Tonight, after laying the cattle’s bedding, Lu Beiping sat beneath the lantern, leafing through his long-untouched books, peeling the wet pages apart from one another. His harmonica, which he hadn’t played for weeks, was beginning to rust. He remembered Han’s blouse, stuffed into a crack in the rocks down by the creek—maybe the fabric had already disintegrated in the rain. He thought of Jade’s swollen belly, concealing his own ignominious flesh. There was no reason, apart from the protests of his own conscience, that he couldn’t let that tacky blue blouse fall apart into rags, let Han fade back into the realm of fiction and rumor from whence she came. But whether he liked it or not, the child in Jade’s belly would soon emerge into the world, bawling and kicking and impossible to deny or erase. He still had a lot of life left to live; how would he, now a father-to-be (just thinking those words made his heart race) manage the entire thing? Two women, one in daylight, one in darkness, had laid a dual curse upon his head—and now he had to contend with another, even more ambiguous, player, Autumn, that inscrutable entanglement, that unwanted complication; the whole situation was unutterably mysterious, yet he couldn’t just wave it away. God . . . here was one absurdity piled on top of another, at the foot of an even greater absurdity. Kingfisher said he had grit, but did he have enough to handle all of this?
As he mused on these questions, he heard, through the pattering of rain on the banana leaves outside, the crunch of approaching footsteps. Pushing open the shutter and peering down into the darkness, he saw the glow of a hurricane lantern wavering up the slope from the creek. Who was this? It must be Jade. Or Autumn, maybe?
Without waiting for a knock Lu Beiping opened the door for the visitor, then backed away stammering as the man walked into the room. Never would he have expected that at this late hour, in the middle of a rainstorm, Kingfisher would decide to pay him a visit.
Wordlessly Kingfisher took off his broad-brimmed palm-leaf hat and shook it dry just inside the door, then he sat down on a log stool and began rolling a cigarette. Lu Beiping watched the beads of water on Kingfisher’s back glitter in the lamplight. Finally he said:
—You don’t come around here often, Kingfisher.
—You’re well? Kingfisher asked after several silent puffs on his cigarette.
Lu Beiping understood that Kingfisher meant his injuries, and answered with a curt affirmative, then fell back into silence. Kingfisher breathed out a cloud of smoke, then got right to the point.
—Horn came to me in a dream last night. You were standing next to him. Gave me a scare, that did. Finally I decided I needed to come down here myself to tell you . . . that you ought to leave.
—What? Why? Lu Beiping asked, stiffening, conscious again of the lingering ache of his wounds. Why should I leave?
—This hasn’t got anything to do that evil stuff Kambugger told me about, Kingfisher said, rubbing his hands together: Your blood’s been seen, you’re square with them now.
Square with them—catching Kingfisher’s drift, Lu Beiping smiled.
—I’m talking about Jade’s babe. No, don’t get me wrong—what I mean is, no matter whether the child makes it or not, you still ought to leave.
Lu Beiping stared in confusion at Kingfisher’s smoke-shrouded face. Kingfisher took a long drag, breathed it out in a series of shallow exhalations, then heaved a sigh.
—By rights the child should be yours. That’s fate, no getting around it. It was fate that you got marooned up here in the mountains, and it was fate that we took you in.
Kingfisher sat for a moment with his head lowered, lost in thought. Then, raising his voice slightly, he said:
—But your fate isn’t to meet your end with us, Four Eyes! And if on account of that pup in Jade’s belly you joined us for good, got pulled in for good . . . that’d be your end, I fear.
Lu Beiping gaped at him in surprise, slowly puzzling out the logic beneath Kingfisher’s mysterious circumlocutions.
—I’ve tied my brow in a knot lately, thinking about these things. And I think that our days aren’t long here on Mudkettle Mountain. I’ve got a hunch that some great ruin’s fixing to fall on us, swallow us all up, man and babe alike—Kingfisher paused, listening to the bugs gnawing at the rafters, then pointed upward and heaved another sigh—When we lose the balance, when light and shadow get tipped out of true, then god knows the kind of awful things that’ll start taking shape around us, god knows what kind of calamity’ll descend on our heads.
