Ideas of Heaven Page 13

  THE SUMMER was very hot; the mist over the rooftops might as well have been steam. The smells in the streets made me afraid of exposing the children to infection, so we stayed inside, though the air in the courtyard had no coolness to it. Our garden flourished in the hot sun. We had planted grass seed in the one unpaved courtyard of the compound, and this was now a little field where Susan and I played croquet with the children. Susan was a finicky and intense player, who could take several minutes lining up her mallet. She looked much older than her age, she had lost a three-day-old infant in the year before we came, and the games brightened her.

  Ben played too, and the children were vastly amused when he hit a wild ball and it skittered off and broke a pottery jug. Susan said the sound made her think of an Englishwoman she’d met in her early days here, who had walked through the countryside smashing idols. Douglas said, “Oh! I wish I’d seen her.”

  “What theatrics,” Ben said. “The temples are deserted as it is. There’s no need.”

  “She meant well, I suppose,” I said.

  “I did like to go with her,” Susan said, “though she always thought I was not zealous enough.”

  Ben and I often talked at night about what form zeal should take in this place. We had seen from the first that a very long patience would be needed here. After all the semesters at the seminary, all the savings used up, all the talk night after night about a hundred million souls in China. We had to cultivate a different ardor, a suspended thirst, like a lover who waits years for his beloved to come to him.

  My brother had asked in a letter if we had any sport here besides singing hymns. At the moment, Susan was so intent on croquet that she wanted us all to postpone lunch. She was not persuaded until Douglas rolled on the ground in what he claimed was a fainting fit from being famished. It was too hot to play after we got up from eating, but Susan and James were fierce competitors, and they took up their game again, wiping perspiration from their faces as the afternoon wore on. James was a good sport when Susan won, and he made a victory crown for her out of an old American newspaper, folded like a hat. Lucy said it looked like something his goat might wear.

  OUR NEXT YEAR in China was a much better year. Dr. Langston, a homeopath, and his wife Leora came to live on the other side of the city, and they had two boys, one of them close to Douglas’s age, as well as a dog and a canary. More people from the town began coming to services, and though some were not sincere (a few items disappeared from the house), six or seven did seem to want truly to be baptized. Everyone in our mission traveled to Taigu for the Annual Meeting, and we felt ourselves great adventurers, marching into this bigger city in our mule carts. I was very glad to see other Americans and I talked on and on about small matters, for the sheer pleasure of it. And new visitors came to see us at home—first a single lady from Scotland who was passing through on her way to Tianjin and then two Swedish men who had been living in very rough country near Mongolia. We used up all the cans of butter the Board sent to us from San Francisco and had to eat biscuits without it for months till more arrived, but the suppers with guests were fine times for us.

  Ben found us a cooler place to live in the summer months, an old mill near a stream, with trees all around it and an expanse of terraced fields in view. Local people came to the window to watch us while we ate, but from their staring I thought they at least learned how we lived. We had beautiful walks in the open air and picnics on a hill. When Lucy walked with me, she said a woman on the road wanted us to know the fields were planted with white poppy (the children understood more Chinese than I did). In Taigu Lucy had seen men and women addicted to opium, when we visited a hospital where they lay in a ward, wasted and hardly able to move, waiting to be cured if they could be. The fields, ready for harvest, were quite lovely, with their seedpods capped with pale green pads.

  I had been sorry in Taigu that I’d brought Lucy to see those hollow, ravaged faces, and Ben and I had argued later about what should be expected of a mission child. Ben was willing to drive all of us hard. I did want my Lucy to be of use in the world. What is the point of being human if we do not give ourselves to the full task of it? But I sometimes thought of sending her to live with my parents. She had turned twelve before the summer, and while she still had the looks of a girl, I did not like to think of her becoming a young lady here.

  One afternoon Ben took the children on a long walk to the far end of our stream, and James caught a beautiful, glistening carp. Thomas Comber was visiting with us, and at dinner, when I served it with white sauce, he said fish meant abundance, another of those Chinese puns from words sounding the same. “It’s my fish and I’d rather just eat it,” James said. “All this business of everything having a hidden code gives me the flim-flams.”

