River of Dust A Novel

Thirty

A ll those years ago, the door to a hovel had swung open and the whitest man ever to enter a miserable hamlet west of Shansi had ducked his head below the lintel and stepped inside. After him came an almost equally tall and thin Chinese man. Ahcho shut the door behind them, and the Reverend removed his Western-style bowler hat and held it in his large hands. Inside the room, the peasants who lived there did not appear awed or even surprised. Instead, they carried on as if unaware of the remarkable strangers in their midst. Ahcho had rarely seen such lack of interest before but supposed it was because they were preoccupied with the dying boy.

A Chinese medicine man let out a low, mournful cry as he swung a smoking lantern slowly back and forth over the child who lay on a straw mat on the floor. The pungent smell of incense drifted across the room. The medicine man wore a matted sheepskin vest, tattered robes, and several belts across his chest, each bearing animal-skin flasks and silk pouches. Two elders stood nearby, one with his eyes crusted over from blindness, the other frowning down at the scene. The boy's mother knelt at her child's side and held his fingers, which resembled brittle twigs.

Ahcho spoke to the elders in their dialect. "We are on a great journey, Grandfathers, and have stopped for the night. Your neighbors told us about the dying boy. The Reverend here would like to help the child to be saved," he said.

Torches appeared at the window just then, and a row of faces pressed against the soot-covered panes. The elders conferred with one another. Finally, the one with blind eyes shook his head. "We want no help."

They turned back to the sick boy, and the medicine man rubbed packed herbs and oils onto his chest.

The Reverend whispered in English to Ahcho, "They seem to be performing some sort of primitive last rites. That can't be doing any medical good."

"It is the custom," Ahcho replied.

"I left my Bible in my bedroll on the donkey's back. I shall go for it."

Ahcho caught his arm. "Better for the Reverend not to go out there alone."

"You're right. And the poor child might not make it until I got back."

"Your own words will do just fine," Ahcho encouraged the young minister.

The Reverend stepped forward and was about to speak when the mother threw herself over the boy as if to protect him.

"Has the child finally passed to the other side?" the Reverend asked Ahcho. "Sometimes it's so difficult to discern even the simplest of things with these people."

Ahcho shook his head, and they watched the mother cradle her still living son. She began a song, her words unrecognizable but the meaning of her lament clear. The Reverend appeared moved by the sorrowful sounds. His young wife was expecting a child soon. Ahcho knew that she had lost two others already. Out on the trail in those months, the Reverend bent his knees each night and prayed beside his kang, or straw mat. Ahcho had overheard him asking that their child be born alive and healthy. He also prayed that the native children survive, and even thrive, as well.

"How is it, oh Lord," the Reverend had asked in his nightly prayers, "that one child is spared when others are dying?"

Ahcho thought of those words now as he and the Reverend listened to the mother's lament. "Spare my son, dear God," the woman sang. "Spare none other than this child, my own."

The Reverend cleared his throat and interrupted. "In Jesus's name," he began, "we ask thee, O Heavenly Father, to take this boy here before us into your loving arms."

The mother turned suddenly and seemed to fully see the Reverend. Her eyes grew small and sharp and glinted in the lamplight. She rose from the boy and shouted. Her hands flailed and pointed at the white man. The crowd outside banged on the mud walls of the hut, which rattled the windowpanes. Ahcho pulled the Reverend by the jacket sleeve toward the door, but the woman was too quick. She stumbled forward on bowed legs and planted herself before him.

The Reverend raised himself up to his full six foot four inches and stood perfectly erect and ready, his fingers on his gold watch chain. He was a young man and terribly thin, but he knew how to appear as solid and unyielding as an elder statesman.

"Calm, now," he said. "Calm."

The mother looked all the way up into his blue eyes behind the gold-rimmed glasses. "Ghost Man!" she shouted. "You may not take away my son!"

The mother lifted her thin arms and struck her fists against the Reverend's chest, pounding the buttons of his vest and the white handkerchief folded in his pocket. Although she was trying to injure him, her blows appeared to be as mild as those of a small child. Ahcho stepped forward to insist that the woman stop pestering the Reverend, but the Reverend waved him off.

"Madam," he said as he reluctantly took her by her narrow wrists, "my heart goes out to you. Your son is in my prayers."

The crowd tapped at the glass. Ahcho could sense men moving around outside, positioning themselves before the door.

"Sir," he whispered, "we must go."

The Reverend spoke only to the mother. "I have come to help you and your boy to find peace in his final moments."

The mother's arms appeared to grow tired, and her angry movements ceased. She dropped to her knees on the packed dirt floor, and the Reverend helped ease her down.

"Go away, Ghost Man!" she said, more softly. "Go out of my house." She pointed toward the door, and the Reverend looked that way.

At just that moment, the crowd flung it open on its leather hinges and stood blocking the threshold. They stared with frightful expressions, their voices hushed at first, then steadily rising.

Ahcho helped the Reverend take the mother by the arms. When she was standing, they looked about and saw that there was no chair for her to settle into. Ahcho knew that any furniture had been used for fuel that winter. The mother swayed between the two men until she threw herself onto the dirt again beside her son's mat.

The medicine man picked up the lamp and continued his ritual, apparently unperturbed. But the crowd at the door was restless as the people jockeyed to see inside.

Ahcho tugged the Reverend toward the door. The young minister paused one more time to speak to the incense-filled room. "May the Lord Jesus Christ accept your son into his great care and grant this boy heavenly grace for all of eternity. Amen."

Neither the elders nor the mother nor the medicine man offered any acknowledgment of the Reverend's words.

"Come," Ahcho said, "that's all you can do."

The Reverend turned and made his way into the onrushing crowd in the courtyard. Flames from the peasants' torches danced dangerously close to his head.

