—Poor Han, he said. It was right around the time we city kids arrived on the plantation that she died. It was this time of year, cold and raining on and on, it must’ve been freezing when she waded into the creek with no clothes on . . .
Back in the rubber grove they’d teased the whole story, piece by piece, out a whimpering, groveling Wing. Han, who’d always done well in school, had been tasked with supervising her struggling younger brother while he did his homework. Wing had just learned about the birds and bees, and insisted that he’d only do his homework if she slept with him. Later their father found out and laid the blame on Han. The “teasey blue” blouse was, just as Choi said, a gift he’d bought her, using his first farm wages. But then, on more than one occasion, Wing had been walking through the grove that Han tapped and saw his father and sister . . . Not long afterward, the grove caught fire and burned down, then Han “got the fever” and died.
—Why are you still brooding about that evil business? Autumn asked, chuckling. Careful, the bale might seep into your blood, then we’ll have to whip it out of you again!
—But Autumn, Lu Beiping said, beginning to feel dejected: I’m afraid we’re already in over our heads. It’s not going to be pretty when the foreman hears what we’ve done. And then how will Kingfisher react?
—Fight when you can win, run when you can’t—that’s the Enlightened Revolutionary Ideology that Kingfisher’s always abided by. But the way I see it, you’ve won this round. You’re holding the trump card. I’m curious to see what your father-in-law’s next move will be, now that this unspeakable thing’s come to light.
—Screw him, Lu Beiping said. Let him do his damnedest. Worse comes to worst, I’ll run away with you, and we can start our own driftfolk band.
—Bei . . . Autumn said, his eyes growing bright as Lu Beiping made this declaration: Hearing you say that, I know it wasn’t for nothing that I weathered this storm tonight.
Autumn turned, fished around in the pile of wet clothing, and produced a plastic bag containing the familiar black book. But when he reached into the bag he pulled out, instead, a small bottle of clear liquor.
—Never fear, he said, flashing the bottle at Lu Beiping: This isn’t the yam beer you’ve got such a terror of. The other day I made a special trip downmountain to a Loi encampment, where I traded a bundle of white rattan for this bottle of hillflower rice wine. Here, take a sniff. Isn’t it lovely?
Autumn opened the bottle. A rich, mellow fragrance threaded its way through the rain-fresh evening air.
Autumn was in high spirits tonight. He seemed to have gone straight into his expressive, quick-speaking mode without passing through the intermediate tongue-tied state. Wrinkling his nose at the smell, he laughed:
—Bei, you said I’m a man of letters. Tonight let’s celebrate like a real pair of literati. I’ve brought my book—let’s lay aside our worldly cares and enjoy an evening of wine and poetry. You can play Xin Qiji, I’ll be Nara Singde.
—How about I just play deaf and dumb? Lu Beiping said teasingly, aping Autumn’s mouth-agape, tongue-tied pose. Let all sound by silence be surpassed! Isn’t that from some poem or other? Lu Beiping caught a whiff of the liquor’s heady aroma, and as he listened to the cold autumn rain pattering outside he realized how much he’d missed his conversations with Autumn. Bursting with warmth and contentment, he hummed cheerfully to himself as he puttered around the room, feeling like he could dance.
Autumn, looking on with a smile on his face, picked up a shallow bowl and an enamelware mug that sat on a table next to the stove and poured out the wine between them. Offering the bowl to Lu Beiping, he said:
—The poets of old told of a thing called the ferrufloral oath. It was a pledge of eternal friendship, the brotherhood of steel and flowers. Here, let’s toast our friendship with this hillflower wine, swear our brotherhood by hill and flower—as Autumn said these words, the bowl in his hand began to shake ever so slightly—for who knows when the river will meet the mountain again. Even if we don’t cross paths again after this, having known you, Bei, I feel like these years I’ve spent wandering through the mountains weren’t wasted.
