by Virginia Pye
The screen door hung before them on one hinge. The tired mesh flapped gently in the breeze. With all of her, she ached to have the Reverend beside her at that moment, although she was also glad that he had been spared this forlorn sight. She wondered, in the end, if he had come to believe in ghosts, as she had. That seemed possible, given the other changes that had come over him. And, if so, might he have allowed himself the comfort of imagining that their sorry cottage was inhabited by spirits now? Crowded with them, the setting might not seem so miserable after all. Perhaps she had been right to hear voices cascading down from the porch. She thought she heard little Wesley's happy cry now just inside the door.
As Ahcho held it open and Grace was about to step inside, she looked down and saw something tucked beneath the threshold. She knelt and found a copper coin half hidden where it must have fallen: an American penny, a young boy's treasure, now a gift to her.
Grace turned the dark coin over in her hand, examining it, squeezing tightly, hoping to feel something. Yes, her dear boy. He was here with her. Then, with trembling fingers, she placed it inside the pouch that had held the skull.
She stepped cautiously into the large, open room that had been stripped of the charming furniture that her husband and Ahcho had made prior to her first visit. Grace found herself drawn to the few items still left behind by scavengers. She touched the surface of things. She shifted a pot on the iron stove, traced the crack in a simple ceramic vase, and dragged a finger in a spiral over the dusty wooden mantel.
She could hear Mai Lin and Ahcho whispering to one another. They were far too worried about her. Mai Lin appeared at her elbow as she stood before the stone fireplace.
"Ahcho has prepared a mat for you. You must sleep, dear Grace."
Grace looked down at Mai Lin and was not surprised to hear the old woman's voice caress her name so sweetly. She had never been spoken to this familiarly by her servant, but now that seemed most right and appropriate.
"Yes," Grace said. "Sleep will be good. But first, help me with this, please?"
She opened the pouch again and gestured for Mai Lin to keep it open as she used her hand to swipe dust from the mantel inside. A yellow cloud rose from the embroidered dragon's mouth, and Grace tied shut the silk strings.
"Thank you, Mai Lin."
Grace felt satisfied. She had brought something to this distant corner of this distant land, and she would leave with something: an exchange of dust for dust.
Ahcho called them over to the corner where the children's cribs had once stood. The clever man had constructed a makeshift mattress from heaps of dirty straw there behind the tattered calico curtain. He patted it down, sending a cloud of dust into the air.
"Thank you, Ahcho. You have been most kind."
"It is not much," he said, his voice full of sorrow.
"It will do," Grace replied and let him help her down.
Grace lay still under the warm hide and listened to the gentle rocking of an overturned tin bucket on the floor. Weeds that grew between the floorboards rustled their dried pods. A breeze passed through the house with little resistance, issuing a hollow sound like someone's faint breath.
Grace took it all in: the wind and dust, the rising storm out there, the unsettled air inside. It was as the Reverend had once described it. A gentle, eerie peace settled over the place.
In the dimming light, she looked up at the sky through a hole in the roof. Earlier they had ridden under an achingly blue sky with pristine wisps of summer clouds. Now she could see denser clouds forming, low and tan and ominous.
"Is a storm coming?" she asked.
"A sandstorm, perhaps," Ahcho said. "We will be protected well enough in here."
"Good," Grace said. "Very good."
She did not sleep but remained alert and waiting for something. She could see out one of the open windows. The air had begun to swirl with crimson clouds. A storm was coming, no question about it, quite quickly from across the plains.
Grace shut her eyes, and in no time the first drops of rain fell. Water from the sky landed with a soft patter on the tile roof. She felt certain that this portent was auspicious. The future was most welcome, if seen in the right light.
Mai Lin lifted her head and made her drink from a small vial, Grace assumed to help her sleep.
"It's finally raining, is it not?" Grace asked.
Mai Lin nodded, or at least Grace thought she did. The storm had darkened everything, and night appeared to be descending fast. Grace glanced around the cottage and could no longer make out even the outline of the door. The screen flapped, and loose boards creaked. The air moved, and she swore she heard rain dripping from the eaves and spilling onto the packed ground. Out the window, she thought she saw great sheets of rain crossing the land. Soon the soil would yield to it.
But why weren't Mai Lin and Ahcho celebrating? The old pair had sat down with their backs against one of the cabin walls. They slumped against one another, and Grace blinked several times but could have sworn that she saw their hands intertwined on the gritty floorboard between them. My Lord, she thought, perhaps they were husband and wife. Maybe Mai Lin and Ahcho had been a couple all along. As the thought came to Grace, she chuckled to herself.
So little she and the Reverend had ever understood of what transpired around them in this strange land. How had they ever convinced themselves that they were anything but tourists? They were as ignorant as the most ignorant of coolies who eyed the white visitors with curiosity and fear. Grace's amusement at the way her Chinese servants had kept secrets seemed to lighten her heart and even her body. She could feel her limbs becoming less pained and her chest not nearly so burdened by the illness. Yes, it must be true about Mai Lin and Ahcho. There was love there all along.
