Which, she reflected, might account for the look as well.
They talked it over, went before the community association responsible for orphans, and offered the boy a home. Their friends argued with them, saying that there was something very wrong with the child, that the boy must have attracted the evil eye somehow, to be so consistently cursed, and that he would bring his disastrous heritage with him. Mah's soft heart could be understood, but surely Long could see that the best place for the child was a nice anonymous orphanage? His friends' arguments, however, fell on ears that had been deafened by the faint ring of hope in his wife's voice. Long determined to go ahead; his friends and neighbours shook their heads, saying that his weakness for injured creatures would get him into trouble.
With spectacles, the boy's squint went away; with affection and stability, the superior gaze faded. Nothing much could be done about the boy's stature and crooked back, although good food, corrective shoes, and a regimen of traditional exercises helped, but in the end, it did not matter. He was very bright, and with a little luck and a lot of planning, he might not have to depend on manual labour for a living.
School was easy enough, for the teachers in the Chinese school appreciated a student who did his work and more. And with care, the family savings would stretch to teacher-training college, and the boy would teach others, not carry loads like his adoptive father or scrub floors and iron shirts like his mother.
Four years later, the gods decided to intervene in the family fortunes.
Divine whim being by its nature both capricious and deceptive, the intervention began with catastrophe. One foggy morning in June 1902, when Long was working with a gang of brick-layers on the third story of a new building, the prophecy concerning his disastrous susceptibility to small, weak creatures was fulfilled. For some reason, a mother cat had decided to shift her litter during the night. And since cats, like ants, have a habit of tracing an impossibly labyrinthine path to their goal, this one had wound her way up some planks, dropped into a half-finished chimney, and come to a rest inside a wall that was due to be bricked in that day. The man with the brick in one hand and a laden trowel in the other had heard the rustle and faint mewing sound, and paused to peer in.
No one particularly wanted to leave the cats inside the wall, but stopping work to dig them out risked getting them all fired. The brick-layer went on with his job, but slowly, sending his hod-carrier to fetch Long who, while not exactly a boss, had a margin more authority than the man with the brick in his hand.
Long came, and saw that, short of tearing down the previous day's work, the only way to reach the litter was from the scaffolding on the outside of the building. And being the tallest man on the crew, his long arms were the clear candidates for the rescue operation.
Mother and two kits were soon in a burlap sack. He was stretching for the third, fingers out and brushing the tantalising softness that was hissing furiously from a niche just beyond his reach, when the board of the precarious scaffolding jerked, trembled for a moment, then slid with a sickening airiness into space. Arms flung out to catch at the framework of lashed-together boards scrabbled briefly at the fog-slick surfaces, then gave way, clawing a path through the intervening structure until Long finally smashed down on a surface that did not give. He lay on his back, staring up at the faraway faces of his horrified coworkers, at the slowing sway of the traitorous scaffolding, at the grey of the sky above, wondering if this was what the transition into death was like.
He waited for the shock of injury to drift away into the afterlife, but it did not. And then he heard the yowl of the mother cat, fighting her terrified way out of the bag, and somehow the noise told him that no, he was not yet dead.
The fall hadn't killed him, miraculously enough, or even crippled him. It hadn't snapped his spine or crushed his skull or ruptured some vital inner organ. It had dislocated three fingers and broken six bones—both those of his left forearm, one in his right ankle, two ribs, and his left collarbone—but the healer who pressed the expensive herbs on Mah assured them that he would heal.
And he did, slowly, although it was a month before he could hook a pair of crutches under his arms and hobble from one side of the apartment to the other. And two months before his leg enabled him to negotiate the stairs and stand on the street again.
Mah worked all the hours she could, and twelve-year-old Tom, strong despite his stature and the twist in his spine, was hired by the downstairs grocer to make deliveries all that summer. Still they went into debt to the money-lender. When the school year started up again, Tom demanded to keep working for the greengrocer, but Long was even more adamant that the boy needed to be in school, and his edict carried. Tom did work after school and on the weekends, but only on condition that his homework got done as well.
