded and smelled of boiled cabbage. Flies stuck to a strip of paper that dangled from the ceiling.

The merchant Woo hung the lamp on a wall hook and came to stand before her, so close that if he had breathed deeply his chest would have brushed hers. She thought of the wedding and the way his lips had felt on her mouth, and it was all she could do not to shudder.

"Have you eaten today?" he said. It was the appropriate Chinese greeting, but spoken in the harsh, guttural Yueh dialect of Canton.

She gave the traditional response in high-class Mandarin. "I am well."

He frowned at her, and his next words were in English. "Mrs. Yorke said you savvy how to talk American. What a big wonderful surprise this is. Good for business. From now on you talk only American, even with me. That way you can practice."

And that way your peasant ears won't have to struggle to understand my Chinese, she thought. But she only nodded in obedience.

He took a step back, sweeping his hand through the air. "Sit down, please. Your golden lilies must ache."

Erlan slowly lowered herself into one of the chairs. If she had been alone, she would have groaned aloud. Her feet were indeed sore. And all those days and nights in that rocking, jouncing coach had left her as stiff as an old woman.

The merchant began to lay out an array of wonderful food before her on the table, and to her shame her mouth began to water. Thanks be to the merciful Kwan Yin that her husband's embracing of the barbarian ways did not extend to what he ate.

She thought of the swing stations where the stagecoach had stopped along her journey, those crude wooden shacks where the horses were changed and the passengers were given a piece of tough meat thrust between the two halves of a soggy, bitter biscuit, and tin cups of coffee thick enough to lacquer a chest. Once they had been treated to a platter of rancid pork and something called corn dodgers, which resembled fried millet cakes. Inedible food served under conditions of indescribable filth, as nourishing as a beggar's soup made of nothing but bones.

But this... aiya, this was truly a feast fit for the gods. Bowls of pickled cabbage, ginger, and lotus root. Steamed buns and duck coated with plum sauce. A cool custard of green beans and a saucer of melon seeds. Steaming meat dumplings, lo mein and snow-white rice. Erlan's belly made a loud gurgling noise.

She was saved from embarrassment by the clatter of a stove lid. The merchant Woo tossed more sticks on the fire. He had to move aside a wok and a bamboo steamer to set a kettle on to boil. The lantern light gleamed off a razor-sharp cleaver that lay atop a chopping block. He must have prepared this wedding banquet himself, for she doubted he had a servant to do it for him. If he had need of her in the kitchen as well as in his bed, the jest was on him. She could embroider cranes finer than the ones on the robe he had given her, and she could coax pretty music from a pi-pa, but she was an abysmal cook. She couldn't prepare so much as a bowl of soggy rice.

She stared from beneath carefully lowered eyelids at this man who was her husband. He knelt before the open door to the stove, jabbing with a poker at the smoking wood. His hands were small like a boy's, but spotted with age, his chin whiskers thick and stiff like the teeth of an ebony comb. His shaven crown shone in the lamplight. His queue was very long and a credit to him.

He turned his head, his spectacles glittering. He offered her a tentative smile.

Emboldened, she asked, "What is your honorable name?"

"Sam is my name now. You will call me Sam. I will call you Lily.

"Lily is a good American name," he went on when she said nothing. "As American as the Fourth of July and Yankee Doodle Dandy, yes? There was a chippy—a joy girl—who worked for Mrs. Yorke for a while and called herself Lily."

Shame burned in Erlan's chest. Once she had thought to marry a man of breeding and scholarship. Instead she must be obedient and pleasing to an old peasant from Canton who wished to call her after a joy girl. But she must stop thinking of herself as what she was. Her father had sold her,
sold
her to a slave broker. She thought of those haunted faces peering through the bars of those whore-alley cribs. How easily one of those faces could have been hers.

She looked down. Her hands were clenched in her lap, and she flattened them, smoothing them over the blood-red satin. A tremor of fear coursed through her. "Who are those men gathered outside the door?"

He rose to his feet, dusting off his hands. "There're not a lot of Chinawomen in the Montana Territory, so they're curious, you savvy? They envy this unworthy one such a young and beautiful wife."

"Perhaps it is your wealth they envy, that you were able to buy this foolish self."

He grunted in agreement. "Those little shits couldn't put together a string of copper
cash
between them, no sirree jingle. They work the tailings and played-out placer claims on the hill, what the white man no longer has use for. They're not allowed to work in the Four Jacks."

