A Single Swallow

by Zhang Ling

  Buffalo helped Ian to the guest room, and Wende cleaned him up. The wound was deep, and there was a good deal of mud, dirt, grass, and leaves embedded in it. Wende used gauze, dipping a bit at a time into warm water to wash the wound. With every wipe, he winced. Each time he winced, her brow furrowed. Wende took out the dirty water but didn’t return to the room. She couldn’t bear watching Pastor Billy’s stitches. They had no painkillers or antibiotic, and the church medicine chest was almost empty, with nothing but a few quinine tablets and some sleeping pills left. The Japanese had been especially vigilant guarding the roads recently, and anyone caught smuggling drugs was executed on the spot. The price of black market drugs had risen to where Pastor Billy couldn’t afford them with just goodwill, and the camp’s medical supply line had been broken, and it was a full three days until the next airdrop was expected.

  Pastor Billy told the men to hold Ian’s leg, and he started stitching. Howl after howl came from the room, and you could almost follow the needle’s pace with its rise and fall. The little newborn woke up and cried in alarm. Wende sat outside the door, covering her ears tightly, but her palms weren’t thick enough. The sound seeped in through her fingers, filing her eardrums one scrape at a time. Her body became smaller and smaller, until she looked like a ball with protruding bones and tendons. If you saw her then, you would hardly recognize her as the person who’d sewn the head back on a corpse or the person who’d just delivered a baby. It dawned on me that she had fallen in love with Ian. Love was the only thing that could make someone lose their courage like that, transforming from a powerful warrior to a terrified wretch. I knew my tongue and breath were no use then. Nothing can comfort someone undone by love. I could only hide in a quiet corner, staying out of everyone’s way.

  When the stitching was finally done, Wende found the courage to go back in. Ian’s clothes were soaked in sweat, and his golden curls were plastered on his forehead. Wende wiped his face and changed him into some of Pastor Billy’s clothes, then fed him some porridge and helped him lie down. Pastor Billy gave him a sleeping pill and sent the men away. Exhausted, Ian finally fell asleep.

  But the baby outside wasn’t ready to sleep. He cried until he was hoarse and his throat was raw. He must have been hungry. His mother had not started lactating yet, so Pastor Billy milked their goat, boiled the small bowl of milk, and waited for it to cool before trying to feed it to the baby with a spoon. He’d never fed a baby before, so he was clumsy, dribbling milk everywhere. Wende took over. Putting the child in her lap and holding its head in one arm, she held the bowl in one hand and the spoon in the other. She tested the temperature against her lips, then carefully began to spoon a little onto the baby’s lips. The child didn’t know how to swallow yet, and gurgling sounds came from his mouth. So Wende wiped her hand on her shirt, dipped her finger into the milk, and then put it into the baby’s mouth. He slurped and began sucking. When he’d finished the whole bowl, he fell into a deep sleep.

  After feeding the child, Wende told Pastor Billy to sleep for a while, since they’d gotten almost no sleep the night before. She sat beside the bed and kept watch over Ian, just as she had watched over the woman and her son earlier. The vigils looked similar, but they were completely different. The first had been a vigil of the eyes and ears. The second was a vigil of the heart. Ian’s skin glistened like a fish, with sweat seeping from every pore. She was afraid that he was losing so much fluid he would turn into a dehydrated skeleton. She wiped the sweat away and dabbed cool water on his lips to moisten his mouth. Still, he only slept for a short while, then the sleeping pill wasn’t enough to keep the pain of his wound at bay. He woke not knowing where he was. His lips twitched, and he stammered. Wende tried to understand, but it took her some time to realize he was saying “cold.” She heard a rattling and realized it was his teeth chattering. She went to her room and took a quilt, then grabbed her cotton shirts and trousers, which Pastor Billy had bought her when she came to Yuehu. She covered Ian, but he still continued to shiver. After a while, she got a few bricks, heated them in the fire, wrapped them in towels, and put them around him. That finally seemed to help a little.

