Candle in the Attic Window(79)
Bao is standing at the tent flap, pulling on his boots. He looks relieved to see her.
“Li! I was going to come find you,” he says. “It’s not safe in a storm.”
Lien is touched by his concern, but doesn’t dare show it.
“I was at the latrine,” she says.
“Of course,” Bao replies, his mien equally icy.
Without another word, they go to their cots, where Lien lies awake, listening to the breathing of the sleeping men, thinking only of how she is likely to meet her death tomorrow. She whispers many prayers to the ancestors, wondering whether Fa did the same. In the wee hours, she finally finds sleep, but it is a restless sleep and she awakens many times in the night to the frightening feeling of falling from a great height.
The next morning finds Lien dangling over a cliff face in a huge basket of woven reeds. The basket is large enough to hold a man twice Lien’s size, but the job is easier if the contents are as light as possible, and the dynamite takes up its share of the container. As she does every time she is lowered over a precipice, Lien eyes the dynamite in the bottom of the basket warily, knowing how volatile it is. Their hands cold, the men lowering her over the cliff with a rope are stopping and starting more than usual, and the jerking movements of the basket remind her of the seasickness on the voyage from Qwangtung to California. She closes her eyes and thinks of warm summer fields full of wildflowers. She thinks of hot, soothing tea and her mother’s kind smile. She thinks of Bao’s brown hand brushing hers so carelessly. She thinks of anything other than the dizzying height, the bone-numbing cold, the jerking rope, and the unstable explosives.
Finally, the jerking stops. She looks up at the lip of the cliff. A boy appears and gives her a hand signal. She signals back and scoots around in the basket so that she can slowly tip it towards the cliff wall. She braces with her feet and knees until she is perched perilously on the side of the basket. The woven reeds creak and groan beneath her weight.
She grabs the dynamite, heedless of the danger, ignoring the terrifying possibility that the basket might break beneath her. The cliff face is already defiled with the marks of an explosion and Lien shakes her head. Why would they blast the same place over and over again? She wants to cry, thinking of Fa and how her life will be wasted alongside his in this careless manner, but she marshals herself. The Chinese workers are no more valuable to their white masters than hammers or chisels – they are simply tools to do a job, interchangeable and replaceable. This is their fate – this is her fate.
Sighing, reluctantly resigned to her doom, she jams several dynamite sticks into the shallow crevasses of the cliff’s face. Once they’re secure, she lights a match on her teeth, presses the match to the wicks, and drops the match without watching its descent. She takes a deep breath and observes the flames’ progress with the skill of experience; this is the part of blasting that requires finesse. Timing is everything.
She silently thanks Fa for his wisdom as the wicks burn faster than usual, spurred by the cold, dry air. She presses her feet flat against the stone and then pushes with all her strength, rolling backwards so the basket tips upright again, hopefully protecting her from the blast.
The hard, frozen stone refuses to give way to the dynamite, and the explosion has only one outlet. Instead of tunneling into the cliff, the blast explodes into the open air, pushing Lien’s basket away from the cliff face. Above, the men gripping the rope struggle to maintain a hold on her lifeline, the explosion yanking the rope over the edge of the precipice with such force that they can’t hold it for long. They cry out in dismay as the rope is torn from their protesting fingers, the pulley on the edge snapping under the pressure, the basket spinning away from the cliff and falling, taking Lien with it to the ground.
Lien dreams of women in bonnets and children in straw hats. She can’t see their faces, and their voices are strange and muffled, so that no matter how much she strains to hear their words, the sounds remain elusive. They sit in the dark, clustered around a tiny fire. Around them, the night is an empty, starless void. They are small and vulnerable, and the children are shivering in their cotton clothes, but she can’t find any blankets in the dark, and the women don’t respond when she tries to tell them the children are cold. The figures and their fire seem to grow smaller and more indistinct. Then they are simply gone and Lien is alone in darkness.
She awakens to warmth and light, but above her is the starless void. She realizes gradually that she is not in her tent, on her cot; she is lying on hard, frozen earth, without a blanket, and her limbs are stiff with the cold. She tries to sit up and screams as pain sears through her head.
One of her legs is immobilized. In the dim firelight, she can see that it has been splinted with slender branches. It aches dully and attempting to move it results in a sharp, grinding pain that takes her breath away. She must have broken it in the fall, she muses, though her thoughts are hard to grasp, slippery as eels.
She wakes again later to more light and warmth, the fire having been fed and burning brightly. A few feet away, on the ground, she sees the shape of another person, lying prone. She slowly sits up, fighting pain in her head as she does, until she can make out some details.
“Fa?” She cries, recognizing the bruised face turned toward the fire. Fa’s eyes are closed. Even though she calls his name several times, he does not wake. She fears for a moment that perhaps he’s dead, but then sees that his chest is rising and falling with slow, even breaths. His right arm and right leg have both been splinted in the same manner as hers.