As for the town, I can’t tell you very much about it, because one hardly goes outside the “house”; indeed, I’ve ventured out only a few times, as there is an awful lot to do at home. However, from my few ventures I can tell you that the streets are quite narrow and the walls quite high, so that you feel as if you are in a labyrinth with the Minotaur waiting, perhaps, right around the next corner. Just as it is inside the house, too, where you can’t see anything but the sky overhead. I imagine that I may come to miss wide open spaces very soon, and that when I think of the times we all went out picnicking in June, and you and I went running over the meadows to watch the grasshoppers leap out of our path, I shall feel very sorry for myself indeed, and start writing you longer letters, even than this one, that are filled with sighing reminiscences of life back in the States. However, I won’t despair yet; there must be some open spaces in town. I am curious, but not impatient, as I know there will be plenty of time to get accustomed to everything. This is our new home, after all. How strange to write that! But for now I am content to get the house fitted up for us to live in, and to visit with the Riddells every day. Mrs. Riddell is not exactly “my type” of woman, but one can’t choose among friends here when the white faces are so few. In any case, it is a delight to play with their two-year-old, Julie, a sweet little girl named for her mother. You can imagine what I feel, playing with that dear baby and thinking of the future.
Lu-cho Fu waits for us outside our gate, and it will still be there tomorrow, and next week, and next month—whenever we are able to explore it more fully. Trust that when we do, you will receive a most faithful account of all its wonders from
Your loving sister,
ADDIE
p.s. Coming over the mountains, we were stuck for the better part of a day behind a camel train. Such terribly ugly, mangy-looking creatures, they seem to have no more love for the men driving them than the men have for them. I wouldn’t have thought to see camels in China! But I’m sure that won’t be the last surprise I’ll encounter.
Indeed, it was only one of a great number of surprises, and not the first. The letters in that packet and in the next many that followed were filled with descriptions of bizarre customs and thrilling encounters: everything was new, exciting, frightening, different. Louisa caught a high note of pride in these letters—Look at me, living through all of this! It made her proud of her sister, and somehow, at the same time, proud of herself. Hadn’t they both thrown away comfort for love, or something like it? For adventure? For faith? It was something to remember. When Louisa read her sister’s letters, the world could again be what it had been to her as a child: grand and mysterious and full of wonders. She could write back, giving an account of the day or the week she’d just spent, and she would search out the significance in her mundane stories; she would make an effort for philosophy. On a good day, if she saw a hawk overhead as she went out to feed the pigs, she would set down her bucket to watch it. The swoops and arcs of the bird’s flight would become invisible writing on the sky, and the trees the hawk flew over would be whispering to one another using the secret language of moving leaves, and she would feel herself to be a witness to grace. She would save it up, this feeling, and write it in a letter to her sister.
On a bad day, she didn’t notice the hawk at all. Or she saw it and hated it, fiercely. Or she saw it and it made her tired.
Good days and bad days. As one year turned to the next, Louisa began tallying them up and found that she didn’t have very many that refused this easy accounting—first days, then weeks. Good weeks, bad weeks—Bert called it the weather. “The weather’s fine today, is it?” he’d say, and kiss her on the mouth. The good weather was simply good all the way through, but the bad weather was subtler: it had shape and distinction; it was dynamic; it was as if her soul were curdling. Every movement was a struggle, but because there was no languishing in bed (as her mother used to do when she had a headache), she was forced to make the effort. Sometimes her work would bring her from sadness to anger, or from numbness to hurt, and so when Bert and the hired man came in from the fields they might find her sobbing as she peeled potatoes, or muttering darkly to the weeds as she pulled them up from the garden. The men would stay away from her then, taking their dinner outside to eat while seated on the stools by the henhouse, the plates wobbling on their laps. During these stretches, Louisa refused to go anywhere and as a result often missed out on those neighborly gatherings that had a common purpose. She canned tomatoes alone, scrubbed the sheets alone. Five years went by. Several times she was pregnant, but the pregnancies never completed.
