White Lotus

by John Hersey

  We came up on Peace from behind. He was standing on the open ground, near a rude belfry, or gong house, which looked absurdly like the Yen’s dairy, with his legs spread and arms folded, gazing up at the soaring lines of the yamen. A narrow, winding stone stairway led up to the awesome portico with its huge purple columns. Clumps of goats stood ruminating in the shade in the gateway near the glowing shafts; a broadcast of their droppings trailed up the steps.

  Peace stood there, just so, staring, for a time that seemed endless.

  Finally, at a grunt from him, and a sudden start away, we tore off to High Thoughts Hill and the patrician end of town, where famous men lived in beautiful houses, and Peace was truly and dangerously drunk now, and it was all Auntie and Solemn and I could do to hush his murderous shouts and steer him along.

  We walked out Favorable Wind Brook Road toward home, and I thought often of my having ridden out that way the first time on the cart with Mink and the agent.

  There were certain stout men Peace said he wanted to speak to at the villas along the road, and he made an effort to hide his drunkenness when he approached these men—but he fed it, too, offering and taking yet more drams. Either the country slaves were more suspicious than the town whites or they sensed Peace’s state. The first three said they would think about what he said—ponder it—turn it round.

  Peace was disgusted; wanted to see no more cowards that day. We went straight home….

  The next morning at Top Man’s second blast on the buffalo horn we started out, men and women alike carrying scythes to cut a meadow’s hay, and we saw that Peace had not yet come out of his room. Auntie told me to hurry and rouse him.

  I ran to look for him first in the room where he lived with Solemn and Solemn’s wife and two children.

  He lay asleep on his pallet, loudly snoring. Frantic, I shook his shoulder with my hand, again and again, to try to waken him. I called him, dug my knee in his side, lay on him and rolled on him. The smell of spirits on his breath made me giddy; my heart was beating wildly.

  All at once he lunged upward, with a kind of growl, and I slipped aside, and on his knees on the k’ang he ripped his long gown from the throat downward almost to his groin. He pulled me to his chest with a pitiful moan, and he drew me down—but he suddenly fell asleep again, groaning and snorting.

  Then he seemed abruptly to waken, and he saw me through swollen eyelids, and he said, “What are you doing here?”

  I leaped up and stood by his k’ang, and I said, “You’re late, Peace. Top Man has blown his second horn. They’re going out.”

  “Thank you, my dear handmaiden, Sorek woman,” he said, in his usual formal tone. But he was still drunk.

  The Fish Feast

  Late in the sixth month came the summer lay-by, and a time of light work after the tobacco had all been transplanted and the hay was in, and the weather came on fine, and word was passed around that there would be a fish feast for all the slaves of all the owners out our way, organized by the slaves themselves.

  Peace took me fishing alone for the common supply the afternoon before the affair: Auntie was to mend his ripped gown, Harlot had planned to do some wash.

  As we set out Auntie sallied after us and threw a child’s wornout shoe at Peace for luck in his fishing; it struck him on a buttock, and he picked the ragged shoelet up and roared that he would knock her ears together so they would lay side by side like two millet cakes, but she was running toward our quarter and would not look back at us for fear of snapping the luck. Peace laughed hard.

  There were many whites out fishing along Favorable Wind Brook, but we found a fair place by the lower end of a pool. Peace was plain, jovial, playful, and boyish, and I was unusually spirited. Peace warned me not to bad-luck the poles by stepping over them, and he went off to catch some baby grasshoppers. The tall, thin slave Tree, who was fishing a few yards upstream, began to eye me and tease me, and I had a wild warm feeling, as if my loins had drams sloshing around in them, and when Peace came back and sensed what was happening and in good humor called to Tree, “Young man, plow not with my heifer,” I laughed, as Peace himself did. He baited my hook, and I spat on the tiny green machine of a grasshopper and dropped my line into the pool, but I pulled it out often and fished poorly. Whatever Peace needed, I got or did for him.

  “See that rock, Sorek girl?” he said, pointing to a round boulder with green skirts at the center of the pool. “That rock is called Etam. That rock is Etam rock, daughter. My rock.”

