Sarah Canary Read online

  There had been just enough that was odd about Miss Dixon’s story, however she tried to slide quickly over it, to attract a second set of responses. The detective left these letters behind. Chin picked them up off the little marble end table and began to read them.

  A Mrs Bastion forwarded a small newspaper clipping from Tenino, Washington, where a train had struck a creature, first assumed to be an Indian, knocking it senseless. The engineer had stopped the train and found the body of an extremely large, extremely hairy manlike beast, still alive but damaged about the skull. Jacko, they were calling him. Jacko had recovered consciousness and was being shipped to Chicago for further examinations and possible exhibition.

  A Mrs Farrell wrote that, in 1869 during the last solar eclipse, she and her husband had seen a small but exceedingly bright point near the limits of the corona, just below the circle of the moon and in the general area of the anvil-shaped protuberance. They had assumed it was a star, but no star in that position can be seen by the naked eye. She now believed it was a ship from another world. She had just finished reading 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, and she begged Miss Dixon to remember that the world was full of possibilities.

  An unsigned letter told Miss Dixon that a funeral home in Seattle had opened its doors one morning to find that a coffin had been left on the porch. They tried to bring it inside, but it was unusually heavy. Upon prying it open, they found the statue of a woman inside, or perhaps a real woman’s body that had been turned into stone. The woman, the letter said, was smiling.

  Chin thought that Miss Dixon’s interest in Sarah Canary had waned and he surprised himself by taking this a little personally. Miss Dixon spent her days now at the Lydia Palmer trial and came home from each session in a fine rage. Chin couldn’t figure out if this was because of the way the trial was going or because the suffragists had found Miss Dixon too scandalous to sit with them.

  ‘You’d think he was a saint,’ Miss Dixon said. ‘The way people talk about him. We love dead people. As soon as they die, we start loving them.’

  ‘Not all of them,’ said B.J.

  Miss Dixon looked at him. ‘Oh, well,’ she agreed. ‘Some people are never dead enough.’ Miss Palmer had proved to be an excellent witness, remembering nothing about the murder and fainting four times under cross-examination. But public opinion was against her. Her fate was far from assured.

  Chin was spending his days delivering laundered clothes to white demons on Nob Hill. Usually he let B.J. come with him, not up to the doors, which would have required too much explanation, but along on the deliveries. B.J. spent his nights at the Occidental, where Miss Dixon was paying for his room. Miss Dixon certainly did not need Chin. B.J. was fine. Chin told himself, self-pityingly, that he was clearly no help to Sarah Canary either. He was a free man again. He should go somewhere. No one would miss him.

  Chin told himself that Sarah Canary was gone for good. Gone for good. It was a peculiar phrase full of Caucasian optimism. Chin had done his best for Sarah Canary, but his best had included striking her, losing her repeatedly, and, at the very end, choosing Miss Dixon instead. Wherever Sarah Canary was, surely she had found someone more worthy.

  It was time for Chin to move forward along the straight line of his life. It was time for him to marry. It was time for him to return home and prove to his mother that he had not died in Golden Mountain, no matter how many times she had heard otherwise. He put aside the notes from the readers of the El Camino Real and explained this to Miss Dixon. She was sitting in the stuffed chair, one white hand spread out on the chair arm where Sarah Canary had sat. She wore a dress the color of plums. Chin would not look at her face. He stared at her hand, which whitened as she gripped the chair arm. Chin told her that he would not go, of course, until he could find a happy situation for B.J. He would not go if the Pinkerton detective returned any word, any word at all, about Sarah Canary. The room was filled with the smell of gardenias sent to Miss Dixon by some admirer.

  ‘I am Chinese,’ Chin pointed out. Could Miss Dixon deny it? The Chinese did not let go of their dead the way Indians did. In fact, Confucianism subordinated the living to the dead as surely as it subordinated the individual to the group and the wife to the husband. The Chinese spoke the names of their ancestors forever.

  They did not let go of their living families either, not like the Caucasians, making permanent moves to new homes on the other side of oceans. Chin believed that white people loved their parents, but he wasn’t sure they loved them as much as Chinese people did. Chin said none of this. ‘I cannot stop being Chinese. When I am home, I may even take the Imperial Examinations.’

