Vera Carol Edgarian (great novels of all time txt) 📖

“We have to find her,” I mumbled, my mouth full. I sopped up the chicken gravy with the last bit of corn bread.

“We wait. One, two, three days.” He shrugged. “Maybe she took the ferry. May-be hospital. May-be—”

“She isn’t dead.” I looked at him to see if he agreed. I wouldn’t have admitted it, but Tan’s opinion mattered to me.

He studied the street and sighed. “Nah,” he said. “Rose, she’s not dead.” He thought a bit more and added, “Rain tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow will be too late,” I said. “If the fire jumps Van Ness tonight, we’ll have to run for it.”

Tan nodded, agreeing with me. I gathered myself, stood, and made a show of brushing the crumbs from my skirt. “Right now I need help upstairs. Will you come?”

He followed me up to Rose’s study. Indoors, Tan was second-in-command—not as my servant, never that—but for the simple reason that Rose would have expected it.

In the library, her heavy walnut desk with its leather top had tipped on its nose. We each took hold of a corner. Tan was strong, all nerve and steel, but I was tough too. We heaved the desk to its place against the wall. Then Tan tried to lift one of the deep drawers full of papers and ledgers all by himself; he cried out in agony, “Ayyy!” and dropped it. His silk tunic lifted as he jumped, and I caught a glimpse of the welts that covered his low back. Someone had beaten Tan.

“My God, what happened to you—?”

He caught my words, but more so the command in my voice. I heard it too. It was part of me now.

“What happened to you?” he snapped. “What happened to you?”

Here’s what happened to Tan.

The day I visited The Rose, she handed him his severance and tickets for the ferry. After he dropped me, he collected his things at Rose’s—twenty years of service could fit in a single sack. He returned to the room in Chinatown where Lifang lived with her grandfather. That same night, as Tan feared, the tong boys came to the door at the behest of their leader—Hop Sing Tong—and demanded that Lifang be given as a bride to one of the gang’s leaders. It was a simple transaction and there was no possibility of refusing. They promised to reward Tan handsomely as the father of the bride. Tan assured them that they could have his daughter in a week, but first he needed time to prepare her with the proper clothes. He’d use their money to buy the dress and other necessary items for the wedding. No one in Chinatown would dare go against the tong. No one except Tan, who used the money to buy train tickets to Sacramento; they were due to leave on the ferry the morning of the quake.

Their building collapsed in the first shaker; it folded as most of Chinatown fell, like a paper lantern. Tan, Lifang, and LowNaa clung to one another and rode the building down as it buckled into the street. The residents on the floors below them died, but luck kept Tan, Lifang, and LowNaa alive. Still, Tan had to dig with his bare hands to unearth the old man.

They’d rushed to the ferry, passing too many dead, Chinese and white folk alike, and a hundred dead steers who’d busted loose from the stockyards and were shot as they stampeded down Market Street. At the Ferry Building it was madness, only whites were allowed to board, and even then, only the rich. They spotted Sarah Bernhardt getting on with her dogs; Caruso was accompanied by his valet and dozens of steamer trunks. Tan, Lifang, and LowNaa showed their tickets. When Tan insisted, when he claimed the right to board as the butler of Rose’s house, one of the toughs beat him with a rod. With no options—with the Chinese herded like stock to a guarded camp in the Presidio—Tan came to us.

Strange Lands and People

Pie understood that as long as the fires raged, she couldn’t expect to hear from James. But that didn’t stop Pie’s heart from wanting. Nothing stops a heart from wanting.

On the third day of the fire, Pie and I were preparing to leave the house—we’d gathered our pails to take to the relief lines—when it struck me that Ricky wasn’t singing. I checked Rose’s parlor, where we’d put him that first morning, there in the curved bay where he could feel the sun pouring through the tall windows, an eerie orange light cast by the fires. He wasn’t there.

Ricky had figged the bamboo latch on his cage. It wasn’t the first time he’d used his beak to free himself, and in our old house we’d threaded a wire round the little bamboo stick to secure the cage’s door. In the post-quake mayhem, I’d forgotten to twist the wire. Pie and I searched the house but Ricky was gone—out the busted parlor window.

“Oh, V, I’m sorry. What a thing,” Pie fretted.

How I must have looked, absorbing yet another loss. Pie insisted that I sit on the divan and gather myself.

I stared at the carpet, seeing nothing, while beside me Pie coughed into her fist. “I… didn’t think about him today,” I admitted. “I even forgot to feed him.”

“It’s all right, I took care of it. I fed him this morning—” Pie’s eyes got huge, as she realized she’d forgotten to twist the wire. “Oh, V, I’m so—sorry!”

I covered my face with my hands.

She suggested we look for him in the ring of trees that topped the highest point of Lafayette Square, and though I doubted Ricky could last long in the smoke and wind, I brought along an orange, to lure him from wherever he’d gone.

Pie put her arm around me as we looked among the neighbors’ roofs to see if Ricky was up there.

“I don’t blame you,” I said. “It was a mistake.”

“Well, I blame me. You’re doing everything,” she