River of Dust (22 page)

    Grace turned abruptly from the fireplace and cleared her throat, attempting to hide what Ahcho suspected were tears. "You must bring me to the Reverend at once," she announced.

    Ahcho clasped his hands behind his back and bent forward as if he had not heard her correctly. "Madam?"

    She turned to Mai Lin. "I shall see my husband now. I have important family business to discuss with him."

    Mai Lin reached for Mistress Grace's arm, but she pulled away.

    "I don't want to hear either of you telling me that I can't go. After I see my husband, I shall sleep for days and will be a most agreeable patient. But if you make me stay here, I swear I will not rest for a single moment and will make us all miserable."

    She crossed her arms over her chest and waited for a reply. Ahcho didn't dare shoot a confirming glance at Mai Lin, but he could tell by the clucking sounds emanating from her that she agreed with him that the mistress's plan was most absurd.

    "Why, I don't know where the Reverend is," he said.

    Grace stamped a delicate foot on the carpet, and a cloud of yellow dust wafted around her. "Of course you do," she said. "You've known all along. You know far more than you let on. I don't hold it against you, but this is most urgent. You must take me to him."

    Now Ahcho did look at Mai Lin, but she could only offer a mystified expression. What had come over their feeble mistress, Ahcho wanted to ask, to make her suddenly so strong a soul?

    "I really ought to change out of my wedding dress, but we haven't the time," Mistress Grace continued. "I saw the Master's traveling coat hanging on the hook in the hall. Fetch it for me, please, Mai Lin."

    Ahcho used his calmest voice as he said, "I don't mean to offend, Mistress, but you don't look well enough to make an expedition. You appear to be quite ill. Wouldn't you rather be in your bed with your baby at your side?"

    Mistress Grace appeared to blanch for a moment at this commonsense suggestion, but she answered, "It is precisely because of my condition that I can't hesitate. I shall ride on donkey back. I have done it before. I am quite able."

    Mai Lin returned with the Reverend's ragged traveling coat and held it up. The mistress slipped her arms into it. When she took an awkward spin in the long coat, it swished and more loess hovered in the air before settling on the rug.

    "It's good you don't mind donkey back," Ahcho said to humor her, "because we no longer have a wagon."

    "Is that so?" Grace asked with little concern in her voice, no sign that she grasped her situation. "How about a horse?"

    "Long gone, I'm afraid."

    "Ah," she said brightly. "Well, as I said, I'll be fine on a donkey. Thank you, Ahcho. I will wait outside on the porch for you. It is a lovely spring afternoon. The fresh air will be good for my lungs. But do come along and don't dawdle, please. I must see my husband today, and nightfall will soon be upon us."

    Ahcho bowed, but he was not pleased. When the screen door wheezed shut and they heard the mistress's footsteps recede, Ahcho and Mai Lin stared at one another with wide eyes.

    "Aieee!" she said in a harsh whisper. "They are cuckoo, the two of them."

    "Don't be disrespectful," he said. "The Reverend is a great man. He built the roads and the hospital and— "

    "Yes, yes," Mai Lin said, "I know about his accomplishments, but that was some time ago. He's no longer a great man."

    "I disagree. The Reverend has faced terrible trials recently, but he will always be a great man, and his wife a fine lady."

    Mai Lin waved her hand at him.

    "They just need rest and peace," Ahcho said. "That's all."

    "True," Mai Lin had to concede, but then she sidled up to him and poked at his chest with a bent finger. "Which, I do not need to tell you, they won't find on a dangerous journey to the Gobi Desert. And have you considered that their new baby might be kidnapped out there like the other one?"

    She looked up at him with searching eyes, but Ahcho was not a man to discuss grave things lightly. It worried him terribly that a family's fate rested in his hands. He was no god, nor had he ever been meant to be one. For weeks now, he had tossed and turned sleeplessly. He wasn't any closer to understanding what to do than the evening he had shared a bottle with the traveling trader who had told him of the golden-haired prince who was surely better off wherever he was than this sorry lot here.

    Ahcho pinched shut his lips and looked away.

    "Sometimes," Mai Lin said with a coy singsong in her voice, "the Fates decide things for us. Our role is simply to sit back and watch."

