Gold Mountain Blues (13 page)

“What time?”

“Now.”

The saddled horses, the card table, the liquor. Ah-Fat's head was spinning but all these disparate fragments gradually began to make up complete picture. Like a thunderbolt, the realization came to him that all the men in the camp were being abandoned in the wilderness.

“This … each person?” he asked, pointing at the sack.

“No, just you.” The foreman pointed at Ah-Fat's chest.

“Contract, contract…” Ah-Fat was trying to say, “What about the compensation stipulated in the contract?” but his English was not up to it. All he could do was repeat the word “contract.”

The foreman understood anyway. He started to speak, but the only words that came out were a repeated “Sorry, sorry.”

Ah-Fat ran out of the tent and said to the record-keeper, who was standing at the entrance: “Call the men, all of them, quick!”

The record-keeper looked at the foreman who had followed Ah-Fat out and dared not move.

“You afraid of that dickhead? They're trying to dismiss us on the spot! If you don't go, the whole camp will starve. Quick!” Ah-Fat gave the record-keeper a savage kick and the man stumbled off down the mountain.

A fierce argument broke out among the three foremen and although Ah-Fat could not understand, he hazarded a guess that the other two were pinning the blame for this new trouble on his foreman. After the shouting had continued for a bit, the three men went into the tent, rolled up the bed mats and slung them across the horses' backs. They were about to mount, when Ah-Fat pulled a bottle from his pocket and blocked their way. “You dare make one move,” he said, “and I'll smash this. I'll take your three lives with my one life. Fair's fair.”

The foremen could not understand a word Ah-Fat said, but they did not need to. Their eyes were drawn to the bottle in Ah-Fat's hand and the yellow liquid that glinted in the early morning sunlight. They suddenly looked ashen, as if a receding tide had sucked all the blood from their faces, exposing a network of livid lines and wrinkles.

A dense black cloud started to roll up the mountainside. It was a black cloud of men, several hundred Chinese men, all from the dozen or so tents that made up the camp. They came brandishing shovels, hammers, pickaxes, rock drills, axes and sticks. They brought the brazier shovels and the ladles too. Anything that could be moved, they brought with them. The black cloud coalesced from scattered puffs of vapour, gathering speed and momentum as it surged up the slope and arrived at the foremen's tent.

Ah-Lam was first on the scene. He was holding a knife which he had grabbed from the cook—one used for peeling potatoes and cutting up cabbage. He had torn his trousers running here and the tatters flapped in the wind like the wings of a sparrow hawk.

“You motherfucker,” he raged at the foreman. “We gave years of our lives for you, and now you think you can get rid of us just like that.”
Ah-Lam grabbed hold of the foreman's jacket and lunged at him with the knife. The foreman dodged and Ah-Lam deflected, missed his footing and tumbled down the slope, coming to rest against a sapling. The tears in Ah-Lam's trousers caught on the branches and he had to make several attempts to stand upright. A trouser leg ripped off in the process, leaving him with one bare leg. His hair stood up like wire bristles and, his eyes blazing and almost starting from his head, he launched himself into a new attack.

Just as he was raising his knife to bring it down on the foreman's head, he glimpsed, out of the corner of his eye, something which leapt, pantherlike, from the crowd of men. It seized his arm. Ah-Lam saw it was Ah-Fat, and his aim faltered—but too late to stop the knife on its ferocious plunge downwards.

Ah-Fat felt a smack on the face and shut his eyes involuntarily. When he opened them again, it was to see a bright red duck egg suspended over his head. After a few moments, he realized it was the sun. Gradually his vision cleared and he looked at the trees and the men standing around him. They seemed to be slowly spinning, each branch and leaf and face coloured in a single hue—the vermilion red of the print in his school books.

There were shouts of “Ah-Fat, Ah-Fat!” Some of the men rushed to pull Ah-Fat to his feet, others made to grab the foremen.

“Don't move! Or I'll blast you with this!” Ah-Fat leaned against a tree trunk, holding the bottle of Yellow Water in his hand. The men froze, and the shouts died in their throats, reduced to astonished gasps.

