Authors: John Joseph Adams
“All of us,” the man affirmed. “Men and women, Han and Chuang, Cantonese and Hakka,
we’re all equals.
Tienwang
even has armies made up of women soldiers, who can rise to become generals and dukes
just like men. Now drink to your heart’s fill, and let us pray of toppling the Manchu
Emperor and opening his storehouses so that all of us can eat white rice!”
And she drank, and drank, and the cold rice porridge tasted like heaven.
* * *
Still drinking from the cup held to her lips, Yun opened her eyes.
A face, framed by unkempt hair and a bushy beard, hovered a foot or so from hers.
In the flickering firelight, it looked like the face of one of the men who had attacked
the camp, killed Ah San and Gan and the others, and then chased her all the way here.
She shuddered and tried to push herself away, but she was too weak and only managed
to spill the water all over herself.
“Easy now,” the man said. “I won’t hurt you.”
It was his voice, more than the words, that calmed her. She could hear in it a gentle
weariness, like an old mountain that had been worn down by eons of ice and water.
She saw now that, though the man was white, he was much older than the five who had
come to her camp.
“You a lawyer?” Yun asked.
“No,” he said, and chuckled. “Though I tried studying to be one, a long time ago.”
“Then how did you get through my maze so quickly?” she asked, gesturing at the dark,
dense woods, the twisty trails, the thick mist that made the fire crackle and turned
the sparks into glowing fireflies. She spoke slowly, so that he could understand her
accent.
He looked around at the foggy forest again, like a man who suddenly found himself
in an unfamiliar place. “This fog, the trees, the trails—
you
did all this?”
She nodded.
“How?”
“With these,” she said, and reached inside a fold in her dress to pull out a few sheets
of paper, full of tiny, dense print.
Of course the man wouldn’t understand.
She sighed. So much had happened. So much to explain. Words, she needed words to help
her, words in this beautiful, foreign tongue that she loved but would always wield
like an unfamiliar sword.
“Excuse me,” she said, and struggled to sit up straight. Slowly, carefully, she bowed
to Amos. She tried to put grace and deliberateness into her movements, as though she
were sitting at a formal banquet, dressed in ceremonial armor draped with silk. “We
haven’t met properly. I am Liew Yun, formerly a general of the Heavenly State of Taiping,
and now placer gold miner of Idaho.”
* * *
The five men had come to her camp in the evening.
Hey, Chinamen
, said the one with the scar across his face. His name was Pike, and he had been threatening
the Chinese miners in the valley all spring.
Didn’t we tell you to get out of here last week? This is my mine.
The mine’s ours
, Ah San explained.
I told you, you can go to the courthouse and check our claim
.
Well lookee here! We got ourselves a law-abiding Chinaman!
Pike exclaimed.
You want to talk about the law? The law?
Then Pike explained to the Chinese miners that Congress had already decided that all
Chinamen needed to be gone from these mountains and go back to where they came from.
Indeed, all law-abiding citizens had a right and duty to
deport
—he savored the word—the Chinamen into the sea.
One of Pike’s men took out a sheaf of papers and shook them in the miners’ faces.
These are laws
, he said.
Some old, some new. You Chinamen are scared of laws, aren’t you? Then you better pack
and run.
Yun grabbed the sheaf of papers out of his hand and started to read from them aloud:
…and may be arrested, by any United States customs official, collector of internal
revenue or his deputies, United States marshal or his deputies, and taken before a
United States judge, whose duty it shall be to order that he be deported from the
United States as hereinbefore provided…
I don’t understand
, she said.
I can’t make any sense of these words. Do any of you really understand them?
Pike’s gang gaped at her, amazed that she could read.
One of the men recovered.
The law says that you have to pick up and leave before we make you.
Before we shoot you like vermin
, Pike added.
Gan was the first to take a swing at him, and the first to be shot. Then chaos was
all around Yun as deafening gunshots and flowing blood seemed to put her in another
time, another place.
