At dusk, the pigeons came home to roost in a flurry of white wings and damp air. The rains had finally stopped, and Charles and Han waited on top of the wall to reward them with seeds from their palms. After the birds landed and strutted about, the boys gripped their trembling bodies and stuffed them into the coop.
“You were right,” Charles said. “They came back.”
Out beyond the upturned tile roofs of the town stretched fields of millet and hemp that had never produced a bountiful harvest. The pear and apricot orchards begrudgingly offered up shriveled fruit each summer, and further in all directions stretched rocky ground that to the west ended in forbidding mountains. In winter, wind swept across the plains, carrying dust from the Gobi Desert. The ground stayed hard and crusted with snow for months, cracking into fissures that healed only with the spring rains.
But on this day, the arid earth glowed as new leaves softened the landscape. This brief, bright, promising moment in June wouldn’t last long. Soon the sun would beat down and turn the fields brown, the trees limp. Rain might return in autumn, although the farmers knew not to count on it. This part of North China remained dry and desolate for much of the year, nothing like the lush visions Charles carried in his mind of America, where he had seen fields of tasseled corn so green it hurt his eyes.
As he gazed out at the countryside now, he felt more convinced than ever that he belonged in that other, distant place he still called home. The harsh landscape before him had caused the Carson family nothing but heartache. Six weeks before, Charles’s father had died on the trail in the mountains west of town, his body not yet recovered. Reports pointed to a deadly fall in a mudslide, the cruel earth swallowing the Reverend Caleb Carson and offering little in return.
At his funeral, his fellow ministers had reminded the congregation that he was in a better place now: heaven, they said, not the hard ground, held the Reverend in its embrace. Charles had been raised to believe that, but it seemed just as likely to him that his father hovered somewhere over the plains like the terrifying characters in his amah Lian’s bedtime stories. Those frightening spirits swooped down and skimmed the earth, flying senselessly from place to place, impossible to catch and impossible to contain. Charles feared that his father’s spirit would be forever trapped in this restless purgatory known as North China.
“Where the devil is our last bird?” he asked his friend now.
“You have to be prepared to lose one or two on the first run,” Han said. “They fly off into the wilds, or someone from the market snatches them and claims them as his own. It is to be expected.”
“But not our Little Fat One. He’s too clever to be caught.”
“No, not Hsiao P’angtze. He will return.”
“I would never let anyone steal my birds.” Charles crossed his arms over his narrow chest. “You can’t let people walk all over you, Han. You need backbone.”
“So you have said, Charles.”
“It’s high time you people got rid of these bastards. It’s been more than five years since the Japanese occupied the North, and no one’s doing anything about it. This would never happen in America. Every farmer in Ohio would tote out his rifle and shoot the Japs right off his land.”
Han let out a little puff of air and turned again to the countryside, his eyes scanning the horizon. Charles knew his friend saw things out there that he never could. The Chinese were uncanny like that, which was why the situation seemed so galling.
“You think maybe the Reds will finally get rid of them?” Charles asked. “Guerrilla tactics seem the way to go.”
The corners of Han’s mouth rose, and he let out a slight laugh. “What do you know about the Communists, Charles?”
“Not much.” He shrugged. “Father said they’re hiding up in the hills to the west.”
“You should believe what Father says. Reverend Carson was a very wise man.”
“But I want to know what you think, Han. There’s something you’re not telling me. Like what are all these Reds doing in our town all of a sudden?”
“Putting on plays.”
Now it was Charles’s turn to laugh. “Those are the strangest performances I’ve ever seen. Imagine thinking that people would want to watch a play about land reform? Back home in America, they’d be hooted off the stage, but here, everyone loves it.”
“That show was not so good. The one about the death of the landlord was much better.”
“The Reds must be doing more than just putting on plays. I bet they’re itching for a fight.”
“And on what basis do you make this deduction?” Han asked.
Charles threw up his hands and said, “I don’t know. Maybe I’m itching for one. I wish something would happen around here.” Then, to show Han he meant what he said, Charles stepped forward, tossed back his head, and spat over the wall.
Han grabbed his sleeve and yanked him away from the edge. “What are you doing?” he shouted.
“They’ll never know who did it. They’re too dumb.”
“American fool,” Han said, his black bangs shaking from side to side. “You’ll get us in trouble. You’re too impulsive. You never think things through.”
“And you sound like a crotchety old maid. Are you Lian? Is that who you are?”
Charles spun away from Han and spat again, this time with a full mouth. The outraged cry of a Japanese soldier rose from the street below, and Charles said, “Direct hit. Damn, I’m good.” He could curse only with Han, and it always felt excellent.
“Damn you,” Han hissed as he crouched low. “You’ll get us killed!”
A shout came up to them. “Who for stands on our wall?”
“Not your wall,” Charles shouted back as he ducked down beside his friend. “This wall is as American as I am. Belongs to the Congregational board, headquartered at number 14 Beacon Street, Boston, Massachusetts. You can write them a letter of complaint if you want.”
“Go home, America!” the Japanese soldier shouted. “Get off our wall.”
Charles popped up again and leaned over the side. He tipped his golfing cap and said, “Hey, mister, can you spare a dime?”
The soldier shook his rifle in the air. “American missionary boy very bad. Come down from our wall.”
“Told you, not your wall,” Charles said again. “It’s one hundred percent American property.”
“We come up and arrest American boy and teach him whosoever owns wall.”
“‘Whosoever’?” Charles repeated. “Big word, soldier. But in this instance, that whosoever is me.”
The Japanese soldier gave up on his sorry English and resorted to ranting in his native tongue. Charles smiled down at Han, who still huddled on the brick walkway at the top of the wall. Beads of sweat had appeared on Han’s forehead, and he rapped his knuckles against his knee. Charles switched to the local Chinese dialect to set his friend at ease. “Don’t worry, they can’t bother me. I’m not the enemy. And besides, I’m going home soon. You knew that, didn’t you? Mother and I can’t very well stay in China with Father gone.”
“You are lucky to leave, Charles, and even luckier that no one ever attacks your country,” Han said. “But you shouldn’t be so cocky.”
“Of course no one attacks America. They wouldn’t dare,” Charles said and began to whistle.
Down below, the voices of the Japanese soldiers blended with the rattling of wooden carts over the rutted road, the calls of peddlers heading to market, and the braying of mules in a field nearby. The day carried on, uninterrupted. The Chinese went about their difficult business, trade as paltry as ever. The Imperial Army had paved the road leading in and out of town, so now more travelers stopped, though, finding little there, they quickly moved on.
Still, even the lowliest of merchants felt he had gained from the occupation. Opium dens, prostitutes, and bars selling rotgut and sorghum wine did their best to unburden the Japanese soldiers of their meager salaries. The Mandarins tried to play their cards right, secretly pledging their allegiance to the invaders, whom they declared their liberators, even as they were appointed to be officers in the Chinese Nationalist Army. When Chiang Kai-Shek placed the nephew of ancient Tupan Feng in charge of his forces in the region, everyone knew that the warlord system of bribes and levies would continue, only now with the constant threat of conscription as well. As farmers and coolies shuffled past the American mission compound on their way into town, they kept their heads down to escape the interest of their own army more than that of the Japanese.
“So where the devil is our Little Fat One?” Charles asked.
Han stood again. “Patience, Charles. He is coming.”
“How can you be so sure?”
Han might have offered any number of answers, for he had learned a great deal about pigeons. His father, the Carson family cook, had taught him before he’d headed out on the trail with Reverend Carson. New pigeons must be treated with care. For days before their release, the trainer should place cloths over their heads so that the birds remained blind, their initial flight as fraught as a baby’s first steps. When they returned, they must be rewarded amply, especially if the trainer intended to use them again, and for a greater purpose.
The finest of the flock finally swooped down, and Han reached into his pocket for seeds. Hsiao P’angtze glided over the wall and landed. The pigeon’s cooing grew louder as it paced and then preened, cautious and yet eager—ready for whatever was needed of it next. Han felt the same way. He fed the bird from his open hand and prepared for what came next.
A final chord hung in the air as Shirley closed the lid on the piano keys. The other ladies gathered up their things and thanked her, then slipped across the front hall and out the screen door. During practice, they had spoken in hushed tones and hadn’t even raised their voices on the stirring chorus. Shirley appreciated their delicacy but realized that if the choir were to regain its singing vigor, she would need to convince them that she was all right now—or at least all right enough to endure a full-throated rendition of a song. She doubted she’d ever be fully all right again.
Mrs. Carr stacked the hymnals, and Mrs. Reed set the floral Chinese teapot and cups on the lacquered tray for Lian to clear. The missionary ladies knew a hundred ways to be of help, Shirley thought, and yet none of their efforts over the past weeks had eased her pain. After word had come of her husband’s death out on the trail, the ladies had taken turns in shifts outside her bedroom door. But, receiving little encouragement from her, they soon drifted off and sent their servants instead with suppers in straw baskets and stacks of devotional readings—dog-eared passages from the Gospel and scraps of sentimental poetry torn from Christian ladies’ magazines. None of it had suited Shirley, not here in China nor back in the States, not while married nor now as a widow.
Her friend Kathryn appeared at her elbow and patted her sleeve. “Good to have you back, my dear. But next time, the choir should meet in the chapel. You don’t need us traipsing through your home.”
“I must grow used to it again.”
“They say it’s good to have people around after a certain amount of time,” Kathryn offered.
“But what amount of time, they never say.”
Kathryn brushed a stray curl from Shirley’s forehead. “You look better. Your eyes are less puffy.”
Shirley doubted it but thanked her as they made their way to the front door, opened the screen, and stepped out onto the wide verandah. She noticed for the first time that full summer was well upon them, the night air thick and close with no breeze from across the plains. Crickets already sawed madly in their fever, and in the lantern light that shone from the Reeds’ front porch, silhouettes of a few spindly stalks of corn and sturdy sunflowers rose above the communal vegetable garden: proof that time and the world had carried on without Shirley, without Caleb. Lost in mourning, she had somehow missed the month of June altogether.
Her husband had always been the first with a hoe and rake, but Shirley could see now that this year someone else had stepped in to take over the task. Shirley wished it had been she. Instead, she had passed the spring and early summer beneath her bed’s silk canopy, tangled in embroidered sheets and tossed about on a sea of tears, sleep, and morphine-induced oblivion. If concern for her teenaged son had not periodically bobbed to the surface of her mind, she might still be lost to the shore.
“You haven’t seen Charles, have you?” she asked.
“Not to worry, we’ve all got our eyes out for him.” Kathryn tucked an arm into hers. “He and your cook’s son have been hanging about up on the wall.”
“I hope they aren’t getting into trouble.”
“I can’t imagine a flock of pigeons causing trouble. Just be thankful he’s not like us at his age. He could be lolling about in opium dens or gambling with the White Russians in town.”
“We were never as bad as that. A cigarette behind the bleachers hardly compares.”
“Or a flask in hand,” Kathryn said as she squeezed Shirley to her side. “But he’s a young man now, and you should be aware of the proliferation of prostitutes since the Japanese influx. There’s one on every corner, and that’s during the day. I can only imagine what goes on at night. Russian, Japanese, Chinese, you name it, there’s a girl of every nationality. A young fellow like Charles can get the clap just by stepping outside.”
“Please, Kathryn.” Shirley let out a soft moan and pressed her cheek against her friend’s bony shoulder. “I just thank heaven he’s still a boy. By the time he reaches that age, we’ll be long gone.”
Kathryn offered a discordant grunt. Although two years younger and almost a full foot shorter, with straight raven hair instead of Shirley’s light-brown curls, Kathryn had always been Shirley’s match in intellect, if not in appearance or opinion. The two often locked horns but only became closer for it, their devotion to one another deepened by their differences.
“The Lawtons offered to take him out to the countryside with their brood, but he refuses to go.”
“He doesn’t want to leave you. He’s worried about you. We all are.”
“But I’m worthless to him. I’m worthless to everyone so long as I’m here.”
“It’ll be different back home. We just need to get you there.”
“God help me if Cleveland has become my salvation.” Shirley shifted away and went to the porch railing. “Have a cigarette handy?” she asked.
Kathryn laughed a little. “Lighting up in plain sight now? Mourning has changed you. I think Caleb would be proud of your independent thinking.”
“Oh, please,” Shirley said. “He had far more important concerns.” She looked out at the empty courtyard. “Besides, no one seems to be around at this hour, and even if they were, they’d leave me alone. When you’re in mourning, you can get away with practically anything. I could have stayed anesthetized in bed for another half a year, and no one would have bothered me.”
“Not true. Charles and I were already conspiring to drag you out of there.”
“You were, with Charles?”
“I did my duty as a loving auntie while you were laid up,” Kathryn said as she rummaged in her Chinese silk purse. “I came around quite often to make sure the boy wasn’t going hungry. I even told him he needed to start shaving. I think he was mortified, but someone had to point it out.”
She placed a monogrammed flask on the porch railing, pulled out the matching monogrammed cigarette case, then dropped the flask back into her purse and yanked shut the silk tassels. Shirley smiled at the familiar sight of the tarnished silver. Before China had ever entered Kathryn’s plans, she had cavalierly broken off an engagement to a lackluster college boyfriend and accidentally driven her coupe into a ditch after too many old-fashioneds at the country club. As her father prepared to roundly discipline her, Kathryn concocted a punishment far greater than any he could have mustered: she announced her intention to take up the Christian cause with, in Cal James’s words, a group of uptight, sanctimonious teetotalers halfway around the world. Before she left America, he gave her the monogrammed silver set and a bottle of fine Kentucky bourbon. Shirley would have liked to reassure him now that Kathryn had come to care deeply for the Chinese children she had gone all that way to teach.
Kathryn handed Shirley a cigarette, took one for herself, and shimmied up onto the porch railing, her pencil skirt straining as she crossed her long legs. She really was a fine-looking gal, Shirley thought, deserving of far more attention than she received here in this hinterland. It was all for the best they were heading home before Kathryn’s window of opportunity began to close. Shirley would set her mind to finding Kathryn a good catch once they got stateside. Wasn’t that the sort of thing that a widow did with her time? They thought of others instead of themselves.
She inhaled slowly, her head bent and spirit worn. “Caleb was always so generous and so full of life and vitality. Far more than I am.”
“Oh, now, that’s not true,” Kathryn said.
“I’ve always been too—” Shirley looked at her friend, whose cheeks in that moment appeared especially rosy, her blue eyes sparkling. Really, she thought, not for the first time, Kathryn and Caleb would have been better suited to one another. They were easygoing and warm, nothing like Shirley in temperament. “I’ve been stingy with my heart,” she announced. “I’m sure Caleb stayed out on the trail because of it. I didn’t show my love for him nearly enough. And this is my punishment. I will never love again.”
“Oh, for goodness’ sake, “ Kathryn said, “don’t talk nonsense. You’re my oldest friend, and you know perfectly well how to be loyal and dear. Your husband has died recently, so of course you’re miserable. But you must eventually face the fact that your own life is not over.”
“It might as well be.”
“That decides it.” Kathryn hopped down from her perch on the railing. “Tomorrow morning, I’ll impress upon Reverend Wells the need to hurry our papers along. We can’t wait another month. He has to find us passage sooner. And it’s time for you to focus on something else. How about your son for starters?”
Shirley let out a sigh. “Don’t remind me what a negligent mother I’ve been. But do tell Reverend Wells I’m concerned for Charles. This is no place for a teenaged boy without a father.”
“According to my father,” Kathryn said, “this is no place for anyone. Another telegram came from him begging me to return home. Apparently everyone but us knows that we’re living in a danger zone.”
