Joseph had come in from somewhere. “Mama,” he said, lifting his arms, and she bent down to hug him as he demanded. She picked him up and held him close. She had made her bargain: here was her child with that sour smell coming from his head, the crust behind his ears. In his hair was something dark and matted. She hadn’t given him a full bath in over a week. But he was hers, hers, he was alive and hers.
When he had run off again to play with his sister, she took up the letter from the table. It weighed hardly anything—far too light for the news it held. She was steady now. Her fingers didn’t shake as she slid them under the flap. “Dear Louisa,” her father had written,
prepare yourself, for the news is more terrible than we dared fear: Addie is killed and all her family with her, we don’t know by which method. The Missionary Board wrote to inform us and Mother has not left her bed since the letter came. Your sister and brother-in-law and your dear nephews are with the Lord, we are happy for that. But it is a loss from which we will not soon recover.
Louisa read the letter twice through and was ready to put it into the cookstove as she had the newspapers, but then she stopped herself and thought she might need to have proof later. If she mistrusted herself. If hope was still hidden inside her, somewhere, like a cancer slowly growing.
Half a year passed, and she was pregnant again. If the baby was a girl, they were going to name her Adeline. Louisa would put the tragedy behind her. For it was true that though she took the news calmly at first, the loss of her sister had had its effect. The old darkness had gradually crept up on her again, the “weather” she had used to experience years before, in that time before she gave birth to Herbert, in that time when they were still in the little cabin a quarter mile down the lane. Once again, she felt some part of herself curdling. She felt a screw turn inside her chest, a screech like a rusty hinge that sounded in her head and seemed almost to want to be released into the world. Throughout the winter following the receipt of her father’s letter, as she sat by the stove patching Bert’s clothes and letting out the seams on Herbert’s old shirts and pants so that Joseph, bigger than his brother had been at his age, could wear them, as she moved the needle up and down through the cloth, she kept her lips pressed together to keep the sound from escaping. A screech, a screaming. Beneath the cloth falling over her lap, she’d stab a needle into the flesh just above her knee. This helped. Though sometimes she could swear that the baby in her womb felt it, too, and kicked her in revolt. It was too early for that—much too early, she was barely showing at all. The kicking was in her imagination, but it felt all too real.
The baby would quiet the terrible noises inside Louisa’s head. It would remind her that a needle should not have your own blood on it.
When Adeline came, there would be four. Adeline and Emmaline, Herbert and Joseph. There were women who became pregnant and cried with sorrow, but Louisa had the memory of those first years of her marriage, when her body had failed and kept on failing, and so she felt satisfied.
For now they had three. Soon it would be four.
She lost the baby halfway through. Almost halfway. She had grown used to losing babies this way, and it was not easier at all. It would never be easier. She would cry for this one even when the next one came. She would keep crying for this one whenever she remembered her own sister. Adeline, Addie. A doomed name.
She was pregnant again, and this time the baby came: a girl with dark hair and red mottled skin and a mouth like a pink snapdragon, perfect. Louisa, exhausted from labor, told Bert to name her. “Not for anyone,” she said as she guided the baby’s lips to her breast. “I want her to have her own original name.”
“How about Rose?”
She watched the baby screwing up her face for a scream. “There, now, Rosie,” she said, moving her hand to the back of the head to guide her in the right direction. “There you are.” But the baby refused to hold on.
A few hours later, Bert came in to see her again. It was early spring, and he smelled of manure—he’d been dealing with the giant pile by the barn. By the end of winter it was always an impressive size. “What do you think about Violet?” he asked.
“Violet?”
“For a name.”
“She doesn’t have to be a flower,” Louisa replied. Then, seeing his face, she said that of course Violet was a fine name.
Bert frowned. “She could be a Mary. A Henrietta.” They went through a long list of names, one after another, but most of them already belonged to people they knew. At last, Bert held up his hands. “If she’s going to share someone’s name, anyway, why don’t we make it on purpose? Why don’t we just call her Adeline, like we planned with the other? We never—”
In the end, they decided on Iris. It was a name neither of them much cared for, though it would come to seem the only choice they could have made.
As all names eventually do for the children that live.
The children that live—how do you count them? Do you count Emmaline, who died when she was two? The same age her brother had been when Louisa, in a moment, had made her bargain with God. Take my sister and leave me my son. With Emmaline, there was no time for such bargains; you hardly knew she was sick before she was gone. One morning, her body suddenly heavy with death. Tiny teeth bared like a rat’s. A strange bruised pallor along the side of the body that held her weight, so that it looked like the mattress was the thing that had killed her, a dark mold growing up, seeping into the skin.
Dear God, take my sister and leave me my son—Louisa hadn’t been sufficiently precise back then. And, oh, He had caught her on it, He had taught her a lesson. You don’t try to make bargains with God or the devil. You don’t call something a prayer when it’s no more than a transaction.
This for that?
No. Both will be taken, if that’s what He wants.
