by Amy Tan
We took the upper path along the foothills. After five minutes, we heard shouts along the main road below us. I imagined the horrified looks of those who saw our poor effigies lying just out of reach in the inferno, burned beyond recognition. Azure would be directing everyone to save the temple. And what would Perpetual do? What would he feel? How long would it be before someone entered the room and examined those bodies with skins of burnt bark?
The path turned up, and we looked over our shoulders frequently and saw how high the orange flames had grown. I wondered if the entire house was burning. Would the village burn down as well? I was stricken with guilt at the thought. We all talked bravely, but our voices gave us away. We were frightened. I had the sense that Perpetual would jump out of a bush in front of us. As the village receded, we could no longer see the smoke above the lower foothills, and we all felt relief.
We walked for three hours. Pomelo had to rest often because her arms tired with the crutches. We were stopped when we arrived at a spot in the path that was covered with rocks. There was a way to get through, but it was dark and we did not want to risk anyone falling, so we found a place behind bushes and slept, two at a time.
With the new day, we were struck by the beauty of the open sky and the slopes and dips of the mountain. I had a sense of peace within me I had never felt. When we returned to the path, I saw that Perpetual had said one thing that was true. The mountain had slid down and covered the path with rubble. Magic Gourd and I could have jumped from boulder to boulder to cross. But we stayed next to Pomelo as she planted her crutch carefully with each step. She teetered over the larger boulders, and we had to be ready to catch her. When she reached the other side, she was exhausted, and so were we. We indulged ourselves in an hour of rest and a meal. Our progress was slow, and she thanked us often and profusely, apologizing as well.
“The world does not care for the woes of another when they have their own,” she said.
Someone once told me: When you save a person, even unwillingly, you feel bound to each other for life. That’s how we felt toward Pomelo. Magic Gourd often asked if she needed another rest. I asked if her feet were painful. And she asked if we had tired of carrying her little sack of belongings. We protested loudly that nothing was a burden, and, in fact, it was not.
By the afternoon, we had climbed high enough that the path had gone into the forest, where it was mercifully cool. We worried, however, that a tiger or bear might leap out from behind the trees. I confessed that I imagined worse: that Perpetual might appear.
“How could that be?” Magic Gourd said. “It would take him a while to learn we are not those fake corpses. He would also look first along the river. Why would he think to go into the mountains?”
We walked through the pine forest and began seeing patches of open sky, and soon, the whole sky. The oppressive fear immediately lifted from my chest. But soon it returned when the path narrowed into a foot trail that had been cut into the side of a cliff. I grew dizzy seeing how far down the bottom was. I remembered the story Edward told about the boy who flew over the edge of cliff trying to catch a doll.
“Look ahead and not down,” Magic Gourd warned. “Where you look is where you’ll go.”
“According to this map, we are coming close to the grotto,” Pomelo said. “It must be somewhere across there.” She pointed to the other side of the abyss. “We should reach it in a few hours.” Pomelo had a feeling our jewelry was hidden there. I imagined a hermit sitting in the grotto, just as the poems had described him. I always thought of the hermit as Perpetual. The idea that we might find him in the grotto made me shudder.
“Look!” Pomelo said. She pointed down the mountain. It was a small figure far below, and it was moving. We stared and agreed it was not a tiger or a deer. It was walking on two legs and could not be anyone else but Perpetual. He was the only one who knew there was no curse on Heaven Mountain.
We hurried up that dangerous narrow path, hoping to find a forest where we could hide. After half an hour, I could tell by Pomelo’s grimace that she was in agony. Her arms and hands were blistered from using the crutches. And her feet were no less painful. She was wobbling over a narrow trail that was barely wider than her hips. If she stumbled, she would pitch over the cliff. Magic Gourd stood behind her and grabbed onto the back of her jacket to steady her as she swayed. I told myself not to look down. We had danger on one side and another danger coming up from behind. We finally reached a wider path away from the cliff. Magic Gourd and I quickly climbed up the path to get a better view and determine where Perpetual might be. We both gasped to see he was far closer than we had imagined he would be. What had taken us hours to traverse seemed to have taken him no time at all. He was clearly in a hurry. Was he chasing us? Or was he coming to the grotto for other reasons?
