Dead Man’s Hand

by John Joseph Adams

  She laughed. “I have seen words free the minds of men who thought they were slaves.”

  * * *

  YUN (1885)

  The men who had rescued her brought her back to Tienching, the Heavenly City, capital of the Heavenly State, where she became a soldier just like all the other Taiping women. She was bright and worked hard, and soon she was selected to study how to read and write.

  Her teacher, Sister Wen, was a former prostitute who had learned to read and write from her clients in Canton. She freely admitted that she did not know how to write like the scholars, only like a child. “But the magic of writing is strongest in the least skilled,” she said, “just as in the Bible it is the last that shall be first, and the first last.”

  Sister Wen wrote the characters for the Heavenly State of Taiping on a slate.

  “This is the character tien, which means ‘heaven,’” she said, pointing to the third character. “It is like a man standing with a beam over his head, which he must keep balanced over him.”

  This made sense to Yun. It was her old life. A man was weighed down by the world of his superiors, and a woman’s burden was even heavier. Looking at the character, she could almost see the person’s back bend with the weight.

  “It has been written this way for thousands of years, but no more.” Sister Wen erased the line at the top and redrew it, so that it tilted like the man was throwing off his weight.

  “Tienwang decided that we can write ‘heaven’ like this, and already you can hear the Emperor in Peking quaking with fear.”

  Yun looked at the character on the slate and felt her heart beat faster.

  But still, she doubted.

  “How can we just change it?” she asked. “Hadn’t our ancestors always written tien the old way?”

  “Our ancestors are dead,” Sister Wen said. “But we are alive. If we want something, then we must take it and make it true. Have you ever known poor women like you and me to read and write, to fight with swords and arrows next to their brothers and fathers? Yet here we are.”

  Yun could almost see the invisible strands of power rise from the slate into the hearts of all the men and women around her.

  “If we wish to express that which has never been thought, we must create new characters. There will be no more concubines, no more bound feet, no more rich and poor, and no more shaved foreheads and queues to show our submission to the Manchu Emperor. We will be free.”

  And Yun felt the ground tremble under her, and she was sure that the tremors could be felt in far away Peking.

  * * *

  No way of thinking or doing, however ancient, can be trusted without proof.

  She chewed on the words and swallowed them.

  “I saw a single character shake the foundation of an Empire,” she said to Amos. “And you dare tell me that words are mere words. Now, eat.”

  She handed him a slip of paper.

  What a man thinks of himself, that it is which determines, or rather indicates, his fate.

  He ate it, masticating the bitter pulp slowly.

  She looked at him. “You could have left me to those men. Yet you stayed. Doesn’t matter if you want to be. You are a hsiake.”

  A wave of heat rose from his stomach and suffused his body, gradually seeping even into his limbs and extremities. He felt as though he had the strength of many men flowing through him.

  “Now, you see,” she said, her voice strong as a Douglas fir.

  * * *

  AMOS

  As the shadowy figures crossed the stream, Amos fired his first shot. It hit the water near the leader and made a big splash, the water glinting white in the moonlight.

  “Go back!” Amos shouted.

  The man in the lead—Pike—swore. “I told you to mind your own business, stranger!”

  “There’s been enough killing,” Amos said.

  “It’s her hoard, isn’t it? What did she promise you? Don’t be foolish. We can take it all, together, and pay you your share.”

  The stream, reflecting the moon, gave him light to aim by. Amos shot again, closer to Pike’s feet. The men scrambled back onto the bank of the stream, fell back among the trees, and returned fire. In the darkness, their shots thudded into the fallen trees Amos and Yun hid behind, and bits of bark and dirt rained down around them.

  “Foolish,” Yun said. “They’re wasting bullets.”

  “They’re wiser than you think,” Amos said. He showed her a handful of brass cartridges. “These are all I’ve left. If they keep on drawing my fire, I’ll run out before they do.”

