Gold Mountain Blues (50 page)

But it was not Six Fingers who disembarked that day. It was Kam Ho.

He was the last off the boat. He staggered under the weight of a carrying pole with two enormous suitcases, inching his way along like an ant burdened with a lump of mud. Ah-Fat nearly buckled at the knees with astonishment.

“What's happened to your mother?”

“Mum said I had to come because Kam Shan's left and you need help.”

“Was that your granny's idea?” asked Ah-Fat, seizing his son by the front of his jacket.

“No, it wasn't. Granny told Mum to come too but Mum said that if she came it would add to your expenses, and she wouldn't be able to pull her weight. I didn't want to come. It was Mum who insisted on buying the ticket for me.”

As Kam Ho stammered out his explanation, he saw Ah-Fat's face fall. He knew then that his dad did not want him here. He had stumbled in his very first steps in Gold Mountain. How many steps did he have to take before he could stand tall and proud in his father's eyes? Kam Ho walked slower and slower, bent ever lower under his burden, as if to hide in his own shadow.

“What are you crying for? I haven't done anything to hurt you.”

Ah-Fat frowned in distaste at the sight of his son's tangled, filthy hair and the dried-up puke on the front of his jacket from the long sea journey.

He wondered how on earth his two sons had turned out so different from one another.

“This is it.”

Ah-Fat jumped down from the cart, handed the blue bundle to Kam Ho and walked towards to the house. It was big, two storeys, with a garden in front. Kam Ho stood outside the iron gate looking into the garden. He could not see the front door, only three porches. The midday sun beat down, bleaching everything white. The three porches stood out like black holes against the white glare. When Kam Ho thought about who lived in these black holes, a cold shiver ran down his spine in spite of the heat of the sun.

“I don't want to go, Dad! I want to stay at home and work on the farm with you” was what he wanted to say.

He had held the words back from the moment they left home. Now they had turned to stone in his mouth and he was not able to utter them.

When Ah-Fat first raised the idea, he did so gently.

“The Hendersons' maid has gone back to England to get married, and they can't find anyone to help out. Mrs. Henderson is not a well woman, and she needs a servant,” he had told Kam Shan.

“Mr. Henderson is a friend I met when I was building the railroad. He's helped me and your uncle Ah-Lam a lot. If it wasn't for him, I would never have had the money to buy all this land.”

It was only after Ah-Fat had talked his way around the subject of the Hendersons for some time that Kam Ho finally caught on. His father wanted him to go and be their houseboy, the way that Ah-Choi and Ah-Yuet were servants. Mr. Henderson had saved his father's skin and he could not turn him down now.

The shock of this realization stuck like grains of uncooked rice in Kam Ho's throat, making it difficult to breathe. When he could speak again, he protested: “But I've never cooked. I don't even know how to light the stove.”

“Mrs. Henderson will teach you.”

“But I don't understand the
yeung fan
s' language!”

“You'll pick it up.”

“But.…”

Gradually his father's patience wore thin. His eyebrows drew together in a frown and his scar thickened. “I can't imagine why your mother sent you out here!”

Kam Ho shut his mouth then. Ah-Fat had touched a nerve, one that remained raw for years. The boat that brought him should have been carrying his mother, who could make life comfortable for his father as he got older. That comfort had been snatched away by his arrival, even though he had not wanted to come. He, Kam Ho, would never be able to redeem himself as long as he lived.

During that morning's journey, Kam Ho slumped listlessly over his bag of belongings. He was silent. He could not speak—his eyes brimmed with tears and he knew that if he opened his mouth to speak, the tears would flow. He had been in Gold Mountain for four days and had seen nothing and no one except for his father and their farm. Gold Mountain was a bottomless pit and his father was the lifeline that hung down over the edge. Without him, Kam Ho would be lost in this pitch-black hole and never see the light of day again. But today, his father demanded that he leave that one familiar face and walk through a stranger's door, to wait on a
yeung fan
woman. He had no idea if he would be able to stomach the food she ate, or sleep in the bed she provided. Worst of all, he did not know a word of her language.

