The Chink

I

IT is an odd trick of memory that after almost a quarter of a century I still remember Mah Li better than I can remember anyone else in that town. The people I grew up among, many of the children I played with every day, are vague names without faces, or faces without names. Maybe I remember him well because he was so ambiguous a figure in the town’s life. He and his brother Mah Jim, who ran the restaurant, were the only Chinese in town, and though Mah Li did our laundry, worked for us, delivered our vegetables punctually at seven in the morning three days a week, he was as much outside human society as an animal would have been. Sometimes I catch myself remembering him in the same way I remember the black colt my father gave me when I was nine. I loved Mah Li as I loved the colt, but neither was part of the life that seemed meaningful at the time.

He called me O-Fi’, because 0-5, our laundry mark, was easier for him to say than Lederer. Every Monday morning he appeared at the back door with his basket, got the laundry, grinned and bobbed so that his pigtail twitched like a limber black snake, and said, ‘Velly good, O-Fi’. Leddy Fliday.’ I have a picture of him in my mind, shuffling up the worn path along the irrigation ditch, dogtrotting in his hurry as if daylight were going out on him while he still had a lot to do, and his black baggy pants and loose blouse blowing against his body.

I have other pictures, too. Whenever I think of him a swarm of things come up: Mah Li and Mah Jim sitting in the bare kitchen of the restaurant, a candle between them on the table with its flame as straight as a blade, playing fan-tan in intent, serious, interminable silence. Somehow that picture seems sad now, like a symbol of their homelessness. They had no women, no friends, no intercourse with the townspeople except when men kidded them along in the way they kid half-wits, condescendingly, with an edge of malice in their jokes.

I remember Mah Li meeting someone on the street in winter, the white man stopping him to say hello, rubbing his stomach and saying ‘Belly cold today,’ and Mah Li beaming his wide smile, jabbering, and the white man saying, ‘Put your shirt inside your pants and your belly won’t be cold,’ and slapping Mah Li on the back and guffawing. Old jokes like that, always the same ones. And the kids who hung around Mah Jim’s restaurant jerking the Chinks’ pigtails and asking them if it was true that they kneaded their bread in big tubs with their bare feet, or if they really spit in the soup of people they didn’t like.

The town accepted them, worked them like slaves for little pay, I suppose even liked them after a fashion, but it never adopted them, just as Mah Jim and Mah Li never adopted white man’s clothes, but always wore their black baggy pants and blouses. They never got the white man’s habit of loafing, either. Mah Li, for instance, when he worked for us in summers down at the potato field, tended his own garden from daylight till about seven, worked our potatoes till almost dark, and then came into town to wash and iron till midnight on the laundry Mah Jim had taken in for him during the day. Maybe they liked to work that hard; maybe it helped them against their loneliness. My father always said that a Chinaman would outwork a white man two to one, and do it on a cupful of rice a day.

It is around the potato field and the garden that most of my recollections of the Chink centre. The second year he worked for us he asked my father if he could rent a little piece of land to put in vegetables, and father let him have the ground free. Mah Li never thanked him — I don’t think he ever knew what the word for thanks was. He just looked at him a minute with impassive slant eyes, bobbed his pigtail, and went dogtrotting down to go to work. But in July of that summer he appeared at our back door one morning just after I’d brought the milk in from the barn. He had a basket over his arm.

‘Nice day, O-Fi’,’ he said. ‘Velly fine day!’

‘It’s a swell day,’ I said, ‘but you’ve got your dates mixed. It isn’t laundry day.’

‘No laundly,’ he said, grinning, and passed me the basket. It was full of leaf lettuce and carrots and string beans and green peas, with two bunches of white icicle radishes sticking up in it like bouquets.

After that he came three times a week, regular as sunrise, with vegetables that were the envy of every gardener in town. And when Mother tried to pay him for them he beamed and bobbed and shook his head. I remember her saying finally, in a kind of despair, that she wouldn’t take his baskets free any more, but he always came, and we always took them. It would have hurt his feelings if we hadn’t, and I suppose too he felt that he was paying off his debt.

