Heart of the West (44 page)

"You will not try to...?" He gestured at the cleaver.

She buried her hands up the sleeves of her robe and crossed her fingers to trick the listening ears of the gods. "Not so long as you abide by your promise not to touch me."

He heaved such a hefty sigh of relief that his chin whiskers fluttered. Suddenly, the whole drama struck Erlan as funny and she had to bite the inside of her cheek and cover her mouth with her hand.

Aiya, the man was nearly as foolish as she was. She had fainted at the sight of her own blood and awakened to the merchant Woo wrapping cloths soaked with ginger water around her neck and cursing the gods for saddling him with a madwoman for a wife. And when she had opened her eyes and sat up, with the cleaver still gripped in her hand, he had shrieked and reared back on his heels as if she were a dead woman come back to life. More laughter welled up in her now at the memory. She bit her cheek harder and turned her face away.

He had turned his back on her anyway and was putting on a nightshirt. He coiled his queue neatly around his head and covered it with a sleeping cap. Erlan removed her wedding robe, but not the underjacket she wore to flatten her breasts so that she wouldn't be called a wanton.

She eased down on the bed, and the mattress sighed, the grass stuffing rustling and filling the room with the smell of hot sunshine. She had been on her golden lilies a lot today and her feet were raw. She longed to put on fresh bindings, but it was too intimate a thing to do in front of this man she didn't know. She massaged the aching muscles in her legs, swallowing a groan.

"Would you like me to rub your calves for you?"

His offer startled her and she looked up at him out of narrowed eyes, mistrusting his motive. Eldest Sister used to rub her calves for her, especially when the bandages were first used to bind her feet. Oh, how they had pained her, as the four small toes were curled underneath the sole and the sole forced toward the heel until her feet were almost bent in half.

The merchant Woo took a step. Erlan snatched up the cleaver.

"Amitabha!"
he exclaimed, flapping his arms. "I will do nothing but rub your calves, I promise."

She huffed a soft snort. "Everyone knows that you Cantonese lie like dogs."

He pointed his finger at her, a gesture so contemptuous she gasped aloud. "And you..." he sputtered. "You are a dead ghost!"

It was the worst sort of insult, to call a person a dead ghost. She was surprised the gods didn't strike him dead for uttering it. "Turtle fart," she muttered under her breath, but not softly enough.

He glared at her, his brows drawn low, his cheeks sucked hollow. She glared back. He rolled his eyes, seeking consolation from the Immortals.

"Have you not heard the proverb, you stubborn, useless girl: When the cat overturns the rice bowl, the dogs will feast? I bought myself a wife so that I might have sons to sweep my tomb after I am gone. Do you not know how sons are made?"

"I know, honorable husband."

"A wife is no good to me if she cannot give me sons."

"I know, honorable husband."

"Think on it, then."

"Yes, honorable husband. I will think on it."

He crawled into bed and tured the brass screw of the lamp, plunging the room into darkness. The rough muslin sheets rustled as he settled in. She lay down as well, but a moment later she was sitting bolt upright.

"Strike a light, please, my husband," she asked, making her voice as sweet as a late summer peach.

A match scraped and the lamp flared again. He held it up. "What is it? Is your neck bleeding again? Aiya, if you die on me, I—What are you doing?"

She had scampered out of bed and gotten down on her hands and knees to look beneath it. She saw a lot of dust balls as big as chrysanthemums, but no gourd beneath where her head would lie.

"There is no gourd under the bed," she said.

He heaved a huge sigh. "This is America. There is no need for gourds."

"But what will chase away the ghosts and keep them from choking me?"

"Ha! And this from the girl who tried to take off her head with a cleaver." He patted the space beside him and actually smiled. "Come back to bed and go to sleep, child. There are no ghosts in America."

Darkness once again enshrouded the room. The log walls trembled and creaked under the wind. Her neck throbbed and her whole body ached; that demon-cursed stage driver had aimed for every stone and rut in the road. Even lying quietly she could still feel the ceaseless rocking motion of the coach, as if it had entered her blood. She drew in a deep breath and rubbed her palms over her breasts and down her sides until her fingertips came to rest low on her belly.

