St. Freda

a story...part 2

"I was addicted to the pipe," he said after a moment. I could understand that all too well I told him, remembering a few friends who'd gotten lost in their own search for the dragon. "I still haven't beaten it," he said matter-of-factly. "I've just changed venues," he added.

I looked down at his left sleeve and saw the bruises and scars of needle marks traced along the inside of his arm--a dark, thick line that seemed black and filthy. He looked at me knowingly, as if he could read my most intimate thoughts and was willing to forgive me for thinking the less of him. He seemed to shrug a shoulder, lazily, and then reached up to scratch at his cheek again and take a drink, looking off into nothingness as he struggled to pull another cigarette out of his battered package. I suppose he was waiting for me to come to terms with whatever prejudices he might have felt I had.

"Let's just say that I ended up in the employ of a local warlord in Manchuria, sometime around 1937," he said as he lit the cigarette, the smoke floating lazily around him--and for a moment I pictured him sucking on a pipe, smiling through another opium dream.

"It was at the time of Japanese expansion--when they were reaching out and trying to control everything they could: China, Korea, the South Pacific--everything. And though they hadn't touched our little part of the world yet, they would soon enough. In fact, things had already been put into motion that would tax my belief in everything I thought I knew, or understood. I'd question my own sanity about it before too long, telling myself it wasn't possible, these things couldn't be happening the way it seemed they were. It's like the first time you make contact with God--not talking to God yourself--" he added quickly, wagging his cigarette in front of me, "but perhaps there's someone you see, or recognize, or even know; something--someone--who has something about them you can't explain any other way than by saying that it comes from God.

"It's a difficult thing for anyone to admit to in this day and age. Religion, I mean. It's like saying you've always believed in God just because you went to church; after all, we celebrated the Saints' Days when they came around, and we put our pennies in the poor box--but we never really believed, did we? Not people like you and me?" He said it with the self-assurance of a man who probably hasn't questioned the idea of God in his life for more than thirty years; it was probably something that was lost somewhere inside the caverns of his poisoned brain I told myself, and I wondered if this was why he hid himself inside his dirty habit. I doubted how a man who lived that way could even ponder the existence of God? I told myself that I knew his story already; his god was the poppy, the last of the Mystery cults, and he celebrated the ancient rites to his god with the ultimate sacrifice--that being his own addiction. That was the beginning and the end of this story I told myself--there could be nothing more for a man like him.

"It didn't matter if I was sincere with my prayers or not," he went on; "religion was always a solemn occasion in the Empire--something celebrated by the State as a holiday because the Emperor was a devout Catholic. Nothing else mattered. I simply went to church because everyone else did," he added with a laugh--short, crisp, sardonic. "You couldn't tell me--as a man who'd lost his parents in one of the greatest maritime disasters of all time--that praying for them would've helped to bring them back, or saved their condemned souls. Later, when we found out my father was an embezzler, George told us if they'd actually landed in America, he doubted if they would've bothered coming back. 'They would've sent for you boys,' he told us quickly--and we believed him because we wanted to--even as he tried convincing us that he would've made certain we were re-united. But I knew it was all a lie. Was I supposed to pray for their souls now that they were dead and condemned as sinners? I can tell you right now though, I would've counted it among one of life's blessings if they had survived, and we lived in America. My life might've turned out differently," he added with a slow nod as he absently scratched at his cheek, taking another drink. Suddenly he remembered his cigarette, and dropped it on the floor.

"My being here isn't so much about me, as it is Freda," he said after a moment. He seemed to stare out into nothingness, at the lights above us as he said it--and then he turned to looked at me with his dark, pinpoint eyes, as if he was trying to determine whether or not I would believe anything he said.

"I think--just like everyone else did at the time--that I wanted to believe in her," he smiled. "We needed to. She was our Joan of Arc in a way--and you know what happened to her," he added. "I don't know if Freda heard voices, had visions, or anything as fanciful as that; but I think she must've seen something. I'd like to think a person doesn't do what she did and not see something.

"They came into the compound with the rest of the refugees. They'd been on the road for at least a day or two--there were five of them--coming in from some place I'd never even heard of before. It was one of those isolated places that used to be a Buddhist monastery before the missionaries took it over--one of those places made up of mud, brick and wood, you know the type I mean, with huge timbered walls meant to keep invaders and bandits out five hundred years ago, and stood abandoned for the last fifty years. It never stood a chance against the Japanese. But they never knew it was the Japanese army because they were isolated, like I said, and had no contact with the outside world except for those few times a year when they crossed the valley to the neighbouring village--to pick up seeds and what not, for next year's crops. That's the only thing that saved them from the same fate that befell the others.

"I remember talking to Su-mei and Lin later--he was one of those hot-headed young men who thinks the answer to everything is to fight--and they said they were sent out by Alex's father to buy seeds. The rats had gotten into the storage shed, Su-mei said, and if they didn't find seeds somewhere soon, it would be a difficult year for them.

"I never paid any attention to them when they first came in; they were just another rag-tag collection of refugees seeking shelter with the Warlord. I'd see them when the Warlord did. They'd picked up a cart along the way though, loading it up with foodstuffs and bedding, and they were willing to share it with everyone--in fact, that was the only reason the guards let them in. Our own food supplies were running low. Lin told me they came across a village on their way in, and everyone in it was dead, but I'm getting ahead of myself here.

