No Certain Home

by Marlene Lee

  He reached through the unmoving air pocketed in the canyon and pulled up on her pony’s reins. “I’ll come for you next Saturday.” He leaned toward her and kissed her on the mouth.

  Agnes softened. She shifted toward him on her pony, then stiffened and pulled back. “No,” she said. “I’ll meet you in Morenci.”

  By the time Agnes and Big Buck neared Morenci, stars salted the sky with millions of bright grains. They had ridden the high desert ridge and canyon in silence. Now as they drew near the town, Big Buck began to talk.

  “Workin’ every day in the mine,” he said almost to himself. “Up at four, breakfast, lunch, a Chink dinner, bed, and then the same thing all over again… “ He rolled himself a cigarette and struck a match on his thumbnail. “I’d trade it all in for a yaller dog.” The horses snuffled and the saddles creaked.

  “Mining is no way to live,” he added. “It’s just digging. Been thinking of going down to Mexico.” The glow of his cigarette came and went. “Fight in the Revolution.” He glanced sideways at Agnes. “Pancho Villa.”

  “Like our forefathers!” She spoke urgently. “Like my great-great-great-grandfather in the American Revolution!”

  “Yessir,” said Big Buck, encouraged by her outburst. “I just may do ‘er.”

  Agnes turned in her saddle. “I read in the library,” she said, “where the Indians licked the Spaniards. It’s called the Pueblo Revolt.”

  “Yup,” said Big Buck. “Digging is for moles, and I ain’t no mole. Revolution’s the thing.” He pulled his horse closer to Agnes. “Ever see a flash flood in the desert?”

  Agnes said she hadn’t.

  “Well, first you see a dark cloud far off, kind of in long fingers, like the shape of the mesas underneath. The storm comes down but there’ll be bright sun still shining above.” Big Buck’s voice deepened. “The air turns blue and gold and the rocks and yucca and cholla turn a queer color.

  “Then you’ll see rain streaks off in the distance, and you’ll see lightning strikes”—he turned to look over his shoulder and jabbed a thick finger at several imaginary spots on the horizon—“all around you, all at the same time.”

  Agnes inhaled deeply, as if she could smell the wet rock and cactus and dampened dirt.

  “Then the thunder rolls down the canyons and it starts to rain.” Big Buck stopped talking.

  “Is that all?”

  “Is that all?” he said, offended. “You’ll be riding along a dry wash and the dirt will get kind of sticky. Your horse will slip around a little. The stream bed beside you is still dry so you figure you’ve got time. If you cross a river it’s just a trickle.” Again he stopped talking. Agnes waited a decent interval.

  “Are you finished?” she asked.

  “Like I say, the river is just a trickle. Then, all at once you hear a roar. It splits your ears. Maybe it’s a whole mountain caving in, and you think terrible thoughts about buried miners.

  “You turn your horse and scramble up to higher ground, and you look up-canyon and see a wall of water slamming down the river bed with trees and rocks churning around and around.” He concluded the story with a lesson. “Next time you see the dry bed you’ll know why it’s gouged out and scarred.”

  “Are you really going to join Pancho Villa’s army?” Agnes asked after a respectful silence.

  “Might. There ain’t nothin’ keepin’ me here.”

  “I’ll go with you.”

  Big Buck looked at her in surprise. “You will?”

  “To fight for freedom.”

  “What about your Mormon billiard cue?”

  “He’s nothing special to me.”

  “He likes you,” said Big Buck. Music from Morenci carried through the thin night air. As they drew nearer they could hear stomping and singing and violins, accordions, harmonicas. The glow of lanterns hung over the town like steam over hot springs.

  Big Buck reached out and reined in both horses. “It’s not that I want to go to Mexico exactly,” he said. Agnes turned at the despair in his voice. “I’m lonely,” he said. Her horse danced away, but Big Buck jerked on the reins. “I’m not much,” he said.

  Agnes leaned forward and stroked the hot, leathery skin of her horse’s neck. “You’re a lot,” she murmured into the horse’s mane.

  “Marry me.”

  Agnes sat bolt upright in her saddle.