  A while later he started babbling, calling out names. She only recognized the word “mom.” Her heart ached, and her mouth twitched involuntarily. Then he started to kick the blanket. One of the bricks fell, nearly crushing her foot. She wiped his forehead, and it was burning with a high fever. Suddenly he opened his eyes wide, looking at her in a way that gave her the creeps. He saw her, but didn’t seem to know her. His eyes rotated in their sockets, then suddenly fixed on a corner of the ceiling. His neck arched as if he were desperately trying to see something visible only to him. One hand poked outside the quilt, its fingers curled like hooks. Wende realized he was having convulsions and rushed in a panic to wake Pastor Billy. Poor Pastor Billy had been awakened several times already that night. Sleep oozed from his eyes in a furious current, making him seem like a very old man in that instant. After shuffling into his slippers, he took Ian’s temperature: 107 degrees. He shook his head silently, and Wende knew without him saying that there was nothing they could do to help his body cool down, aside from physical cooling. The medicine Ian needed was at least three days away. Ian could only rely on his own ability to bargain with God now.

  The cistern was empty, so Wende drew bucket after bucket of water from the well. She wiped Ian’s forehead and body with a towel soaked in cool water. After she went through several buckets, he quieted down and stopped twitching. Pastor Billy could not tolerate the fatigue and had gone to sleep again, but Wende wasn’t tired. She checked Ian’s temperature again. As she held the thermometer up to the light now streaming in through the window, she closed her eyes and whispered something. The mercury was still at 107. She ran to her room again, returning with her sewing basket. She took out two pieces of material left over from making soles, one big and one small, and rolled them into balls. Then she rolled four smaller scraps into cylinders. When she stitched them all together, I saw that they formed a human figure. She took out a piece of chalk and wrote sick ghost on the little cloth man’s belly, then took four needles of varying thickness and poked them into him. She used great force, and once a needle slipped and poked her finger. A purple bead crawled out from her fingertip and turned into a black worm. She quickly sucked the little purple bug, then spat it onto the ground. At that moment, she looked as delirious as Ian had during his convulsions, and I was a little frightened. She checked again, and Ian’s temperature was down to 104. Wende knelt in the corner, palms clasped together and her lips trembling, and whispered:

  The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want.

  He maketh me to lie down in green pastures;

  he leadeth me beside the still waters.

  He restoreth my soul;

  he leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for his name’s sake.

  Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,

  I will fear no evil, for thou art with me;

  thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.

  I was surprised. I knew “the Lord” was not Wende’s bodhisattva—that was Pastor Billy’s bodhisattva, and Ian’s, and all the Americans. Although Wende went to Pastor Billy’s sermons, she’d never worshipped his bodhisattva. But now, for Ian’s sake, she threw aside her own bodhisattva.

  Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies;

  thou anointest my head with oil; my cup runneth over.

  Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life;

  and I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever.

  Wende repeated the prayer over and over, each time swallowing a few words. In the end, there was only “I will fear no evil.” She chewed those words, swallowed them, then brought them back up, pushing them from her heart through her throat and out her mouth. They traveled that path so many times that they ground a rut into her tongue.

  For the rest of the day, she was in constant motio
n. Her energy was split among the feverish Ian, the frail mother, the crying baby, and the hungry pastor. Even the goats and weeds wouldn’t help, refusing to provide milk and food. Pastor Billy had tried to do the cooking, but the firewood never caught, despite his best efforts with the bellows. Instead, he’d just gotten smoke in his eyes. The boy who helped around the church had chopped plenty of wood before going home, but the woodshed was leaking, so the wood had gotten damp. Pastor Billy realized that God could not be expected to intervene in every disaster, so today he’d have to take care of it himself. He went into the village and found a woman who was breastfeeding and asked her to take the newborn child in for a while. That way, at least one of them was fed.