"It was Alex who intrigued me. He was a white man like myself. Later, when I asked him what happened, when he was talking to the Warlord, he looked at me like I was the Devil's spawn--like I was an ogre out of some children's book--or the enemy, his own personal enemy--and I was here just to defile his Puritan's piss-ass piousness with the stench of my breath, the sound of my voice, and the double meaning of my words. I tried to take into consideration the fact that he'd been through a great deal--hell, they all had--you could see that from the moment he levelled his eyes at me. They were deep-set eyes, and there was a penetrating depth to them, with a blue colour that looked as soft as cobalt, but with an intensity that made them look as hard as coal. He came across with the attitude of a single-minded young man, determined and stubborn, with an inflexibility you could see in the depth of those eyes, and the tightness of his clenched jaw, too. But now that they'd reached their goal and everything was out of his hands, he seemed more than willing to take credit for having brought them to safety of sorts, even though you could see it on him--and he wore it like a bad shirt--that he thought he was at an impasse. He quoted long passages from the Bible to us, citing them all by chapter and verse, and speaking for all the world like he was full of the fire and brimstone Lin and Su-mei said his father had; as if his words could protect him from the madness about him. I went to my quarters afterwards and looked up some of the passages he quoted--at least as many as I could recall--in an old battered copy I'd brought with me from Vienna all those years ago. I've memorized some of the better ones over the years. I still know them--or parts of them," he said with a smile, "but I've probably forgotten more than I ever knew, since I lost the book years ago. Or did I throw it out in guilt?" he asked himself carefully.

"It doesn't matter. Lin told me that Alex wasn't like that before--all that fire and brimstone stuff, I mean--not until they found what they did when they eventually made it back to the mission. Su-mei agreed with him, nodding her head and speaking up quickly. They said Alex was the last person they'd have expected it from. They said if there was anyone who'd be taking over from his father, they certainly never thought it would be Alex. He had a younger brother--his mother died giving birth to him, Su-mei said--and Alex never stopped blaming his father for it because there was no one at the mission to help her when things went wrong. I suppose he blamed his brother for her death just as much as he did his father; people have a tendency to do that, I hear.

"When they left the mission to get seeds that morning, it was with that same sense of adventure that punctuates the young at heart--at least that's the feeling I had from everything Lin told me--but when they returned, it was to tragedy; modern warfare came to invade their idyllic existence. I asked him to tell me what happened, but he avoided the issue; perhaps he thought by not talking about it, the nightmare would go away?

"Su-mei said they thought it was thunder when they first heard it. Alex said it had to be close, but there was no lightning--at least, not like any lightning they'd ever seen before. There were flashes in the distance, but there was no rain, and there were no storm clouds overhead. When they saw smoke drifting lazily into the sky, they were certain the mission had been struck--I suppose that sort of thing happens all the time out there--and they made their way up the goat trail, tripping in potholes, and falling over each other in their hurry to reach the top.

" 'Alex and Freda were there first', Su-mei said. I watched Lin swallowing hard as Su-mei struggled for the right words. He was looking at me closely, trying to determine if I could possibly understand how they both felt.

Lin was a big boy, with the body of a fighter that seemed to match his fighter's temperament. He had delicately arched eyebrows most of the time, but he had a habit of knitting his brows so they bunched up into a tight knot above his eyes, and his eyes seemed to narrow even more than they were all ready. I could see that he wanted revenge, but I could also see that it went against everything he'd been taught, and it was confusing to him--like he was fighting it inside his mind--or his heart--and it was twisting him apart. I suppose he thought Alex would feel the same way he did, but when he saw Alex quoting Biblical texts on his knees beside Freda, he didn't know what to do. Su-mei said it was as if Alex's father had invaded his son's mind and taken him over, body and soul.

" 'It was a horrible find,' he said to me at last. As soon as they crested the hill, they saw Alex on his knees beside Freda. Alex was weeping, holding on to her--perhaps thinking he could draw some of his strength from her--but it was like she didn't even know he was there. She was praying fervently, zealously--like neither of them had seen her before; the tears were running down her face, and her tiny body was racked by great, heaving sobs that looked like they were exhausting her. Lin said he could remember hearing the mission bell ringing out and echoing across the valley with  a doleful melody. I suppose falling bits of timber were hitting it as the bell tower burned, because before too long, he said it toppled over and fell in on itself, tumbling across the yard until it came to rest up against the wall, the echo of its lyric lost in the roar of the fire. He said hearing it like that seemed to bring him out of his trance, and when he looked up, he saw the figure of Alex's father nailed to the mission wall. The old man's naked body had been slashed so severely, the flesh hung off it like the carcass of a partially skinned animal--he looked as if he'd been flayed alive like one of the martyred saints out of the past.

"The blood ran down his arms and thighs in thin crimson stripes, like crimson spider webs Su-mei said, and his limp head lay to one side; but his eyes were open--staring out into the emptiness in front of him--and his lips were moving, muttering, like he was praying to himself. He was alive! They fell to their knees in front of the man, and Lin says he looked over at Freda murmuring constantly. Alex's father seemed to find strength from somewhere deep inside of himself--as if God had risen him up and he was looking out at the fields of Heaven in front of him--and he lifted his head, looking out over the small group below him, blessing them with his last words. Lin said he thought Freda must have gotten too close to the old man, because her face was covered in blood. It was all over her hands, he said, and her smock; even her feet were wet with blood. Suddenly though, unexpectedly, the wall fell back on itself and an explosion of sparks danced and swirled on the billowing clouds of smoke, and they could see that everyone else inside the mission was dead. They'd been laid out in the centre of the courtyard: men, women and children--as if they had been put on display, Su-mei said. They had bullet holes in their heads, and it looked as if most of the women had been raped--young, old, indifferent, it didn't matter--and some of the children had been defiled as well. They all entered the mission together--except Freda--looking at the destruction. It meant more to them than any of them understood; it was the only home they'd ever known. The doors were blown in off the hinges, and Lin said he thought that they had been struck by lightning. I knew as soon as he told me that it was the cannons, but they'd learn about that soon enough.