  “It could mean an abundance of anything. Of fleas,” Douglas said. Fleas were a problem in our beds.

  “A drawing of a fish was a signal for the early Christians,” Ben said. “You know that, James. That was how they let each other know where they were meeting. Because the letters for the Greek word for fish were the initials for Jesus Christ, Son of God, Savior.”

  I heard James whisper to Douglas that he hoped the boiled potatoes did not have a secret meaning, and Douglas went into a brotherly fit of sputtering giggles.

  I had a mouthful of carp while some of this conversation was going on, and I wanted my fish to be only simple food too. I wanted just to chew. No one lives that simply, I thought. Not here, not anywhere. Everyone is always straining to see a web of connection.

  And didn’t I myself believe that earth and heaven were constructed according to a holy design? Yes, but I did not believe that I could see it. Not in this life.

  And I was glad that James did not have an analytic temperament. I wanted him, and the others too, to be contented in the meal Lucy and I had made—her peach pie was next—and in the pleasant summer evening, whose soft green scents came through the window.

  “There are no potatoes in the Bible,” Ben said, “but I happen to know these are the exact biscuits they ate in Eden.”

  “When people use opium,” Lucy said, “how is it they cannot eat?”

  “They cease to concern themselves with food,” Thomas Comber said. James said that was a poor version of paradise, in his opinion. When I looked behind him, I saw the faces of three men, peering in through the window, staring at us in what seemed to be endless curiosity, and I thought we must make quite a nice picture, just as we were.

  WHEN WE CAME back to Fenzhou, Ben began to talk about having a school for boys, like one we had seen in Taigu. He wanted to throw himself into some work of his own, apart from the other men, who did not always get along. He talked to the few friendly Chinese in town who were not too poor to pay a minimal fee, and by January we had seven boys from these families boarding with us. Ben taught the boys their catechism, and we hired a Chinese teacher for their other lessons. We let Douglas play with the younger boys, and James helped his father teach, but I kept Lucy away from all of them, as much as I could; the older boys were in their teens.

  Chunhua, the daughter of the Rexroths’ cook, was Lucy’s own pupil. I would hear Lucy trying to explain in Chinese what the Sabbath was, a thing unknown in China. It was hard to know what Chunhua made of all this, but Lucy was very attached to the girl, and carried her around like a sack of meal, with the girl squealing in glee. She called Lucy jiejie, big sister. Lucy taught her to sing “The God of mercy be adored,” which she rendered in a shrill voice, blurring the syllables. I tried my best not to laugh. Her mother said the music alone was enough to scare away any bandits in the vicinity. She was a dear woman.

  Susan Rexroth was expecting her first child, and I taught the cook to fix beef tea and soft puddings to nourish her without upset. I would coax Susan into taking exercise by walking up and down our street in the early evening; we talked to the Chinese women who sat in doorways with their babies, and the four of us strolled along, Susan and Lucy and Chunhua and I. In the thinning light, I
felt (though I didn’t say so) how much more at my ease I was than when I had first come, and Susan, naturally enough, was in a cheerful state of mind.

  WHEN WE CAME back one evening, the cook, Azhu, was in the courtyard, sitting in her padded jacket, waiting under the lanterns for her daughter. She asked if we might tell her just one thing about the crosses we wore. We were very happy for any such question. We couldn’t quite follow her Chinese, but she seemed to be wondering why we wore sets of gallows as jewelry (we did know the word for execution). We tried to tell her our own rough version of the Passion, which sounded gory and fantastical, as it must have been. There we were, two sober matrons and a tender girl, speaking of blood and torture and unstoppable love. Azhu looked quite startled, and then she carried Chunhua off to bed.

  A week later Ben told me Azhu had asked to be included in the lists for eventual baptism. All our talk of suffering had struck her. Perhaps she had been turning in this direction for many weeks, and our answers had had little to do with it. But it was one of my best moments in China, when Ben told me.

