River of Dust (17 page)

    "Does that mean you have beans," the Reverend pressed, "but you won't trade them?"

    The man crossed his arms again and looked around at his band of thuggish friends. "I have many mouths to feed."

    "I see that," the Reverend said. "But I have a pregnant wife who is terribly ill. She may not make it unless I procure some sustenance for her. She has endured far too much already. Please, take pity on her and our unborn child."

    The proprietor looked at Ahcho for a translation as the Reverend, in his distraught state, seemed to have lapsed into English.

    Ahcho got to the point and said, "You know what he wants. Don't make him beg."

    The proprietor shrugged and stepped back. His friends turned, too, and the Reverend heard the old people beginning to chatter again amongst themselves. His chance to save his family was slipping away.

    The Reverend spoke again in a clear voice. "I wish to offer you something else. Something most precious."

    The proprietor did not even bother to look his way. He simply waved his hand. "I don't need anything but rain. Can you give me that, Ghost Man? Somehow I don't think so."

    "I can give you something better," the Reverend said as he pulled the enormous wolf hide off his back. "This is what caused the miracles. This!"

    He held the sagging fur before him in his outstretched arms. The proprietor and his friends and family turned to look at it. The proprietor sauntered back to the Reverend and ran a hand over the thick fur.

    "What do I want with this mangy thing?"

    "
It
is what caused the miracles. You who are from here and already a prince in this land, when you wear it upon your back, it will bring you rain, if that is what you wish. Since I started wearing it, I have been invincible. All that I have wished for has come true. It will work for you, too."

    "This old thing caused the miracle of the two bullets?" the proprietor asked.

    "This is what saved me," the Reverend answered.

    "And what about the elephant that flew?"

    The Reverend placed the heavy fur in the other man's arms. "Yes, it made that magnificent creature fly. This, and nothing else but this."

    "You say your wife is starving, Reverend?" the proprietor asked, his head cocked to one side. "And you need beans?"

    The Reverend nodded eagerly.

    "I have beans. I have a great deal of them."

    "I will trade you, then," the Reverend repeated. "I would be most grateful to trade this remarkable hide for your beans."

    "For this hide that has saved you and your people, you will receive food. That seems a fair deal," the proprietor said. He looked around at his companions, and they nodded. "But first, one more thing."

    "Anything," the Reverend offered.

    "I had thought that your Lord Jesus made the miracles happen, Reverend."

    A cloud passed over the Reverend's face.

    The man continued, "Didn't Jesus make the water turn into wine and the fishes into loaves of bread?"

    The Reverend took a step back. "How do you know the Gospel?"

    "I went to your school as a boy. I hated it. All those nonsense tales and strict rules."

    The Reverend tried to smile as he countered, "But you seem to have been a good pupil."

    The proprietor inched closer. "So tell me, Reverend, did your Jesus heal the sick and feed the hungry?"

    The Reverend didn't know what to say.

    "Was it He or was it this fur hide that has saved you out here in no man's land? Because if it wasn't this old, mangy thing, then our deal is off. So tell me, was it your Lord Jesus or not, Ghost Man?"

    The Reverend bowed his head. No words issued forth from his lips.

    "Come on, which was it?" one of the thuggish friends echoed.

    "Was the Lord Jesus responsible for the miracles or not?" another asked.

    The Reverend finally answered. "No, He wasn't."

    "I didn't think so," the proprietor said and spat on the floor. "Your Lord Jesus means nothing here, you foolish man."

    The proprietor then gestured to his friends to help lift the fur up onto his shoulders. Once it was in place, he paraded around the room and said, "This was a fair trade, I believe."

    The Reverend cleared his throat and finally spoke in a weak voice. "I will need five bags of beans, please."

    The proprietor raised his arms, and the animal's claws rose up, too. The fierce yellow eyes glared down at the Reverend.

    "Three bags," the proprietor replied.

    "Four."

    The proprietor motioned to one of the boys, who got up and disappeared into the back of the store.

    "I can feel it working already," the proprietor announced. "I feel stronger." He turned to the Reverend and asked, "Invincible as a god, you say? I bet you enjoyed that feeling, Ghost Man. But now you are a frail human like the rest of us."

