Dreams of the Red Phoenix (22 page)

“Do not trouble self.” Cook set down the bowl of porridge
and clapped the dust from his hands. “You prepare instead for
the other side.”

Cook's friendly-sounding words descended over Caleb, as
heavy and uncomfortable as the wool blanket that weighed him
down. Cook, of all people, grasped that he had outstayed his wel
come in this life. He was but skin and bones, and many of those
broken. But his mind would not stop. It had the tenacity of his
old mule, which had miraculously survived the fall. But luckily
for the animal, it had been shot in the head soon afterward and
finally set free. We only reserve such kindness for animals, Caleb
thought. His eyes grew moist again as he realized that the mule's
release was what he longed for, too.

Cook stepped away to allow him privacy, thoughtful as al
ways. Caleb could rest now. But then the young man came near,
Cook's son and his son's friend. Caleb couldn't recall the young
man's name as he pulled up the stool to sit beside the cot. He
heard whispered Chinese words. Then the boy leaned in closer
and placed his round, handsome face in Caleb's line of sight.

“Esteemed Reverend,” he said in quite good English and
bowed his head.

Caleb wished with all his heart he could reach out and touch
the black hair and fine, though already creased, forehead. The
children of this country grew up far too early, Caleb thought,
and faced hardships far worse than those endured by most
adults back home. Chinese boys did not tromp into the moun
tains in springtime in search of small game and mild adventure.
They did not discover through play a boundless sense of them
selves, as Caleb had with his older brothers. A spasm of pain
shot down his spine at the thought, and he scolded himself for
remembering.

“I have seen your son,” the boy said.

Caleb grimaced.

“No, it is all right, Reverend. He is well.”

Caleb bit his bottom lip as the pain suddenly returned. He
didn't want to frighten the young fellow, but he sensed an uncon
trollable scream rising up inside him.

“Charles has come to the decision to leave. Not just our town
and province but China.”

With great effort, Caleb fought back the urge to moan or ex
claim. He even tried to make the corners of his mouth rise into
a smile.

“That is what you wanted, yes?” the boy asked. “I told him so.”

Caleb couldn't help the moan that finally seeped out of him.

“Please do not worry,” the boy said and laid a gentle palm on
his chest. “I did not tell him you are alive, or that I see you. But
I said to him that I am certain you want him and his mother to
leave the country and be safe.”

Cook came over, touched the boy on the shoulder, and said
something to him in Chinese. The young man bowed his head
again.

“I must go,” he said. “You are greatly missed, Reverend.
Charles-Boy loves you very much.”

Caleb could feel his eyes brimming over, and he no longer
cared. The boy wiped his own eyes with his sleeve, and that was
fine with Caleb, too.

Cook remained dry-eyed as always as he said, “Enough. Rev
erend sleep now.”

Caleb lifted his finger, but the boy was gone. Caleb hated for
him to go and wished with all his heart that he could have asked
questions about his family. But his thoughts were coming slowly
today, staying deep within. The boy had said that his son was all
right. That was what mattered. There was no need for words
beyond that.

As sleep started to slip over Caleb again, a clear, powerful
thought struck him, and he was suddenly wide awake. Like
his wife and son, he, too, must move on to the next stage. He
must leave this life behind. His stubborn body had refused to re
lease him, but Caleb knew a way around that. Every soldier in
the camp carried a weapon—a rifle, pistol, knife, or bow. These
young men had been raised on farms around livestock and un
derstood that an animal with a broken back was done. He would
ask the best of them, the one with the keenest intellect and deep
est sympathies. When he awoke, Caleb would ask Captain Hsu
to kill him.

Some hours later, he awoke again and was alone on his cot at the
mouth of the cave. Midday sunlight drenched the leaves, but the
cool, moist air from inside the mountain felt refreshing. On fine,
clear summer days like this one, Caleb recalled, he and his broth
ers had tromped out into sunlight, brushed through high, wild
grass, and taken the paths up the mountainside. They knew the
trails by the rocks and trees that marked each bend. In mid-Au
gust in the White Mountains, berries weighed the branches low,
tempting the boys. They knew it was still too early but couldn't
resist and popped them into their mouths only to spit them back
out again. “You have to learn to wait,” his oldest brother would
say as they washed their stained hands in an icy brook and pressed
on toward the peak.

Caleb understood now that those familiar mountains had been
his testing ground for this mountain in China. So far away from
where he had begun, and yet he knew the feel of the damp walls
and the pebbled floor that surrounded him. For hadn't he and
his brothers taken shelter in caves many times? When the wind
whipped up and sudden bouts of rain came careening across the
open sky, first darkening the mountainside across the way, then
releasing torrents, the boys would duck into a cave to wait it out.
That was all he needed to do now, Caleb told himself: wait it out.

