The Taste of Rain

by Monique Polak

  Miss E. sighs. “I should never have let you go first,” she tells Tilly. “Now how will I ever get the other girls to take it?”

  I’m not used to hearing Miss E. sound discouraged.

  “I’ll go next,” I offer.

  “Why, that’s very kind of you, Gwen. I suppose I might as well tell you what’s in this paste. I went to a lot of trouble to get it. It’s crushed eggshells mixed with a little fresh water. It was almost as hard to get my hands on the fresh water as it was to get the eggshells.”

  “Crushed eggshells?” Tilly says. “Are you saying I just ate crushed eggshells?”

  “You certainly did. They’re excellent for you. Full of calcium,” Miss E. says.

  Tilly puts her hands on her hips. “In that case, why don’t you take a spoonful yourself?”

  Cathy, who is next in line after me, says, “Yes, why don’t you? You can have my turn, Miss E.”

  Tilly always says what’s on her mind, and Cathy usually agrees with Tilly.

  “It’s more important for you children to have it.” Miss E. drops her voice. “Your bones are still growing.”

  Your bones are still growing. Her words remind me of when I was little and lived with my parents. It would have to have been before 1939, when they left me at the boarding school in Chefoo so they could do their missionary work.

  Mother used to make me take a spoonful of cod liver oil before bed. “Your bones are still growing,” she’d say. Just the smell of cod liver oil made me want to vomit. Mother showed me the trick of pinching my nose before I swallowed it.

  For a moment I feel a giant longing for my parents. I haven’t seen them for so long that I thought I’d gotten over missing them. I can hardly remember the sounds of their voices. Your bones are still growing.

  Some people might say it’s selfish of us to miss our parents, since they are doing God’s work, converting nonbelievers to Christianity. But sometimes I think that looking after your own child is more important than any other work—even God’s. I have decided that if I ever have a child, I will never leave her to go and help some strangers. I will always put her first.

  “Ready, Gwen?” Miss E. asks.

  I take a deep breath and open my mouth.

  “Down the hatch!” Miss E. says as she puts the spoon of paste into my mouth.

  I nearly gag. The taste is as bad as Tilly said it was. But I close my eyes and swallow it down. I even lick my lips.

  I smile up at Miss E. When she smiles back I forget the bad taste. Miss E.’s smile tells me she is grateful that I’ve made her job a little easier.

  THREE

  Miss E. believes in routine. That’s why, every morning after broomcorn, she makes her students from Chefoo sweep out their huts. “Cleanliness is next to godliness,” she says, pointing to a cobweb Eunice has missed in the corner and smiling approvingly when the cobweb is gone.

  Miss E. says routine brings comfort, and that when life presents challenges, routine helps steady a person. Miss E. says we are all like boats sailing on an ocean with waves that can get dangerously big. Routine helps us ride the waves and keep floating.

  Jeanette is humming “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy.”

  Tilly, who along with several other girls is using a knife to dig bedbugs out of the mattresses on our sleeping pallet, sighs. “Could you keep it down?” she says to Jeanette. “Or better still, could you stop humming altogether? You’re giving me a headache.”

  Cathy looks up from squashing a bedbug. “Me too,” she says.

  Jeanette stops humming. “Sorry,” she whispers to the two girls. I think Jeanette is a little afraid of Tilly. To be honest, we are all a little afraid of Tilly. All of us except for Miss E., of course. Miss E. is not afraid of anyone—not even the fiercest of the Japanese soldiers. When I grow up I want to be as brave, beautiful, wise and cheerful as Miss E.

  Daily lessons are also part of our routine here. When we’ve finished cleaning and Miss E. has inspected every inch of the hut, she reaches into her apron pocket for her reading glasses. At boarding school a bell rang when it was time for class. We don’t need a school bell at Weihsien. When Miss E. puts on those glasses, lessons are about to begin.

  We sit on the steamer trunks we brought from Chefoo. Even if we don’t have chairs, desks or a chalkboard, we can still learn.

  Today Miss E. is teaching us geography. “The Yangtze River is the longest river in all of Asia.” She spreads out her arms on the word longest. “You should probably jot that down in your notebooks.”

