River of Dust

by Virginia Pye

  "Gentlemen, we have no claim on that cow. If you have a dispute, it is with the owner. We wish to pass in peace. We are here in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and intend to follow the exhortation of live and let live. We assume that you will do the same."

  The older man's face tightened. "Lord Jesus?" he asked.

  The Reverend's eyes grew bright. "Yes, you have heard of him?"

  "Lord Jesus, king of the Ghost Men?" the older man asked.

  The Reverend turned to Grace. "How remarkable. They know of Him and the Holy Ghost already." He looked to the men, and the edges of his lips rose in a genuine smile.

  Surely, the miracle of salvation could cleanse even the filthiest of louts. And the Reverend was fast surmising that louts indeed they were: the smoke smoldering on the horizon seemed irrefutable evidence of what these hooligans had torched along the way.

  The older man suddenly began to shout again. He let out a hideous cackle followed by a long, low growl. Staring down into the Reverend's blue eyes, he spat at his chest. The man thrust his saber at the sky. "No Lord Jesus! Death to Lord Jesus!"

  He released a stream of sounds the likes of which the Reverend had never heard before. He felt certain the man was the devil incarnate, screaming with every intention of waking the gods— both his and theirs. The Reverend had met with fury and treachery before. He knew that to stand in the face of it, to neither turn one's cheek nor one's back but to straighten the shoulders to face one's fate, was the only way to illustrate the true strength of the Lord. He stared into the man's wild face, ignoring the spit and the curses and the swords.

  Grace began to whimper and held tighter to his waist, pressing Wesley against him, too, until the child clung to his father's back like a frightened monkey.

  "Please," she said, "let us alone. Take the blasted cow, we don't care. Let us be. Certainly, we have done nothing to harm you."

  These words seemed to infuriate the older man beyond all else, and he threw his thick leg down over the horse. He landed with a thud on the ground, his fur boots sending up a cloud of dust. He raised his sword over Grace's head and began chanting in words the Reverend did not understand. Not words so much as sounds, rocking and keening, as if he had experienced a great loss. The older man bowed his head in soulful prayer. After a long, low moan, he looked up and clapped his hands.

  The younger man appeared before the Reverend and thrust his hand into the minister's breast pocket. He snatched the white handkerchief neatly folded there. His grimy fingers held it aloft, whipping it in the breeze. The thing unfurled as he waved it in circles, and the older man laughed, although not as maniacally as before. He seemed somehow calmed by the sight of the small white flag on the breeze.

  The Reverend was relieved that his wife did not insist on further communication. It was best to remain as neutral as possible. The dangerous men seemed to be releasing their fury, and perhaps that meant they would move on soon. In the meantime, the barbarians appeared positively light-hearted now. As the younger one waved the handkerchief, the two joined arms in a little dance. They each held a corner of the cloth aloft and spun around it like peasants at a festival, two simpletons rejoicing over the harvest. The Reverend managed to pat Grace's arm in feeble encouragement. The older man appeared to be humming to himself. Then, as abruptly as their prancing had begun, it ended. The older man clapped once more, and the younger man let go of his corner of the flimsy fabric and the dance was over.

  The older one wiped the Reverend's handkerchief across his own perspiring forehead. He held it out before his face and inspected it. The black initials— J. W. W: John Wesley Watson— hung in the air. The man nodded in confident affirmation, although of what the Reverend could not know. Then the fellow let out a high, happy cry of triumph.

  Baffling people, Grace thought as she watched the man stuff the handkerchief into one of his many pouches. As he did so, she noticed something that equally surprised her: hanging from the dirty, embroidered sack was another strip of cloth that appeared to be made of the same fine linen as her husband's handkerchief. Thin and gray from use, the edge of this other piece of fabric looked identical to the one the man's thick hands stuffed inside now.

  The Reverend appeared mesmerized by this sight, too, although he did not seem concerned about the coincidence. His face remained steely and firm until Grace noticed the slight twitching of his eyebrow, a tic from his boyhood whenever self-doubt captured him. The older bandit pulled the red string on the pouch. He let out a long, satisfied sound, then looked directly at the Reverend and pointed, his eyes fierce and sure.

  The Reverend suddenly whipped around and shouted at Grace. "Go, woman, get inside with Wesley and lock the doors!"

  Grace heard her husband's words and wanted to obey, but her arms wouldn't let go of his sleeve. He pried her fingers off and pushed her toward the cottage. With effort, Grace finally began to move.

  "Run, Grace, run!" the Reverend yelled again.

  Clutching Wesley to her chest, she hurried up the rocky path in the direction of the cottage. She heard Mai Lin screaming to her from the porch. It was a harebrained plan. She could not possibly escape two men on horseback. But Grace tried anyway, her fingers digging into her son's small body to keep him close. As she approached, she called out to Mai Lin to open the door.

  "Gentlemen," she heard her husband behind her plead, "take this very fine watch. Sell it for many cows."

  The older one shouted orders. Grace turned back, and it wasn't the gold watch she saw held in the air but a sword aloft in the older man's hand and pointed in her direction. The younger man threw himself onto his horse and rode hard toward her. Grace stumbled over the rough ground toward the cottage, but she did not fall.

