Li Jun and the Iron Road Page 6

  Melanie pretended to hit him with her fan as she leaned into him. “I do not smell. I am scented with the finest French perfume. You like?”

  She turned to survey the long line of Chinese men at the immigration desk. “Who are they to insult us with words like that? I’ll be glad when they finish our railway and get back to where they belong.”

  James ignored Melanie’s comments and Little Tiger was glad that most of the men couldn’t understand this vile woman’s words. They’d already given up so much; at least they could keep their dignity.

  Melanie linked her arm through James’s and headed out the door with him. Little Tiger wished that this lady in pink would go back to where she came from and leave James alone. He deserved someone better.

  Even though they couldn’t read Chinese, the immigration officials scrutinized each document that the workers presented. When Little Tiger stepped up to the desk, she broke into a cold sweat. What if this official turned her away? What if he saw that she wasn’t a man? What if he questioned her credentials? She wanted to show that she would be a good worker in Canada and that she was fantastic in English so she smiled and, pronouncing each word very carefully, said, “Hello, sir. My name is Xiao Hu. How do you do?”

  Hearing the rhyme, the officer raised an eyebrow and nudged the guy beside him. “Whad’ya know? A Chink who thinks he’s a regular Shakespeare.”

  He stamped Little Tiger’s papers with the date and wrote her name in his book.

  “Good luck, kid,” he said. “You’ll need it.”

  Little Tiger wondered if her father might be listed in a book like this one. Surely the Chinese workers who had travelled north from San Francisco had been registered in British Columbia. Maybe she could find a way to check the books to see if her father had made the journey safely and been admitted by these same immigration officials.

  ***

  The workers gathered on the platform, waiting for the train to take them to Hell’s Gate. It was true that James had described a train, but nothing had prepared Little Tiger for the massive hulk of metal that arrived, belching clouds of steam from its stack and pulling railcars with equipment, supplies, timber, even horses. At this sight, some of the Chinese workers screamed in terror, thinking it must have come from the spirit world. But they soon realized that this iron horse was very real. Within minutes they were jammed into open flat cars with nothing but wooden slats to protect them from the fierce wind.

  Clutching her rucksack, Little Tiger huddled on the floor and pulled her arms around her body to stop the cold wind gusting through her clothes. Why had nobody told them the climate was so harsh or the land so rugged? Mountains seem to grow out of the sides of rivers, and trees taller than any building she had ever seen formed dense forests on either side of the rail tracks. Most of her friends wore only straw hats and thin jackets and pants. Little Tiger was grateful that she had her warm felt hat to pull over her ears.

  Soon she heard the roar of a river and stood up to peer out of the railcar. On one side she saw a wide, fast-moving river. On the other, rising at odd angles along the tracks, were rough wooden stakes — grave markers with Chinese names scrawled on them. Workers had died here in the hundreds. Was her father one of them?

  With a huge blast of steam, the train rolled to a stop at Hell’s Gate, just past the bustling town of Yale where the river narrowed into raging rapids between the towering walls of the canyon. A railway boss explained that their job was to build the track from there to Eagle Pass to connect with the track coming from the east. They would live in tents that they moved with them as they built the track.

  They would build trestle bridges across the rivers and canyons — hundreds of feet high, some a thousand feet long. They would cut tunnels through the mountains — thirteen of them before they reached Eagle Pass. Some workers would clear the forest, some build the bridges, some break up rocks into gravel, some lay gravel to grade the track. When they couldn’t go around a mountain, they would chip out a tunnel by hand with their chisels, or blast away its side with dynamite.

  What an impossible task! thought Little Tiger. The mountains rose thousands of feet into the heavens on both sides of the river. How could they build bridges up to a thousand feet long? Or dig tunnels by hand through the hardest granite in the world? No wonder the place was called Hell’s Gate. Maybe it really was the gate to hell.

  They were herded off to the construction camp. There the track came to an abrupt end and, with a sharp whistle, the engine pulled to a sudden stop. Its steam hit Little Tiger, Wang Ma, and her group in the face as they clambered down from their flat car, amid the Chinese foreman’s shouts of “Hurry up! Move it!”

