All the Flavors, page 8
At the end of the week the Chinamen were paid.
“This is not what I was promised,” said Lao Guan to the clerk. “This is not even as much as half of what my wages should be.”
“You are deducted for the food you eat and for your space in the tents. I’d show you the math if you can could that high.” The clerk gestured for Lao Guan to move away from the table. “Next!”
“Have they always done this?” Lao Guan asked San Long.
“Oh yeah. It’s always been that way. The amount they charge for food and sleep have already gone up three times this year.”
“But this means you’ll never be able to pay back your debt and save up a fortune to take home with you.”
“What else can you do?” San Long shrugged. “There’s no place to buy food within fifty miles of here. We’ll never be able to pay back the debt we owe them anyway, since they just raise the interest whenever it seems like someone is about to pay it all back. All we can do is to take the money that we do get and drink and gamble and spend it all on Annie and the other girls. When you are drunk and asleep you won’t be thinking about it.”
“They are playing a trick on us then,” said Lao Guan. “This is all a trap.”
“Hey,” said San Long, “it’s too late to cry about that now. This is what you get for believing those stories told about the Old Gold Mountain. Serves us right.”
Lao Guan went around and asked men to come and join him. He had a plan. They would run away into the mountains and go into hiding, and then make their way back to San Francisco.
“We’ll need to learn English and understand the ways of this land if we want to make our fortune. Staying here will only make us into slaves with nothing to call our own excepting mounting debts in the white men’s books.” Lao Guan looked at each man in the eyes, and he was so tall and imposing that the other men avoided looking back.
“But we’ll be breaking our contract and leaving our debts unpaid,” said Ah Yan. “We will be burdening our families and ancestors with shame. It is not Chinese to break one’s word.”
“We’ve already paid back the debt we owe these people twenty times and more. Why should we be faithful when they have not been honest with us? This is a land of trickery, and we must learn to become as tricky as the Americans.”
The men were still not convinced. Lao Guan decided to tell them the story of of Jie You, the Han Princess whose name meant “Dissolver of Sorrows.”
She was given away in marriage by the Martial Emperor to a barbarian king out in the Western Steppes, a thousand li from China, so that the barbarians would sell the Chinese the strong war horses that the Chinese army needed to defend the Empire.
“I hear that you are homesick,” wrote the Martial Emperior, “my precious daughter, and that you cannot swallow the rough uncooked meat of the foreigners, nor fall asleep on their beds made from the hairy hides of yaks and bears. I hear that the sandstorms have scarred your skin that was once as flawless as silk, and the deadly chill of the winters have darkened your eyes that were once bright as the moon. I hear that you call for home, and cry yourself to sleep. If any of this is true, then write to me and I shall send the whole army to bring you home. I cannot bear to think that you are suffering, my child, for you are the light of my old age, the solace of my soul.”
“Father and Emperor,” wrote the Princess. “What you have heard is true. But I know my duty, and you know yours. The Empire needs horses for the defense of the frontier against the Xiong Nu raids. How can you let the unhappiness of your daughter cause you to risk the death and suffering of your people at the hands of the invading barbarian hordes? You have named me wisely, and I will dissolve my sorrow to learn the happiness of my new home. I will learn to mix the rough meat with milk, and I will learn to sleep with a night shirt. I will learn to cover my face with a veil, and I will learn to keep warm by riding with my husband. Since I am in a foreign land, I will learn the foreigners’ ways. By becoming one of the barbarians I will become truly Chinese. Though I will never return to China, I will bring glory to you.”
“How can we be less wise or less manly than a young girl, even if she was a daughter of the Martial Emperor?” said Lao Guan. “If you truly want to bring glory to your ancestors and your families, then you must first become Americans.”
“What will the gods think of this?” asked San Long. “We will become outlaws. Aren’t we struggling against our fate? Some of us are not meant to have great fortunes, but only to work and starve — we are lucky to have what we have even now.”