It was Mother who suggested that I give the Chinese the suckers I caught in the river. We never ate them, because suckers are full of little needle-bones and don’t taste very good. I just fished for the fun of it. So one afternoon I went down to the potato field in the river bottom, near the flume, with four big suckers on a willow crotch. Mah Li was moving down the field with a hoe, loosening the ground around the vines. When I gave him the fish he looked surprised, beamed, nodded, trotted down to the riverbank and packed them in grass, and rolled them up in a big handherchief.

‘Nice, O-Fi’!’ he said. I guess that was the way he said thanks.

That afternoon I hung around and helped him a little in the field, and went over with him to see his own garden. I remember him stooping among his tomato vines feeling the fruit till he found a big, red, firm one, and rubbing it off on his blouse and handing it to me. And I remember how heavy and sun-warmed that tomato was, and how I had to jump backward and stick out my face because the juice spurted and ran down my chin when I bit into it. We stood in the plantsmelling garden, under the yellow summer hills, with the sun heavy and hot on our heads, and laughed at each other, and I think that’s where I first found out that Mah Li was human.

After that I was around the field a good deal. Whenever I didn’t have anything else to do I’d go down and help him, or sit on the riverbank and fish while he worked. Just to watch him in a garden made you know he loved it. I used to watch him to see how long he’d swing the hoe without taking a rest, and sometimes I’d fish for two hours before he’d pause. Then he’d sit down on his heels, the way I’ve seen Chinese squat on the rails when they work on a section gang, and stay perfectly still for about ten minutes. He was so quiet then that bumblebees would blunder into him and crawl around and fly away again, and butterflies would light on his face. He let them sit there with their wings breathing in and out, and never made so much as the flicker of an eyelash that would disturb them. When he was ready to go to work again his hand would come up slowly, to pick them off so gently that they never knew he touched them.

His yellow hands were very gentle with everything they touched, even with the potato bugs we picked into tin cans and burned. Many afternoons in August I worked down the rows with him while he went bent-kneed along, his face placid and contented and his eyes sharp for bugs. He could do it three times as fast as I could, and cleaner too. We’d meet at the ends of rows every now and again, and dump the striped bugs out into piles, and Mah Li would pour kerosene over them and touch a match to it. Then we’d go down the rows again while the stinking smudge went up behind.

And then there was the magpie that I ran across in the brush one day when I was coming up from fishing. It was a young one, with a hurt wing so that it couldn’t fly, but it ran like a pheasant with that one wing trailing, and I had a chase before I caught it. It was still pecking at my fingers and flapping to get away when I brought it up to show Mah Li.

The Chink’s face looked as if a lamp had gone on behind it. He chirped with his lips, quietly, and put out a dry hand to stroke the feathers on the bird’s head. After a minute he lifted it out of my hands and held its body cradled in his palm, stroking its head, chirping at it. And it lay in his hand quietly as if it were on a nest; it made no attempt to peck him or to get away.

‘He likes you,’ I said.

Mah Li’s shaved head nodded very slowly, his lips going in a singsong lullaby and his finger moving gently on the magpie’s head.

‘Think his wing is broken?’

He nodded again; his pigtail crawled up his back with the bend of his head, and then crawled down.

‘ You better keep him,’ I said. ‘Maybe you can fix his wing.’

Mah Li fixed his narrow black eyes on me. I was always being surprised by his eyes, because just talking to him, working with him, I thought of him as another person, like anybody else. Then every once in a while I’d see those eyes, flat on his face, with scarcely any sockets for them to sink back into, and so narrow that it looked as if the skin had grown over and almost covered them.

‘ Slicee tongue,’ Mah Li said. ‘Talkee.’

And that night he carried the magpie home. A month later, when I saw it perched on the back of a chair in Mah Jim’s kitchen, glossy and full of life, it opened its mouth and made squawking noises that sounded almost like words. By the middle of October he had it so tame that it rode around on his shoulder, balancing with its tail and squawking if he moved too fast and disturbed its footing, and whenever he chirped at it it squawked and jabbered. I laughed like anything when I heard what it said. It said‘O-Fi’! O-Fi’! Nice, O-Fi’!’

II

So that’s the way we were, friends, — very good friends, in a way, — even though Mah Li touched my life only on one of its outside edges. He was like a book I went back to read when there was nothing else doing. And I suppose it was that quality of unreality about our friendship, the strange and foreign things about him, — pigtail and singsong and slant eyes, — that made me think of him always in a special way, and forced me into the wrong loyalty that night at the end of October in 1918.

