those who followed their religion.
Shir Li, old now, with yellow stains in his white beard, and his queue gray with age, modeled three figures of Kuanyin in Pearl River clay. He had modeled the Buddhist saints all his life. He used the clay of his native Ningwu near the Great Wall’s shadow in Shangsi Province. When the troubles began, the missionary had brought Li’s son, Shir Ting and his wife King Ki, to this foreign semi-tropical China near Guangzhou.
Li did not like Guangzhou. He was an old man. In the dry mountains of Ningwu, his bones had not reminded him too often of his age, except on the coldest and snowiest of nights. Here, where the rivers, marshes, and seas all breathed dampness, Li’s bones breathed pain. And the food was not to his liking. He preferred wheat or millet to rice, and lamb to the ubiquitous chicken and fish of this coastal area. He didn’t like the missionary very much, either.
Li did not expect to enter the missionary’s Heaven, and did not want to enter it. Perhaps Nirvana one lifetime. Or perhaps the Old Master, Lao Tzu was right, that one might be in the wheel of change and transform oneself out of it by embracing it. Philosophical and theological splitting of hairs was no more an interest to Li as his sore and stiff fingers shaped a Kuanyin around the vial he had put in its center. The Kuanyin would be one of a set of three Kuanyins, meant to go with his son and daughter-in-law when they fled China.
Secretly Li sympathized with the antipathy of the I Ho T’uan to the foreigners. Li was an old man who had seen many die for reasonless causes under the heavy and grinding heels of the Qing Dynasty. He had no wish to see any one die in a war over which god to worship. Away to the North, in Shangsi, many had died, and here now was news coming from Peking of war and troops of the foreigners battling in Peking. Resistance was ineffective. Did not a sacred one somewhere say one became what one resisted? Resist the foreigners and China would become foreign.
Li shook his head. He put the last smoothing on the Guangzhou clay and set it aside to dry. Then he made a second and third Kuanyin. The set would go over the great water with Ting and Ki and their missionary friend. It was the missionary who had persuaded Li to come with them out of Shangsi just before the trouble started. They had ridden on the railway. Ah! The screeching of that machine, and the long lines of cars, like a dragon wounded and howling through the countryside of China, still haunted Li. As did the battles to fill the rice bowls along the way. Now he would die in this stinking place of rivers and marshes while weird water birds wailed in the wet winds.
One Kuanyin’s head inclined to the left, one’s head to the right, and one was upright for the center place between the other two. When his trembling fingers had put the last details on the Kuanyins, Li sat back to eat his cold rice while the statues baked in the sun. Li understood the missionary had meant to be kind as an expression of his God’s commands. Yet Li had wished to die in Ningwu in Shangsi Province to be buried among the graves of his ancestors. Alas, not now!
Two days later Li took paints and a small brush. He painted each of the clay statues with the bronze base-paint. When the paint dried, he put a second coat on. To a careless eye they would have seemed bronze. Anyone who lifted them would know them to be of a lighter material. The waterproof vials in them added an odd balance to their heft.
Li scraped the last of his rice grains into a heap in the bottom of his bowl and counted them. There were nine, the sacred number. Reverently he scraped them out on the ground, and a small Mandarin duck came and took them one by one. Then the duck bowed three times to Li, and Li, without rising, inclined his head to the duck. The duck waddled away. Night was coming. He would read a little in the books of poems, which the missionary had, translations of religious poetry from his own barbarian tongue, and then he would sleep.
Shir Ting and King Ki wept for Li when they went to wake him in the morning. Li would not rise again to make statues or to paint them. Ting and Ki presented the statues to their missionary friend, the Reverend Philo Zinner, in remembrance of their father. They declined to go with the missionary. They decided to stay with a young friend they had met named Sun Yat Sen and overthrow the Qing Dynasty.
Reverend Zinner took Li’s Kuanyins, with their implanted vials, away with him to the City. They remained in his family until the death of his son, Fowler Zinner, when Fowler’s heirs donated them to the St. Edmund’s Dining Room Thrift Shop.
