Erin Eisenhour - [BCS308 S02] Read online

  The Black-Eyed Goddess of Apple Trees and Farmers’ Wives

  By Erin Eisenhour

  My favorite story as a child was the one about the farmer who slits open his wife’s belly and plants an apple tree amongst her insides.

  Mind you, the wife is long dead by the time the entrails come into play (the story loses a great deal of its romance when you skip over that fact, and I am partial to romance). She is a practical person and, stretched out on her deathbed with all her bones jutting out of her skin, she loudly insists that she will under no circumstance permit her body to languish in a lovely pine box when it can serve a far more useful purpose—such as sprouting a tree in the back garden, preferably one that will complement the peonies and grow tall enough to block the sun from reaching the Ling’s plot next door.

  “Never did like those turnip-pushers much,” the farmer’s wife mumbles before her heart gives out. I think the farmer says something too, but that’s not important.

  In some versions of the story it’s these same turnip-pushers who tear the tree up by the roots and burn it; an act sometimes painted as vengeance, sometimes a restoration of honor (the moral gets muddied in all the smoke and excitement). In others it’s Tian, god of great heights, jealous of the reach of the apple tree’s branches. Sometimes it’s even the poor wretched farmer himself, buried in a snug little box patched together from the tree’s soft wood. I, again being in favor of romance, prefer the fourth version, in which the apple tree outlives them all and sits in an overgrown tangle of rhododendrons and yellow-speckled peonies to this very day.

  No matter how you tell it, it’s a much better story than the one the shaman is telling me right now about the Jade Empress and her demigod son Nu, patron of youth, untimely death, and filial obligations, tamer of tigers, etc., etc. I am tempted to ask the shaman if Nu really did try to fuck a pine tree like in the myths (admittedly, it was a very handsome pine tree, bristly like freshly grown chin whiskers), but my mother’s stricken expression keeps my mouth shut.

  “All this to say,” the shaman concludes in a reedy voice, “think of today not as a day of sorrow but as a day of rejoicing. This is the highest honor any young woman can hope to attain in a mortal life. Serve the gods well and you may even attain your own seat in the Pantheon.”

  I smirk down at my bare toes. In my head I conjure up a delightful image of my own face cast in gold with glossy black pearls in place of eyes. Smoke wreathes my head like a crown as neighbors and strangers alike kneel at my feet, bowing and scraping to the immortal Bi, patron of missed curfews, lost slippers, and neglected responsibilities, cracker of ill-timed jokes, etc., etc.

  The shaman does not notice the fine glaze that has shifted over my eyes. He speaks directly to my mother now—when he can edge a word in, that is. Every few seconds another hiccupping sob jerks her body and he is forced to cut his sentence short and pat her hand. I fiddle with the hem of my sleeve, watching the chickens skulk about the front garden through two slats of wood in the far wall. Kuen—the baby the midwives ripped open my sister to retrieve—totters about on unstable legs, collecting fistfuls of tufty white feathers in his pink pudgy hands.

  Really, I don’t see what all the fuss is about. Shamans drag away poor farm girls from the outlying provinces all the time (particularly in seasons of great calamity, as everyone insists we are in now). Even then their lives stray little from their previously charted course. They trade mud thatch and straw for cedar wood and oil, reborn as sworn sisters, plodding away the rest of their days with too many early rises.

  Then again, my heavenly sanctioned calling is a smidge more exacting than a life of poverty and celibacy. If the watery gray dregs of the teacup set before me are to be believed, I’m to cure the plum pox by praying, fasting, and letting the shamans tear out my heart and eat its ashes—not necessarily in that order (though I have my personal preferences) but certainly by the end of the month.

  I avert my eyes as the shaman pays me some compliment about the shape and softness of my hands—very befitting of my sex, he assures me, as my mother, embarrassed, buries her own hands beneath her sash—and I barely manage to smother my laughter. His tongue keeps darting across his lips in a way that reminds me of the black asps with their jewel box eyes that infest the countryside during the hot murky months of summer. I’ve beheaded plenty of them with my spade out in the garden, but this particular specimen, I decide, will require a more delicate touch. Still, it is all I can do not to raise my head and meet the shaman’s gaze with a defiant glare. Like an itch in the small of the back, the world can’t rid itself of me so easily.

