In The Shadow of The Cypress Read online

  IN THE

  SHADOW

  OF THE

  CYPRESS

  IN THE

  SHADOW

  OF THE

  CYPRESS

  THOMAS STEINBECK

  GALLERY BOOKS

  NEW YORK LONDON TORONTO SYDNEY

  Gallery Books

  A Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

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  New York, NY 10020

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  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2010 by Thomas Steinbeck

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address Gallery Books Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020.

  First Gallery Books hardcover edition April 2010

  Gallery and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

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  Designed by Joy O’Meara

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Steinbeck, Thomas.

  In the shadow of the cypress / Thomas Steinbeck.—1st Gallery Books

  hardcover ed.

  p. cm.

  1. Chinese—California—Fiction. 2. Immigrants—California—Fiction.

  3. California—History—1850–1950—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3619.T47615I52 2010

  813'.6—dc22

  2009033355

  ISBN 978-1-4391-6825-7

  ISBN 978-1-4391-6988-9 (ebook)

  This modest volume is dedicated to

  Rubilee Knight,

  Heaven’s testimony that angels live among us

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Bringing any book into print is as much a team effort as staging a play, or producing a film, and in that regard there are a number of very able people who are owed not only credit for this book, but also my full store of gratitude and appreciation.

  First I wish to thank my very talented wife, Gail Knight Steinbeck, for her tireless efforts as my agent. Her mastery of complex contract negotiations has saved my bacon on numerous occasions, and her support and skills as a first-draft editor have proved invaluable over the years. In that same vein I wish to thank Dan Smetanka, a truly professional and thoughtful editor, for helping me with this book long before it found a home with Simon & Schuster. In fact, I’m convinced that it was due to his insight and expertise that it found a home at all.

  I would also like to express my deep appreciation to Anthony Ziccardi at Simon & Schuster for giving me the opportunity to come in out of the rain for a while. My gratitude stimulates a natural desire to always be worthy of his confidence and generosity. I would also like to express my gratitude to my new editor at Simon & Schuster, Kathy Sagan. Her compassion and patience in the wake of many difficulties have been truly inspirational. I look forward to luxuriating in the warmth of her support, her consummate literary sensitivity, and her vast experience for the many tales as yet unborn.

  Family support and encouragement has always been the abiding grace for those artists who are fortunate enough to lay claim to it in any form. And to those of my family who have helped to keep the ship on an even keel all these years, I must first thank the indomitable queen of our clan, Rubilee Knight, a paladin of the “greatest generation,” and in its older and more romantic connotation, a true flower of southern womanhood. “She is a creature of many intricate parts, and all the parts are true and well fashioned.”

  In that same vein, I wish to express my sincere gratitude to Mike and Patti Hilton for all their loving support. This also stands true for my dear friends Myrica Taylor and Mary Jean Vignone. Their sympathetic concerns and timely assistance in turbulent seas is much appreciated.

  For love, inspiration, courage, and music I’m blessed to have Johnny Irion and Sarah Lee Guthrie as a part of my family. But I especially owe their two beautiful and talented daughters, Olivia and Sophie, a mark of personal gratitude for remaining constant reminders that I have readers yet to come, and that’s a weighty responsibility for someone of my tender years. I would also like to thank my friend Gerry Low-Sabado for her valuable insights concerning the coastal Chinese communities of Monterey, and my old mate Kent Seavey for his concise historical perspectives and timely assistance in all things arcane and mysterious.

  And I wish to express my sincere thanks to Harry Lewis, who has every right to lay claim to being a true patron of this work. His patience and kindness has engendered great affection and loyalty. I also wish to acknowledge my dear friends, the O’Connell family. They have generously looked after the balance of my sanity for the better part of five years, with marginally interesting results. I am looking forward to a complete recovery one of these days when I have nothing better to do.

  And last, I would like to personally communicate my sincere gratitude to the nation and people of China for having gifted me a lifelong focus of study that has never once disappointed my historical interest or dampened my enthusiasm to know more.

  PROLOGUE

  WHEN I WAS A CHILD in Monterey my two best friends were gifted Chinese boys named Billy Chen Su and B. D. Chu Mui (better known as “Bee-Dee” Mui to his friends). It was from their respectful relationship with their own parents that I ultimately learned the obligations and abiding value of familial respect, and the cultural pride that comes from being able to name one’s ancestors back through the ages. Despite their pressed financial circumstances, my childhood friends lived with the confidence that they were inheritors of an ancient culture grounded in well-documented history, literature, medicine, and art, while I was the product of a race that, until the eleventh century, most likely painted themselves blue, lived in vermin-infested hovels, slaughtered their neighbors for sport, and stole cattle by profession. My envy of my Chinese friends was truly palpable. Thus, it is to those intrepid Chinese fishermen and farmers of Monterey that I owe the inspiration for this historical flight of possibilities. The past may indeed be prologue, but it is the future that invariably answers the questions of history.

