My Last Empress (7 page)

Urgently I set out on a mule to see her former home, traveling among the country roads thronged with filial tomb-sweeping crowds. The mountainous terrain jutted and strutted, and yet I was as clear-eyed as an owl on a moonlit night, vying for the first glimpse of a fabled and dappled horizon.

Jealousy of another kind suddenly saddened me. I began to mourn not Annabelle’s passing but her life without me. It was emptiness I felt. How I yearned to retrace every single step back in time into her enchanted childhood with her leaning on my arms,
oohing
and
ahhing
over every tree she had climbed, every river she had waded across, every breath she partook, every bird that had shadowed over her in her long summer days and cold winter nights.

Village lads in my wake, I entered the courtyard of her childhood home—Hawthorn House, presently guarded by a blind village man and his seeing son, the former sunning himself, the latter kicking an empty tin cup afoot.

If only the dimpled courtyard bricks could talk, dimpled by a certain pigtailed former dweller’s rope-skipping footfall.
If only the sunken well, dried now, could unleash her muffled echoes, return all her rippled shadows. But such a plea was in vain. It was but empty walls circumventing an empty courtyard, fronting empty rooms, three in number, a faded Jesus portrait still hanging askew in one. The only life attesting to its prior vibrancy was the titular hawthorn tree singularly thriving in this drab watercolor of decay and abandonment, though it having lived would affirm an episodic fable once told me on a long ago summer night by my A.

The Hawthorns delighted in sipping their spring tea under this very tree, betting on whose cup the blossom petals would fall into, the chosen one beholden to brew the next pot. Thrice, Annabelle had said, the petals had blessed her cup.

I fished out a petite silk bag and dusted its premeditated contents—ashes from that fated fire—onto the courtyard ground. This ghost-calling ritual of the Orient—though savagely lacerated by the likes of Dr. Price in the West and his imbecile followers, whose usual tools of crafts ranged from clumsy Geiger counters to oscilloscopes—imminently blurred my vision. Hardly had the last of the gray ashes settled than the ensuing phantasmal vista emerged.

The holes and gaps in the drab, decrepit Hawthorn House were suddenly filled and brushed to life by a rush of greenery of a lively pasture. Sounds and motion of this bygone life came to be.

As if called on by a hidden stage master, upstage walks in a handsome, straight-backed Father H calling dearingly to Mother H, who looks out of her kitchen window with the most adoring expression. Then from the third room, with its gate facing south, strides in my Annabelle, her tiny former
self, white skirt hemmed with green, matching white socks over her trim ankles. She looks nine, if that, skipping her frayed rope toward the courtyard, pigtails swinging to and fro over her shoulders. One glimpse of her and all was gone. Life, as an ebbing tide, was sucked out of the courtyard quadrangle. The sun waned, leaving only the reality of a tree fastened to my mute mule.

“Annie! Annie! You are back,” cried the blind man, his trembling hands touching my nose and my ears. “Finally, you are here.”

I pushed away his fingers, but the crooked digits kept coming back.

“Annie … Annie! Where did she go? She was here only seconds ago,” the blind man persisted.

“Did you say Annie? Reverend Hawthorn’s daughter?”

“Of course. Who else would I be referring to? Her hearty laughter … who could forget?”

“Did you just see her?”

“I saw light shining on this cursed courtyard. Tell me, foreigner, are you a seer? Why is Annie a ghost now? Is she dead?” The old man seemed greatly agitated.

“Yes, burned to death.”

“Dead just like her infant daughter.”

“Her daughter?”

“If you don’t know of her daughter, then you know the Hawthorns not at all.” He spat on the ground.

It was one thing to have a blind one tell you that he saw what you saw, but it was another when he, standing outside your picket fence, could see more than you could from within. In haste I dropped on my knees, begging him to tell me more.

“Are you kneeling?” he asked, his hands brushing over my face and shoulders. “On your feet at once, foreigner.”

“I am merely paying respect to you.”

“If the village Boxer chief smells a whiff of what we saw here, he will behead you,” he warned, dragging me to sit with him on the stone veranda after urging his son to shut the courtyard door, chasing away all the peeping lads that came in my wake.

“You must wonder how I saw what I saw, blind as I am,” said the old man.

I made a murmuring assent.

“I am the gifted one. I see things that ought not to be seen but have to be dealt with nonetheless. After each death of unnatural course, such as hanging, drowning, killing, the ghosts must be chased from the village to the wilderness, to the mountains, or into the water where they belong, depending on the cause of such deaths and the birth sign of the deceased. Some tell the truth as I do, while others tell the people what they desire to hear, making a mockery of our trade. I am pleased to meet one of my kind, albeit an ocean man. But gift I saw and gift you possess.”

“This is a gift?” I shook my head. “It is more like a curse.”

“I was given the gift as one is given a soul upon birth. Always able to see with my inner eyes the ghostly and the dark. If the world hadn’t told me that I had been born without eyeballs, I would not have known what blindness was all about: I am as sighted as the next man. Now do share with this petty blind one how you came to the power.”

Like a shy pupil in the tutelage of divinity, I recounted the death of Annabelle. The old man sagged with sadness,
claiming a fondness for her girlish voice and kindness. Then I talked of my ensuing waves of headaches and swells of dark moods, which led mysteriously to this affliction, and failed attempts to rid myself of her ghost.

“Pray do no such a thing; it would only taint your power, and in some incidences, endanger that shrine that is your person.”

“How do you mean?”

