River of Dust Read Free Page B

tears saw the sun blazing on the horizon, that too-red ball of fire and blood. She could not bear to lose another one.
        The Reverend ran past her and frantically worked to unhitch their horse from the wagon. "Mai Lin," he shouted, "help her!"
        Grace tried to stand but fell again and clawed at the dust that quickly turned her palms yellow. After a few moments, she lay unmoving except by her sobs. Through the dust and tears, she saw Mai Lin hobbling toward her. The old woman bent low, her face alive with worry and indignation.
        "Take care of her," the Reverend shouted as he mounted his horse and rode off after the kidnappers, who were becoming smaller and smaller in the red distance.

Two
    M ai Lin shook her fists in the air and shouted, "Lord Jesus and the great ancestors rain curses upon them!" She then lifted Grace to stand and helped her up the steps and into the cottage.
        It was the first time Grace had walked over the threshold of the new little home built for her by her husband. Her eyes immediately found, over in a corner of the open room, a newly made baby's crib with a toddler-sized bed pressed up beside it. Despite his many duties as head of the mission, the Reverend had clearly spent hours turning the dowels and staining the wood for each charming piece. Such was his love for his children. The infernal humming in Grace's brain grew louder, and she thought she might go mad if it continued. Doc Hemingway had said that she needed rest, and yet how could she find rest in a country that tormented her with loss?
        She broke free of Mai Lin's grip and staggered to the child-sized bed. Suddenly on her knees, she bowed before it, her body pressed over the low cornhusk mattress. A cry broke from her throat, and she wailed into the calico quilt.
        Then she sat up again and looked about frantically, for what she did not know. She grabbed the boy's pillow that his father had no doubt set there himself. She thrashed it until feathers flew out from the pretty embroidered case. She slammed it down again and again, as a dog shakes a rabbit until it grows limp, all life ravaged. Finally, Grace flopped forward onto the bed and simply wept.
        The last of the white feathers fell onto her outstretched arms like surprising snowflakes back home when she woke in early spring to find the milk bottles frosted on the back porch. Black twigs and cherry blossoms littered the sudden whiteness. It was on such days that Grace was glad to be alive in a world where surprising things happened, yet never so surprising as to carry away all hope of something better, of redemption if one simply bowed to the Lord's great plan.
        On springtime mornings like those, when the rain had finally stopped, they waded out toward the creek that had been rising for days. From farms upstream floated all manner of tires, cut logs, old boots, and once a bloated cow, swirling in an eddy until it was skewered by the limbs of a fallen tree. The Lord had seen to such disasters, but there was always an escape, a way to survive and even grow stronger in one's faith. There was a lesson to be learned, and then you carried on.
        Grace sat again, and her head hung limply in the posture of a supplicant. She knew she appeared to be praying there beside her son's unused bed. But she was not. She was cursing the Lord instead. Above the incessant vibrations in her brain, she cursed Him as she never had before. She would not carry on. She would not survive, especially not in this terrible land that He had created out of fire and brimstone and suffering.
        Mai Lin knelt beside Grace and tucked a strong hand under her arm. She helped her stand. As Grace stepped away from the child-sized bed and the crib, she did not look back but tipped her head to see past the curtains and out the window as wild strands of pink and purple slid down the sky. Soon a gray stillness would spread. With nightfall, a frightening