    The Reverend stood with drooping shoulders and had no words left. The boy returned with four bags of beans and presented them to Ahcho.

    "Bring them out a few bags of rice, too," the proprietor said. "We are friends now."

    The Reverend mumbled his thanks and started toward the door.

    The proprietor called out to him, "You watch it out there, Ghost

Man. Without this fur on your back and no god to protect you, you're like everybody else."

    The Reverend nodded as he stepped outside into stark and painful sunlight. He could not argue. He understood as never before that he was like every other godless man in this godless land. His abandonment was complete. His heart sank deeper into his chest as he shut the door on the Lord forever. Ahcho joined him outside, and the Reverend turned his head away. He was too ashamed to look a good Christian in the eye.

S
hortly before labor began, Mai Lin offered sacrifices to the gods and the family ancestors, although her young mistress couldn't even recall her grandmother's grandmother's name. Mistress Grace moaned with miserable, slow pains for many hours. Mai Lin gave her a special mixture of teas proven to move things along faster. She made Grace alternately bear down over a metal tub and then walk back and forth along the upstairs hall to bring forth the baby inside. The mistress had several baths, although she said that doctors in her country would warn against it. Ignorant doctors like Hemingway claimed that germs could swim up the woman's canal and infect the unborn child, something that Mai Lin plainly knew was false. The baby would come down the river to be born, so what was the harm of it getting wet beforehand?

    In midmorning, the Reverend poked his head into his wife's bedroom and inquired after her health. Luckily, Mistress Grace was lying down at the time, and she quickly shut her eyes, pretending to be asleep. Mai Lin had been instructed not to mention that labor had begun, so he quickly left.

    Later in the afternoon, he stopped by again, and this time the situ ation was more difficult to hide. Grace sat upon her chaise and paused between pacing. The pungent smell of the ointment Mai Lin had rubbed onto her belly was hard to miss, but Mai Lin's mistress merely smiled between gritted teeth.

    "Mistress is better today," Mai Lin said to the Reverend, which was not a lie, for her cough had improved.

    "Her complexion does appear brighter," he commented.

    Mai Lin thought it remarkable that he didn't guess that the sweat on her brow and over her rosy cheeks was the first strain of the birth process. But then again, the Reverend had always been blind.

    "Mai Lin, see that Doc Hemingway is called immediately if she goes into labor," he said before returning to his study on the first floor.

    Mai Lin knew she should obey, but her mistress's eyes flew open, and she said, "Don't you dare. This is my baby. Lock the door."

    Mai Lin did as she was told, lit the lamp, and rubbed more oils on her mistress's back and belly. There was much to be done, and having a man in the room would have disturbed the effort. She lit the sacred incense to welcome a new life into the world and handed her mistress pillows to scream into, for one loud yell would carry into the courtyard, and the Reverend would be knocking in no time with Doc Hemingway at his heels.

    It was a grave responsibility, but Mai Lin had birthed more babies than she could count. She concentrated with all her being on every sign given off by her mistress's body. She sensed the pain as if it were her own. As labor progressed, her own body rose and fell with the contractions, and she told herself that this would be her last birth. She was getting too old for this. Still, she kept a hand on Grace so she could judge the intensity of the spasms. When it became too much and Mai Lin couldn't stand it any longer, she shouted again for her mistress to push.

    In the hour of the rooster, of the fourteenth day in the month December, in the second year of the Emperor Pu-Yi, in the reign of the Qing Dynasty, Grace finally let out a howl that echoed off the compound walls and cascaded into the dirt road and plains beyond. Mai Lin knew that the donkeys and horses in their stalls perked up their ears at the sound. Ahcho, smoking his pipe in the back alley, tipped his head to the side and offered a worried smile. The Reverend, seated at the teak desk in his library, set down the fountain pen with which he had been scribbling his Sunday sermon and finally allowed himself to grasp that his child had been born.