We took a zigzag course upward, making it seem as if we were going forward and backward, making no progress at all. I could hardly breathe out of fear.
Around yet another turn, I looked ahead and all hope drained. A rockslide covered a large swath of the path. It had taken us nearly an hour to pick our way through the last one, and until we climbed over this one, there was nowhere we could hide. My temples pounded. We looked at one another. One of us had to decide what to do. At his speed, Perpetual would reach us in less than an hour. I imagined he had a gun or a pickax, something to make it easier to capture—or kill—all three of us.
“You go on ahead,” Pomelo said. She had numb, hollow eyes.
“Nonsense,” Magic Gourd said. “What kind of people do you think we are?”
I agreed. But I also knew that if we stayed we would give up any chance of escape. I imagined the beating we all would receive, and once we were taken back, we would be locked in a burnt cage and suffer ten times worse the rest of our lives. We would do so together, and our unity would make it bearable.
“Keep going!” Pomelo said angrily. “After all our planning and effort, you would do me wrong to stay here. I’ll pick my way through. Maybe there’s a bush somewhere ahead. I can hide behind that.”
That was unlikely, and we all knew that. A few months ago, I would have abandoned her without a second thought. But we had become old flower sisters and had worked hard together to save each other. How could we abandon her? Pomelo insisted again and said sharply, “I’ll feel victorious if any one of us is free from that man. You can’t waste the hopes I’ve had all these years to outsmart that bastard.” She cried and pleaded for a few more minutes.
“We’ll go ahead,” Magic Gourd said, “but only to see if there is a place to hide. If there is, we’ll come back down to get you. By then you’ll be more rested.” I wondered if Magic Gourd truly believed there was some hope to her plan. We did not say good-bye. We said we would come back to get her.
“Go, go,” she said. She waved us away, as if we were nuisances. And we scampered over the rocks. I looked back every now and then and saw her on her knees, grabbing onto the next rock. My heart seized, and although she had ordered us to go, I felt I had betrayed her. After an hour, I could no longer bear it.
“We have to turn back,” I said.
“I was thinking the same,” Magic Gourd said. “He’ll catch us later anyway. We cannot hide in the forest forever.”
“We can try carrying her over the rocks,” I said. “Together, it may be possible.”
“It doesn’t matter whether we can or can’t. We will be together.”
We hurried down with clouds of dust behind us. I was so scared I thought my heart would burst. At last we spotted Pomelo. She was seated on a boulder. We looked farther down the path. Perpetual was close enough now that we could make out his face, his thick eyebrows. He was swinging his arms forcefully, propelling himself forward. He must have already spotted Pomelo. He was shouting her name. She did nothing. She had given up, too tired to move forward even one more inch. I saw a bloody mark across her forehead. She must have fallen. She was shaking her head, as if dazed.
Perpetual was now two
short turns beneath her. He stopped and raised his arm again. “I’ll beat you bitches to death!”
Pomelo scooted backward by pushing her feet against a rock in front of her and loosened it. It slid and buried itself into the soft soil before hitting the path. She pushed against another rock, and we realized she was doing this on purpose. She pushed against a cluster of smaller rocks, and those tumbled and sailed in the air. A few hit boulders below and ricocheted in another direction, singing as they continued downward. They did not come close to hitting Perpetual, but he saw what she was doing, cursed, and pumped his legs even faster. She pushed at the rocks with her crutches, her feet, her hands. They flew at angles away from Perpetual. He had now turned onto the path right below her. She shoved rocks as fast as she could, and a dozen walnut-size ones hit the boulders below and soared in a new direction. One flew by twenty feet in front of Perpetual. He stopped and looked back, then forward and up at Pomelo. His face looked more determined and he rushed upward.
