When Fox Is a Thousand Read online

  The novice suggested that we wait for the patron to finish. I agreed, so we stood behind a pillar and waited for the her to finish kowtowing, three sticks of incense in her elegant hands. Her white silk robe moved as she did, always just a moment behind. Even under the high ceiling of the temple, she seemed tall. She wore an expression of deep concentration which intensified whenever she paused for a moment to take in the effects of the ritual. A few snakes still twisted around the base of the large ornate Buddha, whose head almost touched the ceiling. There among the rafters three doves fluttered, still desperately searching for a way out. “Sometimes,” said the novice, “they die of exhaustion and fall from midair onto the stone floor.”

  When she was finished, the woman strode out of the temple with a walk that suggested royalty. As she breezed past me, something cool flooded through my bloodstream like a thousand tiny birds. My breath darted into my mouth before I could stop it. The novice gave me that funny half-smile again, but I pretended not to notice.

  I lit the incense for my father and placed it in the sandbox beside the woman’s. Hers was still smouldering. I laid out the chicken and the oranges. I put the paper money into the burners and lit them, watching the bright colours dissolve in the orange light, and the smoke spiral up, past the three doves, still fluttering, up to where my father was waiting. For a moment I thought I detected a trace of the herb shop smells flowing under the fragrance of the joss sticks. Then it was gone. I knelt on the cold floor for a long time.

  When I began my descent, the sky had already begun to darken, and it was raining steadily. Quietly, I cursed myself for not having been more careful about the time. By this time, my shoes were damp both inside and out. I shivered a little from the cold. Two more spokes of my umbrella had broken. I scrambled down the hillside, not wanting to get caught by the pitch dark of a rainy night. A moderate wind came up from the north, blowing rain under the umbrella.

  My coat was beginning to soak through when ahead of me on the path I noticed a lantern swaying with a step I thought I recognized. It was the woman who had made the dove and snake offering. I considered whether I should approach her, but thought better of it. The lamp stopped swaying. It glowed evenly from a fixed position on the path. She was waiting for me.

  The dinner Mrs Lee prepared was inordinately simple. She was an old-fashioned Chinese cook with a dab of the New World thrown in, and usually there was never a meal in her house without at least six dishes, including two different kinds of meat and one Western-style dish like breaded shrimp, veal cutlets, or spaghetti. Tonight when Mercy sat down at the table what stared up at her from a lonely white plate was a grey pork chop, previously frozen french-cut beans, and an ice-cream scoop of rice.

  “What kind of dinner is this?” demanded her fifteen-year-old brother Tobin, already flexing his male authority.

  Her mother didn’t look at him, but rather at Mercy, as though she were somehow responsible for her brother’s outburst. Mercy glanced briefly at his sullen face.

  “Okay if I go out tonight, Ma? Just to the library to study with Art,” said Mercy. Whatever was going on in this house, she didn’t want to know about it. It gnawed at her; she felt vaguely guilty for not asking about it, but she knew she would feel better once she was out.

  Her mother looked at her, scooped rice onto her own plate, sat down at the table, and began to eat. “Do what you want.”

  Mercy and Tobin exchanged raised-eyebrow looks.

  “Where’s Dad tonight, Ma?” Mercy asked.

  “Gone to China.”

  “But he was just there.”

  “Well, he had to go again.”

  “A factory we own with Uncle Jim burned down,” said Tobin, “with all these people inside. They couldn’t get out because there were only six windows in the building and they were all up near the ceiling.”

  “Is that true, Ma?”

  “Tell your brother it’s not good to eavesdrop.”

  “Is that how you found out, Toby?”

  “Yeah, and Dad said the government is going to fine them tons of money. So he’s all mad because he’s lost his factory and now he has to pay a fine too.”

  “Tell your brother he should know better than to speak that way about his father.”

  “All those people died and all Dad cares about is money.”

  “You’re the one who’s always spending it,” said Mercy, lapsing a little.

  Their mother ate silently.

  “And he calls himself a Christian.”

  Afterwards, when Tobin had gone down the street to shoot some baskets with his friends, Mercy sat down beside her mother at the kitchen table. Her mother sat silently. Mercy settled in beside her, not saying a word. It was hard for her to imagine her father as a ruthless business tycoon. He was a quiet, gentle man, thirteen years older than her mother. Like his daughter, his face was on the fleshy side, and though it had once been as smooth as a woman’s, it was now spattered with deep-brown age spots which seemed all the darker because the frames of his thick glasses were exactly the same colour. He dressed in modest suits, preached hard work and a simple way of life, and kept the Sabbath as meticulously as a prized invention. In his spare time, when he wasn’t doing business with China or keeping up the Lord’s work, he liked to tinker in his shop, mulling over inventions that were indeed his own, trying to come up with something that would make them instantly rich. Mostly his inventions were things for the kitchen. He had come up with an electric pepper grinder, a tortuous-looking clamp for sectioning grapefruit halves, a pair of self-operating chopsticks.