  Miss Dixon said she understood. Miss Dixon understood nothing. What did she know of the sacrifices a family made so that a son could study for the examinations? How could she know of the success that family had every right to expect in return?

  Miss Dixon said there would be a verdict in the Lydia Palmer case in a day or two. She, in fact, was just about to purchase a train ticket to New York. She was, she reminded Chin, a forward-looking person. The episode with the tiger had brought her some small attention. It would not last forever. The condition of women had not improved while she sat idly in the Occidental Hotel. The time had come to start her new lecture series.

  Chin was surprised. ‘I thought you were staying. I thought you were giving lectures here.’

  ‘No, not on the West Coast,’ said Miss Dixon. ‘The West Coast has not really worked out for me.’

  Her face was rather drawn. B.J. watched her anxiously. ‘I will marry you, Miss Dixon,’ he offered, and she said how very kind of him, but it really wasn’t necessary. She excused herself to go to her room and lie down. The exertions of the prosecuting attorneys! Just watching them had made Miss Dixon quite tired.

  ‘I will be coming back, of course,’ Chin said. He was knotted with unexpected unhappiness. ‘I am only going for a visit to China. I will come and see you when I get back.’

  ‘Won’t that be nice?’ said Miss Dixon. ‘Of course, if you pass the examinations, you will be too important to leave, won’t you? I wish there were a country I could go to and be important. I wish it were that simple for me.’ She left the room quickly, turning once at the door, but careful to keep her face shadowed. ‘Good-bye, Mr Chin. I wish you the best of luck.’

  ‘Did I tell you about the exhibit called the Happy Family?’ B.J. asked Chin when the door had closed. ‘At Woodward’s Gardens?’

  ‘No,’ said Chin.

  ‘It was a bunch of different kinds of animals all in one cage together. Monkeys, two bear cubs, dogs, pigs, peccaries. The bulletin board said the bear cubs were orphans who’d been suckled by a pointer bitch and that they still lived with their foster mother.’

  ‘It sounds like something you would like,’ Chin said, surprising himself by letting a white man know how well Chin understood him.

  ‘I didn’t, though,’ said B.J.’ ‘The bears cuffed the dogs around. Even their mother. The monkeys fought with the pigs and with the dogs and with the other monkeys. I wished they all had their own cages.’

  His adventures were over. Chin rejoiced in the straight, simple line his life had become. How glad he was to be free of complications and responsibilities. How could he ever miss Sarah Canary, who hadn’t spoken a word to him, or done him one kindness, but had involved him, again and again, in messiness, and even peril? Did you miss spending nights in jail and being forced to hang men in the morning? Did you miss red-faced white men shouting ‘Whoo-oo-ee?’ from hidden rooms? Did you miss Indians who overturned your canoe and swam away and left you to drown? Were you crazy?

  Chin returned to his narrow bed in Tangrenbu. He lay upon it, listening to the gossip and complaints of the men all about him. There was an argument over the debaucheries of the Manchu Emperor. There was an argument over the possible medicinal uses of tiger claws. There was an emptiness inside Chin that he tried to fill with sleep.

  He tried not to hear the calls of slave girls. In
the safety of Tangrenbu, his prolonged celibacy became physically painful. His dreams were erotic and unsatisfying. He needed desperately to be touched. It was harder and harder to think about anything else. Late at night he was awakened by Wong Woon. Wong Woon had just shaved his forehead. It glimmered in the darkness like a new moon. Chin remembered vividly how Miss Dixon had looked at him when he had his own forehead shaved. ‘You look so Chinese,’ she had said in a tone that sounded startled and unhappy.

  ‘A white demon has come,’ Wong Woon told him. ‘He is looking for you.’

  Chin rose, cleaning his eyelids with his fingers. B.J. stood, shivering, coatless at the door. His light hair blew about his ears.

  ‘It’s Miss Dixon, Chin,’ he said. He was breathless, as if he’d been running.

  ‘Is it Harold?’

  ‘No, it’s Miss Dixon.’ B.J. paused. ‘I didn’t see Harold. I guess he could have been there,’ he admitted. B.J. took two noisy breaths. ‘The verdict on Lydia Palmer came in this afternoon while we were at the hotel. It was for acquittal.’

  ‘Yes?’ said Chin. ‘Isn’t that what Miss Dixon wanted?’