I came downtown that night about eight o’clock to join the gang and pull off some Hallowe’en tricks. You were everybody’s enemy on Hallowe’en. You hauled your own father’s buggy up on somebody’s barn, and pushed over your own outhouse along with everybody else’s. I say that to explain, in a way, how I came to be lined up against the Chinks that night. Things like that were automatic on Hallowe’en.

We had planned to meet at Mah Jim’s, but I found the crowd gathered a block up the street. They were all sore. I didn’t get the picture very clearly then, but I gathered that they’d been fooling in the restaurant and Tad McGovern had hooked a handful of bars from the candy counter. Mah Jim saw him, and raised a fuss, but Tad wouldn’t give them back. He challenged Mah Jim to wrestle for them. The Chink got excited, and jabbered, and the kids all ragged him, and finally Mah Jim got really mad. I never saw him that way, but he must have been, because he jumped on Tad and took the bars away from him, and when three or four other kids took hold of him to put him down he shook them off and grabbed up the poker from the stove and ran the whole crowd out. So now they were just on the verge of getting even. They were going to tip over the Chinks’ privy first, and then put the hospital sign on their front door, and then pour water down their chimney and put their fire out, and some other things.

I joined in and we went sneaking back through the alley toward Mah Jim’s. It was a cold night, with a light snow that didn’t quite cover the ground. In the dark it was just possible to see the pale patches where the snow lay. We crept up behind the laundry, just a couple of rods from the outhouse. Mah Jim must have closed up his restaurant after the ruckus with the gang, because there wasn’t a light. The privy was just a vague blob of shadow in the dark.

We gathered behind Tad, waiting for the signal. Sometimes people stood guard on their privies, and we had developed a raiding technique that didn’t give them a chance to do anything. When Tad whistled we rushed out pell-mell, about a dozen of us. Our hands found the front of the privy and we heaved hard, all in one hard running push. There was a startled yelp from inside, a yelp almost like a dog’s, as the privy lifted and tottered and went over with a crash.

Tad let out a whoop. ‘Gee, the Chink’s in there!’

‘Let’s lock him in!’ somebody said, and a half-dozen boys dived for the door to hold it down. Someone found a nail, and they hammered it in with a rock.

I stood back, because I didn’t quite like the idea of the Chink’s being locked in there in the cold, and because I was a little scared at the silence from inside. After that one yelp there hadn’t been a sound. Even when Tad put his face down close to the boards and said, ‘Hey there, you Chink Mah Jim!’ there was no answer. Tad laughed right out loud. ‘Gee, he’s so mad he can’t speak,’ he said. He put his face down again. ‘ When you get tired you can come out the hole,’ he said.

Then one of the scouts stationed at the back of the laundry jiggered us and we scattered. I ducked behind a shed in the back lot and listened. Someone was calling from the side of the restaurant. ‘Boys!’ he said. ‘Boys, come out. I want to talk to you.’

In the dark somebody made a spluttering noise with his mouth. ‘Try and catch us,’ he said. But the voice went right on. I recognized it as belonging to Mr. Menefee, the principal of the school. ‘I don’t want to catch you. I want to talk to you.’

‘What do you want to talk about?’ I yelled, and felt big and brave for coming right back at Mr. Menefee that way. But Tad McGovern, over behind the hardware store, shouted at me: ‘Shut up! It’s a trick.’

‘No, it isn’t a trick,’ Mr. Menefee said. ‘Word of honor, boys. I just want to speak to you a minute.’

There was such an anxious, worried tone in his voice that I stepped out from behind the shed and into the open. I could hear others coming too, cautiously, ready to break and run, but Mr. Menefee didn’t make a move, and soon we were all around him where he stood in the faint light from the street with his overcoat up around his ears and his hands in his pockets.

‘I just wanted to tell you,’ he said, ‘that it wouldn’t be quite decent to pull any pranks tonight. Three people are down sick and Doctor Carroll says it’s the flu.’

His is voice was so solemn, and the thought of the flu was so awful, that we stood there shuffling our feet, without being able to say anything. We’d heard plenty about the flu. It killed you off in twenty-four hours, and you died in delirium, and after you were dead you turned black and shriveled. I felt it then like a great shadowy Fear in the dark all around me, while Mr. Menefee stood and looked at us and waited for his words to sink in.

