Addie
11
One winter night when Freddie was a baby, Addie woke suddenly and went to his cradle. Her son lay on his stomach, arms bent at his sides, hands squeezed into fists by his ears as if blocking out sound. She rarely had to nurse him more than once in the night anymore, but she’d still awaken three or four times between bedtime and morning, and each time she passed from sleep to consciousness it was as abrupt as opening a door. Eyes suddenly open to the dark, she’d listen for her son’s breathing, and it was only when she heard it that she could go back to sleep.
Freddie’s face was heavy with sleep now, something deeper than peacefulness dragging the cheeks downward. And yet, rather than feeling assured by the evidence that all was as it should be, Addie felt panic like an ammoniac burn. If her sense that something was amiss always turned out to be based on nothing, then what would happen if there actually were some danger? What if Freddie, one night in his bed, stopped breathing and she lay a few feet away, her own chest rising and falling in a dumb, even rhythm?
She stood looking down at her son. The light coming in through the window silvered his shape so he looked like a photograph of himself. People photographed their dead children, propped them up in a chair or laid them flat in a coffin tilted to the eye of the camera. The image came to her quickly—where had she seen it, and when? Years ago, in some neighbor’s home; she might have been six or seven years old. She remembered a smell of camphor and the vanilla scent of cake. A breeze stirring curtains, swirling the shadows on a green rug so that it looked like pond water. On a table by the window was a photograph in a frame that showed a young girl crouched behind a tiny sofa, where her brother lay. They were both wearing lacy bonnets, both grasping dolls. The girl gazed at a point somewhere past the camera, but the boy’s eyes were closed and his body was arranged as if he had fallen onto the sofa to sleep. Arms curled around the doll, he wore on his face a slight smile. Not a normal smile—Addie had known that even then. She’d turned away, heard her mother telling the neighbor that the road down the hill had been dry, and if Addie hadn’t been wearing her new boots, she would have let her run down it. But you can’t let them, always, be thoughtless. That boy, Addie had thought suddenly, will never again go running down a hill.
But here Addie was looking down at her son, and couldn’t she see the edge of the blanket in the moonlight moving softly with his breath, and wasn’t that his face registering the flash of something she couldn’t see? She should go back to bed, crawl under the covers, but the devil was in her now. She couldn’t sleep. She would only lie awake staring at shades of silver and gray, the shadows on the wall so terribly still, it was as if they had been pasted there.
Taking up her dressing gown, she wove her arms through the sleeves and quietly opened the door. Outside, the courtyard was glossed with moonlight. She shivered in the cold and considered going back inside to get her coat, but something stopped her. The cold felt bracing and clean. For once, the air seemed clear of the dust that often needled her lungs. Of course, it was probably only the dark that kept her from seeing it, but that didn’t matter. If she could fool herself, all the better.
Along the opposite side of the courtyard, in front of the covered walkway that circled the perimeter, were the two benches the carpenter was carving for the sitting room. He had told Owen today that he would be done before the end of the week. If the carpenter was honest, that meant that soon they could have as many as fifteen or sixteen women gather for Bible lessons. The thought made her nervous; she pictured her neighbor Hsiu Taitai’s face multiplied several times, each one squinting at her without either understanding or belief.
Addie shook her head. It was late—past midnight—but she was wide awake. The moon was bright enough to make every shape in the courtyard visible: the almost-completed benches; the pillars holding up the roof; the four small trees and the potted flowering bushes; the stone urns filled with rainwater, used for mopping the floors. But the nighttime shadows were deep. Perched atop the eaves, the faces on the stone creatures could have been those of owls. Addie stared at one, almost daring it to move.