  Pastor Billy’s lunch that day was rice crust and leftover radish strips. Wende ate nothing. Under pressure from Pastor Billy, she took a bite of pickled vegetables, but immediately spat it out. There were ulcers in her mouth from worry and sleeplessness, and the salt stung. Both Ian and the new mother needed hot water, so instead of eating, Wende moved the bundles of wood into the yard and spread them out in the sun. It was October, so the sun looked strong, but wasn’t. Wende felt the rays of light glaring through the branches and wanted to shield her eyes. The sky suddenly slanted, the light so strong it knocked her over. I rushed to her in a panic and started licking her face, but she didn’t wake. I could feel her breathing, so I knew she was alive, just exhausted. She needed sleep, even if it were out in the yard like this. I snuggled beside her quietly, keeping her warm with my body.

  Later, she was woken by a strange sound, almost like wind, but weaker and with a twist. She forced her eyes open and looked at the tree. The branches weren’t moving, so it wasn’t wind. She considered getting up, but her body was too heavy, like someone had nailed her to the ground. She couldn’t move. She closed her eyes and listened to the sound like wind that was not wind. Gradually, she recognized a melody. Then she realized it was “Yankee Doodle.”

  She scrambled up and stumbled toward the house. Her body was weak, and after just a few steps, she felt like she’d been running for hours. She leaned against the door, holding her chest, and only after she caught her breath did she push the door open. She saw Ian, leaning up against the pillow and whistling weakly. At that moment, her mind was a blank, and she couldn’t stop herself from running toward Ian and throwing her arms around his neck.

  “You . . . you . . . You’re oh . . . You’re OK . . . Alive,” she rambled incoherently.

  He smiled a weak, crooked smile.

  “You trying to suffocate me?” he said.

  She suddenly became aware of herself. She pulled away, a layer of red spreading over her face like dye on rice paper, filling all the ragged wrinkles of exhaustion. The expression on my master’s face was a mixture of shock, embarrassment, shyness, confusion, and maybe some other things. Any one of these emotions would have been expected or maybe even mundane, but all jumbled together, they inexplicably produced a sort of chemical reaction. At that moment, Wende was extraordinarily beautiful. Ian stared at her, then squeezed her hand. “You’re shivering. Come, get warm,” he said, gently lifting the edge of the quilt. She hesitated, then covered her face and ran out of the room. That night after dinner, Ian asked Pastor Billy for a pen and paper, then wrote a letter to his sister Leah. He wrote the opening a few times, but crossed them all out. He finally ended up with this:

  Romain Rolland said misery is like a flint from whence a spark might fly to set the whole soul on fire. We never know what demons may sleep in our hearts . . .

  In the end, he didn’t finish the letter. The next morning, Wende found several balls of paper scattered on the floor.

  Day 50

  Millie:

  Ghost, today, everything seems to be a dream, a short, absurd dream. Things happen so fast, and people are unprepared for them. In fact, even dogs are unprepared for them. When it comes, it comes like a thief. In the few moments it took, I didn’t even realize what was going on. I felt I suddenly had no legs, no body, no head. But I had eyes, ears, and a nose, because I could still see, hear, and smell. Also, in the human language, the word “crawl” is associated with legs, and I’ve lost my legs, yet I am somehow crawling on the beams, watching everything happen below me. I see a middle-aged man in a tunic. As he removes the rubber gloves from his hand, he is pacing back and forth, sighing.

  “We shouldn’t have let them be together. We should have known the size difference would lead to this,” the old man says to a girl in the room.

  She squats on the floor, looking at a disgusting mess of filth. She may be crying, or maybe not. I can’t see her face, only her bowed head. She says, “They were so happy together. Who could stop them?”

  She pulls a clean handkerchief from her pocket. I think she is going to wipe her tears, but she crushes it into a ball and gently wipes the blood from the mangled thing. I can see now that it’s a dead dog.

  “Millie. Millie, how could you leave me like this?” she murmurs.

  Hearing my name, I’m shocked. I’m suddenly aware that I’m dead. I died giving birth, and my master Wende is cleaning my corpse. I remember when Wende delivered that woman’s baby not long ago, Pastor Billy said something about there being a litter of giants in my little body, and he wondered if I would be able to give birth. He said something else that day, and in his words, I smelled ominous predictions about himself and about Wende’s future. Pastor Billy’s lips were cursed by the god of destiny, and every name that crossed his lips was likewise cursed.