"Ghost Man!" the people shouted, having heard the mother christen him inside. "Go away, Ghost Man! Go away and leave us alone!"

They pawed at the Reverend's topcoat, pulled at his sleeves, and tried to reach up to his hair. In all their travels, even the long trip to the Gobi, Ahcho had seen country people fawning over the Reverend many times. Villagers frequently picked at him with meddling fingers. They stroked his clothing as if it were made of heavenly material and reached for his magical glasses that transformed his blue eyes into startling gems. And although Ahcho and the Reverend tried to dissuade these strangers from their primitive notion that white men were gods, they had benefited from such ignorance more than once when offered a home-cooked meal or a comfortable place to sleep.

But this crowd showed none of that awed curiosity. They pressed closer and shouted into the Reverend's face. Ahcho was pulled away from his master and tried to return to him, but many struggling bodies intervened. He saw that there were hands on the Reverend's back and more hands on his arms. Odors of sweat and soil and excrement surrounded them, and the pressure of damp flesh felt far too intimate. All of this was extremely unpleasant for Ahcho, but it was the Reverend he worried about. The people clawed at him, not to be saved but to overpower and crush the life out of him.

Ahcho hit at their backs with his fists but could not push back through the crowd. Over their heads, he tried to shout and signaled to the Reverend to press on in the direction of the village gate, where their donkey driver had their animals prepared and waiting. Ahcho had no choice but to watch helplessly as the Reverend made little progress.

The big man appeared to be trying with all his strength to stride forward, but the crowd had his legs in a tight grip. As the Reverend strained, his legs stayed anchored, and suddenly his upper body fell. He came crashing down like a toppled ancient pine.

Years later, in the hours after Wesley was kidnapped, the Reverend had wept as he had revealed to Ahcho all that had happened next in the miserable hamlet of Yao dao ho. He spared nothing when he described the circumstances. As the crowd began to suffocate and stomp over him, the young minister prayed that he be allowed to live long enough to see his child born. Then, as his efforts to get loose from the crowd became more impossible, he prayed to the Lord the same prayer he said at every deathbed he had ever visited: let this sweet and singular life be cradled in Jesus's welcoming arms. Let this life be saved in death. Only now it was his own life he wished to be held peacefully for all eternity.

The villagers pressed down upon him, pinning him to the hard ground. The Reverend felt a blow to his head, another to his ribs and back. The peasants kicked and punched him, and the pain made his great body writhe and convulse. He said his prayers louder, more insistently, and at the same time he tried with great concentration to crawl forward. But someone still had him by the legs, and the blows to his body were coming faster. The Reverend took in the pain and let out a scream of both anguish and fury.

"Save me, dear Jesus!" he cried. "Save me, oh Lord!"

The sound of his own voice helped him muster his strength. The Reverend pulled his knee close to his chest and released his leg in a mighty kick behind him. There came a crack: the furious blow had landed on something solid but yielding, and it broke. Yes, the Reverend later explained, it was sickeningly satisfying— the same sensation he had felt as a boy when crushing rotten pumpkins in the fields with his boot.

He kicked again and again, each time with greater success. And as he did so, the Reverend felt himself being lifted up. He was certain in that moment that the Lord had him under the arms and was raising him higher, back onto his feet and toward salvation. He pushed with his arms and threw the bodies off his back. A great strength coursed through his long limbs, and then, in a final surge of spirit, he stood and ran forward. His legs were free. No one clung to him any longer. They had let him go. And, to his amazement, the crowd did not follow.

It was a miracle: the Reverend was saved. He had called out to the Lord, and the Lord had answered.

He reached his donkey and threw himself upon it. Ahcho met him there, and even in his cumbersome robe, he quickly clambered onto his animal, too. The donkey driver beat the beasts to get them moving, but they were already edgy and eager to escape the torches and needed no encouragement to bolt through the village gate. The frightened visitors made it into the desert, the hamlet of Yao dao ho a quickly receding nightmare.

Although the Reverend was rife with pain, the miracle of having been saved coursed through his veins with a fiery lightness that gave him renewed energy. In those first moments of freedom, he felt certain that he had seen the Lord on this very night and been chosen by Him. He was alive with hope.

Then, like Lot's wife, he was tempted to look back over his shoulder. The Reverend wished to merely stamp in his mind the place where God had allowed him to escape doom. But in one quick glance, he saw what he would never forget. For what he spied caused a great fissure in his faith that the Reverend, and even Ahcho as well, had tried to repair ever since.

Back through the dilapidated village gate, the Reverend saw that the coolies of Yao dao ho had formed a half circle around a man who knelt on the ground. It was a father, holding a limp child in his arms. He rocked the small body as the people around him fell to the ground and wailed. They threw back their heads and cried. In an instant, the Reverend understood.

He understood and yet he turned away again. And for that, he could never forgive himself. He did not stay and offer his condolences, for he knew it would mean his life. As he moved out into the desert, the Reverend stared up at the night sky. He reached for his handker chief and found it gone. His glasses were missing, too, trampled under the villagers' feet, and so, for him, the stars blurred and burned like a low fire overhead. Then a cloud crossed the trail and blocked out the moon. The Reverend bowed his head in that shadow and understood that he would remain under it forever onward.

He could not erase the image from his mind of the limp child in his father's arms. Pain shot through his ribs with each step of the donkey. Blood trickled from his mouth and over his jaw and onto the backs of his hands that held the reins. But his true pain was in remembering.

The Reverend had shouted for his Lord, and his Lord had answered. John Wesley Watson had received divine mercy. The Lord had decided that he should survive. But in that instant of looking back, he had seen the reason he had been spared. Under the light of the torches and a million stars overhead, a child lay dead, his life stolen from him by a ghost man.