Part 6 (2/2)

Great Great Uncle gulped his tea and Lin filled his cup.

'That's good,' said Lin Gan when he could breathe again. 'More.'

'Tell me,' said Lin, tipping a spoonful of spirit into the cup, 'about the goldfields.'

The old man eyed him suspiciously.

'Why? You never wanted to hear those tales when you were a boy. Still are a boy, of course.'

'I wish to profit by your wisdom,' said Lin, withholding the flask. 'With a little age we get a little wisdom,' he added.

'Maybe. I went there when I was six. You never saw such a sight, boy, as those goldfields. As though thousands of moles the size of horses had been digging for their lives. Humps and hummocks and holes everywhere, and mud you could drown in. And they hated us, boy. Don't you mistake that. Even the children used to run alongside us chanting ”Ching Chong Chinaman, go home, go home!” and they'd throw stones. That place was a pit of scorpions, a vision of the Nether h.e.l.l.'

He held out his cup. Lin added some whisky.

'Most of them wanted to go home,' said Lin Gan. 'Most of them were going home as soon as they could. Most of them wanted to swagger into their own village with a pocketful of nuggets and be a Gold Mountain Uncle with the pick of the girls. They used to sing a song...how did it go...?'

In a thin trembling voice such as a spider might have had, he began to sing.

'Don't marry your daughter to a baker, he never comes home. Don't marry your daughter to a scholar, she'll sleep each night alone. Marry her to a Gold Mountain Uncle, with sleeves that clink and s.h.i.+ne...I think that was how it went. We sang a lot of songs while we were working.'

Lin felt that the subject was established and he could attempt to guide the ancient man's recollection.

'Venerable One, do you remember the murdered couriers?'

'The Hu murdered them,' snarled the old man. 'I hear you have settled the feud. And that your grandmother is very angry with you.'

'They didn't do it,' said Lin, suppressing a private wince.

'Eh?' demanded old Lin Gan. 'Didn't do it, you say? Of course they did.'

'It was someone else,' said Lin. 'Mr Hu would not lie about that. Tell me about them. Did you know them? What else could have happened to them?'

'There were four,' said the old man slowly, holding out his cup again. 'I don't remember all their names. Servants, not Lin family. Sung Ma was the leader. I remember that he was sick, someone said he was sick, but he went anyway. They carried the gold in baskets, baked inside loaves of bread. Needs four men to carry that much gold. It's heavy. Your great grandfather, my brother, he was in Melbourne, buying the land for this house. He had started building, I think. We moved up here from where we landed, down in Spencer Street-that was foul land and marshy, and we got sick. This is drier. When the others saw what my brother had done, they came here too, and we are still here. Give me another drink, to take the taste away!'

Lin obliged. The old man smacked his lips.

'The couriers, yes, they jogged off-they laughed at our gait, you know, the yellow-haired ghosts-and then they were gone. I always thought the Hu killed them. We tried to find them. Hu said they had not seen them, the Loong family saw them go past their camp and onto the main road, a woman called Ah said they bought tea from her, after that-nothing. They had vanished completely, baskets, bodies, gold and all. But that goldfield was a very dangerous place. The miners were always brawling. And drinking and brawling some more. Heaven had abandoned that place.

'We searched but we could not find the couriers. If they had gone on the road the Hu must have seen them so we a.s.sumed it was them. Then there was the riot and we no longer felt safe, even though the Protector of Chinese came and said it will be all right. Lin Chiang moved the family onto the mullock heaps, land that the miners had abandoned, where no man could complain of us, and then we found that there was good land by the river, already dug by the miners, so we started a garden. Good deep rich soil. We grew greens and onions and potatoes for the miners and we found quite a lot of gold in the tailings, so we stayed.'

'We had a market garden?' Lin had not known this. The old man grinned, showing three remaining teeth.

'It was the only supply of fresh vegetables to the diggings for a long while. Those fools used to dump their horse dung, used it to fill old mine shafts. None of them could farm. We collected night soil and dung-the people paid us to take it away!-and our garden bloomed. We used to go into Castle-maine once it had a market, when it grew to a town. Even then they spat at us, even refused to deal with us. Until they got scurvy,' Lin Gan chuckled. 'Then they bought our cabbages again. Fools.'

