The man laughed. “Call me Brother, and you shall be my Sister. In the Heavenly State of Taiping, there are no masters and servants. All of us are equal before the Heavenly Father.”
“All of us?” This made no sense to her. The world was made up of chains, hierarchies, rules that ranked superiors and inferiors. At the top was the Emperor, his Throne held up by the noble Manchus; below them came the servile Han Chinese, with the Hakka lowest of all among them, their lot to till the rockiest fields. And a Hakka woman? She was like a worm, a nothing, barely worth the air she breathed.
“All of us,” the man affirmed. “Men and women, Han and Chuang, Cantonese and Hakka, we’re all equals. Tienwang even has armies made up of women soldiers, who can rise to become generals and dukes just like men. Now drink to your heart’s fill, and let us pray of toppling the Manchu Emperor and opening his storehouses so that all of us can eat white rice!”
And she drank, and drank, and the cold rice porridge tasted like heaven.
* * *
Still drinking from the cup held to her lips, Yun opened her eyes.
A face, framed by unkempt hair and a bushy beard, hovered a foot or so from hers. In the flickering firelight, it looked like the face of one of the men who had attacked the camp, killed Ah San and Gan and the others, and then chased her all the way here.
She shuddered and tried to push herself away, but she was too weak and only managed to spill the water all over herself.
“Easy now,” the man said. “I won’t hurt you.”
It was his voice, more than the words, that calmed her. She could hear in it a gentle weariness, like an old mountain that had been worn down by eons of ice and water. She saw now that, though the man was white, he was much older than the five who had come to her camp.
“You a lawyer?” Yun asked.
“No,” he said, and chuckled. “Though I tried studying to be one, a long time ago.”
“Then how did you get through my maze so quickly?” she asked, gesturing at the dark, dense woods, the twisty trails, the thick mist that made the fire crackle and turned the sparks into glowing fireflies. She spoke slowly, so that he could understand her accent.
He looked around at the foggy forest again, like a man who suddenly found himself in an unfamiliar place. “This fog, the trees, the trails—you did all this?”
She nodded.
“How?”
“With these,” she said, and reached inside a fold in her dress to pull out a few sheets of paper, full of tiny, dense print.
Of course the man wouldn’t understand.
She sighed. So much had happened. So much to explain. Words, she needed words to help her, words in this beautiful, foreign tongue that she loved but would always wield like an unfamiliar sword.
“Excuse me,” she said, and struggled to sit up straight. Slowly, carefully, she bowed to Amos. She tried to put grace and deliberateness into her movements, as though she were sitting at a formal banquet, dressed in ceremonial armor draped with silk. “We haven’t met properly. I am Liew Yun, formerly a general of the Heavenly State of Taiping, and now placer gold miner of Idaho.”
* * *
The five men had come to her camp in the evening.
Hey, Chinamen, said the one with the scar across his face. His name was Pike, and he had been threatening the Chinese miners in the valley all spring. Didn’t we tell you to get out of here last week? This is my mine.
The mine’s ours, Ah San explained. I told you, you can go to the courthouse and check our claim.
Well lookee here! We got ourselves a law-abiding Chinaman! Pike exclaimed. You want to talk about the law? The law?
Then Pike explained to the Chinese miners that Congress had already decided that all Chinamen needed to be gone from these mountains and go back to where they came from. Indeed, all law-abiding citizens had a right and duty to deport—he savored the word—the Chinamen into the sea.
One of Pike’s men took out a sheaf of papers and shook them in the miners’ faces. These are laws, he said. Some old, some new. You Chinamen are scared of laws, aren’t you? Then you better pack and run.
Yun grabbed the sheaf of papers out of his hand and started to read from them aloud:
…and may be arrested, by any United States customs official, collector of internal revenue or his deputies, United States marshal or his deputies, and taken before a United States judge, whose duty it shall be to order that he be deported from the United States as hereinbefore provided…
I don’t understand, she said. I can’t make any sense of these words. Do any of you really understand them?
Pike’s gang gaped at her, amazed that she could read.
One of the men recovered. The law says that you have to pick up and leave before we make you.
Before we shoot you like vermin, Pike added.
Gan was the first to take a swing at him, and the first to be shot. Then chaos was all around Yun as deafening gunshots and flowing blood seemed to put her in another time, another place.
Run! Ah San screamed, and pushed her.
She saw Ah San’s head explode into a bloody flower before her eyes as she turned to run into the woods. Something hit her left shoulder hard and made her stumble, and she knew that she had been shot. But she kept on running along the deer trail, as fast as she could.
She heard more shots fired after her, more cries that suddenly became silent, and then, the sounds of pursuit.
She said a prayer to God and Guanyin each. I’m hurt. But I can’t die. Not yet. I still have a mission.
And she saw that she still clutched the pamphlets that the men had brought to the camp with them, pamphlets full of words that none of them could understand, words that made up laws they claimed said she was unwelcome in this land.
They were her last chance.
