Clockwork Canada Read online

  Perhaps he could pretend to roll to one side, as if he wasn’t in control? Surely the lion, made with his father’s sturdy workmanship, could handle such a fall? But Shin would bring shame to his ancestors if the controls got smashed and were unable to function for tomorrow’s ceremony.

  Shin balanced on the left leg for so long, his thigh muscle trembled.

  He heard his father hawk and spit on the ground in disgust at Shin’s delay.

  He couldn’t crush Margie, he couldn’t. Perhaps he could fall to the left, very slowly and gently, controlling the lion’s iron spine. He raised the lion’s right foot and placed it close, deliberately too close, to the left foot. He slowly eased the main lever upwards, arching the lion’s spine, placing the centre of gravity slightly over the paws. Too much! The lion overbalanced and crashed forward. Shin quickly threw his body leftward. His head hit iron bars and the lion hit the ground. He closed his eyes for a moment until the dozens of sewn-on bells stopped jingling.

  It was almost a relief when Baba, still swearing, opened the neck hinges so he could scramble out onto the dirt of the courtyard. The left side of the chicken coop was smashed to bits, loose boards dangling at all angles. Snapped cables littered the ground near the lion. The giant head was crushed and broken in several places. The far end of the chicken coop appeared undamaged but it was hard to tell.

  He listened for the rustle of thistles as he helped Baba carry the broken pieces into the grocery-cum-workshop but heard only the inauspicious caw of a crow. He gave a final look back, the lion’s bright horsehair tail dragging in the dust behind him, but there was nothing to be seen.

  * * *

  After a meal of rice and dried salmon, accompanied by unsellable black-edged greens, Shin crouched on the floor of the workroom. The lion head lay on a workbench and his father hunched over it, cursing loudly and slamming various hand tools around. The bakery opening would happen at first light. The almanac had been consulted and it was an auspicious day. The ceremony could not be delayed.

  Shin’s offers to help were ignored so he did his evening shop chores, including winding the springs on the little shop heaters needed to ward off the springtime chill. Shin’s failure to do his duty to the family drummed through his head even as he took pride that his fingers no longer bled during the endless turning of the tiny keys. Small gadgets like the heaters could be human-wound, unlike larger coils that required teams of men trotting in circles, or oxen like the White Men used. The lion’s clockworks were powered by a mid-sized coil and Baba had arranged delivery of a new pre-wound one at sunrise. The fee – a fifty-cent coin – gleamed under the oil lantern by the door.

  Shin tinkered for a while with a clockwork monkey he had been working on for Margie. Over a period of months, he had taken apart an old tofu-maker and he had reassembled the sprockets and gears. He had shaped the framework from cedar, rather than the more traditional, and more expensive, bamboo. Daringly, he had travelled six blocks, his first foray outside Chinatown, giving his Spring Festival money to a dark-skinned Indian down by the stockade in exchange for a raw beaver pelt. After soaking the skin in an oak stump, he had softened it to a felt-like material that he thought might resemble monkey fur. He had crafted robes and a headband from scraps of Mama’s dress that Baba had been using as a window covering. The shade of yellow matched the cover of Shin’s proudest possession, a book of tales about the Monkey King’s many journeys.

  The rebuilt clockwork mechanism functioned well enough to make the monkey wave its hand; however, Shin wanted to do better. He took a used wax cylinder – its grooves blurred by overuse – and began to cut new and intricate lines with his pocketknife.

  The day that Margie had shown him the White Men’s wax cylinders had changed his life. She had snuck him into the whorehouse’s laundry room to show him the shoe-polishing machine, thinking he would be impressed. Shin had opened the machine’s repair hatch and been appalled at the White Man’s crude and clumsy clockworks. “Like a beast would expel,” he had told her. But, he had been fascinated with what had conveyed the wondrously precise instructions to the poorly engineered clockworks: wax cylinders, each grooved with a thousand tiny lines. Even the richest Chinese didn’t have such marvels. When Margie had given him dozens of spent cylinders, he had clapped his hands in glee.

