Lee paused. “I thought I could tell it in a few sentences,” he said. “But you don’t know the background. I’m going to get a cup of water—do you want some?”
“Yes,” said Adam. “But there’s one thing I don’t understand. How could a woman do that kind of work?”
“I’ll be back in a moment,” said Lee, and he went to the kitchen. He brought back tin cups of water and put them on the table. He. asked, “Now what did you want to know?”
“How could your mother do a man’s work?”
Lee smiled. “My father said she was a strong woman, and I believe a strong woman may be stronger than a man, particularly if she happens to have love in her heart. I guess a loving woman is almost indestructible.”
Adam made a wry grimace.
Lee said, “You’ll see one day, you’ll see.”
“I didn’t mean to think badly,” said Adam. “How could I know out of one experience? Go on.”
“One thing my mother did not whisper in my father’s ear during that long miserable crossing. And because a great many were deadly seasick, no remark was made of her illness.”
Adam cried, “She wasn’t pregnant!”
“She was pregnant,” said Lee. “And she didn’t want to burden my father with more worries.”
“Did she know about it when she started?”
“No, she did not. I set my presence in the world at the most inconvenient time. It’s a longer story than I thought.”
“Well, you can’t stop now,” said Adam.
“No, I suppose not. In San Francisco the flood of muscle and bone flowed into cattle cars and the engines puffed up the mountains. They were going to dig hills aside in the Sierras and burrow tunnels under the peaks. My mother got herded into another car, and my father didn’t see her until they got to their camp on a high mountain meadow. It was very beautiful, with green grass and flowers and the snow mountains all around. And only then did she tell my father about me.
“They went to work. A woman’s muscles harden just as a man’s do, and my mother had a muscular spirit too. She did the pick and shovel work expected of her, and it must have been dreadful. But a panic worry settled on them about how she was going to have the baby.”
Adam said, “Were they ignorant? Why couldn’t she have gone to the boss and told him she was a woman and pregnant? Surely they would have taken care of her.”
“You see?” said Lee. “I haven’t told you enough. And that’s why this is so long. They were not ignorant. These human cattle were imported for one thing only—to work. When the work was done, those who were not dead were to be shipped back. Only males were brought—no females. The country did not want them breeding. A man and a woman and a baby have a way of digging in, of pulling the earth where they are about them and scratching out a home. And then it takes all hell to root them out. But a crowd of men, nervous, lusting, restless, half sick with loneliness for women—why, they’ll go anywhere, and particularly will they go home. And my mother was the only woman in this pack of half-crazy, half-savage men. The longer the men worked and ate, the more restless they became. To the bosses they were not people but animals which could be dangerous if not controlled. You can see why my mother did not ask for help. Why, they’d have rushed her out of the camp and—who knows?—perhaps shot and buried her like a diseased cow. Fifteen men were shot for being a little mutinous.
“No—they kept order the way our poor species has ever learned to keep order. We think there must be better ways but we never learn them—always the whip, the rope, and the rifle. I wish I hadn’t started to tell you this—”
“Why should you not tell me?” Adam asked.
“I can see my father’s face when he told me. An old misery comes back, raw and full of pain. Telling it, my father had to stop and gain possession of himself, and when he continued he spoke sternly and he used hard sharp words almost as though he wanted to cut himself with them.
“These two managed to stay close together by claiming she was my father’s nephew. The months went by and fortunately for them there was very little abdominal swelling, and she worked in pain and out of it. My father could only help her a little, apologizing, ‘My nephew is young and his bones are brittle.’ They had no plan. They did not know what to do.
“And then my father figured out a plan. They would run into the high mountains to one of the higher meadows, and there beside a lake they would make a burrow for the birthing, and when my mother was safe and the baby born, my father would come back and take his punishment. And he would sign for an extra five years to pay for his delinquent nephew. Pitiful as their escape was, it was all they had, and it seemed a brightness. The plan had two requirements—the timing had to be right and a supply of food was necessary.”
Lee said, “My parents”—and he stopped, smiling over his use of the word, and it felt so good that he warmed it up—”my dear parents began to make their preparations. They saved a part of their daily rice and hid it under their sleeping mats. My father found a length of string and filed out a hook from a piece of wire, for there were trout to be caught in the mountain lakes. He stopped smoking to save the matches issued. And my mother collected every tattered scrap of cloth she could find and unraveled edges to make thread and sewed this ragbag together with a splinter to make swaddling clothes for me. I wish I had known her.”
“So do I,” said Adam. “Did you ever tell this to Sam Hamilton?”
“No I didn’t. I wish I had. He loved a celebration of the human soul. Such things were like a personal triumph to him.”
“I hope they got there,” said Adam.
“I know. And when my father would tell me I would say to him, ‘Get to that lake—get my mother there—don’t let it happen again, not this time. Just once let’s tell it: how you got to the lake and built a house of fir boughs.’ And my father became very Chinese then. He said, There’s more beauty in the truth even if it is dreadful beauty. The storytellers at the city gate twist life so that it looks sweet to the lazy and the stupid and the weak, and this only strengthens their infirmities and teaches nothing, cures nothing, nor does it let the heart soar.’ ”
“Get on with it,” Adam said irritably.
Lee got up and went to the window, and he finished the story, looking out at the stars that winked and blew in the March wind.
“A little boulder jumped down a hill and broke my father’s leg. They set the leg and gave him cripples’ work, straightening used nails with a hammer on a rock. And whether with worry or work—it doesn’t matter—my mother went into early labor. And then the half-mad men knew and they went all mad. One hunger sharpened another hunger, and one crime blotted out the one before it, and the little crimes committed against those starving men flared into one gigantic maniac crime.
“My father heard the shout ‘Woman’ and he knew. He tried to run and his leg rebroke under him and he crawled up the ragged slope to the roadbed where it was happening.
“When he got there a kind of sorrow had come over the sky, and the Canton men were creeping away to hide and to forget that men can be like this. My father came to her on the pile of shale. She had not even eyes to see out of, but her mouth still moved and she gave him his instructions. My father clawed me out of the tattered meat of my mother with his fingernails. She died on the shale in the afternoon.”
Adam was breathing hard. Lee continued in a singsong cadence, “Before you hate those men you must know this. My father always told it at the last: No child ever had such care as I. The whole camp became my mother. It is a beauty—a dreadful kind of beauty. And now good night. I can’t talk any more.”
3
Adam restlessly opened drawers and looked up at the shelves and raised the lids of boxes in his house and at last he was forced to call Lee back and ask, “Where’s the ink and the pen?”
“You don’t have any,” said Lee. “You haven’t written a word in years. I’ll lend you mine if you want.” He went to his room and brought back a squat bottle of ink and a stub pen and a pad of paper and an envelope and laid them on the table.