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“Ming Lei? Niece Leah? I not recognize.”
Leah gulped. “Third Uncle, how did you get here? And why have you come?”
The man’s rolling gait took him around the horse to where she stood. “I come on train.”
“From Portland? From San Francisco? All the way from China?”
“Yes! From Canton on ship. From San Francisco in train. Long trip with much smoke in cars.”
Leah reached out and touched the man’s shoulder. She had never particularly liked her mother’s youngest brother; he had opposed her mother’s marriage to Father, and afterward he had treated his older sister like a fallen woman.
“Third Uncle, Ming Cha, how did you find me?”
The black eyes twinkled. “Chinese Presbyterian Mission in city. Not hard to trace.”
“But why?” she persisted. “Why have you come?”
“Times not good in China,” he explained. “I sell shop in Luzhai. Start business here in Land of Gold.”
Dumbfounded, Leah stared at the man. “Uncle, you cannot sell ground dragon horn and cherry ginseng elixir here in the West.”
“Do not want to,” he said with a grin. “I start baking business. You know, cake, cookie, even pie. I go to apprentice school in San Francisco and learn how.”
“But Third Uncle, how could you leave China? It was your home!”
Her relative’s round face sobered. “My family all gone since your mother, Ming Sa, die. You only family I have left.”
Leah’s senses began to spin. She reached for Lady’s bridle, closed her eyes and hung on. This was too much to absorb; perhaps it was only a dream.
“I must offer you hospitality,” she began.
“No need. I stay in hotel, like real Western shopkeeper,” he said happily. “Tomorrow I look for place to open bakery.”
She did not know whether to laugh or cry. Now there would be not one but two Chinese people in town. She suppressed a groan. She could just see the expression on Carl Ness’s face.
She struggled not to smile. God forgive her, she hoped she would be there to watch when the mercantile owner met jolly, stubborn Third Uncle.
She rode home in a daze. At supper she explained to Thad and Teddy about her uncle’s arrival, and sat dumbfounded on the dining chair while Teddy peppered her with questions.
“Is he a real Chinaman? From China, like you?” The boy could hardly wait to see him. “Does he wear funny clothes? Does he talk Chinese talk?”
A week passed. The weather grew hot and then hotter still. The sun seared everything. Leah irrigated her kitchen garden with buckets of used wash water, and spent the stifling afternoons sewing muslin shirts for Teddy and Thad and light seersucker skirts and lawn shirtwaists for herself.
And no matter how oppressive the weather, or how unsettled her nerves, each Saturday she saddled Lady, rode into Smoke River to visit the Ladies’ Knitting Circle, and purposefully drank tea while the ladies gossiped. Once she made a plan, she stuck to it.
Her mother always said “A drip of water wears away the hardest stone.” Perhaps that was how she had endured years of being called the White Devil’s woman. Leah resolved she would not stop her own efforts until the “stone” wore away.
Today, instead of having to defend Thad’s wheat-growing venture, she had to answer pointed questions about Third Uncle and his bakery.
“Yes,” she acknowledged in as calm a voice as she could manage, “my uncle has come from China.” And yes, he was planning to open a store—a bakery.
Over violent objections from Whitey Poletti and Carl Ness, Third Uncle—or Uncle Charlie, as he now wished to be called—had managed to rent the space next to Verena Forester’s dressmaking shop. And the mercantile was now becoming the focus for what Leah recognized as growing unease on the part of Smoke River townspeople.
Uncle Charlie was undeterred. Blithely he set to work building shelves and storage bins, apparently unconcerned about whether he was accepted or not. Independent to a fault, in Leah’s opinion, Uncle Charlie would accept no help or advice from her or from Thad; but each Saturday, Leah brought him a basket of vegetables from her now-thriving kitchen garden, or some squares of cornbread.
At first, Uncle Charlie could not find a boardinghouse that would accept a Chinese man, and Rooney Cloudman was the only man who would stand next to him at the bar in the Golden Partridge Saloon. But with what Leah came to recognize as his typical persistence, Uncle Charlie moved into the tiny room at the back of his bakery and began collecting discarded pieces of furniture.
Slowly the bakery began to take shape. Leah helped Charlie paint the interior walls of the bakery a buttery-yellow, and she spent one entire Saturday washing the tall windows in front with hot water and vinegar. A handsome new Windsor stove came by Wells Fargo wagon from Portland, and then two glass-fronted display cases were shipped by rail all the way from San Francisco.