  He put down the knife and opened a page in his second proudest possession, a programming manual that Margie had stolen for him last month. He had been explaining to her that the last new moon was the beginning of the Year of the Monkey and, later that day, she had brought him a slice of bread dripping with salt pork fat. She had some concept of birthing day anniversary gifts that made no sense to him. He had politely eaten the bread. Baba had told him many times that the diseases White Men got by drinking unboiled water and eating uncooked greens were many and complex, challenging even for Chinatown doctors and pharmacists. Shin had carefully watched his bowels for days but there appeared to be no ill effect from the treat.

  He flipped a page in the book, looking for a certain coding sequence that would help the monkey move its tail in synchronization with its hands. Margie’s aunt had boxed her ears soundly for the book theft but then covered for her, telling the irate customer it had been taken by one of the maids. Margie had spent hours teaching English numbers and coding symbols to Shin, as well as all the algebra and geometry she learned in the school for White children. In return, he had patiently drawn diagrams of simple clockworks on scraps of butcher paper, explaining them in his broken English, sitting cross-legged beside her in their favourite spot atop the greengrocery roof.

  He tossed the monkey aside, not in the mood to work on it when all of his dreams were being dashed by his foolish actions. He watched Baba grapple with the broken lion as fresh waves of shame washed over him. Over the past few months, the yin and yang synergy of elegant Chinese clockworks and White Men’s wax cylinders had filled his thoughts. Ideas had poured out of him faster than he could form the English words to tell Margie: how wax cylinders could perhaps someday be used to guide abacus beads, making giant calculating machines. When he was old enough to run Baba’s greengrocery, he would investigate such things in the evenings, like men did, much as Baba tinkered nowadays with clockworks.

  “Come.” Baba pointed at the bicycle in the corner. Shin squeezed between crates of carrots and gear parts and mounted the bike. The length from the seat to the pedals had become too short for him. With a strong push, he started the pedals turning, then settled into a fast, even pace. In front of him, the lengthy bike chain spun and the friction welder started up. His father grasped an iron rod with bamboo tongs and pressed it in the collar of the welder. He touched the lower end of the rod to an interior brace of the lion head, which lay wedged in a vise below.

  As Shin kept up a furious pace, the rod began turning fast enough to blur. It would take a long while to heat enough to form a proper weld. He let his thoughts drift. There was no point in buying Margie bao or other pastries for her birth celebration, whenever it might occur; her calendar was too strange to have much meaning. Plus, she had smilingly refused every piece of food he had ever offered her. The thought of food made his stomach growl, empty again. As acrid smoke swirled around him, he imagined the wonderful contents of Teck Woo’s market cart, soon to be a full-fledged bakery in a new finely styled brick building across the street. Businesses were springing up every day. White Men might refuse to hire Chinese for even the worst jobs at Roger’s Sugar Mill, but that would not break the businessmen’s spirits; the community would build their own new China here in the Dominion of Canada.

  “Steady, Shin-Shin,” Baba said, as the end of the rod began to glow a cheery red. By the time the sun had set and the automated oil lanterns clicked on, the many necessary welds were completed. Shin stepped down and dried his sweat on his too-short jacket sleeve. His stomach rumbled again. The store’s income was not enough to live on; without the lion ceremony earnings they would be hungry next winter, like they had been before Baba had
built the wonderful mechanism.

  Coming to the “golden mountain” was to be a new start for the Wong family. Baba had come first, earning money labouring in the fields on the mainland to the east, paying off his head tax and landing fees. Years later, Mama had left her small village and travelled in what she had called “in fear and boredom,” along with several other women in a large stinking ship. Both had worked hard at the greengrocer business as baby Shin played on the store’s splintery wood floor amid clucking chickens and broccoli stems. His first toy had been a broken abacus. His second was a broken automated wok-stirrer he had first turned into a toy warrior, then a stick-like doll for Margie.