  Mai Lin called, "Here, Mistress, come!"

  Behind Grace, the Reverend instructed her to press onward, too. But as she did, she was in such a state of confusion, she could no longer tell who was yelling what, and then it no longer mattered— none of it mattered. She might as well have been standing still, for the young man barely slowed his horse as he swooped down over her. He grabbed Wesley's arm and pulled. The boy held on to her neck for as long as he could. He cried out as his mother and the bandit fought over him. But finally, the barbarian stopped toying with Grace and simply yanked her son away.

  She would never forget how easily Wesley was lost to her, as if to show that these men could have done it at any moment all along. They could take whatever they pleased. And what they wanted was not her but the child.

  "My son!" she screamed.

  The robber turned his horse and rode away across the flat land with her baby in his arms. The older man let out a loud cry, too, as he whipped his horse away. Grace chased after them. She ran until the frantic noise in her ears became unbearable. She tried to press on through it, but finally she bent over to catch her breath and crumpled onto the hard dirt. Her hands gripped her belly, and she squeezed shut her eyes and saw blackness. A quick prayer passed through her mind for the unborn child in her belly. She opened her eyes again and through tears saw the sun blazing on the horizon, that too-red ball of fire and blood. She could not bear to lose another one.

  The Reverend ran past her and frantically worked to unhitch their horse from the wagon. "Mai Lin," he shouted, "help her!"

  Grace tried to stand but fell again and clawed at the dust that quickly turned her palms yellow. After a few moments, she lay unmoving except by her sobs. Through the dust and tears, she saw Mai Lin hobbling toward her. The old woman bent low, her face alive with worry and indignation.

  "Take care of her," the Reverend shouted as he mounted his horse and rode off after the kidnappers, who were becoming smaller and smaller in the red distance.

  Two

  M ai Lin shook her fists in the air and shouted, "Lord Jesus and the great ancestors rain curses upon them!" She then lifted Grace to stand and helped her up the steps and into the cottage.

  It was the first time Grace had walked over the threshold of the new little
home built for her by her husband. Her eyes immediately found, over in a corner of the open room, a newly made baby's crib with a toddler-sized bed pressed up beside it. Despite his many duties as head of the mission, the Reverend had clearly spent hours turning the dowels and staining the wood for each charming piece. Such was his love for his children. The infernal humming in Grace's brain grew louder, and she thought she might go mad if it continued. Doc Hemingway had said that she needed rest, and yet how could she find rest in a country that tormented her with loss?

  She broke free of Mai Lin's grip and staggered to the child-sized bed. Suddenly on her knees, she bowed before it, her body pressed over the low cornhusk mattress. A cry broke from her throat, and she wailed into the calico quilt.

  Then she sat up again and looked about frantically, for what she did not know. She grabbed the boy's pillow that his father had no doubt set there himself. She thrashed it until feathers flew out from the pretty embroidered case. She slammed it down again and again, as a dog shakes a rabbit until it grows limp, all life ravaged. Finally, Grace flopped forward onto the bed and simply wept.

  The last of the white feathers fell onto her outstretched arms like surprising snowflakes back home when she woke in early spring to find the milk bottles frosted on the back porch. Black twigs and cherry blossoms littered the sudden whiteness. It was on such days that Grace was glad to be alive in a world where surprising things happened, yet never so surprising as to carry away all hope of something better, of redemption if one simply bowed to the Lord's great plan.

  On springtime mornings like those, when the rain had finally stopped, they waded out toward the creek that had been rising for days. From farms upstream floated all manner of tires, cut logs, old boots, and once a bloated cow, swirling in an eddy until it was skewered by the limbs of a fallen tree. The Lord had seen to such disasters, but there was always an escape, a way to survive and even grow stronger in one's faith. There was a lesson to be learned, and then you carried on.

  Grace sat again, and her head hung limply in the posture of a supplicant. She knew she appeared to be praying there beside her son's unused bed. But she was not. She was cursing the Lord instead. Above the incessant vibrations in her brain, she cursed Him as she never had before. She would not carry on. She would not survive, especially not in this terrible land that He had created out of fire and brimstone and suffering.

  Mai Lin knelt beside Grace and tucked a strong hand under her arm. She helped her stand. As Grace stepped away from the child-sized bed and the crib, she did not look back but tipped her head to see past the curtains and out the window as wild strands of pink and purple slid down the sky. Soon a gray stillness would spread. With nightfall, a frightening moonscape would appear, cold and lifeless and full of peril. Her husband was out there in that lonely land in pursuit of their beloved son.

  Mai Lin hobbled forward on her miserably deformed feet and helped Grace sit on the adult bed in the far corner of the open room. Grace leaned against the pillows, almost calm now, although the dizziness and agitation in her brain remained a quiet refrain. Even in her grief, she noticed the touches the Reverend had added to please her: the coat hooks beside the door, a handsome cabinet to hold pans and plates, a fine celadon pot on the mantel and calico curtains he must have sent for from back home to separate the bedrooms from the living area.

