Ideas of Heaven Page 15

  I was glad I had not seen it. In our dull little square, people were frothing at the mouth and stabbing the air. We might have found them laughable, if they had not been dangerous. Ben said he thought that in time the Boxers would move on, this was not a place for them. Perhaps he believed that.

  The town magistrate issued an edict against them—edicts were very powerful here—but a day later signs were up revoking it. He was a new magistrate, with a long face and intelligent eyes, and he more or less liked us, as far as we could tell, but he had to placate the governor of the province, who thought foreigners were ruining China. I wrote to my brother Fred that the politics here were as treacherous as Caesar’s Rome. I wrote to James that the students were all leaving us, one by one, and that his goat had eaten my summer hat, the straw boater with the finch’s feather in it. I saved my letters, to be sent later if we lived or if we didn’t.

  What had I been doing all these years if I had not learned how to die? I wanted so much to be in a frame of mind where the question of dying did not weigh on me, and my sense of His glory was the strongest of my feelings. When we were praying with the kitchen boys and the cooks, in Chinese and in English, I had a few minutes of freedom and lightness. I could not think why I had ever worried, and I hoped they saw it, our own Chinese.

  LI YOU CAME into the compound one morning very agitated, muttering and shaking his head—he had just seen an imperial edict posted on a wall, announcing that in three days all foreigners were to be killed. Ben and Thomas and Edward went out at once to the magistrate to plead with him. They came back tight-faced and confused. “He was very calm and very friendly,” Ben said. “He told us the edict was all talk.”

  No one knew what to think. Susan, who was pregnant again, kept saying she hoped that our own armies would come to save us. “Where are they then?” her husband said. Ben had a shotgun for hunting and a revolver for killing wolves; he took them out and cleaned them. “Have we come to China to murder people?” Susan said. “All this way to kill Chinese?” I suppose I did not like to think of being with Ben after he had done such a thing. All of us discussed this for an entire day, and in the end I brought out the garden spade and we wrapped the guns in oilcloth and buried them by a red rosebush. Douglas patted down the soil and sprinkled dry pine needles over it.

  I spent the next day packing a trunk, in case we had a chance to get away, and we put whatever money we had in a strongbox, and Ben hid them both under straw in the chicken house. On the day of the ordered executions, we read the Bible and sat with each other and waited. There were noises from the street but they were not new noises. I wrote letters to James and to my parents and to my brother Fred. I talked to Lucy in my mind. Ben dug up the guns and cleaned them again. I stewed rhubarb and strawberries from the garden, and I had the boys sweep out all the closets. I had Douglas do his sums. Ben practiced his calligraphy. We waited through the night, and when dawn broke, we saw the day had passed, and no one had come for us.

  AND SOON THE telegraph line was working again. There was a wire from Baoding, and no one knew why it had been directed here. “Do you know, it’s in Latin?” Ben said. “I suppose no Boxer knows Latin.”

  The men translated together, interrupting each other. Thomas Comber’s Latin was the best. “Solum spes yoreciv statim imperat mittere milites. Sex mille pugiles ad orientum liu obsidentes Romanos,” they read. “Our only hope is if the viceroy orders the General to send soldiers. Six thousand Boxers are at Tung Lu village besieging Romans.”

  What Romans? “Roman Catholics,” Ben said.

  He tried to send a message out to Tianjin for help, but the lines were down again. He kept trying, but the lines never came back.

  THOMAS COMBER wanted to ride to Taiyuan to get Anna Esther out. None of us thought Thomas could survive on the road long enough to save anyone, if she even needed saving. She might well be safer than we were. Thomas was induced not to try, but he was always at the stables, and I saw him praying while he stood by his horse.

  Every foreigner in Beijing had been killed; every foreigner in Beijing had been rescued by a vast fleet of the British navy; the Empress Ci Xi, who was sixty-five, had a lover who was a Boxer. There were too many rumors; we had no one whose word we could rely on, and we were shut in with our own ideas. We made a rule that we would not talk about the Boxers after the midday meal, though we did speak of the pugiles. I did everything I could to be calm in front of Douglas, who had all his toys and books stacked by his bed next to his packet of James’s letters, ready for flight.