  Margie’s story was similar. Her mother had come from a mountainous place over the ocean to the east, where people slid on snow with boards tied on their feet. Margie wanted to be an architect, designing buildings like the new brick Driard Hotel where fine ladies drank tea. Meanwhile, she did kitchen duty at the brothel, saving up customers’ tips for an architecture mail order course from the Simpson’s catalogue. Once she had shown Shin a paint set a customer had given her. She had swirled powders together, yellow and blue. “That’s like you and me, together we can make the Dominion of Canada better than either of the two alone.” Shin had answered in his stumbling English that Canada was more like the many colours of vegetable fried noodles – a mixture of everything but a blend of nothing.

  “Come. Try this.” Baba’s wiry body swung the lion head to the floor, not bothering with the hoist. Together they reattached the long body to the head in the cramped space, laying the drooping middle over some barrel staves at the rear of the shop and looping the legs and back feet towards the head by the big door at the front.

  Shin swung his short queue over his shoulder to his front as he examined the rebuilt lion. It would be a tight fit. Baba had reinforced the head with more cross supports, threading iron rods past the leg braces to the back of the head. Shin hastily reattached the yellow cloth, sponging off the dirt from the yard, and brushing out the red and gold horsehair fringes while his father repositioned cable housings every which way. Baba was a competent craftsman, but Shin suddenly realized his designs were less elegant than the sturdy oxen White Men used to wind coils.

  “You, east wind, get in.” His father gave an impatient gesture and Shin got down on his knees beside the head, a second insight flooding into his head. His father’s continual reference to the famous battle in China that depended on a late-arriving east wind – a wind crucial to the success of the fire ships being sailed toward the enemy – was not a compliment to Shin. Instead, his father was ashamed of their deception to the community and ashamed of the necessity of using Shin to operate the lion. Shin studied the stern line of his father’s mouth. There was no time to dwell on the matter.

  Shin bent his head so that Baba could lift the lion head over him. Bowing his head had not been necessary even three months ago. He must have grown a full tsun – a hand’s breadth – since then. His wrists jutted out from his jacket as he helped lower the lion head over his own.

  A gasp, a grunt, and the head – now probably weighing as much as Baba himself – came down hard on his thighs, cutting off all light but for a faint glow though the nose screen. One of the new iron rods crushed down on Shin’s knees. He shoved a leg out the side of the head and under the huge rear paw on the side away from his father. He tucked his other foot under his buttocks, where it was useless to power the leg controls.

  “Good, it works.” In relief, Baba waggled one of the lion’s silk balls, the connected bamboo handle striking Shin on the ear. “Now, get out. A short sleep is still possible.”

  Shin quickly tried various other positions as he clambered out from beneath, Baba holding the lion head aloft. In the poor light, Baba hadn’t noticed Shin’s struggles, how his legs stuck out. His failure.

  Shin’s mouth tasted like raw bitter melon.

  He no longer fit inside the lion.

  A small part of him thrilled at the thought that Baba’s shameful fraud could not continue. He pushed the thought away. The red envelope money would go unearned. He had let down Baba and all Wong ancestors. And Teck Woo’s bakery would forever have bad luck.

  As his father climbed the narrow stairs heading to the sleeping mats, Shin stayed huddled on the cold dirt floor. He didn’t deserve to sleep tonight.

  * * *

  The lion weaved and dodged, as graceful as bamboo in the wind. It danced closer to the barrels, surrounded by smiling, dark jacketed men who nodded with delight. Lucky green onions tied to its horns waved merrily. The drummers intensified the beat, luring the lion closer and closer to the leafy green lettuce hanging over the bakery doorstep and the red envelope tied within. The lion approached, cocked its head at the lettuce, put a foot on a barrel, then stepped off again, turning its head to wink coquettishly at the crowd.

  A toddler emerged from between a man’s legs and headed for the lion, probably attracted by the glittering metal discs sewn to the red and yellow layers of cloth. The lion continued to dance, oblivious, stepping forward and back in a tradition as old as gunpowder.

  From his perch atop the greengrocery roof, Shin wrapped his arms around his bruised knees, the clay tiles cold under his thin slippers.

  Finally, a woman scuttled from between the men and grabbed the child’s arm, dragging it back into the crowd.