‘We’re all going to have to help,’ he said finally. ‘I hate to take you away from your fun. You’re entitled to it on Hallowe’en. But this is a time when everybody has to pitch in. Are you willing to help?’

That gave us our tongues, like a chorus of dogs after a porcupine. ‘Sure,’ we said. ‘Sure, Mr. Menefee!’

He lined it up for us. We were to go to the drugstore and get bundles of flu masks and bottles of eucalyptus oil, which we were to distribute to every house in town, warning people not to come out without their masks, and not to come out at all except when they had to. The town was going to be quarantined and nobody could leave it.

It was like being Paul Revere, and in the excitement of hearing all that I forgot for a minute about Mah Jim locked in the overturned privy. Then I caught myself listening, and all at once I remembered what I was listening for. I was expecting the Chink to hammer on the door and yell to get out. But there wasn’t a sound from out in back.

Mr. Menefee snapped to attention the way he did when we were having fire drill in school. ‘All right, men! What are we standing around for?’

The crowd shuffled their feet, and I knew most of them were thinking, just as I was, of the privy out behind with the Chink in it.

‘ Mr. Menefee,’ I said, and stopped.

‘What?’ I could see him bend over and stare around at us sharply. ‘You haven’t started anything already, have you?’ he said.

The silence came down again. Every one of us was ashamed of what we’d just done, I imagine, except Tad McGovern. But none of us dared admit we’d done anything. It would have been a kind of treason. We were soldiers in the army, helping protect the town against the plague. We couldn’t just stand there and admit we’d done something pretty raw, something we shouldn’t have dared do to a white man. It made us look small and mean and vicious, and we wanted to look heroic.

Tad McGovern was right at my elbow. ‘Naw,’ he said. ‘We were just getting ready to start.’

Mr. Menefee snapped to attention again. ‘Good!’ he said. ‘All right, on the jump now. Divide up into squads, half of you into each end of town. And remember to put on your own masks and keep them on.’

Some of the boys jumped and ran, and in a second we were all running for the drugstore. All the time I wanted to turn around and go back and say, ‘Mr. Menefee, we pushed over the Chinks’ privy and Mah Jim’s in there.’ But I kept on running, and got my bundle of masks in the drugstore, and my package of eucalyptus oil bottles, and opened one and soused a mask with it and put it on, and gathered with the others outside, where we split.

The eucalyptus oil smelled so bad, and came so strong into my mouth and nose through the mask, that I almost gagged, and that made me think about myself for a while. But while we were running from door to door up in the Poverty Lane end of town I got thinking more and more about how the Chinks didn’t ever wear very heavy clothes, and how Mah Jim might be freezing out there, catching the flu, and how he’d be too big to crawl out through the hole. I mentioned it to the boy I was with, but he said he was sure a grown man could kick that nail loose with one kick. The Chink was already out, he said. He’d be sitting by his fire right now, cussing us in Chinese, but perfectly safe.

Still I wasn’t satisfied. Suppose he was hurt? Everything had been dark when we pushed the privy over. That meant that if Mah Li had gone to bed in his laundry room he wouldn’t know Mah Jim was still out. And if Mah Jim was hurt he’d lie there all night.

It gnawed at me until, after we had raised Orullians’ house, I was ready to quit the army and go back to see if the Chink was all right. The excitement had worn off completely. I was cold, my nose was running into my mask, the stink of the oil made my stomach roll every time I took a breath. And so the first chance I got I stuck the remaining masks and bottles into my mackinaw pocket and cut out across the irrigation ditch toward town.

Everything was quiet when I slipped into the black back yard. Probably everything’s all right, I thought. Probably he did kick the door out and get loose. But when I felt for the door and tried to open it, it was still nailed down.

‘Mah Jim!’ I said. I knocked on the boards and listened. Not a sound. I could feel sweat start out all over me, and my hands shook as I groped around in the dark for a stone. What if he was dead? What if we’d killed him?

With the rock I hammered and pulped the edge of the board where the nail was, until I could spring the door past. And when I scratched a match and looked down inside, into the overturned privy that looked like a big coffin, I saw not Mah Jim, but Mah Li, and he was sprawled back against the downward wall with his legs across the seat, absolutely quiet, and his pigtail hanging across the bend of his arm.