  She peered through the steam to see the construction site. It seemed that the bosses had train cars of their own at the end of the track — an office car, a dining car, and the house-on-wheels that James had told her about. Even from the outside, it seemed fit for an emperor: the windows had red-velvet curtains and there were brass handles on the doors.

  But past these, she was amazed by the buzz of activity in the camp. Hundreds of men swarmed like ants. There was a constant thrum of hammers and chisels. Men were chipping rocks into gravel by hand; others wheeled it away in barrows. Horses pulled wagons loaded with timber and boxes of dynamite. Beyond that were the workers’ living quarters, which seemed to be in two parts — one had cabins made of logs, the other was a collection of tents that flapped in the wind. White men clutching metal bowls lined up in front of one of the log cabins and emerged with a steaming dinner. Little Tiger was so hungry that she felt faint at the smell of this food and walked toward the lineup.

  A white worker quickly pushed her away. “Hey, kid, where in hell do you think you’re going?” he demanded.

  Little Tiger pointed to her stomach. “No food for long time.”

  The worker laughed and pointed far beyond to the tents. “Yellow and white don’t mix here, kid. Your kind eat and sleep in those tents over there. And don’t get too comfortable. You yellow men are working in the tunnels tomorrow.”

  Little Tiger looked at the muscular men, Chinese and white alike. Could a puny kid like her survive here? Or would she die from exhaustion and hunger on her first day on Gold Mountain?

  She and the men were taken to the work site on horse-drawn carts over a narrow road built of logs. It hugged the mountainside and she couldn’t help but peer down into the canyon far below. Every time the cart swayed dangerously close to the edge, Little Tiger felt her heart drop into her stomach. The driver of the cart warned them not to move, telling them that only last week the lead horse had lost its footing and tumbled more than three-hundred feet into the river below. The animals and that entire crew had perished.

  But this time they made it, and when they arrived she and Wang Ma were assigned to the same gang. They would live in tents, five men in each, and report to a “bookman” who kept track of their hours and their pay. Each crew also had its own cook and tea boy.

  Wang Ma whispered to her, “Good. A Chinese cook. Finally, some food we recognize.” She answered with a grin, “Finally some food!”

  At dawn on her first day of work, Little Tiger stood in her canvas shoes with her crew outside the cook’s tent, waiting for their congee. Cook was a rough fellow with only one arm and a rough sense of humour to match. He was the first to notice the Chinese man riding toward them wearing Englishman’s clothes and sitting tall and arrogant in his saddle. Cook, who was the camp gossip, pointed at him and whispered to the kid, “That’s Bookman — be sure to stay on his good side. They say he killed a man in a fight and wears the scar to prove it.”

  Indeed he did have a scar — a long, ugly one.

  There were fifty men in Little Tiger’s crew and Bookman wrote each man’s name in his ledger. Cook explained that he kept track of every man on the crew, how many days they worked, and how much they spent each week.

  “What do you mean ‘spent’?” asked Little Tiger.

  Cook laughed at the naive
boy until his belly ached. “You’ll never see a full dollar a day, kid. You gotta learn not to trust these foreigners.”

  Cook listed the money that Little Tiger would have to spend each week on the job. First of all was a deduction to repay the passage from China to Canada — forty dollars in all. The money would be taken off, a little from each paycheque.

  “What! Forty dollars? But they promised passage paid!”

  “I told you,” said Cook. “Never trust the gwailo.”

  Little Tiger was almost dizzy counting up all the money she would have to pay to the Nichol Railway Company — board: nine cents a day; food: twelve cents a day in summer and seventeen cents a day in winter. If she was sick or couldn’t work ­­­— no pay. And Bookman himself got one cent a day from every member of the crew.

  Cook shook his head. “Nobody on the dock in Hong Kong tells you about the winters here. They’re fierce. You’ll need blankets, boots, hats, gloves, socks, and medicine. A dollar a day doesn’t go far here.”