“It's the Pacific Railroad Company who took this decision. What's the point of killing these three? It'll take us a month or more to walk back to the city, and if we don't get supplies, we'll all starve. We'll keep two of them here and send the third down the mountain to cable for supplies. If no supplies turn up, then we'll keep them pri—”

Ah-Fat crumpled to the ground before he finished talking.

Three days later, the supply team arrived in the camp heavily laden with sacks. There were eighty rice sheets for every navvy. Carrying the food sacks and tools over their shoulders, the motley crowd of men trailed like yellow
ants down through the autumnal forests, at the start of the long trek through the wilderness to the city.

Ah-Fat dozed fitfully on the back of the foreman's horse. His wound was long and deep—it stretched from his left temple to the right side of his mouth. He was capable of walking but the foreman insisted that he ride pillion on his horse—at least as far as the major road.

“You nearly took my life, but you nearly lost your life to save me, so that makes things even and we're quits,” said the foreman and asked the record-keeper to translate.

“What's his name?” Ah-Fat asked the record-keeper. He could only speak through one side of his mouth and his words came out faint and fuzzy.

“Rick Henderson.”

When they parted, the foreman took a walking stick out of his baggage and gave it to Ah-Fat. It had been made by a Redskin and was of hardwood, with a grinning eagle carved at the top. The foreman patted Ah-Fat's shoulder. “Maybe we'll meet again, kid.” Ah-Fat got down, holding the walking stick, and felt the weakness in his legs.

I hope I never set eyes on you again, was what he thought to himself. But he did not say it. Instead he said: “Maybe, Rick, maybe.”

Ah-Fat began to walk but he had not gone far when he heard the clopping of hooves behind him. The foreman was back again.

“Nitroglycerine is kept under lock and key. How did you get hold of it?” he asked.

Ah-Fat laughed. His lips were thickly swollen and the laugh twisted his features into a savage grin.

“That was horse piss. Your horse.”

As Ah-Fat made his way through the almost uninhabited forests towards the city, carrying on his back one long cloth bag and a smaller round one, he had no idea that the last spike had been driven into the railroad sleepers in a little town called Craigellachie. At long last, the Pacific Railroad had joined up with the Central and Eastern Railroads, creating a great artery snaking across the chest of the country. Lavish celebratory banquets were taking place, to the popping of champagne corks, and gentlemen in black
tuxedos shouted and laughed in between clinking wineglasses. Newspapers and magazines flew off the printing presses, carrying photographs and news reports on their front pages.

But not a single photograph or news report made mention of the

Chinese navvies who built the railroad.

That was something else Ah-Fat did not know.

Ah-Sing got up early in the morning and, before opening up the store, shouted to the boy to come and hang up the lanterns. They had been hung up last New Year and then been put away in the attic in the intervening months. They were dusty and the boy took off his apron and gave them a rub, revealing gold lettering underneath: “Years of Plenty” on one, and “Everlasting Peace” on the other. He was too short to hang them on the nails on the wall even when he stood on a stool, so he fetched a bamboo cane and lifted them up onto the nails. A tenuous air of good cheer filtered grudgingly through the door and windows and into the street outside.

The boy shook out his apron and the air filled with clouds of grey dust.

“Uncle Ah-Sing, how much New Year stuff do you want me to get today?”

The boy was referring to gift boxes of snacks such as sesame and green bean cakes and lotus crisp, with a festive red paper cover stuck on top. Ah-Sing bought these in from the cake shop. He did not stock them or make them himself.

Ah-Sing counted up on his fingers. “Five boxes,” he said. “Just five, each kind.”

The boy was startled. “Five?” he queried. “Will that be enough for the New Year festival?” “If we sell 'em all, then you can go and light incense before your mother's picture!” said his boss. “Haven't you seen the railroad navvies are back and the streets are full of them? They haven't even got rice to eat. How can they afford cakes?”

Ah-Sing watched the boy clopping off down the street, two large baskets slung from the ends of his carrying pole. Then he went back inside and opened the shop, laying the goods out on display. He looked up at the sky. A thick cloud pressed down so low, it was almost as if he could put up his hand and tweak one corner. Leaden skies like this meant snow, he knew,
and it would come down with a whoosh just as soon as the wind blew an opening in the cloud. The snow might tip down for the duration of a day, or a season. You never knew.