Everything was still—so still it made her restless, and suddenly she found herself lifting the heavy bar from the front gates and pushing open one side. She paused to see whether Wei-p’eng would come out from his room a few yards away. But no sound came to warn her, and, stepping over the threshold, she stood looking down the empty street. It was a long corridor, bleeding into darkness. She pulled the door most of the way closed, leaving an inch-wide gap, and then set off. On either side, the walls of other houses rose. She touched the soft wood of a door and trailed her fingers along its surface. She could have been a ghost, her presence felt but unknown. On the other side of the door were rooms filled with people soundly sleeping, though she couldn’t picture them. Did Chinese children have dolls that they hugged close as they slept? Did the women let down their hair or keep it coiled in a bun? Addie had been invited into various houses in town, but there were places you couldn’t go, couldn’t even imagine.
At the end of the street she turned left and then right, making her way along the wider street that led to the market. When she arrived at the square, she barely recognized it. The empty streets were one thing, but the square, stripped of all occupants, gave her another feeling she couldn’t name. She had the awful thought that this was what the first few moments after death might be like: a wandering through deserted streets that were almost recognizable, but made strange by their emptiness.
The square was still and quiet, but gradually she became aware of a soft clicking sound: a dog was trotting along the perimeter, close to the wall. It was mangy and dirty, as all the dogs in town were. Not large, but not small, either, and Addie suddenly felt that she was an intruder. At night the town’s streets belonged to other creatures, and she had no business claiming the empty market for herself. The dog swung out toward the middle of the square and then stopped, considering her with its head lowered, as if she had been its object for some time and yet it didn’t know what to do with her now that she was found.
For a long moment, she and the dog looked at each other. Then it growled, and Addie took a step backward. She felt a sudden sharp wind at her back, sweeping down the street she’d just taken. All at once the dog leaped forward, crossing the space between them, and sank its teeth into her leg.
She yelped and took a few stumbling steps, but the dog held on. She didn’t feel pain. There was the sensation of a foreign creature latched on to her body, but this was oddly familiar: for months she had been teaching her body to allow such an act whenever she brought her son to her breast. Nursing Freddie was uncomfortable in a way that was worse than pain, in a way that made her want to bat away her son’s head, to force a separation between her body and his. She never did; she had been continually reminding herself not to fight. Now she looked down at the dog and saw its blurred head joined to her leg and the tangle of her nightgown caught up around its neck and she kicked the leg it was attached to, and still it held on even as it growled again.
She stumbled toward the wall of a house, and when she felt the smooth surface, she braced herself on it and swung her leg so the dog’s head connected with the bottom. The dog made a different noise then and released its hold. She kicked a second time and felt a sickening softness as her foot met a space between the ribs, and it yelped again and then swung drunkenly away.
Not stopping to watch it stagger, she set off running in the direction of their house. She wasn’t limping at all; the leg still didn’t hurt. It was only when she arrived at the gate and went in through the cracked door, only when she heard herself panting in the moonlit courtyard, that she started to feel a stiff soreness. At the sound of a voice speaking nearby, she turned to see Wei-p’eng standing by the door of his room. He had a long knife in his hand that Addie had never seen before. “It’s me,” she said in English, but Wei-p’eng didn’t move. “It’s me,” she repeated in Chinese. She had learned enough of the
language to be able to say that.
The door of the bedroom opened, and Owen came out. “What’s going on?” he asked, taking a few steps forward. “What are you doing, Wei-p’eng? What’s this?”
“It’s my fault, Owen,” Addie said. “I went out, and—”
“You went out—you mean, out into town? At this hour, and alone?” He glanced wildly around the courtyard, as if suddenly unsure that it was the middle of the night. “What were you thinking, Addie?”
“I don’t know.” Her heart was pounding. She leaned against one of the pillars. Everything had happened so quickly. She couldn’t imagine now why she’d had the compulsion to go out. She watched Wei-p’eng cross to the gate and push it closed. He pulled the bar down into place and then went back into his room, sliding his own door shut behind him. With a start, she realized he must have been waiting in the courtyard when she came in. He likely left his bed after she first passed through the gate, and then he’d sat up waiting with the knife at the ready, to protect her.
“Owen,” she said now, “I’ve got a dog bite.”
“A dog bite!”