“When you were at home, you had servants to wait on you. Now you're going to a
yeung fan
house to wait on them. Don't put on any ‘young master' airs. Any kind of noises—farting, burping, coughing—you do them out of earshot. At mealtimes, if she doesn't ask you to eat with them, then you eat in the kitchen. Wash your feet every night before going to bed. There's a piece of salt fish in the bag, so if you don't like their cooking, you can eat this with it.

“You'll work six days a week and have one day's rest. When you've cooked the Saturday dinner, you can go. I'll come and pick you up and bring you back first thing Monday morning.

“You'll get one dollar twenty-five a day, including your day off, that's thirty-seven dollars fifty a month. All your board is covered, so you should be able to earn quite a bit in a year.”

As he pushed open the iron gate and walked in through the middle porch, Ah-Fat suddenly put his arm round his son's shoulder. Kam Ho was so skinny that his bones dug into Ah-Fat's hand. Kam Ho heard his father's voice crack a little as he said: “There's a lot of money in Gold Mountain, and one dollar is equal to several dollars when you send it home. If you and I can keep this up for a few years, we can clear the debts from the
diulau
.”

His father knocked on the door and a dog barked on the other side so furiously the sound made the windows and door frames rattle. The door opened a crack and a woman's face appeared. She shut the door and shouted at the dog. The dog gave an answering bark. Dog and woman continued this exchange of shout and bark until finally the dog admitted defeat and quieted down. At that, the woman opened the door.

She was tall and lanky with a pallid complexion and pale eyes. She was so colourless, in fact, she looked as though she had been steeped in water for days until all the flavour had drained out of her. She was wearing tight-fitting top and a floor-length skirt. When she turned around, Kam Ho quickly shut his eyes in case her waist snapped.

The woman and his dad exchanged a few words but Kam Ho understood nothing. He shrank, trembling, against his father. He gripped his bag as if it were the only thing that held him together.

“Mrs. Henderson asked how old you are. I said fifteen, but she doesn't believe me. She thinks you only look about ten,” Ah-Fat explained.

“Only bloody ten!” Kam Ho swore, but silently. It was the rudest utterance he was capable of.

“Mrs. Henderson asks if you have any questions.”

“I'm not going to make her bed for her, no way,” said Kam Ho after a long moment's thought.

His father hooted with laughter. Then turned back to the woman and said, with a straight face: “My son says he doesn't know how to make beds.”

Mrs. Henderson frowned. “From what Rick says, your boy doesn't know how to do anything. Making beds is the simplest task, but of course I'll teach him.”

His dad ruffled Kam Ho's hair and was gone, taking that protective shadow with him and leaving Kam Ho exposed to the woman's gaze. When Kam Ho turned to look, his father had already jumped onto the cart. “Saturday, Dad, as early as.…” he said, but the words were snatched away by the wind. The horse was already clip-clopping down the street.

Kam Ho threw down his bag and leaned against the door frame, sobbing.

The tears, so long suppressed that they felt like grit in his eyes, fell heavily to the floor. His father was gone and he had no sky to shelter him or earth to hold him up. How was he going to face the world?

The woman stood in the doorway, watching him silently. The dog came out and, extending a blood-red tongue, began to lick the salty tears from his jacket.

“Just a year, Dad, that's what you said,” Kam Ho said to himself.

It was something he was to repeat to himself countless times in the days to come.

Until finally, he stopped believing it.

“E … gg.”

Mrs. Henderson took an egg from the basket on the table, held it up for Kam Ho and pronounced the word for him.

She put the egg back and made a circular motion with her two hands in the air, enunciating:

“Ca … ke.”

Once she had done this, she pointed to a photograph of Mr. Henderson on the side table, then to her mouth to indicate eating.

Kam Ho had been at the Hendersons' for two weeks, and this was the method Mrs. Henderson had adopted for speaking to him. He did not understand in the beginning, and he did not understand now. When he first arrived, his inability to understand was like a great black cowl; now, though the cowl was still in place, glimmers of light seeped through here and there.

He understood that Mrs. Henderson wanted to make her husband a fried egg. Actually, what she really wanted was to make him a cake, a birthday cake.