  With a long intake of air, studded by staccato sobs, Grace swung her legs around so she might lie down. But in that instant, she felt wetness between her legs. She sprang up from the bed in alarm. She pawed at her long linen skirt and tried with trembling hands to yank it off. She had no words to say to Mai Lin, but somehow the woman understood.

  Mai Lin worked with gnarled fingers on the ivory buttons that ran down the back of the delicately made garment. Then she undid the endless buttons that confined Grace into her high-collared shirt and pulled it off her. Grace stood in only a simple petticoat and looked down and saw what she feared most.

  She fell back onto the bed. Red pooled on her white slip, red rose up from her broken heart and filled her mind. She shut her eyes and felt water fill her ears, but then she knew better: not water but blood. Blood streamed around her, tossing her about and spinning her in its own ill luck, like that cow in the eddy that had been stopped only by a limb like a spear. The robber had raised his sword high in the air before he had raced forward to steal her son. Grace would have given anything for him to ride toward only her and plunge his blade into her heart. Perhaps he had. Perhaps that explained the oozing wetness that now surrounded her on all sides. She felt Mai Lin blot between her legs and place her healing hands upon Grace's stomach, but she knew it would do no good. Yes, the robbers had pierced her and were taking away her life's blood.

  The old woman bustled around the bed, but Grace no longer cared. The vibrations in her mind were terribly loud now, and she knew the blood poured forth. Soon she would lie on a bed made only of blood. Mai Lin pulled potions, creams, tinctures, and lumps of incense from the many pouches and sacks that hung on leather strings around her waist and neck. Grace was dimly aware of her grinding something with a mortar and pestle on the bedside table. Within moments, the bitter, sickly-sweet smell of incense wrapped itself around Grace's faint head. Mai Lin whispered soft and mysterious words over her as she had in the middle of the night two times before. Grace did not know the meaning of the chants. She did not hear the word Jesus, nor did she care to. This fact surprised Grace with such force that she let out a cackle, a most unladylike sound the likes of which usually issued forth only from her old amah.

  "Death to Lord Jesus!" Grace shouted feebly. "That was what the robbers said, and I say it now, too. Death to the Lord!"

  But the instant she repeated it, she feared she would be punished, struck down utterly and forever. She heard thunder raging in the distance and felt certain that a lightning storm would come this way. In a blinding flash of light, she, Mai Lin, and the cottage would be reduced to a smoldering pile of ashes. That was what she deserved. That was what she wanted. It was she, not her husband, who would be carried upward in a holy conflagration.

  Three

  N ight fires gleamed in the distance, and smoke clung to the horizon, blurring the far-off mountains in a blanket of dark haze. The Reverend pressed on in the direction of the smoke, although the robbers might easily have slipped into one of the ravines or outcroppings that bordered the dirt road. In this maddening countryside there were too many possibilities, as many directions as travelers. It occurred to him that at this very moment the bandits may have been watching him from a rocky hilltop, laughing at his efforts. Or they might have turned away, no longer interested in the father who rode on and on forever in search of his son. For the Reverend understood that he would not stop his journey until Wesley was found.

  The old horse was not meant for such swift travel, but the Reverend paid it little heed. He had not ridden bareback since he was a boy on the farm. It did not matter. Nothing mattered except going onward. Off to his right he saw a fire burning, and further ahead on the left a hamlet appeared— a cluster of buildings made of yellow brick, though in the dark they resembled nothing more than dark outlines. He had passed this cluster of derelict buildings before but assumed they were empty and no longer in use. Now from this ghost town came a dim light that the Reverend headed toward.

  He let himself wonder what he would do if the bandits were holed up inside. He had no weapon. No sword or gun, not even a rock to hurl or a stick to swing. The Reverend bore nothing except his fury, height, and stature as a Man of God in a land of infidels. That would have to be enough. As he grew closer, he let the horse slow and then come to a stop. He swung down off the sweat-soaked back and kept hold of the reins. He could at least use the element of surprise to his advantage. He would come out of the black night to frighten the devils.

  He passed through a broken wooden gate whose fence had long since fallen away. The moon came out from behind a cloud, and he saw the lay of the courtyard: a barn on one
side, its roof staved in; a shed on the other, with no door or windowpanes and only darkness inside; and there, before him, an old inn with the windows boarded over. A light shone dimly through chinks in the brick near the back of the building.

  The Reverend ducked behind the edge of the barn and tied his horse to a leaning post. He strode across the courtyard with his traveling coat billowing. A rough board with a knot of rope for a handle served as a door to the inn. On the wood were scrawled careless Chinese characters that the Reverend could not decipher. He couldn't be troubled about the meaning of the words, nor did he care to unravel the mysteries of this decrepit place. He merely wanted the Lord to lead him to his son. Faith, not knowledge, would guide him.

  In his hand the knot of rope felt prickly and unwelcoming, but he twisted it and pushed open the door. He, who had been called a giant by even the friendliest of Chinese, now ducked below the lintel. He stepped over the threshold, placed both boots firmly on the sunken dirt floor, and rose up to his full height, impersonating Goliath as best as he could.