River of Dust A Novel

Three

N ight fires gleamed in the distance, and smoke clung to the horizon, blurring the far-off mountains in a blanket of dark haze. The Reverend pressed on in the direction of the smoke, although the robbers might easily have slipped into one of the ravines or outcroppings that bordered the dirt road. In this maddening countryside there were too many possibilities, as many directions as travelers. It occurred to him that at this very moment the bandits may have been watching him from a rocky hilltop, laughing at his efforts. Or they might have turned away, no longer interested in the father who rode on and on forever in search of his son. For the Reverend understood that he would not stop his journey until Wesley was found.

The old horse was not meant for such swift travel, but the Reverend paid it little heed. He had not ridden bareback since he was a boy on the farm. It did not matter. Nothing mattered except going onward. Off to his right he saw a fire burning, and further ahead on the left a hamlet appeared— a cluster of buildings made of yellow brick, though in the dark they resembled nothing more than dark outlines. He had passed this cluster of derelict buildings before but assumed they were empty and no longer in use. Now from this ghost town came a dim light that the Reverend headed toward.

He let himself wonder what he would do if the bandits were holed up inside. He had no weapon. No sword or gun, not even a rock to hurl or a stick to swing. The Reverend bore nothing except his fury, height, and stature as a Man of God in a land of infidels. That would have to be enough. As he grew closer, he let the horse slow and then come to a stop. He swung down off the sweat-soaked back and kept hold of the reins. He could at least use the element of surprise to his advantage. He would come out of the black night to frighten the devils.

He passed through a broken wooden gate whose fence had long since fallen away. The moon came out from behind a cloud, and he saw the lay of the courtyard: a barn on one side, its roof staved in; a shed on the other, with no door or windowpanes and only darkness inside; and there, before him, an old inn with the windows boarded over. A light shone dimly through chinks in the brick near the back of the building.

The Reverend ducked behind the edge of the barn and tied his horse to a leaning post. He strode across the courtyard with his traveling coat billowing. A rough board with a knot of rope for a handle served as a door to the inn. On the wood were scrawled careless Chinese characters that the Reverend could not decipher. He couldn't be troubled about the meaning of the words, nor did he care to unravel the mysteries of this decrepit place. He merely wanted the Lord to lead him to his son. Faith, not knowledge, would guide him.

In his hand the knot of rope felt prickly and unwelcoming, but he twisted it and pushed open the door. He, who had been called a giant by even the friendliest of Chinese, now ducked below the lintel. He stepped over the threshold, placed both boots firmly on the sunken dirt floor, and rose up to his full height, impersonating Goliath as best as he could.

The Reverend thrust out his chest, pulled back his shoulders, and glared with as much menace as he could muster into a smoky, dimly lit room. His top wave of reddish hair grazed a low wooden beam. It took a moment for his eyes to adjust to the smoke. His lungs, which were never strong even in the best of settings, began to constrict in his chest. He hoped he would not cough and spoil the full effect of his pose, for he intended to appear not altogether human but rather a creature from an Amazon tribe, more native than the natives themselves.

An old, gnarled man wrapped in a heavy woolen cape and high fur boots stepped forward from the shadows at the back of the unfurnished room. He was bent so low, the Reverend felt certain he had spent decades behind a plow, although the ropes and pouches he wore around his neck and waist suggested more the life of a nomad or trader.

Perhaps, the Reverend thought, he was the grandfather of the bandits. The Reverend took a step forward, and the man cowered, suggesting he had none of the swagger of the men who had stolen his son. No doubt this fellow was instead the patriarch of a sorry, lost clan that still tried to hold on in this forgotten corner of the western plains.

The man did not speak but looked up at the Reverend with bright and nervous eyes. They regarded one another like animals of different species, although, the Reverend considered, at least animals had an instinct that told them who was predator and who was prey. He wished he had paused to wipe the infernal desert dust from his spectacles before entering, for now the dense clouds billowing from the back of the dark room further narrowed his vision. He was seeing the old man as if through the wrong end of a smudged spyglass.

"Grandfather," the Reverend began in as deep and sonorous a voice as he could muster, "I am here to find my son. He has been stolen, I believe, by the likes of you!"

The older man flinched at his words and seemed to be trembling, but that did not stop him from daring to step forward. He inched closer, reached out a palsied finger, and poked the Reverend none too delicately in the chest. When his touch reached firmness, the man staggered back and let out a frightened yelp.

"Yes, old fellow, I am real, and my mission is most urgent."

The grandfather nodded his head repeatedly in an attempt at understanding.

The Reverend boomed, "Have you, or your family, seen a small boy taken by robbers this very night?"