  He mistakes my silence for shyness—or, worse, humility.

  “Speak, child,” the shaman urges. “What have you to say to this glorious calling?”

  “I am deeply honored to have found the favor of the gods,” I say with as much graciousness as I can muster, all the while keeping my eyes set at a demure angle that never strays above the shaman’s knees. “An honor far beyond what a simple peasant girl such as myself could ever expect from the world.”

  My mother blinks at me in stunned silence. Instinctively, she presses the back of her hand to my forehead. The lines that encircle her drooping mouth only deepen when she realizes that my skin is quite cool, my heart plugging along at its usual lethargic pace. Brace yourself, I think.

  The shaman’s lips peel back in a reptilian smile. His gums are black from the bitter tea the shamans use for scrying—the kind they mix up with vetiver roots and ashes.

  “Your words make my heart smile,” he says, and his voice drips with sweet oil and venom. “I think the Pantheon is well within your reach. But, forgive me—” The tip of his pink tongue skirts his lips. “I must now ask a somewhat... delicate question. Standard procedure, of course. The maiden, I trust, is indeed still a maiden...?”

  His sentence trails off as he ducks his head in a sign of deference to my mother. She cuts her crying short. Something about this breach in propriety revives her. As she gathers her strength, her face purples and swells, twisting into an indignant expression that proudly declares as if there was any need for such a question!

  I raise my head to meet the shaman’s crinkled eyes and offer him a honeyed smile as I at last answer this gambit with one of my own. “About that—”

  My mother yanks me up by the collar. “What?”

  Her voice is so loud and shrill that it wakes my father, asleep for so long that we’d all forgotten he was even there. His head dips forward and, to the accompaniment of a sharp cry of surprise, slams against the low table. The half-empty bottle set before him tips over the table’s edge and meets the floor in a spray of green glass.

  My mother is still shaking me, my toes barely brushing the floor, but I manage to turn my head and meet the shaman’s gaze, flush with triumph.

  “Since that appears to disqualify me,” I gasp through my mother’s stranglehold, “I won’t waste a moment more of your time. Here, allow me to show you the way out.”

  As if he could somehow lose his way in our little three-room farmstead.

  But something is wrong. Something hangs in the air, more clinging than the humidity. The shaman’s cool façade does not slip for a second. He stares at me with his too-pronounced brows arching up into his forehead, looking at me the way a teacher does a young student who has just completed a sum and—oh, how silly—marked a two where there should be a four.

  “Not to worry, my dear,” he assures me. “The mistakes of youth will not follow us into the next life, so why let them haunt us in this one? Besides, we have certain... procedures now to compensate for any such blemishes that m
ight otherwise tarnish the gods’ chosen Elect.”

  I cannot work the muscles in my mouth. My father stares blankly at the shaman, then at the puddle of glistening green glass on the floor, as my mother wrings her hands around her handkerchief. In this horrible silence it is easy to make out the slight hum of an insect’s wings. A fly slips through a crack in the door, spiraling overhead before settling on my cheek. The shaman sees it, too. He stretches his arm out and, smiling, pinches it between two fingers.

  The nice thing about inking your death on the calendar a few decades earlier than anticipated is that it gives you an easy out of all kinds of otherwise unavoidable social obligations—weddings, court summons, and the like. Sorry, Aunty Feng. Would if I could, Uncle Yu. But something tells me the other girls won’t appreciate me oozing puss and blood all over the skirts of their shiny new ruquns. Alright, if you insist, so long as my severed head gets its own cushion—oh, I see you’ve changed your mind.

