Water Ghosts Read online

  They took water from the bucket—warm minerally water that dribbled from the ladle down their chins—then went back to the field. Her father resumed at the plow and Po Pei scanned the ground for stones. The skin on her neck and back was tender—sunburnt, she knew. Her lower back ached; her arms were sore. She tipped her head up, to look out from under her hat, and saw her father. He had paused at the plow, his face bent into his arm. His shoulders shook.

  Ba? she yelled.

  He lifted his head and looked at her. She was too far to see his face. He waved his hand to her, then straightened up and began pushing again. Po Pei reached the end of the field, removed what she believed was the last rock. She went to wash the dirt from under her nails. From the pan where she washed, she gazed across to her father. He was a mere outline against the red sky, still plowing.

  THE GHOST CAME the next week. Po Pei first saw her in the well. At first glance, her own reflection, but as she peered over to lower the bucket, she saw it was the face of her neighbor, Old Chan’s wife. The bucket broke the reflection, until it was merely ripples of the sun overhead.

  Po Pei began to see Old Chan’s wife in every water surface—her cup as she tipped to drink, the water she bathed in, the trough where the animals drank. Her mother would say it was Po Pei’s imagination, but Po Pei was sure it was a water ghost. If she could sense the future, why not also the world not on the other side of time, but the other side of the veil? Those who were neither living nor dead, but in limbo for unfulfilled destinies, or to gain retribution. Po Pei was nervous, but not afraid. In the far side of the field, she burned money for the dead, and watched as the wind swept in and carried the ashes up into the sky, up to heaven.

  She awakened one night to her mother’s angry voice in the loft above. She lifted her head from her pillow, just a bit, and held herself very still, holding even her breath. Her mother had seen Old Chan’s wife and she was asking her father why. Why did the ghost linger here rather than at Chan’s? What did she want with them? Her father said, over and over, I don’t know, I don’t know and his murmur was broken by a thud and the sound of liquid. The chamber pot next to Po Pei’s bed had overturned and spilled. Urine narrowed from a puddle into a stream, stopped at the ladder, pointing like an accusing finger.

  Po Pei? her mother asked.

  It wasn’t me, Mama, Po Pei, in fear, admitted. It was a ghost. And she told her mother how she had seen Old Chan’s wife everywhere, for the last few days. Her mother listened quietly. When Po Pei was finished, she screamed at Po Pei’s father, because there was only one explanation for the lingering spirit.

  The next afternoon, Po Pei’s mother returned from the medium with three pieces of paper, marked with characters and threaded with gold leaf. Her mother instructed each of them to dip the paper in their tea and rub it on their faces and necks. Then she burned the paper and mixed the ashes into their tea. The taste and texture made Po Pei gag, but the ashes would protect them. Her father drank it without comment, with downcast eyes.

  Rather than disappearing, the ghost seemed to multiply. She moved from water surfaces to glass so that Po Pei saw her through every window. According to the old stories, the ghost wouldn’t be settled until she gained retribution, but Po Pei couldn’t reconcile her sightings with the stories. She looked in on rooms where the ghost cooked, embroidered, swept, plucked chickens. When Po Pei burst into these rooms, determined to catch the ghost unaware, there was no one, save for a last floating feather, or a settling cloud of swept dust.

  Her father began to work more slowly, to move deliberately. Po Pei thought it was guilt—his face paling, his body narrowing. Her mother, content with the eaten ashes, did not notice. one night when they had all been sleeping for hours and a chill had fallen on the room, Po Pei saw her father climb down the ladder and slink out the front door. Caught up in the world of old stories, where the daughter trails her sneaking-away father to discover secrets, she followed him.

  He was careful with his feet. He did not let his soles lift too high above the ground, did not let them slap back down, so that he glided through the village, past dark windows and settled animals. Po Pei followed him to the cemetery on the hill. At a grave whose stone glowed pink in the moonlight, he met a woman. The woman was clean and light as polished ivory, her clothes pressed and beautiful, but Po Pei could see it was Old Chan’s dead wife. Under the deception of the moon, her face was carefree, joyful. They embraced, and even in the small touch, Po Pei saw the transference of her father’s essence. He grew dimmer as the woman shone. He was losing his yang chi’i, his male essence, his life-light. His yin had grown unbalanced—too much darkness, too much moon, too much female.

