by Virginia Pye
Old Tupan Feng doddered forward and, with some effort, pulled his long, ornamental Japanese sword from its lacquered sheath, almost toppling as he raised it up toward the ceiling. “Halt,” he said. “Unhand Mrs. Carson.”
Major Hattori had been standing back with his hands on his hips, but he now strode toward the old Chinese man and laughed. “Where did you get that saber, grandfather?” he asked.
Tupan Feng blinked several times and brought the sword back down to his side. “Tupan Feng Number One Student at Tokyo Military Academy. Top of class. Excellent training.” He bowed.
“That’s right,” the major said without bowing as he took it from Tupan Feng’s trembling hand. “I recognize this as one of ours.” He held the sword out before him in his open palms. The silver blade shone handsomely in the dim light of the front hall. “You have taken good care of it.”
Tupan Feng raised his chin as high as he could. “We were taught many important things. Discipline and virtue above all. I tried to bring this superior Japanese standard to my people here in my province. But they were lazy and would not obey.”
“Of course.” Major Hattori chuckled. “They are Chinese. What did you expect?”
“But,” the old warlord continued, his voice growing stronger than Shirley had ever heard it before, “they were never cruel, evil, or heartless. They are not barbarians like you!”
The major swiped the saber in the air, and the others skittered back, but Tupan Feng stuck out his chest and kept his firm gaze forward. “If you must take a prisoner,” he said, “I volunteer. I am highest ranking of these people. I am the only military here. They are civilians. We do not attack civilians. We are civilized.”
The major signaled his men. As they pushed Shirley out onto the porch, she called over her shoulder, “Please find Charles and reassure him that his mother will be all right.” Once out on the porch, she planted her feet on the red-painted floorboards and shouted, “Let go of me! I am perfectly capable of walking without assistance. Major, tell your men to release me.”
The major nodded to his men, and they let go of her arms. Shirley straightened her skirt and blouse and looked down upon them with fiery eyes. “My riding coat, gentlemen. I never go out in the evening without proper outerwear.” Lian instructed Li Juan to bring the coat. After it was placed over Shirley’s shoulders, she said, “Do get word to Reverend Wells, though I hate to bother him in the evening when he likes to read.”
“Enough instruction,” the major shouted. He motioned to his men, and one of them prodded her forward with the butt of his rifle to her shoulder blade.
“That is completely unnecessary,” Shirley said as she started down the steps. But then she stopped: there he was, tromping up them, looking as bedraggled as a boy his age could. “Charles,” she asked, “are you all right?”
It took Charles a moment to come out of his haze, but then he looked up and saw Japanese soldiers standing behind his mother, their rifles pointed at her. He clutched the railing and stepped out of their way. “Mother! What’s going on? Where are they taking you?”
“Don’t panic, darling,” she said. “It’s just a misunderstanding. We’ll get it straightened out. Steady hand and cool heart, as Father used to say.”
Charles then surprised her, and perhaps himself, by speaking directly to the Japanese officer as he passed. “This is a clear violation of the Geneva Convention. The legation in Peking will hear about it. We’ll get the American forces involved if we have to! Don’t even think of hurting her, and I mean it!”
The soldiers nudged Shirley onto the mission grounds. Lian threw her arms around Li Juan, who held on to Dao-Ming. The major gestured for Shirley to move, and she set off. Fear swirled and tangled her thoughts and made her legs weak and heavy, but her heart was calm.
Fifteen
Cook set Caleb’s head down on the straw pillow and wiped watery porridge from his chin. “Sun out today. Reverend feel better,” he said.
Caleb tried to smile.
“Han-Boy brings news.”
Caleb frowned, which for some reason was easier to accomplish than a smile.
“No worry,” Cook said. “He not tell others. Family does not follow. They carry on without Reverend. Very good!”
Cook’s upbeat voice echoed against the damp cave walls. Caleb’s eyes shifted to the opening, where the sky hung like a perfect blue cutout made by a child.