“Wasn’t Lord Guan Yu once an outlaw? Didn’t he teach us that the gods only smile upon those who take fate into their own hands? Why should we settle for having nothing for the rest of our lives when we know that we have enough strength in our arms to blast a path through mountains and enough wit in our heads to survive an ocean with only our stories and laughter?”
“But how do you know we’ll find anything better if we run away?” asked Ay Yan. “What if we are caught? What if we are set upon by bandits? What if we find only more suffering and danger in the darkness out there, beyond the firelight of this camp?”
“I don’t know what will happen to us out there,” Lao Guan said. “All life is an experiment. But at the end of our lives we’d know that no man could do with our lives as he pleased except ourselves, and our triumphs and mistakes alike were our own.”
He stretched out his arms and described the circle of the horizon around them. Long clouds piled low in the sky to the west. “Though the land here does not smell of home, the sky here is wider and higher than I have ever known. Every day I learn names for things I did not know existed and perform feats that I did not know that I could do. Why should we fear to rise as high as we can and make new names for ourselves?”
In the dim firelight Lao Guan looked to the others to be as tall as a tree, and his long, slim eyes glinted like jewels set in his flame-colored face. The hearts of the Chinamen were suddenly filled with resolve and a yearning for something that they did not yet know the name for.
“You feel it?” asked Lao Guan. “You feel that lift in your heart? That lightness in your head? That is the taste of whiskey, the essence of America. We have been wrong to be drunk and asleep. We should be drunk and fighting.”
“To exchange the pure and tranquil pleasures that the native country offers even to the poor for the sterile enjoyments that well-being provides under a foreign sky; to flee the paternal hearth and the fields where one’s ancestors rest; to abandon the living and the dead to run after fortune — there is nothing that merits more praise in their eyes.”
– Alexis de Toqueville
Chicken Blood
The Idaho City Brass Band played “Finnegan’s Wake” at the insistence of Logan.
“There’s not enough noise,” he told them. “In China we’d have all the children of the village setting off firecrackers and fireworks for the whole day to chase off the greedy evil spirits. Here we have only enough firecrackers to last a few hours. We’ll need all the help you boys can give us to scare the evil sprits off.”
The men of the brass band, their bellies now full of sweet sticky rice buns filled with bean paste and hot and spicy dumplings, set to their appointed task with gusto. They had not played with as much spirit even for Independence Day.
All the rumors about the Chinese New Year celebration were true. The children’s pockets were filled sweets and jangling coins, and the men and women were laughing as they enjoyed the feast that had been laid out before them. They had to shout to make each other heard amidst the unending explosions of the firecrackers and the music blasting from the brass band.
Jack found Elsie among the other women in the vegetable garden. An open bonfire had been lit there so that the guests would be warm as they mingled and ate.
“I’m surprised at you,” Jack said to her. “I’d swear that I saw you take three servings of the dumplings. I thought you said you’d never touch the food of the Chinamen.”
“Thaddeus Seaver,” Elsie said severely. “I don’t know where you get such strange notions. It’s positively unchristian to behave as you suggest when your neighbors have opened up their houses to you and invited you to break bread with them in their feast. If I didn’t know better, I’d think you were the heathen here.”
“That’s my girl,” said Jack. “Though isn’t it time for you to start calling me Jack? Everyone else does now.”
“I’ll think about it after I’ve tried a piece of that sweet ginger,” Elsie said. She laughed, and Jack realized how much he missed hearing that sound since they moved here to Idaho City. “Did you know that the first boy I liked was named Jack?”
The other women laughed, and Jack laughed along with them.
Abruptly the brass band stopped playing. One by one the men stopped talking and turned to the door of the house. There, in the door, stood Sheriff Gaskins, who was looking apologetic and a little ashamed.
“Sorry, folks,” he said. “This isn’t my idea.”