'Venerable One, what happened in the riot?'

'We heard the camp roaring,' he said, looking back into the past. 'Always noisy, the goldfields, always a babble of languages, but this was different. It was like a tiger roaring, a roar that says ”I am strong”. A roar that says ”I am hunting and you are my prey”. I was scared even before we heard them coming up the hill, hundreds of feet, and that mob noise ahead of them as they came on like wild boar, breaking trees, snapping branches. We wanted to run, but we were against the foot of a rise; behind that was a marsh. There was nowhere to go. I remember cousin Chung saying that when he heard the noise he ran through a whole speech he was intending to deliver to the Black Judge of the Netherworld. I was too scared to do anything. I just stood there and wet my pants.'

His hands were trembling and Lin had to hold the cup to tip the whisky into his mouth. He recovered enough to continue.

'There were hundreds of them, all roaring, led by five men, two lascars as black as demons, three of the straw-headed ones. And then, just as I knew we were all going to die, out stepped Constable Cooke, the one we called 'Gem-eye'. He had bright eyes, like gems. He was a big man and he stood there, not moving, as the mob yelled and poured up the hill, and then they stopped, because he didn't move. And they yelled at him to move and he didn't move, and I don't know what he said because I never learned English, but then he raised his rifle and pointed it at the five leaders, one after another, and then all of a sudden, like a dam breaking, they backed down. I never saw such a thing before. He never moved. They backed away and then they ran and they were all gone and it was quiet again. Then Gem-eye, he walked over to us and said that we'd be safe that night and he'd call the Protector, and he said that the mob would have to go over him before he'd let them hurt us, and then he sat down under a tree with his rifle in his hands and he stayed there all night.'

'That was a brave man!' exclaimed Lin Chung, who had never heard this account before.

'And not even Chinese,' said Lin Gan, still amazed after seventy years.

'What happened then?'

'He went back to his police station when the Protector came to us. I heard that the mob had broken all of his windows. He was in trouble because of that. Gla.s.s was very scarce and expensive. We used to give him vegetables as soon as we had a garden. I heard-yes, I am sure-that he was dismissed from the police force and he went to the quartz mine. We didn't see him again. He was a good man. They don't make men like that these days. I can still see him, standing like a sea-wall, quite still, while the waves broke on him.'

Lin Gan stared back into the past for some minutes. It was not kind to tire the old man. Lin stood up.

'Thank you for your wisdom, Venerable One,' said Lin Chung, handing over the flask. The old man caught his arm.

'Sit a while, Great Great Nephew.'

Lin sat down again.

'You did well to settle the feud,' said the old man. Lin suppressed a stare of astonishment.

'Thank you,' he managed.

'And your grandmother will forgive you her demotion in time,' continued the old man, sipping a little whisky.

'I hope so,' said Lin.

'I like your wife Camellia,' observed Lin Gan. 'She is clever with gardens. I saw her planting, I saw the garden she designed for your concubine and I watched her tie up this very jasmine. She will be a good wife to you.'

'I hope so,' said Lin.

'But you must leave us all for a time,' said Lin Gan, his old eyes as bright as bradawls in his walnut face.

'I must?' asked Lin, overwhelmed by unaccustomed compliments.

'Of course,' said Lin Gan, presenting him with the empty flask. 'You must go to Castlemaine, and find out what happened to our four hundred ounces of gold.'

In the thirteenth year of the reign of the glorious Emperor Lord of the Dragon Throne Kwong Sui of the Ching Dynasty, Sung Ma in what ought to be the Beginning of Winter the ku'li greets his sister Mai.

Soon we are going to land. We have seen new birds-land birds. They are also very strange. One was blown aboard, screeching like a soul in the Ninth h.e.l.l. It was as big as a chicken, as white as paper, with a crest like crocus. It snapped with its black beak and screamed for a while and then flew off, making a terrible cry, and after it flew seventeen others. The sailors are still lighting incense. They are sure that they are spirits. I feel that if they are spirits they have come back from the dead in a very odd shape and a very bad temper, so probably they are birds. I burned some incense to Kwan Yin in case they aren't.

The elder brother sends his love to the younger sister.

CHAPTER SIX.

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