  Yun shuffled through the papers in her bundles. “Here, I knew this would come in handy.”

  Amos saw that she was holding a small poster showing a colored drawing of a Fourth of July celebration. Someone was making a speech. In the background, fireworks filled the night sky.

  Yun flipped the poster over: the words to the Star Spangled Banner.

  She tore the paper into strips, wet the strips with her mouth, and wrapped a few of the words around the cartridges: red glare, bombs, rocket.

  Silently, Amos loaded the cartridges. The added bulk of the paper seemed to not hinder the smooth slide of metal on metal, but he was afraid that the doctored cartridges would misfire.

  Muttering a prayer, he aimed and fired.

  The first shot exploded into a bright ball of red fire in the woods on the other side of the stream. Pike’s men yelped and rolled on the ground to put out the flames on their clothes.

  The next shot turned into a series of explosions that was so loud and bright that Amos was temporarily blind and deaf.

  The return fire from the woods ceased.

  “They’re not dead,” Yun said. “But this will stun them and make them think twice about shooting. Maybe they’ll be more reasonable in the morning.”

  “I suppose we’re safe for the time being,” said Amos, still not quite believing what he had seen.

  Satisfied, she sang in a low voice:

  “Then conquer we must, when our cause it is just,

  And this be our motto: ‘In God is our trust.’”

  Amos settled in for the standoff.

  “Tell me,” he said, “what happened to your rebellion?”

  * * *

  YUN (1860)

  The Taiping armies were invincible. Wherever they went, the Emperor’s forces fell back like sheep before wolves. Half of China now belonged to the rebels. Tienwang spoke of sending emissaries to France and Britain, fellow Christian nations that would come to the Heavenly State’s aid.

  But, gradually, rumors began to spread of how the commanders and generals had taken concubines and hoarded treasure for their own use, even Tienwang himself. While food was still plentiful in the capital, stories described men and women starving in far away provinces, just like they had under the Manchu Emperor. There was even talk of how the other Christian nations said Tienwang was a heretic, and they would support the heathen Manchus, who were amenable to European demands for concessions, and not the Taiping.

  The Taiping armies began to lose battles.

  Now a general herself, Yun steadfastly refused to believe those stories. She was always the first to lead a charge and the last to retreat. She kept none of the conquered goods but shared them all with her sisters and brothers. She prayed and preached, and taught everyone in her army how to write tien with a tilted roof.

  Still, the convoys of supply wagons from the Heavenly City dwindled, and streams of refugees stole away from the Taiping territories at night like rats leaving a burning building. Yun noticed that the banners of the other commanders were becoming tattered, their character for ‘heaven’ drooping, falling back into the old ways.

  One night, Sister Wen came to her tent in the middle of the night and woke Yun.

  It had been a few years since Yun had last seen her teacher, who had stayed behind in the capital. She was startled to see how white the older woman’s temples had grown and how stooped her once-straight back had bec
ome.

  Sister Wen wore a thick coat meant for a long journey. Yun’s heart sank. “You’re leaving?” Yun could not keep the anger out of her voice. “You would abandon the Heavenly State in its hour of need?”

  Instead of turning her face away in shame, Sister Wen looked at her calmly. “You visited the capital a year ago. Could you tell Tienwang’s palace apart from the Forbidden City in Peking?”

  Yun had no answer to that.

  “It’s not too late to leave,” Sister Wen said. “You can still escape to the remote mountains and hide in the bamboo groves, where the Manchus will never find you and you can leave this world to its own ugliness.”

  Instead of answering, Yun took her sword and wrote the character tien on the ground, the bar at the top tilted like a ladder to the sky.

  Sister Wen stared at the character. She was weary. “When the heart no longer believes, the magic of words is useless.”

  And that was the last time Yun saw her.

  * * *

  “When Tienching fell a few months later, the Manchu slaughter turned the streets into rivers of blood: men, women, children, the elderly, the wounded, none were spared.

