River of Dust. Virginia Pye
had stopped.
"I remember your people," the grandmother said. "They all died. But you, you come out from the desert. You are the man we have heard rumors of for years." She looked around at the others with gleaming eyes. "This, before us, is the Ghost Man. He is alive!"
"No, you see," the Reverend started to explain, but then he stopped and did not continue. Perhaps, in this instance, it was best to leave them to their ignorant beliefs. He took a small step backward toward the exit, their eyes still steady upon him.
Suddenly, a man lurched out of the darkened corner where the gamblers huddled. He was young and strapping and the only healthy looking specimen in the place. He pushed past the grandmother, although she pawed at his shoulder with an arthritic claw and shouted for him to stop. He yelled back and shook her off with ease.
As this commotion took place, the door behind the Reverend swung open. He glanced back over his shoulder and was overwhelmed at the sight of his manservant, Ahcho. Never had the Reverend felt so grateful for a familiar face.
"Good God, man, how did you find me?" the Reverend asked.
"I know this place," Ahcho answered.
"You do?" the Reverend asked.
"No, no, not I. Everyone knows it."
The Reverend made a mental note to follow up with Ahcho, his most devoted convert, on this unsettling suggestion. Then he looked back at the grandmother and, in a flash, saw the young gambler raise his hand. A loud noise sounded, followed by a puff of smoke. The Reverend felt a thud against his chest. He stared out at the room and swayed slightly. He prepared to fall, and yet he did not.
"Ghost Man is shot!" someone shouted.
The Reverend watched as the grandmother used her fists to pummel the strapping gambler. "You idiot!" she shouted. "Ghost Man will rain curses on us like never before."
"We will all die!" screeched one of the girls.
"He will haunt us forever!" another shouted.
"But look," someone else pointed, "he does not die."
A frightened screaming and general agitation overtook the room. Ahcho raced toward the young gunman and wrestled him to the ground. The Reverend took the opportunity to study his own chest. As a man of science, he searched for a logical explanation for his survival. In an instant, he understood what had happened. He had read of just such miracles taking place on battlefields for those boys wise enough to carry their Bibles over their hearts.
"Help us, you drunken louts!" the grandmother yelled above it all. "Stop this fool before we are cursed for all eternity."
The young, strapping fellow was too much for Ahcho. The gamblers finally gathered their wits about them and joined the elderly Ahcho in his attempts to subdue the strong gunman. But in the confusion, he managed to yank his hand free. He raised it for a second time and shot again.
The Reverend grasped what had happened by the anguished look on Ahcho's face. He felt a searing heat rise up in his torso as his head grew light and vague. The sight of the red cloth over his chest startled the Reverend as he wondered if it had always been the color of blood. He had forgotten he wore such a strange talisman, but now he noticed that the second bullet had gone right through the fabric, and yet it had not been severed so badly as to fall off him. Like the pouch with the twin golden dragons attached to the red cloth, the Reverend swayed gently. But still, he did not fall.
A great hush filled the room. The people sucked in gasps of air, their hands covering their mouths, their eyes wide and unblinking. Ahcho left the gunman, finally held fast by the other gamblers. He wrapped the Reverend's arm over his shoulder and had him lean into him.
Unable to disguise the desperation in his voice, he said, "Don't worry, Reverend, the Lord Jesus will save you."
"No doubt," the Reverend mumbled. He clenched his teeth and hoped his convert understood that his lack of enthusiasm was no indication his faith was faltering.
Yet his mind was narrowing, his vision closing in. He placed trembling fingers over the second bullet hole, where blood had begun to appear. Using all that was left of his blurred and pain-filled brain, the Reverend pieced together that he must have been turned sideways when the gunman, lying prone on the dirt floor, had fired. The second bullet had risen at an acute angle, grazing his rib until something— something quite impenetrable— had stopped it from bisecting his heart.
The Reverend looked up with wonder in his eyes. If he was going to live, which remained to be seen, he now fully grasped that he would owe his life to poetry and, by extension, to the Lord's great whimsy. There was a lesson in it, one he would exploit for a future sermon should he be allowed to live long enough to give another. As his vision fully darkened and he began to topple, the Reverend managed a final wish: that his son be brought home on just such a tide of good-humored grace.
Four
A hcho pushed open the screen door and joined Mai Lin on the front porch. She crouched on the top step, chewed betel quid, and spat the juice over the side. They acknowledged each other with customary grunts. He brought out his pipe, struck a match against the rough side of the mud-brick home, and puffed. Smoke wafted into the restless air. Ahcho squinted into the darkness, where the wind rustled under a moonless sky. He was thinking about the boy out there somewhere.
"Your patient is the easy one," Mai Lin started, interrupting any peace Ahcho might have hoped for. "He has merely a gash and a broken rib. Those will heal with little help from you. As always, you're the lucky one."
"It's not so simple as that, and you know it," Ahcho said. "The man has lost his son."
Mai Lin shrugged. "Well, at least the mistress did not lose the baby in her belly. I saved it. No one else could do that. Am I right? You tell me anyone else in these provinces who could have done that?" She did not wait for a reply but carried on. "I will be up all night, giving her remedies and burning incense over her. You know all that must be done. Her female organs are— "
"Enough, woman," Ahcho said wearily. He bit down on the stem of his pipe. He had no intention of listening to a medical report about their mistress. Mai Lin had no sense of propriety.
"Ha, you are still squeamish?"
"Quiet, I said."
Mai Lin let out a long yawn.
Ahcho tried to think of where the kidnappers might have taken the boy. There was little chance that the opium sots from the nearest hamlet had been involved. They existed only in an ineffectual haze, although he did not blame the Reverend for starting his search there. By the Reverend's description, though, Ahcho could tell that the bandits had traveled a great distance to get here. If still alive, the boy was no doubt being taken far away.
Over the past seven years, Ahcho had accompanied the Reverend further than any men from Shansi Province had gone before. They had seen the Mongolian steppes and the great Gobi Desert, about which Ahcho had previously heard only fantastical stories. He admired the Reverend in many ways, but not least because the younger man had shown Ahcho a world he had dreamed of since he was a child. And now, the Reverend's only son was out there in that vast land.
"She kept calling for her boy," Mai Lin's grating voice interrupted again. "So I gave her something to ease her."
"The Master doesn't like you giving her that," he said.
Mai Lin let out a disgusted puff of air. "He should understand by now that I know best. I saved her twice already when she lost the other babies. The man thinks only Jesus can perform miracles. I am better than that long-faced Ghost Man with the straw-colored hair. You have seen the picture of him in the chapel? Why would anyone believe a person with pink skin and watery eyes the color of a summer sky? That Jesus person doesn't even look healthy."
"This is a sacrilege, you know. Besides, you should be careful. Their bodies aren't like ours."
"That is my point. You be careful of the Jesus man. He is not one of us." She reached into a pouch, and her fingers reappeared