“American Mrs. Carson joins Red cause.”
Caleb raised an eyebrow.
“You do not believe?” Cook asked with a chuckle. “I not believe, either. But very sorry,” he shook his head, “Reverend cannot see to believe.”
Caleb looked up into the man’s lined, yet cheery, face.
“Do not trouble self.” Cook set down the bowl of porridge and clapped the dust from his hands. “You prepare instead for the other side.”
Cook’s friendly-sounding words descended over Caleb, as heavy and uncomfortable as the wool blanket that weighed him down. Cook, of all people, grasped that he had outstayed his welcome in this life. He was but skin and bones, and many of those broken. But his mind would not stop. It had the tenacity of his old mule, which had miraculously survived the fall. But luckily for the animal, it had been shot in the head soon afterward and finally set free. We only reserve such kindness for animals, Caleb thought. His eyes grew moist again as he realized that the mule’s release was what he longed for, too.
Cook stepped away to allow him privacy, thoughtful as always. Caleb could rest now. But then the young man came near, Cook’s son and his son’s friend. Caleb couldn’t recall the young man’s name as he pulled up the stool to sit beside the cot. He heard whispered Chinese words. Then the boy leaned in closer and placed his round, handsome face in Caleb’s line of sight.
“Esteemed Reverend,” he said in quite good English and bowed his head.
Caleb wished with all his heart he could reach out and touch the black hair and fine, though already creased, forehead. The children of this country grew up far too early, Caleb thought, and faced hardships far worse than those endured by most adults back home. Chinese boys did not tromp into the mountains in springtime in search of small game and mild adventure. They did not discover through play a boundless sense of themselves, as Caleb had with his older brothers. A spasm of pain shot down his spine at the thought, and he scolded himself for remembering.
“I have seen your son,” the boy said.
Caleb grimaced.
“No, it is all right, Reverend. He is well.”
Caleb bit his bottom lip as the pain suddenly returned. He didn’t want to frighten the young fellow, but he sensed an uncontrollable scream rising up inside him.
“Charles has come to the decision to leave. Not just our town and province but China.”
With great effort, Caleb fought back the urge to moan or exclaim. He even tried to make the corners of his mouth rise into a smile.
“That is what you wanted, yes?” the boy asked. “I told him so.”
Caleb couldn’t help the moan that finally seeped out of him.
“Please do not worry,” the boy said and laid a gentle palm on his chest. “I did not tell him you are alive, or that I see you. But I said to him that I am certain you want him and his mother to leave the country and be safe.”
Cook came over, touched the boy on the shoulder, and said something to him in Chinese. The young man bowed his head again.
“I must go,” he said. “You are greatly missed, Reverend. Charles-Boy loves you very much.”
Caleb could feel his eyes brimming over, and he no longer cared. The boy wiped his own eyes with his sleeve, and that was fine with Caleb, too.
Cook remained dry-eyed as always as he said, “Enough. Reverend sleep now.”
Caleb lifted his finger, but the boy was gone. Caleb hated for him to go and wished with all his heart that he could have asked questions about his family. But his thoughts were coming slowly today, staying deep within. The boy had said that h
is son was all right. That was what mattered. There was no need for words beyond that.
As sleep started to slip over Caleb again, a clear, powerful thought struck him, and he was suddenly wide awake. Like his wife and son, he, too, must move on to the next stage. He must leave this life behind. His stubborn body had refused to release him, but Caleb knew a way around that. Every soldier in the camp carried a weapon—a rifle, pistol, knife, or bow. These young men had been raised on farms around livestock and understood that an animal with a broken back was done. He would ask the best of them, the one with the keenest intellect and deepest sympathies. When he awoke, Caleb would ask Captain Hsu to kill him.