  I raise my hand. “Miss E.,” I say, “I’m at the end of my notebook. Are there any extras?”

  Miss E. shuts her eyes. She does that when she is trying to solve a problem. There must not be any extra notebooks.

  “I’m nearly at the end of mine too,” Jeanette adds.

  “Me too,” Dot and Cathy say at the same time.

  Tilly shakes her head. “I still have lots of pages.” She uses her index finger to count the number of pages she has left. “Seventeen! You three must have made your letters too big.” From her tone you’d think Tilly’s the teacher and we’re her class.

  Miss E. opens her eyes and claps. “I’ve got a solution.” She reaches into her apron pocket and pulls out a rubber eraser. “Ta-da,” she says, holding the eraser out in front of her. “You girls must erase every single thing you’ve written in your notebooks.”

  “Every single thing?” Judging from the way she’s raised her eyebrows, Jeanette does not like Miss E.’s plan.

  “Every single thing,” Miss E. says. “Then it’ll be like having a brand-new notebook!”

  Dot looks like she’s about to cry. Dot always looks like she’s about to cry. “If we erase everything in our notebooks,” she asks, “how will we remember all the things you’ve taught us? A person needs notes to remember things. Isn’t that why you always tell us to jot things down?”

  This time Miss E. doesn’t have to close her eyes to come up with an answer. “Take it from me, Girl Guides, you’ll remember our lessons in here.” She taps the side of her head three times. “Besides, the very act of writing things down—of moving your pencil along a blank page—is a way of remembering.”

  Miss E. hands me the eraser first. It feels a little sad to erase the notes from the lessons we learned in our first days at Weihsien, but I’m sure Miss E. is right. She’s always right. I’ll never forget everything she’s taught us.

  “Before the days of steam engines,” Miss E. continues, “men called trackers had to pull ships by hand up certain sections of the Yangtze River.”

  “Did women work as trackers too?” Tilly forgets to raise her hand.

  “That’s a good question, Matilda. I believe the trackers were mostly men. A woman would have to be very strong to help pull a ship up a river,” Miss E. says.

  Cathy raises her hand. “You’re always telling us girls can do anything boys can do.”

  “Indeed,” Miss E. says. “Well then, there may well have been women trackers too. Only they may not have made it into our history books.”

  “That isn’t fair,” Tilly says.

  “Quite right,” Miss E. says.

  There is a loud rapping on the door to our hut. It’s one of the older boys from Chefoo. He doesn’t wait for Miss E. to invite him in.

  We groan when we see what the boy is carrying—a fat dead rat.

  I know it’s dead because of the way the rat’s head sags to one side and the glassy look in its beady eyes.

  Jeanette scrunches her eyes shut. “Tell me when he’s gone,” she whispers to me.

  “Do you mean the boy or the rat?” I ask her.

  “Both,” Jeanette says without opening her eyes.

  “It’s for the rat-catching contest!” the boy announces. He has sandy-colored hair. His face, like everyone’s at Weihsien, is pale and terribly thin. Maybe that’s why his dark, lively eyes stand out. “We clubbed him to death.”

  Miss E. does not blink at the sight of the dead rat. “
Matthew,” she says to the boy, her voice as calm as it was when she was teaching us about the Yangtze River, “I appreciate your enthusiasm. But I’m afraid you’ve interrupted our geography lesson.”

  FOUR

  All this leads to a loud debate about the murder of rats.

  Tilly is in favor. “Rats are filthy creatures.”

  Cathy is in favor too. “Didn’t they spread the Plague during the Middle Ages? What if we catch the Plague?” she asks.

  “I don’t think there’s much danger of that,” Miss E. says. “In fact, I read that it wasn’t rats who spread the Plague—it was people. Which is why, whenever there is boiled water available, I’m always telling you girls to wash your hands. So that you don’t catch dysentery, which is a far bigger problem around here than the Plague.”

  Jeanette says every living creature has a soul and it’s a sin to club a rat to death. “Couldn’t we just catch them and let them out somewhere else?” she suggests.