  He was an odd man, perhaps, but no more than anyone else. It was hard to imagine him as a vicious hard-hitting capitalist. But that was how they portrayed him on the news that night, which her mother insisted on watching on the black-and-white TV in the kitchen. Her face was still as a stone except for the corner of her lip, which quivered slightly when they showed smoke pouring from the wreckage of the factory followed by a clip of screaming, sobbing family members. Thank God Tobin was still out playing.

  “It’s not like people are going to cut us off, Ma. It’s just business. Everyone understands that.” But she knew as soon as the words were out of her mouth that she hadn’t helped matters at all.

  “Did you know your father used to write poetry? In all the classical forms. I wanted him to become a teacher. When we got married he said he would think about it.”

  “He would never have gotten a job.”

  “But he could have. He would have been so good at it.”

  The news ended. Mercy drew three coins from her pocket, the really old kind with the square hole in the middle. Her mother’s eyes opened wide. “No.…”

  “Come on. You showed me how to do this yourself when I was eight, remember?”

  “Your father.…”

  “He isn’t here.” She pushed the coins into her mother’s hands. Six times her mother tossed them, and six times Mercy recorded the results in a series of broken and unbroken lines on paper meant for telephone messages. She consulted her own English-language copy of the I Ching and wrote the result beneath the hexagram.

  Remain steady and allow

  the world to shape itself.

  “Don’t go out tonight,” said her mother.

  They stayed up until almost midnight playing cards for the first time since Mercy was a small child, when her father had called it the Devil’s game and tossed her favourite pack in the fire, one by one.

  I have been thinking of my father a lot these last few months. I think of the herb shop, the little drawers of leaves and stems, flowers and bones.… The smell of medicine always makes me nostalgic. They said my father was strange, that he would regret teaching me to read when I was five, that my water-clear soul would cloud over and fade away, and that I would never marry. He said I have my mother’s face, the same forehead, the small, slightly pointed nose. I can’t remember her at all. Can’t remember her holding me. Can’t remember her walking me into the garden in spring to
watch the cherry trees blooming. Can’t remember how the fog came in like the tide and stayed for months one autumn, taking her life when it ebbed out.

  What I do remember is the magic leaving my father’s hands. When I was younger, it seemed there was nothing he couldn’t cure with the essences of flowers, plants, or animals. My mother started bleeding on the inside and he couldn’t stem the flow. The house filled with steam from various infusions boiling away in the kettle. It smelled the way you would expect it to smell deep beneath the earth, where the soil is rich and gently heated by the planet’s bubbling insides. Strong and bitter as blood. I imagine my mother must have begun to smell that way too, stinking of life until the moment she died. I don’t think that smell ever left the house, although after her death it diminished to the faintest odour, which would occasionally bloom with the pungency of memory when I shook out sheets that had been in storage for a long time. I don’t remember her, but I remember that smell. It never entered the house with that intensity again.

  After her death, he began to get the prescriptions wrong. His hands became clumsy in the measuring, his nose lost the ability to determine quality herbs from stale. His vision grew blurry. His eyes lost the ability to distinguish the various shapes and sizes of the raw materials he used to make his medicines. It was as though his senses were retreating deep inside his body, renouncing the world in favour of an ascetic’s lifestyle.

  He would come alive, sometimes, at night. He would collect the oddest assortment of objects – strange flowers in the deepest reds, plants with thick green leaves, mushrooms in brilliant oranges and russets which must surely have been poisonous, branches that smelled sweet when burned, and sometimes even small animals or lizards, still wriggling. None of the traditional paper money or candles. Occasionally he would use incense I had bought at the market if it was within easy reach as he stumbled through the kitchen into the backyard. He would set his offerings on fire, fully expecting the smoke to journey straight to heaven and bring her back to him. He would sit up late into the night waiting for her. It terrified the neighbours.

  When a younger herbalist with a pretty and very much alive young wife set up shop on the other side of town, business began to drift in his direction as gently as the wind changes with the turn of the seasons. As my father’s customers dwindled and he had more time on his hands, his nocturnal rituals increased in frequency. It was unlikely that a marriage would be arranged for me at this rate, so I began to consider alternatives. There was a rumour of a village in the West inhabited entirely by women. Since I have always had trouble distinguishing what is a story from what is real, I packed a bag to take with me the moment I could find out how to get there. In the market, I asked numerous travellers, horse vendors, and fabric sellers if they knew the way, and everybody gave me an answer. The only problem was that the directions I received all contradicted one another, so I was no better off than had I received no response at all.

  I arrived at a more practical solution late one night after a bout of tossing and turning. The wet smell of burning flowers and branches and mushrooms found its way into my head. Outside the window, my father sat beside a smoky fire, looking for all the world like a ghost. His hair needed trimming and he was as thin as a hungry dog. I almost wished my mother would appear to put him out of his misery.

  In the morning, he was more or less himself, although his eyes were tired.

  “Father,” I said, “how is the shop doing?”

  “You know it is not doing well.”

  “Yes, I know. I think that if you had a little money to invest, you might still make a go of it.”