How remarkable, but no less so, than the rain that finally fell here in this parched and blistered land. She listened for Mai Lin's snores and Ahcho's steady sleeping breath. When she was sure the two elders were asleep, Grace wished them sweet dreams and softly began to shift and move.
She pulled the great wolf hide around her and lifted the animal's jaw up over her head. As she sat up, she felt as small and light as a child under the enormous fur. If only the Reverend had not given it away, he might still be with her today. For Grace understood that the fur did offer true protection, though mostly against one's own fears.
She stood on weak legs and listened again for the rain. It continued to fall, and she was sure it was doing some good. She stepped slowly across the bare floorboards, opened the screen door, and stepped outside onto the porch. She paused before the broken-down railing where her husband had once stood and waxed poetic about the divine and mysterious landscape all around. In so many ways, he had been right. She did not regret for a moment coming to this land. For this rough place, with the help of the wolf hide now, had made her fearless. She was a modern American woman after all, striding into a future of her own making.
Grace stepped down the porch steps and into the rain, which was slowing now to a mere sprinkle. Her feet avoided the shallow puddles. When she looked up again, she saw her husband before her, a donkey trailing at his heels. The Reverend John Wesley Watson held the reins in one hand, an open book in the other. His steps were slow as he came closer, his head bent. His boots, long topcoat, and hat were covered in a thick yellow layer of loess. The Reverend squinted through his goldrimmed glasses, concern on his face. He stopped and surveyed their cottage, and Grace wanted to tell him not to be upset at the sight. They would make it right again. But he merely pulled out his handkerchief and wiped his glasses of the infernal dust.
The rain stopped altogether, and Grace turned up the dirt road and began to walk. Little Wesley toddled along not far in front of her. He kicked pebbles as he went. His colorful Mongolian robe caught the sun's rays, and she thought she heard the high tinkling of bells accom panying him. Amulets and talismans swung from his neck and around his waist. Grace was glad he wore a thick fur hat upon his golden head, for it would protect
him in the desert climate. She picked up her pace to join her son, but the distance between them remained the same no matter how quickly she moved her feet.
Then she saw why the boy was maintaining such a rapid pace. He followed his father, who strode on ahead, his donkey left behind. The Reverend's footsteps struck the hard dirt, his march unfaltering. Here on the road to Yao dao ho, the Reverend seemed at peace, his gaze taking in the landscape that he loved. Grace trailed after her husband and their firstborn child.
As she walked, she vaguely sensed Mai Lin hovering nearby, pressing a loving hand on her chest and applying the most pungent of compresses. Why was she always administering to Grace? She wished to be left alone now. She was trying her best to hear the song that Wesley and the Reverend were singing. A hymn, no doubt, but which one?
The Reverend stopped singing and counted softly to himself, saying the numbers of churches or converts or perhaps only the calculation of successful crops a farmer could hope to garner in a good year. The number of fields ready to cultivate, enumerated with satisfaction. Grace was happy for him that he had forgotten his disappointments and grave mistakes and had returned to what he knew best: the land. He was born of farmers and remained a farmer in his heart. The Reverend seemed contented as he wiped the sweat from his neck with a handkerchief that bore his initials.
Grace watched as he accidentally let it slip from his hand. When he did not stoop to collect it, she hurried to retrieve it from the muddy road, thinking it might be useful on the journey ahead. Little Wesley traipsed right over the flimsy thing, still singing with his head flung back. A carefree boy on his merry way.
When Grace reached the thin white handkerchief, she scooped it up, but it slipped through her fingers and was lifted away again on the wind. A strong breeze off the desert was not unusual in early summer, Grace reminded herself, as she heard soft moaning and weeping nearby. Mai Lin and Ahcho made far too much of things. She wished she could tell them not to worry. She had found her son and her husband, and they were on the right road now.
Grace turned to watch a gust take the pale handkerchief and blow it further up the trail, where it twisted and hung in the air, finally drifting over an ocean, a vast and white-capped sea. There on a steamer stood a proper and upright couple at the prow. They each held the hand of a small girl, a toddler somehow now, although when Grace had last seen her she had been but a babe in arms. Still, the couple kept the girl between them and pointed out at the endless water and squinted. Grace did so, too, and thought she could just make out America on the horizon.
The handkerchief danced in the swift breeze around this new family, but it was the child who spotted it and reached up to catch it in her small hand. She touched the worn, soft fabric to her cheek, and Grace realized that she could turn away now.
She gazed up the dirt road that led west from Shansi Province. On and on the land rolled, eventually arriving in the great Gobi Desert. The Reverend had told her how remarkable it was to come upon a section of the Great Wall, or the famous Ming Tombs, or the extraordinary monoliths known as the Sand Buddhas. Farther beyond those sights lay the tribal provinces where men in woven costumes herded sheep at the edge of steep cliffs. Bent farmers tended verdant crops and orchards on stepped terraces. Nomads, not all of them rogues, roamed the unpaved byways, hopping rides on ferry barges that crossed forgotten rivers.
