At the Heart of the Universe (19 page)

They sit in the shade, popping pieces of persimmon into their mouths, the sticky juice making runlets down their chins. It is quiet but for the sound of a solitary bird—a sound Clio hears as that velvety one, of nostalgia.

“You know, Katie,” Clio says, “we're going back to the place you were born.”

“We are?” Clio nods. “You mean the hospital?”

“No, there aren't any hospitals out here. The farmhouse where they live.”

“I always thought I was born in a hospital, like everybody else.”

“Well, hon, it was like everybody else
here
,” Clio says.



Ja Ja is hardly more than ten low houses around an open patch of dirt. Now, in early afternoon, the village seems deserted. In the open patch sits a pool table, balls unracked, cues abandoned like pick-up sticks. One building looks like a store. They follow Rhett in.

One counter, one dormant coal stove, a table and several chairs. A shaft of light squeezes itself through a lone and clouded window. The scent is of garlic, tobacco, and ash. An old man is asleep in a chair, in his lax hand an unlit clay pipe. In the golden, shadowy light his face seems all lines, a leathery persimmon. Rhett awakens him and says something. The man answers but Rhett can't understand him, and tries again. Again, nothing.

“It's either him or the local dialect,” Rhett says. He tries again. The old man goes to a freezer and produces ice creams on sticks. They lick hungrily, the ice cream washing down the sticky persimmon. Rhett asks where the farmhouse is. Another long back and forth ensues. At one point the old man makes a face like he's just swallowed a bad piece of water buffalo and spits on the earth floor and sneers. Rhett asks him a few more questions. The spitting and sneering continues. Rhett leads them out into the sunlight.

“That was quite something,” Clio says. “What was he saying?”

“The farm is just up there. They're not his favorite people.” Rhett glances up at the sky. “Looks like we might get a shower. We better hurry.”

17

The red-dirt road to the farmhouse turns immediately up. They get off their bikes and walk them along. The air is still: a dark line of clouds hovers over a range of high mountain peaks far to the west. They go slowly, owing to the brutal heat. The persimmon trees close in, scratching them. Clio, glad to contain her wild hopes by doing something physical, is in the lead, and holds the branches to keep them from whipping back at the others.

Finally, after a long uphill serpentine, they come to a clearing.

A single fig tree marks a fork in the road. The path to the right dips into a valley of early rice. A series of paddies climbs the hills on either side. Some fields are green, others are flooded with no sign of plantings and reflect, in slivers, the high, flat sun. Far down in the valley Pep spots a single white-yellow dot poking up out of the green rice grass—the yellow is a conical straw hat, and the white a shirt: a lone person bent over nearly at a right angle.

“Man or woman?” Pep asks.

“Can't tell,” Rhett says. “Pulling weeds. The house is the other way, up there to the left. Let's go.”

A turn in the path, and then a climb up at a harsh angle, through flooded paddies and dikes and narrow mud footpaths between them, some paddies a muddy brown and with no sign of rice-life, some furry with early sproutlings, others flush with knee-high grass. No sign of houses or people.

“I could see sitting here all day long with a fishing pole,” Pep says, with a wistful sigh, “just fishing. Nobody else around. Throw in your line. Sit. Fish.”

“How can you think of fishing at a time like this?” Clio says.

“It's the only way I can stay calm,” he says, “and it's not working worth a damn.”

A few more minutes of uphill pedaling and they turn the corner onto level ground, and see the farmhouse. Set back from a dirt courtyard, it is a concrete-walled one-and-a-half-story structure huddled under a red-tile roof. To the right is a half-dug-out foundation and an attempt at an enclosure for small animals—chicken wire strung between steel rods sitting akimbo in the holes of cinder blocks. Pep notes that the attempt has been weak, and abandoned, with clear gaps exposed. Chickens are pecking in the hard dirt of the courtyard and in the wilted, dusty undergrowth.

Katie stares at it, surprised at how run-down it is. She thought it would be like in pictures of China, or movies, or even some of the farms she's seen in their travels, with a neat stone fence, and walls and a roof that look really solid and can withstand a hurricane, and lots of trees and flowers. She looks at Clio, and sees the surprise and disappointment on her face.
And Mom thinks
Mary's
Farm is a falling-down wreck? She doesn't look too happy about this. What's that she always is saying, “A hard dose of reality”? And I was born
in there
? But the people are what count—my grandparents and birth dad and sister are what really matter—like Mary really matters. Where are they?

As if to affirm her optimism, among the chickens a bantam hen is strutting around, followed closely by a fuzzy yellow duckling. “Look, guys, a baby. A baby duck following a chicken!”

Pep stares, assessing the property for clues to its inhabitants. Against the front wall of the house are farm implements of some ancient sort, long wooden handles leading to what looks like a scythe and some kind of wooden-pegged rake. The windows on either side of the doorway are open to the air, but barred. On one side of the door are several twig brooms in various stages of deterioration, like women in skirts once fashionable, now tattered. A ruined woven basket lies on the ground, like a partly submerged boat. Junk—botttles, plastic bags, cans, rotting greens—are scattered around some broken brown bricks. On the other side of the door is a tall iron container with a hinged mouth used for transport, maybe of coal? Shocks of straw lie on top of it, as if tossed by a recalcitrant cow, or a bloated water buffalo. The tall, wide wooden door, in several crudely fitted sliding sections, is open. Over the doorway is a tile mosaic with many pieces missing—a dragon? A phoenix?
This is a house of people who
are not quite making it through the basics of the day.

“Well, here we are,” he says in a somber tone, putting his arm around Katie, feeling her trembling.

“Stay close,” Clio says, clutching Katie's hand hard.