On a cold day like this, no one would get up at such an early hour to come to his store. There was no hurry.

The truth was that it was a long time since he had had any fresh food. By the last month of the old year, fruit and vegetables were long gone, except for a few apples he had stored since the autumn, now so dried up, they were smaller than tangerines and as wrinkly as an old woman's face. There were a few South China delicacies like dried bamboo shoots which he got in last autumn too, but they had not sold either. Even the cigarettes and tea which always sold well had gradually stopped moving off the shelves. At least the tea leaves were packed in foil in wooden boxes and would keep for a year or so. To prevent the tobacco from going mouldy Ah-Sing wrapped it in cloth bags and put it in sacks of rice which absorbed any moisture.

Business was going from bad to worse.

The Pacific Railroad had taken five years to build, stretching farther and farther into the interior. Before it had time to begin carrying goods and people, the trash it created began to surge towards the city—an army of unemployed for which absolutely no preparations had been made. They appeared overnight on the streets of Victoria's Chinatown and scurried hither and thither like rats hunting for a corner to take shelter, searching for food and warmth in the chinks left between one man and the next.

Things were constantly being pilfered from Ah-Sing's shop: an egg, a cucumber, a bag of rice, a potato, even a pack of needles and thread. So Ah-Sing moved all the goods displayed at the entrance back inside the shop. Then he locked the side door and back door and kept just one side of the double front door open. That way, everyone who came into the shop had to pass in front of his eyes. Even so, things kept disappearing. He simply did not see how these pilferers could use such seamless sleight-ofhand tricks. What he did not understand was that a hungry man could learn tricks in one day that someone with a full belly would never learn in a lifetime.

In recent years, the city had found itself with more and more mouths to feed, and less and less to feed them with. If you had had a full plate of food before, now you only had half. If you had only had half a plate before, now you only had a few crumbs. If you had had a few crumbs before, now you did not have a single one. The city's inhabitants believed that it was the Chinamen with the pigtails hanging down from the back of their heads that had brought this bad luck upon them. The newspapers explained that it was the fault of the Chinamen that everyone only had half the amount of food on their plates, so a campaign was launched to prohibit doing business with them. A few young hotheads even noted the names of people who continued to buy from the Chinamen and scrawled a sign on their walls with whitewash during the night. Anyone marked with such a sign met scowls in the street or suddenly found themselves being elbowed out in business deals with other White men. Little by little, Ah-Sing's
yeung fan
customers dropped off.

Today, Ah-Sing had scarcely finished arranging the baskets of produce when the first customer came in.

He was squatting down at his work and at first only saw a pair of feet. He could tell straightaway that this was a navvy from the railroad. He had on a pair of boots so worn that the uppers were coming away from the soles but the toecaps looked almost new because metal strips had been nailed over them. The trouser legs were covered in burn holes, where sparks from a fire had scorched the material. Ah-Sing gradually raised his eyes to the man's body. He was wearing a heavily patched, double-fronted jacket. The stitches around the patches were so crude that they looked like crawling maggots. He had a bag slung over each shoulder, a long one and a smaller round one of the sort used to carry foodstuffs on long journeys. This one looked saggy. The long sack had something solid packed into it but it was impossible to tell exactly what. Then he saw the man's face. He dropped the rice wine bottle he was holding and it shattered on the floor.

The man had a scar that stretched from his left eyebrow to the right side of his mouth. Although the scar no longer wept pus, it had not healed over either. The winter wind had dried it to a desiccated gash which looked like the furrow of a newly ploughed field.

“Give me a sup of porridge,” said the man. “I haven't eaten for a day.” He spoke gently, even with a slight smile. But the scar refused to cooperate with the expression on his face. The smile and the scar kept falling out, and the scar turned his gentle smile into a sombre grimace.

The hand which Ah-Sing was using to collect the fragments of glass began to tremble. “You want porridge?! You can kiss my arse! ” was what he wanted to say. He had seen too many beggars in Chinatown. But this one was different and he did not dare give him the brush-off. Instead he stammered out: “Fi … Fisgard Street, at the Chi … Chinese Benevolent Association, they'll see to you. Have you, have you paid your dues?” Ah-Sing knew that every Chinese who stepped ashore at Victoria paid two dollars towards the Association fees.