Ideas of Heaven Read online

  After we came back from our summer home, I packed up Lucy’s clothes and sent them to the mission Board in San Francisco, where some other girl might find them useful. I sent a few keepsakes back to my family—Lucy’s Chinese shawl and the long carved wooden hairpin the Chinese women had given her—since I wanted them saved but did not like to see them now. In the first months after Lucy died I had walked about in an odd state of clarity, where nothing in her going from us was unnatural or cruel, and I’d been grateful for this clarity. I was all right then. I was less all right a year later.

  Ben was often out again in the villages, talking to people and passing out tracts. I would have liked him more at home; our families in the States had begun sending us worried letters. Farther south, along the coast, ten English missionaries had been horribly murdered, by an obscure vegetarian sect with no ties to where we were; my mother, who read of this in August, did not fully understand how big China was.

  Nor did James, as it turned out. We were doing lessons together one morning and he seemed to think that Connecticut was the size of Mongolia. A great boy of fifteen, almost sixteen. He tried to make a joke of it, saying that Connecticut had put on flesh since last we’d been there, but this irritated me too. He had spent these years playing with the Chinese students, who would not cross him in anything, and with Douglas and the Langston boys, who were all much younger.

  I spoke to Ben about it when he and Edward Rexroth and Farley Langston came back from the villages, sweated and dusty from being jostled in a donkey cart. “He’ll be an egotistical ignoramus if we don’t take him in hand,” I said.

  Ben said I was always finding trouble where there was none; he wanted only to bathe and rest. “I wish you would listen to me,” I said. “Just a little.”

  I watched James more closely in the next few days. He spent hours tending his goat, who did not need much care, and asking the Chinese boys their Bible questions—there was considerable disorder in the class, but some of the older ones recited the right answers. When they did not, he was at a loss and could only read out the correct lines loudly.

  “What will he do in the world outside?” I said to Ben.

  I had the idea that we might take him back to America, to study at Briar Field for his last year; I thought Ben’s family would be very happy for us to stay with them awhile. And then we could get James settled with someone to learn a trade. We might ask the Board’s permission to leave China early; other people had done that. Once I got hold of this thought, it was with me every minute, though days went by before I voiced it to Ben.

  Ben said he would be ashamed to leave so soon, and he was disappointed to hear me speak of it.

  “I could take the boys back without you,” I said. “Both of them. And you could join us in another year or two.”

  Ben’s face drained of all its vibrancy when I said this. I had cut him badly, as I must have known I would. “Why are we a family then?” he said. “Why have we bothered to link ourselves?”

  THIS QUESTION KEPT burning in me, as if it were the title of a sermon I was writing. I wanted so badly to go, but I had to answer this first, it seemed to me. I tried to think of any people in our mission who were solitary. There was Thomas Comber, who had learned the best Chinese of any of us and who ate his meager meals alone and spent his evenings at his books. But he must have felt the lack, because he was now engaged to marry Anna Esther, the single lady from Perth who had passed through here two years before. And there was Li You, the boys’ teacher, who had no family in the district and few ties in the town because he was a Christian. He was a quiet figure, though he was known to beat his pupils. I admired his sticking to Christ even unto friendlessness.

  And could I have done the same? I would not have come to China alone, as some women did. Love of Ben had brought me here, bound up with my older feeling for Jesus, a simpler love. I had never thought to be anywhere without Ben. But now the thought of leaving here had become to me what opium must be to people who sell whatever they own for it.

  It was no good arguing, Ben was not changing. I was sick quite a lot the year after we quarreled about this. I had some digestive trouble and then a long bout of bronchial illness. Douglas had bronchitis with me, and I was afraid for him. But once his fever was gone we lay in the big bed all day and played games of checkers on a board we set up on the quilt. Li You brought us rice porridge with red dates to strengthen our systems, and Susan’s cook Azhu sent over peaches stewed in honey. James and Ben took over the housework, with the kitchen boys at their usual labors, and I thought I might stay in bed for the rest of our time in China and no one would mind either.