It took me five minutes to rouse Mah Jim. I could hear him moving inside, and I yelled and cried that Mah Li was hurt, but he didn’t open the door for a long time, and then only a crack. I suppose he thought it was another trick. My flu mask had slipped down over my chin, and I was crying. ‘ Help me get him out,’ I said. ‘He’s back here. He’s hurt. Come on.’

Finally he came, and we got Mah Li out and carried him into the kitchen, He lay perfectly still, his face like a mask, every line smoothed out of it and his eyes shut. His breathing sounded too loud in the bare room. I couldn’t take my eyes off his face, and while Mah Jim was squatting and feeling over his body I thought of the butterflies that used to crawl on Mah Li’s face when he was resting. This was a different kind of stillness, and it scared me.

For five minutes Mah Jim squatted there, his pigtail hanging, and didn’t say a word. I could feel the silence in the kitchen swell up around me; the only audible sound was the slow loud breathing of Mah Li, each breath coming with a hard finality, as if it were the last one he’d ever breathe. My nose kept running, and I’d lost my handkerchief, so that I had to sniffle every minute or so. I hated it, because it sounded as if I were crying, and I didn’t want to seem to cry.

I kept thinking how I could have done something when the privy went over and I heard the yell from inside, how I’d had the chance to tell Mr. Menefee and get Mah Li out, but hadn’t taken it. And I stood there thinking, ‘What if I’d hauled off and socked Tad McGovern when he first jumped on that door to hold it down?’ I had just come up, not knowing anything about the privy tipping, and I said loudly, ‘What’s going on here?’ and then I hit Tad and he fell down and I felt the jar in my wrist from the blow, and then three or four others jumped me, and I tossed them off and punched them in the nose until they all stood around me in an amazed ring, and I stood there with my fists up and said, ‘Come on, you cowards! You’re so brave, picking on a poor harmless old Chink. Come on and get a taste of knuckles, any three of you at a time!’

But all the time while I was doing that in my mind I heard that rough slow breathing, and saw Mah Jim in the lamplight squatting by Mah Li’s body, and I was sick with shame, and sniffled, and hated the smell of eucalyptus hanging under my nose.

‘Is he hurt bad?’ I said. ‘Can you tell what’s the matter?’

I almost whispered it, afraid to talk right out loud. Mah Jim rose, and his eyes glittered. His face, like a slotted mask the color of dry lemon peel, made me swallow. I began to remember all the stories I’d heard about Chinks — how if they ever got it in for you, or if you did them an injustice, they’d slice your eyeballs and cut off your ears and split your nostrils and pierce your eardrums and pull out your toenails by the roots. Staring into his glittering slit eyes, I thought sure he was going for me, and my knees went weak. A kind of black fog came up in front of me; I lost Mah Jim’s face, the room rocked, I could feel myself falling. Then the fog cleared again, and I was still on my feet, Mah Jim was staring at me, Mah Li was unconscious on the floor.

My shame was greater than my fear, and I didn’t run, but I couldn’t meet Mah Jim’s eyes. I looked away to where the magpie was sitting on a chair back, with his white wing feathers almost hidden and his eyes as black and glittering as Mah Jim’s.

‘I better get the doctor,’ I said, and swallowed. The moment I said it I wondered why I hadn’t done it already. I was starting for the door, full of relief at being able to do something, glad to get away, when I took a last look at Mah Jim, hoping he’d look kinder, hoping perhaps that he’d give me a word that would make me feel better about my own shame. And I stood there, half turned, staring at him. He hadn’t moved, hadn’t raised a hand, hadn’t spoken, but I knew exactly what he meant. He meant no. He didn’t want the doctor, even to save Mah Li’s life. He didn’t want any white man around, didn’t want anything to do with us any more. There was bitterness, and anger, and a strange unreachable patience in his look that stopped me cold in the doorway.

And after a minute, in the face of Mah Jim’s bitter dignity, I mumbled that I hoped Mah Li would be all right, that I’d come to see him tomorrow, and sneaked out. As I shut the door and stood shivering on the step I heard the magpie croaking and jawing inside. ‘Nice!’ it said. ‘Nice, O-Fi’!’