He saw Ah Yan in the corner and waved to him. “Don’t think I won’t recognize you next time I come for your taxes.”
“Time enough for that later, Sheriff. This is a day of feasting and joy.”
“You might want to wait on that. I’m here on official business.”
Logan walked into the room, and the crowd parted before him. He was face to face with the Sheriff before another man darted into view behind the Sheriff, and just as quickly, skulked out of sight.
“Obee has accused you with murder,” said the Sheriff. “And I’m here to arrest you.”
As a child growing up in Mock Turtle, Pennsylvania, the last thing Emmett Hayworth thought he would end up doing one day was to be a judge out in the middle of the Rocky Mountains.
Emmett was a big man, the same as his father, a banker who had retired from Philadelphia to live quietly out in the country. Before he was twenty, Emmett’s greatest claim to fame was that he had won the all-county pie eating contest three years in a row. It was assumed that Emmett would never amount to much, since he would have enough money to not have to work very hard, and not enough money to really get into much mischief. Everyone liked him, for he was always willing to buy you a drink if you called him Sir.
And then came the War, and back then everyone still thought the Rebels would fold like a house of cards in three months. Emmett said to himself, “Why the heck not? This will probably be my only chance in life to see New Orleans.” With his father’s money he raised a regiment, and overnight he was Colonel Emmett Hayworth of the Union Army.
He took surprisingly well to being a soldier, and while his body slimmed down with riding and getting less than enough to eat, his good cheer never flagged. Somehow his regiment managed to stay out of the meat grinders that were the great battles that made newspaper headlines, and they lost fewer men than most. The men were grateful for Emmett’s luck. “Oh, if I were a woman as I am a man,” they sang, “Colonel Hayworth is the man I’d marry. His hands are steady, and his words are always merry. He’ll bring us to New Orleans.” Emmett laughed when he heard the song.
They did get to New Orleans eventually, but by then it wasn’t much of a party town any more. The War was over, and Emmett had scraped through with no bullet holes in him and no medals. “That’s not so bad,” he said to himself. “I can live with that.”
But then he got the order that President Lincoln wanted to see him, in D.C.
Emmett did not remember much about the meeting, save that Lincoln was a lot taller than he had imagined. They shook hands, and Lincoln began to explain to him about the situation in Idaho Territory.
“The Confederate Democratic refugees from Missouri are filling up the mines of Idaho. I’ll need men like you there, men who have proven their bravery, integrity, and dedication to the cause.”
The only thing Emmett could think of was that they had the wrong man.
The trouble, as it turned out, had entirely been the fault of that song his men made up as a joke. It grew to be popular with the other regiments, and spread its way wherever the Union marched. New verses were added as it passed from man to man, and the soldiers, having no idea who Emmett Hayworth was, attributed great acts of courage and sacrifice to him. Colonel Hayworth became famous, almost as famous as John Brown.
Be that as it may, Emmett Hayworth packed up everything he owned and left for Boise, and only when he arrived did he find out that the Territorial Governor had just appointed him to be a district judge for the Territory of Idaho.
Jack Seaver looked across the desk at the plump form of The Honorable Emmett Hayworth. The Judge was still working on a plate of fried chicken that served as his lunch. Life out here in the booming territory of Idaho had been good to him, and he showed it in his barrel-like chest, his sack-like belly, his glistening forehead dripping with sweat from the effort of licking strips of juicy meat from the chicken bones.
The man was supposed to be some kind of war hero. Jack Seaver knew the type: a man accustomed to living off the money of his father who probably bought himself a cushy commission managing the supply lines and then puffed up his every accomplishment in the name of Union and Glory until he weaseled his way to a sinecure here while man like Jack Seaver dodged bullets in the mud and froze their toes off in winter. Jack clenched his teeth. This was neither the time nor the place to show his contempt. He did reflect upon the irony that despite what he had told Elsie’s father back East, he now wished that he had studied to be a lawyer.