One day in 1904, late January, Joseph came in with a letter. Snow on his shoes, but he ran right in. Rural Free Delivery had come over a year before, and it had become one of his games to watch for the mail carriage—in good weather from outside, in bad weather from within—and to try to get down to the end of the lane before the driver had a chance to put the letters into the box. If Mr. Gifford had anything for them, he would deliver it directly into Joseph’s hands. If not, he would ask after the family, and Joseph would give the report. They were always fine, all of them. Well, that was good to hear. Mr. Gifford would give his strange jerking nod, like someone had tied a string to his left ear and yanked it, and then drive away.
“Mama, for you,” Joseph said. He was almost six and not yet in school, but as the designated mail carrier for the family, he had come to recognize the distinction between Mr. and Mrs. on the envelope.
“You’re tracking snow everywhere,” Louisa said, swatting him back toward the door after taking the letter. “You know better than to walk through with your boots on.” She had Iris on her lap. She’d been trying to settle her down after digging a splinter out of her foot, and it had worked until Joseph went running and came back again.
One thud and then another as the shoes hit the porch floor. He came back a moment later, wearing only thick woolen socks. “Is it from Ohio?” he asked. “From Aunt Flora or Grandma?”
Louisa considered the envelope. It was from an unknown address in Delaware. She was certain she didn’t know anyone in Delaware. She would have asked Bert if he had any idea, but he and Herbert were both out in the barn milking. The name on the envelope wasn’t familiar, either. McBride. No title before it. And yet—something caught in her memory. Somewhere, sometime, she might have heard the name.
She took out the letter. It was only half a page long. Scanning her eyes down the narrow column of text, she felt her chest seize up as she read. No, she would not—there was no point in—no. After a moment, she folded the paper up again and slid it into the envelope.
“What’s it say, Mama?”
“Nothing that concerns you.”
Joseph begged to have it read to him. “Plea
se,” he said, but his mother refused. Sometimes a letter went wrong, she said, and was directed to another person by accident.
That evening, while Bert was arranging the fire in the stove, Louisa sat with the letter, trying to decide whether to discuss it with him now or after they went to bed. The children were already asleep, and the two of them were alone. She held the letter at her side. It didn’t concern him. It was addressed to her. She knew that when she shared it, he would tell her immediately what to do; he would tell her that she must write back to the woman at once.
She sat in the dim light by the kerosene lantern, watching him, and when, a few minutes later, he came to sit beside her, she kept the letter pressed between her leg and the edge of the sofa.
The next day, she took it out again and read it in private. “Dear Mrs. Baumann,” the letter began,
I am not sure whether you recognize my name. I was a fellow missionary at Lu-cho Fu in China where your sister and her family lived. We were dear friends for a time. Forgive me for writing you now. The tragedy is still fresh for all of us and you may not wish to have any reminders—I am certain Addie will not. And yet I write to ask you to intervene on my behalf, for I don’t know where to find her unless it is through you. It will be four years this July since we parted—or I should say, it will be four years since she left. We had been in Chungking for nearly a year, far from the violence up north. She did not tell me where she was going, but I supposed it was home. No doubt she has begun a new life since then and does not want reminding of the terrible events of the past, but being returned to the States myself now, I decided that I could not help but try. I have an old letter of yours in my possession that she left behind. Forgive me for keeping it, but I am selfish: I have little else of hers to remember her by. She might have had the same inclination, for she took with her when she left a small possession of mine—a hat. If you should be so kind as to give me a way to reach her, I will retrieve it myself.
The letter was signed, “Poppy McBride.”
Louisa had not slept at all the night before, and going over the contents of this letter again and again in her mind, she had inadvertently changed the meaning in subtle ways. She had thought the writer was still living in China. She had thought the letter in the woman’s possession was one Addie had written.
But she’d gotten the main idea right—that she hadn’t changed. This woman, this Poppy McBride, thought Addie was still living. Not only thought, but assumed. Addie had not been there when her family was killed. The idea was so strange, so unexpected, so miraculous, that Louisa had not been able to comprehend what it meant. That Addie would come home? That she would see her sister again after all these years? Of course she hadn’t slept. It was too much to bear. The possibilities seemed to spread through her mind like spilled water.
Now it was morning, and in the light of the weak winter sun, Louisa had the lucidity that comes from a sleepless night. The possibilities were not endless—there were only two. Her sister had died, as they’d always thought, or she was alive, and she still wasn’t coming home again.
Louisa would not write to this woman. She would not write to her family in Marietta. She would not tell Bert.
Iris was sleeping; the boys were both out in the barn with their father. Louisa took this letter from Poppy McBride and put it into the stove, both the letter and the envelope. The paper smoldered and was immediately turned to ash. It was satisfying, but it wasn’t enough. She thought for only a moment before going to the bedroom and opening the bottom drawer of her dresser. This was where she’d kept all Addie’s letters, not in any sort of order but piled on top of one another, sliding around. The paper smelled old; some of the letters had turned yellow or even had patches of black mold. See: they were consuming themselves, anyway. They would be turned back to nothing, one way or another. Louisa gathered them up against her chest and brought them into the kitchen, where she fed them, one by one, into the stove.