  The next morning, her father couldn’t even rise from bed. Her mother cursed him and fed him soup in a single gesture; it was love tempered by annoyance. Po Pei opened her mouth to tell her mother—It’s more than a fever!—and felt her breath being sucked away, every gasp she took to form the words stolen and her mouth filled with ice. Her mother shouted at her to not stare with her mouth agape like some village idiot. Po Pei clamped down on the iciness and didn’t dare to speak.

  With a closed mouth, Po Pei gathered up all she knew from the old tales and decided on a remedy of her own. She got large bundles of hell notes—sacrificial money for the dead—and crept into her neighbor’s henhouse. Inside, the light was dusty, fell through the spaces between the warped wood, but was enough to reflect back the glitter of a hundred small eyes. Po Pei moved slowly, choosing carefully. Most of the birds rose up and fluttered away from her with a squawk, so she grabbed for the one that was too slow, too weak, that only shivered on its roost at her approach.

  Again, at the far side of the field, Po Pei burned the hell notes. The chicken squirmed on the ground, its legs bound. As she threw more money onto the pile, Po Pei saw the ghost approach, drawn by the lure of underworld wealth. She came closer, cautiously, as if she could not believe all this money was for her. When the ghost was within a few feet, her eyes caught on the swirling rising money-ash, Po Pei sliced the chicken’s neck and held it upside down. It convulsed with more vigor than it ever held in life. The ghost looked from the ash to the blood draining onto the ground, and her mouth opened in shock. She turned to leave, but the vacuum left by the hen’s escaping soul sucked in the wandering ghost. Poppy turned the hen right-side up, and bandaged the slit on its neck. It clucked weakly. It was no longer a chicken, but a vessel for the ghost of a slighted lover.

  Po Pei kept the hen as a pet; she had to ensure that it did not die before the ghost was firmly entrenched as a chicken spirit. It clucked around their doorway, cocked its head at her recovering father, and occasionally leaped into a fit of feathers and dust, as if trying to escape itself. It scurried from her mother, and pecked at Po Pei’s feet. By the time her father glowed again with his balanced yin-yang, when the dark half-moons were gone from under his eyes, the chicken settled into itself. It was as meek as it was in the beginning, too languid to do more than roost, too shy even to lay eggs. In this state, Po Pei returned it to the henhouse.

  30

  THE PIG WRITHES and kicks and cries as they wrestle it off its feet. They slice its throat. The blood spurts and runs over its eyes. Chloe watches the body drain; the squeals fade to snorts, then silence. The white-aproned men move in the artificial light and cast long shadows as they slice open the pig and clean it. Dark spreading blood stains the starched whiteness. The smell of offal taints the nightly ritual, a reminder of the pigs jostling in the barn just yards away. Smoke pipes from the pit and coals hum red at the bottom. The men wrestle the pig onto a spit and lower it into the ground. The baking begins near midnight. By morning the pig will be roasted and ready for market.

  Chloe rounds the barn and catches sight of herself in a mirror that dangles from an eave. She’s not sure if it’s a talisman to thwart angry pig ghosts, or a mere convenience for the men who spend so much time here that they shave with this mirror steadied in one hand and a dry razor in the
other. Green streaked with yellow cups her eye like a bloom. Richard’s bite is scabbed and faint. She’ll just have to go to Sofia looking like a rumpled alley cat.

  At the Hangman’s Tree, Sofia curls into the trunk, her knees up. She’s smoking again, looking slightly ridiculous—a child’s round face, with the cigarette held between her tiny pink lips. Despite all her city-girl aspirations, she blends into the landscape as a sneaking-out country girl in a dirty dress and shoes ready for tromping through weeds. With her free hand, she touches Chloe’s bruise.

  Everybody has a need to pet bruises, Chloe says. She turns away.

  What happened? Sofia flicks ash onto the dust at the roots. Chloe nestles against the tree and takes a deep breath. I didn’t bring you anything.

  I don’t want anything from you or him. especially from him. Richard. Sofia crushes the cigarette into the ground. What happened? A big-sister protectiveness comes through with her indignant set mouth. All this moving back and forth, flirtation, friendship enclosed in thin glass, now smashed. If Chloe has to say it all aloud, she’ll cry.