The old man flinched and sank deeper into his dark cape, clearly still frightened, but finally answered, "No. No boy here."

Although the man did not seem threatening, the Reverend knew to keep a close eye on him. In the seven years since he had come to Shansi Province, he had dealt with all manner of Chinese: the fine and upstanding as well as the tricksters who were more desperate than dangerous. He had also glimpsed the criminal element. Twice, he had come upon a beheading in a market square. Each time, it had become immediately apparent to him that the prisoner and the warlord who had orchestrated the punishment were equally evil barbarians. But the Reverend could not be bothered with such distinctions now. If he was in danger, so be it. His own safety was not what mattered. The boy was all.

The Reverend strode deeper into the room, and as he did so, he heard laughter coming from the dark. Could that be a woman's voice? A girl's? Or, his heart quickened, perhaps it was the high, angelic sound of his son.

"Your family, in the back." The Reverend gestured toward the darkened door. "Have they seen something in the past hours?"

The grandfather did not answer but turned and beckoned with the same palsied finger. On his face appeared an unexpected grin. The Reverend heard the laughter again. This time he was certain it belonged to a woman, or perhaps several women. His son's voice was not so cloying or crass. But still, the Reverend ventured further into the place. He followed the outline of the bent man in the wooly cape, more like the back of an animal than any human outline. The Reverend intended to interrogate each and every person he encountered back there. He would gather clues, then leave quickly and press on into the night.

The old man bowed his head humbly and held open the inner door for the Reverend, as if honored to offer tea in a formal parlor. The Reverend ducked low again, and when he lifted his head, he saw the terrible source of the smoke. All manner of miscreants lay about on low mats, puffing on pipes that emitted an awful stench. The Reverend squinted into the smoky den and covered his nose with his hand. An acrid scent seeped into him. This foul place seemed uninhabitable, as if he had entered an underwater world where he was the sole oxygenloving mammal. He took off his glasses and was about to clean them on his handkerchief when he realized he no longer had it. The bandits had taken it, too. The Reverend chided himself for even a moment's lapse in pursuit of his mission.

"I wish to know if anyone here has seen my boy?" he shouted.

Quiet fell over the room. Even the most delinquent of men sprawled on mats turned their heads toward the Reverend. Several girls in flowery silk robes crowded together and whispered at the sight of him.

The grandfather held up his hand and said something in a rapid dialect that the Reverend could not catch. The ancient fellow clapped his hands and waved them in the air as if conducting a silent concert, and then his message was over. The room buzzed again as the fallen all around him were apparently appeased by whatever had been conveyed. They no longer concerned themselves with the white giant in their midst.

The Reverend shook his head. Extraordinary, he thought, the way evil could be so all-consuming. They had their sinful business to attend to and could not be bothered with anything else. These people would not notice if the Lord Jesus himself walked through the door.

At his elbow appeared two thinly clad ladies, while another stood writhing happily before him. Not ladies, not remotely ladies, the Reverend knew. He was a minister, but he was also an American male who had grown up in a sinful world. After school one time, a classmate had surprised him by handing him a card. Assuming it was an invitation of some sort, the Reverend had flipped the thing over and stared for several long moments at the ample, naked backside of a woman who offered a coy smile over one shoulder and most beckoning eyes. No, the Reverend knew precisely where he stood: at the puerile heart of Sodom and Gomorrah.

He attempted to slip away from the girls and search through the smoke for the grandfather. The ladies surrounded him again, and he could not help but notice that although they were young, they were not children. As their robes fell open, their slight breasts shone in the lantern light. The Reverend did not look away immediately, but when he did, he shook his head vigorously. He must turn from such sights. This was precisely how the devil did his work: by sneaking in under the door of the mind and taking control.

Needing clearer vision now more than ever, he began to undo the buttons on his traveling coat in order to use his shirttail to clean his spectacles. The girls misunderstood his gesture and grabbed his arms and pawed at his traveling coat. They appeared eager to undress him. The Reverend's heart, that involuntary muscle, beat frantically with what he hoped was honest fear rather than prurient desire.

Then their pale hands sneaked into his pockets, and he felt certain he was about to be robbed. But each girl merely held up the object she had found and giggled. Truly, they were hardly older than children. One excitedly examined his small folding knife and simply tossed it back into a side pocket of his coat. Apparently, his throat would not be cut this evening, at least not by these urchins.

Another snatched his thick, compact traveling Bible from his jacket. She flipped through the thin pages crowded with his scrawled commentary. Several sheets of ministerial notes and ideas for future sermons fluttered to the dirt floor. The Reverend snatched them up, stuffed them back into the book, and took the Bible away from her. He returned it to his breast pocket, where it always stayed close to his heart.