Two years ago, when Young Uncle married, she had helped put the bride to bed. She remembered the bridal bed with its red silk canopy and curtains, and the rose petals and baby shoes, of every color in a peacock's tail, strewn on the red satin coverlet. But she remembered most vividly of all the small square of white silk lying on the ebony tray, waiting to prove the bride's virginity.

She would leave no virgin blood on any white silk. Three men had had her, so what should one more matter? Yet it did, it did... She pressed her fist tight against her mouth. She could not bear to have another man do to her what those others had done.

It was the worst sort of fate for a man—to die without sons. Since she would not lie with him tonight, the merchant Woo would certainly complain to the master in the morning. She would be dragged back to the tong man, and he would put her in the cribs or sell her again, this time to a mining camp. And then many men would do to her what those others had done. The dogs would feast.

"'Tes your desire to marry Sam Woo?" the giant had said.

What would have happened if she had said no? Would the fon-kwei giant have carried her off with him? If he had, he would have expected her to lie with him, for such was the way of men. She tried to imagine lying with him and could not. A foreign devil who was fierce, even if he did have beautiful gray eyes, as soft and gentle as rainwater. He had an ugly, hairy face, and he was too big, built like a water buffalo, a peasant animal suitable only for pulling plows and turning waterwheels. He would have crushed her, smothered her, and rent her open with his man's great root.

Her mind twisted away and got caught up in memories again: a hardness piercing her, heavy weight bearing her down, down, blind darkness and a coldness deep within her, so cold, so cold. She hated this violation men forced upon women. Wives, concubines, crib girls—she wondered how a woman learned to bear it, how she endured without wanting to die. How a woman like her...

Her mother.

Hot tears seeped out of the corners of her eyes and dripped down into her ears. She pressed her bunched fist hard against her mouth.

In the Flowery Kingdom when a daughter was born, her father prepared several barrels of rice wine and put them in his root cellar. By the time the girl was of an age to marry, the wine was of an age to be drunk at the wedding feast.

The tea merchant Po Lung-Kwong already had three wives, five imperfect daughters, and a root cellar full of wine when he brought the beautiful young concubine Tao Huo to his bed in the hope of begetting a son.

That Tao Huo failed to produce the desperately needed heir was of course all her fault. When two years passed and no fruit took root in her womb, the patriarch's three wives expected the concubine—no matter how young and beautiful she was—to be sent away. Instead, the merchant Po visited her bed more often than ever. And she wore out his old bone, leaving it limp and useless to his other women.

In the third year, Tao Huo at last showed signs of expectant happiness. The wives gritted their teeth behind their smiles. And when Tao Huo was brought to bed of another imperfect daughter, they hid their smiles behind copious tears. Surely now the patriarch would send the worthless concubine away.

Instead, he visited her bed again as soon as she was able to receive him. There was no hope for it, the wives all agreed. The patriarch was infatuated with his young concubine. Although he was in the sunset of his life, with her he had all the strength and virility implied in his name of Lung-Kwong. Bright Dragon.

The wives, miserable in their jealousy, could not understand Tao Huo's allure. It was acknowledged, reluctantly, that her face was that of a first grade beauty. But she had such big horse feet. Worse, she had been corrupted by fon-kwei ways. She had spent the first fourteen years of her life at the Foochow mission school where she had learned the devil tongue and swallowed the foreign religion. She was nothing but a bullock-footed, clanless country girl, the wives all complained, yet she behaved as if she were a Manchurian princess. And most astonishing of all, she got away with it.

The members of the Po clan all lived together in ten courts beneath their ancestral roofs. The men lived in the outer courts, which the women were forbidden to enter. The daughters of the House of Po lived in the inner courtyards with their mothers, where they learned the arts of homemaking and prepared themselves to be perfect wives.

One of Erlan's earliest memories was of sitting on the sandalwood chest to watch while her mother made herself beautiful for the patriarch's visits. Tao Huo would powder her cheeks until they were whiter than Himalayan snow and paint her lips the shiny red of dew-kissed cherries. She would make her long ebony hair glisten like wet moss with wu-mu jelly, arranging it in the elaborate shape of a lotus blossom. Then in the midnight blackness of her hair, she would put one large and perfect peony. And the sweet smell of the red and pink flower would waft to Erlan on the breeze stirred by a slave girl's gently waving fan.