  When he told her that the Irish workers got a dollar fifty, sometimes two dollars a day plus free room and board, she almost burst into tears. How could the Mountie on the poster betray them this way? With those blue eyes, he’d promised prosperity in Canada.

  Bookman rode up beside Little Tiger and looked her up and down with suspicion. She thought she would be frightened by this man with so much power and a violent past, but in fact she wasn’t. Up close, she saw that his scar ran from his forehead down to the corner of his mouth, but his eyes were tired, not hardened and bitter as she imagined a killer’s would be.

  “What’s your name?” he demanded.

  “Little Tiger.”

  He looked at her over the top of his ledger.

  “You should be called Bottom of the Barrel. You’re little, that’s for sure, but I don’t see any tiger.”

  He wet the flat end of a lead pencil with his tongue, poised to record her name, then looked at her again with a little compassion. “You’ll be useless in the tunnels and on the tracks, probably even a danger to the others. I’d be surprised if you could even lift a chisel, never mind a railway tie!”

  Little Tiger stood her ground. “I am fantastic with black powder.”

  “Are you?” sneered Bookman, disbelief written over his face. “Where are you from?”

  “Ping Wei village.”

  He paused a moment, frowning. “I know the place,” he said. “No good ever came out of Ping Wei.”

  Little Tiger was about to ask a question about his family but she stopped herself. It was as if the name of her village took him to a dark place.

  Bookman turned to Cook. “I have enough men for now. Could you use this boy to wash bowls and deliver tea to the jobsite?”

  Cook looked surprised — he’d been asking for an assistant for a long time — and gave an enthusiastic “yes.” He turned to Little Tiger and said, “If you’re my tea boy, you better call me Powder, like everyone else.”

  Bookman wrote down Xiao Hu in his ledger.

  “Thank you, Bookman.” Little Tiger bowed to him. “It is true I am little but I am brave.”

  Bookman made no comment and announced to the crew, “Your first pay is Friday.”

  The men cheered but Powder gave them a wait-for-it look. Bookman continued, “That’s when you will see your first deductions — rent, food, and money for the passage from China.”

  Wang Ma stepped out from the group. “There must be a mistake,” he said. “We were told one dollar a day, and passage to Canada paid.”

  Bookman looked at Wang Ma with disdain. “Don’t believe everything you’re told.”

  And with that, he spun his horse around and trotted off. The men grumbled but they picked up their hammers and chisels and moved toward the cart that would take them to the tunnels. Little Tiger watched them go with mixed feelings. Would she ever have a chance to show how fantastic she was with black powder or would she be a tea boy for the rest of her life?

  Chapter

  Seven

  Little Tiger would never get used to being with men all the time — working, sleeping, eating, washing. The toilets were little more than stinking holes in the ground. To use them, she managed to slip away alone late at night or early in the morning. She washed herself by reaching under her clothes. Oh, how she longed to slip off all of them and scrub her skin with hot soapy water until every inch of soot and grime was gone but that was impossible, living the way she did, terrified of letting anyone know that she was a girl.

  “Who’s first?” called Powder, the cook, one morning. He pulled out a stool and lifted his butcher knife high in the air.

  Word had come down from the white bosses to Bookman that the Chinese workers should cut off their queues. The gwailo didn’t understand why Chinese men wore pigtails anyway — weren’t they for little girls? Bookman, who had no queue, gave the order, but workers who wanted to return to their homeland someday resisted. They wanted to keep their queues. They’d had them since childhood, and besides, back in China you could be executed if you didn’t have one.

  Bookman turned to Wang Ma. “You — sit down. A queue is dangerous when you’re blasting dynamite.”

  Reluctantly Wang Ma sat on the stool and closed his eyes tight. Little Tiger cringed as she watched. With his knife, Powder sawed through the queue that had hung down Wang Ma’s back since he was a boy, then he grabbed the braid before it fell on the ground and waved it in the air like a trophy. Wang Ma felt the naked back of his neck and bent his head. Almost everyone knew how he felt; they wanted to go back to China someday, too.

