by Virginia Pye
“Wait, I need air,” she said as she took him by the sleeve.
Shirley brought him to stand at the railing so that their voices could be heard above the rain streaming down the tiles. This would be the moment, she thought. If she did as the general asked, would the Japanese soldier take Captain Hsu to his execution in the town square or shoot him right there on her front porch? Would he kill them both simply to have it over with?
“I want to help the injured troops at the camp in the mountains,” she said. “Charles is gone with the others, and I can’t make it to Shanghai in time to join him. Please, Captain, let me be a real Red Army nurse.”
“You must come inside. You have a fever.”
“Please, for my husband’s sake,” she made herself continue. “I want to carry on his good works.”
Captain Hsu studied her hard, and Shirley wondered if he could tell that she was deceiving him. But then a surprising and kind light came into his eyes as he said, “Yes, I think you’re right. The Reverend would want that.”
“But where is the camp located?” she asked. “By what route will we travel?”
So the good captain told her. He said the road and the pass they would take to get there. He mentioned the name of the range and the distance. He spoke casually, helpfully, not knowing how his words would be used against him and his comrades. Shirley’s mind reeled with the magnitude of her betrayal. When he finished, she grabbed his hand and hurried him over the threshold and into the house. She expected the sound of gunshots but heard only the front door slamming and the scrape of the heavy bolt as it fell into place.
Captain Hsu placed his cool palm on her forehead. “You’re burning up. We’ll have to leave while it’s still dark, but you can rest for an hour first. Here, eat this.”
He pulled an oatcake from his pocket. She bit down on the hard surface, chewed, and swallowed with a dry throat. She started to follow him upstairs, but when they reached the landing, Shirley’s gaze drifted down, and she saw the curtain rustle by the front window. Then the basement door creaked closed. On the dusty floorboards in the front hall, she thought she recognized small footprints where there had been none before. The captain raised his pistol.
“It’s nothing,” she said, “only the storm. Someone left a window open in the clinic.”
But she prayed that it was not the wind but instead the miraculous young woman, Dao-Ming. She prayed that the girl would somehow know to warn her comrades. That was Shirley’s only hope to reverse what she had done.
In her bedroom, she was startled by her reflection in the vanity mirror. Bent and ghostly, Shirley looked as old as Lian but thin and drawn, the way her mother appeared after one of her benders. Shirley turned away and ached for bed. The blankets, quilts, and even the sheets had been taken. Captain Hsu led her to the mattress and helped her down. She curled on her side, and he covered her with his Red Army jacket. Shirley longed for the peacefulness she had felt at the Communist camp. Her life, and the lives of the Chinese around her, had seemed so full of promise then.
From the bed, she looked across to the window, where outside everything was monochrome darkness. All light had been snuffed out in the night, and she started to close her eyes. At that moment, from the southwest wall, a sudden flurry of pale wings caught the air as the flock of pigeons that Charles and Han had trained flew off into the pelting rain. Shirley sat up and followed them with her eyes as they flapped frantically against the harsh night.
Captain Hsu saw them, too, and looked across at her, an urgent question on his face.
“Run!” Shirley whispered.
Captain Hsu held his pistol high and, without a word, hurried from the room. Shirley heard his soft tread as he descended the steps and then fled across the front hall. She listened for the grating of the bolt on the door, but it never came. Nor did she hear his footfalls on the creaking porch floorboards. But then, in the quiet, she heard a shot, then another, and finally a third.
Shirley raced to the window, Captain Hsu’s Red Army jacket falling to the dusty floor. She saw nothing outside except rain battering the glass as night sealed the courtyard. She pressed her fingers to the pane and waited for something to tell her what had transpired below but saw no movement and heard no further sound. Her fingers left a ghostly print on the fogged glass, but that was all.