  ON A COLD and nasty November morning, Lucy complained of headache, and in the middle of the day she lay on a sofa with a cloth over her eyes. I needed her to help with the ginger cake (she always made the desserts), and I was about to tell her not to be dramatic when it struck me she might be near the start of her first menses. She answered petulantly when I questioned her about symptoms. But when I put my hand on her cheek, her skin was distinctly hot, and so I let her nap.

  By evening she was shivering with fever and clasping her forehead in pain. Ben carried her upstairs to her own room, and we put quilts over her, but her teeth chattered as if she were in the Arctic. James went to get Dr. Langston, who said that we should keep giving her water to drink but otherwise let her sleep. In the night she looked astonished each time she woke, her eyes glazed with disbelief that this attack was being visited on her.

  In the morning a red rash appeared, as if a scalding iron had been applied to her face and chest. The rash seemed to spread before our eyes. And then we knew. “Did a louse bite her at any time?” Dr. Langston said. “Typhus comes through lice.”

  “Don’t be afraid,” I said to Lucy. It was my fault that she had played so often with Chunhua. Why had I never stopped her, why not?

  “Steady on, girl,” Ben said. “God has not left.”

  We did not let the other children in the room, but James sent in her finch in its cage. It made a twittering racket, but the children knew to expect certain indulgences when they were being nursed. Lucy grew more childish under her fever, laughing hoarsely at the bird and pulling at my hand if I tried to leave her bedside, calling us by pet-names she had not used in years. All my children did such things when they were sick, but I was frightened that Lucy was falling through time, slipping down away from us. Ben said this was a morbid fancy. The mild depths of his voice when he was praying in the room were sometimes quite wonderful to me.

  By the fifth day, I could see that Ben was becoming more alarmed, though he was still the best at soothing Lucy. I bustled too much, and she turned her head away when I offered cool water. “You have to drink,” I said. I was angry with her. When she closed her eyes, her whole face seemed to shut, and I had a spell of being frightened of my own child. She was becoming something I knew nothing about. I understood that I was an innocent now compared to her. She twitched and shifted under the covers. “Are you all right?” I said, an idiot’s question. Still, I felt better for asking it.

  Lucy did not answer me—why should she answer? All my grasping and fluttering and flapping were not, at this moment, to the point. She was not very interested in us at present; she seemed busy elsewhere. When I watched her closed face, I had the sense to be in awe. She was so clearly working at something. When Ben came into the room (looking old, with his streaked mustache), he asked me if she was sleeping, and I said that she was occupied. “Is she?” he said. We watched her as we might have watched a figure on the road in the distance. The next days were not so hard for us as I would have thought.

  ON THE EIGHTH day we went into the parlor to tell James and Douglas that their sister had died. Their faces were terrible to see, and very little we said could lighten their anguish, though I thought if we could get them not to be afraid, we would be doing our best for them. I let Douglas sleep in our bed, though he was seven and old for this. But then I worried that James was in their bedroom all alone.

  The Chinese carpenters took as much care as they could hammering together a coffin, and I had the kitchen boys dig up a corner of the croquet field to make it ready. This was the only ground that was ours; there was no church nearer than Taigu, too far to go. James and Ben went out to the flower market and brought back pots of roses and two young trees, a willow and a red pine, for the boys to plant before the service.

  Thirty Chinese came to the service, more than had ever been inside our compound at one time. It did me good to see them file in, row after row in their long tunics and webbed sleeves, quiet (for once) in their soft-soled shoes, except for the tap of the women’s canes.

  Ben and I worried that James, who had been Lucy’s nearest companion almost his whole life, might be unsteady during the service, but he was upright and composed. It was Douglas who sniffled and wept; Susan had to keep whispering to him. Afterwards, when we were giving refreshments to the assembled group in the yard, we got both boys seated on a bench and I gave them tea and lotus-seedcakes someone had brought.

  “So many people are here,” James said.

  “We have a form of hope that they don’t have,” Ben said. “It is something, that they can see that.”

