Rebellion

by Molly Patterson

  It was cold out. I wasn’t wearing gloves, and my hands were chilly, clutching a mug of coffee that wasn’t all that hot anymore. George had left his inside; his hands were shoved deep in his pockets. He stayed quiet until we were almost to the road. “I didn’t expect that,” he said at last, and squinted up the way. A truck was coming along, and we both waited to see if we recognized the driver. No one I knew, but we all lifted our hands in greeting, anyway. “No, I sure didn’t expect that,” George repeated, “Lydie pushing us out the door together.”

  “Me, either.”

  A few dozen yards down the road was a narrow stream. As we walked toward it, George asked what I thought of the proposal he and Lydie had made.

  “I don’t know what to think.”

  “You’re probably wondering why I didn’t bring it up before.”

  I was looking straight ahead, at the creek bed cutting through the stubble of corn harvested months before. There wasn’t any standing water at the moment, but a soft fuzz of frost gave the ditch a silvery glint. Yes, I said, I was wondering about that.

  “I’ve never lived with secrets before. Nothing like this. It’s made things difficult—” He started coughing and turned away before he could finish.

  I waited, feeling strangely distant from the moment, from the conversation, from him. I watched him coughing—shoulders jerking down—and then turned my eyes to the creek again. I wanted to say, I’ve never had secrets like this, either. But I stayed quiet because I knew our situations weren’t the same. They could have been only if Karol were still alive, if I had to worry about my husband sensing another man’s touch on my skin. I didn’t have to deceive anyone in my house except my children, and despite what some people say, children are the easiest ones to fool.

  If our affair was to end, it would only be because George had to end it. I’d understood that from the beginning, I realized now.

  So be it. I waited.

  “Sorry about that,” he said once he’d finished coughing. “Got something in my windpipe, I think.”

  I took a sip of the coffee. Tepid now, it had an acid taste.

  “What I was saying—”

  “Things are difficult for you,” I filled in. “Keeping secrets.”

  “That’s right,” he said and gave me a curious look; clearly, he’d heard the sharp edge in my voice. “What I’m trying to explain here, Hazel—”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “—about this idea, where it came from. I’m just trying to explain why I think it would be a good thing for us.”

  A sudden gust of wind swelled up, and I pulled my elbows in closer, trying for warmth as George explained what I’d somehow failed to see, that if he were the one renting my land, he’d have good reason to be over at my place every day of the week. He wanted to see me, he said, more than he’d been able. It was killing him, he said. It was eating him up inside.

  I’d never heard such words spoken before outside of the movies. They didn’t sound as I’d have expected them to. George—calm, slow-talking George—was speaking quickly, but in a low voice, almost a mutter. He sounded more frustrated than he did caught up with passion. It reminded me of the first time our family car had broken down, when Karol and I were on our way into town. Joe was in the backseat and Debbie, just a few months old, was settled on my lap when the car had suddenly begun making a shrieking sound and Karol pulled over to the side of the road, cursing. He got out and opened up the hood. With the doors closed and that shield of metal in between, I couldn’t hear what he was saying, but I could hear the tenor of his voice change as he discovered the cause of the screeching and determined what was needed to make it stop.

  “—because we can’t go on like this,” George was saying, “seeing each other every now and then. It doesn’t make sense. You name the terms, and I’ll sign right there on the line.”

  It took me a moment to remember that we were talking about the rent. “You won’t make anything on it.”

  “I know.”

  “It’s not just your money, either.”

  A pause. Then: “Lydie wants to help out.”

  Why? I could have asked, but I already knew the answer. Because she was good. Because she cared for me and Debbie and Joe. Because every day she looked out her kitchen window at a hill of trees, and never suspected that they could hide a thing.

  Louisa

  16

  Between the last letter and the first newspaper report, more than nine months passed. It was long enough that Louisa could believe the two events had nothing to do with each other. Addie was as far away as the moon and yet always seemed close.