In October, Long began to look for employment, but building crews wanted the able-bodied and offices the formally educated. He picked up a few hours a week keeping the grocer's accounts, and tutored some men in English, but it was not enough. The money-lenders bit deep, and deeper.
The rains came, and if California in November was not as cold as China had been, nonetheless the air in an underheated apartment chilled the bones, especially bones that had been broken eighteen weeks before. On the days he did not have work, Long often walked, with an idea that he was building his strength. He also kept his eye out for potential jobs, along the docks or in the industrial edges of the town, although he was wary about the shopping centre, and avoided the residential areas assiduously: A forty-four-year-old man with a gimpy leg would be easy prey for a gang of toughs.
One Saturday in late November, Tom came upstairs from the greengrocer's and told his father that he had been asked to deliver a crate of exotic vegetables clear the other end of the city, all the way out at the western shore. The boy was both excited and apprehensive about the lengthy expedition, and Long offered to accompany him. In fact, he even convinced the grocer to throw in a second cross-town street-car fare, to ensure that the produce would arrive without mishap. The month before, another, older delivery boy had been set upon by a gang of white boys, leaving the fruit he had been carrying crushed and worthless. Even limping, Long's presence might serve to deter the vandals.
The trip went smoothly, other than a few disapproving glances. And the restaurant at the end of the world was so pleased at the freshness of the crate's contents that the cook gave Tom a dime tip and two thick sandwiches. Father and son took the food down to the beach at the foot of the cliffs, settling in against the sea wall for shelter.
It was a cold afternoon, the wind fitful from the previous day's storm, the waves erratic against the cliff. Although the Playland carnival rides were going full-strength, there were few other beachgoers that day to object to a Chinese boy. Tom happily stuffed the remnants of his sandwich into his mouth and ran off to see what the waves had thrown up. He stopped regularly to swipe his glasses clean on his shirt-tail, and squatted occasionally to examine some treasure or other.
Another family was making its slow way up the beach in their direction. They were white people: a tall man with that yellow hair some of them possessed and, behind a pair of gold spectacles, the peculiar blue eyes that often went with the hair; a woman with dark eyes and tendrils of normal-coloured hair blowing out from under her warm hat; between them, half hidden between the woman's dark red skirt and the father's tall legs, toddled a young child. The father had taken off his hat and tucked it under his arm against the wind. The man and the woman, both of them warmly bundled, were talking and watching the ground. The woman, too, bent from time to time, holding up whatever small thing she had found to show to the man or the child.
They did not see Tom; Tom did not see them; the two paths were set to coincide. And although Long did not worry that this man would perform any act of actual violence against the boy, he did not want his son's day ruined by a white man's crushing remark. So he got to his feet, as if his limping gait might actually interrupt the meeting.
To his relief, however, the progress of the trio was broken when the child's small foot caught on a length of kelp and she was sent sprawling face-first into the sand. Both parents lifted her, brushed her off, comforted her. The father held her to his chest and seemed to be engaging her in conversation, which made Long warm to him: White men so seldom talked with their children. And then the father turned away from the sea, carrying the child to the shelter of the sea wall. Long could not hear her, but he could tell when she laughed, and he was smiling himself when the father sat down with his great arms wrapped around her slim, well-padded body.
The woman, meanwhile, had been distracted by the approach of Tom. Long's face twisted in concern and he strode as quickly as he could out onto the damp sand, but half a dozen steps and he slowed again. The woman said something to Tom, but whatever her greeting, it had been friendly, and Tom answered her by holding out something in his hand. She leant over to examine it, and the two discussed it for a while. She must have asked where he had come upon the object, because Long saw his son's arm go out to point up the beach towards the rocks. The woman straightened to look, and then she nodded at the boy. They both continued in their original directions, Tom down
