River of Dust

by Virginia Pye

  Mai Lin leaned out and saw the shape of a tall figure whom she hoped was the Reverend. The man stood, and the long queue down his back glistened in the moonlight. There on the ground at Ahcho's feet was a bag of sand, or maybe, if they were lucky, a bag of rice. Mai Lin could already imagine the taste of it.

  But she sensed that her old eyes were deceiving her as they often did, and so she squinted harder. Something wasn't right. A few paces from the porch steps, Ahcho fell to his knees. Mai Lin then made out the shape of what lay on the ground. She quickly closed the shutters with a clatter, and the mistress awoke.

  "Is something out there?" her mistress asked.

  "You sleep," Mai Lin said. "The fever is finally better, but you still need rest."

  "They have returned. I know it. Ahcho has brought my husband back to me."

  Mistress Grace pushed herself higher in the bed, pulled off the covers, and reached for her robe. Mai Lin wanted to yank the covers over her legs again, but her mistress was already putting on her slippers and sliding down from the bed. Such a foolish girl to imagine she was well. But sometimes, Mai Lin thought, you had to let the river run its course.

  "Help me, Mai Lin. I must see my husband right away."

  Mistress Grace's voice fluttered forth both feeble and determined. For once, Mai Lin did not argue or explain. She lit a lamp and carried it in one hand as with the other she held her mistress's arm. In this way, the frail young woman made her way into the hall, down the steps, and across the front entrance.

  Mai Lin held open the screen door, and Mistress Grace flew past and down the porch steps. The cool night air struck Mai Lin as most dangerous. It would reach down into her mistress's lungs with wet fingers and cause the cough to return. Mai Lin knew the damage it could do. Not to mention how her husband's death would affect her patient. She had taken care of her mistress after childbirth and after the loss of her unborn children, but this final blow she felt she could do very little to counteract.

  Mai Lin hobbled to the edge of the porch and looked to the ground where her mistress had thrown herself over the Reverend's prostrate body. Ahcho knelt beside the sobbing woman and patted her back ineffectually. He looked up at Mai Lin and snapped his fingers, and she knew that he was right.

  She belonged there beside her mistress. She was needed to wrap an arm around her, to steady her shaking shoulders and silence her cries. Mai Lin let out a hard grunt, but she couldn't seem to make herself take another step. Instead, she crossed her arms over her chest and let out sounds of the variety that she knew Ahcho hated.

  The Reverend was dead. What was the news in that? she wondered. He had been dead to the household for months.

  Ahcho snapped his fingers again, and this time Mai Lin expelled an exasperated sigh and moved forward. She spat a satisfying wad of betel quid over the side of the porch and began her slow descent to join them.

  "Quick, Mai Lin, bring the lamp," Grace cried. "I must see my beloved."

  Mai Lin held the lamp over the Reverend's bloodied and dust-covered body. With her other arm, she held the shivering woman.

  The lamplight showed the Reverend's face in a most unfortunate expression. His eyes were open and wild. The Spirits had no doubt entered him already. They had flown in and by now fully inhabited him. Mai Lin reached quickly to correct the situation and tsked at Ahcho for having overlooked such an important task. He was no good at anything if he couldn't be trusted to remember this simplest of precautions. Such an old fool, Ahcho, to believe the Jesus business and forget all else.

  Mistress Grace ran her hands over the Reverend's chest, where blood was dried and matted. Her fingers swept over his head and untied the string around his neck that held in place the foul nomad's hat. Mai Lin's mistress pressed her palms against the Reverend's skull as if she hoped to squeeze the life back into him. Even in the low lamplight, Mai Lin could see the vermin on his scalp. She tugged on her mistress's nightgown sleeve, but it was too late. The critters were quick, and Mai Lin knew she would have her work cut out for her tomorrow.

  She shook her head, and the mistress must have noticed and misunderstood, for she gripped Mai Lin's hand and said, "Don't despair, Mai Lin. He has gone to where he is needed most."

  Mai Lin patted her mistress's hand, for it was she who needed comforting. But then Grace pulled away and asked Ahcho, "How did it happen?"

  "An idiot with a pistol wanted to see if the Ghost Man could survive another bullet."

  "Ah," the mistress said. "They believed in him until the end."

  Mai Lin wondered how her mistress could twist the circumstances around so. As far as she could tell, no one believed in the Reverend any longer except for the two who grieved over him now.

  Ahcho sat hunched, his head bowed. His cheeks looked more sallow than ever, and his chest had become concave, as if the life had been pulled from him this night as well. Mai Lin wondered if she would have another patient to care for the following day. His heart, she worried, his good and weakened heart.

  "But where are my husband's glasses?" the mistress asked.

  Ahcho answered softly, "They must have fallen off."

  Grace reached over and patted his wrist and said most reassuringly, "Don't worry, he'll see just fine without them where he's going."

  "In heaven," Ahcho said.

  The two devoted ones nodded in unison.

