Homesick (9 page)

“You don't understand,” I cried. “You and Mother will never understand. I was waiting for Miriam to grow. I knew she'd understand. She was the only one. I was counting on her. I
needed
her.”

I looked up at my father. His head was back on the headrest, his eyes were closed. Tears were streaming down his cheeks. “I do understand, Jean,” he said. And we went on rocking and rocking together.

4

AFTER MY FATHER LEFT THIS TIME FOR HANKOW, he didn't come back at all. Communist soldiers had begun to attack Wuchang (the city across the river from Hankow) and he was helping to set up hospitals for the sick and wounded. He wrote that we should come home as soon as Mother was able in case the riv erboats stopped running, so in the middle of September, even though Mother could walk only a little, we went back down the mountain. Kurry was shut up tight in a basket on my lap, and the Jordans, who were traveling all the way to Hankow with us, led our procession.

I wasn't sorry to leave Kuling. The bluebells and the tiger lilies had dried up and dropped off their stems. And I was glad to get away from the wind. Every night it came howling down from the mountaintop as if it were looking for something lost. It shook the trees inside out, rattled at doors, banged at shutters. Then it would stop for breath. Not there, it seemed to say. Not there. Then it would begin again.
Whooo, whooo,
going back to all the same places it had been, looking and looking. Some nights it never gave up. Even in a war, I thought, I would be safer in Hankow than in these mountains and with a wind that might, for all I knew, be looking for me. Maybe in Hankow my mother would get well quickly so I wouldn't have to worry about upsetting her. Maybe sometime I could talk out loud about once having had a real baby sister with fingernails that had to be cut.

Not yet, of course. My mother was carried down the mountain on a stretcher, and although she got up for meals on the boat, she spent most of the time lying down in our cabin. When we approached Hankow, she went on deck and stretched out on a long chair.

“It looks just the same, doesn't it?” she said.

And it did. Even from the middle of the river I could see the plane trees marching up the Bund in their white socks. (Their socks were painted on to keep bugs away, my father said.) As we came closer, I saw that there were more coolies on the dock than usual, more jostling, more noise, but I thought nothing of it. Just coolies. There was nothing that looked like war.

Then the gangplank was lowered and my father bounded on the deck in his white panama hat and his white duck suit. He hugged us both, but Mother got the first hug and the longer one because of course she was the one to worry about. He shook hands with the Jordans. “This may be the last boat to get through,” he announced triumphantly. My father loved to set records: to be the last, the first, the fastest, to get through what he called Narrow Squeaks.

He explained that he'd borrowed the Hulls' Dodge sedan (which the Y.M.C.A. had bought) and parked it close by on the Bund. Did my mother think she could walk that far?

It really wasn't far and when my mother said yes, she could, my father motioned for coolies to carry our luggage to the car. I think he suspected there might be trouble because he stood on the gangplank and held up four fingers, as if he were trying to keep more coolies from coming on board. Mr. Jordan, a wide man, blocked the gangplank by standing right behind my father.

But suddenly there was a roar from the dock and thirty or more coolies stormed up the gangplank, lifted my father and Mr. Jordan right off their feet and set them down on the deck. They circled around our pile of luggage (ten pieces), shouting, grabbing up suitcases and bundles, even pulling the briefcase out of my father's hand. One coolie, seeing the basket I was holding, tried to pull it away. I clung tight.

“This is not baggage,” I shouted. “It's alive.” When he didn't let go, I kicked him on the shin. “It's a baby tiger!” I yelled. The coolie glanced at a tall, pockmarked man who stood at the edge of the crowd, each hand tucked, Chinese fashion, up his other sleeve. He was better dressed than the coolies and seemed to be the boss. He motioned for the coolie to leave me alone.

By this time five coolies had taken charge of the baggage. The others had backed off but had not left the boat. “Pay now,” they shouted. “Make the foreign devils pay now.” The tall, pockmarked man unfolded his arms; in one hand he held a knife.

