River of Dust (6 page)

    Ahcho felt relief as he transferred the object from his old and weary hands into those of the Reverend, who was far wiser and bound to know what to do.

    "Place it in here," the Reverend said. He pointed to the pouch with the twin golden dragons that the unfortunate madam had given the Reverend earlier that evening.

    "You do not intend to wear that filthy peasant thing strapped over you?" Ahcho asked.

    "I will carry it with me until dear Wesley is found. It shall be my hair shirt."

    Ahcho would have liked to have asked what this shirt of hair was all about, but another wave of pain washed over the Reverend, and he shut his eyes.

I
n the first days and weeks that followed, as the Reverend regained his strength and his rib healed, his second-in-command, the Reverend Charles Martin, led several unsuccessful search parties into the Shansi Desert and the borderland provinces beyond. The Reverend was most grateful, and yet he could not have been more frustrated. While he waited for his compatriots to return, he wrote passionate letter after letter as he sought help from the Chinese authorities and the local warlords of the region. The American legation in Peking became involved for a time.

    A long month later, Doc Hemingway granted permission, and the Reverend was finally able to take over the search. During his period of recuperation, he had devised a plan to visit every village of the mountains and plains. He set out right away. He followed rumors. Someone had seen a startlingly pale child in a market, or on a boat going upriver, or on the back of a Mongol tradesman's horse. The Reverend remained on the road all through that summer. He would return to the compound for a day or two but then quickly saddle up again. As head of the mission, part of his duty was to support and grow the outlying churches, yet everyone soon understood why he was gone so much of the time.

    Confined at home through the humid summer months as the child in her belly held on, Grace had her bed turned to face the window. Her nervous condition remained inflamed, and Mai Lin saw to her health with strong potions. Grace could not shake from her rattled mind the feeling of her son being torn from her arms. The panic that had accompanied that moment hovered over her still. It kept her awake at night until Mai Lin arrived at a correct dosage.

    When the moon spread a pewter glow over the rocky ground and a breeze from across the plains finally blew in milder, Grace was given respite and reward for her vigilance. The ghosts of her babies came back to her, and she was most grateful for their presence. They hovered just over the windowsill and beamed at her with their sweet, divine faces. Their high, angelic voices sang her to sleep, although a restless sleep it was. In that dreamy state, she listened to her angels of the desert, whom she came to both love and fear. As night wore on, she thrashed about in her bed, waiting for the visions to calm her. Sometimes it took hours for her to no longer reach out and try to snatch her children back. Instead, she would finally let them go and, when morning came, she woke with a pillow wet from tears but with a renewed lightness in her heart. Her children were out there, she was sure of that. It was only a matter of time before she was allowed to hold them again.

    It would have been so much easier to simply give up, to lose one's faith; easier to turn against the Lord as she had on the first night after Wesley had been stolen. But from that dark moment, her true self had risen again. There was no denying she was a cheerful Midwestern girl at heart: an American girl, synonymous with optimism. And in so being, she understood that she must endure her greatest punishment. She must live with the hope, the infernal hope that love could survive even out here where nothing else did. Her son would return to her. She just knew it.

    One evening near the end of summer, as Mai Lin prepared Grace's sleeping concoction by the water basin, the Reverend startled them both by rapping on the bedroom door. Mai Lin let him in and stepped aside. He did not seem to notice the old woman. Grace knew he had been terribly preoccupied since Wesley's kidnapping with his travels and attempts to find the boy. But she wished he would be kinder to the one person who had been kindest to her in the aftermath. Given her delicate condition, Grace felt certain that her current pregnancy could not possibly have lasted into the fourth month if it had not been for her skilled amah. The Reverend needed to appreciate that.

    He strode into the room with remarkable haste and stopped at her bedside. He rattled as he walked now, the several pouches and bags he had begun to acquire on his summer-long trips making him sound altogether too much like Mai Lin, who wore similar belts of accessories. Grace started at the sight of him bedecked in his amulets but then quickly began to pat down her flyaway hair. She was glad that she had changed into a fresh gown that morning.