III

Later, when I lay in bed at home with my head under the covers, shivering between the cold sheets and breathing hard with my mouth open to warm the bed, I resolved that next morning I would take the doctor down, Mah Jim or no Mah Jim. ‘You can’t just lock the doors when somebody’s sick or hurt,’ I’d tell him. ‘You have to have help, and I’m the one that’s going to see you get it.’

But I never did wake up to do what I planned. My sleep was haunted by wild dreams, flashes, streamers of insane color that went like northern lights across my nightmares. Once I woke up and discovered that I had been vomiting in my bed, but before I could do more than gag and gasp for somebody to come I was out again. I remember a hand on my head, and a face over me, and once a feeling of floating. I opened my eyes then, to see the stair rails writhing by me like snakes, and I shut my eyes again to keep from dying. When I woke up it was a week later; I was in bed with my mother in the sixth-grade room of the schoolhouse, and my nose was bleeding.

They kept us in the schoolhouse ten more days. After I was home, lying in bed in the dining room where it was warm, I felt good, full of the tired quietness that comes after sickness, and sleepy all the time, and pleased that I was getting well. Once or twice a day I got up in a bathrobe and tottered a few steps on crazy knees so that everybody laughed at me as if I were a child just taking his first steps.

On the fourth morning at home I felt perfectly well. When I woke up the sun was shining in the dining-room windows, and outside I could see the clean snow and the tracked path that led up past Shawn’s house. Then I realized that something had awakened me, and listened. There was a mild, light tapping on the kitchen door. For a minute I forgot I was still weak, and jumped out of bed so fast that I sprawled on hands and knees, but laughing at myself, still feeling well and full of life. I got up and found my slippers and tottered into the kitchen, hanging to walls and doorjambs. On the back step Mah Jim was standing, with a basket on his arm.

‘Nice day, O-Fi’,’ he said, just the way Mah Li used to say it when he brought the vegetables. All in a rush the memory of that Hallowe’en night came back to me. I’d forgotten it completely during my sickness. I pulled Mah Jim inside and shut the door. ‘How’s Mah Li?’ I said.

His face perfectly blank, Mah Jim passed me the basket, covered with a clean dish towel. I lifted the cover and there was the magpie, looking ruffled and mad. I didn’t understand. ‘You mean he’s giving me the magpie?’ I said.

Mah Jim nodded.

‘Is he all right now?’

Like a wooden man, full of ancient and inscrutable patience, Mah Jim stood with his hands in the sleeves of his blouse. ‘All lightee now,’ he said.

The magpie shook its feathers, snapped its long tail, opened its beak, and its harsh squawk cut in. ‘O-Fi’! O-Fi’! Nice, O-Fi’!’ I put out a finger to stroke its head the way Mah Li did, and it pecked me a sharp dig on the hand. I was so relieved about Mah Li, and so bursting with the feeling of being well, that I laughed out loud.

‘That’s swell,’ I said. ‘Tell him thanks very much. Tell him I sure appreciate having it, Mah Jim. And tell him I’m glad he’s well again.’

He stood silently, and I began to remember how sinister he’d looked in the kitchen that night, and how he’d scared me then. To keep the silence from getting too thick I kept on talking. ‘I’ve been sick myself,’ I said. ‘I got sick that same night, or I’d have been over to see him.’ The sunlight flashed on the windshield of a car turning around in the road, and the light was so bright and gay that I wanted to yell for just feeling good. I bragged. ‘They thought I was going to die. I had a fever of a hundred and three, and was unconscious for a week, and my nose bled like anything.’

I stopped. Mah Jim had not moved; his face was yellow parchment with the slit eyes bright and still in it. ‘So you tell Mah Li I’ll be down to see him soon as I get on my feet,’ I said.

Something in the way he looked stopped me. Why did Mah Li send him with the magpie? I wondered. Why didn’t he come himself? Mah Jim took his hands out of his sleeves and made a short, stiff little bow.

‘Mah Li dead,’ he said. ‘We go back China. Bye, O-Fi’. Nice day.’

He opened the door and shuffled out, and I sat still in the kitchen chair too shocked to feel anything really, except just the things around me. I felt the cold draft on my bare ankles, and I felt the sun warm on my arm and shoulder, but I couldn’t feel anything about Mah Li. I didn’t really feel anything yet when I started to cry. The tears just came up slowly the way a spring fills, and hung, and brimmed over, and the first ones ran down my face and splashed warm on the back of my hand.