Gold Mountain Blues - Ling Zhang [39]
Ah-Fat re-wrapped the body, bound it up tightly and told the others to start digging the grave. The ground was frozen hard as iron and their pickaxes pinged against it. The men dug until they were covered with sweat, but all they made was a shallow hole. They tipped the matting bundle in and covered it with a few clods of earth. Suddenly Ah-Fat dug the body out again and rearranged it. He pointed it in a different direction and started burying it again. The men were puzzled but Ah-Lam could see what he was doing: “It points East now, towards Tang Mountain.”
To stop wild animals digging up the body, they piled stones on top of the earthen mound and stuck a tree branch in as a marker. Ah-Fat thought the branch would blow down at the first gust of wind, so decided to carve Red Hair’s name on the trunk of a nearby fir.
He took the axe to the tree but then realized that he only knew Red Hair’s surname—Fong—but not his formal given names. No one else knew either. Finally he just carved “Red Hair Fong” in crooked characters on the tree trunk.
Ah-Fat stood looking at his handiwork in a daze. After a while he said: “Uncle Red Hair, wait seven years and I’ll be back to collect your bones.” He suddenly remembered what Red Hair had said that day when they helped Ah-Sing collect his cousin’s bones in Victoria: “I brought you out here, you send me home, then we’re quits.” Red Hair’s words had been prophetic.
“I’m sorry you’re missing a bone or two, Uncle Red Hair,” said Ah-Fat as he knelt with all the ceremony he could muster before the makeshift grave.
The Pacific Railroad wound first northward, then eastward, snaking its way along the Fraser Valley and biting a great hole in the belly of the Rocky Mountains. As this great dark snake crept forwards, inch by inch, the camps kept pace, moving along in its trail until, before Ah-Fat knew it, he had sewn more than sixty crosses in the corner of the tarpaulin.
One day, just as Ah-Fat had sewn the sixty-eighth cross, he saw the record-keeper hurrying over. “The foreman’s called a meeting,” he said. The men were squatting on the ground, slurping at their bowls of porridge. They did not move. “Could be the Lord in Heaven above, but you gotta fill your belly first,” said one. The record-keeper glanced at them. “He doesn’t want any of you, he wants him,” he said, indicating Ah-Fat. “So he wants you to make another trip with the Yellow Water bottle, does he?” said someone. “A hundred-dollar bank draft won’t be enough this time. Times have changed…” “You dickhead, there’ll be no carrying Yellow Water anywhere,” Ah-Lam retorted. “All the tunnels are finished and they’re waiting for the tracks to be joined up. There’s fuck-all blasting to do now.” “Oh, but the boss thinks Ah-Fat carried the bottle so nicely, maybe he’s going to let him enjoy his wife as a reward,” put in another man. “You’re still a virgin, Ah-Fat, aren’t you? Lucky you to have a hell of a woman for your first time around!”
Ah-Fat walked away with the men’s mocking laughter ringing in his ears, prickling him like a sticky burr clinging to his back.
The foremen’s tent was about a hundred paces away up the slope. As he looked up, Ah-Fat could see horses, already saddled and bridled, tied to trees far in the distance. He watched the horses, heads lowered, drinking from the water buckets as the record-keeper went in and reported his arrival. He recognized his foreman’s horse, a skittish black pony two to three years old, kicking out and swishing its tail. It snorted playfully as it drank from its bucket. Ah-Fat walked over to it and began making plaits all the way down its mane. The pony looked round at him. It seemed to enjoy the attention, and rubbed its neck against Ah-Fat’s hand, whinnying softly.
The record-keeper called Ah-Fat inside.
The tent was exactly the same as the one Ah-Fat lived in, except that his was shared between ten men, and this one housed only three. They were all foremen, each in charge of their own horses and men. The lamp had been turned up to its brightest