“Could you fetch me a cloth and some hot water? I need to clean it.”
He didn’t move. “This is completely unaccountable, Addie.”
“Yes, but my leg is starting to hurt pretty terrible.”
He left and came back a few moments later. “What have you got to say for yourself now?” he asked as he helped her over to a bench and sat down beside her. He put her leg up on his lap and began cleaning the wound, which was no more than a few punctures at the front and back of her leg. They were deep and oozing blood, though not very much of it.
Addie squeezed her eyes shut against the pain of Owen’s finger probing the cut. “I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I guess that’s all.”
His face was tight and grim and covered in shadow. He didn’t say anything in response. After a few minutes, he went to find a bandage. Waiting for him to return, Addie tried not to focus on her leg, which ached deep down and felt larger than it was. She tried not to think about the dog, either, how it had watched her for a moment, head lowered, considering, and then come forward to attack.
The years ticked by as they would have done back home, as they did for everyone, but the changes that were taking place elsewhere didn’t reach as far as Lu-cho Fu. There were no bicycles on the streets here. Neither Addie nor Owen could imagine what cornflakes tasted like or why anyone would want to eat them, though letters from home mentioned how this new food had changed breakfast in more than one household. Addie’s letters in response had the advantage of the exotic, but in reality her life felt more or less mundane.
Her days were filled with family and work. She had Freddie and soon after a daughter named Grace, who died so soon after birth that she was hardly more than an idea: an expectation and then, immediately after, memory. The local women whose homes she visited congratulated her on the fact that she had one healthy son. What’s the loss of a daughter? they asked in the wake of the death. What have you lost but a burden? Mrs. Riddell, who accompanied Addie on these trips—or perhaps it was more accurate to say that Addie accompanied her—always immediately corrected the women’s views by saying, “We are all blessed in the eyes of the Lord, the girls no less than the boys, though we are intended for different purposes.” A woman must consider her husband as her guide through the darkness of female incomprehension, she said, so long as the man were a Christian. To those women whose husbands were resistant to conversion, Mrs. Riddell explained that the women’s special mission was to bring their husbands around to the teachings of Jesus, to keep their family from the dire fate that awaited all heathens after death.
No matter where they began, the missionaries’ discussions with locals always ended up at the same point. When they went to nurse a woman whose husband had torn her arm from the socket and blinded her in one eye, Mrs. Riddell explained that his anger stemmed from a stubborn unwillingness to know God. It was therefore the woman’s duty to lead her husband to belief. She said all this as she dabbed at the swollen face with a wet cloth, though the woman kept up a low moaning throughout the visit. Addie didn’t have the words to say what she felt, which was just as well. What she felt was that the violence visited upon this woman was no part of a divine plan. But she did her part by reading aloud several of the Psalms in translation, trying her best with the pronunciation.
Their methods were sometimes effective, but more often they failed. They failed, and then they kept coming back. Repetition was the key, Mrs. Riddell insisted. Repetition and Hard Truth. People needed to hear the meaning of their own experiences presented to them through the lens of Christian faith. They needed to be taught to recognize the Lord’s work and not to question His ways. “Yes,” Addie said. “Of course, you’re right.” In the days immediately after her daughter’s death, she insisted that Owen keep Mrs. Riddell from seeing her. Though she knew God had taken her own child for what were no doubt good and meaningful purposes, she did not need to hear that she was wrong to mourn. Addie wanted to lie in bed and be alone with her grief. She asked Owen to send Freddie to stay with the Riddells for a few days, to give her that time alone and to keep Mrs. Riddell busy.
She mourned intensely for three solid days, and then, less acutely, for two or three months after. Then, abruptly, she was done. She wasn’t like her sister Louisa, who mourned every baby lost in the womb as if it had been born and she had known it as well as Addie knew Freddie. Louisa wrote: This sadness has teeth and it chews away at me from inside, making the place even meaner to the next one that tries to grow there. Addie wrote back to her sister to have patience and hope, to put her faith in God. Look at her own loss, she said: she’d never have thought she could get over losing Grace, but she had. “Surely,” Owen was fond of saying to her now, “our daughter rests with the angels.” And so Addie believed, too, in an abstract way.