  JOURNAL EXTRACTS OF

  DR. CHARLES H. GILBERT

  Stanford Professor of Marine Biology

  “True wisdom comes at great cost.

  Only ignorance is free.”

  —TAOIST PROVERB

  IN 1906, AT THE TIME these entries were written, Dr. Gilbert was a highly respected instructor and researcher at Stanford University’s Hopkins Marine Station in Pacific Grove, California.

  Dr. Charles Lucas

  Stanford University

  Department of Marine Studies

  2008

  Partial diary entry: June 1, 1906

  The raging China Point fire was an experience that must be forever etched in the memories of everyone who witnessed the tragedy, though I presently suspect there were those who perceived only profit in the flames. On the night of May 16, 1906, aided by predictably seasonal winds from the southwest, the fifty-year-old Chinese fishing village on China Point was completely burned to the ground in less than o
ne hour. It was the most horrifying conflagration I have ever witnessed. My heart was wrenched with concern for the poor occupants of the village, and I feared the worst for the plight of those trapped in their shanties. The dwellings seemed to burst into flame like boxes of kitchen matches, but there was nothing anyone could do without suffering death for their efforts. By dawn the whole village was nothing more than a black, smoldering skeleton. It was only through the grace of a merciful God that no Chinese were killed in the racing inferno. But it is a certainty to all witnesses that they had lost most of what they once possessed, including some of their nets, sheds, and beached fishing boats.

  The fire’s ignition point was most certainly a Chinese-owned hay barn at the south end of the village, and I’m persuaded the deed was initiated with the strong seasonal winds in mind. Though it disturbs me to say so, I am thoroughly convinced that the consequential inferno was the result of a determined and planned act of arson.

  If armed with the perspective of hindsight, one can easily deduce that the following narrative has roots that stretch back more than sixty years, and perhaps more than several hundred years if the truth was known. The one person who might be said to have set the engine of destruction in motion is a strange fellow who I came to know in early June of 1898. The man’s name, appropriately enough, was William “Red Billy” O’Flynn.

  By any definition, Mr. O’Flynn is a unique-looking individual. Roughly in his midforties, weathered and apparently used to hard labor, the man comes across as keen and observant, and considering his lack of formal education, he shows good sense in most all things. His novel appearance, despite his being born in Ireland and saddled with a brogue broad enough to occasionally make his speech almost incomprehensible, bespeaks a colorful parentage. He once volunteered that his mother’s people were of Moorish blood. “All thoroughgoing Gypsies to the bone,” he said, and “all armed to the teeth with endless batteries of the most chilling curses imaginable.” He had thus inherited his mother’s soft, dark complexion and black eyes, as well as a moderate knowledge of European Spanish, which our local Mexican population disdains for historical reasons.

  Mr. O’Flynn’s father, according to his son’s recollection, was “a large and dangerous fellow with a ruddy, moon-pocked face, and hair as red-crested as God makes a peckerwood.” As a result, the young man also inherited a prodigious mane of copper-bright curls. And though he possesses marginally pleasant features, and a muscular physique tempered by hard labor, the abiding contrast between his dark Mediterranean complexion and his vivid red crown of hair is truly a most striking sight to behold. One never quite gets used to his appearance. Every time I came across him at his duties, it was like a novelty surprise all over again.

  Only once did Mr. O’Flynn reveal a portion of his history to me, and to this day, knowing his verbal habits as I do, I can’t imagine what inspired him to do so. It was on the day that he first applied to me for part-time work at Hopkins Laboratory. I suppose that, as I was the prospective employer, he felt somehow compelled to reveal that he “first drew breath overlooking the tar-blackened docks of Cork.” His father was a brawling shipyard-pipe fitter, “built like a Birmingham brickbat, but lacking all the wit and modesty God gave a cobblestone.”

  Mr. O’Flynn gave me to understand that when he was fourteen years old he escaped Ireland altogether. His father, he said, had long since matriculated well beyond his amateur standing as a tavern tippler, and had gone on to become a renowned professional whiskey drinker. This all-too-common situation, with its predisposition toward physical cruelty, evidently distressed the family sorely. At last Mr. O’Flynn’s long-suffering mother

  felt she had endured more than enough. Circumstances obliged her to call forth her mortal quiver of Gypsy curses. Two days later, the senior O’Flynn was discovered facedown in a rain-filled gutter. The coroner formally declared that the notorious and unrepentant boozer had drowned in three inches of rainwater.

  I record this here only in passing, because this tragic incident seems to have deeply influenced Mr. O’Flynn, for as far as I can deduce, he has always expressed a total aversion to alcohol. He impresses me as the driest Irishman I have ever encountered. He has for some years been confirmed to the Methodist faith and vehemently speaks against the use of spirits, as well as “all those misbegotten fools what do indulge.”