Sometimes Erlan would sit beside her mother on the great rosewood bed, Tao Huo's green robe spread out like a giant fan on the blue silk counterpane. Tao Huo would rub her nails pink with rose petals while she taught her daughter the English words they used to converse privately with in a household of three jealous wives and many spies.

Listening to her mother's pi-pa-sweet voice, staring at a face that was painted to evoke the timeless delicacy of Ming porcelain, Erlan learned more than English. She also learned the power of a woman's beauty. And the power Tao Huo wielded in the great rosewood bed.

Erlan saw her father only rarely, but each of those precious moments was engraved on her memory like the dragon on the family's jade seal.

She would wait for him in the garden, sitting by the lotus pond on a porcelain taboret, wait for him to come and air his birds, the small brown larks in their bamboo cages. Together they would sit and watch the golden carp swim in the pond, Erlan chattering like a crow and watching his beloved face in the hope of catching a smile, her father puffing on his silver water pipe and indulging her childish questions about the world beyond the garden walls.

Once she dared to ask, "Who is your favorite daughter, Father?"

He smiled and touched her cheek, tracing the curve of her chin. "You are, Erlan. See all the day lilies I have had planted in my garden. Every time I look at them I am reminded of you."

But whenever she complained about Eldest Sister making a joke of her big feet, or of First Wife ordering her to pick out her embroidery and do it over again, he would only say, "You must learn to yield, my daughter. Only by yielding can a woman achieve self-perfection."

Erlan spent many hours hiding high up in the watchtower set in the garden wall, where the guard beat out the passage of time with his wooden clapper. From there she could see the city roofs of yellow and green pottery tiles rolling and peaking like waves and, between them, the narrow hutungs crowded with peddlers and rickshaws and litters. Beyond the roofs graceful pagodas nestled against hills covered with bamboo and tea shrubs. The oolong, black, and green tea that was shipped to the fon-kwei lands had made the House of Po rich.

On days when the sun burned away the mist, she could see the river and the huge junks with their matting sails and the great round eyes painted on their bows to frighten away the river demons. She was too far away to see the fishermen with their nets and the bamboo mats of cuttlefish drying in the sun. Or the bales of tea bricks marked with the dragon seal of the House of Po piled on the wharves, awaiting shipment to foreign and exotic lands.

She was too far away to see, but she could still imagine. And as Erlan looked to the hills and the river, she dreamed of a day when she would journey beyond the garden walls and see these wonders for herself.

In the fourth moon of Erlan's seventeenth year, Tao Huo shared a secret with her daughter. Motioning her to silence with a finger to her lips, she led Erlan along a hidden passageway through the forbidden courts. They stopped before a small round window concealed by a wooden lattice screen. The window looked into a room that was set aside for the reception of visitors. Erlan sucked in her breath at the treasures it contained: silver-and gold-inlaid cabinets, porcelain in peach bloom, ox-blood red, and mirror black, screens and boxes of deeply carved lacquer, cloisonne vases, Tibetan tapestries. All of it glittered and gleamed in the light of dozens of bean-oil lamps.

The room was vacant, but a moment later a door opened and a servant ushered two fon-kwei men inside. "They are from America, the Flowery Flag land," Tao Huo whispered. "They wish to enter into an agreement with the patriarch. Six shiploads of tea a year in exchange for many taels of silver."

Startled, Erlan looked at her mother with new eyes. It occurred to her that this was not the first time Tao Huo had stood behind this screen, watching and listening to what went on in the reception room. And the patriarch must know of this, for even a favored concubine would never dare to trespass into the forbidden courts without permission. Erlan remembered a time she had come upon her father showing her mother a document written in the fon-kwei way, asking her what message it contained. Erlan understood now why her mother had taught her how to read the English tongue as well as speak it. Tao Huo's woman's power and her value to the patriarch lay not only in the great rosewood bed.