Dreams of the Red Phoenix (10 page)

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 expres
sion 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 diz
zying 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.

C
harles 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 shuf
fling 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 vege
tables 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 cher
ry and ginkgo branches. Shriveled grandmothers in many-lay
ered 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 start
ing to grasp, as often as soldiers, were prey to the Japanese Im
perial 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 sym
bol, 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 grand
father 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 be
fore.

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 Chi
nese 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 in
sisted 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 old
er, would inflict such an experience on a small child while wear
ing 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 dia
lect—one from the countryside that Charles happened to recog
nize 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 dia
lect. “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 em
barrass them by showing that he had grasped their rude com
ments.

“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 opin
ion. 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 hap
py 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 coun
try 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 dev
ils. 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 sto
ries, 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.