by Bo Caldwell
The women are fascinated by her, but no more so than I. No one told me that having a child is like falling in love. I feel giddy and light, and I never tire of gazing at her. She is a marvel or, as Mo Yun says, she is our Pao Pei—our Little Precious. The world seems blessed and beautiful and charmed, and I cannot remember my dull old life before our Lily. How did we live without her?
As December approached, Katherine longed to spend Christmas in Ch’eng An Fu with Edward and Naomi and their children. She was fatigued and I worried about her getting sick, but I could not refuse her. We set off two days before Christmas, with Katherine sitting on the bench of the wagon holding our seven-month-old daughter wrapped tightly in woolen blankets. To lighten the load for the donkey, and to keep warm, I walked.
Late on the first afternoon we reached a village in the low hills of Shantung province where, because of the cold, we stopped at the first inn we came to, the Inn of Great Bliss, a dismal place that I suspected was no worse than any others. After a dinner of noodles with vinegar, we purchased millet straw from the inn’s owner, a small stout woman whose manner let us know that having us as guests did not please her. In our room we spread a thick layer of straw on the earthen floor and covered it with the bedding we had brought with us, then Katherine and I lay close together on our makeshift bed with Lily nestled between us. Katherine was exhausted from sitting in the springless cart all day, and she and the baby quickly fell asleep.
I was in that vague state of half-sleep, half-wakefulness when something woke me. I looked at Katherine and saw she was asleep, which did not surprise me; she was slightly hard of hearing due to ear infections she had suffered as a child. I lay very still, listening, and heard men talking loudly in the inn’s main room. I knew what kind of place we were in—rough, unfriendly to foreigners, far from the larger roads—and I knew the group had been drinking rice wine all night. The voices grew louder and someone called out, “Shah, shah!”—Kill, kill!—followed by raucous laughter. My heart began to race; I was afraid not for myself but for Katherine and Lily next to me. If the situation worsened, I did not know how I would protect them.
The shouting and coarse conversation went on for a while, then suddenly there was a moment of quiet followed by a heavy thud, as though something or someone had been knocked to the floor. The voices stopped except for one man, speaking in low, even tones. Then I heard the sounds of men leaving the place, and everything became still. More time passed, and I heard only a dog barking in the distance.
I finally fell into an uneasy sleep, and when I awoke the winter sunrise had lightened the room’s darkness to sepia. Outside it had begun to snow, and snowflakes had drifted in through the tile roof, leaving a thin layer of white that covered Katherine and Lily and me like a blessing. I knew we had been saved.
An hour later when I asked the proprietor for tea and noodles, she treated me very differently than she had the night before. She seemed frightened; she would not meet my eyes, and when I tried to pay for our breakfast, she shook her head vehemently. In answer to my confusion, she held out a long strip of red paper, eight inches long and four inches wide. It was a calling card, and its size indicated that it was from a person of some notoriety; the larger the card, the more important its bearer. Two black characters were printed vertically on it, and when I read them I felt a wave of apprehension. I had heard of this person—Hsiao Lao, or Laughing Tiger—a well-known bandit chief. On the back of the card was a Chinese proverb printed in neat black characters: a good neighbor is a found treasure.
I had no idea what to make of the message or the card, and while I hoped not to cross paths with the bandit chief again, I decided that if I did I would be better off if he considered me a friend. I carefully folded the calling card and hid it in the lining of my woolen hat. I said nothing to Katherine.
At that time bandits were a constant and very real threat. The young republic was in turmoil; the new government established in 1911 had been unable to unite the country, leading to a period of violence and unrest that would last for decades. Without a strong central government or military presence, banditry became widespread, and men like Hsiao Lao did as they pleased. They held up travelers, taxed everything and everyone, and raided villages, towns, and cities at will, injuring or killing those who resisted and burning villages and crops to the ground. Kidnapping was a means of increasing their income, and they targeted anyone they thought might bring a good ransom, particularly foreigners, all of whom were believed to be wealthy.