Pomelo’s face was red from the effort. She leaned back on both arms and pushed hard. I held my breath and watched as dozens of rocks, thumb- to fist-size, tumbled down in clouds of dust, bouncing and knocking other rocks loose, whistling as they tore through the air between Pomelo and Perpetual. Perpetual dodged away from the tumbling rocks, and as he ran for cover toward a boulder in front, he glanced up, and a red explosion covered his face and twisted his head to the side then backward. His limbs looked boneless as he fell backward. Magic Gourd and I did not move at first, but Pomelo was stumbling to reach Perpetual, and we raced down to stop her. We all reached him at the same time and saw a red mash of flesh without eyes, nose, or mouth. His torso and limbs were turned the wrong way. Dust was still settling around him. Blood spread like a banner under him.
Magic Gourd nudged me and gestured to Pomelo. She was sitting on the ground. She appeared to be gleeful over what she had done. Each time she looked down at Perpetual’s body, she leaned back with openmouthed gales of laughter. It was shocking. When we went to her, I realized she was wailing like a madwoman. She turned to look at us, and fixed on her face was an expression of helplessness and horror. She reached for us, and we sat beside her and cried without words. She continued to wail: “Bastard! Why did you make me do that?” She told us between sobs that she still hated him. She needed to kill him to save us and was too scared to do anything else but push and push. But at the very moment the rock smashed his face, she did not want it to happen. She had killed him and there was no wrongdoing. Yet to kill another—with a stone or by leading him over a cliff—taints your spirit and you set yourself apart from those who have never killed. Any one of us could have been the one to do it. I was grateful she had saved us from Perpetual and from being his executioner. I put my heart into her deep well of sadness as I imagined her agony in seeing what she had done over and over again, for the rest of her life. I now recalled that Edward had told me: “To kill another person is also violence done to yourself, and you bear the damage to the end of your days.”
Pomelo wanted us to bury him. She said it was not decent to leave him to vultures and wolves. We convinced her otherwise. If anyone found him, they would think he had died because of a rockslide, and that fate had brought those rocks down, and not her two feet.
Beyond the forest, the path wound around the mountain, and when we emerged on the other side, we saw a shaded grove, a small pool of water, and a spring that fed it. We immediately set down our bundles and drank the sweet water, before splashing our faces. Farther ahead, another spring was set in a dark hollow. That must have been Perpetual’s hideaway. I stopped when we were fifty feet away. I saw the back of a seated man: the hermit. For a moment, I thought the man would turn around, and we would see it was Perpetual. I picked up a rock, and so did Magic Gourd.
“Hey there!” Magic Gourd called out. The figure did not answer. She took a few steps forward and called again. He made no motion. Then she turned back toward us.
“It’s what I thought. Our monk has meditated so long, he has become a boulder.”
We hurried over and stepped around the boulder and found ourselves in the grotto. Against one side water streamed from a crack and onto a boulder worn down into the shape of a bowl. There was nothing else there. No treasure box. Not even a place to sit.
Magic Gourd became suspicious of a pile of rocks next to the grotto. She quickly knocked the rock pile apart, and we were suddenly looking into a small dark cave half our height. A rope lay at the entrance. She pulled, and the three of us joined in, dragging something heavy toward us. I hoped it was not a body. The first thing we saw were pale spiders scurrying over the top of a box. We jumped back. Magic Gourd broke off a branch and swept away the creatures.
The box contained books and dozens of small scrolls. We were disappointed. Where was our jewelry—the rings, bracelets, and necklaces that Perpetual had taken from us? Pomelo unrolled a scroll. It was a poem. She pulled out a book. It contained the edicts of Emperor Qianlong. I spotted something at the bottom of the box, and we quickly dug out the rest of the books and lifted out two slim cases.
One was made of hardened leather and was longer than a book. It had a gold-embossed illustration of a courtyard compound and its inhabitants. There was no lock on the latch. Pomelo lifted the lid. I held my breath—and there it was, our jewelry. I fingered my gold bangle, a pearl necklace, and the jade-and-diamond ring Loyalty had given me, which Magic Gourd had refused to sell, against my wishes. She had said the ring was like a bank account. All I had to do was wave it at Loyalty and money would flow.