Some hours later, he awoke again and was alone on his cot at the mouth of the cave. Midday sunlight drenched the leaves, but the cool, moist air from inside the mountain felt refreshing. On fine, clear summer days like this one, Caleb recalled, he and his brothers had tromped out into sunlight, brushed through high, wild grass, and taken the paths up the mountainside. They knew the trails by the rocks and trees that marked each bend. In mid-August in the White Mountains, berries weighed the branches low, tempting the boys. They knew it was still too early but couldn’t resist and popped them into their mouths only to spit them back out again. “You have to learn to wait,” his oldest brother would say as they washed their stained hands in an icy brook and pressed on toward the peak.
Caleb understood now that those familiar mountains had been his testing ground for this mountain in China. So far away from where he had begun, and yet he knew the feel of the damp walls and the pebbled floor that surrounded him. For hadn’t he and his brothers taken shelter in caves many times? When the wind whipped up and sudden bouts of rain came careening across the open sky, first darkening the mountainside across the way, then releasing torrents, the boys would duck into a cave to wait it out. That was all he needed to do now, Caleb told himself: wait it out.
As he and his brothers waited, they watched the rainfall and told stories. His oldest brother was the best at creating an entertaining chill in the younger ones. Rumors and tall tales circulated among the country folk and in the mountain villages. Certain stories caught hold and couldn’t be shaken for generations. Once a group of boys—not Caleb and his brothers but boys of his grandfather’s era—had lifted their lantern to see down a defunct mining shaft and spotted with their own eyes the bones of a man, his clothing stripped away and the whiteness of his skeleton shining as if lit from within. The boys raced home, but when they returned to the woods with their fathers, the skeleton was gone. Ever after, it was said that the ghost of that fallen miner roamed the hills.
Caleb tried to chuckle at how that story had kept him awake many nights until he was almost his son’s age now. Never a brave or stoical child, Caleb had been unable to banish it from his mind, especially before sleep. It had haunted him the way Lian’s bedtime stories bothered Charles until Caleb had finally forbidden their amah to tell them. But the damage had been done: Charles, like his father, had a too-active imagination. It tortured him, even when every rational explanation offered by grown-ups insisted otherwise. He and his son were weak in that way, Caleb knew, and susceptible to worry. But he loved Charles for it, for he equated a fanciful mind with a generous heart.
Caleb could no longer pretend to maintain a self-imposed stricture on memory. Grasping that he would not live much longer, especially if he enlisted Captain Hsu’s help, Caleb decided that he might as well let the stories from his past cascade over him as readily as the tears that he let fall willy-nilly. During the endless hours when he lay half awake and half asleep in the cave, he would allow himself to recall and invent and dream, his mind roaming—in search of what, he wasn’t sure.
Another story his brother had once told wove its way into his thoughts. A hiker had wandered off the Appalachian Trail as an early winter squall rumbled down from Mount Washington. The young man took cover in a cave, where, wet and cold, he shivered and ate the last of his food. Snow quickly burdened the pine boughs and obscured the shapes of rocks and cliff sides. If he ventured out again into the rising drifts, he might take a misstep and tumble over the edge. So the hiker stayed in the cold of the cave. As the sun went down behind the hills, the world outside became as blank and forbidding as a sheet of paper in a platen, its purpose not yet known to the writer. Night fell, and the young hiker pulled leaves around himself to try to keep warm, but he knew it would be impossible. He would not survive to see dawn paint the whiteness with a gentle, rosy glow.
But the young hiker did awake the next morning. He stumbled out of the icy cave and found the trail not far away. At the general store in the nearest village, he drank black coffee with trembling hands. The owner’s wife, old Mrs. Knox, didn’t look up from her crossword puzzle as she asked, “Bear save you, did he?” The young man nodded into his cup, realizing she must be right and no longer amazed by anything. He would spend the rest of days searching for an embrace as warm and miraculous as the one that had surrounded him in that cave.