  But I had to get up once Douglas was better. When I went out again, the streets of Fenzhou seemed worse than dismal. Susan had been helping Farley Langston in his clinic and she came back with terrible stories. A family with an infant who died on the way home from the clinic threw the dead baby girl outside the town wall for the wolves. A poor farmer had a son with a gangrenous leg that needed amputation, and he was so angry at his son’s uselessness that he ordered a coffin made and was ready to bury the son alive. The smell of the streets was hellish when I thought of these things. The weather was bad for crops this year and a rumor had spread that the missionaries kept rain away by fanning very hard at the clouds. We did this in the nude, apparently, as part of our other unspeakable orgies. Also we took the eyeballs out of orphans’ sockets to use in our cameras.

  James had taken over the care of Lucy’s pet finch and while he was taking it outside in its cage for an airing, as people did here, some boys rained pebbles down through the bars and injured the bird. James ran home with the poor thing making piteous squeaking noises. He tended it as well as he could; it was like looking at a sentimental drawing, to see him put salve on the little finch’s wing and stroke its feathers. Chunhua gave it sesame seeds to eat. I was surprised when the bird recovered. Perhaps I should not have been surprised that James was clever in something.

  BEN WHEEDLED the money out of the Board, for my sake, and we had workmen come in and transform the house into something much more habitable—new flooring, new walls, the gray brick pavement dug up for more gardens in the courtyards. Our Lucy would have liked the gardens. I wrote the details to my family—I drew them floor plans, I sketched the arrangements of the furniture. James teased me about my “big story.”

  I thought of the Dickens I had read as a child, when the theatre manager in Nicholas Nickleby brags of a performance by his wife so remarkable it had to be discontinued because “it was too tremendous.” A boy of James’s age might be expected to see a comic element in such letters as mine. And yet I thought of my life as a “big story,” with much dared and much expended, with airy heights and echoing depths, and set with illustrations as garishly colored as any child’s Bible tales.

  BEN AND JAMES were together a good deal in the year I was so often sick. They began to call each other Chinese nicknames—lao wazi and xiao maozi, old sock and young hat. I was glad to see Ben diverted. The sight of him jostling and joking with James in the donkey cart was very charming to me.

  So it surprised me when he wanted to send James home. He spoke of it as if it were my idea. The Langstons had announced they were moving on to another posting on the coast. And, in bed that very night, Ben said to me that they might easily take James with them to a port in Zhili where he could board the boat for home. “He is not a baby,” Ben said. “He is old enough to be on a boat by himself.”

  “He’s past the age for Briar Field.”

  “Somewhere near my parents there must be a veterinary surgeon he could attach himself to. Or something else. Since he’s not to be a minister.”

  “You could stand to be without him?”

  Ben did not answer. It was good of him to let James go, I saw that. And when the two of us talked to James the next day, all the sulkiness left his face at the thought of going home.

  I had not thought this too would be asked of me. To have James taken from me for t
he next five years, if we all lived to see each other. Douglas was upset too, and had to be kept from kicking at the bushes in my garden. He was losing the Langston boys as well; I had to remind him that his life was lucky compared to many. But a group of tiny chicks he was raising had just been eaten by a rat too, and I was sorry that we were not giving him a more innocent childhood. I thought China was a nation with hardly any liking in it for innocence. How soft and witless we must seem to them. Small wonder so few were drawn to Jesus, with all our talk of His sweet unstained mildness.

  IF THE WEEKS of preparation were agitating to Douglas, and sorrowful for us, they burdened James with an excitement that made him sometimes loud and overbearing. Li You said he was like a drunken puppy. In the end James acted embarrassed to leave us—“You will keep on working so hard,” he said—and I felt an odd surge of pride that I was staying.

