“I’m all right,” she said. “I’m fine. I’m just — I seem to have lost my way.”
Bao Yu
The days fell away like the skin of a rotten fruit. She was in bed, waiting for the hemorrhage to come on while the household tiptoed round her, Will grave, Edith so white-faced it was as if she were wearing a mask. But then the hemorrhage didn’t come — she had a cold, that was all, her eyes itching and her nose running and a bronchial cough compounding the problem, yes, but it was a cold and nothing more, the sort of thing anyone was susceptible to. A cold, that was all.
The fog lifted. It rained. There was a day of sun. And then she was up on her feet again, sniffling perhaps, weakened, humiliated (she’d had to do her business in the chamber pot and it was Ida who had to see it there and dispose of it), but able to work at sewing the lambrequins for the shelves and go out of doors to feed the turkeys and chickens and walk round the yard and even partway down the road for exercise.
She was alone in the house, a Sunday afternoon, the sun high and everyone else taking the day off — or the afternoon, anyway — to go out hunting Indian artifacts, pottery shards, arrowheads. Edith was on horseback, Will on one mule, Adolph on the other, Jimmie and Ida following along on foot. They’d begged her to come in order to make her feel a part of things — at least Will and Ida had, Edith so swept up in the excitement of the horse and the treasure hunt she didn’t even try to hide her indifference — and that was thoughtful and she was touched, but she told them she wasn’t feeling up to it. Ida made a little moue of sympathy. Or pity. Will had just nodded.
For once, the house was warm. Will had built up the fire before he left, very solicitous—Can I get you anything? Are you sure you don’t want to come? It’ll be an adventure—and with the sun shining and the wind down it was pleasant, even in the corner by the front window where there always seemed to be a draft. She brought her crocheting into the parlor and sat there at the window, where the light was good, thinking to work on the shirt she was making for Edith, but as soon as she got settled she laid it aside. She was bored. Profoundly bored. It was the fault of this place, of course, each day identical to the next, nothing to do but work at sewing, knitting, cooking, cleaning, and the same faces to look into and the same unchanging conversation every night. The same cards even. The four walls. The bowed ceiling. Will would make a comment about the sheep, the barn, his dynamite sticks. Jimmie would say something in return, Adolph staring across the room as if he were working out the metaphysics of sheep dip or the broken haft of a spade. Edith, she would say, just to hear herself, what are you reading? Edith, looking up from her book: Nothing. A novel.
She got up from the chair and drifted across the room to the table where Edith had left her latest book, the one she’d insisted on buying before they’d left the mainland, and idly picked it up. It was by E. R. Roe, a name she vaguely recognized. Light reading, she supposed. Harmless enough. The author had written a preface to this, his fourth novel, and it really wasn’t so much a preface as an advertisement. Her eyes fell on the last line: “A glad zest and hopefulness might be inspired even in the most jaded and ennui-cursed, were there in our homes such simple, truthful natures as that of my heroine, and it is in the sphere of quiet homes — not elsewhere — I believe that woman can best rule and save the world.”
Rule and save the world. She closed the book and set it back on the table, angry suddenly. If only they’d stayed in San Francisco. If only she’d resisted. Rule? She ruled nothing. And as far as saving the world, she’d give everything she had if she could only just save herself, for Edith’s sake if nothing else, because what would Edith do without her?
It was then that something made her look up, some sixth sense, and she caught her breath: there was a face in the window, a man’s face, staring back at her. If she’d been home, in the apartment or even the rented house in Santa Barbara, she wouldn’t have been so startled — this man, he was a Chinaman, she saw that now, a Chinaman holding something up to the glass as if to offer it to her, would have been a delivery boy from the laundry or a yardman or some such, and Will would have dealt with him. But here, his appearance was so unexpected, so impossible, it was as if he were an apparition from another realm, and it jolted her. She didn’t move. Didn’t breathe. Just stood there staring like an animal in the zoo.
His eyes were fixed on hers. He reached out and tapped at the glass with his index finger, very softly, politely, and gave a discreet shake to the object — objects — he was holding aloft in his other hand. Dun things, flattened, gathered together on a loop of wire. And what were they? Slabs of meat? Fish of some sort? He smiled suddenly, his eyes lost in their creases, his face shining and hopeful. It came to her that he was harmless, a castaway, survivor of a shipwreck, a man in need, perhaps hungry and thirsty, maybe even injured. She went to the door, pulled it open and stepped out onto the porch.
The man widened his grin, gave an abbreviated bow. He was short, shorter than she, wearing an embroidered skullcap and a long silk tunic over a pair of ordinary twilled cotton trousers. His hair was braided in a queue. On his feet, gum boots smeared with the residue of one sort of oceanic creature or another. “Bao yu,” he said, holding the dun things out to her.
“Are you thirsty?” she asked. “Hungry? Has your ship gone down, is that it?”
“Bao yu,” he repeated. “You take.”
He handed her the loop of wire and she had no choice but to take it from him. What she was holding — and it was heavier than it had looked — was dried abalone, that was what it was, and this man was one of the coolies Will had told her about, men brought out to the deserted islands off the Pacific Coast to live in crude huts for months at a time, collecting, boiling, pounding and drying abalone for shipment back to China. And here he was, presenting her with abalone she didn’t want, abalone he might very well have taken from these very shores, from her own private stock, stolen abalone. He was watching her closely. This wasn’t merely a gift — he wanted something in return.
“You give,” he said.
She was no longer feeling generous. “Where did you get these?” she demanded, imagining some hidden encampment infesting the surface of the island like an open sore.
He lifted his chin, still smiling, and shot his eyes in the direction of the harbor. There was a boat there, and how had she missed it? His boat. A sprawling low-slung junk with sails furled and a triangular red-bordered flag gyrating in the breeze atop the middle mast. She’d seen boats like it in the harbor at San Francisco, boats that brought Chinese goods and spices and the coolies to work the railroads and live one atop the other on Grant Avenue as if that was the way they preferred it. She was amazed all over again — had this man actually come all the way across the sea from China to stand here on the porch of her assumed house and bargain with her? The thought was staggering. No, it was comical, absurd. What did she have that he could possibly want?
“What do I give?” she asked. “What do you want?”
“You give meat,” he said, and it all became clear. He wanted mutton, wanted lamb, of course he did. If you ate nothing but fish, fish three meals a day, you’d want anything else, anything you could get, viands especially — but to offer her abalone, dried abalone, no less, when she lived atop a trove of it, was ridiculous. And he wanted lamb in return?