    "My dear, this won't do," he said abruptly.

    She looked down at her hands.

    "People are beginning to wonder about us," the Reverend continued. "I would like you to accompany me to chapel tomorrow morning. The natives need our example."

    She nodded. Of course she would. He was right. In so many ways, he was right.

    "We must carry on, mustn't we?" he asked.

She lifted her chin and attempted a smile.

    He pushed aside his long coat and the belts with the pouches hanging down as he sat at the side of her bed. The sack with the twin golden dragons was most handsome and bulged as if it held some sort of orb. She had meant to ask him about its contents, but she had seen him so rarely in the past few months, she did not wish to distract them from more pressing matters.

    "My dear," he said, more softly now. He took her pale hands in his own rough, red ones. "I am so sorry. So terribly sorry."

    His high, usually erect head bowed, and then suddenly, he fell forward and pressed his face against her breast. The metal of his wireframed glasses dug into her soft skin, but she did not complain. She placed her hand on his head. She let herself feel the actual touch and texture of his fine, thinning red hair. He was no apparition.

    "It isn't your fault," she said. "Please, don't blame yourself."

    He groaned as if she had struck him a blow. "But it is, and I do."

    She pushed her fingers through his hair more firmly now. Then she touched around his unshaven cheek and rough jaw and lifted his face to hers. "The baby inside me will also help us to heal. This one is going to make it. I know he will."

    The Reverend must have seen the doubt in her eyes, or heard the quiver she tried to keep from her voice. He looked at her with a tender expression, and she felt tears rise up behind her eyes. He brought her to him and kissed her on the lips. Grace thought she might faint, she was so happy to be in his embrace again. She had feared she had lost him forever.

    But his lips were dry, and they did not press for long against her greedy ones. He pulled back and looked away out the open window.

    "I have a sermon to prepare," he said. "You will come with me to chapel tomorrow?"

    "Of course I will come with you."

    "Bless you, my dear." He turned and began to leave the room. Then he paused and stepped back, closer.

    Her heart could not help fluttering with hope that he might bestow upon her another kiss.

    But he simply added, "Do not be surprised to see that our ranks have swelled. I seem to have sparked a revival of sorts. Most strange, but positive for our cause, I believe."

    She looked at him, waiting for more, but he bent quickly and merely kissed her on the forehead before stepping away.

G
race cherished the Reverend's firm grip on her elbow as he steered her up the aisle, but she hated the moment when he placed her in her seat in the front pew and moved away. It took all of her self-control not to turn to him before the assembling congregation and beg him to hold her a moment longer. She watched him rise to the platform behind the simple podium. Then she looked down at her lap and ran her fingers over the fine lacework of her dress stretched tightly across her growing belly. She hoped that no one would spot the tears gathering behind her eyes and prayed she could make it through the morning service without causing a stir.

    But, quickly enough, she and the other missionaries and the usual Chinese faithful were distracted by a racket at the back of the chapel. Grace turned to see what the disturbance might be. A cart had pulled up out front, and from it climbed more than a dozen men. A second cart followed closely behind, and another after that. While Grace couldn't see all that was happening beyond the open double doors, she gathered that a steady stream of congregants was clamoring toward the little chapel.

    She recognized none of the peasants' faces that entered through the door. She heard the rattle of more carts arriving, and the influx continued with no sign of abating. In the seven years that the Reverend had lived in Shansi, the mission had grown slowly and steadily in numbers that were nothing to be ashamed of. But as she glanced up at him now, he must have sensed her eyes upon him, because he glanced back and raised a single eyebrow, as if to say that he, too, wondered what the Lord had wrought.

    The service began a full half hour late because the new congregants had to pack themselves into every pew, some sitting on each other's laps. More stood at the back and along the sides. Others filled the central aisle and edged out the door. The faces of those who could not enter pressed against the windows.

