Rebellion
Page 51
Addie felt the reply as a rebuke. She sat quietly for a moment, staring at her hands, which she had placed in her lap.
“Look here, it’s all very far away, and I am still convinced that it will remain that way.”
“Far from us, you mean.”
“Yes.” Poppy’s eyes were clear and hard as she said, “There’s nothing to be done about the past, Addie. Even if, moving down the scroll as the Chinese do, it is hovering right above us.”
She was referring to Addie’s decision to leave, of course. Addie could not go back and change that decision or the journey that followed it. She could not return to Lu-cho Fu. Her and Owen’s and the boys’ fates had once all been bound up together, as threads in a single spool of yarn. Then hers had unraveled. She had not understood how completely until now. They were there and she was here, and whatever would happen to them, she had no control over it.
Poppy would leave it at that, but she had to take it further: Addie was not responsible for the violence galloping over the north, but neither was she an innocent. None of them were. They’d come to China to spread the flame of Christian faith, to shepherd all the sheep that didn’t even know they were lost, but the truth was that they had failed. The people did not want them here. As Widow Liu had pointed out, the foreigners as a group had taken much more than they had given. And so, the Boxers, who hovered over them now as a shadow.
Surely Owen would know what to do. Even now, she hoped—she trusted—he and the boys were on a ship back to America.
She looked across the table at Poppy. “We must decide what our own course of action will be.”
“With regards to what?”
“The rebellion. Poppy, you truly don’t feel we’re in any danger here?”
“I don’t. But evidently you do.”
“I think it’s worth considering our options.”
“All right, then, I’d say there are two: first, we pick up our skirts and run as fast as we can to the nearest port so we can flee; or second, we remain here and continue our work.”
Addie stood and went to the wall of books. She saw the volume by Mr. Wickford but didn’t take it down from the shelf. She only wanted something to busy her while she thought, and ran her eyes over the titles. There were the many volumes of missionaries’ accounts from all different parts of the world; there were the religious tracts; there were the map books and prayer books and books of common Chinese words and phrases that had been compiled and edited and expanded by a succession of missionaries to Chungking, of which she and Poppy were only the latest. And suddenly she found herself thinking of the sitting room in her sister Louisa’s house, where she had spent a few weeks during the only trip back to America that she had taken since coming to China. It was the room where she and Owen and the boys had slept: the whole house encompassed only a kitchen on one side, and a small bedroom on another. But almost the first thing Louisa had done upon Addie’s arrival was to take her into the sitting room to show her the shelf that held jars of fossils and arrowheads, and beside them, a collection of four or five books. There was a Bible and an almanac of the world, as well as two or three novels. “If you knew,” Louisa said fiercely, “how I had to fight to get every last one of these. We don’t get the newspaper here very often, you know.” Addie had nodded and said with a laugh that they didn’t take a paper in Lu-cho Fu, either.
She hadn’t understood then why her sister so needed to show off this meager library. There were so many other things to see, to discuss: the changes that had occurred in both their lives were too great to be numbered. Two weeks was too little to go through even a small part of it.
She understood now. Remembering how, as they drove up the lane that day, Bert, previously a stranger to them all, had shaded his eyes with his hand and said, as if it were the most ordinary thing in the world, “There she is. There’s Louisa.” Addie had squinted at that lone figure standing in front of a small house, a few small buildings—she would come to find out that they were the barn and the henhouse—and seen nothing else but that figure and the great immensity surrounding it. Her sister, pointing at the books a few minutes later, had been telling her that you couldn’t get further from the world than where she was. Not even China was further. No place was further from the world than where you were.
I have all your letters, Louisa had told her later. I’ve kept every last one.
Addie turned from the wall of books and said to Poppy, “Tell me they aren’t in danger—Owen and the boys. Tell me they’ll be all right.”
Poppy tipped back her hat so she could look her in the eye. “They aren’t in danger. They will be all right.”
Addie nodded. If it was a lie, then she’d choose to believe it for now.
Hazel
28
When Lydie got sick—real sick, I mean: those last months when she wasn’t able to move around very much—I was in and out of their house two or three times a day, bringing food and helping with the laundry. It was summer and because I didn’t have my work at the cafeteria, I had time to help. Sometimes I brought Debbie over. She didn’t like to be inside the house with Lydie and me, but she’d find things to do outdoors when I didn’t have any chores for her. She was almost ten, and every pail of standing water still had the potential to become a magic potion. Sometimes she sat in the yard drawing faces on rocks. She did the same thing at our house—I’d find whole families of them lying there when I walked to the mailbox or to the clearing where we burned trash. I avoided stepping on those rocks with their faces either grinning or surprised-looking, the same as I’d avoid stepping on a baby chick.
Debbie would have been fine at home on her own, but I brought her over to the Hughes’s house as a sort of protection because I knew she’d be a warning bell for when George was coming. He always stopped to say hello on his way to the door, and sitting inside with Lydie, I’d hear them talking through the open window.