She ripped the papers into strips and scattered them behind her. As she passed, trees gathered behind her, the mist rose, and the path bent, forked, and curled around itself.
The sounds of pursuit scattered and grew fainter.
* * *
AMOS
“You can do magic with words?” Amos asked.
“Words hold magic for the desperate and the hopeful,” Yun said.
Amos looked at her, certain that the woman was mad. A general of the Heavenly State of Taiping. He shook his head.
When she had been asleep, her face had been relaxed and peaceful, almost smiling. He had thought she looked a bit like one of the taciturn but friendly Shoshoni women on the plains of Wyoming sitting around the fire on those cold nights he had sought shelter with them.
But now her eyes, feverish, intense, bore into his face like a pair of locomotive headlights.
A wolf howled in the distance, soon echoed by others.
Then followed the sound of a gunshot, and the howling ceased.
“They’re getting close,” Yun said, gazing into the dark mist. “It’s this fire. You’ve led them straight to me.”
Amos picked up the kettle and poured water on the hissing fire to put it out. Soon they were wrapped in darkness, lit only by the light of the moon through the fog.
“I can carry you on Mustard,” Amos said.
Yun shook her head. “I’m not leaving.”
“Why?”
Yun’s glance flickered to a small mound some distance away. Amos squinted and made out a conical shelter made out of chopped tree branches leaning against each other.
“It’s the gold, isn’t it?” Amos asked. “That’s why you ran here.”
After a second, Yun nodded. “We moved it out here when Pike’s gang started to harass us this spring. All the gold we’ve mined and saved for two years is here.”
Amos’s heart grew heavy. “You can always get more gold.”
She shook her head.
“This is not my fight,” Amos said.
“Then leave.”
Amos felt a wave of disappointment that turned into anger. He strode over to Mustard and mounted. Gently
, he nudged the mare with his calves and rode away from the hill, away from the howling wolves and the pursuing men.
* * *
Amos held Mustard’s reins loosely, lost in his thoughts.
She can’t let go of that gold, he thought. A fool. He had seen far too many die from greed out here.
In the years he had been wandering, he had grown more and more mistrustful of the hearts of women and men. Having more than a few of them together always seemed to lead to schemes, plots, robbery disguised as something more respectable. He would sometimes go warily to the towns to trade for goods that he could not do without, but he far preferred to be alone under an open sky, accompanied only by the howls of coyotes and wolves, dangers that he understood better and feared less than the dangers hidden behind the smiling faces of settled men.
In Kansas, he had seen the light of hope go out in the eyes of black families as they realized that they were free in name only. In New Mexico, he had seen the sorrow on the faces of the Indians forced to swallow their pride and anger as they learned of yet another betrayal. And now, it was the Chinamen’s turn.
He tried to push Yun out of his thoughts, but the grief and terror of her tale refused to let go. He shook his head angrily.
Every year, as the railroads expanded and ramified like the roots of some tenacious weed, they brought along with them the homesteaders, and farms turned into villages turned into towns turned into cities.
In his mind, Amos saw the railroads as chains yoking the land around him to an East that was full of noise and stale air and invisible bonds that weighed down a man’s spirit until nothing was left of it except the capacity for brutality in masses. Even the Chinamen were once welcomed out here, when the land was open and empty. But now that it was filling up and fewer mines were panning out, they became vermin.
Was it really greed? he thought. The look on her face when she had refused to leave wasn’t one of lust for the luster and weight of gold, but one of determination to live like a free woman, not hounded prey.
A Chinaman’s chance was bad enough. But a lone, crazy Chinawoman?
An image from long ago came unbidden to his mind. Help me, a young man’s voice croaked. Amos closed his eyes, trying to make the voice go away. Then he shuddered as he heard the gunshot again.
He opened his eyes. Somehow Mustard, who knew him better than he knew himself, had already turned around and was heading back the way they came.
* * *
Amos dismounted, grabbed his rifle from the saddlebag, and walked over to Yun. The woman sat serenely and followed him with her eyes, not having moved since he left her.
“I knew you’d be back,” she said.
“Why?”
“You’re like a hsiake from back home in China.”
“What’s that?”
“A hero.”
Amos laughed bitterly. “I’m no hero.”
* * *
AMOS (1864)
The generals and politicians would eventually call it the Battle of Olustee, but for Amos Turner, it had been hell.
A young clerk struggling to learn the law in Boston, he had volunteered out of a sense of duty, a desire to end the sin that was slavery, the stain upon the honor of the Republic that the abolitionists denounced in the streets.
But in those Florida pine woods on that day, there were no beautiful ideals, no duty and honor, no God and country, only confusion and slaughter. Too frightened to even think, he charged mindlessly into hailstorms of bullets and screaming artillery even as his companions disintegrated on each side of him.
“Leave them!” He looked over and saw a white Union commander shouting at the remnants of some colored troops, who had barely been trained before entering the battle. The black men were reluctant to leave their wounded comrades behind, but the officer wanted them to haul away the artillery instead, in the hasty retreat.