Her husband had seen all of this and more. Grace wished with all her heart that she had traveled with him on his many journeys. But it was all right now, for soon she would join him in that mysterious land ahead.
Grace set off, knowing well how far she had left to go. She didn't want to delay a moment longer. She marched with purpose in her step, a modern woman on a road less traveled, but no longer frightened because of it. Indeed, she felt quite grand as she walked on, deeper and deeper into the adopted desert of her dreams.
Author's Note
My grandfather, the Reverend Watts O. Pye, was amongst the first missionaries to return to Shanxi Province in northwestern China less than a decade after the Boxer Rebellion of 1900. During his tenure in Fenchow as head of the Carleton College Mission and in conjunction with the Oberlin-Shansi Program, he helped build a hospital, roads, schools, and a library. I gather from Reverend Pye's journals that he was a fervent evangelist who recorded his success by the number of converts he made while roaming the region. He was the first white man to visit many of the villages and wrote with both humor and respect for the peasants he encountered. In romanticized prose, he recorded the stark and eerie beauty of the land. And while riding on donkey back over the rough terrain, he truly did read and recite aloud from the Romantic poets.
Reverend Pye and my grandmother, Gertrude Chaney, had three chil dren in Shanxi. Their two daughters died young. My father, Lucian W. Pye, was the only offspring to survive into adulthood. The Reverend Pye's death occurred when my father was five, the same year he lost a sister. Not long afterward, young Lucian suffered an illness similar to rickets that kept him bedridden with limp bones for a year. Gertrude, a strong Midwesterner, managed these trials and stayed on in the mission compound in Fenchow with my father even under Japanese occupation. A year after Lucian left for college in the United States, Gertrude was finally forced to abandon China on the neutral Swedish ship Gripsholm, which left from Shanghai after the attack on Pearl Harbor. She always wanted to return but never did.
My father soon returned to China as a translator for the U.S. Marine Corps, and thanks in part to the G.I. Bill, he studied at Yale and went on to become a prominent sinologist in the field of political science. He authored over twenty books on China and the postwar developing countries of Asia. He always said that political scientists were frustrated novelists, but I think he was just being kind to me— although his scholarly approach did center on hard-to-quantify subjects such as the Chinese political mind and spirit.
Although I have never been to China, I was steeped in its aura. I grew up in a household decorated with Chinese objects, and they carried with them the feeling of an earlier time. My grandmother Gertrude doted on me as the youngest, and together we held tea parties using her finest porcelains from Shanxi. Families pass down wisdom and pain often in equal measure, and I sensed my father and grandmother's losses in China. Like many American families, the earlier generations survived experiences that we can hardly imagine, yet strangely inherit. This book is a fictional expression of that distant, haunted time and place— one that exists in my mind and not precisely on any map.
Acknowledgments
Like many debut novels, River of Dust has many generous people behind its creation. I am deeply grateful to Greg Michalson for his insightful and wise editing and for deciding that this story was worthy of Unbridled's excellent name. Much appreciation, too, goes to my agent, Gail Hochman, for taking on this project with enthusiasm. I especially want to thank Nancy Zafris, brilliant author and teacher, for her invaluable help redirecting my energies so that I wrote this manuscript in particular, and also for seeing that it was read by the right person at the right moment.
For a number of years, I worked on a previous manuscript set partly in China. While that book did not find its way to publication, many kind friends read part or all of earlier incarnations: Margaret Buchanan, Patty Smith, Nathan Long, Susann Cokal, the late Emyl Jenkins, Rosemary Ahern, James Marcus, Kirk Schroeder, Phyllis Theroux, Brian Deleeuw, Meg Medina, Julie Heffernan, Jonathan Kalb, Kate Davis, David Heilbroner, Karl Marlantes, and Robert Goolrick. Additional authors Gigi Amateau, Leslie Pietrzyk, Belle Boggs, James Prosek, Dean King, Suzanne Berne, Sheri Holman, and Arielle Eckstut also generously extended a hand to help me join their ranks.
For many years I have benefited from the encouraging company of writers and publishing professionals through the literary nonprofit organization James River Writers. The Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, WriterHouse, the Tin House Writer's Workshop, and the Acadia Summer Arts Program have each offered time, fine company, and a place to work.
> My siblings, Lyndy and Chris, have offered generous support over decades, as have my in-laws, Carol and Earl Ravenal. I wish that my mother and father were here to enjoy this publication. My mother, Mary Toombs Waddill, was a crackerjack editor and reader, and her wisdom, goodness, and love continue to guide me always. My father wrote prolifically for decades, sometimes with a Red Sox or Celtics game on the TV, and showed me that writing can be both a discipline and a joy.
And, finally, this novel is dedicated to my immediate family: Eva, for her bright spirit and abiding faith in me and herself; Daniel, for his clearheadedness, humor, and solid love; and, most of all, John, who has been at my side for thirty-plus years and has helped us to make a hopeful life together where I could pursue what I wanted most.