Yet another of the young ladies sank a lithe hand into one of his deeper pockets and pulled forth his leather-bound copy of the Romantics. This thick volume, every page of which the Reverend had read and reread, committing many fine lines of poetry to memory, had been given to him upon his graduation from seminary. Here in China, it had proved almost as important a companion as the Lord's good book. Within those poems, the barbaric was tamed; the wild was praised, and yet the language, through its refinement, proved that civilization won out in the end. Whenever his heart was sunk low by the unresponsive Chinese, he turned to wise Wordsworth, swashbuckling Byron, and sublime Keats and knew that faith would abide.

Now this child harlot before him waved the heavy thing in the air and sang a silly song. He grabbed it back from her and placed it out of reach in his other interior breast pocket. At all costs, he would keep these profound and uplifting texts safe from sly pickpockets.

Luckily, the ladies did not go into his other trouser pocket to find the gold watch his father had passed down to him before he had left for Shansi Province. The temptation of that shiny object would surely have been too much for this greedy gang. Instead, one of the girls reached for the spectacles in his hand, and before he knew it, she was swinging them in the air and wearing them herself.

The Reverend grabbed for his glasses, but the girls had him now. Their ranks had swelled, and they pulled him down onto one of the filthy mats, where he fell like Gulliver himself. They swarmed him, and he felt certain they would tie him down with ropes in the manner of the Lilliputians, but it was merely their delicate hands that pawed over him and made him frighteningly weak.

"Please, ladies, please," he shouted. "This must stop!"

And they did stop— such was the force of his voice speaking their tongue. But then one of the younger ones burst into giggles again, and the older ones put on more determined faces than ever. They dove for his shirt buttons. The Reverend pushed them off with some effort and managed to get his boots back upon the dirt floor. He finally snatched his spectacles, put them on, and stood.

He held out his arms in preparation for a further attack, but the girls just looked up at him. Disappointment and even boredom quickly passed over their young faces. Several of them trailed off toward the opium pipes and lamps. Others went to customers who mumbled in the sickly air. Such were their distracted natures and the fickleness of their passions. Sin could be quite desultory at times.

Over in a back corner, the Reverend spotted a group of men he had not noticed before. They sat on their haunches and threw dice against a mud wall. They cursed under their breaths, or sometimes quite loudly, and drank from dark bottles.

This sort of behavior rotted the soul to its very core. The Reverend faced the room and called forth his most effective preaching voice. "You, every one of you, is giving your one and only life over to the Devil," he announced, loud enough he hoped to reach even those most lost in their own ether. "Throw off the mantle of evil and join the pure way of Christ."

The grandfather shuffled forward from a corner of the chamber and reached out a claw to grip the Reverend's arm. Strangely, the Reverend felt almost glad to see him again. He felt he could talk sense to this fellow and perhaps get somewhere. The old man had taken off his wool cape, and, as he stood close, the Reverend was puzzled to notice that he wore a high lace collar, a European or American woman's finely wrought garment with ivory buttons down the neck. As the man inched forward, the Reverend saw on his bent head a thick, crocheted oval. He was mystified at the sight. Could it be an antimacassar?

But then in a flash he understood: the antimacassar and the lace collar had once belonged to the missionary families that had perished in the Boxer Rebellion a decade before. This grandfather standing in front of the Reverend wore loot from the massacre of the American faithful.

"You must leave now," the old man said softly. His voice again surprised the Reverend with its high timbre. "You see, no son here."

"Grandfather," the Reverend began, but then, through some strange intuition, he corrected himself and said, "I mean, Grandmother."

The old woman looked up at him and offered a crooked smile as she squeezed his elbow. Then she took a thin leather rope from around her neck. From it hung a brass coin, though of no denomination that the Reverend had ever seen before. She held the thing up before her, and the Reverend understood that she meant for him to wear it. He hesitated. While he had no intention of taking on the appearance of these types, it did not seem wise to refuse.

"This will help you find your way," the grandmother said.

The Reverend had no idea who these people were, and he was fully convinced that evil ruled their every thought and deed, and yet the old woman's expression seemed somehow convincing. He bowed low, and she placed the necklace over his head.

Then her ancient hands worked at a knot on a strip of cloth that served as a belt around her thick waist. After a moment, she had it off, and he could see that from it hung a small sack embroidered with twin golden dragons.

"And this will help you find your son," she said, holding it up in offering.