I didn’t want to be around George because I didn’t like having to pretend we didn’t have things to say to each other, to speak like we were neighbors and nothing more. What were we by then? Former lovers, I guess. But only recently former. And we were angry with each other: he was angry with me because I’d kept Lydie’s secret, and I was angry with him because—I wasn’t sure why. Because I had to be. Because he had let it be easy between us for so long, and the truth was that no matter what we felt for each other, it had never been right to take up together as we did. I was angry with him because he’d ended our affair, and I was angry with him for not ending it sooner.
I came to the house in the morning, late enough that George was sure to be out in the fields. Sometimes I’d see him from a distance as I drove down the lane, sitting way up on his John Deere, tending the land that had my name on the deed. I always drove down to their place because I was loaded down with the food I brought each day: meatloaves, roasts, pots of chicken and dumplings. Every night I fixed the next day’s dinner for George and the boys so I could spend the morning doing other chores. Come dinnertime, I’d set the food out on the table and say good-bye. Then I’d collect Debbie from the yard and Joe from the fields, and drive back home before George and his sons came in to eat. Twelve years old, my son had decided he was going to be a farmer, just like his dad had been, but I made him come home to eat dinner at our house because mealtimes were sacred. Even though Lydie could barely eat anything more than applesauce, it was her house and her family and I wasn’t going to preside over her table or have my family intrude on hers.
In my own kitchen at dinnertime with Debbie and Joe, I’d imagine George and the boys sitting down to the meal I’d left out for them in the kitchen, the table set, knives and forks lined up on either side of the plates, glasses waiting to be filled with milk or water. This routine was repeated for supper, except that I didn’t heat up the meal myself. I left casseroles on the counter, Tupperware containers packed with chicken salad in the fridge. Fresh Parker House rolls in the bread bin. Cobs of corn in a pot of water on the stove
, needing only a ten-minute boil. I always left a note on the counter with careful instructions and arranged it so the food wouldn’t sit for more than an hour or so because it was summer and anything would spoil if left out for too long. I always included that in the instructions, too: Meat and vegetables go in the fridge when you’re done.
The next morning, the first thing I’d do after going in to see Lydie was to open the fridge and see what was left. I started to learn what they liked and what they didn’t. Lima beans were never more than half eaten, whereas large quantities of spaghetti would have disappeared completely, the platter washed clean and waiting for me on the counter. I knew without being told that it was George who did it. I always looked for a note slipped under the base, but there never was one.
As much time as I spent in their house, I didn’t spend all that many hours with Lydie, at least not while she was still well enough to have guests. When someone was visiting, I tried to stay out of the way as much as possible, even if I knew the person well. My sisters all stopped by at various times, and even then I made myself scarce. I figured that Lydie had her friendships without me, and I had no business butting in on them. I wasn’t fooling myself: I knew I’d gotten in the middle of the one relationship that mattered more than any other, and I guess I was trying to make amends, even in the smallest of ways. I couldn’t ask Lydie to forgive me, so I did my penance through deeds. Which meant that I spent a lot of hours in the kitchen, peeling potatoes and boiling beans and frying hamburger patties, and down in the cellar with the washer, and out in the yard hanging wet clothes on the line. I did some light cleaning, too—a little sweeping, a quick wipe with the dust cloth—but I tried to get this done when Lydie was taking a nap, because whenever she caught me at it she told me to stop, she wasn’t paying me enough for all that.
My own house was going without cleaning, my own garden growing weeds, the vegetables all rotting on the vine. No matter. It was only in the mornings that I had any free time, and though it wasn’t much, I spent it with Lydie. Sometimes I turned on the television and we watched the morning programming, but most of the time she preferred to lie quietly listening to the birds singing and the flies slamming up against the screens. I’d read to her then; I read aloud parts of the newspaper and we discovered together how dull most of it was: tips on summer gardens, reports from the statehouse. Nothing competed with Lydie’s sickness. And why would she care, anyway, about a bill being debated, when she wouldn’t be around to hear how it turned out? This was the first time I’d been present for the long process of dying, and I was learning how it took you out of time, how it turned the world inside out.
Usually Lydie preferred to hear one of her Agatha Christie novels instead of the paper. We started with The Body in the Library, and when that was finished we went on to A Murder Is Announced. A few chapters into the book, Lydie declared that she was tired of Miss Marple. “I’ve got a few Poirots,” she said. “Any one of them is fine.”
I set down the paperback and went over to take a look. She and George didn’t have a large library, but they had a few shelves of books behind a glass-fronted door. One shelf held the staples that every household kept: dictionary, family Bible, church cookbooks, world atlas, and a decade’s worth or more of the Farmer’s Almanac. But they also had three full shelves of novels, one of them nothing but Agatha Christies. I ran my eyes down the row and plucked Murder on the Orient Express. I’d read it myself years before but didn’t remember anything except that there were a lot of deaths in the backstory—a whole family, I thought I recalled. One murder had set in motion several other deaths by grief and suicide. I didn’t remember much about the lead character, though. “Why not Miss Marple?” I asked.
“Oh,” Lydie said, “I think I’m just tired of women.”
It was an odd thing to say for someone who was married and only had boys. It was true, though, that all her visitors were women. Lydie’s mother had died years before, but George’s mother came down from Wood River on the weekends and bustled around. There were sisters-in-law, too, and the endless procession of neighbors and friends. Somehow only women seemed able or willing to venture near. I wasn’t sure if it was the nature of Lydie’s disease or some more elemental law: only the female of the species can minister to the sick.
