Read Online Alive and Dead in Indiana by Michael Martone - Free Book Online
Authors: Michael Martone
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above the street. The smells of soy and dry-roasted peanuts. Taiwanese mainly. Many from the fall of the Tachen Islands. Quemoy is being shelled again. There are animated arguments at the walls where the language dailies are posted. Children dribble basketballs along the sidewalk. Wearing scarlet, they weave around their fathers. The public phones are in pagodas. The shelter signs are in Chinese.
It is not really like Changsha, though there is a jinriksha. Most people here wear black sneakers. They miss China. I can pretend I am still there—bow to the men in sleeveless shirts and gray pants in my building, share silk thread with their wives, who sew all day. I can imagine when I leave in the morning, I am on my way to the Yale-in-China Hospital again. Taste tea in a coffee cup. And I wait for you. At night in bed, I hear a train slam into the station. It is the Japanese shelling.
There is a man here who says he remembers you when you preached in Chekiang Province. He is still a Christian and insists I go to church with him, an A.M.E. in the next ward. He says he was told you joined the AVG, that all China has heard of you. He tells me your Chinese is perfect. He would not be surprised if you were still alive and preaching to many converts. Mao himself would not be able to tell you were American. I think the man says what he thinks I want to hear; he brings me fried bananas and takes me uptown on the bus to the cathedral to play Bingo.
There is one bathroom on my floor in my building. I like to sit there, steaming in the tub. I can smell the starch from the street. Do you remember the P-40 shot down over Lingchuan when we lived there? It crashed, pilotless, down the road. I remember when the Chinese peasants, hundreds of them it seemed to me, carried the cracked-up plane up the road to our house. The smaller parts, they held them above their heads. It looked as if it was coming apart as it moved. It was like the dragons at New Year’s. “Here is your plane,” they shouted, dropping it near the porch. We were the only Americans they knew of. You thanked them in your perfect Chinese. Sly General Wang took the aluminum from the fuselage and had his smith make the bathtub. Remember the bathtub? All we had before was the Yangtze Kiang. The way I washed your back like an Asian wife. Why did you leave with Drummond without saying anything? You wrote to Betty trying to explain. She has shown me the letters. And you wrote to your parents. In Lingchuan, in Changsha, when we made love, you whispered to me in Chinese. In Chinese . I didn’t know Chinese. I don’t know it. The geese flying backwards. The Eastern menagerie. And I would have gone with you to the West, to Turkestan if you had wanted. Converted the Jews. It is a place for a woman. “Look, I have a mission.” Now, I have a mission, John. I had one then and they are the same. You, John. Did you, in doing your duty (and was it duty to God or to country that allowed you to leave me?), confuse your two missions? A missionary is always the best warrior. I remember the Jesuits saying mass along the road in camouflage, the host made of spinach flour. I remember the almond eyes of that Flying Tiger. I kept them above our bed after you left. I would stare back at them as they bore down on me and try to imagine its smile.
I asked for you at HQ. I waited for your letters every day at the Yale Hospital. I rode my bike back home past the quilted soldiers who eyed me along the road as they unwrapped their puttees at night, just as they had wrapped them as I went to work in the morning. Your letters never came. I always left forwarding addresses. Mailed a packet of letters to your family. I tried to write the letter that would free me. I could live with the secrets of the war you shared with me. I could have lived with you and your God and your other women. I watched you for hours as you studied the code books. A mission makes us the thing we pursue. We are what we study. I am
It is not really like Changsha, though there is a jinriksha. Most people here wear black sneakers. They miss China. I can pretend I am still there—bow to the men in sleeveless shirts and gray pants in my building, share silk thread with their wives, who sew all day. I can imagine when I leave in the morning, I am on my way to the Yale-in-China Hospital again. Taste tea in a coffee cup. And I wait for you. At night in bed, I hear a train slam into the station. It is the Japanese shelling.
There is a man here who says he remembers you when you preached in Chekiang Province. He is still a Christian and insists I go to church with him, an A.M.E. in the next ward. He says he was told you joined the AVG, that all China has heard of you. He tells me your Chinese is perfect. He would not be surprised if you were still alive and preaching to many converts. Mao himself would not be able to tell you were American. I think the man says what he thinks I want to hear; he brings me fried bananas and takes me uptown on the bus to the cathedral to play Bingo.
There is one bathroom on my floor in my building. I like to sit there, steaming in the tub. I can smell the starch from the street. Do you remember the P-40 shot down over Lingchuan when we lived there? It crashed, pilotless, down the road. I remember when the Chinese peasants, hundreds of them it seemed to me, carried the cracked-up plane up the road to our house. The smaller parts, they held them above their heads. It looked as if it was coming apart as it moved. It was like the dragons at New Year’s. “Here is your plane,” they shouted, dropping it near the porch. We were the only Americans they knew of. You thanked them in your perfect Chinese. Sly General Wang took the aluminum from the fuselage and had his smith make the bathtub. Remember the bathtub? All we had before was the Yangtze Kiang. The way I washed your back like an Asian wife. Why did you leave with Drummond without saying anything? You wrote to Betty trying to explain. She has shown me the letters. And you wrote to your parents. In Lingchuan, in Changsha, when we made love, you whispered to me in Chinese. In Chinese . I didn’t know Chinese. I don’t know it. The geese flying backwards. The Eastern menagerie. And I would have gone with you to the West, to Turkestan if you had wanted. Converted the Jews. It is a place for a woman. “Look, I have a mission.” Now, I have a mission, John. I had one then and they are the same. You, John. Did you, in doing your duty (and was it duty to God or to country that allowed you to leave me?), confuse your two missions? A missionary is always the best warrior. I remember the Jesuits saying mass along the road in camouflage, the host made of spinach flour. I remember the almond eyes of that Flying Tiger. I kept them above our bed after you left. I would stare back at them as they bore down on me and try to imagine its smile.
I asked for you at HQ. I waited for your letters every day at the Yale Hospital. I rode my bike back home past the quilted soldiers who eyed me along the road as they unwrapped their puttees at night, just as they had wrapped them as I went to work in the morning. Your letters never came. I always left forwarding addresses. Mailed a packet of letters to your family. I tried to write the letter that would free me. I could live with the secrets of the war you shared with me. I could have lived with you and your God and your other women. I watched you for hours as you studied the code books. A mission makes us the thing we pursue. We are what we study. I am
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