  “Next!” called Powder, waving his knife and eyeing Little Tiger. He motioned her over. Horrified, she grabbed her pigtail and ran off to the far side of the tents to hide. She had good reason to keep her hair. One day she hoped to become a woman again. Perhaps then she could look as lovely as her mother in the tintype, with her hair wound in coils, held with fancy combs. There was no way she would let anyone chop off her hair; for her, the queue was a hope that under her slouch hat and neck scarf she was still a beautiful girl with long black hair.

  She sat behind a tent and caught her breath. She heard voices and realized that Bookman was close by and a seedy-looking Irishman — the Controller for the Nichol Railway Company — was beside him. He was a bigwig, almost as important as Mr. Alfred Nichol himself or Edgar, the chief engineer. This controller was responsible for all of the money that came in and went out. He looked around at the tents that had been set up for the thousands of newly arrived Chinese workers. Satisfied that they were alone, he lit a cigar and turned to Bookman.

  “With all these new workers, there’s bound to be some casualties this week.”

  Bookman nodded his head.

  “Just make sure you get all their names down,” the Controller ordered.

  Bookman seemed offended. “I know my part,” he muttered and patted his ledger.

  Little Tiger found it an odd conversation. Of course Bookman would have all the names! He had noted ever­yone on her crew and she’d seen him write down each name. But now there was no time for her to think about what the Controller meant. Here was her chance, while her crew were having their queues cut off, to visit the grave markers along the tracks close to the camp. Ever since she’d spotted them from the train, she wanted to see if the name Li Man appeared on one of them. It was the last thing she wanted to discover, but it was something she had to do.

  She walked along the tracks, checking each marker.Many men, Chinese and white, died doing the dangerous work but the Chinese were never given proper burials. Their bodies were usually covered with a thin layer of dirt and left where they fell, marked only by a simple wooden stake with their names scratched on it. She searched the markers but no, her father’s name wasn’t here.

  Already her quest seemed hopeless. If he was still alive, how could she find him among the thousands of Chinese workers? And if he was dead, how many markers would she have to read, and how could she get back along the tra
ck to find them?

  Discouraged, Little Tiger ran back to the cook tent and rinsed the rice under Powder’s watchful eye. Little black insects were crawling in the bag and she squashed some of them with the flat of her hand, then boiled the rice for the crew. Wang Ma picked up a mouthful with his chopsticks and made a face.

  “What the heck is this?” he asked. “Bugs! Look.” He shoved his bowl under Little Tiger’s nose and then laughed. “Don’t tell Bookman. He’ll charge you extra for them.”

  Little Tiger smiled at the bitter joke and dug into her own rice bowl. Still, she longed for anything fresh — fish or vegetables.

  “I wish we had fresh food,” said Little Tiger.

  Powder laughed at her. “If you want something fresh, boy, you could learn to fish. But there’s only one problem. The blackflies will devour you before the fish bite your hook.”

  The crew went back to work and Little Tiger boiled more water for tea. As she threw in handfuls of loose tea leaves, Powder looked over her shoulder.

  “Make it strong,” he barked. “I’m sick of the men complaining that it’s too weak.”

  She added another handful of tea leaves, stirred them, and then poured the tea into pails that she balanced on a yoke across her shoulders. She walked carefully over the sharp stone path that led from the camp to the new tunnel where her crew was working.

  At the tunnel entrance, Little Tiger set down her pails and watched. It was amazing how they made a hole through a mountain. First they blasted an entrance with nitroglycerine — black powder — then they shored up the sides and the roof with timbers. There was always a danger of the roof collapsing inside the tunnel but the men had to go in anyway, and every day they chipped the granite away inch by inch, carving by hand a tunnel wide enough and high enough for a train to get through. Hundreds of men worked solemnly, silently, concentrating on the dangerous task at hand. Some chiselled away at the rock, others pounded the walls with pickaxes, others carted out the debris. It was slow, back-breaking work, but this new tunnel was almost completed.