River of Dust (23 page)

    The sight was the same as it had been when he'd come here before: all around them on dingy mats lay mere stick figures with sallow eyes and sunken cheeks. Some sucked on opium pipes as the oil lamps were fired up and smoking. Ahcho tried not to look too closely for the source of the constant moaning. In a corner, the same young girls huddled, their heads upon one another's bare breasts, their legs and arms riddled with sores. They looked like tattered dolls, flung about unclothed and uncared-for. Their eyes stared fiercely in search of something— food, no doubt. They didn't even have the strength to rise and curl themselves around the visitors and beg. Ahcho almost missed their pathetic attentions, but he could see that they had lost all life.

    The smell was unbearable, and Ahcho tried again to hand his mistress the Reverend's handkerchief. This time she took it, but she didn't press it to her nose, where it might have done some good.

    "We've seen enough," he whispered. "I will ask if they know the Reverend's whereabouts, but then we must leave. They have the sickness."

    Grace studied the prone figures. "These people?" she asked, finally taking in the drugged and ill bodies.

    "The cholera, Mistress. That explains the smell."

    As he said it, she finally pressed the cloth to her nose and began to gag. And yet she still did not turn back. Instead, Ahcho followed his mistress as her dusty, cracked boots shuffled toward the niche where the gamblers had once tossed their dice and raised their voices in drunken boasts. Only one or two men sat on the hard ground now, their legs splayed and their backs slumped against the damp mud walls.

    An oil lamp flickered from where it had been placed upon a barrel beside a straw mattress. Upon that primitive bed lay the shriveled figure of the old proprietress of the brothel.

    Ahcho stepped around the corner and now saw what had stopped his mistress in her tracks. There, in the darkest shadow, seated on a small stool placed against the wall, was the Reverend. His head re mained bowed, and his hands lay folded in his lap, the fingers nervously fingering the sack that held the orb. Ahcho noticed immediately how sallow and ill shaven his cheeks had become. The man needed his proper ablutions. Ahcho stepped closer and would have given anything to attend to his master, or at least fling away that terrible hat given to him by the nomads. It pained Ahcho to see it still cocked crookedly upon the Reverend's head.

    Mistress Grace, however, did not appear nearly as upset by the sight of her husband as Ahcho had anticipated. She heaved a deep sigh, and her shoulders drooped with relief. Her entire being appeared to grow calm in his presence. Ahcho couldn't imagine such a reaction: for him, the sight of the Reverend brought forth an almost violent urge to do something.

    The mistress inched closer, and Ahcho sensed that she wished to reach out to the Reverend, who remained sunk deep in his own thoughts. No doubt he was praying. Clearly, she wanted to rouse him and make him know that she had come for him. But she did not. She remained quiet and waited to be noticed by the man who was a shrunken version of his former self.

    The Reverend's back sat curled and bent. His long legs were crossed like a scholar's, and his tattered trousers and worn boots trembled. Upon a closer look, Ahcho could see that all of the Reverend's thin limbs were shaking. The great man had been reduced to nerves and sinews with very little meat or muscle on him any longer. Ahcho could tell he was exhausted and needed food. He was wasting away.

    Ahcho became aware of the raspy, irregular breathing that emanated from the proprietress under a coarse blanket on the bed. The smell of decay and human stench in this corner was so severe, it made Ahcho's eyes burn. He longed to remove both his master and mistress from this wretched place.

    But Mistress Grace seemed undaunted by sight and smell. She moved closer and reached out a delicate, tentative hand toward her husband's shoulder. Her pale fingers hovered, unsure and yet brave, until she finally bestowed a firm grip upon him. The Reverend flinched at being touched, his gaze whipping upward and all about like the eyes of a cornered animal. He staggered off the stool and fumbled with the red sash across his chest until his hand took hold of the pouch that hung at his hip. Once he had it in a tight grip, he grew calm again and seemed to finally see his wife standing before him. To Ahcho's surprise, once the initial shock of being interrupted at his prayers subsided, the Reverend did not appear one bit surprised to see Mistress Grace.

    "My dear," the Reverend said, his hand fiddling with the pouch and his eyes darting uneasily about the room.