Her sister wrote of her two boys growing and gaining personalities. She wrote of a daughter who died within six hours of her birth. She wrote of going up into the mountains in the summer to escape the heat and the flies, and coming down again in the fall when it was livable again. She described and described. The trees in the springtime as they frothed with white and pink flowers, the pall of dust that hung over the valley. Today we visited a temple, another ancient one with great urns overflowing with burnt incense and fake money. But dear, don’t put anything else grand into the equation: a few dirty chickens pecking around the courtyard within, a saffron-robed monk asleep in the sun.
Louisa imagined her sister holding her pen over the paper, squinting up at the ceiling, thinking of adjectives.
The letters came steadily. Reading them, Louisa sobbed for the surety of her sister’s daily existence. Addie’s concerns were on a higher plane, even while she moved on the lower one. The doubts she sometimes expressed—doubts about the mission, doubts about her role as mother, as wife—Louisa didn’t take seriously. Addie was doing good in the world, and Louisa was patching holes in her husband’s shirts.
Sometimes she pricked herself with the needle on purpose. She wasn’t sure why she did it; the act made her feel better, but the bubble of blood that came after only made her feel worse.
And then came the letter announcing Addie’s return. She was coming for a visit of three months, and Owen and the boys were coming, too. Most of their time would be spent in Ohio, but they would stop at Louisa’s for two weeks on their way back to San Francisco. From there, they would take a steamer to Japan and then on to China, repeating their first trip of six years before.
They would be in Illinois by the end of July. No need to entertain them, Addie wrote; she only wanted to spend time with her younger sister again, to meet her husband and see the farm. Louisa wasn’t sure. She had known her brother-in-law only briefly and she remembered him as a much older man (though he was not as old as Bert) who wore glasses (though in fact he never had), and whose mind was so taken up by lofty religious ideals that he might well be incapable of noticing—much less admiring—the things that made up her and Bert’s entire world. And they were coming in July. July meant that Bert was in the fields working from dawn to dusk, and she—in addition to her usual charge of feeding the pigs and chickens, collecting eggs, cooking and cleaning and laundering—was wedded in the mornings to an overflowing garden, and in the afternoons to the kitchen where the garden ended up: canned and pickled and boiled into jams. She tried to imagine what to do with her sister’s family. How would they spend their days? Where would they sleep? At least the house was better than it had been before. The previous fall, after harvest time, a crowd of neighbors had put their little cabin on logs and rolled it a quarter-mile up the hill. With help, Bert had added on a room, and they were now out of the damp hollow whose unhealthy location, he claimed, was the cause of Louisa’s “bad weather” and the reason for her “difficulties.”
It was a kind of superstition, but perhaps it was true. When the letter announcing the planned visit arrived, it was January, and Louisa was pregnant again. She wasn’t sure how far along she was, but by May, when she received a letter from Ohio that included a few lines from Addie, her stomach had grown enough that she’d had to let out her dresses. All through the spring and early summer, the weather was good within and without. The fi
elds and gardens were baptized by sun during the day, and in the evenings, storms rolled in purple and electric. Louisa went to sleep with a hand on her stomach and awoke to find her fingers entwined with Bert’s.
Oh, how she wanted this child.
The day of her sister’s arrival came. It was hot and sultry, the sky an even white, every blade of grass unmoving. Louisa’s dress hung like limp curtains over her ankles. They had grown puffy in the past month, and her hair was thick and oily. Several times a day she went to the outhouse white and shaking and could hardly sit down before her bowels unclenched and delivered a foul liquid mess into the hole below. Was this the normal way? she asked the neighbor women. Was this how it should go? Every day, one of them came to help her keep house. They dipped buckets from the well and swept dirt out through the door. They told her there was no normal way, there was only the way you were given. We were made to suffer, weren’t we. Put your faith in God.
Louisa wanted to go to the station in town to meet Addie and her family, but Bert wouldn’t allow it. He had grown hard with her—not rough, but implacable. So he hooked Prince onto the wagon and drove away, and Louisa lay down and tried to sleep. Then she got up and dragged a chair outside. She watched a dark line of clouds moving in from the west, fingers crooked from their bottoms as if pointing the way. The fingers gestured down to the earth, then seemed to change direction and turn toward her. She felt a black omen and turned and spat.