“What is this I hear about chicken blood?” Emmett asked.
“That’s outrageous,” said Obee. “I won’t do it. Why are you even letting the Chinaman talk? This is not the way it works in California.”
“You are going to have to,” Judge Hayworth said to him. He hadn’t been very enamored of the idea of the Chinamen’s ceremony at first, but that Jack Seaver had been very persuasive. If he ever decided to become a lawyer, he’d eat the other guys in town for lunch. “Maybe in California they’ll just take a white man’s word for it since the Chinamen can’t testify in court, but this isn’t California. The accused has the right to a fair trial, and since he has agreed to swear with his hand on the Bible as is our custom, it’s only fair that you agree to swear the way that his people have always sworn in witnesses.”
“It’s barbaric!”
“That may be. But if you won’t do it, I’ll have to direct the jury to acquit.”
Obee swore under his breath.
“Fine,” he said. He stared at Logan, who was across the courthouse from him. Obee’s eyes were so filled with hate that he looked even more like a rat than usual.
Ah Yan was called for, and he came up to the witness box. In his left hand was a struggling hen dangling by her legs while in his right hand was a small bowl.
He set the bowl down in front of Obee. Taking a knife from his belt, he slit the hen’s throat efficiently. The blood of the hen dripped into the bowl until the hen stopped kicking in Ah Yan’s hands.
“Dip your hand into the blood and make sure it covers your whole hand,” Ah Yan said. Obee reluctantly did as he was told. His hand shook so much that the bowl clattered against the wooden surface on which it was set.
“Now you have to clasp Logan’s hand and look into his eyes, and swear that you’ll tell the truth.”
Logan was escorted over to the witness box by Sheriff Gaskins. Since his legs and arms were shackled together, this took some time.
Logan looked down at Obee, contempt was written in every wrinkle in his blood-red face. He dipped both of his shackled hands into the bowl of chicken blood, soaking them thoroughly. Lifting his hands out of the bowl, he shook off the excess blood and stretched the open palm of his right hand towards Obee. The color of his hands now matched his face.
Obee hesitated.
“Well,” Judge Hayworth said impatiently. “Get on with it. Shake the man’s hand.”
“Your honor,” Obee turned towards him. “This is a trick. He’s going to crush my hand if I give it to him.”
Laughter shook the courtroom.
“No, he won’t,” said the Judge, trying to control his smirk. “If he does I’ll personally thrash him.”
Obee gingerly stretched his hand towards Logan’s hand. He eyes were focused on the shrinking distance between their palms as if his life depended on it. He wasn’t breathing, and his hand shook violently.
Logan stepped forward and made a grab for Obee’s hand, and he gave a low growl from his throat.
Obee screamed as if he had been stabbed with a hot poker. He stumbled back frantically, pulling his hand out of Logan’s grasp. A spreading, wet patch appeared at the crotch of his pants. A moment later the Sheriff and the Judge were hit with the unpleasant smell of excrement.
“I didn’t even get to touch him,” Logan said, holding up his hands. The pattern of chicken blood on his right palm was undisturbed with the print from Obee’s hand.
“Order, order!” Judge Hayworth banged the gavel. Then he gave up and shook his head in disbelief. “Get him out of here and cleaned up,” he said to Sheriff Gaskins, trying to keep himself from smiling. “Stop laughing. It’s, uh, unbecoming for officers of the law. And hand me that chicken, will you? No sense in letting perfectly good poultry go to waste.”
“All you have to do is to tell the truth,” Lily said to Logan, “that’s what Dad told me to do. It’s easy.”
“The law is a funny thing,” said Logan. “You’ve heard my stories.”
“It won’t be like that here. I promise.”
Earlier that day, she had told the jury what she saw on that day by the Chinamen’s camp.
Mrs. O’Scannlain, who was in the front row of the courtroom, had smiled at her as she walked up to sit in the witness box next to the judge. It had made her feel very brave.