  Mistress Grace then busied herself by investigating the Reverend's jacket pockets, and Mai Lin fretted about whatever other pests she might encounter. Her mistress's hand paused over the red cloth that lay across the Reverend's bloody chest. Her fingers reached for the pouch that lay on the dusty ground beside him. The twin embroidered yellow dragons were filthy now and had lost their sheen. This was the pouch that the Reverend had worn at his hip since their boy's departure. He had kept a hand upon it much of the time, as if it were his own personal rosary.

  Ahcho's head snapped upward as he watched her untie the small sack. He looked too beleaguered to object, but then he managed to say, "No, Grace, leave it alone."

  Mai Lin wanted to chuckle because she had never heard the proper number-one boy of the finest house in the compound call his mistress by her first name. Ahcho might very well be a changed man tonight, too, she thought. Perhaps he would be less strict and not so much of a scold. For her sake, she hoped so.

  Grace opened the pouch all the way and lifted out something round and white. It sat on her palm in the lamplight. The globe glowed as if it emanated a soft, low flicker. Mai Lin leaned toward it to get a better look.

  "Hmph!" she said, for she recognized what it was right away.

  Grace looked at her, waiting for an explanation, but the answer was so obvious that Mai Lin didn't want to be bothered.

  "It's quite lightweight," Grace said.

  "Of course," Mai Lin scoffed. "It belonged to a child."

  Grace recoiled at the word and dropped the thing onto the dusty ground. "This is a child's skull?" she asked. "Ahcho, explain this object to me."

  Ahcho bowed his head and repeated the obvious. "Yes, it belonged to a child."

  Mistress Grace began to cough, and Mai Lin knew the night air was the culprit. "No more talking," she barked. "Mistress needs to be in bed. I must take you there now."

  Grace continued to hack, the sound rising from deep inside her, but as Mai Lin began to lift her up by the arms, she pawed at her husband and wouldn't let go of his lifeless body. Finally, Grace's fingers reached into his breast pocket and pulled out one of his handkerchiefs. She waved it in the air, and Mai Lin noticed that some of the Reverend's blood from the bullet wound had stained the filthy fabric.

  Grace did not seem to notice. She let Mai Lin lift her to standing, calmed by holding the little stained square of linen close to her lips.

  Ahcho remained hunched over the Reverend. Mai Lin did not need his help. She could haul her patient back to bed herself. Ahcho was the one with the more difficult task. Tomorrow he would have to dig a hole in soil as hard as stone. Mai Lin la
ughed to herself and waited for the mistress's cough to subside so they could begin the slow climb up the porch steps.

  Twenty-seven

  I n the shadowy territory between wakefulness and dreaming, Grace's body brimmed with loss. The ache, which grew more in tense as she slowly entered consciousness, was not merely physical. She was now a hollow vessel filled to the brim with nothing but grief and illness. Her eyelids flickered open, and she called for Mai Lin to push open the shutters. Outside, day appeared again, casting its stark light on her sorrow.

  Grace felt she deserved her unhappiness. She had left her husband behind in that horrible place, and there was no undoing that fact. She rolled over and buried her head in her pillow and longed for sleep to take her again. She wanted Mai Lin to administer to her, even in the morning. She wanted to sleep forever.

  But, as she turned in her sheets again, Grace allowed herself to consider her final moments with the Reverend two days before. While it pained her to do so, she also sensed another feeling starting to creep over her. Was it possible that she and her husband had achieved an understanding before they had stepped away from one another forever? She considered this possibility and tried to take solace in it. And, if so, what was it that they had finally shared?

  She pictured him again in the wretched opium den. His feeble and withered self brought forth her quiet tears. She recalled what he had said before turning to go: he wished to attend to the dead. Grace sat up in bed and realized that her husband had been signaling to her something both grave and important. And, although she had not understood it fully at the time, she had signaled back, as if they were ships acknowledging one another across a vast and dark sea.

  She couldn't go back to sleep now, for the thought in her mind was too potent. With his kind and gentle beacon, he had wished for her to see something on the flat horizon ahead. He had shone forth a light across an inky ocean, lighting her way to a distant shore. She would meet him there. That was what he intended. She would meet him there again someday quite soon.

  Grace rose quickly from her bed, slipped on her robe, and shuffled to the window, where she leaned against the sill. Dizziness darkened the edges of her vision until the courtyard came into focus. It was bare. It had always been bare, but now there was nothing but the blankness of cracked ground, a lone tree on which the light green leaves of spring had appeared again, and footprints in the dust. Beside those marks in the earth lay the path where her husband's body had been dragged.

  She placed a hand upon her congested chest and understood that while the world outside her window was empty of people, her lungs, her whole body, were filled to overflowing with grief and illness. She sensed a strange paradox: she was most fraught with life when all around her appeared serenely barren. Her mind wanted the quiet of the courtyard to inhabit her, too, but her rattling chest and painwracked body left her agitated and full.

  She returned to her bedside and lifted the small white skull from the table. Mai Lin stood at her elbow and made that tsking sound that Grace had come to understand meant she had things she would not say.