  “I’m not much, but I’d be good to you.”

  Agnes didn’t speak.

  “If it’s my age you’re worried about,” he said, still controlling both horses, “I’m only forty-two. Without this mustache I look a lot younger. And I ain’t a Mormon who don’t know which end is up. I’d take good care of you.”

  “I know you’d be good to me.” She laid her head back and half-closed her eyes until individual points of starlight swam together. “You’ve always been good to me.”

  Big Buck took a long, audible breath.

  “But I’m never getting married,” she said.

  He let go of the reins. “Why’s that?”

  “I’m just not.”

  “Got to be a reason.” The horses moved forward, their breathing and footfalls loud in the still night.

  “I’ll fight in the Revolution with you but I’m never getting married.”

  His silence troubled her. “You’ll always be a friend,” she said. It was the best she could do.

  They entered Morenci. With the music and lights and stomping, it seemed like the heart of the world. They tied up their horses. In the crowd the billiard cue found her. As they danced, Agnes looked over at Buck, his face solemn under the red, white, and blue lanterns swinging from lines strung between poles. Maybe she could marry him; maybe she should marry him. If he’d asked her to fight in the Mexican Revolution, she would have said yes.

  “You sure like to dance,” he said when they started on the ride home. Moving rhythmically with the horse’s gait, he rolled himself a cigarette and looked up at the stars. “You’ve learned a thing or two since the coal camps.”

  “I haven’t learned enough.”

  Big Buck lit his cigarette. A worm of fire burrowed into the tobacco.

  “I talked to a girl who’s been to teachers’ college for six years.” Her voice held both contempt and awe. Big Buck listened. “But I told her nobody needs that much schooling.”

  Big Buck smoked and Agnes fell into a morose silence.

  “Where is this school?” he asked.

  “Tempe.”

  Big Buck flicked away his cigarette butt. “I’ll stake you to one term,” he said. “After that, you can come back and marry me.”

  “What if I don’t want to?”

  “Then it’s a present.”

  She studied the sky for a long while. “Mother wanted me to get an education, but she didn’t tell me to take six years doing it.”

  “Did Sarah Lydia die sudden?”

  “No.”

  He left a silence that she could fill or not fill. It seemed to Agnes the night sky blazed up and died down. Pungent odors rose from the damp desert floor.

  “I sat with her three days and nights.” Beneath her the horse continued its steady gait. Big Buck rolled another cigarette. “On the last day Mother asked me to hold her.” Agnes was crying. “Said I’d been a good daughter.” The color of her mother’s face had frightened her. Death is colorlessness. It is a body without weight. Agnes sobbed. “She was dried out. She was like something left in the field after harvest.”

  Big Buck struck a match on his thumbnail and grunted. “People get used up,” he said softly. She turned to look at him. Tears were coming down his cheeks, but his hand holding the glowing cigarette was steady.

  “I’d appreciate your help going to school,” she said, wiping her eyes with the back of one hand.

  He stared straight ahead and nodded.

  “Where’s your sister and brothers?” he asked after a bit.

  “Farmed out.”

  “Farmed out!”

  “John a
nd Sam are at Leonard’s in Oklahoma. Myrtle’s in Raton.”

  Big Buck weighed the information. “Leonard’s the one that married Nellie?”

  Agnes nodded. “Nellie died before Mother.” She was afraid he might tell her to go back and take care of her brothers and sister, that he might tell her he’d changed his mind about helping her with school. But he pulled close and touched her hair once with his big hand. Then his horse moved away.

  Early the next week Agnes climbed onto a coach car of the Southern Pacific. Big Buck handed her grip up to her.

  “Write,” he said. “Don’t be a stranger.” Agnes had failed to hug him on the way to the depot. Now that she stood above him on the platform between cars, it was too late. The train started up sharply. Cars bumped in uncoordinated jerks and the great wheels began grinding slowly away from Clifton. Neither Agnes nor Big Buck waved. A whistle blast filled the widening gap. With a steady, expressionless gaze, they watched each other grow small and disappear.

  9

  China 1937

  “My education was not as my family wished,” said Zhu De.