Shir Ting survived to a great old age. King Ki had died of a swamp fever in 1907. Shir Ting was instrumental in organizing the Chinese Republic. He was with Mao on the Long March. For long years he did not think of the three Kuanyins his father had made. During World War II he met a man from Ningwu who knew Li. The man told him that his father had had a great Chinese treasure. Ting deduced that this treasure was small enough to be secreted in the Kuanyins.
It was 1972, and Nixon had come to China. Shir Ting asked a Western reporter to help retrieve the Kuanyins. When the reporter returned to the United States, he hired a detective from the City who called himself Quigley Drye to search for the statues. Quigley quickly became obsessed with the task, and adopted the persona Fu I for undercover work.
In Beijing, Shir Ting lay on a bed in a government hospital. Around his shriveled figure stood several persons in white medical clothes. The medical persons gravely wagged their heads in unison in the manner of medical persons worldwide. One of Shir’s hands periodically rose and clawed at the air, and then fell to his side and scratched at the sheets. They applied more steel needles to vital areas and his arm grew still. His breathing worsened. The doctors wagged their heads periodically. The enemy they never conquer won again. Shir Ting’s breath rattled in his throat. He died. The People’s Doctors wagged their heads over him several minutes before they noticed. Then one signaled another who closed Shir’s eyes. They all wagged their heads as they left in single file.
In the course of time, Quig Drye determined the Kuanyins had remained in the Zinner family for nearly seventy years, but that family had donated them to St. Edmund’s Thrift Shoppe. The round-faced monks could not remember who had bought them. No, no one deemed them valuable enough to record in the sales book as anything other than miscellaneous.
Scene on a Country Road
Some other clergy wife filled the Presbytery position, though Vanna did interview for it. She had broken through a barrier, though, in her own mind, and in Dickon’s mind. She persevered in her job search until she found work with Quigley Drye, a private eye in the City. The freedom and excitement of a world outside the church paid for the long commute. Vanna did not forget, however, Dickon’s opposition. From the first day, she had an independent check in her bank she vowed to leave him, and then to destroy him. Evil spirits heard her vows, and recorded them.
Today the sun was low in the eastern sky, shrouded in retreating mist, as though reluctant to face another day’s trip across the heavens. Moisture dripped from the eucalyptus trees onto the windshield of Dickon Shayne’s old Plymouth. Every time he passed a grove he had to turn the wipers on. Silently he wished he had a newer car, one with intermittent wipers.
Vanna fumed beside him. He felt her tension like a third presence in the front seat. “Can you drive a little faster? I don’t want to be late. Mr. Drye gets all out of joint if I’m late,” she said.
“Up ahead, where the road straightens, I can go faster.”
“You’d like me to be late, wouldn’t you? Late, so I get fired.” Vanna leaned forward and glared at the twisting road.
“Vanna, the road is slick from the fog last night. That’s all. I’m going as fast as it’s safe to go.”
“Yeah, right.”
Vanna subsided into the passenger’s seat. She stared out the side window at the passing pastures. Here and there a few cattle or sheep dotted the hillsides. Vanna hated the country. For her it was a prison she feared she could never escaped. And Dickon, damn him, thought it was a wonderful place.
“Look, Dickon, we�
�ll never have anything if we try to live just on your income. Churches just don’t pay, at least not country churches.”
Dickon sighed heavily. He frowned sidelong at Vanna. “Don’t start up again, Vanna. I asked you to quit, and you said no. That’s the end of it.”
Vanna spat her words at Dickon. “I’m not going to be a good little church wife, Dickon. Church wife is a church mouse. I’m not a mousy type.”
Dickon spoke with all the weariness of a wheel turning without moving forward. “No, Vanna. I know that.”
Vanna pointedly stared at her watch. “Better make good time on the straightaway. I’ll be late otherwise.”
Dickon increased the car’s speed. When he reached the straight stretch, he floored the accelerator. The Plymouth groaned and crept forward to a faster pace. “I’m pushing this old crate as hard as I can,” Dickon said.
“Okay, okay.”
Vanna kept silence until they reached the bus station. She leaped from the car and dashed for the bus without saying goodbye. Dickon sighed. He knew the bus wouldn’t leave for another five minutes. Vanna had plenty of time to get on, and get to the City in good order. Not that this secretarial position with a private eye paid particularly well. Vanna
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