She hadn't grasped all he had said, for many of the English words were unfamiliar to her. She couldn't imagine why anyone would choose to work deep in a hole in the earth, but it made no sense that the men would be forbidden to do so. "Why are they not allowed?"

"Because they're Chinks." He studied her from behind his spectacles, his eyes unblinking. She thought that he would say more, that he had a secret to impart to her, or perhaps a sorrow. Instead he shrugged. "You will understand after you're here awhile."

She didn't want to understand; she didn't want to be here long enough to understand. She was overwhelmed suddenly by the thought that it might be years before she could go home. So many thousands of
li
of land and sea now lay between her and her lao chia. And a barrier of honor betrayed and honor lost that was wider and longer than the Great Wall itself.

She wasn't aware he had come up beside her until he laid a small box wrapped in red silk on her lap. "This is for you," he said.

She unfolded the silk, a little excited in spite of herself to be getting a gift. She opened the box to reveal a small hinged case of gold with a new moon and a star engraved on its round face.

"It's a picture locket," he said. He showed her how to pry it open with the tips of her fingers. "Look... This is Sam Woo, my photograph. Clementine McQueen took it of me. She shot me," he said, laughing.

His face sobered. "You wear it here," he said, this time in his rough Cantonese. And he touched her throat where the bone curved beneath the high collar of her robe. Her pulse beat so wildly she was surprised he couldn't feel it. He took the locket from her trembling fingers. He snapped it shut and pinned it on her breast, just above her heart. "Or here."

"I am unworthy of such a fine gift," she said. She was struck by what a strange sight it was—the fon-kwei locket on her red satin wedding robe.

The kettle shrieked, startling them both. He let out a short laugh and hurried to take it off the fire. She watched while he placed tea leaves in two porcelain cups, poured boiling water over them, covered the cups, and placed them in copper bowls. He set one before her and one at his place across the table, then took his seat.

He removed the lid and took the cup from the copper bowl, cradling it in both hands. She did the same. The steam of the dragon well tea wafted around her face, smelling of flower petals, sweet and soft.

"Empty cup," he toasted and drank his down to the last drop.

She took a sip. He was staring at her over the porcelain rim of his cup. There was something in his eyes, something she had seen before... Fingers of memory gripped her heart, of rough hands groping, squeezing, teeth nipping, lips slobbering, a prodding, and then a pain like a knife rending her open, thrusting into her, a heavy weight heaving on her breasts and belly, crushing her...

A scream filled her throat, sticking there. The skin of her chest pulled taut.

Her husband stood up abruptly and came back with an empty rice bowl, which he set before her. Above the bowl, he laid a pair of chopsticks neatly on their stand. "Thank you for honoring my unworthy table with your presence," he said.

He brushed his knuckles along her jaw while she sat in utter stillness. She had been taught always to appear serene, but inside, she wanted to scream at the feel of his hand sliding along her cheek and down her neck. She tried to breathe and couldn't. The scream... the scream was there, in her throat, choking her, and she couldn't, she couldn't—

"Now," he said, his voice rough. "I will lie with you now."

And something within her shattered. She lurched to her feet, thrusting him away from her. The table scraped hard across the floor, bowls and platters sliding, falling, shattering. She backed up and up until she slammed into the stove. She felt its heat through the thick padded satin of her robe. The scream, trapped in her throat, beat hard like the wings of a frantic bird.

"Stay away from me," she said, or might have. The scream was so loud, so loud...

He came at her, anger hard on his face, his spectacles flashing in the dim light. She groped behind her, her fingers finding the handle of the cleaver. The scream was now roaring in her head, darkening her vision.

She swung the cleaver in a wide, desperate arc, missing his face by inches, and he reared back, shouting, "Holy God!"

The scream in her throat subsided some. She felt herself breathe, felt words form and push their way out her mouth. "Forgive this unworthy girl, but I cannot let you touch me," she said. Polite words, proper words. She would be a dutiful, obedient daughter, but she would not, she could not let any man force his way inside her again. She would rather die. To die, to die, to die... was the only honorable way.

The merchant Woo stared at his wife, his lips folded tightly to his teeth. It was unthinkable that a woman would attack her lord and husband. That she would deny him the use of her body. "There will be nothing to forgive," he said stiffly, "if you put that down this instant."