The Rock Child

by Win Blevins

  She stole a copy of the map of Idaho Territory Tarim sold to customers, and another of what was called the Far West, kept them under her thin mattress of ticking, and studied them by candle at night, when Tarim was asleep. As she learned to read the words, Snake River, Great Salt Lake, Idaho Territory, Oregon Territory, Utah Territory, Nevada Territory, she pieced together a picture of her journey. Southeast from Hard Rock City, in what they called Idaho Territory. Walk several hundred miles by foot to Salt Lake City. Travel west by coach across vast deserts and then across mountains to the big bay at San Francisco. Then a ship … How will I get a coach? How will I get a ship? She refused to consider. As long as she lives, a warrior fights.

  One day the doctor brought the promised cedar. The barley flour was long since ground. She mixed the flour with butter to make tsampa, wishing she had old yak butter. She shaped the dough into cones. She burned the cedar, and placed the deity’s food before the box. First she prostrated herself in front of the altar three times, then sat in the lotus position. She chanted the long-known words, words she had memorized over years, familiar as furnishings in a beloved room. No longer were they comforting—they made her mind bristle with the sense of danger.

  When she had finished, properly, she threw the torma to the dog.

  She set the altar box at the foot of her cot. Would Tarim recognize an altar? Would he care? To the ignorant eye it was nothing.

  Sun Moon knelt before the altar. She did a full prostration, then another, then another, and many more. She sought to find the warrior spirit within her, and to accept it.

  3

  Tarim lifted the flap and stood in her doorway. She was eating the tsampa she had made as a relief from the endless rice. “Come,” he said, “I want you to meet the new arrivals.”

  She had no idea what he meant until they went through the flap into the tavern.

  Five women sat at plates of rice.

  Whores. How did you manage it? The freighters were having trouble getting through the winter weather. Sometimes the store was short of supplies. But Tarim had managed to get new whores for his tavern shipped in. Gold. He will do anything for enough gold. Like Americans.

  “Sun Moon,” said Tarim, “these are the Twin Treasures, Hansel and Gretel.” He touched the twins on the head.

  They were white blondes, another woman was fair with flame-red hair, one was black, one an Indian.

  Am I to fill out your color scheme?!

  “Bridget here is Irish.” Sun Moon hadn’t been able to figure why people talked like the Irish weren’t even white people. This woman was so white she looked powdered, but wasn’t.

  Tarim put his hand on the shoulder of the black. “This is Martha Washington.” He smiled nastily and moved on to the Indian. “And this is Count Your Coups.”

  Tarim started on, but Gretel stood up and glared until she got his attention. “Tarim, we need more’n rice and vegetables to eat. We need eggs, we need meat.” She flipped her plate of rice upside down on the table.

  Tarim slapped her. Gretel staggered and fell to her knees. “You will eat the rice off the table now,” he said softly.

  Gretel got back into her chair. Under his glare she started eating rice with her fingers. Sun Moon noticed that the fingers shook. She stared, caught herself, and averted her eyes.

  “You start work at dark,” Tarim told them flatly. “I will let the miners know. This afternoon you may rest. You serve whisky, dance with anyone who asks, and do whatever else they want. One dollar. I will watch and the bartender will watch. If you try to cheat me, I will beat you.”

  Now he turned to Sun Moon and beamed. She steeled herself. “I have a surprise. Sun Moon will join you.”

  I won’t!

  “The hell she will.”

  “She is Buddhist, a nun, and a virgin …”

  Tarim stopped himself, realizing what Bridget had said.

  She repeated it. “The hell she will. I won’t work with no China Polly.”

  Sun Moon stifled a gasp. She studied the woman, astonished, struggling for control of her face.

  “Me neither,” said Hansel. “That wasn’t in the deal.”

  “Me neither,” said Gretel, regaining her courage.

  Tarim started hissing, “You will do as I…”

  “No and hell no,” said Bridget. “I won’t.”

  Tarim cocked his arm to hit her, but the black woman jumped up and grabbed his wrist. Tarim and Martha Washington glared at each other. When she let go, he didn’t make a move.