  Li You played catch with Douglas in the courtyard for hours. It touched me to see the Chinese who stayed with us, who chose not to go. We had done something in these years, I had to think, to bind them to us. Azhu still cooked for Susan the delicate soups she liked to eat when she was pregnant.

  Our carpenter had word from a cousin that in one village, Chinese Christians had been buried alive by Boxers. When the servants heard these stories, they sharpened all the kitchen knives; they wrapped their queues inside headcloths so they couldn’t be seized by the hair. Our kitchen boy looked like a tiny pasha, and Li You’s eyes were fierce under his turban.

  There were tales of Boxers asking people to urinate on a cross drawn in the dirt, and cutting off the heads of those who would not. I heard this without flinching, but at night with Ben I began to weep. “What have we done?” I asked, as if my poor husband had to answer. For years we had talked of how the Word was so often watered with martyrs’ blood, but we had said this to gird ourselves, not to wish it on anyone else. What a dark chapter of the Bible we were in.

  The town was now full of posters ordering all converts to recant. Everyone knew that in a village close by, four converts had been beaten with clubs by the magistrate’s men, and made to bow in front of idols in a temple. Thomas Comber asked if it was a Buddhist or a Taoist or a Confucian temple, but no one knew. “The magistrate had them beaten,” Ben said, “to save them from the Boxers.”

  “You think he is clever, do you?” Edward Rexroth said.

  In the morning I was working at the stove with our turbaned kitchen boy, frying squares of cooled porridge for breakfast, when I heard something rolling over the dirt of my garden. It was Chunhua and her mother Azhu, both pushing a wheelbarrow with their belongings in it. They spoke to each other, but not to us, though they saw me. We were already dead to them, love was dead. I had such a mix of anger and sadness at seeing them leave, I could not think what to say. I would have liked to give them something, but I hoped they were not stealing anything we needed.

  A week later we heard that a district official had been killed while he was trying to arrest a group of Catholics in a village. I did not mourn him, but Ben said the governor of Shanxi, whose name was on the Boxers’ banner, could appoint whom he liked now. Our local magistrate would be helpless under his rule.

  All that day, the Chinese who worked for us moved about the compound, rolling their bedding, loading sacks, strapping baskets on their backs. The sun was very hot and I would have pitied them hauling everything they owned in such heat, had bitterness not been creeping over me. Now we had nothing to show for our years of work; soul by soul, they moved through the two sets of gates and out into the street.

  By nightfall Li You and two other men were all that remained to us. In the morning a note came, saying that we were going to be sent out of the city and escorted to the coast.

  “Escorted to safety?” Susan said. “Can that be? It could be, couldn’t it?”

  “Oh, my dear,” Thomas Comber said.

  They were providing an escort, we had only to hire litters and mules for ourselves. We did not have anywhere near enough money for this, and the next day when Li You went out to raise cash, someone had pasted on the city walls a new decree from our own magistrate, “Kill Foreigners.”

  Li You told this first to Ben, who came to me while I was picking pole beans from the courtyard for supper. “It’s very plain, isn’t?” Ben said to me. “No hidden meaning
for us to parse here.”

  He looked baffled, his face twisted into a deep squint, contorted from thinking what God meant. He took the shovel from my gardening tools and went into the chicken coop and came out later with the money box. There was no point, he said, in any of the Chinese staying with us, and we had to give them something to leave with.

  WE ALL STOOD by the inner gate to say goodbye to the three men—Li You looked quite undone when Douglas shook his hand. Thomas Comber came out of the stables with his mare, and he walked her over to the man who had been his housekeeper and gave him the bridle.

  That night I dreamed of Lucy. Ben and I often had dreams of her, as people do of their dead. In this dream Lucy was giving us tickets to America, on a steamship that could skim over land and had come right to our door in Fenzhou. The boat was full of bats, who flew out of it into our faces, opening their black mouths, spitting and shrieking, and I would not board, and Lucy told me not to worry. When I woke up the fright was still in me.