For these reasons, I worried for several months after our stay at the Inn of Great Bliss that Hsiao Lao could appear at our home at any moment, demanding what I couldn’t imagine. Then our lives changed so profoundly that I didn’t think of bandits or anything else in the world; I thought only of our child.
In early April of 1917, when Lily was eleven months old, she woke crying and feverish in the night. She would take neither water nor the canned milk we ordered from the United States, and the way her abdomen tensed and contracted made it clear that she was in pain. Katherine bathed her in cool water and held her, and Lily grew calmer and fell asleep.
But by next morning the fever had returned, and it remained throughout that day and evening, despite everything we did to relieve it. The next two days continued like that, Lily frighteningly hot, we trying hard to cool her.
On the third day Katherine came to me, still holding Lily in her arms. I had hardly seen her not holding Lily for those three days. Katherine’s face was pale and drawn, her dark gray eyes anxious. “I know what’s wrong,” she said. “There’s mucus and blood in her stool. She has dysentery.”
I sat down as heavily as if I had been struck. At that time and place, dysentery was nearly always fatal in an infant.
That night began our vigil. We placed wet towels on Lily’s feverish body, trying to keep the fever down, and we held her close when she seemed to be in pain. She was becoming dehydrated and losing vital body salts, but there was no doctor to call and no hospital to take her to within hundreds of miles; we were everything. No matter what we did, she grew weaker by the day, sometimes experiencing bowel movements every hour. We did not have the only medications that might have helped, emetine and magnesium sulfate. Katherine had ordered both of them from Parke-Davis a year earlier, just as she always did, but we had missed several shipments of supplies, presumably intercepted by bandits. We sent a messenger to Edward in Ch’eng An Fu, but they too had missed shipments and had nothing to offer.
I had never felt such helplessness or despair. On the sixth night, unable to sleep, I went outside. In my exhaustion, I had not noticed that Katherine was not in the bed next to me, so I was surprised to find her next to me in the darkness. As I stood there, I began to question everything I had done since coming to China. Every decision I had made—save asking Katherine to be my wife—seemed foolish and ill-conceived, and I saw that we should have gone home when we had a child. Surely we had done enough in China by then.
Finally Katherine spoke. “I have been pleading with Him,” she said. “All my life, I have tried to be obedient, to say, ‘Thy will, not mine.’ But I can’t say it tonight. For the first time since I was a child, the words won’t come.” She paused for a few moments. “It’s my fault that we don’t have any emetine or magnesium sulfate. I should have ordered them earlier. I should have ordered more.” She shook her head and began to weep.
I held her close to me. “You did nothing wrong,” I said, and I thought, It’s Your fault, not hers.
Katherine was trembling in my arms, and I wished for something more to tell her. But I had no answers; all I could tell her was what I felt. “I don’t understand either,” I whispered, and she nodded.
Three more days passed. We held Lily constantly, for if we laid her in her crib, she cried out in pain. Mo Yun asked if she could give Lily an herbal remedy made from shepherd’s purse, a weed that grew in the west of China. We said yes without having to discuss it; we had seen much evidence of Mo Yun’s abilities as
a healer. She charred the surface of the herb’s leaves, mixed them with honey and water, and fed them to Lily. Katherine and I were hopeful, and we watched for the slightest sign of improvement. Lily did seem better; she had a more restful night and was more peaceful in the morning. But by the next evening she was worse again.
Word of her illness spread quickly, and people brought us food we had not asked for and for which we had no appetite. On the tenth night Lily grew less fretful, which I thought to be a good sign. Then Katherine said, “Look at her eyes.” They were half open and glassy; she did not seem fully conscious. Her breathing had grown irregular and her pulse weak, and I understood that our child was dying.
