The stores and homes of Chinese people filled the upper end of the town, so Barkerville’s Chinatown was the first area I walked through on my way to Pa’s shop. The buildings here were cramped together, even more closely than they were in Barkerville’s Lower Town.
There were several stores which were full of bins and shelves of dried herbs and other mysterious things, some recognizable, some so dry and brittle that I couldn’t tell if they were animal parts or bits of roots and tubers.
One of those stores is owned by Sing Kee. He is an herbalist, and he sells medicines which are bought not only by the members of the Chinese community, but also by others in Barkerville. I had been in Sing Kee’s store many times, wondering at the goods which were for sale, and listening to him as he tried to explain to me which ailments each product cured. Some people say that Sing Kee’s medicines are the best in the goldfields, even better than those doctors offered.
Many of the Chinese miners had left their families behind when they came to the land of the “Gold Mountain,” which Pa said was the English translation of the Chinese name for North America. There were “mountains of gold” here in the goldfields, underground mountains, and rivers too, of gold. But you had to stake your claim on the right spot and dig deeply enough to find them. Some miners, like Billy Barker, the man for whom the town was named, found rich veins of gold, but others laboured for months, even years, digging deep shafts but never uncovering the blue clay, below which the gold was often hidden. Both before and after Billy Barker’s famous strike in 1862, there had been miners who found nothing but heartbreak and despair.
I walked by the Chinese Temple, the Tong building. Here the Chinese miners gathered for worship, for meetings, for companionship. They also played games, one called mah-jong, another called fan-tan. My father said that the Chinese gambled on those games and that a great amount of money had been won and lost in the Tong, enough money to build a whole new town. It was the “White Dove,” Pa told me, that people gambled on the most, a game where each day numbers printed on small white tiles were picked, and the people who had bet on those numbers won a lot of money.
Perhaps the reason that the Chinese men spent so much time in the Tong building was that they had nowhere else to go. There were very few Chinese women or children in the goldfields. It was expensive to travel here and many men came alone, waiting for the day they would find their fortune and could afford to send for their families. Pa said that most who had made the long trip from China never saw their wives or children again, but were buried here, in the land of the Gold Mountain. I didn’t know if it was true or not, but I had heard that years after a Chinese man had been buried, his bones were dug up and sent home to China, to be buried again in his own country with the bones of his ancestors. I’d never seen anyone digging up a grave in the Chinese cemetery at Richfield, because I never went near that graveyard; James Barry was buried there.
The Chinese funeral processions went right past our house, and everyone carried food to leave at the grave. I didn’t know if the food was for the spirits, or for the dead man to take into the other world with him, in case he got hungry. My friend Moses told me that sometimes miners down on their luck would go to the Chinese graveyard after a funeral and steal the food. I had never tasted any Chinese food, but I thought that a person would have to be extremely hungry to eat a meal served beside a newly dug grave. Then, just as I was thinking about graves and death, I passed by a building behind the Tong.
It was only a cabin, smaller than most of those in Barkerville, with only one tiny window and a narrow door. But this cabin was where Chinese miners went when they were very old or very sick. Here, lonely men, whose families were far away and could not look after them, went to die. Others brought them food and medicine, cared for them and made them comfortable during their last days and hours. The Chinese had a name for that cabin in their own language, Tai Ping Fong, which meant the Peace Room or the Peace House. To me it was the Death House. I looked away as I passed and walked faster.
The buildings in the lower end of Barkerville were raised on posts so that when Williams Creek was diverted, either by accident or to create a water supply for a claim so that gold could be washed from the gravel, the water stayed away from the houses and stores. Sometimes these diversions caused the creek to burst its banks and come rushing merrily down Barkerville’s streets, flooding homes and stores whose foundations were too close to ground level. Even though snow still lay deep on the hills and in the shadows of the buildings, Barkerville’s main road was thick in mud today which meant that Williams Creek had thawed and left its normal course once again.
Raising the buildings worked well, except for the fact that no two stores or homes were built at exactly the same height. Boardwalks were erected along the fronts of buildings, but walking along these boardwalks, while it kept your feet out of the mud, meant continually climbing from one level to another and back down again as the walkways followed the different heights of the buildings.
As I passed Moses’s barbershop, I realized I hadn’t seen him for a while. I stuck my head in the door and he turned to me and smiled.
“Ted. Come in, come in. Sit a spell. I’ve no customers at the moment so it’s a good time for a visit.”
“Just for a short while,” I said. “How are you, Moses?”
“I am well, if not yet wealthy,” laughed Moses. “And you, young man, have grown again.”
“Not really, Moses. It’s just that you haven’t seen me for some weeks.”
“I noticed,” said Moses. “Now that you spend so much time working with your father I see little of you.”
“I’m sorry. I’ve been busy.”
“Busy? Yes. But perhaps maybe you would also prefer to seek other friends, friends more your own age instead of someone of my advanced years.”
“You’re not old, Moses,” I said.
“Not in spirit, perhaps. But the years add up, and they seem to accumulate much faster once you pass the half-century mark.”
Neither one of us spoke for a while, and the silence felt awkward. “I guess I’d better be going,” I said. “I’m already late. Pa went without me this morning.”
“I know,” said Moses. “Your father dropped by here, just after I opened up. He told me that you had a difficult night.”
“It was just a dream, that’s all.”
Moses looked at me for a while before he spoke. “It is not good for you, Ted, to dwell on what has passed.”
“I don’t ‘dwell,’” I said. “I never think about him.”
Moses didn’t ask who I meant by ‘him.’ He knew.
“Just now you turned to look all around you,” he said.
“As if you suspected James Barry to be lurking in my barbershop. I think he is with you more than you will admit. Perhaps that is why you no longer seek my friendship— because I remind you of a time you would sooner forget.”
“That’s not true,” I said, getting angry. “I wasn’t looking for Mr. Barry, I was merely glancing around. He was only in your barbershop twice when I was present, so why would I look for him here?”
“You speak as if he still lives,” said Moses. “You carry him with you, in your heart, in your mind, as if he were still alive. That is not healthy.”
“It’s none of your concern,” I said. “I don’t care what you believe is healthy. I don’t think of James Barry and I don’t dream about him.”
“I