  By noon the next day Li You had come back to us—his knocking at the gate alarmed us at first. He had a plan to help us escape, by a wagon into the mountains. Guards had been posted outside the compound walls, but he believed we could slip out at night. Ben said that we should try if we could, and he got the others to agree. I said that I was ready to die but not through rashness.

  Was my husband a rash man? My family had thought he was too modest and weak, though they changed that when the idea of China got hold of him. In China he had often thought better of people than I did, but he was never imprudent. I had to ask myself now if he was a fool for hope, a goose who flapped his wings at the merest crumb.

  He had already grown old in hope’s service; his hair was entirely white, his neck webbed. Old sock indeed. He was still wearing his long Chinese vest and calling his tea cha, even now when no escape could ever make us disappear into the populace. But we were tied to the Chinese, I did think so, as we were tied to all humans, though the net was barbed, the net was choking us.

  SO I DIDN’T argue against Ben in any of his plans. All of our men were struggling to do whatever they could. They had Li You give silver to a man who promised to go to Tianjin for help, but the man disappeared. They had our belongings smuggled out so we could pick them up when we got out, but the cart was stolen. It all ended when the magistrate got word of the escape plot and and sent his men to confiscate our guns. Then we really had nothing.

  We were left to wait. Susan was in her ninth month and I was in the kitchen alone, working to feed us, drowning in my own sweat. I was hanging the laundered sheets out in the back courtyard when I looked across to Thomas Comber’s doorway, where he was speaking to a Chinese woman I had never seen before. She was dirty and her pants were torn; he went into his house to bring her a melon he had from our garden, and then she walked out the back gate. When I called out to find out what was going on, he put up his palm as if to stop me, and turned and went back inside.

  I was afraid to guess what this was about, until Susan came to me later. In Taiyuan, which the woman had just walked all the way from, the Boxers had set fires all around the mission compound, and the sparks spread from the gate’s roof to the buildings inside. Anna Esther had been fleeing, helping a student with newly unbound feet, when she slipped and fell and people pushed her into the bonfire. The Chinese woman had seen her get up from the flames and walk away to pray, but the crowd had thrown her back on the burning pile, and then a door and a table and boards were stacked on top of her, so she could not get out.

  Susan told me this in a kind of whisper, as if it could only be uttered as a secret. I thought of how the world had always held such things, Jesus knew them. They were like a hiss under all speech. Ben came in when Susan and I were clasping each other, and she said we were envying Anna Esther.

  THE MAGISTRATE SENT a notice to our door—we were now expelled from the city. Edward went himself to plead for a delay until Susan had her baby. He came back wincing in anger, saying, “What people are these?” Li You was sent to ask for an audience for Ben. I said how brave You was to go, since a man had just been lashed eighty times across the face for not addressing the magistrate politely enough. Li You was told if we did not leave the next day, the city would send troops to flog us out.

  We had no money to hire carts to carry us, and where could we walk to? How could we carry food and lead the children? The government was going to seize our houses, so we couldn’t sell them. I sat with Timothy and Douglas and told them we were going to wander the desert like the Jews in the Bible but in time we would come to a sparkling oasis that overflowed with everything we could want. I knew this for certain. Douglas gave me a knowing look, and Timothy was confused but satisfied.

  It was Thomas Comber who managed at last to arrange to sell our summer house in the mountains, the old mill by a stream with its shading of willows. He got us a tiny allowance for it, and so we hired carts to take us out.

  I WAS SO busy getting all of us ready, I did not have time until midnight to go out to the garden with Ben to take leave of Lucy’s grave. I was not so superstitious as to think she was truly there—no, she was elsewhere—but I was sorry to leave her behind nonetheless. Troops were going to be housed here, Ben told me.