At sunset Katherine asked me to hold her, a first; I usually had to convince her to rest. I took our infant in my arms then watched in disbelief as Katherine devoured a bowl of noodles, more food than she had eaten in a week, then washed it down with a cup of tea so hot it must have scalded her mouth and throat. Minutes later, when she had finished, she held her arms out, ready to take the baby back. Seeing my confusion, she said, “I need my strength.” I understood: she was eating to gain strength for Lily’s death.
Our firstborn died the evening of April 11; I cannot say the hour. I know only that it had been dark out for some time. We were in our bedroom. A small piece of camphor wood burning in a saucer gave a soft light and a musky scent. Katherine sat in the rocking chair I had made, holding Lily in her arms; I was kneeling on the floor next to her, praying, my hand on Lily’s head. Lily’s breathing had become increasingly shallow and more labored.
I do not know how long we sat like that. At some point Katherine said, “She’s gone,” and I nodded. But we still stayed like that for some time, the only sounds in the room that of Katherine weeping and the creak of the chair as she continued to rock.
When Katherine finally laid our child’s body on our bed, I could see that it was painful for her to do so. It was very late at night, but Chung Hao went for the carpenter who had helped to make our new home habitable, and as I watched, he worked in our courtyard, making a small coffin of hard Chinese elm, the same wood I had used for our furniture. Katherine and Mo Yun bathed the body and dressed our daughter in a gown of white silk that Mo Yun had made. When the carpenter had finished, he sealed the bottom of the casket, rough and unvarnished, in quicklime; then we took it to Katherine in the bedroom, where she lined it with a white coverlet. When there was no longer any excuse to wait, I carefully laid our child’s body inside the coffin, the most difficult thing I had ever done.
When the workman had sealed the lid with quicklime, Katherine covered the coffin with a white coverlet my mother had sent us and with chrysanthemums brought by Mo Yun, who said they were a symbol of longevity, and that because of Christ she knew Lily’s soul would have eternal life. We held a small service in our bedroom with Mo Yun and Chung Hao and a few other church members. The whole room had the clean scent of freshly cut wood, a scent that would from that time on awaken in me a sense of great loss and great love.
In the morning I visited the magistrate for permission to bury a foreigner in a Chinese cemetery. Because the magistrate’s wife was Katherine’s friend, she pled our case and convinced her husband that we should be allowed to bury our daughter in the family graveyard of Chung Hao, who said that it should be so because he and I were brothers.
That afternoon, Chung Hao and I visited the cemetery, a small plot of land surrounded by pine trees an hour’s walk outside of the city. Katherine did not accompany us; she said it was a decision she could not make. Chung Hao and I decided on a space near his mother—so that, he said, she could watch over Lily—and Chung Hao hired workers to prepare the grave.
Early the next morning, we prepared to take the coffin to the cemetery. When we opened the door of our home and stepped outside, we faced a large crowd, some sixty people standing closely together in the chill morning air. Word of our loss had traveled in the night, and our church family had come to accompany us. Katherine and I were stunned by the gathering, most of whom were peasants and farmers. For a few moments I could only look at them, unable to take in the fact of their presence. “Thank you,” I murmured at last, and they nodded silently.
We began making our way through the city. People walked next to us and behind us and in front of us, and at the cemetery they surrounded us as I prayed aloud and read Psalm 121. Then, as Katherine and I watched, Chung Hao and two other church members lowered the coffin into the freshly dug grave, and we said goodbye to our firstborn.
April 14, 1917
We buried our daughter yesterday, and I am brought up short by the harshness of Your ways. I have given my all for You and in return You have taken the gift I love most—my sweet child. But perhaps I am mistaken; perhaps I haven’t given my all but have held something back. Did I love her more than You? I know You are a jealous God, but are You that jealous, that You would take the other object of my devotion? I feel broken, as though there is a great gash inside of me, and my only prayer is a question: “What have You done?” I ask not from anger but from confusion, for I truly do not understand.
Perhaps You are a flawed God, imperfect as we are. We are, after all, made in Your image. Perhaps it was not Your intention to take Lily, but Your inattention. Did You look away for a moment? Was Your mind elsewhere? Many times a day I ask myself what else I could have done and search for some mistake I made. But perhaps You are at fault, not I. It seems there is so much You could have done.