  Bridget flushed with it now. “I see Martha Washington won’t.” She looked at Count Your Coups but got no response. “Count Your Coups won’t. Us white women sure won’t.” She flung her napkin onto the table. “You didn’t say nothin’ about no China Polly, and we won’t do it. Shaming, it would be. I won’t stoop so low.”

  Sun Moon reeled. Not stooping to whore, not stooping to work next to blacks and Indians, but stooping to work with a Chinese.

  Tarim began, “I advanced you …”

  “I’ll give your money back. We ain’t broke. That Jehu is somewhere making deliveries. We can ride back out with him.” Bridget looked at her sisters in sin triumphantly. “We can ride straight back out the way we come in. And we will.” She even included Sun Moon in her look of triumph, like Sun Moon would sympathize.

  Sun Moon was quietly struggling for breath.

  “I will replace you,” said Tarim.

  Bridget shrugged. “You think there ain’t another bar in the West we can’t whore? Even in this town?” She cackled. “We’ll give you good competition!”

  “You will work here! Tonight!”

  “We will, but not her.”

  Tarim glared at them. “We will discuss this again later.”

  “Yeah,” said Bridget, “way later.”

  Tarim grabbed Sun Moon’s forearm and turned to leave. Sun Moon was dizzied by the turn, and her anger, and her relief.

  “And we’ll have some real food,” snapped Gretel.

  “Yeah!” said Hansel.

  Tarim grunted and pulled Sun Moon away. She followed, half-stumbling.

  In the back room, she mustered, “I’m going to be sick.” She held her hand at her mouth like she was going to vomit.

  Tarim shoved in her the direction of her door flap.

  She collapsed onto the bed. Feelings surged over her like waves on the ocean. Anger, relief, shame, each rose in a rhythm, lifted her up, and let her fall into the trough of despair. Tears sprouted on her cheeks.

  In a few minutes Tarim’s voice came. “You are needed in the store.”

  “Just a minute,” she said.

  She struggled for control. The iron band was back around her throat, gripping.

  She sat up. The band allowed her to control her face, and she was glad of that.

  It hurts.

  I need it.

  In a few moments she stopped the tears. She wiped her face carefully and composed it. Not a whore. Not yet.

  When she walked into the store, her body was still numb. Her hands were restless, nervous. Her face was blank, inscrutably pleasant.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  1

  She was standing to the left of the door flap, a short miner’s hammer in her hand. She controlled her breathing, staying ready.

  Tarim was being childish, really. He was a silent man, and would never give himself away by movements as audible as pacing. But did he think she was not used to his slightest sounds? Did he think she could not read his heart? Since the confrontation with the whores, more and more often he had looked at her appraisingly, as a man does when he thinks of taking a woman. Today he had done it repeatedly. Now the tavern was closed. It was past the hour of midnight, perhaps far past. He hadn’t gone to his woman tonight. Sun Moon stood ready.

  She flexed her fingers on the handle of the hammer over and over. It was heavy enough to stun, light enough not to fracture. She hoped.

  No whore. She had told Dr. Harville. He said to stick u
p for herself, which was a funny white man way to say it. Dr. Harville was a good man. She prayed for him, and gave thanks for his help.

  She kept telling Tarim in Chinese, “No hundred-men’s-wife.” He smirked at her. The only thing he would understand now was the hammer. She asked Mahakala for strength under her breath. Destroyer and Creator.

  Her door flap stirred. Tarim had put all the candles out, so she had only faint moonlight through the back door window to see by. But Sun Moon’s eyes were accustomed to the dark. She rubbed the steel across her open palm.

  A finger eased the flap open an inch.

  I shall try not to kill him! Tarim was her protection from the white men, such as it was. They didn’t respect her person, but they seemed to respect his property. As long as he owned her, they would not expect to rent or buy her without paying. Besides, she was afraid of the white-man law. Dr. Harville told her the white men hanged people for murder. And they would see this as murder, he added, the rebellion of a servant against her proper master.

  No, killing would be stupid. So she told herself. But she wondered whether she was simply afraid to release with abandon the joyously destructive spirit of Mahakala.