  What are we leaving behind? I had been asking all afternoon while I was assembling what we needed to take. Ben kept saying he was sorry we had not been able to do more here, but I had my sentiments attached to each room. I did think our ghosts were in this place, the ghosts of our broken ardor, but the spaces were so ancient these could scarcely tint the air.

  In the morning, the carters came in through our gates and loaded our baggage. Then we climbed aboard the carts, sitting on the slatted seats like chickens in a coop. When the second set of gates opened, the sunshine flooded in on us, and we could not help feeling glad to be in the open again.

  Soldiers on horseback rode ahead of us. On either side of our street were throngs of people, as many as could fit between the walls and the road. The crowds continued for blocks; I had never seen so many Chinese in one place. Ben said he thought there were thousands—all of Fenzhou had come out to watch us leave. People stood on rooftops and on the ledges of walls. They were silent in their attention; I thought they all wanted to remember the time they saw the foreigners driven out.

  Once we had passed through the city gates, a fresh breeze rose up over the fields around us. The sorghum, which had survived the drought, grew in grassy stalks five feet high. The cassia trees were in bud, and for once the sky was a cloudless blue. Douglas stood up to look out, as if we were on a summer excursion. Susan said, “That was a very large group that came out to wish us bon voyage.”

  I said, “Our soldier escorts have handsome uniforms too.” I had not thought we would be bantering.

  LI YOU WAS in the back of the cart, with Susan’s Timothy clambering over him. Ben had told You he should not stay if he could get away, but he could not seem to bring himself to leave us. Timothy was interested in the soldiers’ horses and wanted to know if they were sweating, which made Li You laugh. Douglas sat with the breeze ruffling his hair; he was very still for an eleven-year-old boy. I was full of regret that we had not sent him home with James.

  The day grew hotter as we bounced along the road, and Ben asked me if I wanted my umbrella. When I said no, he handed it to a soldier, to give it to his leader to keep the sun off him.

  At every village we passed, people came out to stare at us. When we stopped in one spot to water the mules, I saw a man selling melons, and I sent Ben out to buy some for us. The fruit was fragrant and cool in the heat, and we all sat eating it as if we had no concern more urgent than picnicking.

  When the carts started up again, we were on very rocky road, and I worried at Susan’s being pitched about; we could do nothing but mound piles of clothes to cushion her. Timothy crawled over us to find his mother and fall asleep against her side. Douglas was singing something under his breath, a rhyme about a poll parrot.

&n
bsp; Lucy’s finch was back in Fenzhou, released from its cage to feed in town on grains in dung. I should never have had children, I thought. Though my best love had been for them, we should not have brought them into our audacious project. It should have been Ben and I alone, living without family. That would have been fairer.

  I looked back to see the road vanishing into the horizon and I did not see Li You’s back. No one was sitting where he’d sat. He wasn’t in the front with the carter either, or in the other cart with Thomas and Edward and the baggage. He had slipped away, taken a chance when he’d seen it. This was not a good sign.

  We went through another small, parched village, with everyone in it standing to watch. Outside the town we came to a sorghum field, and the carts stopped. Ben put his hand on Douglas’s shoulder. There was the loud thud of a single gunshot somewhere ahead of us. Let it happen quickly then, I thought. And as if I had ordered it—but I was already screaming to wish it back—men were rushing towards us, coming out of the brush and the cover of trees with swords in their hands, shouting. We were yelling to God to save us, though we knew we would have to be shattered to get to Him. The men were running to us, their faces wild as wolves’, their arms reaching to thrust and cut. Our deaths were pulsing in us, like Susan’s baby in her body, our sweet kingdoms within. The first man to reach us struck Thomas on the forehead with his sword and left a bleeding gash. We have to help him, I thought, over the clamor, but men were streaming forward—I put my arms in front of Douglas’s face, and a blade slashed at them. The pain made me cry out, and then my head was smacked, over and over, and my neck was weeping. I couldn’t see where Ben was. Why was there so much blood? Why was it so hard to get across this gate? I wanted the other part to begin. I had such longing. We were so near. We had to be shattered to get to Him. I closed my eyes for it to begin.