Some time later, from far off, she heard the low rumble of an engine. Approaching bombers, she was sure, come to finish off the mission. General Shia had not ordered her shot because, as he had boasted, he preferred to destroy all. The tangled history of this foreign outpost would finally and fully be obliterated. But instead of aircraft overhead, a black car drove in through the southwest gate. The beams of yellow light pierced the fog and rain. The car slowed to a stop in front of her home and idled ominously, waiting, she realized after a long moment, for her.
Shirley raced to her closet and pulled down a small valise from the shelf. Her husband’s gold monogrammed initials caught the car light as it reflected off the mirror. She put her only two remaining dresses inside the small suitcase and closed the latch. Next, she crouched before the empty fireplace and removed a brick from the back, then reached into the opening and pulled out a tin box. From inside it, she stuffed Chinese and American currency and her family’s papers into the pockets of her apron. She found her raincoat and hat on the hook by the door and pulled on socks and high Wellingtons. Shirley cinched the belt of the mackintosh around her waist, lifted the valise, and headed downstairs. She looked about for Dao-Ming but saw no sign of the girl.
Twenty-six
The train slowed, delayed once more by Chinese storming the tracks. They clung to the windows and climbed onto the couplings between the cars. More Chinese mobbed the corridor outside the compartment and pressed their faces to the inside glass. Charles barricaded the door with suitcases, and Kathryn pulled the frayed curtains closed. Then he hunkered down on the bench and pulled his father’s driving cap lower over his eyes. He knew he was lucky to have a seat, lucky to have made it this far through the dangerous countryside. Lucky, really, to be alive.
Despite the commotion, Kathryn fell asleep with her head resting against his shoulder. Charles pressed his forehead to the window and watched the blurred fields pass by. He wondered where Han was at that moment.
White steam unfurled as it drifted past the window and dissolved into wet air. He shut his eyes and let the rhythm of the train lull him until he remembered his father’s words again: Keep your wits about you, son. Steady nerves. Don’t fire till you see the whites of their eyes. Charles had no pistol, and his father had never meant for him to carry one. But Caleb Carson wanted him to be on the lookout for danger in a country fraught with it. Han, too, had tried to teach Charles to stay attuned to signs and signals, to listen more, and, as he had politely insisted, jabber less. Both his father and his friend seemed better suited than he to handle the adversity around them.
Charles shifted in his seat, and Kathryn finally stirred. Her charming little hat tipped off her head and landed in his lap. Her sleeping face under the dark bangs was cocked up toward him at an odd angle, and he couldn’t help noticing that even though she wasn’t close to his age, she also didn’t seem so old, like his mother. She had insisted he call her Kathryn. And as he whispered it now, it occurred to him then that she was his one and only friend. That seemed such a forlorn thought that it made Charles long once again to see Han. Kathryn continued to snore softly, so he nudged her harder this time. She swung around abruptly, tilted her head back further, and, with eyes still closed, pushed herself up to kiss him. Charles’s eyes opened wide, while hers remained decidedly shut.
“Hey, now,” he said as he gently pushed her off, “what have you been drinking?”
She snatched her hat back and placed it on her head.
“How about sharing?” Charles asked. “I’m dying of thirst. Give me a slug or two, and we’ll really pucker up.”
She pinched his rumpled sleeve and offered an embarrasse
d laugh but opened her silk purse and handed him a tarnished silver flask. She had already finished off a third of it. Charles was determined to catch up. The booze burned the back of his throat, heated his chest, and plunged deep into his empty stomach, sending heat straight to his brain. A minute before, he had felt friendless in this world. Now he had a girl on his arm and hooch in his hand. He’d been around people who drank but had never tasted liquor before. He’d also never kissed a girl before and felt it was long overdue. He was finally a young American, headed home.
“That’s fine Kentucky bourbon, not some lousy Chinese firewater,” Kathryn explained as she straightened her skirt. “My father gave it to me, and I kept it in the back of my closet the whole time I was here. There were temptations galore to break it open, but aren’t you glad I waited until now?” She took the flask from Charles, screwed it shut and dropped it into her purse. “But not a word about any of this, kiddo. It was just a little dream you had.” Kathryn shut her eyes and rested her head against his shoulder again. “Go back to sleep.”