  DOUGLAS WAS SAD at being left behind, and I did my best to divert him. A week after Halloween, which we celebrated with a few carved round squashes, Anna Esther came down from Taiyuan and as soon as she was out of the cart, she said, much too quietly, “I have something terrible to tell you.” A flash of pure pain shot through me, and I took Douglas’s hand, but the news was not about James, as it happened. In Shandong, a province to the east of us, two German Catholic priests had been murdered by a small armed band. What band? How murdered? “A Chinese gang was robbing them,” Anna Esther said, “and you will not want to hear the details.” Some people thought it wasn’t bandits but one of the secret sects that always made trouble for rulers.

  There were many reasons not to worry, and we all said them aloud to each other. Shanxi was known to be a peaceable province. Catholics interfered in local courts to help out their converts, which other Chinese resented, and we never did that. We had not run a railroad through anyone’s sacred graveyard or brought bad luck to the city by building on a wrong-facing site. And none of us (Ben pointed out) were interested in pouring poison in wells or removing the organs of babies, despite the rumors. We repeated these reasons in every conversation with one another for weeks.

  IN THE EARLY SPRING the city of Fenzhou was suddenly crowded with men who had come to town to take the civil exams. We could hear waves of them outside, walking in the street. Susan and I did not leave the compound, but Ben went out as always.

  At lunch Ben came up the stairs to the room where we were eating, and he was holding a bloody handkerchief over his eye. “I’m all right,” he said. “A man threw a clod of dirt at me. Several men.” Just outside the city wall, he told us, a group of more than a hundred men had surrounded him, hooting and pushing. When the dirt-throwing began, he’d resolved not to run. A boy from our street had come up to stand by him, a brave boy, and had led him home by the narrow back-streets, so the crowd could not all follow at once.

  My own Ben. I put a sticking plaster on the bruise and tried not to be flustered—I could see how frightened the Chinese students at the next table were. They lived in a tiny Christian world, like a scene in an eggshell, and their teacher could not keep himself from being mobbed and pelted. Ben said a round of prayers with them and I gave them extra fruit and some nut brittle the cook had made. They let us quiet them.

  “WHY DO THEY hate us here?” Douglas said to me that night.

  I reminded him of how the Pharisees and the Romans had hated Jesus, because people can’t stand to be rebuked. “We’re not in the Bible,” Douglas said.

  “We are always in the Bible,” I said. I suppose we lived, in our way, outside of history, and now we were made to face the mystery of the temporal. It was never very clear to me what the foreign companies in port cities or the opium sold by the British or the disgrace of lost wars had to do with the poor farmers out here in the countryside, or with us. “It is all enraged pride,” I said to Douglas. “A sense of insult makes them vicious.”

  “They oughtn’t to throw dirt,” Douglas said.

  WE WENT ON as always, with our services in Chinese and our great Christmas dinners for the boy students, but fear was always with me and had become my great teacher. It made me more tender to my husband, and it let me entertain (that was the right phrase) my longings to see Lucy. There was no more trouble, but there were reports of trouble in other places.

  Anna Esther told us that in Shandong many people thought that the telegraph wires, which they knew carried words, were strung with the tongues of murdered children. “They are very literal here,” she said. They heard moans when the wires moved in the wind and saw blood when rusty water trickled down the poles. “It is the poetry of dread,” Ben said. “We give them the willies,” Douglas said.

  I had lovely letters from James, who was speaking Chinese to the horses at home and skating on the river with girls, insisting on instruction from the prettiest (he was a breezy writer). I had only the weather to write him about—cold wind in winter, with much dust blowing about, and very little rain in the warm weather. The second summer of no rain was especially bad, with the yellow-brown earth so cracked and bare that the millet and wheat couldn’t be planted. We had more beggars at our gate, and it was costing us much more to feed the boys at school. James said he treated a cow with a prolapsed womb and bathed in a creek attended by adoring tadpoles, though the letter did not arrive until Christmas.

