Free The Kings and Queens of Roam: A Novel by Daniel Wallace Page B

stopped and some of the wet dripped out of their clothes. Then they set the cart on the porch and walked into the house Elijah McCallister had built, so many years ago, and tried to pretend that nothing had changed, when everything had.

ROAM:
A SHORT HISTORY,
PART III
    S ilk made Elijah a very rich man, and as rich men have always done, he built a house far too big for a man to live in. It was elegant, magnificent, absurd. It would have been absurd anywhere, but in Roam, an invented place in the middle of nowhere, it was gloriously, mythically, absurd. In addition to being huge—you had to look at it twice just to see it once—it was also recklessly beautiful, the largely uninhabitable manifestation of the mind of a madman lucky enough to find a thing through which he could channel his ambition. In his dreams his house swallowed everything and everybody; America lived inside of it instead of the other way around. The imported Chinese kept coming, half of them working in the silk factory and the stores and clearing the land to build a bigger factory and more stores; the other half working on his house, building wing after wing after wing, soon to no purpose at all but his own deranged desire to hear theincessant sounds of progress hammering in his ears. Elijah liked to be able to see new rooms, new porches, new staircases; it wasn’t necessary that they lead somewhere.
    At least there was a town in which the house could exist. For quite some time Main Street was the only street, and only was called Main Street after there was a second street, and then a third. It was laid out much like any other town—thoughtlessly, and in haste. Here is where the rich people lived, and here the workers. This is where the white people shopped, and here was the special store for the Chinese, which had everything they could ever want, as long as they didn’t want that much. There was a barn and a bar and a general store. There was a place to eat. One young man opened a haberdashery, and that was welcomed by men and women alike. People lived and died. They loved and laughed and cried. It was the same here as it was anywhere else in the world; people were no more or less sad, no more or less happy, no more or less anything. Roam was new, but at the same time it wasn’t anything new at all. The only difference was, it was Elijah’s. He made the laws and invented the money. His house was like a second town—even he never saw it all—and rumor had it that within its labyrinthine bowels he sired many families with the most excellent of the Chinese women and had children—one of them a son, to keep his blood and name alive—who never saw one another, though sometimes separated only by a wall and a door. They say he had more children than a dozen men, and though he never married a single one of their Chinese mothers, he professed an abiding fondness for each—and in fact treated them all with the gentleness one usually reserved for stray dogs and babies not your own. Outside of his own home he forbade the comingling of white men and yellow woman; he called their offspring combos and created a slum just for them. He created everything, the worst of it and the best of it as well, and for a little while—a week, perhaps, give or take a day—Elijah was content.
    Ming Kai was not.
    All these years, as Ming Kai had watched Roam grow from a patch of mulberry trees into a real town, he was kept separate from its success. Even though it would never have existed without him, he was of value only for as long as Elijah wanted to know his secret. Once Elijah knew the secret of making silk, Ming Kai became just another person in Roam, another person to perform a small part in the drama of Elijah McCallister’s life.
    But not entirely. When Elijah needed to talk to someone, it was always Ming Kai he sought out. When the pressures of running the town became overwhelming—and they did, occasionally, though Elijah would have no one else in the world know