Shirley turned and studied the still courtyard. It seemed remarkably peaceful. The tan brick pathways divided the yellow soil where ginkgo and cherry trees had been planted thirty years before. A calm and idyllic setting, she thought, just the way the early missionaries had envisioned it: the Congregational mission resembled a quintessential small college campus, dotted with fanciful Chinese elements to gently remind the visitor of what existed outside the high brick walls.
The Chinese Boys’ School loomed at one end of the quad and the Girls’ School at the other. Just across the way, in the center of the mission, the chapel resembled a pagoda with an eccentric, Chinese-inspired steeple. The roofs of the buildings flipped upward at the corners, and ornate lead decorations climbed each ridge with colorful sculpted dragons at the peaks. On each wall, moon windows intersected by Chinese wave patterns balanced nicely with standard Western-style rectangular frames. And at the entrance to the wraparound porch of each mission home stood a moon gate, etched with Chinese characters that offered words of welcome and promises of good fortune to all who entered.
Shirley shut her eyes and pictured Caleb dashing through their moon gate, bounding up the steps to kiss her on the lips. When she opened her eyes, her lashes were moist again, and a frightening stillness surrounded her. No one stood gazing up at the evening stars or strolling on this summer’s eve. Earlier, Shirley had assumed that the choir ladies had slipped out quickly after practice to be sensitive to her, but now she wondered if they had hurried home for another reason.
“Are we under a curfew?” she asked.
Kathryn took her hand. “Oh, my dear, you really haven’t been paying attention, have you? Of course we are. I’ve spared you the news, but things don’t look good for our Chinese friends.”
As Kathryn began to explain the situation, Shirley intended to listen but quickly became distracted by the sight of the chips of glossy paint littered across the porch floorboards. She loved the red-coffered ceiling and the intricately painted timbers of her home and the gaudy gold details around the heavily carved front door. But apparently in her weeks of mourning, her house had started to crumble around her. The heavy spring rains could do that—peel the paint right off the walls.
Caleb had always seen to upkeep. It didn’t matter to Shirley anymore how the place looked except that its demise served as a reminder that he was truly gone. She let out a final stream of smoke and flicked her cigarette over the railing and onto the courtyard ground. In the past, she would have hidden her extinguished butts under the porch, but now, she didn’t care who knew about her unladylike habits. So little mattered anymore except that Caleb was gone, and she would be leaving soon, too.
“Even though they’re supposed to be united, they hardly trust one another,” Kathryn was saying, and Shirley realized she had missed her friend’s subject altogether.
“Sorry, who is united?”
“The Nationalists and the Communists, dear. At least that’s their intention, but out here in no-man’s-land, it’s all up for grabs.”
“And people think it’s good that they’re united?”
“A desperate move.” Kathryn stubbed out her cigarette on the porch railing and flicked it under the porch. “But necessary.”
“All right, then, a united front it is,” Shirley said and tried to rally some enthusiasm. “They’ll sweep the Japanese out in no time.”
“Not likely. The Japanese are pouring in from the north.”
“From the north? You mean, near here?”
They both turned to gaze again at the courtyard.
“The young warlord, your Tupan Feng’s nephew, has appointed his usual cronies. They love to strut about, but rumor has it they’re as ineffectual and greedy as ever.”
Shirley gave a weak smile. “Old Tupan Feng finally has a reason to wear his dress uniform.”
“Skirmishes are taking place out there somewhere. Japanese supply lines and railroads and such are being attacked by the Nationalist forces. Or perhaps the Communist ones. Honestly, it’s all a muddle to me.” Kathryn straightened Shirley’s collar and smoothed her flyaway hair. Their hands found one another again and swung ever so slightly, as if they were the schoolgirls they had once been together. “Some people say the Chinese don’t care who rules their country,” Kathryn continued. “I can’t imagine that’s true at heart. They’re just highly pragmatic. And the poor peasants are worked to the bone and haven’t time to look up from their plows. I think they assume they’ll remain miserable under any government. While meanwhile, the higher-ups take Japanese bribes until a better option comes along. They’re cagey, always hedging their bets, but who can blame them, with so many factions in our sorry little province?”
“I wonder what the Japanese are offering?”
“To let them live, I suppose,” Kathryn said with an arched eyebrow. “The alternative, I gather, is not so good.”
“But the Japanese seem decent enough,” Shirley said. “One of the young soldiers started sweeping our back steps after Cook disappeared. I didn’t see any harm in him doing it.”
“But have you asked yourself why Cook disappeared?”
Shirley didn’t know what to say. She should have wondered. Of course she should have. “Is it possible that he joined the Nationalist Army? He was always patriotic and absolutely hates the Japanese.”
“True, but if he’s like everyone else, he hated his own government almost as much. And besides, if Cook had joined, they would have sent him off with whatever feast they could manage. Candles would be lit for him, and we’d probably know his whereabouts.”
“Then perhaps he joined the Reds? I remember Caleb saying they weren’t far from here, up in the hills to the west, I think.”
“The Red Army has been around these parts for months, recovering from their escapades across the country. It’s possible that Cook may have joined them and not the Whites. Did you know that they call them the White Army?”
“Who?”
“The Nationalists. The ones who aren’t Red. Although now that they’ve supposedly combined forces, I assume they’ll start calling them the Pink Army! Oh, it’s all so ridiculous. I can hardly believe we’re stuck in the midst of it. Remember when our greatest concern was which chapeaux to wear to Sunday service?”
Both women shook their heads.
“The point is,” Kathryn continued, “while we are still here, we must do our best to help hold off the Japanese. Most likely, my dear, they are the ones responsible for your cook’s disappearance.”
Kathryn let go of Shirley’s hand and patted her charming cloche into place. She opened her purse and pulled out her lace gloves in the same forest green as her hat. Shirley marveled at her friend’s style, even here in this distant outpost and with the other American women so little inclined to care about such things. Shirley felt certain she was the only one who saw Kathryn for who she really was: a smart, snappy future career girl who had made a wrong turn and wound up in China for her own stubborn reasons. Once she got back to America, she’d find a job and a husband. The rest of the mission might be deluded into thinking that Kathryn cared about China’s endless troubles, but Shirley knew better, because now that Caleb was gone, she felt similarly worn out with the whole mess.
“I’m so sorry to have abandoned you these past weeks, my love,” Shirley said as she bent to kiss her friend on both cheeks. “Let’s make a pact. We’ll take tea with one another every afternoon until it’s time for us to depart. We can start tomorrow. We’ll review the latest news and make our plans. There’s much to be discussed. As our professors used to say at Vassar when the bell rang, ‘Ever more learning tomorrow, fine ladies!’”
“Yes, ever more learning. I remember it well. Now, get some rest. Your eyes do look awfully puffy.”
As at so many partings since girlhood, the friends let go with outstretched fingers. But at just that moment, from around the corner came two young Japanese soldiers with an officer marching a few paces behind. The men halted before the moon gate in front of the Carson home. The two younger men looked identical, their khaki uniforms the same and their blank expressions in the shadowed light unchanging, until Shirley realized that the one on the right was the young fellow who had swept her back steps. She offered a nod, but his expression remained unchanged. The officer stepped forward through the gate, snapped his heels together, and bowed quickly.
“Good evening, American madams,” he began in stilted English. “I am Major Hattori, Fifth Division, Japanese Imperial Army. Does American mother know whereabouts of boy with red hair?”
Kathryn retreated up the steps and stood next to Shirley.
“Is everything all right?” Shirley asked. “He isn’t hurt, is he? I assume he’s somewhere around the compound, but honestly, I’m not sure where exactly.”
“American mother does not know whereabouts of son. Very bad. I have reports American boy is rude and should be punished.”
“Oh, thank goodness,” Shirley said. “I thought he might be injured.”
“From high on wall, American boy spits on Japanese soldier.”
“Good Lord,” Kathryn said under her breath.
Shirley raised her chin. “Why, that’s terrible, Major. I’m awfully sorry. I will speak with him. But you must realize that boys will be boys.”
Kathryn squeezed her hand.
“American boy learn bad manners at home. But bad boy not reason for visit. I come to confiscate your two-way radio.”
“My what?” Shirley asked.
Kathryn whispered something she didn’t catch.
“We believe radio in house used by Red Army. We intercept signal. American missionary woman is spy!” He raised both his voice and his eyebrows with his pronouncement.
Shirley burst out laughing. She pulled her hand free and ignored Kathryn’s worried expression. Her friend quickly regained her arm, but Shirley straightened her spine and thrust out her chin. At five feet eleven inches, she would have been noticeably taller than Major Hattori had they stood nose to nose. Looking down at him from the porch she felt had an even better effect.
“Everyone knows that radios get terrible reception here,” she said. “No signals can make it over the surrounding hills. My husband tried to find my beloved opera on the dial but gave up years ago. And perhaps you did not know this, Major, but he is no longer with us. Our house is in mourning, so I will ask you to respect our peace.”
Shirley’s mind drifted for a brief moment into the chasm left by Caleb’s death. A familiar wafting loneliness sucked her downward. It swirled and engulfed her in its chilly calm. Her arms went limp at her sides, and she had to work to keep her knees from buckling. But instead of leaving her completely floored, as it usually did, she could feel the sorrow somehow bolstering her courage and helping her to rise back up again. It was as if the undertow was buoying her, the way a candle sucks down heat before flaring upward into light.
“I’m quite certain that my husband gave that old thing away years ago,” she continued, her voice growing stronger. “Or if I do still have it, I have no idea where it is.”
“Don’t be foolish, my dear,” Kathryn whispered, her pretty cheeks flushed. “Give the man what he wants. These people don’t mess around.”
The officer marched up the steps and placed himself before them. “Madam,” he said to Shirley, “bring radio to me.”
She had spotted his saber in its hilt at his side, his revolver tucked into the leather case on his belt, and knew she was supposed to be impressed by them and by his crisp uniform and shiny boots, but the fact that she literally towered over the man seemed to contradict all that. She turned and strode into her house, calling back over her shoulder, “I shall return in a moment.”
Kathryn clasped her hands together and looked off at the courtyard and then up at the black and starless sky, anywhere but into the stony faces of the officer and his two soldiers, who remained like sentries blocking the bottom step. “Reverend Carson died quite recently, you see. Mrs. Carson really isn’t herself.”
The major did not respond or acknowledge Kathryn’s words, and she wondered if perhaps his English was rudimentary. She was about to try the local Chinese dialect when the screen door flung open again and Shirley reappeared in a flurry, her black satin mourning skirt swishing and her arms upraised. She had a broom in one hand. With a dramatic gesture, she placed it on the floorboards and began sweeping. As she did, she sang an off-key, airy tune: “Don’t sit under the apple tree with anyone else but me. Anyone else but me. Anyone else but me.”
As Shirley continued to sweep and sing, Kathryn’s jaw slackened. The broom whisked right up to the edge of the major’s polished boots and kept going, as if they were merely annoying debris that had fallen onto the otherwise tidy porch.
Major Hattori shuffled back. “American woman most impertinent. She and son must be punished!”
Kathryn reached for the broom and tried to pull it away, but Shirley held on and surprised them both with her strength. She thought she must have been storing it up all those pointless, painful weeks since Caleb’s death, when she had repeatedly come to the conclusion that there was no reason to go on living. For, as she yanked the broom back from Kathryn, she remembered her husband’s words: Face the foe, he had said. A silly phrase he had heard from British military passing through. He had meant it tongue-in-cheek, spoken in a teasing and irreverent manner, but Shirley had known that at heart, he had meant it. Caleb had wanted her to be brave.
She planted the broom and announced, “You may go now, Major Hattori. Good evening.”
Kathryn rocked back on her heels, and the major let out a growl.
“I will return,” he said and hurried down the steps. His soldiers followed closely at his heels as he strode across the courtyard and was gone.
Shirley let the broom fall from her hand, and Kathryn caught it. Shirley’s arms trembled, and she felt perspiration snake down her sides. She leaned against the carved post and gripped the railing.
“Good heavens, who ever knew I had that in me?”
Kathryn offered no congratulations and no reassurances. She simply stared at Shirley with a concerned expression. Shirley didn’t expect her friend to understand. Kathryn had not endured the hollow sensation that coursed through Shirley’s veins all the time now, its meaning only beginning to come clear to her.
The screen door wheezed shut, and Shirley paused in the front hall, her pulse still thrumming in her ears and her thoughts addled. One of the thick muslin curtains in the dining room wafted, though there was no breeze. She let out a gasp, but it was only Charles. He slipped out from his favorite childhood hiding place and scurried after her as she moved unsteadily into the parlor.
“Bravo!” he whispered. “You were wonderful, Mother. But is it true? You aren’t really a spy, are you?”
“Please, darling, I need a moment to collect myself. How long were you there at the window? You really shouldn’t eavesdrop like that. I’ve told you before.”
Her hands were shaking as she gave her maid, Lian, the broom. The older, dignified woman offered to bring tea, and Shirley thanked her, then tossed herself down onto the wicker sofa. It creaked and complained as she settled into the silk pillows.
“Mother must rest now,” Lian said. “Ladies’ Choir very big effort. Leave her be, Charles-Boy.”
For the first time in many weeks, Shirley said, “It’s all right, Lian; he isn’t bothering me.”
Charles ignored his amah, anyway, and knelt down before the sofa. Shirley tousled his thick red hair, so like his father’s, she thought with a sigh. Then she leaned back again and shut her eyes.
“Brilliant tactic, sweeping that old goat off the porch. I almost let out a cheer when he left.”
“That wasn’t a tactic, son. That was complete idiocy on my part. I’m far too impulsive, and you are, too. You get it from me. Tell me you didn’t actually spit on a Japanese soldier.”
Charles sat higher on his haunches. “In one of his sermons, Reverend Wells said we should do all that we can. So I did.”
Shirley swung her legs around, placed her oxfords on the carpet, and patted the spot beside her. Charles hopped up to join her. His long legs stretched out past hers, reaching the coral-colored cherry blossoms in a sea of blue on the Chinese rug. She noticed for the first time that not only his socks showed above his too-short trouser legs but his bare and surprisingly hairy calves as well. She turned to get a better look at him. What used to be pale peach fuzz above his upper lip had sprouted into actual coarse dark-red hairs. They had appeared below his bottom lip as well. Her son seemed to be growing a rudimentary goatee. His bony wrists protruded from his rumpled linen jacket, and his shirttails were out. Shirley thought that the young man seated beside her wasn’t unattractive. He just appeared un-cared-for, like someone who had no parents and must survive by his wits alone.
“This is serious, my boy. You could have been arrested. Or worse, gotten Han arrested.”
He patted her knee. “I know, Mother, but I think Father would have been proud of us.”
Shirley slumped back against the pillows.
“Father was no coward,” Charles continued. “Remember how he used to put on that fake British accent and say, ‘Don’t fire till you see the whites of their eyes’? He was kidding, of course, but he wanted me to be brave and stand up for what I believed in. It’s a manly thing, but you did swell just now, too.”
“Charles, you’re as wrong-headed as you could possibly be. Your father did not believe in fighting. He wanted everyone to cooperate and trust one another and work as one. And he absolutely understood that women can be as brave as men and, in fact, must be. Such foolishness, my darling.”
Shirley smoothed his wild hair again and realized that with his irrepressible grin, her son was trying to buck her up, not the other way around. Charles had always had a buoyant personality. A chuckling baby, a toddler who raced forward on stocky legs, then an angular little boy covered in freckles and grins from ear to ear. But a sensitive soul, too, whose sunny disposition could quickly cloud over when criticized or corrected. So she simply hadn’t. It was too painful to see him crumple into self-doubt. He had run wild and carefree throughout the compound, without oversight or direction. All had been grand for him for so long. He must have been completely floored when word had come of his father’s accident, Shirley thought. Nothing remotely like it had ever happened to him before.
