Read Online All That Matters by Wayson Choy - Free Book Online Page B

Poh-Poh’s treacherous white crown had been waiting to outsmart me. When she reached for the flowery apron hanging on a hook, I grimaced, but it was not compelling enough to distract her weathered hands from flinging the apron into the air like a net and quickly catching the flaps around me. I yelped, but a relentlesspalm twirled me around; lightning fingers snatched away the chewed-up cane, tossed it back on the kitchen table, and knotted the double-folded apron tightly around my waist.
    Bluebells and violets, red and yellow roses, and swirling pink petals cascaded in repeated patterns all the way down to my bare knees. I looked like a meadow in bloom. It was useless for me to smile, hopeless for me to grin, and futile for me to laugh: a wily old Fox Lady had trapped her innocent victim in an oilcloth apron of sissy flowers.
    Poh-Poh lifted up my shirt sleeve to study the bony appendage of my arm, just as I would have inspected a held-up limb of one of those large, squirming toads Jack O’Connor and I regularly caught at MacLean Park. Or just as the famished Fox Lady would study its prey before … before I knew what was happening, a knobby thumb and forefinger encircled my wrist. Grandmother made a pitying face and took on the talk-story voice of the disappointed Demon Fox,
    “Have bigger shank bones in soup pot!”
    That was when I should have laughed at the silly joke, remembering that that was what the lip-smacking Fox Lady always declared before she locked away her struggling main course to be fattened up. Instead, a scowl stretched the corners of my mouth and I pulled back my skinny arm. But I knew it was pointless for me to resist: Poh-Poh would have her way.
    Father had that afternoon warned me to be on my best behaviour and to help the Old One prepare the
sui-yah
, the late-night dishes, for her party of mahjongladies. “Keep busy tonight,” Father had advised me. “Obey your grandmother and keep the family secret.”
    I knew there was nothing else to do but to observe Poh-Poh, apron-wrapped in the kitchen, in the midst of a squadron of pots and pans being heated on the stove, surrounded by bowls and plates loaded with the food that she had chopped and sliced all afternoon, and obey. And keep the family secret.
    Poh-Poh herself looked unnaturally plump, with her long white apron tied over her blue-quilted jacket and black Old China pants. Between her rolled-up ankle stockings and the edge of those pant legs, I glimpsed her long johns. In the early fall, with the North Shore mountain winds coming down into Vancouver and the constant fog rising from Burrard Inlet, she always felt vulnerable to drafts and chills. Still, with her hands slapping pot lids shut, her sturdy body shuffling the unprepared carrots, turnips, and leafy greens, bringing out the platters of raw meat and chicken wings from the icebox outside on the back porch, Poh-Poh wheeled back and forth like a bun-haired dervish.
    “I save carrots for you to do,” she said.
    Then she took the greens and chopped away with her cleaver, lifting each mound of vegetable with the flat of her blade and sliding exact portions into ceramic bowls; finally, she slapped the meat down and minced with the blade faster than my eyes could see, the rhythm of her chopping and mincing beat-beating like a drum on the cherrywood block. My sulk vanished. Any thoughts of a new brother receded. I was captivated.The climax came when the Old One grabbed the cleaver to hook the anvil-handle of the peep-grill, snapping the iron cover up to study the licking flames in the roaring belly of the stove. Hot enough to heat the rooms and, later, to sizzle the food. All at once, she pulled the blade away and the iron grill landed with an ear-shattering
BANG!
    I jumped.
    In all Poh-Poh’s stories, the clever children escaped the clutches of the ravenous Fox Lady and came back to the village to warn others. I thought of telling Jack O’Connor to be very careful of old ladies who offered