  “Perhaps so.”

  “If you sold me to a teahouse, it might make a difference.”

  His hair became a white forest. “My only daughter,” he said, “how could I?”

  “If you don’t, there will be nothing left for me here either. You won’t be able to afford a dowry to marry me off. If you don’t get another chance, the shop will fold, even assuming I could manage it on my own after you have gone. If you sell me, I will at least be guaranteed a roof over my head, and you will have another chance with your business, or, at the very least, something to retire on.”

  He sighed. “I knew it was a bad omen.”

  “What?”

  “Do you remember Chiu the oil seller?”

  “Just a little.”

  “We were good friends before you were born. When your mother and his wife got pregnant at the same time we promised that our children would marry. But then both women gave birth to girls. We should have known not to make promises under such uncertain conditions. I must be haunted by a fox.”

  A month later, a well-known teahouse took me because I could write pretty lines. I sent my father the money. I was sixteen years old.

  What is the value of human life? We are made up of so much water.

  I have a nightmare about the ocean. Not a nightmare exactly. A dream, then: I am walking along a sandy beach. It’s warm and the sun is bright. Large rocks stick up from the sand like teeth, twice my height. I weave among them. They hide where I have come from, where I am going. Finally I come to a wide-open area that is all grey rock, stepping down in wide plateaus to the edge of a cliff, which drops impossibly down to where the sea is waiting. I lie on the cliff’s edge and wait. For what, I’m not sure. I don’t notice the water begin to rise.

  It comes up behind me, making small animal noises. By the time I notice it, I have to hurry, but the plateaus aren’t so wide after all. I’m climbing, trying to find footholds in an increasingly steep, smooth rockface. The sea is a thousand greedy hands, grabbing.

  The woman I am about to tell you about was not afraid of the sea. She was afraid of the moon, the way it tugs at our blood.

  What about our blood? I wanted to ask. How can something clutch at us from such a great distance?

  Now I want to ask her if that’s how fate works, but she isn’t here.

  “I just wanted to see that you were okay.”

  “I’m fine.”

  “You want me to come and see you?”

  “If you want.”

  “You going to tell me what happened?”

  “Yeah. I guess. When you get here. Come at around two. I have to take my mother to the doctor first.”

  The Peacock Hen was not the kind of place Artemis normally went into. It doubled as a café and bar and was frequented mostly by hip young stockbrokers and film-industry types. She passed it on her way to the bus stop where she meant to catch a bus to Mercy’s house. She didn’t even bother to look up when someone rapped on the window from inside the café. It was only when a man on the street nudged her and said, “I think someone’s trying to get your attention,” that she turned her head and saw Diane grinning and beckoning her with a quick, playful hand. The grin was warm, the kind you don’t turn away from, the kind that promises mischief or a juicy revelation.

  Artemis went around to the double glass doors and grasped a thick brass handle cool from the air conditioning inside. The purple carpeting was plush under her tattered hightops. The clothes that had been hip and urban on the street suddenly became straggly and cheap. She slid into the booth across from Diane. The leather upholstery felt cool against her bare arms.

  “Want to go shopping?”

  “I don’t have any money.”

  “Me neither. I’ll get us some.” Her eyes glittered. “Stay here and watch my stuff.”

  Only Diane could look so smashing in a lime-green spandex dress as she shimmied up to the bar and drew her legs over a high chrome stool, donning a forlorn look. Artemis waited. The pause grew uncomfortably long. A waiter came to the booth.

  “Waiting for someone?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Would you like a drink while you’re waiting?” Out of the corner of her eye, Artemis saw a stately looking man go up to Diane. She quickly ordered an iced tea to get the waiter out of the way. The man was jacket-less. He wore a well-ironed white shirt and a tie in tastefully
aggressive colours, turquoise blue and yellow. Artemis slid to the outside edge of the booth so she could hear.

  “No, no. I just finance them,” the man was saying.

  “I would have pegged you for an actor,” said Diane. “You don’t have those kinds of aspirations?”

  “No, I’d like to write and direct, if anything.”

  “And why don’t you, then? You must have ideas, a story you want to tell?”

  “Oh, of course. I’ve got this idea for a Western, about a homesteader who falls in love with an Indian woman. He has killed her brother and she doesn’t know.” He laughed. “But I don’t know if I would fund it myself.” The bartender slid martinis across the counter. “Run a tab, will you, Allan?”

  “Come on, now. You’ve got to have more faith in yourself, in your own creative process.”

  He shrugged. “I have my own little creative outlets. I’m a photographer.”

  “Oh?”

  “It’s a little sideline I’ve had since I was in college. I do boudoir photography. Would you believe women pay me to take pictures of them? They’re dressed, of course. It’s sexier that way, don’t you think, when you can imagine what’s underneath instead of having it all laid out in the open?”

  “I suppose so.”

  “Sometimes I do it for friends, just for the hell of it. Now that money isn’t really an issue anymore.”

  “I just finished doing some work for a photographer.”

  “I’m sure you looked lovely. Are you a model, then?”