“How are you, Charles?” she asked. “Without Father, I mean.”
The smile on his face evaporated, and he appeared baffled by the question.
“I’m so sorry that I’ve neglected you,” she said softly.
Her son’s large, angular Adam’s apple rose and fell. She sensed he had no idea how to respond.
“I suppose, though,” she said, attempting a smile, “it’s good that you’re feeling strong enough to take on the Japanese Imperial Army.” Then she added more firmly, “But I believe you need to be put to some purpose this summer instead of strutting about like a useless rooster. We’ll begin a new regimen tomorrow morning.”
Charles’s shoulders sagged, but Shirley thought she had finally hit the right note: he needed rules to butt up against in order to regain his fiery gumption.
“I intend to keep a closer watch over you. There will be duties for you to perform around the house.”
“Chores, Mother? When the country is practically at war, you want me to clean my room?”
“Discipline begins at home,” she said and couldn’t help remembering the Japanese officer’s words.
Charles scrambled to his feet and stood far above her. When had he gotten so tall? she wondered.
“Han lives on his own now,” he said. “No one tells him what to do anymore.”
“That’s not something to envy. Your friend’s father has gone missing. I’m sure his uncle and grandmother and other relatives are keeping a close eye on him. Chinese families are terribly close-knit.”
“I know, but it’s pretty keen that he gets to come and go as he pleases.”
“That’s enough, now. Get ready for bed.”
Charles bent low and kissed the air near her cheek. It wasn’t until he had turned and walked from the room that she realized she had meant to offer him a good-night hug. His footfalls struck firmly on the stairs, and Shirley realized that the moment for comforting her boy had passed. He was practically a young man now.
Lian appeared at the door to the parlor with the black lacquered tray, bamboo-handled teapot, and lidded cup. As Caleb had instructed their maid, she did not bow but nonetheless entered quietly. That seemed to be how all the Chinese women walked in their thin slippers, although Shirley’s husband had enjoined Lian to speak up and rattle the dishes however she liked. He was forever encouraging the Chinese to be themselves in his presence, though Shirley had often wondered how a foreigner would know the difference.
Lian set the tray on the teak side table, poured tea, and, after allowing it to steep, handed a cup to Shirley. Although Lian was a bulky woman, she settled delicately into the wicker rocking chair opposite the sofa and tucked her long tunic under her. Out of respect for the formality of the setting, she had removed her apron before entering. It wasn’t customary for servants to sit with their masters in the living quarters, and Shirley knew it made Lian uncomfortable, but Caleb had insisted on it. We are all congregants, he had said, each the same in God’s eyes.
Since her husband’s passing, Shirley had been grateful for his eccentric demands on their servants—essentially, that they all behave as equals under this roof. Lian and even the young and silent girl, Dao-Ming, had offered Shirley kindness and comfort. Lian had become a true friend, Shirley thought, or as true a friend as their dissimilar circumstances would allow.
“Does my son seem all right to you, Lian?” she asked now. “You have brothers. Were they this difficult when they were his age?”
“He is American boy, nothing like Chinese. Our boys behave, or else.”
“Or else what?”
“My father beat them every week whether they deserve it or not.”
“That’s terrible.”
They are responsible men now.”
“And you would do the same if you had a son?”
“I have no son.”
Lian touched a finger to the simple cross she wore around her neck. Shirley couldn’t envision her maid raising a belt to a child, but Lian had no children of her own, so it was a moot point—or, more accurately, a sore point. A barren woman here seemed to be of a lower status, marking a stain upon her for her loss. Shirley undid the laces of her oxfords and slipped them off. Lian pulled her seat closer, lifted one of Shirley’s feet into her lap, and began to rub.
“As young man, Charles needs father more than ever,” Lian said, “but now he has none!” She let out a forceful laugh.
Shirley tried not to be affronted. Her maid meant well. She was blunt, that was all, not unlike Shirley’s mother, another older woman with a decidedly ungracious manner. Though in Shirley’s mother’s case, the sourness went all the way through. As Lian continued to rub, Shirley recalled how her mother was accustomed to being waited on hand and foot. The irony that she thought of this while her maid was waiting on her was not lost on Shirley, and yet she felt certain that she and her mother were utterly unalike. Her mother complained about her servants constantly. Shirley was uneasy with her servants at best and had accompanied her husband to China in part to help ensure that she didn’t inherit her mother’s selfishness. Performing good works, as Caleb called the efforts here, was the best antidote to such upper-class self-preoccupation and snobbery.
“You must find new uncle here in mission,” Lian suggested. “Other ministers do good job with boy.”
Shirley leaned forward and whispered, “Not a single one of the other reverends is half the man Caleb was. They’re fine people, but they lack character. Charles would hoodwink them. They’d wind up doing his bidding. My son is a thoroughbred—good-natured, high in spirits, perhaps too cocky, but with awfully thin skin.”
Lian looked up from her rubbing. “What is trouble with boy’s skin?”
“An expression. He bruises easily.”
“Ah, yes, Charles-Boy is baby! I know this. You should consider the belt.”
Shirley put down her cup. “Can you imagine? A boy who’s never heard a raised voice in his life. He’d be shocked out of his wits.” She placed her stocking feet on the carpet. “Honestly, going forward, I mean to do better by him.”
A phlegmy cough sounded from the hallway, followed by the tap of a cane. Old Tupan Feng stood teetering in the doorway, waiting to be announced.
Lian rolled her eyes and said in a teasing tone, “Ancient Warlord Feng enters!”
He cleared his throat again and spoke in fine, British-accented English. “No need to bow,” he said as he hobbled in. “In the modern fashion, I no longer require that of my subjects.”
Lian stood, slapped her skirt, and began to clear the tea set. Back when Tupan Feng had been an active warlord, he had punished any servants who weren’t silent at their tasks, so Lian made as much racket as possible now. She stood before him, and he blinked at the tray in her hands.
“Is it tea time already?” he asked.
“We finish now.”
“I’m sure Lian would be happy to make you tea, Tupan Feng,” Shirley offered.
He turned his head slowly, as if only now recalling her. He often seemed to forget that this was the Carsons’ home and not his own. “Very kind of you, Mrs. Carson, but I could not possibly. It is bad for the humors to drink at this hour.”
“And what hour is that, Old Feng?” Lian asked, her nose practically touching his.
He waved a hand to shoo her away and relied on the cane. “In my day, I instituted the regulation of the hours. All subjects rose at 6 a.m. My Early Rising Society saw to it! Excellent for productivity.”
“Perhaps it is morning then, hmmm? Do you hear birds outside? Time to rise?” Lian pressed.
“That’s enough, Lian,” Shirley said.
Tupan Feng paused as if considering the time of day but then determining the topic beneath him. He set off again in mincing steps toward the rocking chair that Lian had just vacated. Shirley hopped to her feet to catch him before he sat; otherwise she’d be forced to stay up with him until he dozed off again. The old tupan, or warlord, slept at all hours of both day and night, roaming the house when the spirit struck him. In her own nocturnal ramblings since Caleb’s death, Shirley had slipped into darkened rooms to discover his spindly frame curled on chairs or atop makeshift beds, even stretched out beside the cold hearth. He seemed as partial to the sunny window seats in the dining room as were the cats. As she studied his tiny frame now, Shirley tried to recall if she’d ever seen him eating and wondered if he wasn’t perhaps starving.
But, to his credit, old Tupan Feng never complained. He was stoical and upright, though half bent now. Over his years as warlord of this province, he had professed an amalgam of philosophies—most committedly to Confucianism because of its effectiveness at inculcating respect for authority. He also adhered to Buddhist sensibilities on occasion, and even some Taoist beliefs to appease the old spirits. But because he had ambled into church somewhat regularly, and during his reign had proclaimed his province a welcome bastion for Christians, Reverend Carson had offered him a small room at the back of the house in his less-substantial older age. Being a man of curiosity about the broader world, and also temporarily homeless, Feng had taken the Reverend up on the offer. He wished to observe the American Christians firsthand. He had come to suspect that the self-sacrificing aspects of their religion explained the physical and moral strength of Westerners overall, something he had wished to propagate in his own people.
Shirley took his arm, and he froze in midstep and swayed, his ceremonial sword in its black sheath grazing her long skirt. His uniform was badly stained, many of the brass buttons missing and the collar frayed. But the braid on the epaulettes somehow miraculously had remained in place, giving his shoulders a perversely broad appearance. He was so profoundly hunched that the top of his balding head didn’t quite reach Shirley’s chest.
“Off to bed we go,” she said. “And wouldn’t you like to take off your jacket when you recline? It could use some freshening up. I’m sure Lian would be willing to launder it, wouldn’t you, Lian?”
Lian let out a chuckle. “Good luck peeling it off him. He will be buried in that ratty thing.”
“Must keep it on,” Tupan Feng said. “You never know when the moment will arise.”
“And what moment is that, Old Feng?” Lian asked with a slight smile.
He turned to look at her, and his face went blank. A long moment later, a bolt of light came back into his eyes, and he licked his lips. “Battle!” was all he said.
Lian hooked his arm into hers. “Come now, Old Tupan, I walk you back to your room.”
“Kind of you, Lian,” Shirley said.
“Very bad nephew of Old Tupan should buy him new coat, not to mention his own house, after all the taxes his family took from the people.”
Hearing that word, the old man summoned a surprisingly stentorian voice. “It is necessary and prudent, though not pleasurable, to impose levies on all transactions.”
“Enough!” Lian said, and he went quiet again. When they reached the door, she turned back and asked, “Mrs. Carson, did you see flag raised high today?”
“Flag? What flag?”
“American flag at entrance to compound above gatehouse.”
Shirley shook her head.
“The servants think it means something, but no one knows what. We hear Reds infiltrate Japanese Imperial Army supply lines. We worry they will retaliate here.”
“The Japanese Imperial Army will squash all enemies!” Tupan Feng perked up. “They have very fine leaders. Excellently trained at top-notch military academies.”
Lian pulled him tighter to her side to keep him from listing. “We know all about you and the Japanese.”
“I am Number One Student from Tokyo Military Academy. Prize ceremonial sword proves it!” His palsied hand flailed around to find the sheath on his hip.
Lian ignored him and explained, “Many relatives from countryside come to town with everything they own.”
“But I thought people were moving south, escaping in that direction. Why would they arrive here when the Japanese occupy our town?” Shirley asked. “Wouldn’t they rather go where there aren’t any Japanese?”
“Yes, where to go is big question!” Lian exclaimed. “They come to American mission. It is safe haven, remember?” she asked and added the exasperated tsking sound that Shirley had dreaded ever since she and her family had first arrived. She must have missed something painfully obvious. “We think,” Lian continued, “American flag flies higher today to make Imperial Army remember America is neutral. Also, Japanese not attack same town where they live. No, it is safer here than countryside.” She shook her head. “Out there very, very bad. Missus understand now?”
Lian stared at Shirley and seemed to be waiting for her to say something. The tray in the solid woman’s hand wobbled.
“Yes,” Shirley said, “I see,” when really she didn’t see, hardly at all. “Is there something else you’d like from me tonight, Lian?”
Her maid let out a long stream of air and finally said, “No, I leave now. Good night.”
Lian turned and shuffled out of the room, dragging the old man along beside her, his saber clinking at his side and her long, narrow dress rustling as she went. Just to fluster Shirley even more, Lian’s little helper, Dao-Ming, suddenly ducked her head out from behind one of the muslin curtains and dashed after Lian across the hallway on her thick, ungraceful legs. Apparently, the girl had been spying again.
The little scamp, Shirley thought. The young girl was forever popping up and surprising Shirley. It couldn’t be helped because she was Lian’s charge and a pathetic young thing: a true Mongoloid with the enlarged head, deeply recessed eyes, and rotund body. Back home, she’d have been put in an institution, but they didn’t have such options here. She could no doubt in the end be shuffled off to the poorhouse, but Lian, out of the goodness of her Christian heart, had taken the orphan in. Caleb, whose heart had also been warm and malleable, had agreed to permit Dao-Ming to hang about. The sight of her never bothered him, and, to the girl’s credit, she rarely made a peep, but those spooky hooded eyes, overly pink cheeks, and odd little grin all gave Shirley a chill.
She took a final sip of tea and tried to understand what had just transpired with Lian. Communication between foreigners and Chinese was always fraught, Shirley thought: sometimes barbed, other times overly serene, as if nothing had transpired at all, when clearly it had. Tomorrow she would try to make sense of it all. She might even venture out and see what was going on outside the mission, returning in time for her reward of tea with Kathryn. They would discuss every maddening incident and together parse the unintelligible. But for now, Shirley’s head spun. She needed rest.
She started toward the stairs, but her fingers instinctively reached to graze the chipped keys of her beloved upright piano that stood in the front hall. She wished she could play the rousing chords of a choir hymn, but such noise at this hour would alarm her already concerned neighbors. On the entrance table, she pulled the brass chain on the cloisonné lamp, and the hallway went dark. The timbers of her home settled and creaked after another humid day.
Cuneiform shadows spread over the hardwood floor where moonlight filtered through the lattice screen. The same silvery hues caught on the beveled glass of the two sets of French doors that opened onto the dining room on one side and the parlor on the other. The handsome scholar’s desk and traditional yoke-back folding chairs sat huddled in grayness, waiting for Caleb to return. Stretched across the corner by the bay window, a painted screen showed an impressive golden phoenix spreading its wings and flying toward the distant mountains far beyond the mission walls.
Shirley wondered if it would pain her to have that elegant reminder of China, in addition to some of the other, finer antiques she had collected over the past five years, shipped back to her future home in America or if it would be wiser to simply leave it all behind. She would return to America with nothing to show for her time here. No embroidered silk or delicately painted porcelain. No carnelian-colored carved boxes or lacquered picture frames. No objects to touch and call to mind this place and time, as if these years in Cathay had been but a dream with no evidence of their passing. A strange, inexplicable chapter would close forever, leaving only the memory of loss in another land.
The windowpanes rattled, and the brass box on Charles’s bedside table fell to the floor. His pocketknife tumbled out and scooted under the bed. He threw off the covers and hurried to the window. Smoke wafted his way from fire in a field not far off, the soil churned up from some sort of grenade or maybe even a bomb. The Japanese had recently paved the road outside the town so that it snaked steadily to the west in a ribbon of dark asphalt. Charles thought it looked normal enough until he squinted and noticed that at a distant bend, a crater of smoldering earth had replaced the smooth surface. The fighting seemed to have come closer to the mission than ever before.
Below his window, the massive doors at the southwest entrance to the mission stood open, and Charles could make out Japanese soldiers marching past. Their boots stirred the yellow dust on the rutted road. Into the mission courtyard below streamed hundreds of Chinese, some limping or injured, many with possessions piled on wooden wheelbarrows or bundled on their backs. But just as many Chinese appeared to be fleeing up the paths that led away from the town. They fanned out in all directions like the ants Charles and Han had set on fire with the help of a magnifying glass and the sun when they were younger boys.
Charles didn’t see any damage to the town buildings within his sight except that the American guardhouse appeared to have been attacked, its glass windows shattered, the red, white, and blue wood splintered on the ground. Charles worried about old, blind Mr. Sung, who sat all day on his three-legged stool at the gate. He hoped he had been off tending to his cats when the damage was done. But who, Charles wondered, would want to bombard the entrance to the American compound?
He pulled on his trousers over his pajama bottoms, yanked on his golfing cap, and retrieved his pocketknife from under the bed. He went in search of his mother. She wasn’t in her bedroom or in the sewing room, so he started downstairs but stopped short on the landing beside the moon window. The view over the back wall had not changed. On the horizon, the low mountain range shimmered in the morning haze, its blue skirts flowing onto the rosy desert floor. All seemed peaceful in that greater distance, and Charles wondered why the Japanese Imperial Army, or the Chinese military, for that matter, chose to attack one area but not another. It all seemed arbitrary and mysterious.