Lu Beiping gazed at Autumn and sipped his liquor. Obviously Autumn had prepared these words in advance. Tonight more than ever, his friend’s lofty locution and swarthy profile reminded Lu Beiping of some storybook brigand. There was a persistent, old-fashioned air about Autumn that made him seem quite out of place in the modern world; at first Lu Beiping had found this manner a little off-putting, but now it only increased his fondness for him. Outside the rain sheeted down endlessly, thunderously. Once again Lu Beiping sensed that he’d bumped up against Autumn’s bold, brash side. Autumn always came on strong like this, baring his true feelings in a sudden and vehement way that caught Lu Beiping off-guard, making it impossible to face the topic he brought up in any manner other than head-on.
For a moment, it was as if both of them really had been struck dumb. They sat looking at each other, wine vessels in hand, a giddy rush of emotion putting them both at a loss for words. In a corner of the hut a roof-leak dripped on the lid of a pot, a brisk, chiming tattoo that mingled with the loud rush of the rain.
The moment seemed to last an eternity, the time it took for an unspoken thought to travel by pack horse across many rugged, mountainous miles.
Toward the end of this moment the drumming of heavy footsteps wove its way into the roar of the rain. It grew gradually nearer and louder, then halted just outside the door of the hut. Autumn and Lu Beiping pricked up their ears and glanced at each other in surprise, but heard no further sound. Hesitant, Autumn went over and opened the door. Immediately the fetid reek of yam beer gusted in, followed by a dripping-wet figure in a broad palm-leaf hat. Was it Kingfisher? Lu Beiping stared at the man, then shuddered and took a step back when he realized who it really was. Their unexpected guest on this rainy night was the man whose name had been on their lips just a moment ago—Lu Beiping’s “ghost father-in-law,” the foreman.
He was drunk. Had he been celebrating Wing’s marriage, or drowning his sorrows in liquor? Lu Beiping wondered. His face was flushed and blotchy, his body covered in mud, and in one hand he held a hurricane lantern at a cockeyed angle. As soon as he stumbled through the door his towering frame went limp, and he flopped down on the dirt floor and lay there motionless till the light in the hearth stove prodded him back to his senses. Looking up and seeing Lu Beiping, he dragged himself to his feet, crying:
—Dear friend! . . . Friend Lu! . . . You’re a good boy! D’you know the reason I came up here tonight? So I could beg you . . . to save my life!
Tears flooded down his face. His legs went slack again, and he slumped to his knees. Prostrating himself before Lu Beiping, he knocked his forehead on the ground till the dirt floor was a muddy slick.
Lu Beiping, trying to stay calm and keep his own astonishment from getting the better of him, said coldly:
—Get up, Foreman Kau. You’re drunk.
—I won’t get up unless you say you will! the foreman sobbed, still kowtowing to Lu Beiping. Then he embraced Lu Beiping’s legs and cried imploringly: Please, friend Lu, won’t you give me back my poor Han’s shirt! I’m sick to death for worry thinking about my girl, my poor, poor girl, my poor . . . ack . . .
A gob of spit, phlegm, and bile plopped onto the floor. Lu Beiping extracted himself from the foreman’s grip and said in a stern voice:
—But, Foreman, I can’t give you back that shirt because I don’t know the whole story yet—he traded a knowing grimace with Autumn, who was still standing behind the door—So tell me, what horrible thing, exactly, did you do to Han?
With a shudder the foreman appeared to come sober for a moment. Gripping one of the roof-posts he struggled to his feet, and as he gazed up at the smoke-blackened thatch a shadow of his former aura of chilly command came over his face. With tears still coursing down his blunt, craggy
features, he said with a desolate air:
—Living one life is hard enough, Lu. You’ve no notion how hard it is, being a leader. Two hundred men, women, and children looking to you for their supper, the old, the sick, the dying . . . I did it for them! I did it to keep them from suffering! That year the fever was worse than ever before, the whole unit was sick with it, there weren’t enough healthy arms to bury the dead. You city kids came right at the tail end, I feared you pups would catch it, so I went over the mountains to see the spirit man in Lam-ko. The spirit man said, You’re a leader of men, if you want to save your village, you need to sacrifice your own flesh and blood—only that can quell the fever vapors. Oh, Heaven help me! . . . Leaning on the pillar, the foreman burst into sobs: Wing’s my only son, he was the only one could carry on the family line. I’d no choice but to give up my poor, poor Han for their sake . . . I couldn’t bear to kill her myself, I had to ask her to take her own life, I . . . Oh! Heaven save me!
