Gods Men (10 page)

“How is it you are alone?” she asked.

He had tried to keep the dangerous blue of his eyes away from her, but when he stole a look at her, he saw that he need not take care. She had cataracts on both eyes, not heavy as yet, but filmed enough to see no more of him than his vague outlines.

“My father died in Peking,” he said truthfully, “and I am going to find my grandfather.”

“Where is your grandfather?” she asked.

“To the east,” he replied.

“I am going eastward, too,” she said. “Let us go together.”

“How far east?” he asked with caution.

She named a small city at the edge of the province.

“How is it you are alone?” he asked in his turn.

“I have no son,” she replied. “Therefore I have no daughter-in-law. But I have a daughter who is married to an ironsmith in the city and I go there to ask for charity. My old man, her father, died last week and I sold the house. We had two thirds of an acre of land. Had I a son I would have stayed on the land. But my fate is evil. My twin sons died together in one day when they were less than a year old.”

She sighed and loosened her collar as though she could not breathe and so her wrinkled neck was bare. Clem saw around it a dirty string on which hung an amulet.

“What is it you wear on your neck, Grandmother?” he asked.

She laughed again, this time half ashamed. “How do I know what it is?” she retorted.

“Where did you get it?” Clem asked.

“Why do you want to know?” the old woman asked suspiciously.

Now the amulet was a strange one for a Chinese woman to wear. It was a small brass crucifix wrapped around with coarse black thread.

“It looks Christian,” Clem said.

The old woman gave him a frightened look. “How does a boy like you know what is Christian?” she demanded, and she buttoned her coat.

“Are you a Christian?” Clem asked softly.

The old woman began to curse. “Why should I be a Christian? The Christians are bad. Our Old Buddha is killing them. You come from Peking; you ought to know that.”

“The cross is good,” Clem said in a whisper.

She stopped in the middle of the road and heard this. “Do you say it is good?” she asked.

“My father believed the cross was good,” Clem said.

“Was your father one of Them?”

Now Clem decided to risk his life. “Yes, and he is dead. They killed him.” All this he said without her knowing that he was not Chinese.

He saw her mobile wrinkled face grow kind. “Let us sit down,” she told him. “But first look east and west and see if there is anyone in sight.”

No one was in sight. The hot noonday sun poured down upon the dusty road.

“Have you eaten?” the old woman asked.

He had been walking for four days and his store of bread was gone. He had still some of the dried mustard wrapped in the cotton kerchief. “I have not eaten,” he said.

“Then we will eat together,” the old woman told him. “I have some loaves here. I made them this morning.”

“I have some dried mustard leaves,” Clem said.

They shared their food and the old woman prattled on. “I asked Heaven to let me meet with someone who could help me on the road. I had not walked above half the time between sunrise and noon when you came. This is because of the amulet.”

“Why do you say Heaven instead of God?” Clem asked.

“It is the same,” the old woman said easily. “The priest said I need not call the name of a foreign god. I may say Heaven as I always have.”

“What priest?” Clem asked.

“I can never remember his name.”

“A foreigner?”

“Foreign, but with black hair and eyes like ours,” the old woman said. “He wore a long robe and he had a big silver cross on his breast. He prayed in a foreign tongue.”

Catholic, Clem thought. “What did this priest say the amulet meant?” he asked.

The old woman laughed. “He told me but I cannot remember. It means good, though—nothing but good.” She looked so cheerful as she chewed the steamed bread, the sun shining on her wrinkled face, that she seemed to feel no pain at being alone.

“Did he teach you no prayers?” Clem asked.

“He did teach me prayers, but I could not remember them. So he bade me say my old O-mi-to-fu that I used to say to our Kwanyin, only when I say it I am to hold the amulet in my hand, so, and that makes the prayer go to the right place in Heaven.”

Wise priest, Clem thought, to use the old prayers for the new god! He had a moment's mild uncensuring cynicism. Prayers and faith seemed dream stuff now that his father was dead.

The old woman was still talking. “He is dead, that piteous priest. If he had been alive I would have gone to find him. He lived in a courtyard near his own temple—not a temple, you understand, of our Buddha. There were gods in it, a man hanging on a wooden shape—bleeding, he was. I asked, ‘Why does this man bleed?' and the priest said, ‘Evil men killed him.' There was also a lady god like the Kwanyin, but with only two hands. She had white skin and I asked the priest if she were a foreigner and he said no, it was only that the image was made in some outer country where the people are white-skinned, but if the image had been made here the lady would have skin like ours, for this is her virtue that wherever she is, she looks like the people there. The man on the cross was her son, and I said why did she not hide him from the evil men and the priest said she could not. He was a willful son and he went where he would, I suppose.”

“How is it that the priest is dead?” Clem asked with foreboding.

The old woman answered still cheerfully. “He was cut in pieces by swordsmen and they fed the pieces to the dogs and the dogs sickened and so they said he was evil. I dared not tell them that I knew he was not evil. It was the day after my old man died and I had no one to protect me.”

They sat in the sun, finished now with their meal, and Clem hearing of the priest's dreadful end felt shadows of his own fall upon him. “Come,” he said, “let us get on our way, Grandmother.”

He decided that he would keep his secret to himself. Yet as the day went on a good plan came to him. He could pretend to be blind, keep his blue eyes closed, feel his way, act as the old woman's grandson, and so they could walk all day more quickly and safely than by night. Then too he could use the money which Mr. Fong had given him, which until now he dared not use at an inn. Yet to make the pretense it was needful to tell the old woman who he was and she was so simple that he could not make up his mind whether he dared to trust his life into her hands.

When night drew near and a village showed itself in a distant cluster of lights, he thought he could tell her. He knew by now that she was good and only what she said she was, and if he were with her he might keep her awake to danger. If by chance she betrayed him as not Chinese, then he must make his escape as best he could.