  He, Agnes and Mao Zedong had finished their lunch of boiled cabbage, millet and tea at a wooden table set on the terrace outside Mao’s cave. Mao was looking off toward the ancient pagoda that for centuries had guarded this valley lying between the hills of yellow dust. Zhu De, seated near Agnes, watched her stack the small tin plates and clear a place on the table for writing. Still abstracted, Mao rose and set off down the terrace. His thin, large-headed figure made its way downhill toward a group of soldiers gathered on the drill ground at the foot of the loess hill.

  When he was out of sight, Agnes opened her flat, black notebook, larger than her hand but not too large to fit inside the leather shoulder bag she always carried. Zhu De stretched his stocky legs under the table and began where the previous interview had left off.

  “In 1905,” he said, “after much persuasion from my old schoolmaster, my family allowed me to study at the modern school in Shunching. They had sacrificed much money for my education and wanted me to pass the State Examination so that I could be an official in the dynasty and add to the family income.

  “I promised my family I would study for the Examination. Secretly, I also intended to study the modern subjects of science and physical education.”

  Lily Wu approached the wooden table and took the place Mao had vacated. She laid her Chinese-English dictionary beside the stack of tin plates and poured herself a cup of tea.

  “I thanked my family,” Zhu De continued, “and set out walking for Shunching. I walked for more than a day. I felt”—he looked at Lily Wu and pronounced the Chinese word.

  “’Elated,’” she translated. “He walked to the new school and he felt elated.”

  Zhu De gave the tin teapot two turns on the table.

  “Unfortunately I was informed I could not study the new science and physical education if I intended to prepare for the official State Examinations. They permitted me only one extra class: Japanese language.” He threw back his head in contempt. “All China, you see, all Asia, was impressed by Japan’s victory over Russia. At last an Asian country had become as imperialistic as the West!”

  Agnes’ pencil lead broke. She reached into her shoulder bag and took another from the row of pencils inserted in loops; pencils held like a row of cartridges in a gun belt. Zhu De waited until she was ready to write again.

  “I did as my teachers told me to do, though I wept from frustration. That summer I went home and worked in the rice fields and continued to study for the State Examinations given in Ilunghsien twenty-five miles from my village. When it was time to go, my family worried about me. They had never traveled so far. To them it was as if I was traveling to the far side of the world.”

  He stopped abruptly.

  “Did you take the examinations?” Agnes prompted.

  “Yes,” he answered. “I was the only peasant. All other students were from educated families.” He stared into his enameled tin cup.

  “Did you pass?”

  Zhu De looked up at Agnes. “I passed,” he said. “My family was very happy.” But sitting at the table, he did not look happy.

  “And you?”

  Zhu De spoke after a long silence. “I wrote to them that I needed money, a loan, to take the next level, the Provincial Examinations.” He changed position on the wooden bench. “It was a lie.”

  Lily Wu looked at him suddenly.

  “What did you do with the money?” Agnes asked.

  “Against my family’s wishes I had decided to study physical education, mathematics, geography, and military drill at the new government Normal College in Chengtu.”

  Lily Wu smoothed the long hair flowing down her back like black silk and looked away from his shame.

  “What did you do with the money?” Agnes repeated.

  Zhu De spoke only to Lily. “First I walked twenty miles to see the new western machinery at the Nampu salt wells. There I found no modern machinery, but much sickness and disease. The salt workers were slaves.”

  “Indentured serfs,” Lily translated for Agnes, though the conversation had become Zhu and Lily’s alone. They grieved for their country, they sorrowed for young Zhu’s disobedience to his family. Their Chinese-ness excluded Agnes.

  “Except for loincloths, the men worked naked,” Zhu De said. “They were jaundiced. They coughed and had running sores. They worked from morning until late at night.”

  These moments when Agnes could not be Chinese, yet no longer felt American, were painful. Her eyes darkened and she sat without moving. Zhu De turned again to include her.

  “I saw a childhood friend from Landlord Ting’s estate. I spoke to him but he hid his face in shame. I thought of my brothers, nephews, cousins, poor people who were expecting me to help. I was tormented by my decision and by my lie.”