  We Mahayana Buddhists do not kill.

  Mahakala transforms and redeems living beings through killing.

  The finger pulled the flap well back. Sun Moon was standing in deep shadow. Tarim was outlined by the faint light. He stuck his head in and peered into the shadowed room. She held her breath and hit him in the temple with the steel, hard.

  Tarim staggered.

  She grabbed his hair and slammed his head down onto her knee.

  Tarim growled and fell backward onto the floor.

  She felt her own mouth fill with blood, and her tongue protesting. She had bitten her tongue hard!

  She pounced, knees on his stomach, dropping the hammer. In an instant she had the point of the pocketknife pressed against his throat.

  “If you try to rape me,” she gasped through her own blood, “I will kill you.”

  Then it came, the urge to kill. It rose to her throat. She choked it back. The power of Mahakala, her mind trumpeted. Her hand trembled, and rose higher.

  She belched blood onto Tarim’s chest. He grunted.

  She ripped at the blood with the knife. The clothes sliced open like paper, and she slung them back, sloshing her blood onto Tarim’s arms. She slid the knife along his breastbone, letting the point drag nastily. “This time the flesh,” she said through slitted lips. She lifted the knife erect and pressed lightly on the skin between the ribs. “Next time the heart!”

  She punctuated the last word with a prick of the blade point.

  Tarim gasped.

  Sun Moon got off. “Stand up,” she ordered. He did. “Turn around.” He did. She planted her foot on his lower back and sent him flying into the hall. Mahakala devours men.

  “Next time the heart!” she yelled, and planted her body in the door.

  Tarim scurried off.

  She felt the bite of vomit in her mouth, and hated it.

  She knelt over her basin, washing her mouth out. She was weeping.

  Suddenly she vomited into the basin.

  Control! she told herself. Through an act of will she stopped the heaves. Tarim must not hear me, must not think me weak.

  She listened for his footfalls and heard nothing. She held no illusions about a man of such dark spirit. He might come back and kill her while she slept. He might fear her and keep his distance.

  She tasted it again now, blood and vomit in her mouth, on her tongue, on her teeth.

  Lying on her cot, she flexed her fingers and wiggled her body and felt something else, something ugly. In her fingers, her palm, her arm, skin, muscles, and heart ran an itch, a yearning to shed the blood of another. She convulsed. For several minutes she shivered, and occasionally convulsed.

  She remembered her lifelong teaching. She had been given this human incarnation to discover and live out compassion for all sentiment beings. For herself, she must learn to rise above the afflictive emotions: lust, jealousy, ignorance, and anger. Tarim was a sentient being, a suffering being, and she should empathize with him.

  Her heart cried for blood.

  I have lost nearly everything, but I will keep my vow of chastity.

  She listened. She noticed that the candles were still out in the building. She heard no noises. Her breath heaved, subsided.

  She ran a finger along the knife edge. Tomorrow she would re-sharpen it.

  She looked in her heart. The pitilessness of Mahakala, goddess of Time.

  She looked at the altar box, and the cedar beside it. She approached on her knees, struck a match, lit the cedar. Pungent smoke wafted to her nostrils. She prostrated herself, intending to pray, and it hit her. Tumult, tumult. Emotions raged through her like fever. Sensations and recollections ran up and down her body like invading hands. Memories of her abduction clanged like hunks of metal in her mind.

  Much of what happened when she was abducted she could not remember. Her mind refused. Of the following weeks she had only fragments of memories of the odd reality of the lotus state, life as a sour and unreal opium dream. She remembered fearing that the bandit chief was about to violate her terribly. She remembered his ugly laugh, and his tale of the contract that would protect her for the moment. A man in America, he said, had paid well for a virgin, and he had slapped the earth that he would deliver one. Very well. He cackled. “One day a virgin, next day a hundred-men’s-wife!”

  She shivered with remembered terror. She still did not remember, at all, what she knew had happened during the first attack. The bandits had assailed her family as it traveled to Chengdu. They had killed everyone but her. She had asked to go with her father and brothers to Chengdu to see the formal flower gardens at the monastery. Her mother had gone along to indulge her oldest daughter, a family holiday. So they were all dead. Her mother and father, dead. Her brothers, dead. Her uncles, dead. All dead.

