Gold Mountain Blues - Ling Zhang [191]
Over the past two years, Kam Ho had sent regular dollar letters back home to his mother, and provided his father with pocket money, but had saved every cent of what was left. His father had an inkling of what his son was doing, but had no idea that it all added up to so much. In fact, Ah-Fat often accused him of being so tight-fisted he would happily cut a cent coin in two. He also said he was cheap not to buy a present when Kam Shan’s woman had her baby. But Kam Ho held his tongue. He regarded his cloth bag as a bucket which he was filling with water drop by drop. He was biding his time until the bucket was full, then he could speak out. He had had to wait a very long time for that moment to come.
When he got to the house, only his father and Yin Ling were at home. Yin Ling, Kam Shan’s baby, was five months old, and lay snoring gently on the bed with a thin coverlet over her. Kam Shan’s woman was a waitress at the Lychee Garden Restaurant six days a week. She left Yin Ling at home and Kam Shan took her twice a day to the restaurant to be breastfed.
Kam Ho found his father leaning over the table, grinding ink. Business was always slow between festivals, so most of the time the ink he prepared each morning went unused. By noon, if no customer had darkened his door, the ink developed a hard black crust. Ah-Fat had put up with unimaginable hardships all his life, but the one thing he could not bear was idleness. It made him as bad-tempered as a bear with a sore head.
True to form, his father greeted Kam Ho with an irascible snort: “Oh, so you’ve remembered you have a family!” Kam Ho laughed: “Mrs. Henderson’s been ill, and Mr. Henderson wouldn’t let me take a day off.” “Huh!” Ah-Fat snorted again. “Why on earth would a man as capable as he is choose a wife like her? If he was in Hoi Ping, he’d have got rid of her and married again long ago.” “It’s Mr. Henderson who makes Mrs. Henderson ill,” said Kam Ho. “If he treated her a bit better, she wouldn’t be sick.”
Ah-Fat threw the ink stick down, spattering the table with black drops. “And what the hell would you know about it?”
Kam Ho was imperturbable. Nothing and no one was going to wipe the smile from his face today.
“How’s my brother? Is he a bit better?”
A month or so before, Kam Shan had been on his way to take portrait photographs in Port Hope when he was thrown from his horse and broke a leg. The bone-setter had attended him, but he was still hobbling.
His father scowled. “He was in pain all last night. He’s gone to get some ointment from the herbalist.”
Yin Ling woke up, pushed her little hands out of the blanket and broke into a wail. Babies at this age grew faster than weeds and she was much bigger now than when Kam Ho last saw her. He picked her up and, pulling a twenty-dollar bill out of his pocket, pushed it into her bib. “Don’t cry, baby!” he said cheerfully. “Uncle’s going to buy you candies!”
Ah-Fat turned to look at his son. “When did you get so generous? Tripped over a pile of dollars on your way here, did you?”
Kam Ho put the baby down, then unhurriedly pulled the cloth bundle out of his pocket and put it down in front of his father.
“Yes, I did. Five hundred and twenty-nine dollars, eighty-five cents to be precise. Count them.”
Ah-Fat opened the bundle and looked at the heaps of coins and stack of dollar bills of different values wrapped around them. He was lost for words.
“I’ve saved up enough for the head tax to bring Mum here. Use that ink to write and tell her to buy the next passage.”
His father seemed to shrivel up before his very eyes. Finally he slid to the floor and wrenched at his hair as if he was trying to pull it out.
“Oh Buddha of Mercy, why do you play such cruel tricks on me? What have I done to deserve it?”
Had joy driven his father crazy? Kam Ho rushed over and tried to help him up. But