  ‘Miss Palmer was released. She came to see Miss Dixon at the Occidental. They were both happy.’

  ‘What is it, B.J.?’ Chin asked. ‘Why are you here?’

  ‘Lots of men were unhappy,’ B.J. said. ‘They’re outside the hotel. Some of them say they are going inside. Chin, there are lots of them. Maybe fifty.’

  ‘You stay here.’ Chin’s uncle had risen and stood at his shoulder slightly behind him. He spoke in Cantonese. ‘What is this to you? What can you do?’

  ‘Where are the police?’ Chin asked B.J. B.J. was always getting sizes wrong. Probably there weren’t fifty men. Probably there were ten. Probably there were two.

  ‘Miss Dixon sent me for the police. They said they won’t come. They said it looks too dangerous.’

  Chin reached for his coat. ‘They will kill you,’ Chin’s uncle told him. ‘If the police will not come to save a white demoness, who do you think will come to save you?’ Chin joined B.J. in the street. They began to walk. The bodies of plucked chickens hung by their legs in a store window. Twisted, candied roots gleamed on the shelves beneath.

  They hurried past the opening to the Devil’s Kitchen. An addict watched them incuriously through the opium ghosts in his eyes. ‘What can you do?’ his uncle shouted after him, switching to English in his last appeal.

  ‘What will we do, Chin?’ B.J. asked.

  What would they do? ‘We will be there,’ said Chin.

  ‘I was doing that,’ B.J. told him. ‘It wasn’t helping.’

  Chin began to walk faster. Hurrying after B.J. over streets or through forests, with no particular plan, to help imperiled white women had become the pattern of his life. He felt a curious sort of joy. He was concerned about Miss Dixon, of course. But the emptiness inside him was gone. He had been useful to Miss Dixon before. Perhaps it would be his fate to be useful again.

  They left Tangrenbu. The stars dimmed. The streetlights brightened. They walked from one circle of light through darkness to the next. The streetlights reflected from the shop windows, double images of astounding brightness. The closer they got to Montgomery Street, the more men they saw, all going in the same direction they were. Chin and B.J. turned a corner. B.J. had indeed been mistaken about the size of the crowd. There weren’t fifty men. There were hundreds. They loitered at the edges of the block, talking in small groups, sitting, smoking and drinking, on the fountains and the pavement.

  ‘If she was a man, she would have been hanged,’ one of them was saying, a tall, gaunt man. His voice was not strident, but reasonable, heartfelt, and persuasive. He paused to blow clouds of cigar smoke from his mouth above the heads of his companions. ‘That’s all I’m saying. A woman out here can get away with murder. And now they all know it. What’s to stop the next one?’

  A second man spoke. Chin couldn’t see him. ‘Open season on men. That’s what the courts said today. Any one of us can be shot with absolute impunity.’

  ‘All the same, you wouldn’t have wanted to see a woman hang,’ a third man answered. ‘What else could the jury do? It’s too horrible to think of.’

  ‘I’m thinking of it,’ the first man said. ‘It’s not so horrible. They hang women in their shifts.’

  A man down the block laughed suddenly and just as suddenly stopped. Someone broke a bottle against a lamppost. Chin heard the glass shatter.

  Chin and B.J. walked more slowly. The closer to the hotel entrance they came, and quieter it got. The men here were the participants. They had not come to watch. They were not sitting or climbing the fountains or discussing the case. They stood outside the hotel in a single unit, like a leaderless army, like an ocean, swelling and spilling over at the sides. Chin could smell liquor and gunpowder and anger. He kept his eyes on the backs of B.J.’s shoes, following B.J. closely. He looked at no one’s face.

  A small group began to smash the glass door to the hotel. Chin looked up at the sound. The group was thorough, methodical, and rhythmical. Glass fell to the pavement in sheets and broke again there. No one came to stop these men. The hotel lobby was empty. None of the hotel staff could be seen.

  Chin was cold with fear. His sense of contentment had vanished. He had iced over gradually as he walked, his face, his hands, his feet, until he was so stiff that the walking became difficult. Why had he come? What could he do? He was a frozen man, a man who might break. He stayed very close to B.J. He was the invisible frozen Chinese servant.