Into the front hall, swarms of Chinese people poured. Families with small children, older men in coolie hats, a pregnant woman who looked ready to burst, grandfathers hobbling over their canes, and clusters of young men all pressed into their home. Charles’s mother stood at the center, an electric look in her eyes, and Lian’s shouts rose above it all. She sent some strangers into the dining room, others into the parlor. The handsome French doors had been flung back, glass panes reflecting the many who shuffled in and milled about on the blue carpet with the cherry-blossom design. Charles noticed that the Chinese didn’t set down their bags or take a seat on the formal furniture. They hovered about, clearly at a loss for what to do next.
Charles noticed a young man leaning on a friend, with several others surrounding him. He had been shot in the leg and had a tourniquet cinched around his thigh. Down his torn pants, the caked blood had hardened. A frayed rope held his oversized jacket in place, and his cloth shoes were ripped, the sole of the left one flopping loose. Could this kid, who wasn’t much older than he, be an actual soldier, even though he wore no uniform? Charles had overheard the servants saying that the Nationalist Army troops had been fighting the Japanese off and on for months in North China and were badly undersupplied and underfed. The injured boy swayed where he balanced between his friends, the perfectly good wicker sofa empty before them.
Charles ran down the stairs and stopped beside his mother. She was leaning over an elderly man crumpled in the middle of the mayhem. With his chin tucked to his chest, the grandfather refused to respond to her entreaties that he move so he wouldn’t be trampled by the incoming horde. When she straightened and called for Lian’s help, his mother finally noticed Charles and threw her arms around his neck. Then she pushed him away and held him at arm’s length. She looked him up and down, searching nonsensically for injuries, then offered a grim and apologetic shake of her head.
“I’m so sorry, my boy. This is an awful mess. Are you all right?”
“I’m fine, Mother.” He knew she meant well by her concern, as if it was her duty to make everything right in a world that wasn’t one bit right. It made her look tired, Charles thought, her face lined with worry. He shifted away from her now and gestured toward the parlor. “Should I tell them to sit down?”
“What?” she shouted back.
Charles noticed an elderly woman being carried in by two strong grandsons, her bound feet dangling uselessly. A toddler cried, and another child not much older scolded him but then reached down and took his hand. Charles raised his voice, too. “Shall I help them to feel at home?”
“Yes, excellent idea. Thank you, Charles.” Her eyes were shining, and she seemed ready to cry. “I’m so proud of you.”
“Please don’t make a fuss,” he said and stepped away, his fists balled at his sides.
In the parlor, he wove past several families and climbed onto his father’s leather chair. For balance, he placed one foot on the desk beside the banker’s lamp with the green shade. He tried not to notice the abacus that his father had always allowed him to play with, or the letters and ministerial notes covered in his fine, spidery scrawl. Charles reached down and pocketed his father’s chop, a two-inch-long piece of marble with a phoenix carved on one end and Chinese characters on the other. The bright-red ink his father had used to stamp his signature smudged on Charles’s palm, but he held on to it tightly anyway.
Charles swallowed and then shouted in the local dialect, “Sit!” He gestured to the available chairs. “Make yourselves at home!”
The Chinese stared up at him, and Charles saw only distress and confusion on their faces. Where had they come from, he wondered, and from what were they running? He realized that standing so high above them wasn’t helping to put them at ease. He stepped down and began to yank the rocker and other chairs away from the center of the room. He lined them up against the walls, and the Chinese began to drift toward them. “That’s right,” he tried more patiently. “Put down your things and take a seat.”
From his visits to Han’s father’s quarters at the back of the compound, Charles knew that the Chinese kept their formal furniture around the outside of a room and used it only on special occasions or when an important visitor came. This parlor’s usual arrangement of seats clustered before the fireplace and in front of the bay window would seem odd to them, so Charles tried to create his own version of a Chinese setting. As he moved the furniture, Dao-Ming appeared without a sound and began to help him. When they finished, Charles patted her on the head, and she smiled. She always stood a little too close, literally underfoot, but Charles didn’t mind having her around. She did whatever he asked, and although Charles tried not to take advantage of her too often, every once in a while he’d say something like “Dao-Ming, sneak me a malt candy stick from the cookie jar where Lian hides them, will you?” And she always would, no questions asked. She had never once betrayed him to his parents or his amah.
He spoke again to the crowded room, bowing first. “My family and I would be most honored if you would permit us the privilege of your taking a seat.” He bowed a second time to the most elderly of the gentleman.
The Chinese finally settled in. They sat on the chairs and set blankets on the hearth. More made themselves comfortable along the window seats. But still no one sat on the sofa, which remained in its usual spot on the fine rug. Charles went to the injured young man and gestured for him to lie down on the silk cushions. The injured fellow looked at his friends, then down at his feet. None of them moved. Charles left the room briefly and wove through the crowd. He returned a few moments later and spread one of Lian’s rags over the silk pillows on the couch and gestured again. Finally the young man stumbled toward it on his good leg and eased himself down, grimacing apologetically.
The older of his two friends had hollow cheeks and was missing several teeth, but his eyes seemed kind as he adjusted the pillow under the injured boy’s leg and crouched down beside him. His other friend had a barrel chest, stocky legs, and forearms as thick around as baseball bats. He swayed side to side and kept a restless, eager watch over his injured friend.
Charles stepped closer to the three men and asked, “So, what happened out there this morning?”
They looked to one another again, and the older man finally nodded. The restless fellow could hardly contain himself as he answered, “Communist guerrillas destroyed a section of the railroad the Japs have been trying to build through the mountains. I heard it was a direct hit!”
“That’s a good thing, isn’t it?” Charles asked.
“Yes, but they attacked us out on the plains in retaliation! They must have thought we were responsible.”
“We don’t know if that is the reason,” the older man said. “There could be action elsewhere. Or it could still be in response to the Marco Polo Bridge incident in Peking. We must be patient. Word will come.”
“But you were attacked near here?” Charles asked. “Where?”
The older man looked at him but didn’t answer.
The restless one paced behind the sofa. “If only we had proper weapons and better aircraft, we would stand a chance. Our officers parade around, and the young warlord issues commands from afar.” He waved his hand in disgust. “I could run this army better myself.”
“Settle down,” the older one growled. “And don’t forget we did well in the North.”
“There’s been fighting north of here?” Charles asked.
“They want the coal of this region,” the robust fellow said, “and to use the roads through the mountains to get supplies. So far we have not let them. We have been very brave!”
“Control of the mountains is crucial,” the older one said, shaking his head.
The injured boy, who had lain quietly until now with his eyes shut, opened them and pushed himself up onto one elbow. “The Reds know the mountains better than anyone. When my leg is healed, I’m joining them.”
The robust one patted him on the shoulder. “Do not desert us, my friend, like our traitorous commanders.”
The older one muttered a curse.
“What do you mean?” Charles asked. “Your commanders actually left you?”
“They are puppets, nothing more!” the restless one said. Then he leaned closer to the older man and whispered, “I say, let the Imperial Army execute them! I will do the job myself if the Japs don’t.”
As the injured boy flopped back onto the sofa he said, “There is no such thing as traitors in the Eighth Route Army. No one is conscripted, so there is no reason for desertion.”
“You shouldn’t believe everything you hear, kid,” the restless one said. “Stick with us.”
The injured boy let out a soft moan and shut his eyes again. Charles crouched before him and carefully lifted the torn material to see the wound. The other soldiers leaned in closer, too, and seemed unimpressed.
“You will run again in no time,” the restless friend said.
The bullet appeared to have only grazed the thigh, but the skin was nonetheless badly torn, and Charles thought he saw bone beneath. If this was considered a slight wound, he hated to think what these men might consider a real injury. He quickly covered the leg again, breathed through his open mouth, and held on to the sofa arm. He tried to focus on the task at hand. He would need to find something to clean the wound, also towels and bandages. But first his head must stop spinning.
“American boy all right?” the older man asked.
“He is afraid of blood,” the robust one said and swatted Charles’s arm. “You would never make it in my army!”
Charles tried to smile. “I’ll get supplies for you,” he said to the injured boy.
Light-headed, he gazed around the parlor. Several elders and the pregnant woman sat on the chairs, their families and possessions clustered at their feet. Others crouched on the rug or pushed aside the curtains to look out at the crowded porch and courtyard. What these people hoped for, or what they wanted to see happen next, remained unclear to Charles. What had taken place outside the compound remained equally confusing, despite the explanations from the soldiers.
Charles looked toward the chaotic scene in the front hallway. Each of the Chinese appeared caught in his or her own turmoil, with his mother at the center, trying to make sense of it all. Charles couldn’t help laughing a little under his breath. She looked so alive and engaged, her hands gesticulating as she spoke, her head held high, then dipping low to hear the words of a bent elder or small child. With renewed vigor, she appeared to be doing her darnedest to help each and every one of them.
One family, though, sat stonily quiet, asking for nothing and not raising their voices. On the bottom step that led up to the second floor, an older man sat. Two middle-aged women, who must have been his daughters, and several grandchildren crouched around him. Charles recognized the traditional Japanese robes and realized that this grandfather was the town’s only fishmonger, a Japanese citizen who had been here at least as long as the Carson family. Charles had always been afraid of the old man, not because he was Japanese but because he was a crotchety bastard who never had a kind word for anyone. The man was quite unreasonable about his prices, but he didn’t seem a mortal enemy of the Chinese. Now his hand trembled as he raised it to his brow, and his children and grandchildren hardly lifted their eyes from the floor.
Charles went to his mother’s side and whispered in her ear, “Shall I take them upstairs?” He nodded toward the Japanese family. She looked both exhilarated and utterly flummoxed, her mouth hanging open and wisps of hair falling from her bun. Before she had a chance to respond, Charles said, “It’s all right, Mother. I’ll take care of it.”
He slipped away and bowed before the Japanese grandfather and his family, then gestured for them to follow him up to the second floor. At the top of the stairs, he escorted them into his mother’s sewing room, a space not much larger than the lavatory, which now felt far smaller with all those people in it. The ladies let out thrilled exclamations at the sight of the Singer machine on its special table with the iron foot pedal underneath. They crowded around and touched it with delicate fingers. One of the grown daughters elbowed the others aside and took the seat in front of it. She read aloud the gold letters written in English script on the side of the black base, and the little girls inched closer and clapped their hands as the woman began to practice on a piece of muslin his mother had used for the curtains downstairs.
Charles joined the Japanese fishmonger, who sat at the end of the iron-framed day bed, his head bent, his palsied hand to his brow again. The old man was so distracted by his worries that he hadn’t even noticed the curled body stretched beside him on the pilled bedspread. A tartan throw covered the narrow shoulders, and a lace antimacassar lay over the bald head to keep out the light.
Charles shook Tupan Feng’s shoulder. “Rise and shine,” he said. “You have visitors!”
The Japanese fishmonger still didn’t look up, even when the old warlord’s feet in his tattered slippers shifted beside him. Tupan Feng sat up, wiped his eyes with the back of his hand like a child, and blinked several times. He didn’t look one bit surprised to find Charles standing over him in the narrow room now packed with strangers.
“Is it time?” he asked.
“Yes, it is,” Charles said, though he wasn’t sure what the old warlord had in mind.
Tupan Feng’s face went red as he pushed himself to stand, one hand on his cane, the other on the handle of his prize sword. “Into battle we must go!”
The Japanese fishmonger finally looked up.
“Whoa, hold on,” Charles said and took the old warlord by the arm. He gently eased him back down onto the bed.
The two men sat hunched shoulder to shoulder, neither acknowledging the other. Charles made proper introductions, being sure to sound equally respectful and bowing equally low before each. They nodded imperceptibly and pursed their lips, but neither spoke.
“All right, now, you two should have plenty to talk about,” Charles said and tipped his cap. “How about Tokyo, for starters? Old Tupan Feng remembers it, don’t you? He was a student there. And you, Honorable Fishmonger, you must have at least visited there before coming to China?”
Both men grimaced. The deep frown lines that sloped down their cheeks acted as perfect mirrors when they turned their heads on their sinewy necks toward one another. If only these two could resolve the war, Charles thought.
At the top of the stairs, he held the newel post and listened to the cacophony of voices all around. After his father’s death, the Carson home had felt as chilly as a tomb for weeks. The spring rain had fallen in sheets outside his window and pounded the unyielding ground. The tile roofs had grown slick, and a rush of unceasing water had rumbled down the gutters. Unable to sleep, Charles had crawled out of bed, pushed open the window, and sat with his elbows on the sill, his face splattered by rain. His shirt became quickly soaked, and he shivered but still kept watch. Even in the dark, his eyes stayed on the compound gate. Only when his arms grew numb and his ears filled with the sensation of being lost deep under water in a sea he could not name did Charles realize that he was waiting for his father’s mule to come around the corner of the guardhouse and into the mission.
He finally wrenched himself away from the window and paced on the braided rug to keep from crying. Then he threw himself back onto the quilt, and felt the forceful thud of his own heart as it echoed against his ribs. He was alive. He was breathing, even if his father was not. Only there was little pleasure in it. No joy. Just a pang of guilt and a heartsickness that made every part of him hurt.
If he stayed in bed too late in the morning during those mournful days, Lian would yank back the covers and pull him by the hand down the steps and out onto the front porch, where Han stood waiting. While it embarrassed Charles to have his friend see his red-rimmed eyes, he was grateful to him, too. Lian gave them both a few coins to spend at the market and insisted they bring home fish from the river for supper. Never before had Charles been instructed to go fishing. Lian was also the one who had suggested that Han show Charles the pigeons that Cook had been training up on the compound wall. Charles had enjoyed caring for the birds, even if he didn’t know the first thing about them. Mostly he liked being with Han and away from his sorrowful, too-quiet home.
Now, as he went in search of supplies, he considered the possibility that his summer might no longer feel like a lonely nightmare, although he also knew that in more ways than he could fathom, things would never be the same.
A tall Chinese man with silver hair stepped through the crowd on the verandah and crossed the threshold of the Carson home. Shirley had spotted his distinctive profile above the others at the door and noticed the way people shifted out of his way as he moved forward. He stopped before Shirley, bowed first to her and then to Lian.
“Captain Hsu,” Lian said out of turn, “what an honor to have you join us.”
Shirley looked from Lian to the Chinese gentleman in the threadbare, mismatched jacket and trousers and realized that they seemed to know one another.
“Thank you,” he said in clear English. “It is my honor to meet the widow of Reverend Caleb Carson. Your husband was a good and courageous man.”
Shirley tried to recall the striking profile but couldn’t place it. Surely she’d have remembered the scattering of pockmarks on his cheeks or the pale scar over his right eye.
“You knew my husband?” she asked.
“He was devoted to our cause. He visited our camp up in the hills a number of times. He would be proud of us now, though we still have many battles ahead.” He leaned closer and bowed again. “I am Captain Hsu, Eighth Route Army of the Second United Front.” He pulled from his pocket a green cap with a red star on it and shifted it between his hands before stuffing it back into his pocket. He then glanced around at the crowded house. “I see that you are like your husband, Mrs. Carson, most generous and brave.”
“Not at all, Captain.” She glanced around, too, and let out a sigh. “I so wish he were here. He would know what to do. He was far better than I am at dealing with—” She wanted to say “adversity” but felt compelled to admit instead that the trouble she had was with “people.”
“Mrs. Carson cannot say no,” Lian explained. “I have been telling her we must shut the door. That is all. Simply shut it!”