    Ahcho gazed into her sparkling dark eyes. For once, she appeared to intend nothing but good. As annoying as Mai Lin could be, she was loyal and sometimes even wise. For a rare moment, he allowed himself to relax. Perhaps, just this once, she was right. The Good Lord was watching over them all. Ahcho, as a simple servant of God, had only to steer the donkey on its path.

A
s the other families attended the burial of the Martins' daughter, Mistress Grace and Ahcho plodded out from the compound and into dusk. She fussed for many miles, but he didn't listen. She was flabbergasted that they had only one donkey now. Had she known that the old gentleman would have to walk the whole way, she would have insisted on some other mode of transport. He didn't wish to be disrespectful, but this was a ridiculous notion. Nor did he mention that he had borrowed the donkey from the Martins by bribing their number-two boy with a precious cigarette. This sorry animal was one of the very last beasts of burden in the compound and had to be returned to them without fail this same night so that it could cart that family away the next morning.

    On they walked, Ahcho holding the reins of the tired animal. As he tromped along before it, Grace sat perched upon its back in her long white dress, both legs dangling over one side against a thick blanket. It was not lost on him that they resembled that blessed man and woman on their way to Bethlehem. Although he did not mean to suggest, even in his mind, that they were that sort of couple. He wished only that he could promise his mistress as warm a greeting as the shepherds had given the Virgin Mary on that deep winter night so long ago. If only he could bring her to as pure and simple a setting as the stable where the straw had been warm and the animals had stood guard. He longed, most of all, for her to hear angels singing all around. He liked to think of the cherubim, those chubby babies whose cheeks were always pink and whose voices no doubt rang out like high and happy church bells. He longed for his mistress to hear such sweet music and not the frightening cries of the banshees that cascaded down from the craggy mountains in the near distance.

    But he knew too well the sort of place where he was taking her, and that by doing so, he had become an altogether different character from one inspired by the Good Book. He was now like Judas, a man who loved his master so, but through some will not entirely his own was forced to betray him. This part of the story Ahcho had never fully understood. He needed the Reverend to instruct him again on this most disturbing section of the Bible. For he had grasped that the betrayal was wrong, and a sign of human weakness, and yet it was somehow also blessed, for only through this betrayal had Jesus been brought back to humankind as a true God.

    Ahcho shook his head at this paradox of faith and fate, evil and goodness. It reminded him of the old superstitions, which he refused to believe any longer but which crept into his thinking just the same. Somehow Judas's story made sense, and yet it did not in any rational way. Ahcho fancied himself a man of science, as he had been taught by his master, and so preferred for things to be explicable. And yet sometimes they clearly were not. If only the Reverend were here.

    Ahcho knew that his master would not want Mistress Grace to find him at his current location, and yet, for some reason that only God, and perhaps the great Reverend, could understand, it had fallen to Ahcho to bring her to him. As they traipsed over the dry, rocky ground and each footfall ached, he kept repeating the story in his mind. Judas had been deeply loved by the Lord. And Judas had loved the Lord every bit as much, if not more, than the other disciples. Yet somehow that love had turned and twisted and turned again, in the manner of the desert wind that lifted the sand into the air at sunset now, swirling around Ahcho's boots and around the poorly shod hoofs of this last, forlorn donkey. Ahcho's mouth filled with the sorrowful grit that Judas must have tasted, too.

    The rocky trail had passed through the plains, and the foothills grew nearer. Ahcho tried to think of the words that the Reverend would have used to admire the dark purple shadows, but he couldn't recall even a single poetic phrase. He chastised himself for not better absorbing the great man's wisdom. It was as if all the profound lessons he had learned were slipping away in his master's absence.