  The mob surged toward the hotel. ‘There she is!’ someone called. ‘There she is!’ The mob stopped moving. Above them, on the second story, a woman had appeared. She opened the window to her room, leaned out. She was veiled, but Chin knew her. Adelaide Dixon started to speak. ‘Listen to me,’ she said. The men stepped back and looked up. ‘Are you all listening to me?’

  She was so brave, clearly illumined in the window, masquerading as Lydia Palmer. This was just what Chin would expect of Miss Dixon. Chin thought he had never seen anyone so brave. Or so beautiful. ‘I have a gun,’ she said, although her hands were on the window frame and held nothing.

  ‘You always do!’ one man shouted. ‘How many of us do you think you can get when it takes you three bullets to kill a man?’

  ‘It was your law,’ she said. ‘It was your judge and your jury. God knows, it’s never been ours.’

  Inside the hotel, through the empty hole of a doorway, Chin could see a second veiled woman creeping down the mahogany stairs. He held his breath and hoped no one else was looking. The woman stopped in the shadows of the landing. ‘There she is!’ a man behind Chin shouted.

  ‘What is the value of a woman’s heart?’ Miss Dixon called desperately from her window. The woman on the stairs was still. But the man behind Chin was pointing at neither of them. ‘Back here!’ he called excitedly. ‘She’s back here!’ Chin stretched to see over the white men’s heads. He was too short. He jumped once and still saw nothing but the backs and necks of white men.

  ‘Chin,’ said B.J., seizing his shoulder. ‘It’s Sarah Canary.’

  ‘Are you sure?’ Chin asked B.J.

  ‘She’s bigger,’ said B.J. ‘Chin, she’s so big.’

  The men were surging again, away from the hotel now, carrying Chin with them. ‘It’s not the right woman,’ Chin told the man on his left. The man turned to look at him. ‘It’s not Miss Palmer. Leave her alone.’

  The white men would not let him stop moving. B.J.’s hand tightened on his shoulder, trying to stay with him. ‘B.J.!’ Chin called. It was an appeal for help. He twisted around.

  There was a horrible look on B.J.’s face. Chin recognized the look, although it took him a moment. It made him think of the mermaid back in Burke’s cabin, but it was not the mermaid’s look. It was the look B.J. had worn when B.J. had seen the mermaid. Chin turned back, wondering why B.J. wore this face now, when he had just seen Sarah Canary. ‘He has a gun,’
B.J. said.

  Chin saw it, too. A man near them was pointing a gun at the window of the Occidental Hotel. Chin followed the line of the barrel. He tried to reach for the gun but couldn’t. He could not get to the man.

  ‘Adelaide!’ Chin shouted her name so that everyone turned to him. He became visible all at once. ‘Adelaide! Get down!’ he cried. There was one shot, a sound like a branch snapping in two. Adelaide disappeared into her room. Chin looked back to the gun. The men around him moved away. The barrel was pointing at him. Chin could see straight into its empty mouth.

  B.J.’s hand pulled him back as B.J. pushed past. ‘Don’t listen to it, Chin,’ said B.J., stepping in front of him. ‘Guns always say that.’ And Chin would swear, Chin would always remember it this way, that he heard the second gunshot only after B.J. fell.

  B.J. lay in a heap at Chin’s feet. Chin knelt beside him, pulled B.J. into his lap. Blood fell out of B.J.’s chest. Chin pressed his hand over the hole. ‘Don’t die for me, B.J.,’ he said, but when had B.J. ever done what he was told?

  ‘It was an accident,’ he heard a man say. ‘I only meant to frighten the woman. I only meant to hit the Chinaman.’ The man’s voice was thick and liquored. Chin’s hand rose and fell with B.J.’s chest. His palm was filled with warm blood. Blood seeped out around Chin’s hand. He couldn’t stop it. He couldn’t hold B.J. together. B.J. stared at him.

  ‘The police are coming,’ someone told Chin. Chin did not look up to see who. The pant legs of white men were all about him, like a forest of trees. Chin wanted to ask B.J. if he could remember now the carp who became a dragon by leaping the Dragon’s Gate. Chin wanted to tell B.J. that this was what B.J. was doing. But he wasn’t sure it was true and he wouldn’t say good-bye to B.J. with a lie. Chin was crying too hard to speak anyway.