  On the whole, I have always found Mr. O’Flynn a man of simple, if somewhat cautious, honesty. As far as I can discern, he has always spoken the truth, but only as much truth as warranted by the question. On most occasions his natural reticence induces him to say as little as possible, and with the greatest circumspection. Unlike most of his race, Mr. O’Flynn never indulges in idle conversation or even bemused observation. In fact, for an Irishman, he exhibits not the least vestige of Celtic humor. However, he is at all times a stable, capable, and dependable worker, whose efforts rarely if ever draw the slightest criticism from myself, or the laboratory staff.

  When Mr. O’Flynn first applied to me for a job, he stated that he had worked for the Southern Pacific Railroad for twelve years. He said he had started as a gandy dancer and worked his way up to roadbed foreman with a crew of twenty men to supervise. Then one day a slowly passing engine accidentally ruptured a steam release valve on a piston feed line and badly scalded Mr. O’Flynn and four of his crew. Two of his Chinese workers later succumbed to their burns by way of infection, and O’Flynn almost died himself. Happily, he was pulled back from the brink through the careful ministrations of his hard-nosed Portuguese wife. She bartered housecleaning chores for burn creams and pain medications; these were compounded for her by Charles K. Tuttle’s Pharmacy and given to her at cost. When he later asked the Southern Pacific regional manager for compensation to cover the expense of his injuries, Mr. O’Flynn was given seventy-five dollars and told that he need not come back to work, as his position had been filled in his absence.

  The Chinese victims of the accident received forty-five dollars each, and the families of the dead were given thirty-five dollars to help defray burial costs. These latter particulars concerning Mr. O’Flynn I eventually learned from Mr. Tuttle, but only after I’d already engaged Mr. O’Flynn on a part-time basis. Indeed, once I understood the man’s predicament, I found myself quite pleased to be of some small assistance in his financial restitution.

  I soon discovered that Mr. O’Flynn kept himself adequately solvent by working six part-time jobs every week. On Mondays and Tuesdays he worked for the county on a road maintenance crew. On Wednesdays he came to us. He was taught how to properly clean fish tanks and assisted with all the equipment maintenance at the laboratory. Thursdays O’Flynn worked making deliveries for Tuttle’s Pharmacy, or carefully dusting the hundreds of large glass-stopped medicine bottles that lined all the walls. On Fridays he ran a steam-saw for Thomas Work’s wood yard. But Saturdays were O’Flynn’s special delight, for he alternated between carting and stocking at Steiner’s grocery store and working at Mr. Hay’s ice cream parlor. He cleaned the large copper kettles in the candy kitchen and redressed and oiled the stone taffy tables. A bemused Mr. Tuttle helped him find these additional jobs when he realized that Mr. O’Flynn was in possession of a sweet tooth the size of Seal Rock. The proprietors of both establishments proved very generous with free samples and token prices. His Sundays were just as regular. The mornings were spent worshipping at the First Methodist Church on Lighthouse Road. And, weather permitting, his Sunday afternoons were dedicated to fishing for the Sabbath table with his Portuguese father-in-law. In general, one would appraise all of Mr. O’Flynn’s habits as quite regular, sober, and disciplined. I must here record that these factors, like the man’s sobriety, are indisputable facts that should be taken into account for later consideration.

  There was one additional curious facet to Mr. O’Flynn’s social intercourse within the local community. Though he seemed to possess few friends besides relatives acquired through marriage, he spent much of his free time in the company of
his Chinese acquaintances. In particular, he was often seen associating with the well-to-do proprietor of a successful Chinese laundry in Pacific Grove. This rather popular fellow goes by the name of Master Ah Chung. O’Flynn has also been known to keep company with Ah Chung’s younger brother Jim Len. I have since been informed that despite all modest appearances to the contrary, both these gentlemen are alleged to be heavily involved in diverse business interests up and down the California coast. It is widely believed that they receive lucrative stipends from the Three Corporations of San Francisco. This mysterious organization represents the most powerful Chinese clans in California. It is under the auspices of these secretive and financially powerful families that ninety percent of all Chinese imports and exports are bought and sold.

  The improbability of our Mr. O’Flynn enjoying social congress with the Chinese stood out as an oddity, until I recalled that he had worked for years supervising Chinese road gangs for the Southern Pacific. And it appears that during his time in that capacity he learned to speak a fair smattering of Cantonese, which I understand is the predominant dialect spoken among our local Chinese.

  I discovered these obtuse facts quite incidentally one summer day about thirteen months after Mr. O’Flynn came to work for us at Hopkins. One afternoon a Chinese fisherman and his wife came to visit the laboratory from China Point. They accompanied a rude donkey cart that had been tailored to carry a shallow wooden tub four feet in diameter. The tub had a two-sided hinged lid to keep its contents from splashing out. As they walked along, the fisherman’s wife worked a clever double-channeled hand-bellows. This device, I later learned, pumped a steady flow of air into the tub through a hose end wrapped in a sponge. They had come to our laboratory with a very rare specimen indeed. It was a small, black-skinned, deepwater shark. They had caught the ruby-eyed creature on a deep trotline over the Monterey marine canyon.