Stitched to Skin like Family Is

My stitches laddered their way up the split seam, in and out one side, across, and then in and out the other. When you pulled the thread through, if you had done the job right, it closed the seam like it had never been torn at all.

The salesman kept glancing from me to the road and back again while I worked. I was mending a jacket, his good one, he had told me, handing it over. It draped heavy across my lap, the sleeve I wasn’t working on dangling down by my bare calf.

“You’re Chinese,” the salesman declared suddenly.

“Sure.”

“You’re Chinese,” he said with growing confidence. “I know you’re not a Jap girl, they’re smaller than you.”

“There are a lot of women smaller than I am.”

He puzzled over my words as the sun slipped lower. We’d left the thin woods of the river valley for the fields a few hours ago. The summer of ‘31 breathed fire and dust over the plains states and the sunset cast long, long shadows over the empty fields. Illinois that fall was a held breath, waiting to see what the winter and the dark might bring.

Tying the final knot, I clipped the thread and shook out the jacket. It was a decent piece of clothing, older than the owner might have preferred but with good care it had years yet. It bore the faint scent of detergent and starch, and underneath it, even fainter, the suggestion of hot asphalt and sandwiches eaten at lunch counters from Shreveport to Chicago.

Without thinking, I bent my head closer to listen, closing my eyes briefly to better catch the faint echo:

Well, now, missus, I don’t mean to trouble you for more than a moment, but have you got a pen? Ha, oh no, I don’t need one, because I would bet you dollars to donuts that I have one a hundred and ten percent better than what you’ve got, and now that I’ve got your attention, let me introduce you to the Walker fountain pen—

I must have smiled at the patter because the salesman spoke again, this time without looking at me, his eyes fixed on the road ahead.

“Say, you’re a pretty young lady. There’s a Chinese girl just like you up on the screen, I saw her last week. Bet you’d be great in the talkies, anyone ever tell you that? Because I would bet you dollars to donuts—”

“I don’t need a fountain pen.”

“What?”

“Your wife,” I said deliberately, smoothing my hand over the jacket’s satiny lining. “She has a neat hand with a button. The ones she replaced on the cuff, they won’t be coming off any time soon. You should ask her, if she has the time, to resew all the buttons that way.”

“No one tells my wife anything,” he muttered, turning back to the road, and the jacket’s sleeve slipped down against my calf again.

I pulled it up, turning the jacket inside out and lining up the shoulders before I folded it into a rectangular packet.

I’m not a bad man, no, of course I’m not. It just gets lonely out here on these long roads. Don’t you get lonely, girlie?

I leaned my elbows a little more firmly on the jacket; he could deal with a few creases.

My suitcase in the back, little coffin, chuckled with voices long dead, and we drove into the late afternoon.

The salesman let me out at the crossroads not long after, giving me a curt goodbye and unaware that I had sneaked a sandwich from his tin lunch pail while I was getting my suitcase. The suitcase was nothing special, just cardboard with tin clasps and a plastic handle, but the contents, wool and silk and cotton, whispered to me as the salesman’s car drove away in a cloud of dust. I’d carried them across the country, folded down tight and neat, and their voices were small but insistent.

Augh, the food in this country. At home in Taishan, we wouldn’t give such trash to the dogs.

You going to eat all of that, sis? You aren’t even going to share?

Hurry. Hurry. He’s missing. You’re eating while he’s missing, you’re breathing while he’s missing, you’re living while he’s missing, how dare you?

I had barely gotten the sandwich unwrapped when I heard a rumble, a truck lumbering down the track like some wounded animal. It idled before the crossroads, and I snatched up my suitcase and hurried for the passenger’s side.

I relaxed when I saw a Black woman in the driver’s seat. She was dressed neatly in dungarees and a clean gray shirt with a row of copper buttons down the front, and she wore them with such confidence that any questions would be your problem and not hers. I climbed in while she looked me over critically.

“You’re a long way from home,” she said.

“Miles and miles and months and months,” I replied, which made her snort.

“I’m just heading home to Clovis myself,” she said. “Where am I dropping you?”

I took the battered envelope out of my pocket, pointing at the return address in Yongjun’s frail script. The letter itself was banded together with the others in my suitcase, but they all said the same thing: I am well. People are kind. There is no work to be found, but I hope the next town will be different.