The cost of carrying a bag had always been five coppers, so for eleven bags (including the briefcase), the total should have been fifty-five cents. Today my father handed a twenty-cent piece to each of the five coolies which was, of course, almost double the normal rate.

“I know you fellows are having hard times,” my father said.

The coolies threw the money on the deck as if it were dirt. All the coolies began chanting: “Fifty cents a bag! Fifty cents! Fifty cents!”

I could see my father set his chin in his stubborn, not-giving-in way. Then he glanced at my mother and without another word he opened his wallet and pulled out five single dollars, one for each coolie and an extra fifty cents for the man with the briefcase.

As we followed the coolies off the boat, I thought the trouble was over. Some of the coolies lost interest when we reached the dock and went their own way, but some, including the boss, stayed with us. When we reached the stone steps that led to the Bund, the five coolies plunked the baggage down. That was as far as they went for a dollar, they said. They each needed two dollars more to finish the job.

My father's chin turned hard as stone. He looked at the boss. “We will go on,” he said, “or I will call the police.” He raised his arm as if he were about to call the police, but the boss pointed his knife at him. Other coolies produced knives.

“If you call the police,” the boss said, “you will be dead by the time they get here.”

I felt my knees go weak and tremble. I was surprised, because I didn't know that people's knees really shook when they were scared. I had supposed that writers of books just said that in the same way as they made happy endings at the last minute. As I looked at my father's chin and at the men with their knives, I knew no one was going to give in. Only a writer could save us now, I thought.

Suddenly Lin Nai-Nai nudged me and pointed to the Bund which as usual was lined with rickshas parked on both sides of the street, but there were no coolies with the rickshas. All of them, up and down the street, were running toward us. In a moment they had surrounded us.

“This way, Mr. Gau. Hurry. This way,” one of the coolies cried. I recognized him. My father had helped him once when he was in trouble and he'd been our friend ever since. He must have seen what was going on and called the others. Forming a double line that led to the Dodge sedan, they hurried us and our baggage into the car while they stood guard. My father and the Jordans slid into the front seat, my mother, Lin Nai-Nai, and I into the back. The ricksha coolies stayed until we had the car started and were off the street. It was a grand rescue. I didn't think there was a writer in the whole world who could have done better.

But I was afraid something terrible might have happened to my mother. My father and the Jordans were all asking how she was and she said she was all right and she did seem to be. I put my hand on her knees and they weren't even shaking. Maybe she was better already.

As soon as we were inside the house, I let poor Kurry out of her basket and we all gave a big sigh, glad to be safe again.

My father leaned against the door. “Well,” he said proudly, “that was a Narrow Squeak!” Probably he was already thinking what a good story this would make when he wrote home, but I planned to write first.

We went into the living room where my mother stretched out on the sofa and my father began talking about what had been going on in Hankow. Since the Jordans were leaving the next day, he wanted them to hear everything, so he went on and on, the way he did when he was taking Dr. Carhart's place and preaching a sermon. I paid no attention; it was just more Chinese-fighting talk. Who was going to rule China. Who was going to beat whom. It was like a Victrola record that had been playing ever since I was born. Then suddenly my father interrupted the record to speak to me.

“You'll be interested in this news, Jean,” he said. “The British School is not going to open this fall and Miss Williams has gone back to England.”

“You're joking!” I cried.

“Cross my heart,” my father said.

Like all good news, it was hard to believe. I tried to imagine it. No more Miss Williams ever. No more worrying about Ian Forbes or the king of England or prisoner's base.

“We'll have lessons together,” my mother said.

I nodded, thinking how I'd study my favorite subjects: poetry and George Washington and the map of America. No complicated math problems, no French. My mother didn't speak French and I had never seen her do anything but add and subtract in her account book. She said we wouldn't start for two or three weeks to give her a chance to rest.