  “If we did that, they’d find their way back—and they’d be scuttling across this floor the next day,” Tilly tells her.

  Miss E. closes her eyes for a moment, then opens them again. “Unless, of course, we released the rats outside Weihsien…”

  “How could we do that?” Tilly says. “We’re prisoners here.”

  “There is always a way,” Miss E. tells Tilly. “And—I don’t know why I never thought of this before—we should try to come up with a nicer-sounding word than prisoner.”

  “We are prisoners,” Tilly says flatly. “It’s the right word.”

  I watch the two of them carefully. In all the time we have known her, none of us has ever dared talk back to Miss E. I wonder what she’ll do. I predict Miss E. will find a way to reprimand Tilly. Miss E. is very firm when she has to be.

  But Miss E. does something that surprises me. She smiles. “I prefer the word sojourners to prisoners,” she says. “It has more possibility. Sojourner,” she says again, as if she’s trying out the word and likes the sound of it. “A sojourner never stays anywhere very long.”

  Tilly rolls her eyes.

  Some of the other girls like the sound too, because they start tossing the word around like a bouncing ball.

  “Hello, sojourner!” Eunice says to Margaret.

  “Did you just call me sojourner?”

  “As a matter of fact I did, sojourner.”

  Miss E. says she knows a way to catch a rat without killing it. “We’ll need a bucket and two narrow strips of wood. And something for bait.”

  “Maybe we can use a ruler for one of the strips,” Jeanette suggests. “There’s a wooden ruler in the trunk with our school supplies.”

  Miss E. thinks the ruler is a good idea. “I need a volunteer to go to the latrine to fetch a bucket. And someone else to go and find another strip of wood—a touch longer and wider than a ruler.”

  Jeanette has opened the trunk and is looking for the ruler. Tilly says she’ll find another strip of wood. It’s up to me to get the bucket.

  The latrine is a short way down a gravel path from our hut. When the wind blows the wrong way, the stink is so strong we can taste it.

  I pinch my nose as I get closer. That reminds me of the cod liver oil again. What, I find myself wondering, are my parents doing this second? Are they teaching Bible studies or helping a family in need? I doubt they’re thinking about me. If they’d thought of me in the first place, they’d never have left me behind in Chefoo when I was only seven.

  But wouldn’t it be a coincidence if we really were thinking about each other at the very same time? My parents can’t have completely forgotten me. I’m their only child, after all. Why didn’t they have the good sense to leave China before the Japanese invasion? There had been many rumors about the threat of invasion and the cruelty of the Japanese. How could my parents have been so foolish?

  There’s a row of tin buckets on the low steps leading to the latrine. The ones called honeypots are kept inside the huts overnight so prisoners—excuse me, I mean sojourners—can pee without having to walk all the way here. Others are for scrubbing the latrine floors. I pick up the closest bucket and sniff it. The bucket stinks of urine—and worse—so I grab another.

  “What are you doing with that bucket?” a man’s voice asks in halting English.

  When I look up I see knee-high black boots and khaki-colored pants. Why didn’t I notice the Japanese soldier standing on guard by the latrine? This one has a round face and big ears.

  “We need it to catch rats. We’re going to have a cont—” I stop myself. Then, because I am remembering how friendly Miss E. always is, even to the Japanese, I try giving the soldier a small smile.

  He does not smile back. I worry he’ll punish me. Catching rats may not be a crime, but many of the Japanese soldiers are very harsh and cruel. During roll calls they often shout at prisoners. Anyone who is slow to line up gets two hard slaps to the face, one to each cheek. I’ve even seen soldiers remove their belts and use them to strap prisoners for moving in their spots. Once I saw a Japanese soldier stuff a rag into an old man’s mouth so he wouldn’t be able to scream while he was being strapped. It was the saddest thing I ever saw.

  What if this soldier stuffs a rag into my mouth and straps me?

  He studies my face. Then his eyes drop down to my pale-blue scarf, my Girl Guide uniform and my worn-out leather shoes. Because they’ve gotten so tight, I keep the laces loose. A few weeks ago Miss E. helped me cut away some of the leather to give my toes more room. “How… how old are you?”