  As the ones who ushered me into life, my parents are permitted to accompany me on my journey out of it, even behind temple walls. My mother flutters and ferrets about the house all night in preparation, flinging sleeping shifts and teacups and mud-caked work clogs indiscriminately into a single trunk, only for the shaman to inform us as we load into the wagon the next morning that the temple shall be providing for us ‘in perpetuity’ (and, anyhow, there is nothing to be gained from an over-attachment to the material). In the end she leaves the trunk on our doorstep, where the chickens pick at the faded leather.

  My fiancé Yusheng catches us at the front gate in order to impress a last-minute bribe on the shaman, his red commissioner’s robes hitched up about his knees from the three-mile sprint from town through the rice paddies. Yusheng is especially put out by the whole “Elect” business because now he’s short a wide-eyed girl-bride, and they’re in short supply in Pingli Province, what with the plum pox making the rounds again.

  “And, not to mention...” Yusheng puffs, “I have friends in the magistracy... who would be more than happy to... to compensate you for any inconvenience this might cause.”

  The shaman peers into the little leather purse with its limp red tassel that Yusheng has proffered. With a sympathetic smile he tips it over. Coins spill onto the ground, and the chickens swarm, mistaking them for bread crumbs. Returning the purse to its owner, the shaman mounts the front of the wagon (my father slips uneasily into the seat beside him) and nudges the two mules into motion. Yusheng stands rooted to the spot.

  It is hard for my mother to see him go—especially after all the teas and smiles and belly-crawling it took to make such a respectable match—but as I watch him sink into the rising red-brown slope of the road I bid Yusheng farewell with a gesture vulgar enough to make a twice-widowed commissioner blush.

  I sprawl in the straw in the back of the cart staring listlessly at the passing swells of white pine forests, the country quiet punctuated by my mother’s sudden outbursts as she works her way through a list of every young bachelor in the province who I could have compromised myself with (at this point I can’t bring myself to tell her he doesn’t exist). The wagon slogs along, unaware of the pain each forward movement inflicts on my spine. Steady rains have left the roads in a sorry state, and the wagon wheels are only worsening the problem, churning the loose soil into a thick, earthy stew.

  The only person enjoying themselves is Kuen. He really is an ugly baby, I think, though he isn’t truly a baby anymore. It’s miraculous how little of my sister is in that fat red face, considering the price of admission for its entry into the world.

  Kuen notices my stare. His cheeks puff out and a toothy grin scrunches up his eyes. I pinch his big toe, and something about this coupled with the wolfish smile twisting my lips puts him in an impossible fit of giggles. That’s right, you smug little bastard, I coo in a honeyed voice in my head, you know what you did and you’re prouder for it.

  My mother glares at me, sweeping Kuen up in her arms and squeezing a cheek until he quiets. I sneak a wink at him. As Kuen struggles to imitate me, I think to myself that there isn’t anyone I hate more in the world, except maybe Yusheng and his perpetually sweating upper lip.

  “What about the Shu boy?” my mother prattles on. “Oh, what was his sun sign again?”

  “The Vernal Equinox, I think,” I answer dully.

  “Ah, I should have known!” she declares, and then she sees something in my face that makes her start sniffling again, her grip on Kuen tightening.

  “You know, when I was a boy,” my father says, lifting his hat an inch, “we didn’t bother with any of this mystic bullshit when a fever caught. We just died.”

  “Right,” I say. “And now all your family is dead and you’re an alcoholic.”

  “What was that?” he asks just as the wagon jolts and he sloshes rice wine down his front, eliciting a disapproving hiss from my mother.

  It’s in moments like these where I cannot help but think that marriage between a demigod and a pine tree seems just as likely as that between the man and woman seated beside me.

  “Can you really stop the plum pox?”

  This last statement is from Hulin, one of the young soldiers serving as our escort, though he’s half a head shorter than the others. His ears are lopsided and he reminds me more of a puppy than a hardened killer, but he is not drunk or hysterical or Kuen, so it’s his company I prefer.

  “By letting them chop up my heart, yes,” I say warmly.

  Hulin blanches, to my surprise. I figured he was just as keen on this sacrificial business as the shaman.

  “Apparently Nu visited the shaman in his dreams,” I continue. “Told him to follow the stars straight to Pingli. Then the rest of the signs turned up in my tea leaves—”

  “Did you know that some scholars think the stars are just fiery stones set in the sky?”