Run!
Ah San screamed, and pushed her.
She saw Ah San’s head explode into a bloody flower before her eyes as she turned to
run into the woods. Something hit her left shoulder hard and made her stumble, and
she knew that she had been shot. But she kept on running along the deer trail, as
fast as she could.
She heard more shots fired after her, more cries that suddenly became silent, and
then, the sounds of pursuit.
She said a prayer to God and Guanyin each.
I’m hurt. But I can’t die. Not yet. I still have a mission.
And she saw that she still clutched the pamphlets that the men had brought to the
camp with them, pamphlets full of words that none of them could understand, words
that made up laws they claimed said she was unwelcome in this land.
They were her last chance.
She ripped the papers into strips and scattered them behind her. As she passed, trees
gathered behind her, the mist rose, and the path bent, forked, and curled around itself.
The sounds of pursuit scattered and grew fainter.
* * *
AMOS
“You can do magic with words?” Amos asked.
“Words hold magic for the desperate and the hopeful,” Yun said.
Amos looked at her, certain that the woman was mad.
A general of the Heavenly State of Taiping.
He shook his head.
When she had been asleep, her face had been relaxed and peaceful, almost smiling.
He had thought she looked a bit like one of the taciturn but friendly Shoshoni women
on the plains of Wyoming sitting around the fire on those cold nights he had sought
shelter with them.
But now her eyes, feverish, intense, bore into his face like a pair of locomotive
headlights.
A wolf howled in the distance, soon echoed by others.
Then followed the sound of a gunshot, and the howling ceased.
“They’re getting close,” Yun said, gazing into the dark mist. “It’s this fire. You’ve
led them straight to me.”
Amos picked up the kettle and poured water on the hissing fire to put it out. Soon
they were wrapped in darkness, lit only by the light of the moon through the fog.
“I can carry you on Mustard,” Amos said.
Yun shook her head. “I’m not leaving.”
“Why?”
Yun’s glance flickered to a small mound some distance away. Amos squinted and made
out a conical shelter made out of chopped tree branches leaning against each other.
“It’s the gold, isn’t it?” Amos asked. “That’s why you ran here.”
After a second, Yun nodded. “We moved it out here when Pike’s gang started to harass
us this spring. All the gold we’ve mined and saved for two years is here.”
Amos’s heart grew heavy. “You can always get more gold.”
She shook her head.
“This is not my fight,” Amos said.
“Then leave.”
Amos felt a wave of disappointment that turned into anger. He strode over to Mustard
and mounted. Gently, he nudged the mare with his calves and rode away from the hill,
away from the howling wolves and the pursuing men.
* * *
Amos held Mustard’s reins loosely, lost in his thoughts.
She can’t let go of that gold
, he thought.
A fool
. He had seen far too many die from greed out here.
In the years he had been wandering, he had grown more and more mistrustful of the
hearts of women and men. Having more than a few of them together always seemed to
lead to schemes, plots, robbery disguised as something more respectable. He would
sometimes go warily to the towns to trade for goods that he could not do without,
but he far preferred to be alone under an open sky, accompanied only by the howls
of coyotes and wolves, dangers that he understood better and feared less than the
dangers hidden behind the smiling faces of settled men.
In Kansas, he had seen the light of hope go out in the eyes of black families as they
realized that they were free in name only. In New Mexico, he had seen the sorrow on
the faces of the Indians forced to swallow their pride and anger as they learned of
yet another betrayal. And now, it was the Chinamen’s turn.
He tried to push Yun out of his thoughts, but the grief and terror of her tale refused
to let go. He shook his head angrily.
Every year, as the railroads expanded and ramified like the roots of some tenacious
weed, they brought along with them the homesteaders, and farms turned into villages
turned into towns turned into cities.