Every one of Kingfisher’s sighs raised a chill wind and pulled the darkness in a step closer, Lu Beiping thought. Outside, the rain wept on and on. Kingfisher blew a long wisp of smoke.
—Go, Four Eyes. Get far away from us, however you can. We driftfolk, we’re the ass of the world, we’re the people who’ve been pushed to the farthest ends of the earth, all the way to the edge of the sky. What do you find at the edge of the sky? Gods, spirits. And what do you find at the ends of the earth? Haunts and demons. We folks who keep company with gods and demons, our lives are cheap, and hard. Four Eyes, you wouldn’t last.
By now Kingfisher’s cigarette had burned so short that the flame was singeing his fingertips. Oblivious of it, he took a last drag and said softly:
—I know that in all her life the two men Jade’s loved most are Horn, and you. I told her, Four Eyes is a good man, but I don’t want him to become like Smudge’s pa. I don’t want him to become Horn’s brother.
Kingfisher stood up. He picked up the lantern.
—Kingfisher! Wait!
As Kingfisher made to leave, Lu Beiping was seized by a sudden impulse. He now felt as if he’d gained some new insight into this strange man, that amid Kingfisher’s tangled web of mysticism he’d detected a gleam of something else: human sympathy, a sense of compassion for the whole foolhardy human race, even a kind of wisdom. He was overcome with an urge to tell Kingfisher about Han’s blouse, to spill the dark secret bottled in his chest, reveal everything. His lips trembled, but he fought back the impulse. Then, remembering what Autumn said about Kingfisher, he asked:
—I wanted to know, Kingfisher . . . why did you, why’d a clearhearted man like you, go off and join the driftfolk, go all the way to the ends of the earth and the edge of the sky?
Kingfisher stood in the doorway, his bald head almost touching the lintel. He said with a frosty smile:
—They said I was a godmonger, a peddler of superstition. Struggled me till I was red from head to foot and they were all blue in the face. I’m not a godmonger. I’m just afraid. For years now I’ve been afraid—yet I don’t know what it is I’m afraid of.
Picking up his hat, he said:
—Truth is, it wasn’t so much that I offended them as that they offended me. So I left.
Then Kingfisher turned, and did exactly that.
Lu Beiping rushed out the door into the mist and rain and the all-encompassing forest night and stood there, watching Kingfisher’s lantern and palm-leaf hat dwindle into the darkness.
Then he went back into his hut and sat for a while in silence, listening to the cattle ruminating in the corral. He thought about Kingfisher’s final words—about this “them,” different from that them—and laughed.
But now “they” were closing in on all sides, and Lu Beiping was starting to feel cornered and helpless.
The next afternoon the manure-haulers came. This time the foreman brought along a team of tappers in addition to the grove maintenance crew. Normally tappers didn’t take part in manure hauls, but now, in this time of Selfless Contributions, nothing was outside the bounds of possibility. Yet when Choi hopped down off of the Gaffer’s oxcart and began tittering and cackling as if she owned the place, while the foreman strolled alongside her punctuating her monologue with genial remarks, it became clear to Lu Beiping that the tappers were here because of her, and that she was here because of the foreman—that through her presence the foreman was trying to com
municate something to him. As the workers shoveled, Lu Beiping tried to catch her eye, to read her real intent from even a brief glance; if she hadn’t forced that “teasey blue” blouse on him, Han would’ve been no more than a passing fancy, a faint disturbance in the air, not worth probing into. But though the whole forest echoed with Choi’s chatter, not once did she turn her head in Lu Beiping’s direction. As usual the foreman showered Lu Beiping with avuncular approval, congratulating him for his first-rate work with the cattle and asking Choi in a loud voice: High-quality manure yield’s the key to accelerating production, don’t you agree, Choi? I think we ought to recommend our friend Lu for a medal. What do you think, does the tapping crew have an opinion?
When the manure haul was over, as Lu Beiping herded the cattle back down the mountain, he saw Sergeant Fook and Gaffer Kam coming toward him up the trail, and reeled with alarm. What were they doing walking in the direction of the hollow? The last Lu Beiping had heard, his goose-stepping former rival been reassigned to some sort of cross-divisional Working Group at battalion HQ. They waved, and when they came abreast of each other Fook stopped, gave Lu Beiping a long, appraising look, and asked point-blank: Have you handed in your integration statement yet? Foreman Kau wants to know.