I thought this must be what Lydie was referring to. But then I saw her staring out the window, where at that particular moment you could see the tractor in the distance, and I realized that her words meant something more: it wasn’t only that she was tired of women, but that she missed the company of men. Her husband and boys were out working from dawn to dusk, and she stayed in her sickroom staring out a window at empty fields and sky, waiting for the rare instance when one of her boys came into view.
“Let’s see what our man Hercule Poirot is getting up to,” I said, and opened the book and began to read.
I read until it was time to get dinner ready, and then Lydie closed her eyes and said she thought she might just take a rest. I went to the kitchen and started readying the steak and onions for George and the boys. I’d bought the steaks the day before with the money George had begun leaving for me; every few days I’d find a five-dollar bill tucked under the serving dish. The first time I saw the bill lying there, I thought maybe it was a note he’d left, but the money was probably a better discovery. I didn’t mind the cooking, but I’d been wondering how to handle the expense. George and the boys ate twice what Joe and Debbie and I did. I was reminded of years before, when my mother and sisters and I would prepare giant dinners for the men on days when they were baling hay on our land, or when neighbors came over to help with slaughtering the hogs. I remembered wondering at the amount they could put away, each man taking two or three plates of food. Whole quarts of gravy would have been dispensed of by the end of the meal. Dozens of potatoes. Six or seven pies.
I trimmed the steaks and was slicing up an onion to fry with them when my eyes started watering. That onion must have been particularly powerful because I couldn’t keep my eyes open, and after a minute or two I had to set down the knife and walk away. I went out onto the porch where I’d left Debbie cutting up green beans a little while before and found her reading one of her science fiction novels, one sandal swinging from the big toe of her left foot, the other sandal lying on its side on the floor. “I’m all finished,” she said guiltily before I could ask what she was doing, and gestured to the pile of trimmed beans in the pail.
“Why didn’t you say so?” I asked. “I’ve got plenty more you could do.”
Debbie closed the book on her lap, holding the place with her finger as she waited for me to tell her what new chore she should tackle. I had to think a minute. The truth was that there was more to do than I could keep in my head at one time, and all the inessential tasks I’d pushed to the back burner. There wasn’t any point having Debbie pick tomatoes if I wasn’t going to get around to canning them. Finally I told her to go collect the dirty laundry from the floor of the bedrooms upstairs. It had been a few days since I’d done any washing for the family.
“But those are the boys’ rooms,” she said.
“That’s right, and those boys are busy working all day. The least you can do is help me get some clean clothes for them to change into when they’re done.”
“But—”
“Debbie.”
She laid her book down on the chair and went past me through the door.
After she’d gone, I went down the steps into the yard. It was blazing hot in the house and even hotter outside in the bright sunshine. How long had it been since Lydie was out in the daylight? If there ever came a break in the heat, I decided, I would take her out to sit on the porch. But today was too uncomfortable: it was one of those days when the sky curved over the landscape like a giant eggshell, dull and white, and the heat seemed to rise off every blade of grass.
I was standing there sweating in the heat, wiping eyes still filled with onion tears, when Bobby came up from around the barn. He was a little youn
ger than Joe, but taller and had more muscle since he’d been doing farmwork alongside his father for the past several summers, and this made him seem older than my son, more mature. He was a quiet boy, gentle and pliant. Or he had been, anyway, until all this business with Lydie began. Since then, I hadn’t seen too much of him, and when I did, he always seemed to duck his face to avoid looking at me, as if I was the cause of embarrassment or pain. It had to do with my taking care of Lydie: it was hard to pretend that his mother was still well when I was in the house nearly every day.
He darted a quick look past me to determine whether he could go inside without attracting my notice. But I called out to him and he was forced to walk over the grass toward me. “You finish up your work early?” I asked.
“No, Mrs. Wiz.” That was what all my children’s friends called me, the name Wisniewski too cumbersome. “I was just coming in to get a Band-Aid.” I saw for the first time that he was holding one hand in the other. He seemed to notice at the same moment the tears in my eyes because he quickly glanced away again. No point explaining that I’d been cutting onions—there was plenty to cry about without them.
“You cut yourself?” I asked, and he lifted his right hand to reveal a smear of blood. I asked what had happened.
“Scraped it on the hitch, somehow. It ain’t deep, anyway.”
I took his hand and examined it up close. He was right; it was a shallow cut, but there was plenty of blood, and dirt and machine oil getting all mixed up with it. “Come on inside. Let’s get you washed before you get an infection.”
In the kitchen, I turned on the tap and washed both Bobby’s hands in my own, making sure to scrub at the lines of dirt and digging around the fingernails. I was gentler with the injured hand, but it must have hurt. Still, he didn’t make a sound or even a grimace; he was watching the drips of blood falling into the sink with a kind of pride. Once I was satisfied that his hand was clean, I went to retrieve some bandages from the bathroom cabinet and on the way peeked my head into the living room to see whether Lydie was sleeping. She was.