  Louisa had just given birth to her third child. Herbert was almost four, Joseph was two and a half, Emmaline was a little thing her brothers could hardly believe was human. They asked her about it. “Mama, why’s she so purple?”—this from Joseph, who’d stick a finger right into the soft bulb of his sister’s belly and then look hurt when she made a squawking cry. Herbert, meanwhile, always stood with his hands behind his back, staring at the infant with something between fear and love. He had none of the bearing of an oldest son; you could sense him sending out his feeling into the world like a lonely chord played in the dark on a fiddle. Once, she’d found him reciting Bible verses to the cows, and when she explained to him that the lowly animals are beloved by God even without any clear knowledge of Him, Herbert had said, “But look how they’re all paying attention!” Already she knew he would grow into a wise man.

  The last letter from Addie gave no indication of its being the last. It was a letter like any other: Freddie had grown three full inches in the last year; Henry now squatted down on the ground like a Chinaman. Life kept moving along. There was a sense of flurry about the letter, a suggestion that the writer had sat down amid the hustle and bustle because tomorrow would be as busy as today, so one might as well take the time right now for writing.

  Louisa imagined her sister’s servants coming in and out of the room while she wrote. There had been a Chinese laundry back in Marietta, and she always pictured the couple that ran it when she read Addie’s letters. The couple had gone by Sam and Rose. This had never seemed strange until her sister went to China and began writing to her of people whose names had dashes and apostrophes in them. Then Louisa thought of Sam and Rose and wondered what their real names might have been.

  Several months passed without any correspondence from Addie, but this was not unusual: sometimes she would receive a packet of letters all together, an entire season’s worth or more. The post didn’t come often to Lu-cho Fu. And when it did, once Louisa’s letters were delivered and Addie’s collected, who knew where else those letters might next get held up. Louisa had only a vague sense of China. She knew the names Lu-cho Fu and Peking. She didn’t really know how far apart the two places were, and as for the other towns and cities Addie wrote of, they were all a jumble, there was no keeping them straight. Frankly, it was a mystery that one sister ever received a single letter from the other. When you considered the trip those letters took: horseback and train, however many ships and boats. There might be a camel somewhere in that long line; there might be a Chinaman carrying the mail by foot along the edge of a steep cliff. Louisa could picture the man, bent nearly double beneath the weight on his back: he looked like Sam from the laundry back home.

  She began to worry when six months had passed. She’d wonder, as she wrung out the shirts she was washing in the laundry tub, why Addie hadn’t written. The next moment Emmaline would start crying or Joseph would remind her it was time to feed the chickens, and the day would march on without her thinking of her sister again.

  “Addie’s got busy, I suppose,” she’d say to Bert as they prepared for bed. “She hasn’t written for a while now.”

  “Ah, well, with her work,” he’d reply. Or: “She and Owen’ve got a school to run, don’t they?” in a tone that let Louisa know it was selfish of her to expect a letter from a sister busy converting a country full of heathens. At the same time, h
is tone said that he considered missionary work to be a protracted form of entertainment, not at all like real life, which could only take place on a farm in western Illinois. It was a tone that communicated all kinds of things, none of them of much comfort to Louisa. She’d turn away and sleep with her face to the moon, or the hazy place where the moon seemed to be.

  It was early April when the first report came. Louisa was out in the garden, Emmaline wrapped up in a blanket and sleeping in a little cradle on the ground, Herbert and Joseph helping to break up the ground for planting. They’d been at it for half an hour when Herbert, looking up from his work, raised one dirt-covered hand and pointed behind Louisa. “There’s Mr. Barnes,” he said. Then, after a moment, in a rueful tone: “I wish he would’ve come on Blackie.” Herbert knew all the horses in the area by name.

  Sure enough, their neighbor Jeb was coming up the lane on foot. Midmorning was an unusual time for visiting, but he had three strong sons who kept the farm running. Louisa supposed he was able to get away when he wanted. “Morning,” she called out as she stood and brushed the dirt from her knees.