  Nothing, she whispers. Her brother in the theater, smiling like a stranger. If she doesn’t tell Sofia, then who does she have? Chloe babbles about the slamming door, the broken drawers, the shattered vase, the biting. Quelled fear erupts. In Sofia’s face, the glass is pieced back together. Chloe is fragile and downtrodden and pitiful. But somehow Sofia manages to say, Don’t cry, Chloe. Chloe, Chloe. Don’t cry.

  Chloe lifts her head. Sofia places motherly lips on Chloe’s tears. Chloe stiffens. Sofia pulls away and licks the salt from her lips. Don’t cry.

  Chloe hasn’t known that there could be protection and caring woven through the lust and she wants to scream out curses from the wonder of it. Again, Sofia puts her mouth to Chloe’s cheek and kisses at the tears. Does she dare? Her heart explodes with a different sort of fear. She turns her head. Her mouth finds Sofia’s.

  POPPY MUST BE systematic. She starts from the beginning, running through the narrative as she slips into a sweater. They had come on a cloudy day. No, it had been sunny, but clouded over just as the boat knocked toward shore. She slips on a man’s hat—left in a room by someone who never reclaimed it—to shadow her face.

  Downstairs, George leans in the doorway, sketching Celestials in longboats emerging from dark-lined clouds. In a finished sketch beneath them, two Immortals hunch over a wide tree stump, playing Go before the astonished eyes of a wood-cutter. Poppy gently touches his shoulder.

  Excuse me. She steps around him. I’ll be back tonight.

  George nods. He doesn’t look up.

  They came on a boat in the middle of unusual weather. Poppy repeats the story to herself. Out of a bank of fog. She tries to remember more as she steps down the alley and toward the slaughterhouse.

  But she had fainted. Anything before the moment she saw them standing on land is only hearsay.

  They’ve already killed the pig. A lantern glows in the corner of the yard. Beneath it, a man reads in a chair, with one eye on the cooking pig. His thoughts pass through her mind, shadows glimpsed behind a curtain. He is thinking of the book he reads, a sordid dime-store novel, and of a sore toe. The two thoughts are simultaneous. He looks up at the flicker of movement. Poppy raises a hand. He waves back. He only pretends to recognize her.

  As she disappears into the weeds, footsteps over trampled grass, she feels the girls. She pauses, tries to listen. She closes her eyes, sees first a branch punched out like a fist, rope wrapped frayed, body hung, feet limp, and beneath, two heads pressed together, fingers streaking across tears, turning them to air. She wants the vision confirmed.

  She breaks off the trail, crushes plants dried by the summer. She makes an arc around the front of the tree. Off to the side, she crouches and holds still. A small hand brushing over blond hair, snarling itself in it. Chloe and the preach-er’s daughter. Poppy remembers back to the troupe. Yellow silk stripped away to reveal bare skin, the coal that rubbed off Sarah and marked Poppy’s lips. She became a puppet for hours at a time. Occasionally, she’d slip; her eyes would meet those of a woman in the audience and in the glitter of eyes ready to strike, in the clenched mouth, Poppy realized she was nothing more than an apparition conjured up by heat. When the woman returned home, pulled off her earrings, walked around the bedroom in her underclothes—hanging this, folding that—paused to scratch a fleck of dirt off her sole, Poppy would be recalled, with shame, as only a whore with blank eyes and a heaving chest. The nature of the two girls beneath the tree is different. An aberration. This is a bit of information she will save for later, for another anonymous letter to the preacher’s wife.