The driver squinted at the envelope, leaning over to get a better look. The sleeve of of her gray shirt touched my bare arm, and I got a quick scrap of laughter and a pile of clothes, her shirt and a pretty red dress with a sweetheart neckline, tangled up like limbs on the ground. It startled a breath out of me, making her look up suspiciously, but I must have seemed innocent enough that she nodded.

“I don’t know the house number, but Nine Mile Road, that’s on my way. I’ll drop you off at the crossing.”

“Thank you.”

The sandwich turned out to be roast beef and grainy German mustard, and I split it with the driver, who didn’t ask my name or try guess what I was. She was content to be silent, and I was content to stare out the window, absently twisting a fold of my skirt around my fingers. It was brown sprigged cotton, cut down from a dress Ma had picked out of a charity bin. She’d cut it just for me before she died—I’d done the sewing, and these days, I seldom got more than a hint of linseed floor wax from it or a few whistled notes of Sweet Eleanor, which must have been a favorite.

As promised, the driver let me out at the crossing for Nine Mile Road, but she stopped me before I got the door open. She looked down the long stretch of darkening track before me, hesitated, and shrugged.

“I’m coming back the other way tomorrow morning, probably an hour or so after dawn. I’ll keep an eye out for you.”

I thanked her with surprise, watching as she drove off down the road. Imagine. One of Yongjun’s kind people.

I walked down the side of Nine Mile Road, swinging my suitcase in my hand. I passed several houses, standing empty now with the owners probably gone to California. I passed a honeycomb of postal boxes, and I imagined Yongjun sliding his letter into one hopefully, shy of taking up even an empty box that wasn’t clearly his. It had always seemed like magic when his letters came back to me, defying the vast spaces between us. It had felt like something else when they stopped.

I walked for an hour, long enough to wonder if I had somehow missed a turning on a road with none of them, but then I came to a gravel drive with a battered sign posted beside it: the Greene Inn, and the house number from Yongjun’s letter. The inn turned out to be a low, single-story building with a horse trough and a long hitching rail at the front. The square windows were all thrown open to let the wind in and out, the front door likewise. It looked neat and clean, as if ready for guests. It looked lonesome, and empty, as if those guests were long dead, and only their ghosts came back from time to time.

I went around back, and when I knocked, I made sure to keep it polite. I didn’t slam my fist down on the door like I wanted to. I didn’t call for Yongjun. I didn’t demand that they produce him for me like a rabbit from a magic hat because he was my brother, mine, and—

The white girl who answered looked as gentle and demure as I wanted people to think I was. She was already shaking her head.

“There’s a church up the road if you’re looking for a hand. We’ve already—”

“Not a hand, work,” I said as humbly as I could.

She gazed at me through the screen door, the only line on her face a deep furrow between her light brown eyebrows. I had been two weeks on the road, but I took pains not to look it. Yongjun wrote that nothing got work faster than looking like you’d be fine without it.

“What kind of work?”

“Sewing. Any kind of sewing. Clothes, tarps. Sails, if you have them.”

She cracked a smile at that like I hoped she would. We were hours from the Great Lakes or even the Mississippi.

“Not much call for sails out here.”

“And if not sewing, scrubbing. Cooking. Even for just a night.”

She glanced behind her, considered, and then nodded.

“There’s some mending for you. We eat late here. If you’re done when we put the food on, you can come to the table.”

She unhooked the screen door and let me inside, sitting me down at the table and bringing me a full basket of mending.

“The front’s only for meals and for boarders,” she explained, coming to sit beside me with a box of peas. She slit the pods open with her thumbnail, letting the peas fall into a half-full bowl with a sound like rain. There was something savory in the oven, and a gravy simmering from bones in the pot above it.

I shook out the first shirt, white with a stiff collar and long enough to fall to my knees. The shoulder seam had given way, and when I touched it, the words rang in my head, get down and stay down, goddamn you.

“You must not see too many boarders out here,” I said, plucking out the broken threads that wormed from the torn seam.

“Not too many, no.”

“I think I was the first Chinese that the truck driver had ever seen.”

“First one I’ve seen, too…what, what’s the matter?”

I smiled at her, shaking out my hand.

“Ah. My needle slipped, that’s all.”

I stuck my bleeding fingertip into my mouth, and when I was sure I was no longer bleeding, I took up the shirt again.