  “And what a morning, isn’t it? Fine weather we’ve got today. Helping your mother out, are you, Herbie? Getting the garden put in.”

  “We’re planting vegetables,” Herbert informed their neighbor, and then watched with patient exasperation as Joseph scooped up a handful of dirt and dropped it into his lap.

  “They’re a great help, I see,” Jeb said to Louisa with a wink. “And the little one,” he said, stepping up to the cradle where it sat on the grass. Emmaline was still sleeping, her face turned toward the inside of one arm. “She don’t give you no trouble. That’s a good girl.” He turned his smile from the baby to Louisa and asked if Bert was out working.

  “Him and Al are down in the back fields. You want me to send Herbert after him?”

  Jeb seemed to waver for a moment. “Oh, no, that’s all right. Now I brought out a paper, and this item might make you uneasy, which, I don’t want you to feel frightened, but it’s news and I thought, well, you ought to know, with your sister and all.”

  Louisa glanced down at the boys, who were both seated in the dirt, peering up at Jeb with what looked like suspicion, though they might just have been squinting at the bright sky behind him. “Herbert, you take your brother and go get your pa. Tell him Mr. Barnes is here and wants to have a chat.”

  As soon as the boys were off, Jeb took a newspaper from under his arm. It was already bent to the place he wanted and he thrust a calloused finger at a few sentences near the top of the page, in the section called “The News Condensed.” Her eyes fell on the word “China,” but then Jeb pulled the paper back toward him. “What it says is that there’s Chinese up to no good and they’ve gone and murdered a reverend over there.”

  “Where at?” Louisa asked. “I mean, where in China?”

  He raised the paper to his face as if he couldn’t quite make out the words. It took everything Louisa had not to grab it out of his hands. “It doesn’t say, exactly. In China, it says.” He lowered the paper again and then abruptly handed it to her.

  Louisa read:

  Conflicting reports have been received concerning the I Ho Chu’an, a seditious group otherwise known as the “Boxers,” terrorizing foreigners in the Shantung region of China. The grisly murder of the Rev. Mr. Brooks of the Church Missionary Society last December may have foretold a growing movement in which numerous villages are now destroyed and countless native Christians killed.

  “It’s only the one missionary,” Jeb said when she handed the paper back to him. “They don’t mention any others.” She nodded, but she felt queasy and at the same time as if she were looking off down a long road at a figure coming, though she couldn’t make out who or what it was. “Where’s your sister’s mission now?”

  “I don’t expect you’d have heard of it. It’s in a place called Lu-cho Fu.”

  Jeb screwed up one eye, thinking. “They all sound so similar, don’t they. You have Peking and then, what is it, Shanghai. One of them is where the emperors live.”

  “I believe it’s Peking.”

  They went on like this until Bert came into view, walking over the fields. He was carrying Joseph under his arm, sideways, the way you’d carry a pillow, and Herbert was trotting alongside him. When they got close, he raised his free hand and waved, and then he was with them and telling the boys to scoot off and let the grown people talk.

  Louisa let their neighbor explain what was in the paper. The queasiness had gone away and now she didn’t feel anything much at all; she might have been listening to the news from Africa or Brazil. She tried to tell herself that her sister might be in danger, but some part of her refused to even consider the possibility. She watched her husband as Jeb read aloud the passage. When he was finished, Bert said, “It’s a great big country.”

  “That’s true. It’s as big, almost, as America.”

  “And it says there are conflicting reports.”

  “That’s how it often is. No one’s really sure whether anything’s going on, but the news have to report on it in case there is.”

  Louisa listened to them debating and waited to be pulled into the conversation. It was her sister, after all, and she had the greatest knowledge of China. She doubted whether Bert could even remember the name of the place where her sister was living. The two men went on talking and soon enough had moved on from the topic of China altogether. The conversation tended to go where it always did: the farm, the weather. Louisa stopped listening.

