The Year of the China Lady

Murasaki's parents have brought her up with only one prospect in life -- to be a fine Japanese wife and mother. They have taught her to cook, to clean, and to serve with respect. Her strongest desire, to nurture, to look after little ones, is being eaten now by the slow, black beetle of
TB. She has shamed her parent's hopes for grandchildren, and her own sex. She is being sent away.

It is 1931, and on Vancouver Island, under the clouded sky over Malahat Beach, lies the House of Good Hope, following the shoreline like a long, low ripple of thick cream. A great ward fronts all its length with glass, facing on Mill Bay cleft twice across by deep-wooded points of land. The grey of the harbor stretches out into the roiling green of the sea.

A navy tunic, blue blouse and knitted scarlet tie is the uniform of the woman who waits for her inside the wide arched doorway.

They move from the New Ward down a long winding corridor to the Babies' Ward. Murasaki is shown the bathroom. The corridor from the Babies' Ward then runs straight through to the Playroom. It is large and long and white and grey. On opposite walls hang two oilettes: Simple Simon fishing for a whale, a boy and a girl eating porridge by a fire. There is a great wooden cupboard full of books. A grey stone fireplace fills one side of the room and on the other a great sun-deck is hung between earth and sky.

Murasaki is sixteen. The sanatorium will look after her for a year; she will look after the babies.

There is Tommy. One of the two older children says, "He's like Humpty-Dumpty, 'cept he's broken inside." So they call him The Egg Baby -- an almost chick. He lays listless, his blue eyes never moving. He never cries. He never smiles.

Julia is very pretty, and hardly ever cries also. She is perfect but for her tiny clubbed feet and disfigured hands. The little finger of the right hand is the only whole finger she has, and she uses it eloquently.

Bella is lovely. Her small head is covered with downy, dark curls. Her dark eyes twinkle with curiosity. Sometimes, when they must put her through the pain, a sad, older spirit looks out of her great, bright eyes.

The older children are boys, three and five. Charles and Nathan have lived here all their lives.

They cannot pronounce Murasaki's name. They call her "The China Lady".

* * * * *

The China Lady has a book. In this book she has placed all the seasons like a leaf or a flower pressed between each page. And in each leaf, upon each flower, she has hidden a story.

Listen as she reveals her stories to The Babies. Watch as Julia touches The China Lady's moving lips with her little, and only, finger. Hear the shell crack. Feel pain fading out like ripples of water.

* * * * *

November, and the wind is making a million ripples in Mill Bay. This wet, windy day has miracled a rainbow across the harbor. So much wonder can come from a dark source. The heavy purple cloud I thought was rain, caught on fire when the sun burst through the pine trees.

The China Lady's eyes are not always blue. When she wears green the kelp pops itself with jealousy, for her eyes are then the color of seaweed on a bright day, and sometimes they are the purple of a sunset before the fire
is quenched by the ocean.

And sometimes . . . sometimes when I know she loves me, they are black.

December has been a snowy month, and bitterly cold. But today the air was clear, the sun was bright, and the world shone like a Christmas tree. The sky was its topper of turquoise-blue glass, the leafless trees were strung with silver beads, and the tall evergreens sprinkled with diamond
dust. They are saying it will snow again tonight. I have had enough of snow.

The China Lady says that there are hummingbirds in her garden. They are all the world's bright thoughts, and at Christmas time she sends them out to light the Christmas trees of all the world and bless the people with happy thoughts.

January, and half the roads are washed away and all over the Island there is flooding. No one is visiting. The roads have fallen into pieces and Mill Bay is gripped with ice. Last night I heard tiny snappings and crackings as if the earth deep underneath us is dissolving. The Koksilah has risen over its banks and washed away some of the highway. The babies are used to having no visitors, but I pity the women whose husbands cannot come.

The China Lady has a husband and she keeps him in a large urn. He once was eight feet tall and weighed five hundred pounds, but the China Lady wished him small so she could keep him with her always, and so he is. He wears a top hat and coat-tails, and white spats on shoes the color of Alaskan hematite, and whenever the China Lady wishes to go out she brings him from the urn, tucks him under her arm, and they go dancing.

February is so desolate with the rain and fog, I swear the trees are weeping. The storm at noon lifted the sea in a long ridge so it looked like some ancient green serpent with a white crested spine was struggling toward the beach. The cedars are beating the ground in a frenzy and I fear
for the clumps of crocuses that have sprung up from their roots. I saw two daffodils yesterday, and though the flooding hasn't stopped, they gave me heart.

The China Lady has talked to flowers and she swears that the violet is not as shy as it seems. It likes to speak in purple prose like a wise, but affected, mandarin. The daffodils are the shy ones, the China Lady says. Their sunny appearance is only a cover for their basic demure nature.

The sunlight in March is so pale. The clouds are like thinly sliced clusters of pearls and you can see through them to the pale turquoise sky beyond. It has been raining for three days and this is our first clear day. The rains called to the life in the trees and now they are all in bud.