So before they came to the village he took her aside, much to her bewilderment, for she did not know why he plucked her sleeve. Behind a large date tree, where he could see on all sides, he told her.

“Grandmother, you have been honest with me, but I have not told you who I am.”

“You are not a bandit!” she exclaimed in some terror.

“No—I am someone worse for you. My father was a foreigner, like your priest.”

“Is it true?” she exclaimed. She strained her eyes and then put up her hand to feel his face.

“It is true,” he said, “and my father and mother and my sisters were killed as the priest was killed and I go to the sea to find a ship to take me to my own country.”

“Pitiful—pitiful,” she murmured. “You are not very old. You are not yet grown.”

“No,” Clem said. “But I am alone, and so I am glad that you met with me.”

“It was the amulet,” she said. “Heaven saw us two lonely ones walking the same road and brought us together.”

“Grandmother,” he went on, “you cannot see my eyes, but they are not black as the priest's eyes were.”

“Are they not?” she asked surprised. “What color are they, then?”

“Blue,” he told her.

“Blue?” she echoed. “But only wild beasts have blue eyes.”

“So have many of my people,” he said.

She shuddered. “Ah, I have heard that foreigners are like wild beasts!”

“My father was not,” Clem replied, “and my mother was very gentle. You would have liked her.”

“Did she speak our tongue?”

“Yes,” Clem said, and found that he could not tell more of his mother.

“Ai-ya,” the old woman sighed. “There is too much evil everywhere.”

“Grandmother,” Clem began again.

“I like to hear you call me so,” the old woman said. “I shall never have a grandson, since my sons are dead.”

“Will you help me?” Clem asked.

“Surely will I,” she replied.

And so he told her his plan and she listened, nodding. “A half-blind old woman leading a blind grandson,” she repeated.

“We can go to the village inn there and sleep under a roof. I have slept every night in the canes, and two nights it rained.”

“I have some money,” she said, fumbling in her waist.

“I also,” Clem said. “Let us spend mine first.”

“No, mine.”

“But mine, Grandmother, because when I get to my own country it will be no use to me.”

She was diverted by this. “How can money be no use?”

“We have a different coin,” he replied.

They began to walk again and planned as they went. Far from being stupid as he had thought her, she was shrewd and planned as well as he did. All her life she had been the wife of a small poor man compelled to evade the country police and tax gatherers and she knew how to seem what she was not and to hide what she was.

An hour later Clem was walking down the village street with her, his eyes shut, holding in his hand one end of a stick the other end of which she held. She led the way to the inn on the single street and asked for two places on the sleeping platform for herself and her grandson, and the innkeeper gave them without more questions than such men usually ask of those they have not seen before. The old woman told a simple story, much of it true, how her husband and son were both dead together of the same disease and how she had left only this grandson and they were returning to her old city where she had been reared and where she might find her daughter married to the ironsmith.

“What is his name?” the innkeeper asked.

“He is named Liu the Big,” the old woman said.

A traveler spoke up at this and said, “There is an ironsmith surnamed Liu who lives inside the east gate of that city and he forged me an iron for a wheel of my cart, when I came westward through there. He has the finger off one hand.”

“It is he,” the old woman said. “He lost the finger when he was testing a razor he had ground. It went through his finger like flame through snow.”

Clem passed the night lying among the travelers on a wide bed of brick overlaid with straw and slept in spite of the garlic-laden air because for the while he felt safe again.

Nights and days Clem spent thus, always as the grandson of the old woman, and each day she grew more fond of him. She told him many curious tales of her early childhood and she asked him closely about his own people and why he was here instead of in the land where he belonged and marveled that he knew nothing at all of his ancestors.

“You foreigners,” she said one day, “you grow mad with god-fever. There is something demon in your gods that they drive you so. Our gods are reasonable. They ask of us only a few good works. But for your gods good works are not enough. They must be praised and told they are the only gods and all others are false.”

She laughed and said cheerfully, “Heaven is full of gods, even as the earth is full of people, and some are good and some are evil and there is no great One Over All.”

Clem did not argue with her. There was no faith left in him except a small new faith in the goodness of a few people. Mr. Fong and his wife had been good to him and so now was this old woman good, and he listened to her as they walked over the miles, side by side unless they came among people when he took the end of the stick she held and pretended to be blind. From her lips he learned a sort of coarse wisdom as he went, and he measured it against what he had learned before and found it true. Thus, the old woman said, the great fault with Heaven and whatever gods there were was that they had not arranged that food could fall every night from the sky, enough for everybody to eat so that there could be no cause for quarrel.

“If the belly is full,” she said, “if we could know that it would always be full, men would be idle and laugh and play games like children, and then we would have peace and happiness.”

These words, Clem thought, were the wisest he had ever heard. If his father had needed to take no thought for food, then his faith might have been perfect. Assured of food, his father could have preached and prayed and become a saint.

Thus talking and thinking, sleeping in inns at night, Clem and the old woman reached the city where she must stop. He had noticed for a day or two that she seemed in an ill humor, muttering often to herself. “Well, why should I not?” this she asked herself. Or she said, “Who cares whether I—,” or “My daughter does not know if I live.”

Before they got into the city, on an afternoon after a thunderstorm during which they had taken refuge in a wayside temple where there were gods but no priests, the old woman came out with what she had been muttering to herself.

“Grandson, I ought to go to the coast with you. What will you do if I leave you? Some rascal will see your eyes and think to gain glory with the Empress and he will kill you and take your head to the capital to show for prize money.”

Clem refused at once such kindness. “Grandmother, you are old and tired. You told me yesterday that your feet were swollen.”