Sometimes I thought he was just pulling my leg with the way he talked. His eyes looked considerably more intelligent than his speech and manner would suggest. I would have bet money that if ever I should sneak up on him, I would catch him speaking perfect English, maybe even better than mine. There was something like royalty about him, as if he’d been kidnapped from a palace in China and pushed off the train in Galen. But then, living with Luca had made me touchy about language, so maybe it wasn’t so after all.
I learned through Rennie, as I did all the few things I gleaned about Mr. Sung, that his other name was Chun, but neither of us knew which was the first name and which the last. I suppose it didn’t matter since it all sounded like pots and pans anyway. For his part, he called me Missus, and nothing I could do would persuade him to call me Darcy.
Even the little man’s talents were peculiar. He was always very polite and courteous and glad to do whatever he could around the house. He liked to cook and frequently stank up the kitchen with his concoctions. I wouldn’t eat anything that had heads or feet floating around in it, but Rennie, always so finicky before, seemed to like everything that came out of his cauldron.
In spite of myself, I came to appreciate Mr. Sung’s slaughtering skills. I’d always made such a bloody, godawful mess of killing chickens and pigs. But the Chinaman knew a much neater way. He simply broke their necks with one quick motion. By killing them first, no blood spurted, only oozed when they were hacked up. I watched, fascinated, as he killed and then expertly butchered them, but I never could master it myself.
Even this unaccountable skill was by far not the oddest thing about the Oriental. Strangest of all were his nocturnal wanderings. Every night, sometime after Rennie and I had gone to bed and lay safe behind our locked door, I would hear the creak of his old mattress as he got out of bed, hear the whine of half-rotted floorboards as he crossed the room, and finally the sound of the front door being softly opened and just as softly shut behind him. Where did he go night after night? Where could a Chinaman go in the middle of the night in Galen? The whorehouse in the woods was the only place I could think of and he seemed too fastidious for that, even if one of the girls had been agreeable.
In spite of all his strangeness, his being a heathen, and that he was only five feet tall, there was a dignity about him that I came to grudgingly respect. A respect, I am certain, that was never returned. Because although he was unfailingly polite to me, I was convinced that underneath it all, he felt only sorry for me and thought his landlady all too fallible. It wasn’t that he ever said anything particularly meaningful to me, and certainly never accusing, but still I sensed that somehow, he knew or had guessed just how poorly I had managed my own life and Rennie’s. And I resented him for it.
Nor was I happy about the closeness that had quickly sprung up between my daughter and the stranger, and I only let him stay because making him leave would have broken her heart. He’d become her favorite playmate, if not her only soul mate, and often on entering a room filled with their voices, they would suddenly fall silent, as if in a conspiracy of which I had no part.
There was something about him that I didn’t like and, moreover, didn’t trust. He knew too much, though why I thought this I couldn’t say. Our reputation in Galen was practically legend, and I knew better than to think any of the townspeople would stoop to talking with a heathen. But how much had Rennie told him? There was no way of knowing because, in spite of her youth, in this one way, she was her mother’s daughter and kept her secrets well.
That September, Galen School had a picnic for the children and their parents. Rennie didn’t ask me to go. She knew from experience that I would refuse. I imagined she would go by herself. Strange to tell, the other children and their mothers and fathers never taunted her because of her parentage. But neither did they befriend her. They mostly just kept their distance. I think it was her otherworldliness that gave them pause, as if she might cast a spell and turn them all to frogs. But Rennie didn’t choose to go alone. Instead, she went with Mr. Sung. Later, they came back for supper and fell all over each other at the table recounting the day to me. None of the mothers or fathers would talk to the little