“Okay,” Rhett says. “Let's see who's here. Ming Tao and I'll go in first.”

They walk to the door and disappear into the dark. Pep and Clio try to see inside. On the wall facing the doorway is a large framed portrait of Chairman Mao. The walls are barren, with black streaks. Dark wooden furniture is scattered about.

Suddenly they hear shouting, screaming, a high-pitched voice filled with venom, which, once started, seems to go on without interruption. Then they hear Rhett's voice, also shouting, trying to interrupt without success, and then another high-pitched voice, maybe Ming Tao's, shouting, and the screaming and shouting goes on and on. Abruptly it stops. A few more high-pitched screams. Rhett and Ming Tao hurry out of the doorway into the hazy day. They blink in the glare and, looking back a few times, walk toward the Macys, shaking their heads and talking.

“Okay,” Rhett says, “let's get out of here.”

“But... but is this the right place?” Clio asks.

“Un hunh. Too right. C'mon.” He picks up his fallen bicycle.

“No! What's going on? We are not moving until you explain. Who were you talking to?”

“The grandmother. Katie's father's mother. The grandfather's in there too, but he didn't say anything. I don't think he can hear.” He starts to wheel his bicycle.

“And?”

“Look. She wants no part of this. She doesn't want to see you, she doesn't want to talk to you, she wants you to go away.”

“But why?”

“I couldn't tell why. Lotta hatred there, that's all I picked up. The minute she found out who we were, she started screaming.”

“And where's the father, and the sister?”

“She says they're not here. Won't tell me where they are.”

“Do you believe her?”

“Who knows. But there's no way—”

“You've got to help us,” Pep says. “Come with us back in there.”

“You do
not
want to do that,” Rhett says, shaking his head.

“All right,” Clio says, “I'm going in there.”

“Let's go,” Pep says. “Katie, you wait with Rhett and Ming Tao.”

“I'm going too,” Katie says. “It's my...” She stops and stares.

A woman is coming out, wheeling a wheelbarrow in which lies a man. Both are old, tiny, skinny. With each step the old woman takes, the old man's head lolls side to side. She stops in the sunlight, puts a thin hand to her brow, and stares at them. For a long moment there is silence. The old woman wears faded blue Mao pajamas, the old man the combat-green version. The woman is emaciated, lips mere wrinkles in a desiccated face that seems to Clio, in its darkness, charred. In that dry carved oval, the eyes are rheumy.

Clio finds herself stepping forward, hands clasped in front of her, and bowing slightly. “
Ni hao ni hao
,” she says, taking another step.

The old woman's eyes glance past her. Clio stops, looks back at Katie. Pep has stepped up behind Katie, has a big hand clasped over her chest, holding her tight to him. The old woman screams—Clio sees Katie jump. Clio turns back to her and sees that she has snatched up one of the twig brooms and is shaking it with pathetic weak movements. Her mouth is her real weapon, wide open and toothless. Clio tries again to make contact. Out of that gummy hole comes a series of shrieks and rages, all of it saying in the universal human language of hatred, “Get out of here. Now!”

They pick up their bicycles. They pedal off, down, away.

At the fig tree where the path forks, Rhett stops. They all get off their bikes.

“That was terrible!” Clio says. Katie looks ashen, in shock. Clio reaches over to her, her own hand shaking before it touches Katie's cheek. “Honey, are you okay?”

“What's
wrong
with her?” Katie says. “We didn't do anything to
her
. Jeez!” Thinking,
She's like a bad witch in
Harry
. And why did we find
her
anyway? My birth mom wouldn't be mean.
She's
the one we should find. Her and my sister.

“We certainly didn't,” Pep says. “Rhett? What happened?”

“What can I tell you?” He smiles. “She's crazy about you.”

“I have never, ever—” Clio starts to say, and then points. “Look, down there.” In the valley, the figure in white with the yellow straw hat is walking through the rice fields toward them. “Come on.”

They pedal downhill a short way and then stop, laying down their bicycles at the opening of a footpath on top of the dike—across from the figure approaching them between several flooded paddies. They walk single file toward the person. The path curves this way and that with an ancient elegance and logic, but the curves lengthen the distance to the figure in the field. The air suddenly feels cooler, denser. They slip and slide on the narrow, mucky path. As they get closer to the figure approaching them through the waist-high grass, they see it is a woman.

Rhett shouts to her. She sees them, stops, squints. Rhett shouts again.

After a hesitating movement toward them, the woman turns and walks back quickly into the field, heading for the far dike, curving along down the valley. Rhett and the others try to move faster, but come to the end of the path, at the edge of the flooded rice field, and have to stop.

The woman gives one backward glance and moves resolutely, faster than seemed possible, away through the muck and high grass. She's soon a tiny straw spot—then nothing.

“Shit!” Clio says. “I'm sure she'd know something. Why are they all so afraid?”

Ming Tao says something, illustrating her thought by pointing her index finger at her temple and making a twirling motion—the universal sign of “crazy.”

“She says,” Rhett offers, “that all of them are crazy here.”

“And what do you think, I mean from trying to talk with them?”

He puffs, thinks. “Nah. It's just China—the
old
China. You see a stranger, you figure nothing good can come of it for you. You get out, or get them out, fast.”

“We've come this far,” Pep says, “we've got to do everything we can to try to find the... well, the father, William, and the sister? Can you ask again in the village?”

“Fine,” Rhett says, dejectedly. “I'll try someone else.”

In the square of the village, Rhett wanders off in search of information. He soon returns. “I asked around. They don't live here anymore, but maybe—
maybe
—live on another farm, maybe an hour away.”