    Ahcho cringed to see the great man so weakened. What had happened to him here? This place had changed him in ways that Ahcho feared might be unalterable. At that very moment, poisonous opium, or something worse, must be coursing through the Reverend's veins, otherwise why would he behave so strangely? He needed to be carried home immediately, fed, and straightened out. A good bath would surely help.

    For the first time since the mistress had suggested this nightmarish visit, Ahcho was able to imagine that something good might come of it. He and Mistress Grace would bring the Reverend back to his senses. Although night had descended outside by now, they would, metaphorically speaking, lead him out of the darkness of this vile hovel and into the pure light of the mission again. The Reverend needed merely to be carried forth, and soon they would all live together in the finest house in the compound. Ahcho waited for her to tell her husband this plan so that their journey home might begin.

    "My darling," she replied in a voice as thin and weak as her husband's.

    They didn't step closer, although clearly they had missed one another's company. They were proper people who did not show private emotions in public. Ahcho approved of this.

    "You are attending to the sick?" Grace asked.

    The Reverend's gaze drifted down to the proprietress's shriveled face, which poked out from beneath the covers. He nodded somberly, and Ahcho felt reassured that the Reverend was maintaining his good practices. Perhaps he really had been praying.

    "Master offers last rites to the old, evil one?" Ahcho asked hopefully.

    The Reverend squeezed the pouch on his hip with white knuckles and said, "No, I was merely wiping the liquid away. I can hardly keep up with it. She is seeping something terrible. I remember a goat that once ate nettles and managed to swallow a segment of barbed wire. Her insides oozed out of her for days. This illness is not unlike that."

    "Oh, how awful," Mistress Grace said.

    Ahcho hoped the Reverend might agree that the condition here was equally terrible, but he did not. Instead, he bent over the dying creature and whisked away flies. Then he bent closer— far too close, Ahcho felt— and pinched his fingers against the greasy scalp and pulled out a bug.

    He held his hand up to the lamplight and exclaimed, "Aha! I have rescued another soul."

"Dear God," the mistress said.

Her knees buckled, and Ahcho caught her arm and steadied her.

    "Yes, dear God," the Reverend said and shook his head as if remembering someone fondly from his childhood.

    "We must go home now," she said, regaining her composure. "Our compatriots are all setting out tomorrow morning on their long journey back to America. The compound is soon to be empty, and we must not abandon ship like the others."

    "A ship?" the Reverend asked, distracted again by the gasping breaths of the body below them on the mat.

    "You are the captain of our ship," she reminded him, finding now a firmness in her voice that Ahcho admired. "You must return to it before it sinks."

    "Our ship is sinking?" he asked.

    "Not literally, my darling," she said.

    "Ah." He raised himself up. "You mean figuratively. This is a crucial distinction. Listen closely, Ahcho," the Reverend said, pointing at him. "Your mistress has something to teach you. She is a clever girl. And brave. My goodness, she is brave to have come all this way and to have left behind a life of ease."

    "Don't concern yourself with that now, my love," she said as she took her husband's arm and began to walk him away from the sickbed. "None of it can be helped. We are what we are."

    The Reverend patted her arm and agreed, "We are."

    "What's done is done," she said as she steered him across the room.

    "Done, all done," he murmured.

    They were making real progress and had almost made it to the exit of the interior chamber when the Reverend looked down at her and shouted, "Unhand me!" He wrenched his arm free as if she had held it in an iron grip, which clearly she had not. Ahcho couldn't help wondering whatever was the matter with the Reverend's mind.

    Grace stumbled back.

    The Reverend began scratching his shins under his pant legs. He brushed aside his jacket, lifted his shirt, and scratched his inflamed belly. Ahcho knew he would have to work hard to rescue him from the maddening insects, but luckily he had many methods and would not hesitate to try them all until the battle was won. Perhaps his master's unstable mental condition could be corrected by proper fumigation.

    The Reverend stopped and fixed his eyes on his wife. "Woman," he said both sternly and loudly, "have you ever seen a louse living in a pair of trousers?"