Magic Gourd found her silver bangle and two gold hairpins. Pomelo had more: a diamond hairpin, two gold bangles, several rings, and jade and diamond earrings.
“Charm could have taken our jewelry,” Pomelo said. “She could have reasoned we would never come this far. But she took only her valuables. She is a good person.”
The other box was made of plain wood and had a brass latch. It was heavy. We lifted the lid and the three of us gasped at the same time. Inside were twelve little gold ingots and thirty-three Mexican silver dollars. When I reached the town at Buddha’s Hand, I would have money to buy food, a place to stay, and respect.
We chose to rest that night in the grotto. I woke several times, startled by dreams that Perpetual was standing over me. Pomelo moaned: “He’s come for me.” I assured her she was having a bad dream. “I’m not asleep,” she said. “I feel him standing nearby.”
We left before sunrise. According to the map, we had only a few hours more before we would reach the top, unless the climb was steep or we found more rockslides. We were no longer being chased but being pulled by hopes that we would soon find a better life in the town.
“It’s strange that no one from Mountain View has ever come down into Moon Pond,” Magic Gourd said.
“Everyone across three counties knew about the curse and the ghosts dancing at the top,” Pomelo said. “Why would anyone take the risk to come to an awful place like Moon Pond? Its reputation was widely known.”
“Some people are stupid, they’ll go anywhere,” Magic Gourd said. “Or brave, like us.”
I had never heard of a town at the very top of a mountain, except in fairy tales. But in her note, Charm had called it a town. Once we reached the ridge, we would be able to see it. In my mind, Mountain View would look exactly like the bustling city of Shanghai—with candy shops and restaurants, newspaper stands and bookstores, streets and streetlamps, a department store, a movie house, carriages, trams, and automobiles. The people would be educated and dressed in modern clothes. There would even be a river and a harbor busy with commerce—all on top of a mountain.
This Shanghai was not a place but a feeling of contentment. I was returning with myself whole and unbroken—limbs, mind, and spirit. I had discarded pride, that useless burden of self-importance I had carried around like my portable vanity with its broken mirror. Perpetual and I had pitted our pride against each other, and I would have died to prove I was
superior. And if I had, would he have said, “Violet, you were better.” I would rather live and do what was important—to find Little Flora, to let her know how much I loved her. I would do whatever was necessary.
When we were two turns away from the top of the mountain, we slipped out of our farmer clothes and into our dresses. I was transformed into a modern Western woman. None of us spoke as we walked through the forest. We kept a steady pace because it would soon be dusk, then dark. I was sure that Pomelo’s feet and arms were aching, but she did not mention it.
We came out of the forest and walked along a clearing and saw open sky. In front of us was a mound of rock. That was in Charm’s note. And after that we would stand on the ridge. Magic Gourd and Pomelo wore the eager, innocent faces of young girls. We scrambled over the hump and there we were. Opposite was a white dome in the shape of a hand. Below was a small grassy valley. But where was the town? The valley was too small to hold a town. Even Moon Pond would not have fit in there.
“Charm said there’s a town,” Pomelo said, “so there is one.”
The sun lowered and Buddha’s Hand turned golden. I was walking in a place that was strange and familiar. I thought of the painting that had belonged to my mother, The Valley of Amazement. This place did not look like the painted one. But it held the same feeling, a riddle about myself. Was this place worse than what I had left behind? I was sure it was. But immediately, I wavered between doubt and certainty.
We quietly moved along the rim of the small green valley. Pomelo was panting, exhausted, and in pain. What a strong woman. We spotted a temple below in the valley. So it was not purely myth. From our distance, the temple looked gutted, nothing more than a skeletal perch for carrion birds. No ghosts danced around it. I knew Magic Gourd and Pomelo had looked for them, too.
The air was cooling, and soon the sun would be gone. The white fingers of the Buddha’s Hand turned pink. We walked steadily along the ridge. The grass in the valley turned a deeper green, and the temple darkened to a burnt husk. “Ha! That temple’s just a cowshed,” Magic Gourd said. “Do you see any ghost cows circling around? The mind fools the eye. The eye makes us fools.” She fell quiet again.