The rain came so hard it was a single white sheet. Lightning, thunder. Wind shrieking through the walls, shooting straight through the slab of still air in the house. She didn’t light the lamp. Inside her body, the baby was turning and turning, and she thought of all the previous times, the countless others that had never gotten to this point, the losses that had happened slowly and with what seemed to her, always, to be too little pain.
She pressed her face to the window, looking for a ghost wagon in the rain. Come on.
When the letters stopped coming, Louisa would think back on that moment. More than three years had passed, she was a mother twice over, but her body remembered the sensation of fear vibrating through it as she sat at the window, keeping watch, waiting. She had stayed there because of that fear; she had a feeling that everything depended on her seeing the wagon, on bearing witness to the moment her sister arrived. The storm sputtered out. Hours passed, but still she remained at her post.
There was something in the expectation. If you waited for the worst, then it couldn’t happen.
Addie
2
In Lu-cho Fu, the dust was everywhere. It caked the flat surfaces of the desks and tables and dressers, stuck to the sides of the furniture and to the rounded surfaces of the ceramic vases. It built up in the creases and crevices of the scrollwork at the top of the bed so that the designs seemed to be painted in gray to make them more prominent. It powdered the pillows and cushions. At night when she peeled back the top sheet, if Addie put her palm flat on the mattress, she felt the grit that had found its way into the bed between the sheets. And in the morning, once Owen had finished dressing, when she made up the bed again dust rose into the air. This was the worst of all, the dust crawling in at night to settle on them as they slept. It was like waking up in a china cabinet. You felt that a year had gone by in a night. You could feel time passing.
In the morning, before making the bed, Addie washed her face as Owen lay yawning and stretching in bed. It seemed counter to his personality, efficient and decided in everything else, but ever since they’d arrived in Lu-cho Fu, he’d taken to lolling in bed for several minutes in the morning. It was because they were home now, he said. He was comfortable. One leg thrown out from under the sheet and his arms curled under his head, he watched her ready herself at the washstand in the corner until he fell back asleep. Sometimes he dreamed during this time, vivid flashes or long, involved sagas that he told her about once he had woken again. “We were on the ship crossing over, but we were sailing through clouds, orange and pink from horizon to horizon.” “We were swimming together, and we could breathe underwater.” “You came into the kitchen one morning carrying a dead rabbit at the end of a string, and you set it on the table and told me to bring it back to life.” The dreams always involved both of them, never just him. Even in dreams he didn’t leave her behind.
There was no mirror at the washstand, so she never knew whether his eyes were open or if he’d fallen back asleep. She liked the unknowing and the sense of solitude it provided. This moment of the day held an odd sort of magic; it was as if she had no name or identity; she was held suspended, and she thought of nothing at all but performed a baptism that made her over anew each dawn. Overnight, the water in the basin acquired a thin film, like the skin on a custard. Still, it was the means of her purification. Pulling the stiff cloth from the rod at the back of the stand, she’d wet it and wipe her face, her chin, her neck all around. She cleaned inside her ears, tugging on the lobes as she ran a finger around the whorls. For a moment, once she was done washing and her skin was still damp, she felt a sense of newness, a fresh gloss like leaves after a rain. Sometimes it made her smile, and when she turned, Owen would open his arms and his eyes would be suddenly and darkly shining. She would go to him then, because in the morning it wasn’t unwelcome, as it was when he wanted her at night, at the end of a strange and tiring and hopeless day. Instead, it was satisfying, a hunger that came on quickly and was just as quickly sated. Then, she wasn’t bothered by the sheets twisting up around them or the sticky heat of his skin next to hers, and afterward they both separated to wash and dress and begin their day separately. It surprised her sometimes, how he desired her even now, as big as she was with the child in her stomach.
Once they were both dressed and the bed was made, the omnipresence of the dust bothered her again. She wanted the house to be clean, even though the dust kept crawling across the stone floors and blanketing the furniture. Every day she wiped clean the glass over the photograph of her family that she had brought from America, and every day the cloth came out dirty. The faces, fuzzy and gray, seemed dusty anyway, and sometimes it was a disappointment to set the photograph back on the table and see that it looked no different clean than it did dirty. It was a sort of curiosity piece, but no real reminder of home. You didn’t think of a person as a still form, unchanged and silent. Addie considered the picture and was often puzzled to find that it did not affect her. The faces were blank. There was nothing of home in the picture to make her long for it.