    The men and women asleep or lost in a haze of opium on their beds turned to stare with vague interest in their eyes.

    Grace replied, "No, dear Reverend. I have not."

    "Well, then, you cannot possibly understand."

    The Reverend began to pace as he spoke. He lifted his long arms, and Ahcho could not help recalling the sermons that had made his master famous in this land. His stature, his wisdom, the truth that fell from his lips had rung out over the little chapel, echoing as far away as the hills and the desert beyond. Ahcho's Reverend had preached of man's sin and God's forgiveness and the hope, the pure and absolute hope, of eternal rest and salvation. Ahcho had felt it— he had known it— in the Reverend's words. There was a better world beyond. Heaven awaited us, all who believed and repented. Ahcho knew this because the Reverend had spoken of it.

    "The louse," the Reverend continued in his grandest oratorical manner. Several in their deathbeds stirred. "The louse regards the trousers as a fine and prosperous home. He feels he has attained a wellregulated and honorable life. A decent life. A godly life. But soon, flames will come over the hills. Fire, the like of which has never been seen before, will spread. Villages will burn. Cities will fall. And then the lice will perish!"

    The Reverend bowed his head in what appeared to be abject sorrow, and Ahcho waited for uplifting words to rise from his master's throat. Hope was waiting in the next sentence, Ahcho was certain. They would escape this wretched place.

    But the Reverend looked around the room, taking in the miserable creatures whose lives leaked out of them in smoke and blood and bodily fluids. He growled, "And the man you wish to be, how does he differ from the louse?" He waved his arms at the evil on all sides and asked, "Is this not trousers?"

    The mistress and Ahcho waited for more, but the Reverend's expression shifted again, and he appeared suddenly lost and confused. He pulled his spectacles away from his eyes and wiped them on the tails of the filthy shirt that hung below his threadbare jacket. He did not speak again to his sorry parishioners but only muttered to himself, "Heaven and earth are my dwelling, and my house is my trousers. I am no better than the Confucian lice and no wiser than the Daoists who invented this parable to illustrate Confucian profligacy. I am Lui Ling, a gentleman corrupted by my narrow, spoiled vision of the world. I am, without question, a louse."

    The Reverend placed his glasses back upon his nose, and Ahcho noticed that one of the lenses was cracked. The Chinese gentleman's name the Reverend had spoken sounded familiar, but Ahcho could not place it at first. Then it came to him. He recalled that Lui Ling had been a drunken, hedonistic poet of the Han Dynasty, many hundreds of years before. In his incoherent and impromptu sermon, the Reverend had been citing a foolish ancient argument, a common Daoist story invented to illustrate Confucian corruption. The Daoists hated Confucian immoderation, but the Daoists themselves were heathens of the first order, too, believing as they did in the dangerous old superstitions. Mai Lin's frequent mutterings about Fate and Destiny were an example of their wrongheadedness. All those old religions were like haggling crones at the market, Ahcho thought. They had nothing of use to say anymore.

    "Reverend," Ahcho said, "you shouldn't be bothered by such stupid, outdated arguments. Your way is far better and more modern. Don't fill your mind with such absurdity."

    The Reverend looked up. "You believe that's so?" he asked.

    "Of course I do! And you do, too!" Ahcho answered with what he hoped was a strong enough jolt of enthusiasm and reality to dislodge the Reverend from the shoals of religious relativism where he had momentarily been beached. "Come now, the Mistress is right, we must go home. The little chapel is waiting for you. Tomorrow is Sunday!"

    "Ah," the Reverend said, his voice far off again. "Sunday is the holiest of days. But you know, some religions say that Saturday is the chosen day."

    Why was the Reverend bothering to concern his great mind with other religions? Ahcho had the urge to knock some sense into the bedraggled man. But at just that moment, Mistress Grace beat him to it. She pulled back her tiny fist and socked the Reverend in the arm.

    That finally got his attention, and he stared at her with remarkably

fond eyes and a charming smile. "I have been ignoring you again, my love," he said. "You must learn to speak up, but that love pat you just bestowed upon me also works quite well, too. I gather that today's women employ that method quite often. Gone are the meek feminine souls of yesteryear."