Hawaii - James Michener [317]
The doctor's expression did not change, but he thought quickly: "Aha! Another one who is afraid to come in person!" To Nyuk Tsin he said casually, "This is a fine medicine for itching legs."
"I'm glad," Nyuk Tsin said, not noticing that it was not she who had introduced the subject of itching legs.
Then, as she was about to leave, the doctor said in an offhand manner, "I'm sure this will cure your man, but if it doesn't, remember! I know all the medicines. Remember." And as soon as Nyuk Tsin had gone, the doctor ran into another alley and cried, "Look Sing! Look Sing! Follow that one."
"Which one?" the loafer asked.
"The Hakka woman, with the big feet." But Nyuk Tsin was hurrying home by a different route, and that day the spy did not overtake her. When he reported his failure to the herbalist the latter shrugged his shoulders and said, "She'll be back."
Medicine forty-one was completely ineffective and the growing agony in Nyuk Tsin's mind could not be put to rest. "Wu Chow's Father," she implored, "you must come with me to the Chinese doctor."
"I am afraid," Mun Ki said.
"He told me he knew all the medicines," Nyuk Tsin assured him, so when the dishes were washed and the four babies placed in the care of another Chinese woman, Nyuk Tsin led her husband slowly, and in breathless fear, down Nuuanu Street and across the river to Rat Alley. As they approached their meeting with the doctor, they formed an unusual pair, for Nyuk Tsin in her black smock and trousers did not hobble obediently behind her pigtailed husband, as Punti custom required; she marched side by side with him in the Hakka way, for she was his wife, and if what she suspected was true, in the days to come Mun Ki was going to need her as never before; and he sensed this need and was content to have his strong wife walking beside him.
When they reached Rat Alley, and saw the row of shacks where the girls lived, Nyuk Tsin experienced an abiding gratitude toward the man who had kept her for himself instead of selling her to the brothel keepers, and in apprehension of what her life would have been like had Mun Ki not bought her, she drew closer to him, and when the alley narrowed she even took his hand, and at first he was constrained to throw it back, but he held on to it, and he could feel her fingers softly protecting the unmanageable sore on his index finger, and in that wordless moment a compact was built, and each understood it, for Nyuk Tsin was saying: "No matter what the doctor reports, I shall stay with you."
When the doctor saw them entering his shop he knew what their fears were, and he was certain that this meant money for him. He therefore held his soft, thin hands together professionally and smiled at the worried couple. "Did the medicine cure the itching?" he asked in Punti.
"No," Nyuk Tsin replied. "And now Wu Chow's Father has a sore on his toe."
"I would like to see it," the doctor replied, but when he had drawn a curtain aside so that sunlight could fall upon the floor where Mun Ki's foot Stood, and when he kneeled down to inspect the unhealed lesion and the sickly white flesh around it, he instinctively recoiled in horror, even though he had known, when he knelt down, what he going to see, and Nyuk Tsin marked his action.
"Are there other sores?" the doctor inquired in a subdued voice.
"On his other toes, and this finger, and his shins hurt," Nyuk Tsin explained in broken Punti.
Gravely the doctor examined each of these lesions. Then he rubbed his hands as if to cleanse himself of some terrible scourge. Nyuk Tsin watched this gesture, too, and asked bravely, "Is it the mai Pake, the Chinese sickness?"
"It is," the doctor whispered.
"Oh, gods of heaven, no!" Mun Ki gasped. He shivered for a moment in the gloomy office and then looked like a thrashed boy pleading with his father. "What must I do?"
Now the doctor's natural cupidity subdued any humane reactions, and he assumed his best professional manner--for he was not a doctor at all but a field hand who hated hard work--and