  Agnes’ pencil moved fast as she caught up to his words.

  “In five days I walked through beautiful Szechwan, sleeping at the homes of peasants each night, bathing in the running streams. All day I looked at the mountains, flowers, trees, and smelled the fragrant fruit. I did not know I was bidding good-bye to my youth. Bidding good-bye to old China. I ran the last distance to Chengtu. Its ancient, venerable walls were cool to my touch. Chengtu! Chengtu!

  “Chengtu was the center of culture and politics in Western China. It was once the meeting place of the old trade routes. Now the ancient ways were struggling with the new. Here the teachers shaved off their queues. Women students had natural, unbound feet. The science class had one glorious microscope, one human skeleton, and one globe of the earth. There were no textbooks. Teachers who had studied abroad brought back their notes and lectured from memory. Revolution was in the air. An official position in the dynasty became even more obnoxious to me. I was determined to study science, physical education, military drill. I hoped some day to enroll in the military academy. Yet I was afraid of what my family would say.

  “Rumors ran through the school that certain teachers were members of the secret revolutionary society, Tung Meng Hui, and my heart beat faster. My friends and I went to factories in order to see western machinery. When we were denied admittance, we stood outside the factory walls and listened to the hum of the machines.

  “At the end of the year I obtained a position as a teacher of physical education. Walking the long distance back to my village, I felt confident that my family would understand. After all, as a teacher I could now send money back to my village.

  “When I arrived they stood in a long line and greeted me with bows. They had not enough food for themselves. They lived in a small house. Still, they fed me like a king and gave me a private room furnished with the finest comforts they could provide.”

  Zhu De’s lips trembled. “They thought I was going to become an official under the dynasty, you see, and lift them out of poverty. They would not let me work in the rice fields. They did not want me to touch the earth. My hands and fingernails must b
e clean, the hands and fingernails of an official.” Zhu De paused and looked into the distance. “You see, they were trying to prevent me from sinking back into the darkness of peasant life.”

  Agnes had stopped writing again. Her eyes did not leave his face.

  “I finally told them I was never going to be an official. I was going to teach physical education in Ilunghsien. The effect of my confession was terrifying. My mother sobbed all night in her bedroom. I could read the faces of my father and foster-father: I was giving up an official position in order to teach boys how to throw their arms and legs about.

  “I left for Ilunghsien. My foster-father walked many miles with me. ‘We are simple country people,’ he said, ‘and do not understand many things. What is unclear today may be clear tomorrow.’ He wore threadbare clothes and rope sandals. When he turned back I wept.”

  Agnes walked away from the table and stood at the edge of the terrace. She looked in the direction of the drill ground. But instead of young Chinese soldiers, she saw three children: her brothers and her sister. She saw a woman, old and ill: her mother. And she saw a young woman turn her back and walk away.

  Zhu De had come to stand beside her. “One must often walk alone,” he said. When she returned to the table, Zhu De and Lily Wu had gone. Agnes wiped her face, poured herself a cup of cold tea, and began entering the last of the interview in her notebook.

  10

  Tempe, Arizona 1911

  The train aimed for a single butte thrusting straight up from the desert floor at Tempe. Most of the passengers were waiting for Phoenix nine miles farther on. In the late afternoon sun, orange going to red, Agnes and another student stood on the platform between cars and watched fields of cotton irrigated by the Salt River glide by. Cotton gave way to cabbages, cantaloupes, citrus orchards. The hypnotic clicking of the train’s wheels slowed as the cars rolled by a Mexican village that had dug itself in against the butte centuries ago and appeared to be biding its time until the ages covered it over again.

  The wall of sage and rock and cactus, touched here and there by bright nasturtiums, reared up against the train. Where the butte ended, a spur of track set out toward the river and attached itself to a cluster of buildings under a tall chimney stack labeled Hayden’s Mill. A ferry, a small barge hooked to a cable strung across the river, approached the dirt bank, ready to disgorge a carriage and two horses onto the mill dock. The train veered south, rocking on its rails. Agnes leaned into the long, slow curve until finally the train ground to a stop in front of the depot, open valves shrieking.