Gold Mountain Blues - Ling Zhang [193]
His father said nothing.
After a few moments, he reached out and took hold of the bag of money on the table and gripped it as tightly as if his life depended on it.
“Let me have this money, son,” he said.
He spoke in his usual peremptory tones, but Kam Ho saw a hint of an entreaty in his father’s eyes. His father had never begged for anything in his life. A wave of bitterness flooded over Kam Ho, that his father had been so reduced.
“Dad, you do whatever you want with the money.”
His father’s dull gaze suddenly came to life. “I’m going to divide it in two—the bigger portion I’ll give Kam Shan so he can take you and Yin Ling back to see your mother and get his leg treated by a decent doctor at the same time. And while he’s there, he can get your mother to find you a bride. The rest of the money is to keep me. You and Kam Shan stay in China for two years and I’ll stay here and work for two years. I can’t believe my luck’s completely run out yet.”
Ah-Fat’s eyes reddened like a gambler’s at the fan-tan table as he spoke. “Dad, you shouldn’t need to work at your age. Kam Shan and I’ll look after you.”
Ah-Fat stiffened. “Just give me two years.… When you and Kam Shan get back, I’ll give every cent back to you. I can’t go home looking like disgraceful old tramp.”
The baby, Yin Ling, had cried herself to exhaustion and only choked whimpers came from the bed. Kam Ho went to pick her up and saw blister the size of a pebble on her forehead.
He sighed. “I can’t go. Kam Shan will have to take his family without me. I promised to stay with Mrs. Henderson—it’s vital for me to stay.”
Year seventeen of the Republic (1928)
Vancouver, British Columbia
Opium juice was getting harder and harder to find. The police raided the Kwong Cheong General Store so often that the terror-stricken owner squirrelled his stocks away in the darkest corner he could find. Kam Ho could always be relied upon to sniff out a supply, but the price had gone sky-high. By the time Mr. Henderson discovered that astronomical sums of housekeeping were being spent on “Chinese herbals,” his wife was in the throes of opium addiction. Mr. Henderson did not say anything. He just tightened his grip on his purse. Mrs. Henderson’s efforts to extract money from him were fruitless.
She was forced to find other ways to subdue her pain.
This morning, she had just seen Jenny off to school when excruciating pains began to attack her knees. It felt as if they hid a nest of hungry, restless rats that gnawed at her every movement. She was defenceless against pain this acute. Kam Ho’s acupressure techniques had no effect any more.
She had hardly had time to cry out before the rats were on her again, taking her breath away. She lay upon the sofa, staring at her husband as he turned away, put his brown-and-white King Charles spaniel on the leash, and went out for a walk. Although he was a senior adviser at the chamber of commerce, he went to the office only a couple of times a week—for meetings or to put his signature on a few documents. He found himself with a great deal of leisure time on his hands these days; one way of divesting himself of it was to take the dog for a walk. He took it out after every meal. His invariable habit gave him the greatest pleasure, and was postponed or interrupted only if some major event intervened. His wife’s arthritis did not count as a major event.
This was the Hendersons’ third dog. The first two were golden retrievers. The first died of old age, and the second was lost off leash while they were out walking. The dog had chased after a pretty feral bitch and never returned. Mr. Henderson had been inconsolable.
He had grown vague about people in the years since he retired, but he remembered everything about his dogs. They were his reference points. If he could not remember the year in which something happened, he would describe it as “the spring when Spotty arrived,” or “the time when Leggy chewed up my Italian shoes,” or “the time when Ruben got mange.”
When Mr. Henderson left the