In a letter she’d written years before, her sister had described a custom in which the Chinese went to the graves of their relatives and burned paper money. Not real money, she said, a kind of special currency that served only this purpose—ghost money, it was called. The purpose was to help the dead in the afterlife, to keep them rich and happy. It was both veneration and bribery, Addie explained, because people thought their dead could aid them here on earth, bring them blessings and wealth, protect them from sickness. “You see what confronts us here,” Addie had said. “The dead are less dead in China than they are in the West.”
Louisa put the letters into the stove and watched them flare orange, and then white. Each one gave her the same satisfaction she got from pricking herself with a needle, a feeling like slapping a mosquito that’s landed on your arm. It’s not punishing the thing that’s caused you pain; it’s simply getting rid of it so you’re not bothered anymore.
Addie
17
She tried not to think of what she’d left behind. Those first few days, when they were still close to Lu-cho Fu—when the idea still remained, however absurd, that she could go back if she wanted—Addie tried to push away thoughts of her family. Yet sometimes an image would come into her head of Owen setting out from the house, turning before he stepped over the threshold, and then she would get angry; she would have, for a moment, a wild feeling of abandonment. Her stomach would tighten, her fists clench. How dare he leave the mission and all their work; how dare he leave the boys, leave her.
But of course it was the other way around. She was the one who had left, with Poppy.
They were going south, more than a thousand miles, to a mission in Chungking. There were five of them altogether—Poppy, Addie, and three Chinese guides, who would take them through the mountains on this stage of the journey and leave them in the care of a boatman for the next—and they each rode a mule. They had eight other mules besides, to carry supplies on their knobby backs. Addie was accustomed to riding in a litter, but Poppy had determined that it would be better to ride as they were used to doing in the States. It was a caravan, an adventure. Addie thought of the stories she’d read as a child, James Fenimore Cooper and Sir Walter Scott. This was what she had come to China to do. She had not come to stay confined in one house, one town. She had come to do the Lord’s work, to save the Chinese people and transform the land.
They each carried a gun. “Have you shot before?” Poppy asked, and Addie was glad she could say yes. Yes, she had hunted. Yes, she had shot and killed—animals. Of course, that was not why they carried these guns. They had rations; they could buy food along the way. And the men with them could hunt whatever was available in the territory they moved into. It was never a good idea to travel through the mountains without protection. The three men were something; having their own guns was better.
Though they were ultimately headed south, for now they were moving to the east and north. It was familiar territory: they’d go by land and then by river to T’ien-chin. From there, it would all be different. They’d take a ship down the coast to Shanghai, and then take another upriver as far as they could go. Then they’d go by land the rest of the way to Chungking. Addie told herself that when she made the journey back again, it would be much quicker.
Things hadn’t worked out for Poppy in Lu-cho Fu. She had fought with the Riddells, with Julia, especially. It was impossible, Poppy said, to live with them in the house at the mission, and she spent as much time as possible outside it. For some time after her arrival, Addie had not seen her at the mission house when she came in the mornings to help teach classes. Poppy would be gone, and none of them knew for certain where she was or what she was doing, though it was an almost constant topic of conversation among them. “We haven’t seen her these three days,” Mr. Riddell would tell Addie with a helpless shrug and something close to a grin; he seemed sometimes to be amused by Poppy, though his wife was not.
“I guess we’re to suppose she’s gone up into the mountains,” Julia added with a sour expression.
&
nbsp; “She’s got a certain way about her—”
“Oh, she’s proud and coarse,” Julia said. “And her ideas about the Gospel are something close to heretical. I worry that she’s preaching strange notions, and people won’t have the opportunity to have their misperceptions corrected.”
Addie asked what kind of misperceptions she meant.
“About the Holy Trinity, for one. She doesn’t believe in it. Says there’s only God up above, or maybe all around. I’m not entirely certain where she thinks He abides.”
Addie was intrigued by these notions, and by the woman who espoused them. She waited for the opportunity to see the new missionary again. At last it came. One morning she arrived at the Riddells’ and found Poppy in the classroom. With her was a young Chinese woman she didn’t recognize. They were busy pushing the benches against the walls. “Oh, Mrs. Bell,” Poppy said, giving her a flat smile, as if spotting her from a distance, “and how are you this morning?”
“Very well, thank you.” Addie stopped in the doorway, uncertain as to whether she should enter. There was a distinct feeling of intrusion, though it was the room where she spent most of her mornings; they had moved the girls’ classes here some months ago in order to turn over space in their home to one of Owen’s new projects, training a group of young men to send out as preachers. The students would start arriving in ten minutes. “Are you taking over the girls’ lessons today?”
“I’d like to think we could do it together.” Poppy glanced around the room. It was slightly more spacious with the benches pushed against the walls, though still not much bigger than the pantry in the house Addie had grown up in. With all three of them standing in the middle, the students would have to turn their knees to the side to let them by. “Perhaps not,” she said.
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