    In the last light of day, Ahcho turned toward the abandoned hamlet. Having lived in Fenchow-fu all his sixty years, he knew every trail through the plains. He could have shut his eyes and still known the way. And yet the landscape around them was too mysterious to ever be truly grasped. The sun hung low in the sky, and the moon had also risen. Orange sunset bathed the mistress's face in a golden glow, but when Ahcho turned to see a dead tree by a dry riverbed, or the stark boulder that marked the last turn in the road, these things stood silhouetted and silver against a darkening backdrop. The brightness of day ebbed before his eyes, and all was sketched in charcoal. The edges became smudged as each thing grew softer and more forgiving. The cool night air caressed his cheeks and dried the sweat from his brow. Ahcho wished with all his heart that this hallowed peacefulness could last, but he knew better. The night was only the night and the desert as menacing as ever.

    "Not much farther, Mistress," he said. Then he bowed his head and added too softly for her to hear, "May God and the Reverend forgive me."

A
hcho placed his aged fingers upon the rope handle of the door that hung now on only one hinge. The wind, suddenly up, rushed across the desert miles and shook it slightly, as if insisting they enter. He looked down upon Mistress Grace and wanted to brush aside her strands of hair covered in golden loess, but he did not. Ahcho did, however, think it appropriate to brush the yellow loess from the shoulders of the Reverend's traveling coat that she wore. He wished he had his whisk broom to do the job properly. His fingers left marks on the oilcloth as if the mistress had been pawed by a bear. The front of her gown where the dust had crept under the coat was clearly ruined. A mustard-yellow tint had seeped into the fine lace so completely that Mai Lin would never get it close to white again. Their mistress appeared as bedraggled as a street urchin, which suited this setting more than she could know.

    "Perhaps you would prefer to wait out here, and I will bring the Reverend to you? You will have a moment to compose yourself, and I can help the Reverend do the same."

    "Dear Ahcho," she said with that same unreal, happy lilt in her voice, "you are such a good fellow, but you mustn't try so hard to save us from ourselves."

    She chuckled faintly, and then the coughing began. Ahcho knew his mistress was not well in several crucial ways. Her body was still weak from childbirth and also wracked with illness, but he worried just as much about her mind. He let her lean into him as her narrow shoulders heaved with the paroxysms, and he could feel her delicate body shudder under the massive coat.

    Ahcho looked about to find a seat for her, but there was not a bench nor a log nor even a rock in the deserted courtyard.

    "I believe we should retreat," he said more emphatically. "I will put you back on the donkey, and I can trot us home to safety. You will be asleep in your bed in no time."

    When her coughing finally subsided, she looked up with a scarlet face lined by yellow dust. Yellow loam glistened on her chapped lips, and more mixed with spittle on her chin. Her eyelashes stuck together to form stars encrusted by it. Poor girl, he thought, for in that moment, she resembled a child more than a woman. A frightened child made dimly aware of her mortality by the onslaught of a fever and a cough more than by ever having seen life played out in others. She was still so innocent— ignorant, really— and more desperate than she would acknowledge.

    "Please, Mistress Grace," he said with unusual familiarity, "we must leave before it is too late."

    She reached for his hand, and he hoped she was finally about to heed his words. But instead, she lifted it to the rope handle, turned, and pushed open the door.

    The dark room before them swirled as motes of dust were caught in the last streaks of day. Sunset skidded over the threshold, exposing emptiness— a chamber that had once held buckwheat grain or sacks of hemp waiting to be taken to market. Dried game may once have hung from the low rafters. Now a swag of herbs swayed in the afternoon breeze with a lonely rustling.

    "I see I'm wrong. No one's here," Ahcho said. "I brought you all this way for nothing. So sorry! We will go now."

    Grace stepped down onto the dirt floor and held up her hand. "Sh-sh-sh," she whispered as she walked deeper into the room.

    Ahcho, practically stumbling over her heels, repeated, "Please, Madam, we go."

    But now she had reached the door that led into the second chamber and smiled at him over her shoulder.

    "I must warn you," he began, but it was too late.

    Grace had turned the handle and pushed open the second wooden plank. Smoke curled out from the darkness of the back chamber, and Ahcho followed his mistress as she continued toward the lamplight. More than the stinging smoke, he hated the stench. Ahcho pulled out his handkerchief, one of the master's own, and offered it to the mistress, but she shook her head. He lifted the thin fabric to his nose and tried not to gag. Mistress Grace did not stop but proceeded into the room, which slowly came into focus as Ahcho's eyes adjusted to the dim light.