Mrs. Henderson took an egg, tapped it lightly on the edge of the bowl until the yolk and the white slipped glistening out of the shell. She did the same with the second. The yolk of the third egg was broken and she threw it into the rubbish bin. She picked up the fourth egg, then suddenly changed her mind. Putting it back in the basket, she took Kam Ho's hand and pronounced slowly: “You do it.”

Kam Ho guessed that she wanted him to do as she had done. He took hold of an egg and cracked it on the edge of the bowl. The contents shot into the bowl, taking with them some of the eggshell. With the second, he knew to tap it lightly. The yolk and the white slid into the bowl. When it came to the third, he tapped it lightly and threw it into the rubbish bin.

Mrs. Henderson started, then burst out laughing. She laughed so hard that her forehead came up in a bump.

Mrs. Henderson was severely arthritic, and the pain was so bad that it seemed to crawl through every artery and vein of her body. At night when she went to sleep, it was in her fingers, but when she got up in the morning, the pain had travelled to her shoulders. When she drank her coffee, the pain was down in her back and when she stood up, it was in her knees. Her face usually bore a frown of pain and she rarely smiled. But since Kam Ho had come to live with them, she had laughed several times—laughed until she cried.

The first time was the day of Kam Ho's arrival. In the afternoon, she decided to take him through the sweeping of the sitting room and the kitchen. She took a feather duster and showed him how to pass it over the tables and walls. When they got as far as the dining table, Kam Ho suddenly saw something sticking out of the wall next to it, and gave it a poke. There was a click and the room flooded with light. Kam Ho gave a shocked cry and sat down on the floor, covering his ears with his hands. She realized that the boy had never seen a high-wattage electric light before. He thought he had been struck by lightning. In Hoi Ping, they still used oil lamps and even in his New Westminster house, his father only had two ten-watt light bulbs, a bit brighter than oil lamps but still nowhere near as bright as these.

The next morning, when Mr. Henderson was in the bathroom brushing his teeth and Kam Ho was boiling water in the kitchen, there was a sudden shrieking from the living room. After much searching, Kam Ho discovered
the noise was coming from a black box on the side table. Mr. Henderson came running out of the bathroom with the toothbrush sticking out of his froth-covered mouth, and gestured to the black box. Kam Ho bundled up a tablecloth and muffled the box as best he could. It rang more quietly but he could still hear it. So he fetched cushions from the sofa and pressed them on top of the box. Still it rang. Mr. Henderson related the incident to his wife at breakfast and she laughed until she shook. Poor child, she said, he's never seen a telephone. How come his father never told him about telephones?

When she finally stopped laughing, and wiped the tears from her eyes, she picked the cracked egg out of the rubbish and brought it back to the table. As she broke it into the bowl, she could not suppress a sigh. Oh Lord, how often must I explain to this Mongol boy that you don't throw every third egg away? she wondered.

Mrs. Henderson took a wooden spoon and lightly beat the eggs in the bowl, then gave the spoon to Kam Ho and made him do the same. He cut a comical figure, his shoulders hunched and his hands beating ferociously as if using a brickbat to smash a fly. It was the same every time he learned some new household skill—he learned to go through the motions but never seemed to understand why.

Mrs. Henderson watched as a tuft of hair on the back of his head bounced up and down in time with his movements. She suppressed a smile. It occurred to her that if she did not tell him to stop, this hare-brained Chinese boy would just carry on beating until he shattered the bowl. She looked for a semblance of expression on his bent face. It was as if a cloth were drawn taut over his features, masking them completely. In fact, his whole body seemed to be enveloped from top to bottom in an impenetrable suit of armour. She sometimes felt as if she wanted to pierce a hole in it, just to see what kind of blood would flow out.

But there was no need for that. On the first Saturday after his arrival, as he washed the vegetables in the kitchen, he began to look as if he was losing his wits. His ears quivered like those of a guard dog, straining to hear movement outside the front door. He was desperate for his father to turn up and take him home. Finally, she had found the chink in his armour— and it told her that he hated being at her house.