    But at a moment like this, Mai Lin didn't have time for distracting thoughts. The baby was in her hands. She set its wet and squirming body on a soft pillow and cut the cord at the navel with a pair of pinking shears. Then she applied a special poultice of ash, mud, and dung to the umbilicus. In the way that she knew best, she lifted the child in her arms, pressed it against her shoulder, and slapped the tiny back ten times. A yowl issued forth. She wiped the infant perfunctorily, wrapped it, and placed it in her mistress's arms.

    "Your daughter," she said.

    Grace, as red-faced as the baby and wet with perspiration, held her child against her cheek and wept. "My girl, my precious, precious girl," she said.

    Mai Lin knew this was only the beginning, for now she must help her young mistress to breast-feed, which the master did not approve of and so would take place only in private. Stupid Westerners, Mai Lin thought. The Reverend would change his mind when he understood that animal milk was virtually impossible to come by now.

    After wiping the floor and tossing the birth cloths into the metal tub, Mai Lin returned to her mistress's bedside. The baby had begun to root, and Mai Lin took this for a good sign. This girl baby with her pinched and demanding face was not faint of heart.

    Mai Lin took her mistress's wrist between her fingers and felt for her vital signs, which, unlike the child's, now appeared to be startlingly weak. She studied Grace's suddenly pale face. Only moments before the mother had seemed robust, but her skin was turning gray and chalky, her eyes glazed. Mai Lin pressed lightly again on her thin wrist but could not hear the strong current of life that she was seeking.

    Mai Lin swooped up the baby and placed her in a bed of blankets on the floor. She pulled back the sheet that covered her mistress's lower half. A pool of blood glistened in the lamplight between her legs. Grace began to writhe in pain. After several moments of examining the expelled matter, Mai Lin did not feel all that she wanted to feel. Something wasn't right.

    Grace tossed and moaned, clearly in as strong pain now as she had experienced during actual labor. Mai Lin had no choice but to clamber up onto the bed. Despite her thick, long skirts and awkward legs that had little strength anymore, she nonetheless made herself sit astride her mistress.

    Grace's head was tipped back, her mouth gaping, her eyes open and apparently unseeing. She did not seem to notice that Mai Lin now sat atop her, but she would notice it in the next moment. For Mai Lin used all her tiny body's strength, all her years of accumulated wisdom and power, and thrust her weight steadily and forcefully into her open palms. She pressed down upon her mistress's engorged uterus.

    Grace let out a scream that made her birth sounds seem like whispers. This was a cry of pain the likes of which Mai Lin had rarely heard before, and she had heard a great deal in her many years. Although Grace appeared terribly frail, the sound that came out of her had the fury and desperation of a tiger caught in a trap. Her mistress's weak arms flailed, and her bony fists struck Mai Lin repeatedly with surprising force. Mai Lin did not flinch or give up. She took in a second large breath and pressed all her weight down again. Grace's eyes opened wider, and she stared at Mai Lin in disbelief.

    "You're trying to kill me!" she screamed.

    Mai Lin shook her head at the foolish young woman but couldn't take the time to argue or explain. Instead, she reared up one final time and composed all her strength into a single long push. As Grace's screams and accusations slammed against the plaster walls and her hands battered the old woman's ribs, Mai Lin began to hear frantic pounding at the bedroom door.

    The Reverend shouted, "Unhand my wife. Let me in, you old crone."

    The final effort was done. Mai Lin had nothing left in her, and she hoped the same was true of her mistress. She lost her balance and fell forward onto Grace's sweat-soaked body in her simple white chemise. Mai Lin cared about the foolish girl in spite of herself. Then she regained her composure and carefully slid off the bed. She stood on unsteady legs as pain shot through her bent back, but she chose to ignore it.

    Instead, she pulled the sheet away again and carefully inspected the bloody evidence, but still remained skeptical. She lifted the lamp and had no choice but to reach up inside her mistress. Mistress Grace writhed and arched her back, but Mai Lin was quick and sure. Her fingers finally grasped the cause. She pulled it out and did not flinch at the sight, nor was she made queasy, but instead, like a true scientist, Mai Lin carefully studied the proof in her hands until she felt certain she had found the offending remains of the birth sack.