  Susan’s son could count backwards and forwards in both languages, without faltering, and when the year turned 1900, we let him count down the seconds for us, in his little scratchy voice, though we celebrated at noon, when it was midnight at home. In the midst of broad daylight I was as mellow as any reveler, standing next to Ben, quite flooded with feeling to think of how many New Years we had had together. My heart was really very full all through the prayers.

  IT WAS NOT more than a week later when Ben came to me in the kitchen after the post arrived. “I think you had better sit down,” he said.

  He asked me if we knew a Sidney Brooks, an Englishman, and it was some moments before I stopped thinking the man had to do with James. This Brooks had been on horseback traveling to his mission in Shandong, and had been stopped by a gang of men who belonged to the Boxers, a group who’d been harassing foreigners and converts. They had beaten him and stripped him naked in the cold, and then they’d made a hole in his nose and strung a rope through it and led him around for hours. His dead body had been found in a ditch, riddled with sword wounds.

  I felt there was something wrong with me, that I had no way at all to understand how such a thing could happen. Had this been on the same planet that was my own habitation? A patriotic frenzy had turned these men to demons. I took hold of Ben’s hands and for a while we sat without talking, like a shy courting couple.

  “The twentieth century is not beginning so well,” Ben said.

  WE AGREED NOT to tell any of the children the details, but they could not help hearing the broad outlines. Douglas kept asking if the Boxers wore gloves, but Thomas Comber said that was just our own name for them. They practiced a martial art, like the exercises people in Fenzhou often did in the square, but the Boxers went into trances and fits, visitations they thought made them invulnerable.

  What a lurid world God has given us, I thought, how teeming and loud and crowded with unfurling shocks. I wondered if Jesus had been astounded continually, or if He moved over our tawdry earth without any amazement.

  Li You said he was sure the government would put a stop to all the trouble with the Boxers. I wrote pleading letters to newspapers, in Ohio and Connecticut, telling about the drought and asking that emergency funds be sent at once to China, describing the leanness of people in the streets and a man who’d been living on leaves. “They send money?” Li You asked, but he knew the letters would not even get there till late spring. I cut back on our dinners, with their courses of soups and pies, and we stretched our hoard to feed two Chinese families who were temporarily staying with us.

  When I went out to visit a woman with a sick infant a few streets away, I saw new posters on the town walls, but I could not re
ad them. Ben, who was with me, translated the characters. “Uphold the Dynasty. Exterminate the Foreigners,” he read, quite softly. “Only Then Will Rain Come.” A man pushing a wheelbarrow full of long cabbages walked right by the poster, the same as always. But on the way back, I saw a drawing of a man in a shirt and trousers roasting over a fire, pierced by the lances of scowling soldiers. And I would not go out at all, or let Douglas out, once I’d seen that.

  By the end of May our Chinese couriers were not carrying letters out or in; they came back saying roads were blocked by the I Ho Chuan—the Righteous Fists of Harmony, as they called the Boxers—and word was out that a man caught with a packet of foreign writing had already been killed. The telegraph poles that linked us to the world had also been knocked down, the couriers said. We were cut off from help, if we needed it, but I thought we had better stay where we were anyway. There were still no incidents in our town, except for the chilling posters, and we could not desert our own Chinese. We did have arguments about this in the compound—Ben and Edward Rexroth were bent on staying and Thomas Comber would have left if he could have. Susan’s boy Timothy, who was not yet six, was curious to see the Boxers. I said I hoped he would not have a chance.

  In June Ben went out to bring medicine to a man with an infected eye, and he came back with a look on his face I had never seen before. “They are here,” he said. From across the road he had seen two Boxers in the square, in their white tunics and red sashes and red headbands, and they were leading a drill. They were very young men, and they’d drawn in local boys as young as ten. They called out incantations and bowed to the south, towards a shrine on Peach Flower Mountain, and then all of them—the whole group—fell backwards onto the dirt, rolling their eyes. When they rose up, they went into fits of pantomimed fighting, like the staged battles in their operas. A woman from our street told Ben they were shouting the names of gods and figures from legends, whose strength was in them now.