  Douglas started to cry again when he saw Chunhua, who had her hair done up in ribbons.

  “You will make the others sadder. Try to hold fast, if you can,” I said. “Douglas?”

  “We are all going to die eventually,” James said. He was trying to be manly, but I wished he had not spoken.

  “Death is not the same to me as it was before,” Ben said to them. “It is not so terrible, I think.”

  The children looked upset when he said this—I thought they did not like to hear a father so consoled—the words were only what he and I had been saying to each other, over and over. The agreement was sweet to us. But they were too young for that sweetness.

  AFTER THE FUNERAL, I did not like to see Douglas playing with our Chinese students, but I couldn’t have stopped him or the Langston boys either. I knew that I was wrong to blame China, as if there were no such woes over the rest of the earth. I’d had a sister, two years younger than Fred, who died of diphtheria before I was born. I didn’t want to speak too much of any of this, because Susan Rexroth was having her baby in a month, and we were all happy for her too.

  Douglas, who missed Lucy very badly, was excited when he heard Susan had gone into labor. Hours later, she gave birth to a tiny, round-headed boy, and Douglas was allowed to hold him when he was a week old. I was pleased that Edward Rexroth allowed it; he was a stiff man whom I did not understand well, but he was softened by delight and he could not refuse anyone. Chunhua sang her loud hymn to the baby, who was too young to have musical opinions.

  After a month, Susan was induced to leave her baby with Azhu, her cook, just for a short spell, while the two of us went for our pleasant walk through the streets again. The baby was not ready for the outside, since Fenzhou was in deep winter, but I thought Susan and I both needed to move about, to stir ourselves. When we rounded the corner to come back, we could hear her boy crying, and the sounds were quite loud as we were let back in through the outer gate. In the kitchen we found Azhu with the infant in her lap; she had unfastened her tunic and pushed aside the binding cloths beneath it, and was trying to comfort him by giving him her dry breast. “Please!” I shouted. Susan and I both went to snatch the baby, but I was faster. “Please, never,” I said.

  The cook’s face was pinched tight with hurt, and Susan had to say we knew she meant only kindness. Chunhua was cryin
g too, from hearing her mother scolded. The baby would not settle down for a long time, no matter what anyone did. Susan walked him up and down, while he wailed. Chunhua looked at me in horror.

  THE NEXT SPRING, seven new families asked to be baptized, and Ben said it gave him solace to think that Lucy’s funeral had helped to bring them to God. He said this often to me, and I heard him say it again when were eating dinner at Thomas Comber’s. I had thought a good deal about Christ’s sacrifice and the fearsome beauty of His example. It was a notion I had lived with for a long time, but I did not think it made sense to very many Chinese.

  “You are wrong about that,” Thomas Comber said. “The Chinese are very attracted to sacrifice.”

  We had all read in the English newspapers that Japan’s victory over China in their brief little war had fired up people’s anger against all foreigners, and in a province near us, one group had torn down miles of telegraph lines in its rage. “In this miserable country,” Thomas said, “people are desperate to give themselves over to a higher principle—as well they might be, don’t you think?—and this idea has got itself mixed up with wrecking and pillaging.”

  “Oh, they’re just foolishly nostalgic here, in ways we don’t even see,” Edward Rexroth said. “The ones who rip up the railroad track—what has the railroad done to them? But they believe in a lost paradise, before the foreigners came—they think they can get it back.”

  “It is hard to think of paradise in China,” I said.

  But I thought of a Chinese paradise as soon as I said this—the intricate and perfect gardens depicted in their embroideries, and the actual, careful gardens that grew behind the walls of people’s houses. When Lucy and I paid our visit to the women of the merchant’s family, we had glimpsed—through a moon gate—dark-branched magnolia trees with cups of white petals, groupings of bamboo and rock, stalks of blue iris near a pool of water. I was tempted to picture Lucy now in such a place. But I did not think anymore that heaven was a place. I liked to think of Lucy as beyond the ill fit of places, outside the walls of the visible. Free.