Caleb shivered, and Cook appeared and added a second blanket to the weight that already bore down on him. He shut his eyes and wished for the warmth of that surprising creature, though the summer was full and dry outside, and to anyone else, the air was mild. By mid-August back home, the birch leaves would have begun to flip like coins in a pool of golden light, registering the coming season long before anyone else sensed it. Faint, glowing, upright friends, those white birches had been like family to Caleb. His grandfather, eyeglasses catching the sun, trousers creased sharply, and his minister’s collar worn tight. All the men on that side, including Caleb himself, were as thin as young birches, their tall, sturdy New England bodies bending into the wind.
Like the poet, Caleb had seen birches arched by snow, limbs caught under a crust of ice. He had freed them more than once, though he never chose to ride one, as Frost and Caleb’s more adventurous brothers had. He was too young when they had wrapped their skinny legs around the trunks to make a winsome whip. Caleb had watched instead, snow frozen inside his woolen mittens and up his sleeves, the cuffs chafing him with the red wrists of winter. Scrawny and made mostly of bone, he was often sick as a child and easily scarred by the elements, drawn on like the birches by shadowy lines that he understood now had foretold his end. He was a lone birch, too pale in a forest of pines, weaker than his sturdier relatives.
What he wanted now more than anything was to be amid that glade of white birches on the trail toward home. He longed to see them now—his brothers, his family, and those shimmering branches a little farther ahead.
When he next awoke, night had fallen. He did not move his head but let the sounds of Chinese voices wash over him. Cook and another man spoke rapidly in the local dialect. Caleb had stopped trying to understand that foreign tongue, and perhaps because he no longer made an effort, the Chinese cadences wormed their way into his mind. After a few moments, he surprised himself by recognizing a phrase or two.
The Japanese had taken his wife into custody. He heard Cook and the other man discussing it. He wanted to call Cook over and ask for further explanation. By the urgency of the men’s voices, he could tell that this news had just arrived and that action was being taken. Captain Hsu was no doubt already doing his best to correct the situation through his many channels with the elders of the town. And Reverend Wells, never the most competent at dealing with others, would also rise to the occasion. Caleb assumed that some mistake had been made. The Japanese couldn’t possibly want to hold his wife for long. She was an American, after all, and a woman, for heaven’s sake.
But not just any woman, he thought with a smile. She was his Shirley: sturdy and unbendable in ways that he was not. Shirley Carson was not to be trifled with. If anything, she would see to her own release and not leave it to the others. With this confident thought, Caleb drifted off again, aware that he must stay alive a little while longer, at least until word came that she had returned safely to the mission compound.
Sixteen
> Shirley was willing to bow, but not low, or at least not as low as the Japanese general would have liked.
“Thank you for joining me this evening, Mrs. Carson,” he began as he poured tea for them into fine porcelain cups.
She had certainly not joined him freely but had been forced by the Japanese soldiers through the mission, out the gate, and down the empty town streets until she and her entourage arrived at this municipal building, formerly the center for tax collection under both Tupan Feng and then his warlord nephew. She had visited here with Caleb some years before when he wanted to express his outrage at the practice of excessive levies and bribes. He had felt hopeful that he could help change the historically corrupt system. As she noticed the Nambu pistol in its holster on the Japanese general’s hip and the fiery shine of his shoes, she found herself longing for those old days, when the warlord was greedy, unprincipled, and vulgar, but at least had a patrician sense of responsibility to his people and province.
“Won’t you have a cup of tea?” the Japanese general asked in impeccable English.
She had refused to look him straight in the eye but did so now. “You realize it is past midnight.”
The general spoke to his soldiers, who turned and withdrew, leaving Shirley alone with him. He approached with the teacup, and she took it. Short and rotund, he appeared tidier and cleaner than anyone she had seen in weeks. The stars and medals on his chest shone, and the creases in his pant legs were sharp. He wore thick, black-rimmed round glasses, and his thinning hair was slicked back and greased with something pungent and familiar.
“Please, make yourself comfortable. Have a seat.” He gestured to a wicker chair in the middle of the room. She had been surprised to see the Western-style furniture in this office, a large teak desk and banker’s chair, not the tatami mat, stools, or low tables that the Japanese usually preferred.