  The Intelligencer didn’t devote much room to international events, and what was included was brief enough that it managed to quiet the clamor in the world to a distant calling like that from a flock of lonely geese flying over. A few weeks after the first report, the paper printed another piece about China. This time Louisa didn’t get to see it for herself, but Bert told her that Jeb had given him the story at church. Louisa had had to stay home with Joseph, who’d come down with a high fever almost overnight. He lay across her lap, breathing ragged, and every few minutes erupted in a fit of coughing that brought tears to his eyes. Louisa stroked her son’s head and sang a song about kittens and cows. He slept for a while and she left him to walk Emmaline around the yard, and then she brought her daughter inside and laid her in the middle of the bed. When Joseph awoke and started coughing again, Emmaline grinned and cooed and crawled around among the blankets so that Louisa had to keep reaching out to keep her from pitching headfirst onto the floor. In the lonely house, with no other sound but her daughter’s cooing and her son’s coughing, with only a soft rain-smelling breeze coming in through the cracked window and the occasional creak of the house settling, Louisa felt the world collapsing onto this single point; it was almost more than she could bear. Emmaline was a little idiot, oblivious to all the suffering in the world. Joseph coughed and cried, and Louisa wanted to shake him. She wanted to put her mouth to his and suck the phlegm out so he could breathe more easily, but she also wanted to shake him into unconsciousness. Instead, she stroked his head and told a rambling story about Jonah in the whale and how together they went down through a cave in the ocean floor and came out on the other side of the earth. Emmaline began screaming. Joseph wet the bed.

  By the time Bert and Herbert returned home, Louisa had had enough time to reach the end of her rope and then climb back up, hand over hand. When they walked through the door, the face she turned to them was blinkingly serene. Herbert took over the care of his brother and Emmaline took a nap. Bert kept Louisa company in the kitchen while she began boiling some peas to go with the roast she’d managed to put in the cookstove a few hours before.

  “I stayed and talked with Jeb after service,” Bert said. “It’s that same business from China. There was a line in the paper about it, talk of some warships being sent over.”

  Louisa felt her stomach tighten. She dropped a spoonful of lard in the peas. “Is it American ships you mean?”

  “American and others. Jeb
says England and Germany have got as many people there as we have.”

  “Yes, Addie’s mentioned it.” She shivered a little, saying her sister’s name. They were talking about China as if it were merely news. In Addie’s letters she’d mentioned meeting British missionaries, and German and French—it was all real, it was her life. Our governments collectively have bullied China for years, and the unfortunate result is that we missionaries are sometimes assumed to be agents for some conspiracy—I am often aware that the people here must picture a man in a suit and hat when we talk of God, and they have been taught by decades of reckless business to resent such a figure, and rather deeply. Louisa stirred the peas, watching the lard dissolve into the greenish-brown water. There was some excitement in considering violence that threatened someone you loved, but only in an abstract way, only as a kind of story you told yourself to raise the hairs on your arm. The actual possibility of it remained absurd. “But if McKinley is really sending the military, that must mean it’s serious.”

  Bert sat down, took off one shoe, and busied himself unthreading the lace. “Serious somewhere don’t mean it’s bad everywhere. And if he decides to send a warship—well, I’d say we’ve shown the world what we can do.”

  Louisa watched as he pulled the lace from the shoe and released bits of dried mud that fell onto the floor. She would have to sweep up after him. She hated herself for thinking about something as mundane as sweeping the floor when her sister was perhaps at this very moment in danger. And she hated Bert for the careless way he dirtied the kitchen. He ran his fingers along the lace, stopping at the place where the fibers were breaking. It was a habit of his to fix things before they broke. Louisa had often to remind herself that this was a wonderful quality. At times it could feel oppressive. “It would be better if Addie wrote to let us know she was all right,” she said, turning back to the stove.