River of Dust A Novel

Two

M ai Lin shook her fists in the air and shouted, "Lord Jesus and the great ancestors rain curses upon them!" She then lifted Grace to stand and helped her up the steps and into the cottage.

It was the first time Grace had walked over the threshold of the new little home built for her by her husband. Her eyes immediately found, over in a corner of the open room, a newly made baby's crib with a toddler-sized bed pressed up beside it. Despite his many duties as head of the mission, the Reverend had clearly spent hours turning the dowels and staining the wood for each charming piece. Such was his love for his children. The infernal humming in Grace's brain grew louder, and she thought she might go mad if it continued. Doc Hemingway had said that she needed rest, and yet how could she find rest in a country that tormented her with loss?

She broke free of Mai Lin's grip and staggered to the child-sized bed. Suddenly on her knees, she bowed before it, her body pressed over the low cornhusk mattress. A cry broke from her throat, and she wailed into the calico quilt.

Then she sat up again and looked about frantically, for what she did not know. She grabbed the boy's pillow that his father had no doubt set there himself. She thrashed it until feathers flew out from the pretty embroidered case. She slammed it down again and again, as a dog shakes a rabbit until it grows limp, all life ravaged. Finally, Grace flopped forward onto the bed and simply wept.

The last of the white feathers fell onto her outstretched arms like surprising snowflakes back home when she woke in early spring to find the milk bottles frosted on the back porch. Black twigs and cherry blossoms littered the sudden whiteness. It was on such days that Grace was glad to be alive in a world where surprising things happened, yet never so surprising as to carry away all hope of something better, of redemption if one simply bowed to the Lord's great plan.

On springtime mornings like those, when the rain had finally stopped, they waded out toward the creek that had been rising for days. From farms upstream floated all manner of tires, cut logs, old boots, and once a bloated cow, swirling in an eddy until it was skewered by the limbs of a fallen tree. The Lord had seen to such disasters, but there was always an escape, a way to survive and even grow stronger in one's faith. There was a lesson to be learned, and then you carried on.

Grace sat again, and her head hung limply in the posture of a supplicant. She knew she appeared to be praying there beside her son's unused bed. But she was not. She was cursing the Lord instead. Above the incessant vibrations in her brain, she cursed Him as she never had before. She would not carry on. She would not survive, especially not in this terrible land that He had created out of fire and brimstone and suffering.

Mai Lin knelt beside Grace and tucked a strong hand under her arm. She helped her stand. As Grace stepped away from the child-sized bed and the crib, she did not look back but tipped her head to see past the curtains and out the window as wild strands of pink and purple slid down the sky. Soon a gray stillness would spread. With nightfall, a frightening moonscape would appear, cold and lifeless and full of peril. Her husband was out there in that lonely land in pursuit of their beloved son.

Mai Lin hobbled forward on her miserably deformed feet and helped Grace sit on the adult bed in the far corner of the open room. Grace leaned against the pillows, almost calm now, although the dizziness and agitation in her brain remained a quiet refrain. Even in her grief, she noticed the touches the Reverend had added to please her: the coat hooks beside the door, a handsome cabinet to hold pans and plates, a fine celadon pot on the mantel and calico curtains he must have sent for from back home to separate the bedrooms from the living area.

With a long intake of air, studded by staccato sobs, Grace swung her legs around so she might lie down. But in that instant, she felt wetness between her legs. She sprang up from the bed in alarm. She pawed at her long linen skirt and tried with trembling hands to yank it off. She had no words to say to Mai Lin, but somehow the woman understood.

Mai Lin worked with gnarled fingers on the ivory buttons that ran down the back of the delicately made garment. Then she undid the endless buttons that confined Grace into her high-collared shirt and pulled it off her. Grace stood in only a simple petticoat and looked down and saw what she feared most.

She fell back onto the bed. Red pooled on her white slip, red rose up from her broken heart and filled her mind. She shut her eyes and felt water fill her ears, but then she knew better: not water but blood. Blood streamed around her, tossing her about and spinning her in its own ill luck, like that cow in the eddy that had been stopped only by a limb like a spear. The robber had raised his sword high in the air before he had raced forward to steal her son. Grace would have given anything for him to ride toward only her and plunge his blade into her heart. Perhaps he had. Perhaps that explained the oozing wetness that now surrounded her on all sides. She felt Mai Lin blot between her legs and place her healing hands upon Grace's stomach, but she knew it would do no good. Yes, the robbers had pierced her and were taking away her life's blood.

The old woman bustled around the bed, but Grace no longer cared. The vibrations in her mind were terribly loud now, and she knew the blood poured forth. Soon she would lie on a bed made only of blood. Mai Lin pulled potions, creams, tinctures, and lumps of incense from the many pouches and sacks that hung on leather strings around her waist and neck. Grace was dimly aware of her grinding something with a mortar and pestle on the bedside table. Within moments, the bitter, sickly-sweet smell of incense wrapped itself around Grace's faint head. Mai Lin whispered soft and mysterious words over her as she had in the middle of the night two times before. Grace did not know the meaning of the chants. She did not hear the word Jesus, nor did she care to. This fact surprised Grace with such force that she let out a cackle, a most unladylike sound the likes of which usually issued forth only from her old amah.

"Death to Lord Jesus!" Grace shouted feebly. "That was what the robbers said, and I say it now, too. Death to the Lord!"

But the instant she repeated it, she feared she would be punished, struck down utterly and forever. She heard thunder raging in the distance and felt certain that a lightning storm would come this way. In a blinding flash of light, she, Mai Lin, and the cottage would be reduced to a smoldering pile of ashes. That was what she deserved. That was what she wanted. It was she, not her husband, who would be carried upward in a holy conflagration.