    Grace peered around for her young lady friends with whom she had lost touch during the recent difficult months. None of the not-yetwed missionary teachers appeared to be in attendance. The night before, when Grace had pressed Mai Lin to tell her about the changes to the congregation to which the Reverend had referred, her servant had alluded to the fact that the chapel now belonged to the Chinese. Grace surmised that this recent change was the reason the young ladies now stayed in their homes on Sunday morning.

    She did spot Mildred Martin, the Reverend Martin's wife, and offered what she hoped was not too desperate a smile. Mildred had been quite dear in the first days after Wesley had been taken, although her visits to Grace's bedside had tapered off in the subsequent weeks of summer and finally stopped altogether. Grace realized that she had hardly noticed, occupied as she had become with her constant vigilance all night and then her need for sleep during the day. But now she looked across at Mildred and yearned for her gentle company. Grace smiled, and Mildred offered pursed lips and a little nod that made the hair on Grace's arms rise.

    The Reverend cleared his throat and began to speak. As he did, the new congregants sucked in air, as if amazed that he could converse in their tongue. Why on earth had they come, Grace wondered, if they did not believe they would understand him? Such a daft and mystifying people, she thought.

    Her husband's face appeared pale and calm, but rather quickly perspiration appeared on his handsome brow. He seemed to have a difficult time finding his handkerchief in his jacket pockets or in one of those little sacks and pouches that he wore. As his voice began to gain its stride, she found herself wondering what on earth were in all those odd items strung about him. She had noticed that several of the coolies who had come tromping in carried just such amulets in their hands. She hoped to heaven they weren't bringing them all to the Reverend. The man was beginning to look like a great Hawaiian chieftain sporting one too many leis. At such a ridiculous comparison, Grace giggled quietly to herself. Getting out and about seemed to agree with her. She must try to do so more often.

    The Reverend's cheeks flushed, and the timbre of his words echoed against the plaster walls that he himself had erected. He was a master builder, a man with a vision in the full stride of life at forty years of age, and here, surrounded by witnesses, it was to God that he spoke with force and purpose and even anger, something she did not recall from his previous sermons. Now, from the simple wooden pulpit, he called out and begged the Lord for mercy.

    Grace could not help remembering what a thin reed of a fellow he had been when she had first met him. He could barely raise his voice then to reach the back of the crowd where she and her girlfriends were hanging about. It was in 1903 on the Oberlin College campus in Ohio at a ceremony celebrating the erection of a memorial arch to the recent martyred missionaries of Shansi. As the band played a rousing march and the dedication gained momentum, with speaker after speaker extolling the bravery of the missionaries who had lost their lives in the battle against ignorance and fear in a distant province of a distant land, Grace had left her friends under the trees and drifted toward the front of the crowd. Once there, she had noticed the young Reverend who glanced repeatedly at the papers in his hand as he prepared to take the stage.

    When he stepped forward, the young man towered over the dais, inspiring hope in the crowd that this chap would carry them away with his words. But, instead, his voice had faltered, and Grace could plainly hear that he had the uncertain rasp of a humble servant of God with a head cold. His eyes did not blaze yet with purpose, although he vowed to move to China that very year, but instead blinked under eyebrows that twitched unpredictably. Young Grace felt a surprising tenderness toward this man who bowed awkwardly when he finished speaking. Later she would wonder how she could possibly have sensed his power and potential based on that uninspired performance.

    As she looked around now at the crowded chapel and her husband's flushed face and heroic stance there above them all, she allowed herself to consider that her direction had changed forever, not only because of the message of sacrifice and endurance that the young Reverend had conveyed on the first day she had met him but because the sun had glinted off his fine spectacles and the hand that held his remarks had trembled most sincerely. There was no doubt in her mind that she had chosen her path well, especially because he had become enamored of her, too, not long after her arrival in Fenchow-fu, and their destiny together had been sealed.