  “I and a few others escaped to islands scattered in the East Sea, and made our way to the Philippines. From there we got on a ship and came to America.”

  “So the magic of words failed,” Amos said. He was disappointed. The story had seemed like a fairytale, one that he wanted to believe in.

  “No,” Yun said. “We just picked the wrong words.”

  * * *

  Yun and her companions had never seen so much empty land.

  The wilderness of Idaho was pristine, absolute. In China, every mu of land had been worked on and shaped by the plow for generations, but here, there were no marks but those of God. It was an empty page waiting for old ideas to be thrown away and new ones to be written.

  (Later, she would learn about the Indians who had once been here. Every story was more complicated than it appeared at first, yet hope sprang eternal.)

  Refugees from every land, following every creed, had come with the dream of striking gold. In this place with no rules, they became violent, soulful, self-reliant. They fought with the land, with the Indians, with each other, and yet they also discarded old animosities, welcomed strangers, gave the newcomers aid and succor when they needed them.

  Yun and the other Taiping survivors worked hard to carve a fresh life in their new home, and in the evenings, she studied the language of this new land, as hardy as her mountains, as pungent as her forests, as varied as her population, as rich as her mines.

  Along with gold, she discovered words, bountiful and beauteous words that sang of a love of freedom that beat in sympathy with her rebellious heart. Nowhere else were men so ready to embrace new words—pogonip, pai gow, cowboy—immigrating from other tongues, arising from inventive minds, becoming respectable despite origins in error. Like fresh trails crossing virgin territory, new words allowed thoughts to travel to glimpse new vistas.

  Yun read and savored and built up a treasure trove of words that struck her. She saw that no people believed more in equality, in the power of ideas, in the right to take up arms against tyranny, than the people of America.

  And she saw where the Taiping had erred.

  * * *

  With a stick, she began to write on the ground.

  “There are countless ways to write the last character in the name of the Taiping, kuo, which means ‘state.’ Tienwang could have chosen to write it like this—

  “—composed of the character min—that means ‘the people’—inside the four borders. But instead he chose to write it like this—

  “—composed of the character wang—that means ‘the king’—inside the four borders.”

  “So he created the Heavenly Kingdom instead of the Heavenly Republic,” Amos said. It was an old story, and a familiar one. Those who sought freedom were tempted by power instead, and became indistinguishable from those they sought to overthrow.

  “For years, decades now, we’ve mined gold and sent it back into China, where the money has kept the fire of rebellion alive. Right now, there’s a young man back there, Sun Yat-sen, the greatest magician with words I’ve ever seen. His pamphlets have given the people faith again, and struck terror into the heart of the Emperor. The gold in those boxes isn’t for me, but for him and his revolution.”

  “What if he fails? What if this rebellion, like yours, also turns dark? You said that the magic of words is fragile, subject to the corrupt hearts of mortal men. What good is a lovely name if you can’t live up to it?”

  “Then we’ll just try again, and if that fails, yet another time. It’s not so easy to shake off heavy chains. The Taiping Rebellion failed the same year that a war ended slavery here. Yet this country still feels the shadow of those shackles. China may not be free from the phantom of the Manchu yoke for a hundred years. But my time here has shown me what is possible when men believe.”

  “How can you say that?” Amos wanted to grab her and shake her. “Have you not seen how Congress has decided that you’re to be deported, like rats for Pike and his men to slaughter?”

  Yun looked him straight in the eye. “And yet here you are, defending a crazy Chinawoman against the likes of them.”

  “I am just one man,” Amos said.

  “Everything starts with one person, a man or a woman.” She paused, chose her words carefully, and went on. “You doubt because you see only the ugly words, the words of hypocrisy and fear. Dark laws grow out of confused hearts that have lost faith, and I hope one day to see Congress change its mind. But the words I love I found not in the smoky halls of power in great cities, but in the wilderness out here, among lonesome rebels, refugees, men with nothing to their names but hope.”