(Decades later, Lu Beiping said to Tsung: If it hadn’t been for all I’d seen and heard that year, I might well have bought this compelling tale, and been stirred to compassion for the foreman’s sake. Like Abraham in Lu Beiping’s book of Bible stories, the foreman—so he said—had offered up his own offspring to the gods of Mudkettle Mountain, in order to redeem his people.)
—I really want to believe everything you’re telling me, sir, said Lu Beiping with a grave chuckle. So, then, can you explain why Han drowned herself in the creek without her clothes on? Can you tell me who lit that grove fire, and why? Were you trying to burn Han’s blouse?
At each question the foreman winced and jerked slightly as if a bullet had just whizzed past his head. Then he gave a teary laugh and mumbled in protest:
—Did I do her wrong? She said she wanted to! She said her little brother was just a pup . . . heh, oh, my poor, poor Han . . .
He hugged the post with one arm, wiping tears from his face. Then he turned, finally noticed Autumn standing just inside the door, and straightened with a gasp of surprise.
—Gah! Who are you? Are you from the Working Group?—obviously the foreman didn’t recognize Autumn. He turned back to Lu Beiping and renewed his passionate, drunken plea: Friend Lu, oh please, take pity on me, leave me a way out . . . Please!
As if afraid to linger there any longer, the foreman stooped, picked up his hat and lantern, and lurched out into the rain, still crowing in a sloppy voice:
—Have a heart, friend Lu! Please! I did it to keep . . . to keep them from suffering!
Lu Beiping leaned against the doorframe and gazed out into the mist and rain, watching the foreman’s lantern and palm-leaf hat wobble away into the darkness.
He remembered Kingfisher’s recent visit, which had ended with a scene almost exactly like this one: a single, glowing bead of light afloat on the vast ocean of the night. Both conversations, in their own ways, had hinged on the same point—the spirits of Mudkettle Mountain. But where Kingfisher’s primitive superstitions seemed to grow out of an intuitive grasp of man’s place in the world, Lu Beiping could tell that the foreman’s high-toned rhetoric hid an ugly twist of distorted reasoning.
He turned to Autumn, who still stood silently by the door, and made a face.
It was an eventful night. (It felt like the longest night of my life, Lu Beiping said, years later, to Tsung.)
After they’d spent a good long while laughing at each other’s imitations of the drunken foreman, Autumn fell silent, head cocked again as if listening for some other noise outside the hut, then said:
—What about this blouse I’ve been hearing about all day? I’d like to take a peek at this piece of cloth that your dastardly in-laws are so scared about.
Of course—the blouse. Since the day Choi stuffed the “bale-crossed” garment into his satchel, Lu Beiping had known that it was in some way vitally connected with Han’s death, and clearly it had the power to haunt the minds of the foreman and his son—even more than the hog trap, it had proved a potent tool for extracting the truth from Wing. But all these weeks, perhaps fearing that its evil influence might somehow rub off on him, Lu Beiping hadn’t dared pull out the blouse and inspect it closely.
—Sure! I feel like a braver man with you around, Lu Beiping said, then dashed out through the rain and tugged the satchel out of the crack in the rocks where he’d hidden it. When he came running back, raindrops bouncing off of his hair, he startled Autumn with a cry of alarm: Someone’s here! Who was that, peeking in the window?
Autumn stuck his head out the door. There was nobody outside, but the bushes under the low windowsill had been trampled upon, and a puddle of water gleamed in the mud.
—Do you think the foreman would send someone to spy on us? Lu Beiping said, his heart immediately growing heavy.
—I’ll bet not . . . Autumn thought for a moment, then tossed his head: Devil take it! Whoever they are, I dare them to come mix with us tonight!