  Peace’s eye was suddenly clouded, and I was afraid.

  But at once Peace resumed his lighthearted manner and cub gestures, cuffing at the heads of weeds and, once, tickling me in a grandfatherish, poky way.

  We caught no fish, and Peace went to the water’s edge and waded half up his shins and pulled up the long shafts of seven reeds, and he came up to me and offered them to me, and said, “Bind me, woman. These are strong. Tie me up. Just try and see.”

  Something—the fierce look in Peace’s eye, his calling me woman instead of daughter, or perhaps a rushing feeling that I wanted to be with Tree, who was never baffling—something undid me, and I was suddenly sobbing, with my face in my hands and my elbows bracketing my knees.

  “Come, daughter,” Peace gently said. “No fish in this pool around Etam.” And we went home.

  What colors at the fish feast the next afternoon! The field hands must have borrowed from the house slaves, and the house slaves must have wheedled new wornouts from the mistresses. I had a patterned red silk cape that Auntie had thrown over my shoulders. We paraded in a clearing by the brook in yellow people’s hateful leftover clothes—and such graciousness and kindness!

  “Evening, White Lotus, sweet child!”

  The men bowed. Friends were arm in arm. The day was as fresh and smooth as young Chekiang fan-leaf. Slaves playing pitchpot—arching arrows from a distance toward a narrow-necked jar—whooped at successes. Everywhere the talk was brisk, argumentative. My mind was whirling, and I could not make head or tail of the absurd chatter.

  “If a snapping turtle grabs you, he’s never going to let go till it thunders.”

  “Ayah!”

  “Crayfish all get poor on a night when you have a big moon.”

  “Tee hee hee!”

  Solemn came up and reported to Peace that Ditcher was going around asking the captains to give him their votes for general in the war when the choosing came.

  Peace took this calmly. “Let him,” he said; and then, with a smile, “Ditcher has a powerful frame.”

  Auntie was carrying a bottle for Peace, and he enlisted several men, Mink among others (“You’re bent over, but you’re strong”), and some came to him, whether for drams or for a chance to fight the yellows I could not have said.

  “White God in heaven, you’re too old,” Peace said to Ma’s Mule Foot, one of these volunteers. “You’re too old to fight the yellow people, Mule Foot. Go along now.”

  “I tell you this, Peace: I can run you up some bullets. I know where to get a mold. I can keep you in bullets.”

  “You do that, Mule Foot. That would be good.”

  Peace met one of the slaves with whom he had talked on the way out from Twin Hills. “Have you pondered this business?”

  “I have. I’m going to be in it.”

  “You have a sword, friend?”

  “My master has one, hangs up in the house. I’m going to get that one when the time comes.”

  “You’re a good man,” Peace said.

  Peace was all practicality, and again I had a moment of doubting his prophetic side. He gave me the name of each recruit to remember, and he drank hardly at all.

  The fish was delicious, but there was not nearly enough, and the men began to accuse the women jokingly of having eaten it all.

  Peace shouted out at the top of his voice, “Captains to meet by Etam rock. Follo
w me.” He nodded to Auntie, and we three knew he wanted us. He led his party to the bank of the pool where he and I had caught no fish.

  The meeting was at first disorderly; all the captains had ideas. One said an oath of secrecy should be sworn. Another said a man practiced in Lamaistic charms should be found to make conjurations that would kill any white who talked about the war. Ch’eng’s Candy said, “We’re going to kill all the yellow males from the cradle up, but we’re going to spare all ages of females.” Sheep Wu said, “Ai, yes, that’s the way it has to be.” There was talk of arms, and Solemn said the men should steal scythes from their masters’ toolhouses and bring them to Yen’s smithy; he knew how to make swords and pikes of them. During all this Peace held back, silently smiling and nodding. Wang’s Judge said he was going to enlist at Kaifeng market—could easily get fifty men there. Candy was to go down as far as “the singing tree” to enlist downcountry slaves; there was a diviner down there who could warn of difficulties and hazards with jumping sticks. Sheep Wu laid claim to the bargemen on the canal; another said he would get the copper-pit men; another, the godown boys; another, the dike-menders; another, the slave masons and bricklayers building the new prison. Sheep Wu said he was going all the way to the province of Anhwei to enlist, he needed money to hire time off from his mistress, and Ditcher said Sheep Wu would also need money for liquor to persuade the Anhwei men, and Candy said they would have to hire a donkey for Sheep Wu to ride down there. Solemn suggested going around to all the slaves at the fish feast gathering coppers for a treasury.