  Amos closed his eyes. She seemed to say aloud what he had only thought. The Western frontier, like a kite high in the sky, is where the ideals of the Republic take flight and soar, with the stagnant East pulled behind it like a reluctant boy.

  She caressed the papers in her lap lovingly. “Words do matter. Their magic comes from one mind reaching another across miles and years, and what one assumes the other shall also assume, what one believes the other shall also believe. Words take root and grow in the hearts of men, and from there faith springs eternal.”

  He looked at the pages, at the woman, and at the land bathed in starlight around him. And he seemed to see the land itself as a laid-open book, a record of the long and winding struggle toward freedom by one people—out of many, one.

  Yes, it was true. Words did matter. A piece of paper from a court, a little novel, a proclamation, a few amendments to an old parchment—had these not torn a Republic apart and then sewn it back together?

  * * *

  AMOS

  For a while, there were occasional shots from the woods across the stream, as though Pike’s men were trying to keep them awake. But even that had stopped an hour ago.

  The eastern sky was growing brighter.

  “I think they’re gone,” Amos said.

  Yun let out a deep breath and almost fell over. Amos was quick with his arm and held her up.

  “It’s been a long night,” Yun said. She sounded exhausted. “Well, if you think we’re safe, maybe you can patch me up.” She winced as she tried to move her left arm.

  “I’m no doctor.”

  “Not that way,” Yun said. She picked up another sheet of paper from her bundle, turned it over so that the blank side faced up, and handed it to him along with a pencil she found in the folds of her dress. “Write down how you want me to feel.”

  Amos stared at the paper, surprised and confused. “I don’t know how. Why can’t you just do the magic yourself?”

  “It doesn’t work that way. The magic of words comes from two people: one writes, one reads. I can’t just write whatever I want and make it come true—that’s just wishful thinking. I can pull out the magic of words others print in books, and it works just as we
ll if they write it by hand. But the writer has to believe what he writes, which is why I had to wait till now with you.”

  Amos took the pencil and wrote:

  ALRIGHT

  “Sorry.” He paused. “I always write it as one word though it’s supposed to be two. Let me try again.”

  “Write it the way you like,” Yun said. “Dictionaries and schoolmarms care only for binding words down with rules, fitting them into neat little grids where they can’t move. If they had their way, there’d be no new words and no new magic. Who knows, maybe your shorter word will heal me quicker.”

  Amos laughed. And he wrote some more.

  O.K.

  “Now that’s an American word, a real word of power.”

  She took the paper from him, chewed it, and swallowed. Amos was pleased to see she had that contented, happy look again. A healthy glow returned to her face, and when she moved her arm again, there was no wince.

  “See if you’re recovered enough to get on Mustard. When the sun’s up, we can get out of here.”

  * * *

  While Yun shortened the stirrups and talked to Mustard to get acquainted, Amos sat by the fallen trees and flipped through the other papers in Yun’s bundle.

  The runaway slave came to my house and stopt outside,

  I heard his motions crackling the twigs of the woodpile,

  Through the swung half-door of the kitchen I saw him limpsy and weak,

  And went where he sat on a log and led him in and assured him…

  Limpsy, he thought. Yun is right. This is a land of new words and new ideas, always renewed by the endless wilderness in which man can find solitude and faith in himself—

  A loud shot shattered the peaceful air like thunder. Mustard whinnied and reared up on her hind legs. Yun barely hung on.

  Amos looked down and saw the wound in his stomach, from which blood flowed freely, then the pain doubled him over and he dropped his rifle.

  Pike and his men stood in a semi-circle about twenty feet away.

  “You didn’t think we’d try crossing the stream upriver and come up behind you?” he sneered.

  “You’re right,” Amos said. He felt waves of dizziness and struggled to stay sitting up. “You got us.”