When I have railed against You and worn myself out, I ask You to receive me again, for I have nowhere else to go. You are my God, my only God, and for now that must be enough. I don’t understand You, but I am here, as are You. That is my prayer for now.
May 20, 1917
Grief has made me a recluse. I don’t like to leave our home, and while I force myself to visit those who are too sick to come to me, were I to have my way I wouldn’t leave for many days. I know Will bears the same sorrow I do; I see the deep sadness in his eyes and how distracted he is when speaking to people and the way his shoulders stoop when he doesn’t know I’m watching. But what has hollowed me out seems to have given him wings. He travels now, walking miles and miles from one farming village to another. In the past either Chung Hao or I accompanied him on these treks, but he goes alone now, by choice. At first his ardor and faithfulness for our mysterious Lord made me wistful, even envious. But now I wonder, for while he says he makes these trips because there is much to do and time is short, I have begun to believe that he leaves because being here is too painful.
In a way his absences are a respite, for I keep my grief to myself when he is home. Will has a tender heart that is tenderest of all toward me, and I don’t think he could bear to see the depth of my sorrow. I suspect he feels the same, which is probably for the best. I think the sharp edges of our loss and our gutted spirits make us unable to comfort each other. We are just surviving, each of us too wounded to ease the other’s pain. And so I let Will see only the quiet tears—my courteous, moderated, composed grief. The rest I save for when he is away, and once he is gone I give in to my sadness and am able to do little else.
Nine days ago I was sitting at the window, trying to darn a sock. Simple tasks like these take me a long time now; I cannot keep my mind focused on what’s in front of me. That afternoon I alternated between staring down at the sock and looking out the window. I wasn’t looking for anyone; Will would not be back for several days. But I kept watching anyway.
It was sometime after lunch when I saw Chung Hao go to the front gate that opens to the street and admit someone into our courtyard. I felt a wave of dread for a moment, fearing the magistrate’s wife and her entourage were paying a visit. They have been extraordinarily kind to me since Lily’s death, bringing all kinds of gifts: pickled eggs, apricots, candied lotus seeds, ivory chopsticks, embroidery. I am touched by their kindness, but my conversational and social skills are greatly diminished, and I did not see how I would greet them cordially. Then I
saw that it wasn’t the magistrate’s wife or any of her companions; it was my own sister walking across our courtyard.
I am usually careful about appearances here in Kuang P’ing Ch’eng, even in our home, but I ran to Naomi like a child and fell into her arms. She held me close and whispered, “Ach, meine Beistand”—standby, her name for me from childhood—and I whispered the question that torments me: “Why?”
Naomi led me inside, then faced me and looked me over, taking stock. The moment was familiar—she used to do the same thing each day when I was little, before I set out for school or church. But the sadness and worry in her expression were new, and her appraisal made me appraise myself. I saw my soiled skirt with its creases and stains and my dirty nails, and I touched my hair and could not remember when I had last brushed it thoroughly, let alone washed it.
Naomi kissed my cheek and smoothed my hair. “Come,” she said, and she guided me toward the stairs. “It is as when you were little. First we wash you. Then we feed you. Then you rest.” I nodded, completely willing to be taken care of. All I wanted was for her to talk more; the sound of her voice and of her faint German accent, somehow still present all these years and miles away from home, were a salve I had craved without even knowing it.
Beistand. When I was a child, I was Naomi’s constant helper and assistant, ready to do whatever she asked. She was my confidante; nothing felt real until I had told her about it. I adored her, and after she told me the meaning of her name—my sweetness—I decided she was my sweetness, God’s gift especially for me. When she left our home to begin her training at the orphanage, I was bereft. Her departure seemed to herald bad news; six months later our mother died, a loss I could not take in. It wasn’t until Naomi came home several months later that our mother’s death became real to me.