The China Lady says that Spirits live in the trees. They are trapped there all through the winter, and when they cry with joy at the coming of spring the tree runs with sweet sap. The Spirits struggle from the branches, swelling into buds that soon burst into blossoms. Drawn by the sweetness of the flowers the bees come, and the Spirits cling to their wings and fly off into the world.

This is a glorious April day. Yesterday was such a grey, brooding day. Grey rain from grey clouds in grey sky on grey window . . .

But today is rainbow colored. Daffodils and tulips have given way to rains of wallflowers and clouds of forget-me-nots.

The China Lady's kindness created the rainbow. Before she came the world had no colors but for the flowers, and they only bloomed for two brief seasons and the world was grey again. So the China Lady took all the colors of the flowers into her memory and traveled with them up into the sky until she came to the Land of the Rains. In each raindrop she placed a color, and when, as they must, the rains next fell from the sky, the earth absorbed the colors. But, secretly, the raindrops had kept the best and brightest colors for themselves, showing them to earth at special moments in a boastful arch of brilliant color.

It is May and the weather is so fine we have moved the babies' beds out onto the sundeck. They are stirring in the sun like tiny flowers moving to the light. The very air smells like sunshine. A mellow, honey-wine scent. I feel as intoxicated as the birds that nest in every tree and fill the
air with melody. The babies are moving to the crystal song.

The China Lady sits under a may tree massed with pastel-rose blossom, beside a dark pond in which gold fish flash and talk to the water lilies on the shadowed water, telling stories of the world and humans and how difficult it must be to move around, and not be rooted to one place as they are.

June is a wonderful jeweled-with-green month. Royal summer has crowned the Malahat with emerald and jade and celadon.

The China Lady has a gown the color of myrtle. It is made of silk from a thousand silk worms who ate a thousand shrubs of myrtle. The gown, which covers the China Lady from her delicate chin to her slender ankles, is embroidered with spider web to form the white flowers of the myrtle plant, and black pearls hang here and there in imitation of the black berries that the myrtle grows. When the China Lady lies down to rest, one thousand silk worms eat her dress . . ., and so the wheel turns.

July is truly a dragon month. Even the early morning fogs seem to hold a heat like the warm exhalations of the sleeping beast. And as the day draws out, and I am summoned by the heat, I could swear it rises from slumber
and calls into the air with its heated breath.

But then the evenings, and the cooling breezes -- of its great, marvelous, beating wings.

The China Lady allows me to pet her beast: when he is sleeping, when he is in a philanthropic mood, when he daydreams of peopled pagodas, when his eyes drink in the China Lady. And when he has eaten his fill.

August, such a long, too-ripe month. The air is pungent with the smell of the rain-soaked marigolds and yellow poppies. The wind has blown the sea upon us and our world is one vast landscape of mud. We have taken the babies in again and I am afraid I yelled at Nurse.

When the China Lady wishes to punish anyone she gives them a basket of one hundred pairs of shoes all with the laces tied in a hundred tight knots and makes them sit and untie every one.

September is a windless, waveless, wonderful month. The sea is so calm I had to look up at the sky to see if the moon still stood their and controlled the tides. Such a night of stars and still water. Mornings the grass gleams with dew. Diamonds on emeralds, and beyond, the amethyst glow of a million Michaelmas daisies. If I was not confined here I would run through the fields, taking all the babies with me.

When the China Lady sings, very, very softly breathing out the notes of a waltz, you must shut your eyes and dance through the field with her, through the field to the black pond where a thousand water lilies float. You follow the lilies round and round as they dance on the surface, and soon the pond is the sky, and the lilies are the stars, and you and the China Lady dance through the night as the stars wink out, one by one.

October, and they tell me I am going home. And I tell them I do not wish to.

Tommy smiled at me last Tuesday. I had held him and danced, and although his watered-blue eyes never left his shell, a tiny smile broke through.

They believe Julia's feet can be straightened eventually so she will run and walk like other children.

Bella is much better. Much better, they say.

Charles and Nathan are learning to read and have commandeered the book cupboard for their own.

The China Lady and the little man in the white spats have five children. Three boys and two girls. Their names are Egg, Book One, Book Two, Little Finger and Bright Eyes.

^

Biography

Joy Hewitt Mann has been publishing in print in such literary journals as The Malahat Review, Whetstone and Amelia for ten years. Since January she has been an enthusiast of electronic magazines with fiction appearances in Manx Fiction, The 13th Story and TW3, and poetry in The Paumonok Review, Rose & Thorn and Poetry Now. She received the $5,000 Leacock Award in 1997 and this years Acorn-Rukeyser Chapbook Award. Her first chapbook "Voices From the Other Side of the Moon" was published by Bard Press Books, NY, USA, in 1998. Her first short story collection "Clinging to Water" was published this year by Boheme Press, Toronto, Canada. She lives in an old stone mill house in the tiny village of Spencerville, Ontario, Canada, with her husband and three children. When not writing she runs a large junkstore.