In his mind, Amos saw the railroads as chains yoking the land around him to an East
that was full of noise and stale air and invisible bonds that weighed down a man’s
spirit until nothing was left of it except the capacity for brutality in masses. Even
the Chinamen were once welcomed out here, when the land was open and empty. But now
that it was filling up and fewer mines were panning out, they became vermin.
Was it really greed?
he thought. The look on her face when she had refused to leave wasn’t one of lust
for the luster and weight of gold, but one of determination to live like a free woman,
not hounded prey.
A Chinaman’s chance was bad enough. But a lone, crazy China
woman
?
An image from long ago came unbidden to his mind.
Help me
, a young man’s voice croaked. Amos closed his eyes, trying to make the voice go away.
Then he shuddered as he heard the gunshot again.
He opened his eyes. Somehow Mustard, who knew him better than he knew himself, had
already turned around and was heading back the way they came.
* * *
Amos dismounted, grabbed his rifle from the saddlebag, and walked over to Yun. The
woman sat serenely and followed him with her eyes, not having moved since he left
her.
“I knew you’d be back,” she said.
“Why?”
“You’re like a
hsiake
from back home in China.”
“What’s that?”
“A hero.”
Amos laughed bitterly. “I’m no hero.”
* * *
AMOS (1864)
The generals and politicians would eventually call it the Battle of Olustee, but for
Amos Turner, it had been hell.
A young clerk struggling to learn the law in Boston, he had volunteered out of a sense
of duty, a desire to end the sin that was slavery, the stain upon the honor of the
Republic that the abolitionists denounced in the streets.
But in those Florida pine woods on that day, there were no beautiful ideals, no duty
and honor, no God and country, only confusion and slaughter. Too frightened to even
think, he charged mindlessly into hailstorms of bullets and screaming artillery even
as his companions disintegrated on each side of him.
“Leave them!” He looked over and saw a white Union commander shouting at the remnants
of some colored troops, who had barely been trained before entering the battle. The
black men were reluctant to leave their wounded comrades behind, but the officer wanted
them to haul away the artillery instead, in the hasty retreat.
Then the ground exploded near him, and Amos was thrown into oblivion.
When he awoke, it was evening. All around him, he could hear the intermittent cries
of the wounded. Union or Rebel, they sounded equally pitiful. After a while, he realized
that he was crying out, too, whether for rescue or the quick relief of a bullet to
the head he knew not.
Then he saw the Rebels. In small groups, they scoured the field, methodically picking
rings, watches, money from the wounded and stripping the clothes from the dead.
He saw some of the Rebels raise their bayonets and thrust down, and a cry would be
silenced. The Rebels moved efficiently and mechanically, like marionettes.
They were murdering the wounded, Amos realized.
Desperately, he tried to crawl away, but his legs and elbows slipped in the mud.
“Help me,” a soldier nearby said, his voice rasping.
He saw that the soldier—one of the black men the Union commander had ordered abandoned—was
very young, barely more than a boy.
“Quiet,” Amos whispered to him harshly. “You’ll draw them.”
The soldier turned his head and focused his eyes on Amos. “Help me,” he begged, louder.
A few Rebels turned in their direction.
Amos pushed the soldier down and crawled away as quickly as he could. He shifted a
few corpses around and buried himself under them, praying that the ruse would work.
And then he forced himself to remain still as the men came closer. One of the Rebel
officers stepped over the pile of bodies that Amos hid under and squatted next to
the dying soldier.
“Help me,” the soldier said. “Please.”
“You dumb thing,” the officer said. “The devil has you now.” Amos willed himself to
get up and say something, to stop what was happening, but his body refused to obey.
He heard the sound of a gunshot. And it echoed in his head for a long time.
Though many Union men were taken as prisoners on that day, very few were black.
Amos crawled away from the field in the night. He did not know for how many days he
lay in a feverish dream, licking the water from the leaves that draped about him and
sometimes chewing the leaves for sustenance.
When he was coherent again, he was consumed with shame at his cowardice. He was no
better than the commander who had given the order to abandon the wounded black soldiers.