The Reverend took the soiled red fabric from her hand and kept it in his open palm. With quick gestures she showed him how to wear it slung over one shoulder and across his breast. He lifted it into that position, and she nodded. The Reverend did as she instructed and strapped the ragged red cloth across his chest, over one shoulder, and down toward his waist so that the pouch with the yellow dragons hung at his hip.

When the Reverend looked up from this complicated business, the room had grown silent. The men who had been gambling in the back stood now and were watching. The girls in their open robes stared with dark eyes. Even the steady, almost comforting murmur of the opium pipes had stopped.

"I remember your people," the grandmother said. "They all died. But you, you come out from the desert. You are the man we have heard rumors of for years." She looked around at the others with gleaming eyes. "This, before us, is the Ghost Man. He is alive!"

"No, you see," the Reverend started to explain, but then he stopped and did not continue. Perhaps, in this instance, it was best to leave them to their ignorant beliefs. He took a small step backward toward the exit, their eyes still steady upon him.

Suddenly, a man lurched out of the darkened corner where the gamblers huddled. He was young and strapping and the only healthylooking specimen in the place. He pushed past the grandmother, although she pawed at his shoulder with an arthritic claw and shouted for him to stop. He yelled back and shook her off with ease.

As this commotion took place, the door behind the Reverend swung open. He glanced back over his shoulder and was overwhelmed at the sight of his manservant, Ahcho. Never had the Reverend felt so grateful for a familiar face.

"Good God, man, how did you find me?" the Reverend asked.

"I know this place," Ahcho answered.

"You do?" the Reverend asked.

"No, no, not I. Everyone knows it."

The Reverend made a mental note to follow up with Ahcho, his most devoted convert, on this unsettling suggestion. Then he looked back at the grandmother and, in a flash, saw the young gambler raise his hand. A loud noise sounded, followed by a puff of smoke. The Reverend felt a thud against his chest. He stared out at the room and swayed slightly. He prepared to fall, and yet he did not.

"Ghost Man is shot!" someone shouted.

The Reverend watched as the grandmother used her fists to pummel the strapping gambler. "You idiot!" she shouted. "Ghost Man will rain curses on us like never before."

"We will all die!" screeched one of the girls.

"He will haunt us forever!" another shouted.

"But look," someone else pointed, "he does not die."

A frightened screaming and general agitation overtook the room. Ahcho raced toward the young gunman and wrestled him to the ground. The Reverend took the opportunity to study his own chest. As a man of science, he searched for a logical explanation for his survival. In an instant, he understood what had happened. He had read of just such miracles taking place on battlefields for those boys wise enough to carry their Bibles over their hearts.

"Help us, you drunken louts!" the grandmother yelled above it all. "Stop this fool before we are cursed for all eternity."

The young, strapping fellow was too much for Ahcho. The gamblers finally gathered their wits about them and joined the elderly Ahcho in his attempts to subdue the strong gunman. But in the confusion, he managed to yank his hand free. He raised it for a second time and shot again.

The Reverend grasped what had happened by the anguished look on Ahcho's face. He felt a searing heat rise up in his torso as his head grew light and vague. The sight of the red cloth over his chest startled the Reverend as he wondered if it had always been the color of blood. He had forgotten he wore such a strange talisman, but now he noticed that the second bullet had gone right through the fabric, and yet it had not been severed so badly as to fall off him. Like the pouch with the twin golden dragons attached to the red cloth, the Reverend swayed gently. But still, he did not fall.

A great hush filled the room. The people sucked in gasps of air, their hands covering their mouths, their eyes wide and unblinking. Ahcho left the gunman, finally held fast by the other gamblers. He wrapped the Reverend's arm over his shoulder and had him lean into him.

Unable to disguise the desperation in his voice, he said, "Don't worry, Reverend, the Lord Jesus will save you."

"No doubt," the Reverend mumbled. He clenched his teeth and hoped his convert understood that his lack of enthusiasm was no indication his faith was faltering.

Yet his mind was narrowing, his vision closing in. He placed trembling fingers over the second bullet hole, where blood had begun to appear. Using all that was left of his blurred and pain-filled brain, the Reverend pieced together that he must have been turned sideways when the gunman, lying prone on the dirt floor, had fired. The second bullet had risen at an acute angle, grazing his rib until something— something quite impenetrable— had stopped it from bisecting his heart.

The Reverend looked up with wonder in his eyes. If he was going to live, which remained to be seen, he now fully grasped that he would owe his life to poetry and, by extension, to the Lord's great whimsy. There was a lesson in it, one he would exploit for a future sermon should he be allowed to live long enough to give another. As his vision fully darkened and he began to topple, the Reverend managed a final wish: that his son be brought home on just such a tide of good-humored grace.