  And me. My heart is dead. Cold. Without compassion. Without love.

  She rose from full prostration onto her knees. She shook her head, lolled it back and forth. She felt the iron band around her throat. I cut off my terror with an iron grip, and cut myself off from my heart.

  Suddenly the sound and smell of the convent rose like warm mist in her mind. She saw the butter lamps, smelled the incense, heard the chants.

  Life has scalded that away. I can only boil, and boil. Does anger ever transform itself into anything better?

  A hundred lingams brushed her imagination.

  No!

  She bolted upright, lightninged. She looked hard at the altar and pictured Mahakala, the skulls, the corpses, the bloody mouth. In her mind she heard the wild, mad, joyous laughter of mayhem.

  I will escape, or I will kill.

  She waited, in tumult.

  Tarim didn’t come back that night.

  She touched her own neck with her hands. She massaged it. She couldn’t ease the clamp of the iron band within, which was killing her. And saving her.

  Tarim accepted a bowl of food from her indifferently, as though from a servant. She ate her tsampa standing at the stove used for both heating and cooking. His eyes skittered all around the room, everywhere but at her.

  He finished and set down the bowl before he broached the subject. She had been dreading this, whatever it was, since he announced this morning that they would eat lunch together.

  “You do well in the store,” he said in Chinese, as always. “Very well.”

  She squelched her surprise, and grew more wary. “Thank you.” He would be offended by her not adding the honorific Elder Brother, she knew.

  “The customers like you. You are learning English very fast.”

  “Thank you.” I don’t mind English. I hate speaking Chinese with you.

  Tarim looked up at her, and she saw a flicker of wild light in his eyes. He deadened it immediately. Something would come now.

  “I erred in consid
ering making you a hundred-men’s-wife.”

  Gratitude spurted in her heart like a warm spring. Careful!

  “Thank you.”

  “I will get a better return on my investment this way.”

  Her heart turned cold.

  He turned a bitter smile on her and switched to English. “You will be one man’s whore. Mine.”

  She bit her cheeks until she felt the warm blood in her mouth. I knew it was coming. Far fewer than one in ten Chinese people in this Land of the Golden Mountain were women. A wife was a treasure. A concubine might be a greater treasure.

  She pictured herself being cared for, given fine clothes, pampered.

  Her guts churned with revulsion. “No!”

  Even uttered quietly, the word burst out, offensive.

  Tarim’s mouth snarled. He said it in English again, patiently, as though to a child or a deaf old woman. “You will be one man’s whore. Mine.”

  Involuntarily she bunched her robes in her lap and shook her head no, no, no. She shook and shook it. She felt her face as some puppet visage, her mouth pulled open and shut by a string. “No!”

  The iron band around her throat tightened. She moved her hand toward the pocketknife. As though against her will her fingers clasped it. She eased it from the folds of her robes and showed it.

  Tarim flung up a casual hand.

  “If you try to use me,” she said, “I will kill you.”

  Tarim spat the words out slowly. “You will move your belongings into my room tomorrow morning. Tonight you have alone.” He smirked at her. “For your prayers.”

  2

  In the dark, in the middle of the night, Sun Moon stood up from Tarim’s body. I have done it. She had poured the laudanum he sold for medicinal purposes liberally into his evening tea, and he had passed out. She had tied his hands and feet ferociously with hemp. She would have until morning, when Tarim would not appear and the whores would investigate. She bent again, licked her finger, and held it at his nostrils. She could feel the breath—he only slept.

  She slipped from his room. She wore the loose cotton trousers, shirt, and thigh-length jacket of the Chinese miners, the sort she herself had sewn for them. On her back was a sack with one pot, matches, balls of tsampa wrapped in oil paper, and a coat to keep the rain and cold off. It also held her nun’s robes. For the first time in more than ten years she was not swathed in her robes. Her head was no longer shaven. Her hair, longer now, was pigtailed like a man’s. She would be walking to Salt Lake City not as a Tibetan woman but as a Chinese man.