She looked at the rim of the collar. She brought the shirt to her face and sniffed, and I became embarrassed. The children stared at my mask. “Not so dirty,” Chun Ho said.
“Really? Shall I take them back?”
“No back. I keep. Clean ’em.”
“What are your children named, then?”
“Boy Kwang. Daughter Ng.”
“How do you do?” I called. They stayed back by the stove and studied the apparition that had been greeted by their mother. Something meaty and sweet was slowly cooking on the stove beside the great black kettle in which she heated water.
“No bath today,” she said in a soft voice, as if it were an intimacy impossible to perform before children. Perhaps it was, I thought, regarding her stiff face, her lively eyes, the sweat stains at her arms, and the way her baggy clothes fell back against her flesh. I associated the cooking meat with appetite, the appetite with her, and I stepped away, then stopped.
“Boys work as girls do?”
“No. Always not.”
“But your boy — but Kwang does.” He looked up when I said his name.
“Now, Merica,” she said. “Ogin. Fonia. New City. New York City. Merica States.”
“The United States.”
“Sure. United States. Wife of dead man, boy, girclass="underline" United States. Everybody work. You think?”
I said, in an eager way I am unaccustomed to hearing from my lips, “I would help you, you know. If you needed me to, I would help you.”
She looked at me shrewdly; I felt weighed, evaluated as the steam and the scents of herbs and pork, perhaps, and of something corrosive — maybe a bleaching agent — rose at the low ceiling of the small, hot room. I thought of how she lifted my limbs to scrub them, of how she held each hand in turn to clean the knuckles, the palms.
I said to him, although I faced his mother, “Be good, Kwang. Be a small man.”
“All men not so good,” she finally said. “Some good.”
We studied one another, I suppose you would have to call it.
“Shirts one day, two day. Yes?”
I shrugged.
Then she shrugged, as if in reply, and suddenly she smiled with a kind of abandon before she recomposed her face.
I thought, as I walked one step backward, then turned to leave, that I must remember what she had fleetingly looked like when she forgot to hide: wife of dead man.
At the office, I lit lamps, for the day was sullen and dark and very little light spilled down along the brick wall opposite my window, inches away. Mail came from the main post office on nearby Nassau Street, and I very much appreciated that, for the office had first been the Middle Dutch Church, which for me had the appearance of a bank in a nightmare. I had a notice of freight transfer from one of the wooden sidewheel steamers of the Collins Line, out of Liverpool, to the New York Central — bales of cloth for upstate merchant brokers. I had two letters concerning payment; one enclosed it in the form of a check drawn upon the Bank of New York, and the other begged for time in remunerating me for having purchased and sent by barge across the river to New Jersey a shipment of teak, brought over from the north of Siam through a brokerage in France, for the building of small boats. I wrote an angry note refusing to extend the debt; I would deliver it later to a small man in a large, empty office — he had a desk and two chairs in a room on Maiden Lane the size of a small restaurant — and he would write it gracefully and sign on my behalf and see it sent.
Having thought so recently of Sam Mordecai, I would not have been surprised to receive a letter from him, but nothing had arrived. I was not dismayed when events of which I had dreamed came to pass, nor had I changed in this wise since my boyhood. Once, when my uncle, staying (it felt like a decade) for several days, had lost his pocket notebook, and had become very much vexed and even more difficult than he usually was, I had dreamed of finding it behind the firewood I’d split and stacked, and which he had inspected like a grand vizier of the upstate forests. That is, I had seen the little leather book, had in my dreaming felt the textured surface of its cover, had shoved aside the fresh peach-colored surface of the quartered birch logs to seize it and hold it in the air before his quivering wattles and cloudy eyes. I had wakened and, still in my nightshirt, had walked barefoot into the autumn morning to move the wood about and hold it up. There had been no shaking it in the air before his face, however, because he was Uncle, after all, and he had kept us from falling further into debt and discomfort once my father was dead. But I would not have been surprised to see an envelope from Samuel Mordecai.
I found a strayed mare, on which we carried tarpaulins and blankets and food, rather early in my association with Sergeant Grafton when we were moving down through southern Pennsylvania. I sat back against a tree as he shouted at Burton and as Sam Mordecai went trotting off with a resoluteness I found charming, since he’d no idea where he should seek the horse.
The sergeant shouted, “Bartholomew, you lazy bugger assassin!” But I merely smiled and pulled my hat low upon my head and closed my eyes.
I opened them, only seconds later, and I called to him, “The fruits of my catnap, Sergeant. She’s in a grove of plum trees.”
He walked over and cut a chew of tobacco for himself and inserted it into his mouth. Then, around it, he said, “Specifically plum?”
“I do know a plum tree when I see one.”
“And you saw one.”
“Yes.”
“Yes, Sergeant, goddamn it, Bartholomew. Stand up and give me a goddamned report!”
“Sergeant, the lazy bugger assassin”—and he began to smile—“reports that he dreamed of seeing the runaway mare in a grove of plums.”
“I’m going to send Burton, on the strength of your dream, to look for plum trees. Is that what you suggest?”
“It is.”
“And I’ll never doubt you again, I suppose.”
“I suppose you’ll try, Sergeant. But you’ll wonder.”
He spat some tobacco juice between my feet. When he looked up, he was grinning. “Did you see me swallow any of this and choke to death?”
“I’m willing to be patient,” I told him, and he began to sputter into a laugh.
Of course, we found the horse, and in a grove of trees that Burton thought, though he couldn’t be sure, were plums.
It wasn’t until we were pretty far south, halfway through the Carolinas, that I dreamed the dream about the woman and woke, shouting, to terrify Grafton and Burton and bring Mordecai running over from where he’d mounted watch. The night was cold and wet, heavy rain on everything for hours, and we were soaked and miserable to start with. We had rolled into our blankets and covered ourselves with tarpaulins because we hadn’t the grit, nor had Grafton the heart to order us, to make shelters with rope and tent halves, using the low limbs of slender dogwoods, the only trees near where we had stopped.
“Are you drunk, Mr. Bartholomew?”
“No, Sergeant, and I wish I was.”
“You were dreaming?”
“I’m afraid so.”
“Because? Afraid because? Go back to your watching, Mr. Mordecai. Wake Mr. Burton in two hours and see if you can sleep. If not, find a way to make a fire in a rainstorm and I’ll put you in for medals. Mr. Bartholomew? Why afraid?”