Read Online The Fortunes by Peter Ho Davies - Free Book Online

the dead man might be well attended in the afterlife—and realized he’d never write home again (nor send another cent; his debt was to the dead man, he figured, and he knew himself to be untouchable under Crocker’s roof). He was free, and yet he’d wept, so silently he’d hardly been sensible he was doing it, until he heard the household waking, and then he’d scuffed the tears away as if ashamed.
    He roused himself when Crocker appeared. The big man, restless and irritable, had been looking for coffee, and Ling hurried to set the pot on the stove. But even after he’d set a cup before his employer, Crocker had merely sat and watched, the wooden chair creaking under him as he rocked, while Ling tended the laundry kettles, hauled in firewood, all the time terrified the chair would give way and Crocker crash to the floor, splashing coffee on his clean shirt. Ling was in a sweat worrying what the man wanted, but after slowly slurping his coffee, pursing his lips as if to draw the last of it from his beard, Crocker merely slapped his thighs and bustled out. Ling had sunk into the chair in silent relief.
    The next morning, though, Crocker had come out onto the back porch, two of his business associates with him: Stanford, the former governor, a frequent dinner guest, as sleekly plump in his nankeen trousers and morning coat as one of his prized thoroughbreds, and another gentleman in a sack suit, leaner and with a leather eye patch, whom Ling didn’t know. They talked among themselves, smoking—“The Metropolitan Railway already has four miles of tunnels under London, for Pete’s sake!” “Underground ain’t the same as under mountains, boss”—but Ling could feel their eyes on him, appraising, as he chopped wood. Once, on the stump, Stanford had called the Chinese “a degraded race” and “the dregs of Asia” (Uncle Ng had liked to quote the phrase whenever they emptied their laundry tubs), vowed to drive them out of California, declaiming an animosity that Crocker confided went back to the gold camps. “Leland took it as an affront that some of your brethren struck pay dirt when he didn’t: American gold for American pockets is his view.” Ling always stood a little straighter around him, at once haughty and trying to impress the man, though as far as he knew Stanford had never noticed him before (at dinner the man’s conversation was only of horses, once contending against all the rest that a galloping steed took veritable flight, all four hooves off the ground.
Imbecile,
Ling had concluded).
    And then finally one of the three—the fellow with the eye patch—told him to come forth. The man—Strobridge, Crocker called him—planted himself before Ling, pummeled his shoulders, pinched his arms. It felt odd to Ling to look a one-eyed man in the face, especially as the fellow cocked his head to one side, as if listening rather than looking. Ling stared at the man’s jaw instead, the wad of tobacco bulging and bobbing in his cheek, until he started to imagine it was the missing eye rolling around in there. He made himself focus on the sole good eye then, and it felt like gazing down a long tunnel. Strobridge finally thrust a bushel basket into his arms, piled it high with billets, then made Ling totter around the yard with it. But after a single staggering circuit Ling had lowered the burden and the other two men had looked at Crocker pityingly, the one-eyed man hawking in the dirt, his dusty ball of juice rolling between Ling’s feet.
    â€œKnow what the men call ’em? Wongs. On account, two Wongs don’t make a white.”
    Stanford, beneath his top hat, chortled into his beard—“Don’t look to me, Charles. My competence is horseflesh, though by that measure I’d say you’re trying to sell us a nag”—and Ling wished he’d choke on it. He began to empty the basket to