  “Slow down!” Peace’s voice was sharp. “Not so fast. We have a decision to make.”

  “What is that, Peace?” Sheep Wu, full of his trip to Anhwei, said.

  “This army is not Tou Mu.”

  Ditcher said, “Talk plain.”

  “Remember! Tell them.”

  The idea of Tou Mu had terrified me, one night when Smart in the dark smithy had instructed me in a line of ancient yellow nightmares: Shen Kung-pao throwing his own head into the sky from Unicorn Precipice; the demon Hsü Hao, Emptiness and Devastation, gnawing at the vitals of the Emperor Ming Huang; the dragon with the head of a camel, eyes of a devil, neck of a snake, belly of a huge cockle, scales of a carp, soles of a tiger, claws of an eagle. It thrilled me to have Peace call on me for my small part in the war. Yet I was shaken by a demand like this, for it made me feel the icy breath of the fanatic in him; it reminded me of his unbending hardness like that of a hoe head. My voice trembled as I said, “Tou Mu, goddess of the North Star—three eyes and eighteen arms, that’s the point. All around her, hands, hands—holding a spear, a pagoda, a dragon’s head, and so on. Eighteen arms.”

  The brave captains of our army which would set us free, sound and selfless men, suddenly looked as if they might faint or vomit: perhaps not so much at the thought of this horrible female creature as at Peace’s way of dealing with them.

  Peace raised one clenched hand and blithely said, “Time to pick a general. One pair of eyes and arms.”

  Now there was much bickering as to how the selection should be made, and finally Sheep Wu suggested that each man should place a pebble down, according to his choice, on one of a row of flat stones that would represent the several captains.

  But then we heard Peace’s cavernous voice, saying with a force which simply brushed aside all possibility of contradiction, “You can choose your second-in-command that way if you want. And treasurer, we’ll need a treasurer. As for general, there will be only one general.”

  There was no doubt what Peace meant; there was no question in our minds who our general was. With subdued voices and cautious gestures, the men chose Wang’s Judge as second, and Solemn as treasurer.

  I was afraid to glance at Ditcher, the pretender; I heard him muttering and rumbling.

  Somehow the news that Peace was general swept ahead of us through the fish-feast crowd as we returned into it. “Evening, General,” men and women would respectfully say.

  A thin man slave of Chi Kuo came up to Peace and said, “I want to fight the yellow people, General, but I can’t move my hip down here, on this side, I have a crippling pain in my shoulder socket joint, and it seems as if I have ants creeping under my skin down my eating arm….” And he went on with the catalogue of his miseries, and finally asked Peace if he could help him get well so he might fight.

  Peace fixed his harsh charismatic eye on the man and grandly said, “Brass and copper, they’re great enemies of bone aches. Tie a ribbon of brownsnake skin around your arm where it hurts. What is your name, anyhow? You can stew down some grease from a marsh hen or a good fat owl and rub it on the joints that hurt. When you put your shoes on out in the field, wear a cash out in the toe of one shoe one day and the other shoe the next. Fried grubs, they make a good ointment for pains like these. You see, these pains come out of the earth. Remember, tell this man about brass from Brother Smart’s book.”

  I had to struggle to think what Peace wanted, for now that Peace was general it seemed that a thawing change had come over him, and I was carried away by the power of the emotion which, beneath the grandiose manner and the humble remedies, shook Peace’s voice and hands—his great concern for a slave in pain, his trying to convey, without saying it, that all these pains came from being a slave.

  “And the Lord,” I lamely said, “sent fiery serpents among the people, and they bit the people, and many people of Israel died. And Moses made a serpent of brass, and put it upon a pole, and it happened that if a serpent had bitten any man, when he gazed at the serpent of brass, he lived.”