  Shin let out his breath. The monkey’s cylinder programming was set to a specific pattern. There was no altering it, for toddlers or anything else. He pictured the energy coil unwinding in the body of the lion, powering the mechanism even as the monkey pushed and pulled levers and switches in an intricate pattern; its hands and feet, even its tail, manipulating the lion in a dance more complex than a Chinese acrobatic display, all seven cylinders spinning madly. With wooden blocks tied to its feet and a wire hook embedded in its tail, the monkey had fit inside the lion perfectly. He had used the yellow robes to tie it securely to the framework.

  “That’s charming, that is.” Margie settled beside him on the roof, tucking her green skirts immodestly under her. Her right arm hung in a sling made from a paisley scarf and a long scratch ran down one cheek.

  “Therefore no birth present for you,” Shin answered tensely, keeping his eyes on the lion.

  Margie giggled. “I never understand you even when I understand you. Here, I brought you a present because you saved me. Don’t worry – I waited until dark yesterday then I told my aunt I fell from a tree.” She shoved a pastry in his hand, ruby and gold in the morning sun. “It’s called rhubarb pie.”

  “Rhu-bah pie,” Shin repeated absently and bit into it. He hadn’t had time for rice porridge this morning and working hard all night had made his stomach hollow. Baked wheat flour and tart juice filled his mouth, sliding down as pleasantly as Teck Woo’s sweet red bean jian dui.

  The clockwork lion grabbed the lettuce in the final dance sequence, as the drumbeats grew staccato. From his vantage point above, Shin saw the small brown hand flash out and draw the red envelope inside the jaws. The crowd cheered, Baba loudest of all. For the first time since he’d seen Margie hiding in the chicken coop, Shin began to relax.

  Finished, the lion lumbered back across the street, the crowd parting way. A grinding noise drifted up as the grocery’s large workroom door opened, its escapement mechanism perfectly timed. The lion marched steadily toward the grocery as the door rose higher and higher. Several chek before the work-room entrance, the lion turned sharply to the right, stepped up onto the wooden sidewalk and rammed face-first into the grocery’s brick wall.

  “Ah Shin! Ah Shin!” Baba rushed toward the lion as it made a horrid grinding noise and the front legs collapsed.

  On the roof above, Shin bit down on his knuckles. Baba’s use of “Ah Shin” – the adult form of his name – shone through the awfulness of the crash.

  Below, his father prodded the ruins of the lion. He gave a start then, just before the other men reached him, pulled off the yellow restraints a
nd shoved the monkey beneath his jacket. He made calming gestures at the men and laughed with an open mouth. His words drifted upwards – assurances that the lion could be repaired. After all, he said, it was clockwork-run and the best technology in all the continents.

  Shin licked blood off his knuckles, careful of the large blister on his hand – a result of winding the monkey’s coil for many fan last night. He felt his chest swell with pride. Combining the White Man’s cylinder technology with traditional clockwork meant that the shameful deception of the lion could stop. And, equally importantly, his father saw him as a man.

  He looked out over the rooftops as a gentle rain started. In the distance, Chinatown’s clay tiles blurred together with the White Man’s cedar shingles.

  He grinned at Margie and crammed the rest of the pastry in his mouth. “Two countries, both east wind,” he said, around oily crumbs, and laughed when she shook her head in confusion.

  THE HARPOONIST

  BRENT NICHOLS

  Building factories was a lot more work than burning them.

  Henry McClane grinned ruefully as he lifted a pine board from the wagon bed beside him, set it on a pile beside the wagon, and stepped back, wiping his brow. A kid half his age, eyes shining with enthusiasm, stepped in to take his place, and Henry got out of the way.

  He’d been a woodsman once, able to run through the forest for hours in pursuit of a buck. Now he was puffing and panting after a couple of dozen boards. Still, the building would go up even if he wasn’t much help. The sheer enthusiasm of the two dozen people around him was irresistible, and Henry found himself unable to sustain his usual irritable mood.

  “This is going to be terrific,” said a voice at his elbow, and he turned. Alice O’Reilly was spearheading the Cotton Cooperative project. She was a few years older than Henry, a solid, practical woman who worked harder than anyone Henry had ever met, and managed to be cheerful and enthusiastic the whole time. “Just think,” she said. “Building our own jobs! A factory without bosses.”