“Can’t you see? It’s not her death or your grief that has led to this power; they merely aided you in bringing to the surface what is innate and inherent in you. Such power is the gift from the divine so that you can shed light on what is dark and murky to the eyes of the ordinary, the souls of the unenlightened populace. It’s your second soul, pressed upon you from the very first breath you partook, a double seeing from the womb of your mother and seed of your father.”

The blind man was a poet. Perturbed, nonetheless, I deigned to ask, “But why can’t I see more, such as other ghosts, other etheric aura, other phantoms in limbo?”

“Because your hostess, the first ghost that you have ever seen, holds you in her captivity. You see, a ghost or its spirit is viable only through you, the earthly host, to effectuate its needs and its urges, and carry out its task left undone on earth. Conversely, you need Annabelle, the initiator who pierced the darkness, to widen the narrow breadth of your window into the other side. My hostess held me in her bondage for the first ten years of my life. It was my very own grandmother’s ghost who did such, only that my young eyes would be shielded from the gory and unsavory. Maybe Annabelle intended the same for you, or maybe she was being her
ghostly self, binding you solely to her service so you would let yourself be ridden hither and thither on errands for her and no others.”

Such commentary jabbed like a needle into my heart. My Annabelle enslaving me? When love was premised upon with lust as its able architect, I delighted in following my sweetheart’s every whim; to be told that I had the seer’s eyes all along and that she was merely a ghostly nymph who had confiscated all that was endowed upon me was another matter.

What is one, Pickens or not, to do with such burden, such weighty premise? How did this threshold-sitting vagabond know anything about a white man who might be crazy enough to be labeled psychotic? Did he know that to make such an overall declaration about a soul, fragile as I, was tantamount to dousing more oil on the flaming fire of madness?

I was about to inquire into the validity of his claim when I heard him intone, “It is faith with which you came. It is conviction in the cause not of your choosing that you must depart our village with. But before you so do, please explain to me why there is no ghost of the infant buried in the backyard where all have claimed that the infant daughter of Annabelle was laid to rest.”

“Annabelle had a daughter?” My head turned suddenly into a hive of buzzing bees as I palely asked the question.

The narration trickled out from the bearded mouth. “Annabelle had just turned thirteen when she went on a short excursion with other church girls to the neighboring township of Lord Wang Dan to give away Bibles and sacks of rice. Other girls returned at sunset but not Annabelle. Sunrise the next day, she returned. She brought with her sacks of
silk. There was no trace of any wounds, no claim of torture as had been rumored, or any ransom sought. She claimed to have studied the sacred book with the warlord that night, and that was all. But little did the Reverend Hawthorn know, in his chambers, that that warlord had made a woman out of her that very night. Such ill-gotten pregnancy soon evidenced itself, much to the shame of the good reverend, triggering the bloodiest battles that this region has ever seen. Annie was later said to have borne a stillborn; the stiff bundle was buried in the backyard.”

In the aftermath of such a tale, fablelike but gruesome, I stumbled around, following the blind man, who followed his seeing son into the weed-grown garden. A cloud of sadness seemed to choke not just my heart but also my vision.

In a narrow shaft of sunlight I perceived the small tombstone that bore the words
“Nina Hawthorn, Loved in eternity by her Lord and family.”

I did not remember when I finally found my way back to Peking, though I did recall a certain tael of silver changing hands from my purse to the seeing blind, upon the urging of the blind one’s son, who prodded me to pay for the story his father told. As an afterthought, I’d given them another tael in the hope that they would continue to guard the house for my loved one, and as a throw-in the old blind seer slipped into my pocket a folded page with some writing on it, with a whisper to the effect that if one is inclined to go full circle as a ghost hunter, such printed words were to be heeded.

In patience I waited for the royal summons to arrive. Cicadas sang from morning till night. The mosquitoes from the stale moat buzzed fatly.
Wutong
trees along the narrow alleys turned immodest green, swinging like the pigtails of rickshaw boys. Occasional thunderstorms slanted their lacerating rain at my windowpane. The humidity from the meridian sun suffocated Peking into a prison of lethargy and inactivity, grinding the city and the Neiwufu, the Imperial Household Department, into a dozing stop.

Boredom, insipid poker games with other legatine staff, drove me to finally open the letter thrust into my departing hand by the blind seer. Under a weak lamp was laid bare before my eyes the densely scribbled passage, unpunctuated and rendered in archaic Chinese:

Such spare words. Such clarity.

To gain entrance into the vastness of my power, Annabelle was merely my first door.

Who is it that shall be my next, and the one after, so that I would be guided to the splendor of my widened vista? Could that bestial warlord, Annabelle’s initiator, be my next? Was he the ghost impersonating the faceless monarch in our former threesome encounter?

Seek him as if he were a friend; know him as if a foe
.

Coincidentally, or maybe not so coincidentally, a certain moodiness evidenced itself on my gaunt face, causing the kind-hearted Mrs. Winthrop to introduce me to a poker mate, Martha Plume, a spinsterly librarian with long stilted legs and a pair of big-knuckled hands that could choke the life out of a book or deck of cards. I thanked Mrs. W for her kindness and let it be known that the pending hermetic Court life would inconvenience even the tritest of an attachment. Such rejection, unbeknownst to me, was taken as a token of my shy nature and modesty, bespeaking of well-bred propriety, making me, who now was on the verge of moving out, even more desirable to a persistent admirer. As I sat waiting for the summons to be issued by my employer, a lengthy storm further rendered any departure moot.