  “Thirteen.”

  The soldier studies my face again. “I have a girl. Your age,” he says. Then he clicks his heels together. I know it’s a sign that I’m to get out of his way. I take the bucket—so what if it stinks?—and scurry back to the huts. I can’t help feeling a little like a rat.

  Jeanette has found the ruler, and Tilly has a piece of wood. All the girls from our hut huddle round as Miss E. shows us how to make a rat trap. Miss E. leans Tilly’s piece of wood against the bucket at an angle. “What angle would you say that is?” She asks.

  The rest of us laugh when Jeanette raises her hand. She has forgotten that morning lessons are over. “Forty-five degrees,” Jeanette says, beaming because she knows the answer.

  “Excellent,” Miss E. tells her.

  Miss E. lays the ruler over the bucket so that the ruler meets the edge of the other strip of wood.

  I am starting to understand how the trap will work. A rat will crawl up the angled piece of wood, onto the ruler and then fall into the bucket. But what will we use for bait?

  Miss E. has a solution for that too. “I believe I’ve got an old candy in my apron pocket,” she says.

  “What don’t you have in your apron pocket?” Tilly asks. “And if it’s a candy, why haven’t you eaten it by now—or shared it with us? Have you been hiding it in your pocket since 1942?”

  “I’ll admit it’s practically an antique. But it’s licorice flavored, and I’ve never liked licorice. A rat, however, might feel differently.”

  Miss E. reaches into her pocket and shows us a candy that is so old and shriveled it looks more like a dried-out bug than a candy. She lays it on the middle of the ruler.

  “Now what?” Jeanette asks.

  “Do we wait for ‘Uncle Edward’ to come back?” Cathy asks Miss E.

  Miss E. shakes her head. “I’m sure you Girl Guides know the expression A watched kettle never boils. Well, here’s a variation on a theme. A watched bucket never catches a rat. I don’t recommend waiting around. Besides, waiting around isn’t the Girl Guide way. It’s time to do some good turns.”

  FIVE

  Thanks to Miss E., I know a lot about good deeds. For example, I know that some good deeds can be planned ahead of time. Such as remembering a friend’s birthday or taking soup to a neighbor who’s got a cold. Other good deeds happen on the spot. Like when you see a frail old person in line for broomcorn and let him or her go ahead even when you are ready to coll
apse from hunger.

  When a Girl Guide performs a good deed she must have no expectations of reward. I still have work to do in this department. When I do a good deed I secretly hope Miss E. is watching so she will be impressed. I also like it when the person who is the recipient of my good deed says thank you, but I think that might count as a kind of reward. Then again, it might just be good manners. I agree with Miss E.’s philosophy that good manners matter as much at Weihsien as they do at Buckingham Palace or the White House.

  Since I don’t have a good deed planned out, I’ll have to invent my good deed on the spot. I follow Tilly out of our hut. She needs to use the latrine. I have decided that the first person I meet will be the recipient of my good deed.

  Only I don’t meet a person. I meet a guard dog. One of the German shepherds that help the Japanese soldiers patrol Weihsien. The dog growls when he sees me. He bares his fangs. They are long, sharp and yellow near the gums.

  I stop in my tracks and look around. There is no Japanese soldier nearby. This is the first time I’ve ever seen a German shepherd alone at Weihsien.

  The dog snarls. I take a step back, closer to the hut.

  These dogs are trained to kill. It isn’t just the gray stone wall with electrified wires running along its top that stops prisoners from trying to escape. It is also the fear of being mauled to death by one of these dogs, who are known for their viciousness. What’s strange is that the Japanese soldiers have no fear of the dogs. Just last week I saw a soldier scratching his German shepherd behind its ears, and the dog rolled onto his back and whimpered with pleasure.

  “Hello, dog,” I say in my friendliest voice. “What are you doing out alone?”

  Does speaking kindly to a dog count as a good deed? Maybe not. Especially if the dog doesn’t understand English.

  The dog comes closer. Am I brave enough to scratch him behind his ears the way I saw the Japanese soldier do? It would probably be smarter to save my good deed for another creature.