Outside, the line of Chinese snaked down the porch steps and into the dusty courtyard. Shirley could see similar lines weaving from the other mission homes. The courtyard was packed with Chinese who milled around beside their mules and carts stacked high with bundles.
Captain Hsu offered a nod and said, “I will see what I can do.”
He then slipped around the Chinese in the front hall, stepped outside, and stopped on the top step. He clapped his hands. Shirley made her way past the strangers, too, and brushed aside the thick curtain at one of the open dining room windows. The line of people outside grew quiet. Through the open window, she did her best to follow the words of his announcement, but his voice was too quick, though authoritative and resounding. When he finished speaking, the crowd began to disperse right away.
When Captain Hsu returned inside, Lian blushed as she looked up at him.
“What on earth did you say out there?” Shirley asked him.
“I said that you are most generous but that we are Chinese, and we must take care of ourselves. The Eighth Route Army is nearby, and they must sit tight and be patient and join us to create a harmonious and free China. Also, I said that food rations will come to all who wait outside in the courtyard and not in the house.”
Lian let out a surprisingly girlish giggle. Shirley wasn’t sure why she had felt predisposed to be wary of this captain, but she couldn’t help smiling at him now, too.
“And will food come?” she asked.
“That is the plan,” he said. “But meanwhile, do you need any help here?”
Lian jumped in with a reply. “We need water brought from the river. We have a decent supply of bandages but will soon need more. We have not much rice but plenty of turnips and even a few potatoes.”
“Excellent, excellent,” Captain Hsu said, and Lian blushed again as she bowed her head.
Was it possible that Caleb had visited the Red Army military camp without her ever having known about it? Shirley wondered. She had often discouraged him from talking about politics, so he must have chosen to spare her his interest in Communism. Although, now that she thought about it, she recognized that his impulse for egalitarianism had grown steadily over recent years. She recalled him using words like “proletariat,” “cadre,” and “comrade” with striking frequency.
Then it occurred to her that perhaps her husband had never mentioned his interest in Communist ideals because she was of the class the revolution wished to eliminate. With her interest in Chinese furniture and silks, not to mention her love of simple but elegant outfits worn with a strand of pearls at the collarbone—though never anything flashier than the typical ensemble of a tasteful Vassar girl—she would have been labeled bourgeois in a heartbeat. Weren’t the Communists all about toppling the current structure and putting well-off people like Shirley and her parents at the very bottom of the heap? She tried to picture her stylish mother as a street sweeper or a chambermaid. Surely Caleb couldn’t have hoped for that.
A cry sounded from the parlor just then, and Shirley slipped away from the other two and went in. Charles had correctly placed the wounded young man on the sofa and propped up his leg on pillows covered by a rag, but nothing more had been done for the boy. He bit down on a stick to control the pain as blood oozed through the tourniquet. Shirley noted that the color had gone from his face, and his body sweated profusely.
Shirley returned to the hallway and interrupted Captain Hsu and Lian. “Excuse me, but I will need bandages, Lian. And boiled water, please. Also, retrieve my medical bag from the far back of my bedroom closet. Captain, do you have any iodine or other antiseptic to clean the wound?”
He stared at her blankly and did not reply.
“Something to disinfect a wound?” she repeated. “Your troops must have basic first-aid supplies.”
“My troops have nothing. We manage the injured with poultices and other traditional remedies. We know nothing of Western medicine.”
Shirley placed her hands on her hips. “But you do know about germs? How infections occur in dirty wounds? More often than not, that is what kills a patient, not the initial injury.”
She glanced around at the beleaguered Chinese and straightened her spine. Everyone knew that the average peasant’s hygiene left something to be desired, but now, in this fearful time when they had left their homes in great haste and traveled on dusty roads for who knew how long, the bodily smells of the poor around her bloomed with a frightening putridness. “I swear,” she muttered as she shook her head, “I sometimes think that I’m living in the Middle Ages. Ignorance and filth abound! Imagine not yet grasping the concept of germs.”
The captain straightened up, too. He spoke slowly, his voice quiet and controlled. “Mrs. Carson, you are welcome to teach us new things, but we have our own knowledge, too.”
His expression remained dignified as he spoke, and Shirley immediately recognized a familiar pinched feeling that came over her quite often here in China: she had once again been utterly wrong. She let her hands drop to her sides, and her gaze fell to the hardwood floor as she recalled her husband admonishing her at a similar moment. My darling, he had said, the Tsar and Tsarina were executed for behaving in a less imperious manner than you.
With her head bowed, she said, “I’m sorry, Captain. I apologize for my rudeness. I’m sure that you and your troops are excellent at what you do and know a great deal.” She glanced at Lian. “It’s just that this is what I do. I am a nurse. At least I was trained as one, though I haven’t practiced in years.”
“Very good,” he said. “And useful.”
“I will get the bandages now,” Lian said and headed for the stairs. Dao-Ming, who must have been hiding behind Lian’s back, scurried along after her.
Shirley didn’t know what to say to the captain, nor did he seem to know what to say to her. They stood in the milling crowd in the hall for several endless moments as Shirley began to notice that they were the same height. When she raised her chin, their eyes met on the same plain. She wouldn’t have registered such a thing back home, but here in China, where the people were so much shorter, this coincidence felt odd and almost intimate.
“Nurse Carson,” he finally said.
No one had called Shirley that since before she had come to China. She wanted to argue with the captain and insist that he call her Mrs. Carson instead, but she simply replied, “Yes?”
“We have injured from this morning’s skirmish out on the plains and I assume more to come. I would like to ask for your help.”
“I’m terribly sorry,” she began, “but I need to be with my son, especially with all this going on.” She waved a hand at the chaotic scene around them. “I can’t go traipsing off to some military camp up in the hills the way my husband apparently did.”
Captain Hsu stepped closer. “We go wherever the fight takes us. As soon as the Japanese Imperial Army leaves this town, which we have reason to believe will be quite soon, I will bring my injured men to you here in your home. You will not have to leave the mission.”
“But I have no bandages, no medicines, no beds. Nothing. And I’m not a doctor. I can’t be responsible for the care and treatment of an army. That’s absurd.”
“Do not think of them as an army. With the Japanese here, my men will not come to you in uniform but will look like everyone else. The truth is, they are just country boys, the sons of farmers. None of us has ever seen a doctor before. Whatever you do to help us will be more than we have ever received. We just need care and attention, not complicated medical procedures, though I will see what supplies I can find. A mother’s love would be a most generous and needed gift to my boys. I am sure your husband would approve.”
Shirley didn’t know what to say. She was about to decline the captain’s request again when Charles called to her from the second floor.
“Mother, come quick,” he shouted.
She did not hesitate but hurried upstairs. “What is it, Charles? Are you all right?” she called.
But when she reached the top step, her son looked perfectly fine. He held a stack of towels and other supplies but managed to grab her hand and pulled her into his bedroom. Lian was there already, standing beside the window with several rolls of bandages limp in her hands. Dao-Ming clung to her side.
Charles stood close beside Shirley at the window; his large, damp hand continued to grip hers. She placed her other palm against the warm windowpane and pressed. When Charles was young, they would sit on the window seat in the parlor on rainy days and together trace raindrops with their fingertips. They’d press their palms to the glass and leave ghostly prints, each trying to catch the other’s shadow before it faded. Now, through the glass, her hand felt vibrations.
“See them out there,” Charles said. “Aren’t they awful?”
The thudding footfalls of Japanese soldiers shook the windowpane as they marched in unison on the dirt road outside the missionary compound. Before them staggered a line of Chinese men, most in tan Nationalist uniforms but some in peasant clothing, all with their hands and feet in iron chains. The Japanese soldiers lined the prisoners beside a ditch at a bend in the road that the Americans passed every time they went to and from market. The Japanese then took their positions, and Shirley couldn’t tell which one gave the signal, but suddenly a staggering of sharp retorts sounded as a half-dozen rifles fired in quick succession. The Chinese fell, their bodies splayed in awkward positions on the ground. A cloud of yellow dust rose around them and filtered down onto their bodies, sticking where the blood quickly pooled. Then the Japanese soldiers sauntered forward, no longer in formation, and kicked the Chinese the rest of the way into the ditch.
A high-pitched moan like that of a wounded cat issued from Dao-Ming. Lian patted her back and cooed reassuring words to calm her sorrow. Or perhaps it wasn’t sorrow the strange girl expressed but anger, for suddenly Lian had to block her from charging out of the room and down the stairs. Dao-Ming had certainly gotten larger since Shirley had last taken notice and was a more determined creature than she had realized. The girl’s pink cheeks became streaked with tears shed from piercing eyes, but a surprising fearlessness caused her arms to flail as her voice mounted into an uncontrolled, vengeful howl.
The Japanese fishmonger’s family appeared at the threshold of Charles’s room and bowed their heads out of respect. Old Tupan Feng pushed past them, his complexion scarlet and his sword raised.
“We will fight the enemy!” he announced.
“Go back to sleep, Old One,” Lian said. “We don’t need your help. We need only the skilled and the brave. We need only the good.”
Charles squeezed Shirley’s fingers harder and muttered, “Can’t we do something about this, Mother? Really, we must.”
Shirley didn’t answer but looked across to Lian in reply.
The needle remained steady in Shirley’s hand while Lian’s thick, callused fingers on the young man’s chest assured the success of the procedure. Very few people would not follow Lian’s instructions when she spoke in that firm yet reassuring voice. Shirley was able to concentrate on suturing the wound and left communication with the patient to her maid.
Nursing had never been right for Shirley. Offering solicitous or comforting words didn’t come naturally, though she had risen to the occasion when the young Reverend Caleb Carson with a badly broken arm had been wheeled into the hospital where she was working. He had tumbled from a ladder while placing the shiny star atop a massive fir tree on the seminary campus. A more emblematic accident could not have befallen a more charming and handsome gentleman, who quickly became her guardian angel. He had careened into Shirley’s life on Christmas Eve, and she had tried to live up to his example of headlong goodness ever since. She tied off the thread now and tried to picture her husband’s proud, though queasy, expression. Charles had inherited not only his red hair but also his squeamishness from his father.
“Now we clean it again,” Shirley explained to Lian.
The older woman bent closer as Shirley doused the area with Mercurochrome. Charles hovered over his mother’s shoulder and seemed as eager and jittery as ever, but to his credit, he had remained quiet while the delicate work was being done and hadn’t distracted her.
“Good going, Mother,” he said as she stood and wiped blood from her hands onto her apron, causing a tremor of disgust through him. “I had no idea you could do that.”
“There’s much a son never knows about his mother,” Shirley said with a raised eyebrow, unable to hide how pleased she was with herself. “You can handle the bandaging?” she asked Lian.
Her maid, now her Number One Assistant, nodded. Dao-Ming, at her side, helped collect the rags that had sopped up the blood. They would need to reuse them, Shirley realized. Without proper supplies, they would have to be frugal and clever. She decided not to dwell on the difficulties ahead but instead was grateful that this one young man appeared in better shape than when he had hobbled through the front door.
Then she gazed around at the crowded parlor, the packed dining room and front hall, and grasped that each person here needed something—food, water, or medical attention. An ancient grandfather who had been carried in on a stretcher had since died. There must have been three hundred people in her home, each with his or her own story of hardship. Shirley pushed aside the muslin curtain from a front window and guessed that there had to be several thousand more Chinese out in the courtyard.
“Mrs. Carson?” a familiar, tentative voice asked.
Shirley turned to greet Reverend Richard Wells, the head of the mission.
“I wanted to check on how you are doing,” he said. “Very good of you to open your doors to all these people.”
“Not at all,” she said as she tried to contain a curl fallen from her bun.
When Shirley had risen that day, she had decided to finally set aside her mourning garb and instead put on a delicate lace outfit in anticipation of her planned tea with Kathryn. With all the subsequent commotion, the date with her friend was now out of the question, but she was glad nonetheless to have accidentally dressed appropriately to receive the Reverend. Normally she would like to have drawn a comb through her hair or freshened up her lipstick before a visitor arrived, but she was starting to grasp that such concerns were a thing of the past.
The Reverend Wells’s owl eyes in his thick glasses blinked several times as he noticed the bloodstains on her apron. “Are you injured, Mrs. Carson?”
“Heavens, no, I’m fine. This is from that wounded fellow over there. I’ve just finished extracting a bullet from his leg.”
Reverend Wells looked across to the young man on the sofa. “I see,” he said and smiled politely.
Wells was a nervous man, easily overwhelmed, though an unnatural calm came over him when he rose to the pulpit. Shirley admired his sermons, which were quite erudite. She had often wished that she and Reverend Wells could sit down and parse the Bible, or Chinese culture, or any topic together, but she was relegated to the women’s conversations instead. The lady missionaries were a dear bunch, but none of them, except perhaps Kathryn, was a serious thinker.
Wells glanced out at the crowded compound through the screened window. “We’ve estimated close to five thousand have arrived. Can you imagine? The most we’ve ever had at Christmas service was five hundred. We finally had to shut the gates. I hated to do it, but we had no choice.”
“My, I would never have guessed such an enormous number. Whatever will we do with them?”
Wells’s lips trembled slightly. Shirley realized the terrible irony for him: for years, he had avoided the missionary trail, preferring to stay in his library rather than go out, as Caleb had, to meet the actual Chinese in town and countryside. But now they had come en masse to him anyway.
“I gather,” she offered, “that the Eighth Route Army of the Reds is somewhere about and intends to help as best they can.”
“We’re not supposed to get involved with the Communists, although they do seem to have a good touch with the local people and better success against the Japanese. But the American board in Boston has sent strict orders for us not to become entangled in Chinese internal politics. That is the policy.”
Shirley straightened her spine. “Policy or no, our American board is in America, Reverend. They can’t possibly understand the situation here when we can hardly understand it ourselves.”
As she spoke, Reverend Wells seemed to duck into his collar, and his face turned a soft and lovely pink. Shirley could imagine her husband whispering frantically in her ear that not everyone was accustomed to what he politely called her straightforwardness when what he really meant was her bossiness. Ladies, and most especially ministers’ wives—in Shirley’s opinion an all-too-often simpering and milquetoast bunch—were not meant to speak that way.
She pressed on in a more measured tone. “I just don’t think we can follow directives from afar, given the changing circumstances. Don’t you agree, Reverend?”
“Yes, of course, you’re right. Absolutely right,” he said, head bobbing.
Shirley waited for him to continue, but when he did not, she asked, “And so, what do you plan to do?”
His eyes darted out the window again. “The Eighth Route Army, you say?”
“I must introduce you to Captain Hsu.”
“Why, yes, Captain Hsu,” Reverend Wells said, his voice rising in confidence again. “There’s an excellent fellow. He used to stop by our Bible study group from time to time.”
“Is that so?” she asked. “I was sure the Communists are against religion. Isn’t that one of their central tenets?”
“He’s not a believer. He came to the study group out of respect for your husband, whom he greatly admired. They developed a friendship of sorts. Caleb was always keen to know the Chinese on their own terms, and he took that experiment to its furthest extent with Hsu. But the captain has a fine mind.” Reverend Wells tapped a finger to his thinning hair. “A top-notch intellect. I think Caleb genuinely enjoyed his company. But I’m sure you know all about that.”
Shirley nodded pleasantly and did her best to hide her disbelief. How had Caleb developed such a full-blown friendship with someone whom she had never even met? Since his death, she had spent hours and days recollecting the man she had loved. So many moments with him drowning her mind in a ceaseless torrent until she felt there was nothing more to remember, nothing more to know. But now the awkward, though reliable, man before her seemed to suggest a whole chapter of her husband’s life about which she knew nothing.