Charles looked out the window at the rice paddies and wished he could melt into the wet earth pockmarked with rain. He wanted to get out of the stuffy compartment but knew he should relish this moment of peace and privacy. Instead, he felt trapped and ashamed. It would have been grand if Kathryn James had been his girl. But she wasn’t his girl. She was just some older woman at the end of her rope. When everything was going to hell around you, you went that way, too.
His father didn’t believe in hell. He said it was an invention of zealots intended to frighten people into believing. Reverend Caleb Carson didn’t care for mumbo-jumbo to fool the ignorant masses. We behave well on this earth, he had said, because that is our nature. Humans are inherently good and cooperative, and when we are not, stories of devils with pitchforks won’t make us rise to our higher selves. Charles had heard his sermons about human goodness all his life and had always assumed they were true. But he wished he could show his father what he had seen over the past weeks. Hell is real, Dad, Charles would have said. And it’s here in China.
On the muddy road beside the train track, the throngs marched forward, stumbling and fighting their way to safety. Charles hadn’t seen any Japanese soldiers for a while but knew they were out there. At first, the rain had come as a welcome surprise, but already it was making matters worse. He had seen farm trucks and the black sedans driven by officials stuck deep in watery ruts. But somehow the people pressed onward, unyielding against the wind and slashing rain. The goddamn unlucky Chinese, Charles thought. Nothing ever seemed to go their way.
How his parents had ever thought it was a good idea to live in this country, Charles couldn’t imagine. He supposed he had his father to blame for that. But he couldn’t blame him for the way the earth had given way under him and he had died in a landslide. Caleb Carson had been pursuing his cause, riding out into the countryside to check on the churches up in the mountains. His father had died doing his Christian duty.
Charles hoped that someday he would be as dedicated to a good cause as his father had been to his. A doctor’s calling was like that—done for the sake of others but with the possibility, Charles hoped, of a fine-looking automobile parked in the driveway. No harm in that, he thought. He had every intention of growing up to be like his father, but not quite so dedicated as to get himself killed.
It was his mother Charles would never understand. The more he thought about how she had taken off for the Red Army camp, the less likely it seemed he would ever forgive her. His father had sacrificed his life out of the goodness of his heart. His mother, on the other hand, was just plain foolish, selfish, and wrong. His jaw tightened as he used a finger to follow a raindrop down the windowpane. Dusk descended, and he pressed his palm against the window and removed it quickly, leaving a ghostly print suspended for a long moment.
He recalled how they had sat together on the window seat in the parlor and watched rain fall in the mission courtyard. She pressed her hand to the pane, then removed it, and in their game, he would quickly place his own much smaller palm over the shadow of hers. As the mark of his mother’s hand faded, he had tried to catch it before it fully disappeared. Charles assumed that he would never hold that hand again, nor would he want to. He squinted at the rain rolling down the window beside him and swallowed with a dry throat again. He was on his own now with nothing but the fast-fading memory of his parents, both gone for good in China.
Charles felt certain that his mother must have known she was going to stay at the Red Army camp when she had gone there. Captain Hsu had probably convinced her. Shirley Carson wouldn’t come to Shanghai before his ship departed or even meet him later in America. She might never return from China at all. He would search for her in future newspaper photos standing alongside the Communist leaders—one lone, tall American woman, her eyes bright with zeal. It burned Charles up inside to think of how she had been willing to sacrifice everything for the Reds.
The train jolted, and from the corridor came voices raised in a heated altercation. The Chinese were always shouting about something, Charles thought. The compartment door inched open, and an ancient grandfather pushed his way inside, somehow managing to shift the suitcases piled before the door. Bent nearly double over his cane, he shuffled toward the empty seat. Kathryn hopped to her feet and was starting to shoo him out when Charles spoke up.
“Tupan Feng? Is that really you?”
The old man dropped onto the bench opposite and did not reply, his wheezing breath his only answer.