Then the ground exploded near him, and Amos was thrown into oblivion.
When he awoke, it was evening. All around him, he could hear the intermittent cries of the wounded. Union or Rebel, they sounded equally pitiful. After a while, he realized that he was crying out, too, whether for rescue or the quick relief of a bullet to the head he knew not.
Then he saw the Rebels. In small groups, they scoured the field, methodically picking rings, watches, money from the wounded and stripping the clothes from the dead.
He saw some of the Rebels raise their bayonets and thrust down, and a cry would be silenced. The Rebels moved efficiently and mechanically, like marionettes.
They were murdering the wounded, Amos realized.
Desperately, he tried to crawl away, but his legs and elbows slipped in the mud.
“Help me,” a soldier nearby said, his voice rasping.
He saw that the soldier—one of the black men the Union commander had ordered abandoned—was very young, barely more than a boy.
“Quiet,” Amos whispered to him harshly. “You’ll draw them.”
The soldier turned his head and focused his eyes on Amos. “Help me,” he begged, louder.
A few Rebels turned in their direction.
Amos pushed the soldier down and crawled away as quickly as he could. He shifted a few corpses around and buried himself under them, praying that the ruse would work.
And then he forced himself to remain still as the men came closer. One of the Rebel officers stepped over the pile of bodies that Amos hid under and squatted next to the dying soldier.
“Help me,” the soldier said. “Please.”
“You dumb thing,” the officer said. “The devil has you now.” Amos willed himself to get up and say something, to stop what was happening, but his body refused to obey.
He heard the sound of a gunshot. And it echoed in his head for a long time.
Though many Union men were taken as prisoners on that day, very few were black.
Amos crawled away from the field in the night. He did not know for how many days he lay in a feverish dream, licking the water from the leaves that draped about him and sometimes chewing the leaves for sustenance.
When he was coherent again, he was consumed with shame at his cowardice. He was no better than the commander who had given the order to abandon the wounded black soldiers.
There was also rage, and fear. He could not understand how men who joked and drank and collapsed into fits of laughter over some bawdy tale could suddenly become automata, like interchangeable gears in a machine that they did not comprehend, and become as will-less as the guns in their hands. When the right orders were given, all men could murder in cold blood like devils.
Amos got up and walked west, hiding from anything that looked like an army patrol, until he had left behind the world of cities and laws and the men who crafted them and submitted to their power.
Was it not the world of strictly construed laws and glittering money and elegant clothes and refined speeches that had decided one man could be the property of another? Amos remembered. And it was that same world that had declared ritualized, anonymous slaughter sweet and fitting. It was that same world that would abandon the wounded, knowing what fate awaited them. What was the use of talk of freedom and ideals? Civilization was a lie, through and through.
And so he moved ever westward, searching for and escaping into the trail-less, wordless wilderness beyond the frontier line.
* * *
“I don’t care what you did or didn’t do,” Yun said. “What matters is you’re here now.”
An owl hooted not too far away, startled from its perch.
“They’re coming,” Amos said. “We better get ready.”
He had already decided that the best spot for defense was between two fallen trees near the top of the hill. It would give them some cover and allow them to see the men approach.
“Get me there first,” Yun said, pointing to the conical shelter made out of sticks.
“It’s not gold you need right now.”
“It’s not gold I’m after,” Yun said impa
tiently. “It’s words. Magic.”
Amos had no choice but to help her over. Her legs were unsteady and her breathing was labored as they walked. She leaned into him, as light as a foal.
“Open it up,” she said. There was a natural authority to the way she spoke, as though she really was used to giving commands and having them obeyed.
Amos peeled back the branches to reveal a few wooden boxes underneath, on top of which lay a few bundles wrapped in oilcloth. Yun pointed at those. Amos handed them to her.
She unwrapped the bundles. They were filled with all kinds of printed material: pages torn from books, sheets of newsprint, picture cards with words on their backs.
Though worried about the approaching pursuers, Amos was intrigued. “What are they?”
She stroked the papers lovingly. “Another kind of treasure. Probably the better kind. Words I’ve read and liked.”
She picked up a page from the top and handed it to him. “I’m tired. Read it to me.”
By the faint light of the moon, Amos read:
The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation. From the desperate city you go into the desperate country, and have to console yourself with the bravery of minks and muskrats.
“Wise words,” she said.
“Wise words are not enough,” he said, thinking of all the ugliness in the world.
“Are they not?” And before he could stop her, she snatched the page out of his hand, tore it into tiny pieces, and began to eat some of them.
“What are you doing?” He stared at her, dumbfounded.
“I am in desperate country,” she said, after swallowing, “and I need all the bravery I can get. But I will have nothing of resignation.” She spat out a wad of wet pulp.
And he saw a hardened set to her jaw that was new, and heard a strength in her voice that had been absent before. She seemed literally to have grown bolder.
“You read but do not believe,” she said.
“You do not know what I have seen,” he said. He thought of that young man long ago who had believed himself to be brave and noble until the truth was revealed to him.
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