She was about to ask more when Reverend Wells patted her sleeve and gestured for her to follow him into a quieter corner of the front hall. He lowered his voice even further, and she leaned in to listen.
“The other reason I came by, Mrs. Carson, was to tell you that your Lian’s family from the country has arrived here at the mission. It appears they want to join my household. I thought you should know.”
Shirley stood upright. “How absurd. They should be here with us, of course. If they arrive on your doorstep, send them over to me right away.”
“I’m sorry, this is awkward, Mrs. Carson, but Lian visited my wife late last evening and asked our permission.” He ducked and hedged again, “Apparently you had not invited them to join your household? I’m sure it was a simple misunderstanding.”
Shirley was suddenly aware of Dao-Ming at her side. She shooed the girl away and glanced over at Lian, who chatted with the injured boy and his friends.
“Thank you for coming to tell me, Reverend. I’ll take care of it right away,” Shirley said. “I seem to have missed the cues Lian offered me last night. I’m not accustomed to the politeness of the Chinese. I was raised to speak up if I wanted something. Simply ask! The business of dropping hints, or even saying the exact opposite of what you want, is entirely lost on me. Caleb was a far more sympathetic soul and better at grasping the subtleties of communication between native and foreigner. I’m abysmal at it.”
She started to turn, intending to go immediately to Lian to straighten this out.
“Mrs. Carson,” the Reverend said as he took her elbow in a firm grip, “may I suggest that you let it rest for the moment? After I’ve gone, offer her family a gracious invitation. You don’t want it to seem that you have offered it under duress, do you?”
Shirley looked down at him, and, as Caleb would have advised, she inhaled a long, careful breath. “Quite right. Good of you to remind me, Reverend. I have a hot head and can make terrible messes when I don’t control my impulses.”
He shuffled from side to side and offered little reassuring noises. “Simple mistake,” he said. “We all do it. They are so very different from us.”
Shirley made herself smile but understood that the problem was not with the Chinese—though they could be difficult to grasp—but with her own obtuseness. She had never been skilled at picking up social signals of any sort. She withered in the company of well-bred ladies who had been raised to chatter with one another on a different plain, hemming and hawing and never getting to any particular point. Shirley found taking tea with them most aggravating. The topic was always the weather, or their husbands’ sartorial habits, and nothing of any interest was ever said outright but only implied. Days later would she learn that factions had formed over the course of dull conversation and cucumber sandwiches.
“Mrs. Carson,” Reverend Wells interrupted her thoughts, “do you mind me asking, what you meant earlier by saying that you removed a bullet from that Chinese boy, per se?”
“I meant precisely that. I say what I mean, Reverend, and I mean what I say. I’m simple that way.” She let out a sigh. “Perhaps at some point, my husband mentioned to you that I am a trained nurse?”
“Ah,” he said as a bewildered look overcame his face and he shook his head. “So sorry, I don’t recall. He very well may have. I am terrible at remembering details about, well, people.”
A headache had bloomed over Shirley’s right eye. Normally, at this time of day, she would be curled up in her bed, either crying about her lost husband or, before his death, reading. Endlessly engaging with people, which she had done since first thing this morning, struck her as unrelenting torture. Clearly Reverend Wells knew the feeling.
“I realize I have been holed up for weeks,” she said, “ever since word came of my husband’s death, and before that I kept to myself perhaps more than I should have. I’m sure you’ve noticed that I have never been an active community member. I’m simply not a joiner, Reverend. I don’t enjoy—communication. I know that’s criminal, especially for a minister’s wife, but you, of all people, can understand that I prefer the company of books and ideas.”
The Reverend let out a long sigh, as if he, too, was aching for his library at that very moment.
Shirley gazed out the window again at the shuffling masses in the courtyard. “But I have always found the Chinese fascinating. The variations in their language alone warrant our attention. I would love to study it at university. And such intriguing customs that I barely fathom even after living here for five years. Sadly, though, I never pursued my intellectual interests beyond college. Instead I developed the skills that were expected of me. Like so many girls, I became a nurse, not that it suited me then, or now.”
Reverend Wells let out an understanding grunt. He leaned in closer as if they now shared a secret understanding. “Life flows along, doesn’t it, dragging us with it? It carries us down unexpected and often less rewarding streams until we are spit out into the ocean and have no way back. The tide pulls us, and there we are—out in the vast blue.” He rocked forward onto his toes, a hopeful glow appearing on his face, his voice barely hiding a rising sense of mirth. “Everyone must know,” he continued, “that I, of all people, am not meant to be a leader of men, and yet here I am—in charge! That is simply how it is. We must rise to our calling, Mrs. Carson, however ill suited we may feel.”
His eyes glistened, and an impish smile appeared. “But how fortunate for us that you are a nurse,” he exclaimed. “I will tell the others. Already today, Doc Sturgis has set up the mission infirmary for typhoid inoculations. With the unsanitary conditions and refuse problems, we need that right away.”
The Reverend paused and looked at her, waiting, it seemed for her to say something rousing as well. When she didn’t, he carried on, his eyes still sparkling behind the thick lenses. “I suggest we relieve Doc Sturgis by setting up another, smaller clinic here in your home. What do you say, Mrs. Carson? It would not be for the worst cases but for more routine problems that suit your nursing skills. We really must take advantage of your training.”
Shirley felt distracted by the sight of Lian crossing the hall, a cast-iron pot of bloodied water sloshing in her hands. Dao-Ming followed close behind, her arms laden with used towels.
“I’m sorry, Reverend,” she said. “I must go help the others now.”
“So here, then? A clinic?” he asked again. “I would offer the Parish Hall, but it is packed to the gills with people already, and I think we’d do better to start small. If word gets out that we’re opening an actual hospital here, there will be no end to the Chinese.”
Shirley glanced around again at her crowded home, then out at the overrun courtyard, then back to the Reverend, who seemed to be trembling again, but perhaps now with nervous excitement. “There is no end to the Chinese, Reverend,” she said. “That is the truth of it.”
“Yes, and they need our help now more than ever. Your caring and talents can make all the difference.”
He was such a sincere little man, Shirley thought, his expression straining with optimism and conviction. She had lacked both of those qualities for so long, she marveled that he could exhibit them so easily. He was a leader of people after all, she thought. Short and with poor eyesight and more dedicated to learning than to life, Reverend Wells appeared to have taken the plunge required of him. In the little boat of his life, he was heading out into the wide and turbulent ocean he had described. There would be no turning back. Shirley supposed that the dizzying feeling that surrounded her now was the tide pulling her out to join him.
“I will need medical supplies,” she said. “Have your people bring in as many cots as we can wedge into the parlor and the dining room. Move the table out here in the hall, but leave the piano. Music can soothe a wounded soul.”
“Absolutely, Mrs. Carson,” he said. “Thank you.”
“Let’s carry on, then, shall we? Stiff upper lip and all that, as my husband used to say.” She finally offered a smile.
Where, she thought, was Caleb? It remained unfathomable to her that he was not at her side any longer. She hoped somehow that he was looking down on her and approving, because she couldn’t manage without the thought of him doing so. From now on, she would behave as he would have wished. She would finally rise to the occasion here in China and do some actual good.
Charles cut across the compound and dodged down the back alley between the Parish Hall and the Chinese Boys’ School. He came out in a second courtyard and continued to wind past more clusters of displaced Chinese, some still restless and shuffling about, others sunk listlessly in the sun. He hopped over their bundles of clothing, blackened woks, cast-iron pots, straw baskets of all sizes, bags of grain, and even cooking fires where they had set up camp. Mothers sat on their haunches and chopped vegetables or prepared rice and tea, calling for their children to stay near and not climb too high in the trees. Already patched and tattered clothing and gray undergarments hung from the cherry and ginkgo branches. Shriveled grandmothers in many-layered traditional dresses shouted across the yard to one another as Charles quickly surmised that whole villages, not just individual families, had escaped here together. They had made it out of their ancient pasts and into an uncertain future as one.
The Chinese men congregated and smoked, leaning against the serpentine brick wall dotted with lattice windows. The men didn’t look out at the distant plains but instead leaned toward one another and spoke in serious, urgent tones. Grandfathers slept without pillows under their heads in the shadow of the wall as their sons and grandsons whispered over them about what to do next.
These people were not soldiers, Charles realized, and yet they were already irreparably harmed by war. He recalled that some of the Chinese men he had seen executed that morning hadn’t worn military uniforms. Chinese citizens, he was starting to grasp, as often as soldiers, were prey to the Japanese Imperial Army.
If only his father were here to explain it all. Caleb Carson knew China better than most foreigners, from his many trips into the countryside and friendships with the people. Charles pulled out his father’s marble chop. On one end was carved Fenghuang, the mythical phoenix, with wings partially upraised. His father had taught him that for the Chinese, this bird was a hopeful symbol, suggesting the warmth of the summer sun and the fruitful unification of Yin and Yang. The mysterious creature brought good fortune. For Westerners, the phoenix rising from the ashes had always represented renewal and rebirth. If only his father had carried this good-luck charm with him out on the trail, Charles thought, maybe he wouldn’t have perished under the shifting ground.
He pressed the other end of the chop against the back of his hand and was surprised to notice that the bright-red ink made not the Chinese characters for his father’s name but the image of a winged phoenix. His father’s chop bore that magical symbol, not a written name. Charles lifted his hand into the sunlight and felt a flicker of something—if not hope, then perhaps comfort—as the bird rose. He then let his hand drop again to his side and kept on to the servants’ quarters.
In front of Han’s shack, he caught his breath. The simple woven bamboo screen that blocked the door remained in place, which struck Charles as odd, given that it was midday. He stepped around it, and when he knocked on the door, it swung open. The single room remained dim even in daylight, but Charles’s eyes adjusted, and he could see that no one was inside. No candles flickered in front of the modest altar to the family’s ancestors. The sepia-toned, faded photo of Han’s grandmother and grandfather in their formal attire wasn’t there. The straw sleeping mats that Han and his father usually kept rolled in the corner were missing, too.
Over in the small kitchen area, the storage shelf stood bare, the larder empty. The straw at the back of the cooking stove had been swept clean, and no logs remained stacked ready to be placed inside the oven. The hole where the wok usually sat above the flame was also empty, and the many straw baskets, tin bucket, and wooden water ladle that usually hung beside the stove were all gone, too. The only things left behind were the two ladder-back chairs Charles’s mother had given Cook. They remained against the wall, as unused as ever.
Charles turned and left, shutting the door behind him. He strode down the alley, offering a tentative bow to several servants’ families, though he didn’t recognize most of the faces and they returned his greeting with blank stares. Charles wondered if the ones from deep in the countryside had ever seen a white boy before.
As he approached Lian’s quarters, he noticed that the screen had been pulled back and clouds of smoke from the cook fire billowed out the door. Something was wrong with the chimney, he thought. If his father had been alive, he would have attended to it right away. Charles squeezed the cool marble chop in his pocket and remembered his father insisting on the importance of treating others as you wished them to treat you, no matter their station in life. Charles could recall him pressing the point in the pulpit but more often on the streets of the provincial Chinese town, where Charles had stayed close to his side and held on tightly to his hand.
Once, when Charles was seven, his father had bent down and given a coin to a legless beggar and instructed Charles to share one of his dried oatcakes with the man. Charles liked to carry an extra snack tucked in his pocket when they went on outings, but he did as he was told. He tossed the cake onto the ground before the beggar, then turned away from the gruesome sight of the man’s stumps. But his father yanked Charles back and insisted that he pick up the oatcake and place it directly into the beggar’s filthy hand. In English, he said, We are not offering food to a dangerous mongrel, my boy, but to a fellow human being. Then his father stayed and had a conversation with the beggar as he stuffed the food into his toothless mouth.
Only Caleb Carson, Charles had come to realize as he got older, would inflict such an experience on a small child while wearing a smile and repeating the Golden Rule. His knees felt weak as the realization swept over him again that the reliable, wise person of his father was no longer alive. Charles swallowed and tried to focus on the problem at hand. If his father wasn’t here, then he could at least summon up what he would think: something must be done about Lian’s faulty chimney.
Charles looked away from the roof and noticed an old woman crouched on her haunches outside the door. Beside her, a girl who Charles guessed was around his age sat on the stone bench. The two ate with fast-moving chopsticks from bowls and seemed to be engaged in a heated argument.
He bowed. “Pardon me, esteemed grandmother,” he began, “I am sent from the Carson household, where Lian works. We would be honored to have your company at our home.”
The old woman looked up with eyes milky from cataracts. She tipped her head to the side and shouted in a different dialect—one from the countryside that Charles happened to recognize because many of the mission servants spoke it.
“Who is it that speaks so poorly to us?” the grandmother asked the girl. “His voice hurts my ears.”
The girl answered her grandmother in the same country dialect. “Hush,” the girl said. “He is a white boy. American, I think. He must be the son of that witch Lian works for.”
Charles tried not to laugh. He continued in the more formal dialect, which the girl seemed to understand, not wanting to embarrass them by showing that he had grasped their rude comments.
“Lian works for us, and my mother would like to invite you to come with me to stay at our home.”
The old woman said, “He sounds like someone caught his tongue in the door.”
Charles felt a flame of indignation. No one had ever said he didn’t speak well. He would have to ask Han for his honest opinion. The old woman must have cotton in her ears.
“My grandmother thanks you for the kind offer,” the girl said, “but we are quite contented here. Lian’s home is not large, but there is room for us. She is at her employer’s so much of the time, year in and year out, that we rarely see her, but we are quite happy to be here now.”
Charles noted the dig she had slipped into her reply. So Lian felt she worked too many hours and days. No doubt, Charles thought. He would speak to his mother about that.
“Are you sure you don’t want to come?” he asked again. “We have food and mats for sleeping. Don’t you want to be with your Auntie Lian?”
The girl turned to the old woman again and said in the country dialect, “He says they have food and a place to sleep. How about we go?”
“They poison us with their food. I don’t trust foreigner devils. How do we know they are any different from the Japanese dogs? They come to rob us. No, we will make our own food. I remember when all we had was stone soup. I remember when the Righteous Harmony Society chased them all out! That was the right idea!”
The girl waved her hand and said, “I’ve heard your old stories, Grandmother. Maybe I don’t want to eat stone soup.”
“All right then, go! Leave me here. I will sit like this all day.”
As the girl stood, she swayed slightly, light-headed, Charles guessed, from hunger. He wanted to offer her a hand but didn’t reach out. The top of the girl’s head barely came to his shoulder, her collarbone protruded, and her arms were as thin as young bamboo. But her eyes, dark, iridescent pools, still caught the light. Nothing about her seemed dull to Charles, but clearly she needed more meat on her bones.
“We thank you for the invitation, but my grandmother has been through a lot. It took us days to get here. Lian’s food is the first we’ve had in a while. My grandmother needs to rest before we move anywhere.”
“I understand,” Charles said, “but I’ll drop by again soon to see—” he looked down at the grandmother—“how she is doing.”
The girl blushed, and Charles realized that his cheeks were warm, too. He didn’t know what to do with his hands, and before he knew it, he had reached out to shake hers. The girl’s hand seemed to have no substance to it at all, and he hoped he didn’t squeeze too hard. When they let go, she sat down quickly, and he turned away fast.
“Also, I’ll bring something to fix the chimney,” he shouted over his shoulder as he started down the alley. “It really shouldn’t smoke up the room like that. That’s not right.”
“Yes,” she said, “not right,” though when he glanced back, she was smiling.
Charles didn’t rush on his way home, and when he emerged from the alley, he saw that the central courtyard remained as crowded as when he had left. He wasn’t sure what he had hoped for—perhaps that the Chinese would have all gone back to wherever it was they had come from. It was only the end of the first day since their arrival, and he felt worn out with them already. Charles could hear his father whispering a stern reminder to not be selfish—to think of others, not only himself.