The mission started holding classes for girls to attend, and Addie and Mrs. Riddell shared the task of instructing them in math and science, in world history and the Bible. Mrs. Riddell remained for some time the better language speaker, and Addie frequently found herself using gestures and drawing pictures. The history lessons were as fantastic as anything the girls had ever heard, especially when Addie acted out Cortez discovering the New World. She raised her hand to her forehead and squinted out at an imaginary distance. She acted out the part of the natives greeting the Spaniard; sometimes she selected a few girls to help her. They had never heard of Spain or America, either. The world outside their little corner of China was as distant as the stars, and like the stars, every one of those places might be the same as any other. The Bible lessons were surely as strange.
Yet they were learning, these students, and this was something new. She frequently failed at minor tasks, but her reward was that here were several girls who could do what none of their mothers or aunts had ever dreamed of doing; they were allowed to be fully human. Sometimes, looking down at a new girl struggling to write her own name on the slate balanced upon her lap, Addie felt that she was doing something very noble and grand. Here was progress. Here was an unalloyed good. Here was civilization spreading light into the vast darkness of a strange land.
Yet it was more difficult to feel triumphant with regards to Lu-cho Fu’s grown populace. After the morning lessons in the classroom, Addie generally went out to visit local women in their homes. Early on in her stay, she and Mrs. Riddell had gone on their rounds together. It was after Grace’s death that Addie decided she was ready to begin executing these visits on her own. By splitting up, she argued, they could cover more territory. Mrs. Riddell agreed. And while it was true that this was one motivation for the division, it was also true that Addie was eager for time away from the other woman. Between their mornings in the classrooms, the afternoon visits to homes, and the twice-weekly services, the two women were nearly always together. And yet they weren’t friends. Mrs. Riddell was severe and full of conviction. Addie, on the other h
and, felt less and less sure as the years went by that the small triumphs were anything more than a distraction from the larger failure of the mission. She seriously doubted that the Chinese could be made to be Christian after all.
Only a few citizens of the town had been brought around to belief. Many were hostile to the idea, spreading rumors that the Christians ate Chinese children or that they were trying to take over the land by stealthy means. There was some menace in the existence of these rumors, a promise of retribution. Still, the more discouraging fact was that most of the people simply remained unconvinced. They came to services and tilted their heads at an angle; they narrowed their eyes as they listened. But in the end they went back out into the streets, and maybe they told a few curious friends about the odd things they saw at the mission: the calendar on the wall with drawings of a foreign place (a calendar that arrived every year in the package from Ohio, though sometimes not until March or April); the children with light hair like sunshine; the photograph of all those somber-looking people standing in a parlor totally unlike any seen in China. They might share tales with their neighbors, but it was nothing more than a novelty.
“So we are here to keep the people of Lu-cho Fu entertained,” Addie wrote Louisa a few years into their stay. It was late autumn. Freddie was two and a half and his brother was newly born, and they had both recently come through a bout of sickness, the telling of which took up all but the final paragraph of Addie’s letter to her sister. It had been a difficult and uncertain two weeks, with fevers and flushed cheeks and necks, vomiting and diarrhea. She gave an account to Louisa that highlighted all the most harrowing moments—the night that Freddie first started running a fever, his head damp with sweat as he twisted in the sheets and then suddenly fell still, his eyes going vacant; the morning she couldn’t get either child to drink water; the tiny infant Henry shaking in her arms, vomiting nearly continually into a towel she held to his mouth—and there was an almost frantic need to share the experience with her younger sister, who was still not a mother, yet hoping to be. There was an element of relief that was not only about the children but about what the experience meant to Addie. Do you see what I am? I am a mother, and this is how it will be for you, too. She was, for once, certain of who she was and what she was doing.
Rebellion Page 20