  Poppy scrambles up, steps carefully across the railroad tracks, and edges her way to the water. They came out of fog, and when they landed, Richard’s wife fell to her knees and cried. All three women had seemed unsure on land. She’d come across water too, and wobbled onto shore with a new name. Newly released from three weeks of questioning on Angel Island, Poppy (renamed from the tongue-twisting Po Pei by immigrant officials) was unprepared for the city she had thus far only longed for from across the bay. First, there was the bustle on the dock where her new husband was to meet her. People shouted out in various dialects and languages, calling for their landsmen in order to hustle them over to the appropriate tong. A man led away a drably dressed group of girls. She drank it all in: the smells of water and smoke and bodies that had been at sea for weeks; the city opening up to the sunshine as the fog receded. Poppy felt jostled and hot and excited. She was fifteen years old, in America—Gold Mountain (she laughs now)—waiting to meet the man with whom she would spend her life. She carried a single bag, and the best that she had managed for this special meeting was new shoes. They had remained wrapped in cotton deep in her bag the whole trip over. Her hair was brushed as sleekly as it could be. She stooped to rummage through her bag for a tiny vial of scented ointment, slipped to her by her mother as a parting gift. She rubbed the spicy scent on her neck, kept an eye out for the man from the black-and-white photo she had glimpsed for a few minutes, months ago, when the marriage was first brokered. All she remembered was the pomaded hair and the Western dress. Any of these men—the tong brothers lounging against the posts smoking, or the wrinkle-suited men leading women away—could be him. She heard her name called. These were the only words that made sense and she clung to them above the other voices. She turned her head, looked all around. Some men laughed and punched each other playfully. Their queues flopped out from under felt hats. Though the men were dressed like merchants, Poppy realized, they couldn’t be much older than she. Again, her name, and she yelled, Here I am! See Po Pei!

  He came from behind. He was older—as old as her father! He smiled with a flash of gold teeth. He asked how her voyage was, she replied fine, then he picked up her bag and began walking. She followed. The picture that she’d seen, she realized, was from years before.

  Maybe the women were just as deceived. Maybe Ming Wai expected a twenty-eight-year-old, wealthy Richard to be waiting onshore with a smile, as if ten years had not passed, as if ten years had not aged him. Poppy pushes her way through vines to a small spread of wet bank. The boat has been turned into a fort, strung with beads and tinsel and marked up with colored chalk. A man’s tie hangs lank as an improvised flag. She puts her hands on it, wanting all memory. She wants the other side of the fog, beyond the Delta. Her palms pressed to soft wood. Her cheek on worn white paint. A lifeboat, without markings. Maybe her ear will reveal what tides in the hollow, like sounds washing out of a seashell.

  Nothing. Just hands marked with a child’s drawings.

  31

  CHLOE CROUCHES IN the tub. She dips the washcloth in the cold water that puddles around her ankles. She starts with her most private places, washes her feet, scrubs knees, then thighs. She is still modest. She dips the washcloth again, squeezes traces of blood from it. She washes gently, careful not to rub raw what is already irritated. She winces a little.

  The
gleam of the faucet reflects her face. The baby-blue room takes on a copper sheen in the rounded reflection. Despite the distortion of color and shape, Chloe can see the yellow haze that surrounds her eye. It is fading, diminished already from purple to blue to green. At the bend of the spigot, her face looks extra wide at the center, tall at the forehead and chin. She makes a face at herself; it distracts for a minute from the tenderness between her legs.

  She’s no longer the darling of the brothel. She sells herself as commonly as anyone else, performs her work in one of the narrow rooms that line the hall. The rooms are seven by four—space enough for a step and a bed. There’s a trash basket beneath the bed, a small corner shelf with towels and rubbers.

  Chloe feels entombed there. The small high window does not allow enough breeze to cut the heat created by two writhing bodies, and she pants not for passion, but for lack of air.

  Chloe sticks her tongue out at her reflection. She wrings the cloth in her cold wet hands. Some of the other women have lapsed in the practice. They’ve lost faith. Chloe shakes out the washcloth and hangs it on the rack. She rises and water runs down her legs. She steps from the tub and onto the rug, grabs a towel, and dries herself.

  SHE WAITS FOR him on the bed. It is his first time, he says, so he wants to wash up. From the edge of the bed, she can extend her legs and rest her feet on the opposite wall. She presses her heels against the wood and counts her toes. There’s a knock at the door. It opens slowly and the boy steps in. Her age—seventeen or so. A scruff of hair rising despite the smear of hair oil, wire-rimmed glasses and a sheepish grin. He scratches the side of his nose. When she greets him, he glances at the floor.

  You ready? she asks. He nods. She unbuckles, unbuttons him. His white shirttails hang like accordions.

  Want something? she asks.