Someone bumped his shoulder, and he stumbled over a stack of straw suitcases held together with a cracked leather belt. More Chinese pushed past, and Charles ducked under the branches of his favorite cherry tree. He reached to grasp the black, slick limbs that he had climbed when he was small. Chinese of every sort surrounded him. Families mostly, with children stumbling along, as burdened as the elders, lugging their own things. The rise and fall of Chinese intonations washed over him in a hot tide, and the shade of the tree did little to cool him. Charles breathed through his mouth to avoid the stench that had started to rise in the courtyard, where latrines had not yet been set up.
He felt certain that he had nothing in common with these desperately poor people who were now victims of war, and yet, as he looked around, he felt an affinity with them. They had all faced their own personal tragedies to arrive here. The Chinese before him huddled so close that their bowed heads practically touched. Charles realized that he and his mother, in the wake of their family’s great loss, had lost track of one another. He wanted to be more like these Chinese, he thought, and set off to tell her so.
Charles pushed away from the cherry tree, stepped over and around more people, and went up his porch steps. He slipped into his home, apologizing to those who pressed to follow him inside. He shut the heavy carved door, rested his back against it, and shut his eyes.
A moment later, a woman’s voice said, “Had a long day, honey?” His mother’s friend, Miss James, leaned against the wall beside him. “You always wanted more to happen around here,” she said. “Now you’ve got it.”
He tried to smile.
“I’m sorry your dad’s not with us anymore. He’d know how to handle this.”
Charles looked down at his shoes, covered in yellow summertime dust. He’d forgotten to stomp his feet before entering. He’d probably forgotten a lot of other normal things, too, because nothing was normal anymore. He wished people wouldn’t mention his father so often.
“Your mother’s going to be real busy from now on.” Miss James nodded toward the dining room, where his mother was instructing several Chinese men on where to place some cots. “If you need anything, kid, you ask me, okay? The single ladies’ dorm isn’t nearly so overrun as your place. We have a few empty bedrooms with perfectly decent beds. You come over anytime, and I’ll sneak you in. This house is going to be crazy now that it’s a medical clinic.”
“A medical clinic?”
“She says they enlisted her, though I can tell that she loves it. You know how she likes to be in charge.”
Miss James seemed to be trying to get a rise out of him, but he wasn’t sure why. She always acted as if they were in cahoots, though Charles never knew about what. He supposed it was just her way of showing that she thought of herself as a younger sister to his mother, even though they were close in age.
“But we’ll help her out, won’t we, Charles? We’ll roll up our sleeves together.”
He tried to dodge her hand as she reached to pat down his hair.
“You might even become a doctor someday because of all this. That’s looking on the bright side.”
“I hate the sight of blood,” he said.
She wiped something off his cheek with her thumb, and he wriggled away. “Oh, you’ll get over that. I can picture you in a white doctor’s coat. You’ll be quite the catch.”
Charles doubted he’d ever get over his squeamishness, and he didn’t feel so great about Miss James right now, either. She was his mother’s best friend, and he knew that meant he should like her best, but sometimes she acted strange.
“Have you had anything to eat today?” she asked.
Charles shook his head.
“I see how this is going to be. Your mother’s still not taking care of you, you poor thing. You need to come over to my place, and I’ll feed you. Right now. Let’s go.” She took him by the wrist.
“I just got back, Miss James. I want to tell Mother something. And I think we have food here. I’m okay. Really, I am.”
She patted down his collar and said, “All right, but I’ve got my eye on you. We can’t have you being neglected, can we?” She pointed a long finger at him and offered a flash of white teeth. Her hand hovered a moment longer, and as if she couldn’t help herself, she started to adjust his jacket where it was hitched up wrong on his shoulder.
“Stop it,” he finally said and shifted away. “I can take care of myself.”
She laughed a little, as if it was funny that he didn’t want her pawing at him.
“Remember, now, if you need anything,” she said again, “just let me know.”
As she reached for the front doorknob, Charles spoke up. “Actually, Miss James,” he said, “I’m trying to find my friend Han. You know, our cook’s son?”
“Sure, I know Han.”
“No one seems to know where he is.”
“I’ll ask around. But don’t worry too much. Everyone’s a little out of place right now. And by the by, call me Kathryn. It makes me feel old when you call me Miss James.”
As she headed out the front door and negotiated the crowd outside, he heard her apologizing to them for their wait. She wasn’t so bad, he realized, just a little peculiar around him for some reason. Charles then went to join his mother, who stood with her hands on her hips in the middle of what used to be their dining room.
“I found Lian’s mother, and a girl was with her,” he started right in. “Probably her niece. Did you know that Lian has a niece?”
His mother continued to point at the cots and bark orders at the men helping her.
“I forgot to ask her name,” Charles continued. “Do you happen to know Lian’s niece’s name?”
Finally his mother stopped what she was doing and took him by the shoulders. “Charles, thank goodness you’re back. I was worried sick.” She kissed him hard on the forehead. They stood eye to eye now, and her usual kiss to the crown of his head was no longer possible, so she had substituted this awkward placement. He wished she wouldn’t kiss him at all, especially not in front of everyone. He wasn’t a little boy anymore.
She let go of his shoulders and said, “We have so much to do, son, it’s mind-boggling.”
“The thing is,” he tried again, circling around and blocking her way, “I couldn’t find Han anywhere. Have you seen him?”
“Han? No.”
“I have to find him, Mother. He’s my friend.”
“He’ll turn up. Everyone’s gone a bit missing right now.” She offered a quick smile.
“But what if he doesn’t? What if he ends up like those men lined up by the Japanese this morning? We have to do something. We have to find him!”
His mother turned. “Darling, I understand your concern. But I want you to look around and notice. All these people need our help, not just one. We have to think about the whole, not just the individual. Captain Hsu was saying something to me this afternoon that resonated so deeply. ‘The people, and the people alone, are the motivating force in the making of world history,’ he said. Isn’t that a simple, yet staggering, thought? These people, Charles, these people right here are the makers of world history. We need to face that extraordinary fact and help as many of them as we can.”
Color had come back into his mother’s cheeks, and her forehead glistened under her fallen wisps of hair. He could barely follow what she was talking about but thought that at least she wasn’t as miserable as she had been. His mother—lost for so many weeks and gone over to the ghosts—was now replaced by this manic person before him.
“Whatever you say, Mother. That’s swell. But I’m going to find Han. I’ll see you later.”
Before she could object, he had turned on his heel and left the house again.
In the ruins of the splintered guardhouse, Charles found Mr. Sung, the blind self-appointed watchman. With his three-legged stool nowhere in sight, the man crouched on his haunches, his can beside him, as always. The high ping of his betel juice hitting the tin was the most recognizable sound outside the mission.
“Esteemed Mr. Sung, are you all right?”
The old man stopped chewing and cocked his head. “American boy?”
“I didn’t expect to find you, grandfather.”
“I am here,” the old man said matter-of-factly.
Charles looked beyond the dirt road to the ditch, where some of the bodies of the Chinese men had still not been collected.
“Do you want to come inside the compound, sir?” Charles asked. “It would be safer.”
“I must not leave my spot,” the old man said. “It is my duty.”
Charles pressed his forearm against his eyes. “All right, then,” he said, mustering a voice as much like his father’s as he could. “Carry on! Keep up the good work! Fight the foe!”
The old man gave a blackened grin and saluted.
As Charles headed up the rutted road toward town, he tried not to stare at the dead bodies. Contorted in the worst possible ways, they lay in pools of blood, slick and iridescent as tar. Flies lit and swarmed. Charles yanked his gaze away and watched the millet swaying in the fields, golden in the sun. He tried to fathom how such a fine summer day could continue unchanged.
The town consisted of only several shops on one side of the main street. Across the way, the flimsy cardboard and splintered wooden stalls of the farmers’ market displayed meager root vegetables and fruit. The fishmonger also sold his catch there, if he had any. The Chinese usually had very little money, so commerce tended to be irregular at best. Still, Charles hoped to find his friend. He skirted piles of rubble, broken boards, and clods of soil where the land had been ripped open, Charles guessed by grenades. Hand-to-hand combat must have taken place here, but he saw no Japanese soldiers now. Instead, an eeriness filled the quiet town in the aftermath of that morning’s skirmish.
At the entrance to the market, several more Chinese soldiers lay dead. One boy had been bayoneted through the ribs and left to die beside another with his head tipped back unnaturally, his throat slit. Charles stared for too long and had to race to a gully to vomit. When he opened his eyes again, he saw that the churned-up soil before him had also run with blood. He knew he should turn back. He had no business being outside the mission. He had never seen anything like this, and he knew his mother wouldn’t want him to see it. She had tried to shield him for so long, but how could she here in China, where, even before this Japanese attack, illness, starvation, and other deprivations abounded? Charles thought his father had been right to introduce him to the legless beggar years before.
Look him in the eye, he had said, even if his eyes are crusted over and he cannot see you. Search, my boy, for the human soul inside the suffering.
But Charles wondered if even his father would have felt this was too much evil to witness. He wiped his mouth on his rumpled sleeve, then tore off his jacket altogether and, with shaking hands, placed it over the head and torso of the young soldier whose throat had been cut. Charles continued deeper into what remained of the market, searching for at least one open booth or anyone who looked familiar. He wanted to shout Han’s name but didn’t dare expose him. Although Charles still had not seen any Japanese soldiers, he worried that they could be anywhere, hidden in doorways or behind toppled carts. Farther down the destroyed row of stalls, Charles noticed that the Japanese fishmonger’s place had been burned to the ground. Sheets of paper stamped with the Japanese flag hung on what remained.
He finally stumbled on a stall that appeared open, two meager piles of shriveled turnips and potatoes displayed before the owner, who sat on a low stool. Charles bowed, but the woman’s dull eyes showed no recognition.
“Madam Chen, I’m Charles Carson. Remember me, from Sunday school? Your son and I, we played together years ago?” When he mentioned her son, Charles thought a flash of recognition passed over the woman’s face.
“Fifty thousand,” she said.
“Pardon me?”
“No less.”
“For turnips?”
She scoffed and looked away.
“Have you seen Han, by any chance?” Charles tried. “You know, the cook’s boy? He was in Sunday school with your son and me.”
“Do not mention my noble son,” she said, glaring now. “The boys are gone. No more boys. You go now, too.” She brushed him off as if he were an annoying fly.
As Charles thought about it, he realized she was right. On his walk through town, he had seen only elders and young children. A few mothers but no fathers, and certainly no young men who weren’t already soldiers in uniform.
“Where is everyone?” he asked. “Where are my friends?”
She spat on the ground. “They are not your friends. They were never your friends.”
Charles staggered back and took off running, dodging the craters in the road and the few remaining Chinese who walked with bundles on their backs or pushing cumbersome wheelbarrows piled high with junk. He passed more Chinese soldiers fallen by the roadside and didn’t want to look but made himself, to make sure they were not Han.
At the Buddhist temple, Charles bent double and put his hands on his knees. As he caught his breath, he noticed that the grand spreading cedar tree had been struck and had lost a few limbs. He ran up the low steps and saw light streaming in through gaping holes in the damaged roof. Normally it was so dark and smoky from incense inside the temple that you could hardly see anything, but now the slanting sun revealed that the idols had been badly chipped and shattered by mortar fire. Only one of the standing Buddhas remained intact. Around it, someone had placed fresh flowers, newly lit candles, and incense.
Charles wondered who would even consider coming here on such a hellish day to light candles. He wanted to shout that people lay dying in the streets, and any strength should be saved for them, not for one’s ancestors, or the Buddha, or for that matter Jesus Christ. Back at the mission, additional services had been scheduled for every afternoon, not just Sundays. Charles couldn’t imagine why people would waste time praying instead of trying to stop the nightmare that was taking place around them. He wondered if he could ever make himself go to church again, knowing what God had allowed on this day. His father would tell him otherwise, but his father had not seen what Charles had seen.
Outside again on the dirt road, he kept his eyes down and started spotting small treasures—ammunition clips, cartridge cases, a canteen, and hundreds of pieces of paper with the Japanese flag printed on them. He scooped these items up and stuffed them into his pockets alongside his father’s phoenix chop and his penknife—all for what purpose he didn’t know. From the ground, he lifted a Chinese Army cap with the blue-and-white Kuomintang insignia and twelve-pointed sun. He slapped it against his leg, and yellow dust scattered. As he put it on, Charles wished he could show Han, but he was starting to suspect that his friend might already have one of his own.
With the mission compound in sight just up the road, two Japanese soldiers shouted in Chinese for Charles to halt. Before he knew it, the tip of a bayonet had knocked his new cap off his head.
“We could have shot you, America,” a young Japanese soldier shouted. “Foolish boy, do not wear Chinese Army cap.”
Charles realized it was the kid who had swept their back steps. “Hey, how’s it going? How come you’re still here?” Charles asked. “Looks like the rest of your company’s moved on.”
“Do not ask questions,” the older soldier said. Then he turned to the younger soldier and asked, “Who is this kid?”
“This is no-good, spoiled American,” the younger soldier explained.
The older Japanese soldier pressed Charles’s shoulder with the sharp tip of his bayonet.
“Hey, now,” Charles said, “I’m not the enemy.”
“America is weak, worthless country.”
Charles tried to think fast, tried to think at all with the bayonet blade so near his neck. “Say, you fellows ever hear of Jean Harlow, the movie actress?”
Their eyes remained unflinching.
“You know about Hollywood, right?”
The older soldier may have nodded.
“Then you know that Hollywood’s biggest star is Jean Harlow.” Charles was surprised by the jauntiness of his own voice. “She’s my girlfriend. That’s the truth of it. She and I been going steady for a while now.”
The older soldier cocked his head, and the younger one leaned forward almost imperceptibly.
“I need to get going,” Charles said as he started to back away. “My girlfriend’s waiting for me. Jean Harlow. Remember that name. You see her on the screen someday, and you’ll know, she’s my girl. See you around, fellas.” Charles offered a little wave, turned, and started to stride off.
“Halt, America!” the older one shouted.
Charles’s frantic pulse whooshed in his ears, and he worried that he might faint, but he swallowed and turned back. “What now?” he asked. “My girlfriend’s going to be mad if I’m late.”
“You no Hollywood,” the younger one said.
“You bet I am!” Charles said. “I’m Hollywood all over!”
The soldiers glanced at one another, and in that instant, Charles snatched up the Chinese Nationalist cap from the ground and took off running.
“American devil!” they shouted after him.
Charles pulled the cap onto his head and felt like himself for the first time that day.
Over the following days and weeks, the injured continued to arrive from the countryside. Shirley’s brief nursing experience, which had begun in the emergency room at Cleveland General, then shifted to daytime hours in the pediatric ward, had done little to prepare her for this. Chinese came, leaning on one another and on sticks, some carried in on homemade stretchers. All of them, Captain Hsu insisted, were civilians, although it seemed obvious to her that his men had simply disguised themselves. They exchanged their uniforms for peasant clothing or turned their shabby jackets inside out and stuffed their red-starred caps into their pockets. Despite Reverend Wells’s warnings against getting tangled up in the conflict, Shirley thought that even if the young men had been wearing proper uniforms, she wouldn’t have turned them away. Many weren’t much older than her son, and all were badly in need of care.
Every day, Hsu stood by the front door and determined who would be seen and who would be denied care. Shirley’s feverish hope to help them all was impossible. She knew that. Her job was difficult, but when she glanced over and saw the captain shake his head at some beleaguered person, she understood that his task was even worse.
