River of Dust. Virginia Pye
themselves with the white giant in their midst.
The Reverend shook his head. Extraordinary, he thought, the way evil could be so all-consuming. They had their sinful business to attend to and could not be bothered with anything else. These people would not notice if the Lord Jesus himself walked through the door.
At his elbow appeared two thinly clad ladies, while another stood writhing happily before him. Not ladies, not remotely ladies, the Reverend knew. He was a minister, but he was also an American male who had grown up in a sinful world. After school one time, a classmate had surprised him by handing him a card. Assuming it was an invitation of some sort, the Reverend had flipped the thing over and stared for several long moments at the ample, naked backside of a woman who offered a coy smile over one shoulder and most beckoning eyes. No, the Reverend knew precisely where he stood: at the puerile heart of Sodom and Gomorrah.
He attempted to slip away from the girls and search through the smoke for the grandfather. The ladies surrounded him again, and he could not help but notice that although they were young, they were not children. As their robes fell open, their slight breasts shone in the lantern light. The Reverend did not look away immediately, but when he did, he shook his head vigorously. He must turn from such sights. This was precisely how the devil did his work: by sneaking in under the door of the mind and taking control.
Needing clearer vision now more than ever, he began to undo the buttons on his traveling coat in order to use his shirttail to clean his spectacles. The girls misunderstood his gesture and grabbed his arms and pawed at his traveling coat. They appeared eager to undress him. The Reverend's heart, that involuntary muscle, beat frantically with what he hoped was honest fear rather than prurient desire.
Then their pale hands sneaked into his pockets, and he felt certain he was about to be robbed. But each girl merely held up the object she had found and giggled. Truly, they were hardly older than children. One excitedly examined his small folding knife and simply tossed it back into a side pocket of his coat. Apparently, his throat would not be cut this evening, at least not by these urchins.
Another snatched his thick, compact traveling Bible from his jacket. She flipped through the thin pages crowded with his scrawled commentary. Several sheets of ministerial notes and ideas for future sermons fluttered to the dirt floor. The Reverend snatched them up, stuffed them back into the book, and took the Bible away from her. He returned it to his breast pocket, where it always stayed close to his heart.
Yet another of the young ladies sank a lithe hand into one of his deeper pockets and pulled forth his leather-bound copy of the Romantics. This thick volume, every page of which the Reverend had read and reread, committing many fine lines of poetry to memory, had been given to him upon his graduation from seminary. Here in China, it had proved almost as important a companion as the Lord's good book. Within those poems, the barbaric was tamed; the wild was praised, and yet the language, through its refinement, proved that civilization won out in the end. Whenever his heart was sunk low by the unresponsive Chinese, he turned to wise Wordsworth, swashbuckling Byron, and sublime Keats and knew that faith would abide.
Now this child harlot before him waved the heavy thing in the air and sang a silly song. He grabbed it back from her and placed it out of reach in his other interior breast pocket. At all costs, he would keep these profound and uplifting texts safe from sly pickpockets.
Luckily, the ladies did not go into his other trouser pocket to find the gold watch his father had passed down to him before he had left for Shansi Province. The temptation of that shiny object would surely have been too much for this greedy gang. Instead, one of the girls reached for the spectacles in his hand, and before he knew it, she was swinging them in the air and wearing them herself.
The Reverend grabbed for his glasses, but the girls had him now. Their ranks had swelled, and they pulled him down onto one of the filthy mats, where he fell like Gulliver himself. They swarmed him, and he felt certain they would tie him down with ropes in the manner of the Lilliputians, but it was merely their delicate hands that pawed over him and made him frighteningly weak.
"Please, ladies, please," he shouted. "This must stop!"
And they did stop— such was the force of his voice speaking their tongue. But then one of the younger ones burst into giggles again, and the older ones put on more determined faces than ever. They dove for his shirt buttons. The Reverend pushed them off with some effort and managed to get his boots back upon the dirt floor. He finally snatched his spectacles, put them on, and stood.
He held out his arms in preparation for a further attack, but the girls just looked up at him. Disappointment and even boredom quickly passed over their young faces. Several of them trailed off toward the opium pipes and lamps. Others went to customers who mumbled in the sickly air. Such were their distracted natures and the fickleness of their passions. Sin could be quite desultory at times.
Over in a back corner, the Reverend spotted a group of men he had not noticed before. They sat on their haunches and threw dice against a mud wall. They cursed under their breaths, or sometimes quite loudly, and drank from dark bottles.
This sort of behavior rotted the soul to its very core. The Reverend faced the room and called forth his most effective preaching voice. "You, every one of you, is giving your one and only life over to the Devil," he announced, loud enough he hoped to reach even those most lost in their own ether. "Throw off the mantle of evil and join the pure way of Christ."
The grandfather shuffled forward from a corner of the chamber and reached out a claw to grip the Reverend's arm. Strangely, the Reverend felt almost glad to see him again. He felt he could talk sense to this fellow and perhaps get somewhere. The old man had taken off his wool cape, and, as he stood close, the Reverend was puzzled to notice that he wore a high lace collar, a European or American woman's finely wrought garment with ivory buttons down the neck. As the man inched forward, the Reverend saw on his bent head a thick, crocheted oval. He was mystified at the sight. Could it be an antimacassar?
But then in a flash he understood: the antimacassar and the lace collar had once belonged to the missionary families that had perished in the Boxer Rebellion a decade before. This grandfather standing in front of the Reverend wore loot from the massacre of the American faithful.
"You must leave now," the old man said softly. His voice again surprised the Reverend with its high timbre. "You see, no son here."
"Grandfather," the Reverend began, but then, through some strange intuition, he corrected himself and said, "I mean, Grandmother."
The old woman looked up at him and offered a crooked smile as she squeezed his elbow. Then she took a thin leather rope from around her neck. From it hung a brass coin, though of no denomination that the Reverend had ever seen before. She held the thing up before her, and the Reverend understood that she meant for him to wear it. He hesitated. While he had no intention of taking on the appearance of these types, it did not seem wise to refuse.
"This will help you find your way," the grandmother said.
The Reverend had no idea who these people were, and he was fully convinced that evil ruled their every thought and deed, and yet the old woman's expression seemed somehow convincing. He bowed low, and she placed the necklace over his head.
Then her ancient hands worked at a knot on a strip of cloth that served as a belt around her thick waist. After a moment, she had it off, and he could see that from it hung a small sack embroidered with twin golden dragons.
"And this will help you find your son," she said, holding it up in offering.
The Reverend took the soiled red fabric from her hand and kept it in his open palm. With quick gestures she showed him how to wear it slung over one shoulder and across his breast. He lifted it into that position, and she nodded. The Reverend did as she instructed and strapped the ragged red cloth across his chest, over one shoulder, and down toward his waist so that the pouch with the yellow dragons hung at his hip.
When the Reverend looked up from this complicated business, the room had grown silent. The men who had been gambling in the back stood now and were watching. The girls in their open robes stared with dark eyes. Even the steady, almost comforting murmur of the opium