—How could I hand in something I haven’t written? Lu Beiping said tartly, and turned to leave. Fook called after him:
—Fong’s already handed in hers!
They went their separate ways, Lu Beiping laughing quietly to himself. He realized that he hadn’t seen the familiar faces of Fong, Wing, or Chu among the manure-haulers today, and remembered that on his last trip to camp Chu had informed him, with great relish, that Fong had dumped the Sergeant. When Fong brought you your beef ration, Chu said, Fook thought she’d already entered into Secret Negotiations with the Enemy!
What a ridiculous idea, Lu Beiping thought. But as he watched Fook march off into the forest alongside Gaffer Kam, a feeling of foreboding crept into his chest.
It was starting to get dark earlier now. When at last he’d bid adieu to the manure-laden workers and spread the cattle’s straw for the night, he shut the gate, forded the creek, and hurried up toward the hollow. That morning Smudge had come down the mountain to tell him that Kingfisher and Stump had finally slaughtered the old white rooster. After dining on “Four Eyes’s meat” so many times these past few months, the driftfolk wanted to treat Lu Beiping with their own, since today was a special occasion. All day Lu Beiping wondered what this “special occasion” might be. Was it a sacred feast day? Some sort of rite of passage? He thought of Jade’s belly—did the family want to break meatfast with Four Eyes to celebrate the child’s imminent arrival? Good god, he couldn’t begin to imagine that harrowing day. Maybe Kingfisher wanted to bless the child by holding some kind of special ceremony.
Lately Lu Beiping and the driftfolk had entered into a spell of halcyon relations that had been all too late in coming. After the cockfight and the blood-spilling, Lu Beiping felt like he’d been initiated into their number, had been accepted, at last, as a full-fledged member of the band. Hardly once since his wounds healed had he lit his own stove; he ate “off the registers” almost every single night. At first Smudge delivered his meals to his door, then later he headed straight up the mountain after work for supper. Naturally, on his trips to camp, he took the chance to trade in his ration stamps for various household items he knew the driftfolk could use, adding a touch of “highborn living”—that was Stump’s phrase—to life in the hollow. The first time the three old chimney pots ripped open a twenty-five-cent pack of Harvest cigarettes, Stump and Kingfisher pooh-poohed them as “too light in the throat,” but Jade was an instant convert, declaring that never again would she gurgle smoke from a “canebat” like an opium eater on the Sam Shui waterfront. Stump chortled that Jade, puffing delicately on her cigarette with her pinky finger extended, looked like a “magistrate’s wife.” More like a Jap secret agent in a moving picture, Kingfisher scoffed. Tugging on Lu Beiping’s arm, Smudge demanded: What’s a moving picture? What’s a Jap secret agent? It dawned on Lu Beiping that the kids were already of school-going age and yet had never seen, had never even heard of, a movie. From then on, after supper, Lu Beiping made a habit of sitting with the kids and telling them stories, teaching them numbers and characters, while Jade, Kingfisher, and Stump looked on with a mixture of admiration and sadness.