  “Pastor Billy, when dogs die, do they go to heaven?” Wende asked, looking up.

  Pastor Billy thought for a while, as if it were a question that required him to consult all his reference books. After a while, he said, “Dogs are also God’s creation. He has prepared a place for every soul he created.”

  The girl’s wrinkled brows relaxed almost imperceptibly. She continued to wipe the blood from my body. In my memory, my master’s hand seems to repeat that action every day. She wipes oil from the stove, sweat from the bamboo mats, footprints from the floor, blood from between the new mother’s legs, sweat from Ian’s brow, afterbirth from the baby’s body . . . But there are too many bad things in this world. Even if she grows thousands of hands, she can’t wipe away all its filth. I want to tell her not to bother. It’s done, and that stinking skin sack is not really me. But I can’t do that. I’ve lost my tongue.

  “I want to put Millie in a box and bury her next to Ghost,” she says.

  Ghost, oh, Ghost! I don’t have to spend all that time and energy on a meaningless journey to your grave and back. From now on, I’ll be with you forever. You may regret that we ended up not leaving any little ones in this world, a little you or a little me, or a little mix of both of us. But really, we don’t need them to continue our lives. We’re dead, and we won’t die again. We have eternal life in death, a life without end.

  Ghost, I’m coming. Wait for me.

  Pastor Billy and Ian: Between Goodbye and Farewell

  Pastor Billy:

  All wars eventually end, just as every night ends, but in war, we don’t know when that end will come. Victory, like death, is unpredictable. So when I heard the Japanese emperor’s “Jewel Voice Broadcast,” my first reaction was suspicion and surprise. Joy came later. This war had been going on for too long. It had been eight years since the Marco Polo Bridge Incident, and counting from the Manchurian Incident, it had been fourteen years. If, on the other hand, we looked all the way back to the First Sino-Japanese War, the Battle of the Yalu River in 1894—and many today see this conflict as a continuation of that one—then this war had been going on for half a century. But even a fifty-year war will eventually come to an end.

  I heard of the truce on the radio at the American military camp. I hadn’t taken my bike, so, leaving Ian and his comrades, I ran home so fast, I lost a shoe along the way. When I breathlessly delivered the news to Stella, her shoulders twitched. That was her only reaction. She neither cried nor laughed, but
was still, as if thinking. After a moment, she walked into the yard, paused under the big tree beside the road, and looked at the sandy yellow road and the livestock prints that covered it. For a long time, she said nothing. She was looking in the direction of her home. More than two years earlier, I had traveled that road and brought her back from Sishiyi Bu. It dawned on me that she was homesick.

  I looked at Stella’s back and noticed that she’d grown taller. There was a bowl-sized scar on the tree, from some worm or perhaps a stroke of lightning. When she had first come here, her head just reached that knot. Now, the knot was below her ear. Of course, I couldn’t be absolutely sure—perhaps the tree was shrinking. Everyone had lost something in this war, but not everyone had lost everything. She’d lost her father, her mother, her virginity, and her love. After all that, what could possibly be left? All she had was her homeland, even if it was in ruins now. At that moment, I made an important decision. I would go back to America and raise money to build a church in Sishiyi Bu, along with a clinic and a home—a home for Stella and me.

  The celebration that day continued until late into the night. Everyone in the village, with the sole exception of Stella, flocked to the training ground, where civilians had always been strictly prohibited. After going through so much, Stella no longer trusted crowds, and she no longer trusted emotions that were too big, such as great sorrow or great joy. At the entrance point of every emotion, she had built a gate. After midnight, the crowd finally began to disperse. Ian was still enthusiastic. He pulled Liu Zhaohu and me aside and said he wanted to have a drink with us at my house. He had two bottles of whisky, and camp rules prohibited him from consuming it on base. He wasn’t really concerned about camp rules, but there were only two bottles, not enough to share with everyone. The only way to really enjoy it was to do so privately. Seeing my hesitation, he punched me on the shoulder and said, “Don’t tell me your God is like that—aside from killing someone, any sin committed today can be forgiven.”