As he and his brothers waited, they watched the rainfall and
told stories. His oldest brother was the best at creating an enter
taining chill in the younger ones. Rumors and tall tales circulat
ed among the country folk and in the mountain villages. Cer
tain stories caught hold and couldn't be shaken for generations.
Once a group of boys—not Caleb and his brothers but boys of his
grandfather's era—had lifted their lantern to see down a defunct
mining shaft and spotted with their own eyes the bones of a man,
his clothing stripped away and the whiteness of his skeleton shin
ing as if lit from within. The boys raced home, but when they
returned to the woods with their fathers, the skeleton was gone.
Ever after, it was said that the ghost of that fallen miner roamed
the hills.

Caleb tried to chuckle at how that story had kept him awake
many nights until he was almost his son's age now. Never a brave
or stoical child, Caleb had been unable to banish it from his mind,
especially before sleep. It had haunted him the way Lian's bed
time stories bothered Charles until Caleb had finally forbidden
their amah to tell them. But the damage had been done: Charles,
like his father, had a too-active imagination. It tortured him,
even when every rational explanation offered by grown-ups in
sisted otherwise. He and his son were weak in that way, Caleb
knew, and susceptible to worry. But he loved Charles for it, for
he equated a fanciful mind with a generous heart.

Caleb could no longer pretend to maintain a self-imposed
stricture on memory. Grasping that he would not live much lon
ger, especially if he enlisted Captain Hsu's help, Caleb decided
that he might as well let the stories from his past cascade over
him as readily as the tears that he let fall willy-nilly. During the
endless hours when he lay half awake and half asleep in the cave,
he would allow himself to recall and invent and dream, his mind
roaming—in search of what, he wasn't sure.

Another story his brother had once told wove its way into his
thoughts. A hiker had wandered off the Appalachian Trail as
an early winter squall rumbled down from Mount Washington.
The young man took cover in a cave, where, wet and cold, he
shivered and ate the last of his food. Snow quickly burdened the
pine boughs and obscured the shapes of rocks and cliff sides. If he
ventured out again into the rising drifts, he might take a misstep
and tumble over the edge. So the hiker stayed in the cold of the
cave. As the sun went down behind the hills, the world outside
became as blank and forbidding as a sheet of paper in a platen, its
purpose not yet known to the writer. Night fell, and the young
hiker pulled leaves around himself to try to keep warm, but he
knew it would be impossible. He would not survive to see dawn
paint the whiteness with a gentle, rosy glow.

But the young hiker did awake the next morning. He stum
bled out of the icy cave and found the trail not far away. At the
general store in the nearest village, he drank black coffee with
trembling hands. The owner's wife, old Mrs. Knox, didn't look
up from her crossword puzzle as she asked, “Bear save you, did
he?” The young man nodded into his cup, realizing she must be
right and no longer amazed by anything. He would spend the
rest of days searching for an embrace as warm and miraculous as
the one that had surrounded him in that cave.

Caleb shivered, and Cook appeared and added a second blan
ket to the weight that already bore down on him. He shut his eyes
and wished for the warmth of that surprising creature, though the
summer was full and dry outside, and to anyone else, the air was
mild. By mid-August back home, the birch leaves would have
begun to flip like coins in a pool of golden light, registering the
coming season long before anyone else sensed it. Faint, glowing,
upright friends, those white birches had been like family to Ca
leb. His grandfather, eyeglasses catching the sun, trousers creased
sharply, and his minister's collar worn tight. All the men on that
side, including Caleb himself, were as thin as young birches, their
tall, sturdy New England bodies bending into the wind.

Like the poet, Caleb had seen birches arched by snow, limbs
caught under a crust of ice. He had freed them more than once,
though he never chose to ride one, as Frost and Caleb's more
adventurous brothers had. He was too young when they had
wrapped their skinny legs around the trunks to make a winsome
whip. Caleb had watched instead, snow frozen inside his woolen
mittens and up his sleeves, the cuffs chafing him with the red
wrists of winter. Scrawny and made mostly of bone, he was often
sick as a child and easily scarred by the elements, drawn on like
the birches by shadowy lines that he understood now had fore
told his end. He was a lone birch, too pale in a forest of pines,
weaker than his sturdier relatives.

What he wanted now more than anything was to be amid that
glade of white birches on the trail toward home. He longed to
see them now—his brothers, his family, and those shimmering
branches a little farther ahead.

When he next awoke, night had fallen. He did not move his
head but let the sounds of Chinese voices wash over him. Cook
and another man spoke rapidly in the local dialect. Caleb had
stopped trying to understand that foreign tongue, and perhaps
because he no longer made an effort, the Chinese cadences
wormed their way into his mind. After a few moments, he sur
prised himself by recognizing a phrase or two.

The Japanese had taken his wife into custody. He heard Cook
and the other man discussing it. He wanted to call Cook over and
ask for further explanation. By the urgency of the men's voices,
he could tell that this news had just arrived and that action was
being taken. Captain Hsu was no doubt already doing his best to
correct the situation through his many channels with the elders
of the town. And Reverend Wells, never the most competent at
dealing with others, would also rise to the occasion. Caleb as
sumed that some mistake had been made. The Japanese couldn't
possibly want to hold his wife for long. She was an American,
after all, and a woman, for heaven's sake.