Autumn slowly unfolded the cloth, and Han’s blouse revealed its terrible face to the lamplight. It was faded and wrinkled, like an old woman’s features, and paper-thin from frequent wear and washing. Not quite a blouse, more like a loose jacket, it was tight up top and baggy down below, and most of the cheap blue dye had run, leaving the fabric pale and blotchy looking. At first glance it just looked like an old rag headed for the trash heap. Then Autumn lifted the lower hem, brought it closer to lamp, and turned away with an expression of disgust.
—Look, he said gravely: What’s this filth?
Examining the near-transparent fabric in the lamplight, Lu Beiping made out several discolored patches on the lower front panels of the blouse. Over these faint, overlapping stains were two darker marks, one large and obvious, the other small and faint. And crusted on the stiff, individual threads it was possible to discern the original brown color of the marks—dried blood. These were the bloodstains of a young woman who’d been abused and humiliated, still visible after all these years.
—Blood? But why would there be blood? said Lu Beiping with a quaver of uncertainty in his voice, knitting his brow: Didn’t they say she was naked when she drowned in the pool?
—You still don’t get it, Autumn said savagely, flinging the blouse to the floor. Those beasts! The stains wouldn’t be from just one man. I’ll bet you anything both Wing and the foreman had their way with her on the day she died. It’s not blood-blood, Bei, it’s woman’s blood, it was her time of month and still those curs were glad to do their business. She couldn’t bear the shame of it, so she up and . . .
Understanding dawned over Lu Beiping.
—So maybe the reason she was naked when she drowned herself in the creek—Lu Beiping said quickly, his heart thumping—was that she wanted to leave behind this dirty blouse as evidence, so that people who came afterward would find out the truth?
—I don’t know, Autumn said. There’s some secret behind this yet. Then he heaved a deep sigh: The least we know is that this girl had a touch of pluck to her.
All at once, the string of mysteries that hung around Mudkettle Mountain unraveled itself before Lu Beiping’s eyes. The fire that destroyed Sector 11 after Han’s death, the sudden, uncanny, unatoned-for blaze that began near the pool after Lu Beiping had wandered into the “baleglen,” were both fueled, Lu Beiping now saw, by the guilty consciences of this beastly father-son pair. They thought that fire had the power to efface all such filthy traces from this world; who could have foreseen that Lu Beiping, chosen by the whim of Fate and by a fortuitously placed scrap of paper to banish Han’s memory from their household forever, would be the very one to uncover her father’s crimes and bear witness to her humiliation? He was, in more ways than he’d realized before, Han’s chosen one, her soulmate.
(The beginning was pure chance, but the end was inevitable, Lu Beiping sighed, once again, to Tsung: You can make light of a lot of things in this world, but Chance, no—you can’t make lig
ht of Chance.)
Lu Beiping felt a rush of heat, and blood pounded in his ears. The strange sights and sounds he’d encountered in the forests of Mudkettle Mountain flashed one after another through his mind: the mysterious, ever-shifting “baleglen”; the ghostly infant’s wail; the wooden cowbell, lying mute and bloody among the leaves after Alyosha’s disappearance . . . Now Chance had slipped him this blouse, which even a roaring grove fire hadn’t succeeded in destroying—what other explanation could there be, except that the spirits had had a hand in this? Did I do her wrong? She said she wanted to! . . . Have a heart, friend Lu! I did it to keep them from suffering . . . In this pitiful, tattered garment he saw clearly the empty reality of human power, and hidden behind it, the face of a brave, unyielding young woman, ready to be reborn out of the flames.
He picked up the blouse and spread it open again. First that scrap of red paper, now this ragged blue blouse; he felt like he was holding some unearthly object that had floated up out of the land of shadow and linked this daylit reality to the world beyond. But at the same time he couldn’t help seeing the blouse as a bloody banner, fluttering proudly over Mudkettle Mountain, proclaiming the foreman’s shamelessness and arrogance. At this thought his fancies evaporated instantly.
The Invisible Valley Page 37