Every morning she took the horsehair broom and drew it carefully over the floors, making little piles that she picked up with a damp cloth. The broom was an oddity; she’d had to have it made. The ones they sold at market were only bunches of thin branches tied together, good only for sweeping the courtyards of vegetable scraps or chicken droppings. Addie wasn’t sure what the Chinese used inside; perhaps they never swept at all, but only mopped every now and then, when the filth was too much to stand.
The broom she’d had made was like a great brush, with an inch and a half of stiff horsehair. She’d explained to the merchant what she wanted by showing him her hairbrush—she’d carried it with her to market—and then holding her hands wide to show how large she wanted it to be. The merchant had given her a dubious look and then turned to Owen. It was their first real adventure in town without the Riddells to help them—there had been some discussion as to whether it was proper for her to go out, but it was cold enough to warrant thick coats and so Owen thought it would be all right—and in the end the excursion had been a success. The man shook his head over and over again, incredulous, perhaps believing that Addie wanted to use the giant brush for her hair in some unimaginable fashion. At last he’d nodded and taken the coins Owen held out to him. When they returned a few days later, he presented the broom, and Addie found that she was to demonstrate its use for the small crowd that had gathered. “I feel like the traveling salesman at a county fair,” she said to Owen as she swept the dirty floor of the shop with exagge
rated strokes. “I should have you manning a booth where people can line up to buy their very own.”
“We’ll have to get our friend here in on the project,” he said, nodding to the merchant.
She grinned at him over the stacks piled up in the narrow shop, then turned to her audience and gave a curtsy, which made them laugh. Laughter was fine, but it bothered her that no words could be exchanged; it seemed such a simple thing to open your mouth and speak, but she hadn’t yet learned more than three words of Chinese. “We must sound so silly to them,” she said.
“I imagine we sound about the same to them as they do to us.” He paused, and they both listened to the men in the crowd murmuring to one another and gesturing at the broom in Addie’s hands. She handed it to Owen. “I’m done with my circus tricks.”
As they left the shop and made their way back to the house, Owen said, “Once the prayer books come in, we’ll at least be able to put them into their hands.”
“That will be a start,” Addie replied.
The prayer books had been due to arrive for several months, according to the Riddells. The Missionary Board printed them, but hadn’t sent new supplies for half a year. “I’d thought Mr. Douglas would send along a few boxes with you,” said Mrs. Riddell reprovingly, in a way that made Addie feel as if it was her fault that their host in T’ien-chin hadn’t set them up properly.
In the meantime, they had no way to start their real work. Owen devoted himself to studying the language, and Addie devoted herself to the house. Back home, it hadn’t bothered her to leave blouses and skirts strewn on the chair beside her bed, or to find dried leaves in the corner of a room, tracked in from outside. But here, even though it was impossible to keep the house truly clean, still she kept trying. She went from room to room with a pail of water and a cloth. Wei-p’eng, the older of the two men who worked for them, performed the same cleaning routines, regardless of what she did. She was not quite sure where the prescription had come from, but he adhered to it strictly. He swept the courtyards with his own stick broom twice a day, and he emptied the chamber pots every morning. He collected ashes from the small stoves that warmed the rooms and kept water boiling for them to drink. He ran a cloth over the lamps when he trimmed their wicks, but he didn’t wipe the tables or the desks that they sat on until the one day a week when he dusted, and this he did regardless of whether Addie had just done it or not. One day when their friends were over, she’d asked Mr. Riddell to point out to Wei-p’eng that dusting twice in an hour was a waste of time, but though he had nodded and seemed to listen, still he had gone on with his task as soon as the American was done speaking. The next time Addie saw Wei-p’eng dusting right after her, she’d made a show of drawing her finger over a table to show him it was clean. He’d nodded and gone on as before.
Rebellion Page 4