When sporadic fighting erupted in the countryside at river and railroad crossings, or on roads that led to crucial mountain passes, more disguised soldiers arrived, along with hapless peasants of all ages who had been caught in the crossfire. Some engagements involved heavy artillery, though Shirley surmised that hand-to-hand combat also often occurred. The knife wounds alarmed her almost more than injuries caused by bullets. The Japanese seemed expert at slicing the bodies of their enemies, leaving them without fingers, hands or eyes. Shirley began to think that those hit by grenades or mortar fire were the luckiest because they would die the quickest.
And then the Chinese women started to arrive, and Shirley thought that what they had survived was worse. Although the bulk of the Japanese Imperial Army had departed for the front to the north, several units remained in town and went on rampages, seeking food and the spoils of war. Chinese women stumbled into the clinic, barely able to walk. Some could no longer speak, their minds having left the shells of their flesh behind. The young girls were the most tragic, but several grandmothers had born the same treatment.
Shirley couldn’t imagine that Doc Sturgis over at the infirmary was encountering anything worse. Reverend Wells had promised that she would receive the less challenging cases, but she soon realized that Captain Hsu, who seemed to have a network of Chinese throughout the mission, the town, and the region, either orchestrated, or was at least aware of, everything that went on. He could answer any question or see to any request, and Shirley had quickly come to rely on him, as did many others. It was also becoming clear to her that the Red Army’s infiltration of the province over the previous months had made it a target for the Japanese in the first place. The Red soldiers bore the brunt of the ongoing nightly air raids on the plains out beyond the town, yet Shirley couldn’t help but blame them for the trouble and wish they would move on to another province altogether.
One evening, she sat at the bedside of a young soldier who appeared to have survived an attempted beheading. She had chosen not to wrap this poor boy’s head because she couldn’t risk having bandages stick to the horrific wound. The truth was that she would need them shortly for the next patient. The youth sat up with a dazed and distant expression, his skull essentially sliced open. She estimated that he would die within a half hour of arriving, and as he did, she held his hand until the end. He never spoke. And she, with all her expertise in the Chinese dialects of the region, did not say a word, either. She felt herself soften as she gently squeezed his hand. As he breathed his last halting breaths, she said a prayer in his language, not about Jesus but about finding rest and peace elsewhere and with his ancestors, his family far from here. When she finally stepped away from the bed, she did not cry. She felt more useless than ever but also knew that she had done her best under the circumstances.
Captain Hsu appeared at her side and asked, as he often did, if she needed anything. Shirley raised her eyes and stared into the man’s lined face. She considered that his pockmarks and the scar over his right brow could have made him appear sinister and yet didn’t. Instead, he seemed serious but kind. That his eyes were even with hers came as a relief after this long day. She was tired of looking down into the faces of people she could not possibly save. They had stared up at her with hope, even when there was no reason for hope.
“I could use a smoke,” she said.
He reached into his jacket breast pocket and pulled out a tin case of hand-rolled Chinese cigarettes.
“This will make me even dizzier than I already am.”
“Did you eat, Nurse Carson?”
She took a cigarette and wandered toward the screen door, where a slight evening breeze seeped over the threshold. No one waited in line any longer, but several families had bedded down for the night on the wide verandah. She stepped outside, and Captain Hsu followed. He lit her cigarette with a match struck on the side of the brick house. Shirley stood on the top step and smoked.
“You did well today,” he said.
“I did all right. But, luckily for me, the revolution is not about a single person, but the whole.”
He smiled. “I think you have only a partial understanding of what I’ve been saying to you.”
“I’m teasing,” she said and sent a stream of smoke into the night.
“You are the one who continues to ask me questions,” he reminded her. “I am happy to work alongside you without philosophizing.”
“I enjoy our conversations, Captain.”
Through the open windows came the moans of her patients. The town itself was quiet now that the Japanese Imperial Army had moved on to different parts. But far beyond the compound, periodic mortar fire struck the earth. Several weeks before, Japanese aircraft had hummed loudly and low over the foothills. The distant echo of their bombs had surprisingly caused the bottles of medicine on the shelves to tremble. According to Captain Hsu, the fighting had returned to the ground again soon after, as the young warlord’s troops confronted the enemy to the east, and other factions fought to the north. The captain would mention these areas of engagement casually, in passing, and never with any explanation. Shirley’s overall impression of the military actions taking place in the province around her was like that of a picnicker hearing the buzzing of bees in nearby flowerbeds but never quite seeing them.
Still, although a dull sense of menace hung over her days and a feeling of futility overwhelmed her at times, Shirley shook out her arms now and was oddly grateful for the sensation that shot through her with something like vitality. Though surrounded by the dying, she felt inexorably alive.
“Now that you mention it, I am hungry,” she said and rose on her toes and stretched. “How about you?”
“Famished.”
“Shall we go into the kitchen and make something?”
“Nurse Carson knows how to cook? I did not think American women knew how.”
“We do. We just don’t cook here in China.”
“And why is that?”
“It isn’t done. We have cooks instead.”
Captain Hsu nodded.
“You don’t happen to know my cook, do you? He disappeared some weeks ago.”
“Yes, I know him.”
“Oh,” she said and wondered if there was anything—besides modern germ theory and some Western notions—that Captain Hsu did not know. “Will you tell me where he is?”
The captain took his cap from his pocket, ran his fingers over the brim, and appeared ill at ease for the first time since they had met. “I can tell you that he is all right,” he said.
“But you can’t share with me where he is?”
“I think it is better this way.”
“What way?”
“For an American woman to make her own food for now, since she is good at it.”
She took another puff and studied him. The red star on the cap in his hands caught the light before he tucked it back into his pocket. She would get nothing more from him this evening.
“I’m not sure how it got like this, foreigners having cooks,” she said, “but that’s the expectation. I couldn’t exactly go to market and haggle with farmers and the fishmonger myself, could I?”
He lifted an eyebrow.
“You would have me do that, wouldn’t you? But we have servants to do that for us. We employ the Chinese fairly here at the mission. We pay well, and we don’t take advantage of them.”
She thought the corners of his mouth rose slightly.
“If you didn’t have the upper classes, whether foreign or Chinese, to employ people, the whole business would collapse,” she said. “But I forgot, that’s what you want, isn’t it?”
He finally chuckled. “Nurse Carson, you think this?”
“Yes, I think this.”
“Then yes is my answer, too. The whole business would collapse.”
Shirley flicked her cigarette over the side of the porch. She didn’t like being teased, but she realized she was naive about politics and vulnerable to sounding foolish. It seemed such a harebrained idea to upend everything, though in China there was no question that the peasant class lived more wretchedly than any people she had ever known. The Russian serfs had no doubt had it bad, but who could say in 1937 if life was better for them under Communism? And now the poor Russians were dealing with Hitler, so none of it mattered, anyway, as they tried to simply stay alive. Still, Shirley had to guess that if Communism was ever to work, it might work here in China, where poverty, ignorance, and illiteracy kept the people in the Dark Ages—though now, in this war with Japan, there were other, more pressing concerns.
“That’s enough of that,” she said. “Let’s have supper.” She started toward the door.
“Thank you, but no.” Captain Hsu bowed. “I have my men to attend to. You enjoy your meal.”
“But you haven’t eaten all day, either, and they must be asleep already, your men, whoever, and wherever, they are.”
“I have told you about my men, Nurse Carson. They are country boys. You have met a few of them yourself. And they are hungry, too. So I will go now. Please excuse me.”
“Oh, for heaven’s sake, are you suggesting that I feed them, also?” She crossed her arms over her chest.
Captain Hsu did not reply.
“I haven’t mien for them all.”
Again he did not answer.
“And my son, wherever he is, must be hungry, too. I’m sure he’ll be home any minute. I can’t just give away the last of what’s in my larder. Who knows how long this siege or whatever it is will go on?”
Her head was pounding, and whatever exhilaration and camaraderie she had felt before were now being extinguished by exhaustion. She wished she could blink and have the whole lot of them disappear. Blink and have Caleb at her side again. But the best she could do was retreat inside and try to put out of her mind the captain’s stern and quizzical gaze.
“Good night, Captain Hsu,” she said and started in.
“Good night, Nurse Carson. I will be back again at dawn.”
Shirley let out a slight groan, stepped over the threshold, and skirted around the Chinese asleep in her front hall. The kitchen, located in a small dependency off the back of the house, was dominated by a mud-encased brick kang that Cook normally kept fired with logs or coal. It stood cold now, and the low-timbered room remained dark. The truth was, Shirley hadn’t cooked here, not even once, and had only visited the kitchen a few times. That seemed a sorry thing to admit, but there it was: she didn’t know the first thing about how to make a meal in China.
She lit a kerosene lantern that hung from a hook by the stove. There appeared to be no electricity in this shadowy hut—quite unfortunate, given that a kitchen was precisely where you needed the best light. She wished Caleb were here to correct the situation but realized that now all such problems fell to her. Over the past few weeks of running the clinic and making her home function as efficiently as possible, she had started to sense that her husband had neglected a great many things around the house because of being occupied elsewhere. She had come to realize there was much she didn’t know about him—about his friends like Captain Hsu, what he truly believed politically, and no doubt other things as well. And wasn’t it odd, she wondered now, that she had been so little aware of the workings of the household while her husband was alive? She had to wonder what else had gone on under their roof without her knowing it.
With one hand, she held aloft the lantern, and with the other, she searched around on an open shelf, shifting heavy bags of grain in search of something to cook. She found several iron pots—or rather one pot and one frying pan with edges that sloped up more like a bowl, a Chinese invention, that wok thing she had heard about. Then she reached for a parcel wrapped with string that she hoped held noodles. She picked it up off the shelf, and a rat scampered out. Shirley caught herself before the scream escaped her mouth but trembled from head to toe.
“Dear Lord,” she said. “Vermin, too!”
She sensed someone behind her, lifted the large frying pan in her hand, and turned. “Keep back!” she shouted.
Standing before her was the little Japanese grandfather who ran the only fish market in town. He bowed low. Shirley let the pan fall to her side as she, too, bowed low. He bowed even lower. She bowed lower. He was starting to bow for a third time when she banged the pan on the stove, and said, “Konnichiwa, grandfather.”
“Konbanwa,” he replied with a nod, correcting her with “good evening,” not “good day,” in Japanese. Behind him appeared his two grown daughters and several granddaughters, all in traditional Japanese dress. Continuing in the local Chinese dialect, he said, “My family is here to serve you.”
“Excuse me?” Shirley asked.
“My daughter and her daughters will serve you. You give us roof, we serve you.”
“They will serve me what?”
“Supper. We cook food for you. Help with patients in medical rooms, too,” he said and pointed toward the front of the house.
“Very kind of you to offer. I don’t think the Chinese would cotton to a Japanese nurse, but we can ask Captain Hsu in the morning.”
“My family and I have been here thirty years,” the fishmonger continued. “We do not approve of war.” He made a face. “Japanese soldiers behave very badly.”
“I’m very glad to hear that you are not like them and thank you for offering to help in the clinic, but many of the wounded Chinese are not from here. And even the ones who do come from our own town may not like you very much—not because you are a barbarian but because your prices were always too high.” She added with a slight smile, “You can’t deny it.”
The fishmonger studied her face for a long moment before he got the joke and laughed. “Ah, yes,” he said, “prices too high! Very good! Very true!”
Shirley handed him the pan. “You may cook for me and my son until our own cook returns. Thank you again for offering.”
She left the kitchen and wondered how she was going to explain this to Captain Hsu. Not only could she not cook for herself, but she seemed to have engaged the enemy in doing so for her. She was too tired to even consider the problem. When she reached the front hall, she sat down on the piano bench and let her head droop onto her folded arms as they rested on the keyboard. A moment later, she opened her eyes again and looked past her lap and recognized the pair of size eleven Jack Purcell sneakers covered in yellow dust. She bolted upright and threw her arms around her son. For once, he didn’t flinch or pull away but let her hold him there, his head tipped onto her shoulder.
“Oh, Mother.”
“I know,” she said. “It’s all so terrible.” She wanted to hold him and rock him to sleep as she had when he was small. Reluctantly she let him slip out of her arms but kept hold of his hand. “Supper will be ready soon,” she said and caressed his thick red hair. “You must be starved.”
Charles nodded but then started to pull her after him across the front hall.
“Where are you taking me?” she asked. “Be careful, now, step around these people.” She had no choice but to follow as Charles maneuvered through the sleeping Chinese. “What is it, darling?” she whispered. “Is something bothering you?”
He stopped midstride and looked back at her. “Yes, Mother,” he said with a smirk, “something is bothering me.”
She felt strangely grateful for his quintessential teenaged tone. “Sorry, silly question,” she said. “It has been such a day in such a week.”
As they rounded the corner to the former dining room, Dao-Ming popped out and scampered away. Shirley let out a gasp and whispered to Charles, “That girl is constantly underfoot and everywhere at once. Whenever I come upon her, my heart skips a beat. It can’t be good for my health.”
“Oh, Mother, of all the things to complain about,” he said. “That’s the least of our problems. Now, follow me.” He continued to weave through the cots. “I was down in the cellar earlier today, looking for that special sweeping tool Father used on our chimney last fall.”
“What tool?”
“A long broom with lots of bristles at the end. I need it to fix something.”
“What on earth are you up to?” she asked and stopped at the center of the clinic. “Come, now, Charles, that’s enough for one night. Can’t this wait until morning?”
“No, it can’t.”
As stubborn as he had been as a toddler, she thought as she untied her filthy apron, took it off, and balled it up. But since no laundry would be washed anytime soon, she carried it to the coat tree beside the front door. She tried not to notice her husband’s crumpled fedora tipped jauntily on a brass hook. If she did, she might start to weep.
Charles opened the cellar door, took the kerosene lamp off its hook at the top of the steps, and lit it. As with the kitchen, Shirley had been downstairs only once or twice. From Lian, she had heard that snakes enjoyed the cool damp down there, but she wasn’t going to mention that now. The steps creaked, and when they reached the bottom, Charles started across the mud floor, his footsteps squishing loudly.
“Dinner will be ready any minute,” Shirley said as she ducked under the stairwell and followed Charles. “Aren’t you starved for a bowl of mien? I never thought I’d say that with such relish, but here we are, aren’t we?”
She knew she was prattling on. If Caleb had been here, he’d have turned and kissed her on the lips to get her to shut up. Her husband would have known she was frightened. But she couldn’t show that to her son, who seemed oblivious to the dangers all around.
Charles stopped and lifted the lamp. Before them was a small door held closed by a rusted metal hook. “Have you ever noticed this cabinet?” he asked her.
Shirley shook her head and let out a high, worried sound. She couldn’t bear another tragedy, especially if it involved her precious boy. But instead of a bed of snakes, a Japanese soldier in waiting, or another dead and bloodied body, when Charles raised the hook and opened the door, Shirley saw before them Caleb’s ham-operated radio transmitter. The clumsy old thing sat on a tidy little shelf. Headphones hung beside it from a nail. The inked image of a Chinese mystical phoenix had been stamped in red on the wall, a signature of sorts, Shirley guessed. And a microphone was positioned in front of a single stool on which sat a rosy pink pillow with lovely embroidered chrysanthemums. At least a year before, the pillow had gone missing from the wicker sofa in the parlor, and Shirley had accused a day laborer of taking it. But here it was, no worse for wear. Upon it, to Shirley’s amazement, sat her husband’s driving cap. She would have recognized Caleb’s cap anywhere, and apparently so had her son.
“Father, must have—” Charles began.
But she hushed him. “Not a word,” she whispered and pressed a finger to her lips. Then she gestured for him to close the door and return upstairs. She took her boy firmly by the wrist and pulled him after her. When they reached the steps, Shirley pushed Charles before her, and up he went. She stepped lightly after him, trying to make as little noise as possible.