Yet throughout all this, Lu Beiping’s relationship with Autumn continued to be strange and awkward. The more frequent his visits became, the less often he crossed paths with Autumn; the closer he grew to Kingfisher, Stump, and Jade, the further he and Autumn drifted apart. More often than not Autumn went out before sunrise and didn’t return till after dark, after everybody had eaten, after the men had beguiled the evening with their pipes and Jade had finagled the children into the bath and into bed, at which point he’d mosey back into the hollow, slip into the kitchen, and help himself to a dish of cold rice and veggies and a bowl of cold soup. Autumn was usually such a limp fish that Stump and Kingfisher didn’t notice anything out of the ordinary. But once or twice when, after his storytelling sessions, Lu Beiping slept in the big lodge with Jade and the kids instead of returning to his own hut for the night, the two men bumped into each other as Autumn slunk in to ladle leftovers, and didn’t exchange a greeting or even a glance. Jade was surprised. What’s the matter with you two? she said. Used to be you’d chatter up a storm whenever you were around each other. Now you’re like a pair of chickens with their tongues cut off. Lu Beiping was the first one she asked, and he replied: I don’t know, ask Autumn. Then she asked Autumn, and Autumn said: Don’t ask me, ask Four Eyes. Lu Beiping’s tone was light, Autumn’s was grave; and this made Jade all the more suspicious. But it wasn’t long before this incident faded away into the endless rain and flat light of winter. And the dynamic between him and the hollow-dwellers was changing in other subtle ways that made Lu Beiping himself surprised. At first, whenever he slept in the hollow, Jade spent the night with him; then, from time to time, she’d retire to the men’s quarters to be with Stump or Kingfisher. At first she seemed reluctant to let him know, always waiting till Lu Beiping fell asleep to slip off to the other cabin. But eventually she stopped hiding it. What surprised Lu Beiping most of all was that he himself ceased to care. In daytime, herding the cattle, he would puzzle in amazement at the ease with which he’d accepted the whole arrangement.
The hollow reeked of chicken, the odor brash and pungent. When he asked, Lu Beiping learned that Kingfisher was in the kitchen tonight—that was unusual. When they sat down to eat, he asked Jade what the “special occasion” was, and Kingfisher, passing him the bowl of yam beer, said solemnly:
—Powers be praised, Four Eyes, today we got our logging license.
Logging license? That sounded odd as well.
—Aye, Stump added, got the official stamp and everything. Whitesands County rev board approved us, now we can work these hills with the government’s blessing.
Grinning, Stump reached under the bamboo mat that covered Jade’s bed, pulled out a thick sheet of paper, and handed it to Four Eyes. This wasn’t at all the answer Lu Beiping had expected. Hadn’t Kingfisher said, time and time again, that magistrates were the bane of the driftfolk, that they mustn’t be seen or fettered by the law? Why would they slaughter a rooster and break out the yam beer on account of some document printed by a government committee? Puzzled, he said:
—But Autumn told me you guys already had some kind of official permit from Whitesands.
Once more Kingfisher took a deep breath, let it out in a string of shallow exhalations, then sighed.
—So it goes for us drifters. A permit like that lets you sail your ship, but it’s not till you get an official government license that your ship’s got an anchor. We driftfolk, we’re like deep-sea sailors, one wrong tack and you’re done for. When the sea gets rough, you need to head to shore and drop anchor. But as soon as y
our anchor hits bottom, you know it’s time to set sail again.
Lu Beiping was still confused. Kingfisher chuckled.
—Don’t know how else to explain it to you. You don’t get it now, but you will. Drink, son, drink.
Lu Beiping noticed that Jade said very little—lately she’d been eating less, and was less talkative. Maybe it was a biological thing, an effect of the pregnancy. Lu Beiping couldn’t help noticing the melancholy air that hung over the family all dinner. Every time he’d broken meatfast with the driftfolk before it had been a rare and rowdy celebration, but this meal, for some reason, felt like the Last Supper from Bible Stories. Even Smudge and the little ones, who normally tittered like mynahs all throughout the meal, ate in studious silence.
—Eh? Kingfisher said, chopsticks frozen in the air. Where’s Autumn? What’s he doing, missing out on a good meat supper?
—Running about like a crazy man, hunting for his rosewood tree, Jade answered. I left some chicken for him in the frypan. He said he prefers his food cold.
—Eating cold meat and supping cold tea! Stump exclaimed. Bless me, ’tisn’t right nor proper.
Every time the brawny backwoodsman broke out one of these courtly, antique-sounding phrases, Lu Beiping wanted to laugh. Did everybody speak like that where Stump came from, or was it just his own peculiar way of talking? But this time, the grin of amusement froze on Lu Beiping’s face, and his eyes widened in shock:
Everybody had stood up. Outside, the dog was barking like mad.
Wildweed had charged over to the top of the creek-tunnel and stood on the rocky bank snarling furiously. Just like on the first day when Lu Beiping had driven his cattle up into the hollow, the dog’s hair-raising cries of alarm ripped through the air—
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