  “Fiery stones, huh. No, can’t say we’ve heard much about that in Pingli.”

  Hulin flushes. “I mean, not that I believe them. I just think it’s fascinating because... well, before I came here I wanted to study at the Academy.” His gaze drops to his shoes. “Stars and comets. That type of thing.”

  I look him up and down. “You’d look good with a scholar’s beard,” I conclude, and Hulin’s cheeks flare up with color again, round and red as apples.

  At the temple I am greeted by a swarm of outstretched hands and sun-scorched faces, followed by a more subdued reception from the wealthier attendees, who merely rustle their fans in acknowledgment, porcelain bodies enshrined within the folds of their palanquins. They’ve poured into the city from all sides and provinces, scaling walls, tearing down gates, trampling those too weak to stand on two feet, all for a glimpse of the gods’ chosen Elect. But our wagon parts this press of bodies as if shearing through the surface of a quiet, glassy sea.

  A woman catches my eye. I don’t know why. There is nothing remarkable about her weathered brown face in this mob where all faces are weathered and some shade of brown. I stretch out my hand to hers and, mimicking a gesture I must have observed at a holy festival, touch the tip of my middle finger to her palm. Others eagerly push forward. I reach all those I can. Crooked old men. Sagging young women. Grubby-cheeked children perched on their parents’ shoulders. They drape silk ribbons in plum and ruby and dusty pink across my extended arm and shower me with creamy white magnolia blossoms, fistfuls of fragrant frangipani.

  “Don’t encourage them,” my mother sniffs. “It... it is not becoming of an Elect.”

  “She means it’s cruel to get their hopes up,” my father chimes in from the bottom of the wagon. “They think one little touch will shield them from the pox.”

  My mother scowls.

  I twine a rose-colored ribbon about my finger and continue to touch as many hands as I can. The odds are that by the time we reach the temple I’ll have contracted the plum pox, and then hopefully I’ll be dead in three days’ time—sweaty, swollen, but without the hole in my chest.

  The comb cleave
s a part down the center of my head before sinking into the snarls of thick black hair that hang past my shoulder blades, grazing the soft skin underneath. So, I muse, this is what it’s like to be scalped. Thank goodness I can add that to my list of life experiences.

  A flock of attendants flutter around me, prodding at me as if I am a prized pig about to go up for auction. They are all female and only a few years older than me. Apparently that is not enough to make them view me with any kind of sisterly sympathy. They scrub and pluck and perfume my skin without mercy, and when I try and meet their eyes, they only scowl.

  “Perhaps there has been a mistake,” the eldest girl whispers.

  “There must be,” says a second. “She’s so dark.”

  “Dark and coarse,” a third murmurs in agreement, inspecting my hands with a critical eye. “A bad omen.”

  “Bad enough to send me packing back to Pingli?” I snap, yanking my hand away. The third girl recoils, as if a hairy black spider might come crawling out of my open mouth.

  “What is this talk of omens?” the shaman says, appearing suddenly in the doorway.

  The girls press together, dipping their heads and muttering apologies.

  But the eldest girl decides to press her luck. “Master, look at her—”

  The shaman’s baton cracks across the girl’s cheek. After watching that bamboo rod dangle from his belt for so long I was beginning to wonder about its use.

  “She is the Elect,” he rasps as the girl shrinks back amongst her sisters. “Chosen and without blemish in the eyes of the gods. But, like a diamond in the rough—” He forces my chin up with his soot-stained fingers. “We strip away the excess.”

  I try to remember how the pox is spread. Vapors, I recall vaguely, evil spirits expelled through the mouth. I force a violent, sputtering cough up my throat, dusting the shaman in a fine shower of spit.

  The girls collectively take a step back. I brace for the sting of the baton on my cheek, but it never comes. Instead, the shaman takes in a long, even breath and grabs me by the hair. I claw at his hand as he drags me down the hall, spitting like a cat with its foot caught in a trap.