  All around, men and women gravely nodded. “General, I give you ten thousand thanks,” the man with rheumatism said, bowing and backing away in the yellow manner.

  Summer Evening

  Those seventh-month days were panther days, the heat was enough to drown one, and all we did the day long was hoe, hoe, hoe, keeping the tobacco mounds clean and the soil open and friable.

  After dark one evening Peace took us to the blacksmith shop, the Camp of Dan, where, this night, the only eerie thing was the absence of eeriness. Everything was downright. Solemn had the fire going; he was cutting scythe blades in half and making swords. Peace set himself to woodworking the buckthorn handles. Men kept coming in. Ma’s Whippoorwill gave in two scythes, and applied for a captaincy of the foot, but Peace said he stuttered too much to give commands, he could be a donkeyman: Hai! did not Big Master Ma have a sorrel horse? That horse would be earmarked for Whippoorwill. Lü’s Gallant, too, wanted to be a captain, but Peace sniffed and said he was too trifling a fellow. At this Gallant stamped up and down the smithy shouting curses. “All right!” he finally said. “If you will make me a captain I will get you thirty, forty small arms, by Buddha’s belly. By which I mean pistols and matchlocks, it’s the truth! My master has twenty-nine right there in the tavern. I know where.”

  “I will go look at them,” Peace calmly said, and they set the following market day for this project.

  Various men, on the sly, stooped and made away with pinches of anvil dust, the shiny black flakes that scaled away from hot iron when Solemn pounded it; for that stuff would give strength.

  Late in the night several captains were present, and in murmuring tones Peace said that in four weeks the business should commence. “Too soon,” Ch’eng’s Candy said; we would need more arms and better plans.

  Peace was angry; his voice bounced among the roof joists. “We have plans!” Solemn and he would have twelve dozen swords made by then.

  But, Candy said, we might have five hundred men.

  Fine, Peace said, fine, fine, Chou’s Tinsmith was arranging with Ku the Usher to let us into the yamen to get the arms out that were stored there.

  To do what?—Candy wanted to know.

  Well, the plan was to fire the lower part of town, around the Canal Bund, where the godowns were packed with inflammable goods and the houses we
re poor and thatched; the yellows would go to fight the fires; we would seize the arms and ammunition and commence the attack. But first we would meet at the bridge on Favorable Wind Brook and send a company to Lü’s tavern to capture some arms that were hidden there.

  This arguing made me nervous, and the sight of a forehead—it was Sheep Wu’s—with drops of sweat gleaming on it increased my trembling. The room was suddenly charged; the dry air of practicality was gone. The smithy fire was low. The lamp was flickering, its wick smoking. I saw that Smart, his eyes rolling, had taken over. He broke a rain crow’s egg in a rusty basin of water, and he directed each man to wash his face in it, and I wanted to bury myself in the heap of scraps in a corner, because I knew he was going to call in a ghost.

  And then, yes, it was there, I knew it from the men’s faces, though I could not see it myself because I had not washed my eyes with the mixture. Lord! Lord! Peace’s guttural grunts and muttering told me it was the yellow Matriarch. I could only imagine her as a dim figure in the gloom of the grove. Mercy, God—a spirit of a living person.

  Peace was standing, facing her—and now his forehead was bathed in sweat.

  What could I do to drive her away? I could not run. Sprinkle salt in the fire? A glass button on a dog’s neck? Burn an old shoe? Rice brandy on the ground? Put a knife that had not touched wood in my hair? I had nothing on me for exorcism; I could only die.

  Peace said in a steady voice, “I am going to kill you, Old Matriarch.”

  “Amen,” Smart said, as hollow as a pitcher.

  Then Peace said, “Get rid of her, Rememberer.”

  I was paralyzed. I had no idea what to do.

  “Book words backwards,” Peace moaned in the old language. “Hurry.”

  “ ‘Light be there let, said God and,’ ” I began, and at once I saw Peace’s huge arms relaxing. “ ‘Waters the of face the upon moved God….’ ”