Charles whispered to Kathryn, “He’s like the ghosts in Lian’s bedtime tales—he never dies.”
“Not ghost,” Tupan Feng said, his voice, like everything else about him, surprisingly strong.
“Sure looks like one to me,” Kathryn said as she pulled the flask again from her purse, tipped it to her lips, and took another drink.
Tupan Feng’s bony claw swept the air. He pointed at her but said nothing more.
“Now I’m spooked,” she whispered. “Maybe he’s just a figment of our imaginations, the booze going to our heads.”
“Not figment,” Tupan Feng said.
“Sorry, honorable Tupan,” Charles said. “We don’t mean to be disrespectful, do we?” He nudged Kathryn.
She didn’t take the hint but muttered, “What do you bet he dies right here on the train, and we have to deal with it.”
Tupan Feng shouted, “I die when ready to die—in America!”
“America?” Kathryn asked with a laugh. “Is that so?”
Tupan Feng nodded and announced, “Charles-Boy takes me.”
Kathryn slapped Charles on the knee. “Good luck with that, sonny.”
In every tale Lian had ever told, Charles recalled that those who ignored the signs of the spirits met their downfall swiftly and painfully. Han had explained to Charles many times the importance of honoring one’s elders, respecting the way fate unfolds, and accepting that what must be must be. So although Charles’s head felt woozy, and he was getting a kick out of Kathryn’s bad manners, he rose to his feet and bowed before the wizened warlord.
“I apologize, esteemed old one, for our rudeness. We are honored to have you join us here in our compartment. I will escort you wherever you want to go.”
“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” Kathryn said.
Tupan Feng looked Charles up and down. “American boy will not die a fool.” Kathryn started to snicker until the old warlord added, “Not so for American woman. She is putrid turtle egg of the lowest order.”
She raised the flask to toast him, but this time, Charles took it from her and screwed on the cap. He then helped Tupan Feng stretch out on the bench and tucked his father’s driving cap under his head to serve as a pillow.
“You sleep now, old one,” he said.
But Tupan Feng’s eyes remained opened and unnaturally bright. “Charles-Boy, do not search skies any longer for Fenghuang. The Chinese phoenix will never land again in this country. Never, I say!”
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“Okay, take it easy,” Charles said. “I won’t look for it again.”
“No more good fortune here! Just pain and suffering from now on. The emperor of all birds has flown!”
Charles nodded as he laid his topcoat over the thin and trembling shoulders, and the old man’s eyes finally shut. Then Charles sat again beside Kathryn. She shut her eyes, and before long, she, too, had started to snore softly.
Charles reached deep into his khakis pocket and pulled out his father’s chop. He studied the red ink-stained phoenix carved into marble, its wings partly spread and its head thrown back in defiance. Charles recalled that his father had used it on envelopes and papers written with Chinese characters in his spidery penmanship. He had seen the image stamped on files and telegrams hidden in the secret drawer at the back of the Reverend’s antique scholar’s desk, which Charles had come upon by accident when playing at his father’s feet as a boy. And Charles recalled the same small red stencil of the phoenix flying across the wall beside the two-way transistor hidden in the basement.
He pressed the chop into his open palm now, but it left only a hint of pink, the red phoenix fading. An undeniable thought billowed upward in Charles’s mind along with the steam that fogged the train window, making the countryside out there more shadowed and indecipherable than it already seemed: his father, and not just his mother, had most certainly been a spy. Charles wondered how he had ever thought he knew his parents at all.
Twenty-seven
Rain continued to stream over the lip of the cave all afternoon and evening. Caleb slept fitfully on his cot near the back wall, his bones chilled by the change of season. Deep in the middle of the night, he awoke and heard men whispering at the entrance. He did not call out and interrupt their meeting. He had already been too great a burden. He would be forever grateful to the Eighth Route Army for seeing to his recovery and knew he was still being cared for on the orders of Captain Hsu. Caleb had helped the captain by gathering information about the Japanese, but Hsu’s loyalty since his accident had far outweighed Caleb’s significance as a spy.