I began to see that this war was going to mean more than just talk, but at first I didn't connect Yang Sze-Fu's fingernails with the war. Of course I was surprised the next morning when I noticed that the long, spiky nails on his pinkies were gone and were now the same length as his other nails.

I asked Lin Nai-Nai. “How come Yang Sze-Fu cut his nails?”

“He's a Communist,” Lin Nai-Nai said. “Communists don't believe in long fingernails. They believe all people should be working people, no one pretending to be better than anyone else.”

“Are you still interested in being a Communist?” I asked.

“No,” she said. “How can I like the Communists when they are attacking my city?”

I had forgotten that Lin Nai-Nai's family lived in Wuchang. Once long ago she had explained to me that she had disgraced her family when she had run away from her husband and they would never want to see her again. Now she was worried about them, and no wonder. My father had told me how Communist soldiers were trying to make the city of Wuchang surrender by starving it to death. It was a city with walls around it, and since the soldiers wouldn't let anyone in or out, eventually the people would run out of food. I had read about sieges like this in my English history book, but in ancient days soldiers had worn armor and ridden horse-back and used battering rams against the city walls. These soldiers had only cloth caps and cotton clothes, but they had a cannon which they fired from the hills and they had bombs which they dropped on the city from the one airplane they owned. And they waited.

I took Lin Nai-Nai's hand as she sat in her embroidery chair. “How many brothers and sisters do you have?” I asked.

“Two brothers. One, ten years—Dee Dee. One, twenty-two. Two sisters, sixteen and twenty, but maybe they are married now and moved away. Maybe my parents are dead. Who knows? One thing is sure, anyone alive in Wuchang is hungry.”

From that moment the whole war became for me a war against Lin Nai-Nai's family. When I heard the cannon being fired across the river, I thought of Lin Nai-Nai's little brother, Dee Dee, and wondered if his knees were shaking. The first time the Communist airplane flew over Hankow on its way to Wuchang, I ran outside and shook my fist at the pilot and shouted all the Chinese swear words I knew. My mother called me in.

“What would people think if they heard you?” she asked.

“They'd think I was mad at the Communists.”

“They'd think you hadn't been brought up right. And I think we'd better start lessons pretty soon.”

But we didn't start right away and meanwhile I began to worry about Yang Sze-Fu being a Communist. I couldn't help seeing how he had changed. No butter pagodas now. He just slapped butter on a plate any old way and didn't even try to make our company meals special. He acted as if he hated foreigners, especially me. Sometimes he pretended he didn't hear me when I asked for cocoa.

“I think my father should fire Yang Sze-Fu,” I told Lin Nai-Nai, but she shook her head.

“That would be wrong. Then he might become dangerous. He may be rude now, but no foreigners have been harmed by their servants.”

But I wasn't so sure about Yang Sze-Fu. One day as I was finishing a bowl of canned cherries, I saw a drop of red at the bottom of my bowl that didn't look one bit like cherry juice. It looked like potassium. In strawberry season we used potassium to kill the germs on fresh berries. Of course before we ate them, we had to wash the potassium off with sterile water because potassium was poisonous. (In China we had to be very careful about germs.) I knew we had potassium in the kitchen and suddenly I knew that if I were writing a story about a Communist cook, I'd have him poison his foreign employers with potassium. The more I thought of it, the more sure I was that was exactly what Yang Sze-Fu was trying to do, so when no one was looking, I spit the cherries I still had in my mouth into my big linen napkin. After that, every meal I picked over my food, looking for traces of red, and sometimes with my mouth full, I'd suddenly get the feeling that I tasted potassium and I'd spit into my napkin again.

After a few days the serving boy, who took care of the napkins, spoke to Lin Nai-Nai about it and Lin Nai-Nai asked me. We were sitting beside the embroidery window.

“Oh, it's nothing,” I said. I didn't want her to tell Mother. Grown-ups generally took the truth too seriously or not seriously enough; either way it meant trouble.