  "You knew what was in the pouch all along?" Grace asked her.

  Mai Lin shook her head, and her black braid slapped her hunched back. "I did not."

  "But you have suspicions now about why the Reverend formed such a strong attachment to this gruesome object?"

  Mai Lin shrugged, no doubt another sign that she knew more than she was letting on.

  "Maddening," Grace said. "The lot of you are maddening." She climbed upon the bed again and sat. Her head spun from the minor exertion.

  "Mistress must rest," Mai Lin said. "The damp air was very bad last night."

  "What was very bad last night was having my husband finally return home to me— dead." Grace flopped against the pillows.

  She waited for the tears to commence where they had left off the night before, but they did not. Her hand squeezed the skull, and somehow it made her not weak and sorrowful but angry and strong.

  "Please have Ahcho come to me straightaway."

  Mai Lin ignored the request as she fussed with the potions on her mixing table.

  "Now, Mai Lin!" Grace said. She knew she sounded like a petulant child. "I would like to see him now," she repeated more calmly.

  Mai Lin let out an exasperated sigh, one of her many heaving sounds that needed no translation. "He is very busy this morning."

  "Whatever he is doing can wait."

  Mai Lin offered a beady stare, but Grace did not flinch.

  "He is digging a grave, Mistress."

  A surprising heat rose up Grace's neck as sudden tears pooled behind her eyes. The Reverend was truly gone. Her Reverend was to be buried this very day. She thought she might collapse if she allowed herself to consider that she would never see him again. She cleared her throat and carried on in a firm voice.

  "I shall not keep Ahcho for long. He can return to his task straightaway. The Reverend's soul has already flown, and his body— well."

  The truth was that her husband's body had become a filthy, foulsmelling thing some time ago. She shivered at the memory of his dusty and blood-covered flesh. The meticulous man she had married and admired was a distant memory. His body, like her own, was of no consequence any longer. It was their spirits that mattered. That was what the Reverend had said all along.

  "Please," Grace tried more softly, "ask Ahcho to come?"

  Mai Lin turned and left.

  Grace tipped back her head and shut her eyes. The child's skull felt cool against her belly through the thin robe and nightgown. It was cradled where once she had carried her children. Her body had borne so much, and now it was empty. Her hip bones protruded, and the flesh of her stomach was pulled taut. She had not eaten since— she couldn't recall exactly when. Behind her eyelids darted small suns, and the buzzing in her head carried on as it always did. Her ears filled with the whoosh and pulse of thin blood.

  Strange, she thought, to have less and less attachment to the body just when it was trying its utmost to demand her attention. Her head throbbed, and the coughing began again, though she refused to notice it. She hacked for many minutes until she leaned over the side of the bed and spat blood into the spittoon Mai Lin had placed there for that purpose. Grace felt her insides weighing her down just when her spirit wanted most to lift up. That was all right. She would inhabit this weak frame a little while longer until, like the Reverend, her soul was ready to fully take flight.

  Then she heard the children, always eager to welcome her. Accompanying their high, angelic voices came the clatter of camel bells, approaching ever nearer. Grace smiled and tried to listen more attentively. Yes, bells and singing voices— that was what came to her now that she no longer concerned herself with her illness.

  "Mistress," Mai Lin said and shook her arm most rudely.

  "Don't interrupt, Mai Lin," Grace said, her eyes pinched shut. "The children are about to arrive."

  "No, Madam," her amah clarified, "it's only Ahcho."

  Grace opened her eyes. The vision had seemed so real, every bit as real as the man before her. The poor old fellow stood with bowed head before the bedside. Yellow dust covered him. His cheeks were bisected by still-damp streaks where tears and sweat had fallen. Grace wondered if she should feel ashamed for not having wept more this morning. Ahcho appeared a more dedicated mourner than even the Reverend's wife.

  In Ahcho's arms were the many leather cords and amulets the Reverend had worn. There hung the camel bell that she had heard moments before. And the bloodstained strip of red cloth, which swung lifelessly, no longer strung across the Reverend's proud chest. The pouch that had held the skull drooped like a flayed body. Each of these languishing objects appeared to have had the life sucked out of them on this day.

  Grace pointed to the red sash, and Ahcho handed it to her. She undid the silk string on the pouch and touched the twin embroidered dragons with her fingers. Then she placed the skull back inside, pulled shut the ties, and made a bow. Mai Lin and Ah
cho both nodded in approval, and Grace realized that they thought she was tucking away the skull so that she might forget it, when, in fact, her intention was quite the opposite.

  "Where did this thing come from?" she asked, holding up the pouch that now bulged with the orb inside.

  Ahcho cleared his throat, and Grace sensed that he fought to hold back more tears. "I came upon it the night your small boy was taken." Ahcho's head began to shake from side to side. "I should never have given it to the Reverend. The sight of this awful thing tortured him from that moment on." Tears popped forth and began to cascade down his wrinkled cheeks.