Get down, stay down, you sonovabitch, Christ, he’s all blood.

I sat with the woman whose name was Sally Greene, and she told me about the boarding house, how she kept it with her father and her brother Paul.

“It was better before they put in the big road. The old road ran right by us, and we’d get people all the time. Now it’s just folks who already know we’re here. Or ones that get unlucky. It’s catch as catch can these days, I guess.”

I pressed my lips together, concentrating on darning the sleeve between my fingers. Something, maybe my own fear, maybe only how tightly I held the fabric, made it shiver in my grasp.

I don’t give a damn, get him in the hole. Freeze’s coming, it whispered against my skin.

We worked together in silence, and I worked my way to the bottom of the basket, listening with my fingers to the stories the fabric told. Fabric’s like skin, and darns and repaired seams are not so different from scars. You can learn many things where someone’s been allowed to heal and also where they never did.

Sally looked up in surprise when I set my needle aside, flatting the newly repaired buttonhole with my fingers before neatly folding up the trousers. God in Heaven, God in Heaven, someone cried not long ago.

“Already done? Gracious, you’re fast.”

I nodded, and she smiled as steps rang out from the front of the house.

“Lucky. It’s time to eat.”

The Greenes, father and son, were curiously identical, both tall men who filled up the space with their sullen silences. They nodded to Sally, stared mistrustfully at me, and settled at the table while Sally and I brought out the meal: cornbread in an iron skillet, slices of some thin meat liberally drowned in gravy. I sat through grace with my head down, and when I was served my portion it turned out to be chicken boiled so long it tasted like slivers of bark.

Dinner at the Greene table was a silent affair except for Sally, who sat beside me and spoke in her soft clear voice about the weather, the price of eggs, and about what the pastor had said when he came by on his mule just a few days prior. Yongjun would have decided she was kind, perhaps even that her father and her brother Paul were as well. Everyone looks kind before they speak and before they strike.

Sally asked me about myself. She asked whether I was traveling alone and whether I had someone waiting. I was and I didn’t, and I could feel something close off the room even if the windows and doors were still open to shed the summer heat.

Father Greene sat at the head of the table like a stone, lean and gray in a fine coat that was too small for him. Paul sat at the foot, his twin in nearly every respect save that he was smoother through the face. Father and son alike were most alive through their eyes that flickered like birds between me and Sally and then to each other.

It was difficult to sit and to wait, but at last when I started to gather the plates, Sally stopped me.

“I wonder,” she said, her voice faltering, “if you would like to hear me sing?”

Yongjun would have said yes. How kind of her. I settled back into my seat.

She smiled in relief at my nod, and she went to take her place at her father’s left shoulder, her voice lifting in a low alto that seemed to rise from the very soles of her shoes, look for the waymarks, the great prophetic waymarks. Beside her, her father nodded, and his hand came down on the table in chopping block counterpoint, one-two-three-four, the journey’s almost o’er.

I listened, but there was nothing to listen for when their song was so clearly meant to drown out any other sound. Instead, I watched the shadows, and when one flickered as it shouldn’t have, I toppled forward, ducking under the table so quickly that Paul smashed the hammer straight through the back of my chair. It was a common hammer, nothing special, kept for no special purpose, and this was, for the Greenes, no special purpose at all.

Sally screamed, her father rose from his seat, but I lashed out with the paring knife I’d taken from the kitchen. It struck Paul through the cheap fabric of his trousers, cutting hard into the taut tendon behind his ankle where it was least protected. I couldn’t sever that cord entirely, but I didn’t have to. All I had to do was make his knee bend, bring him down heavily to the ground where I could slap my palm against the sleeve of his shirt. The shirt was green with a fine pink stripe and neat white shell buttons up the front. There was an extra button sewn at the very bottom inside the front placket, because the set was a nice one, and I wanted the extra at hand if one tore off.

The moment I touched it, the shirt writhed, clutching to Paul’s body as if it had breathed in and found him in the way. My head split with a sharp horrified scream, and no, not terror, I needed anger now.

“They’ll kill me,” I hissed furiously. “They’ll kill me just like they killed you—”

An image rose up in my mind, the door to the room open as it was now, sunlight bright as gold beyond it, and hands that weren’t his undoing the buttons, because after all, it was a very fine shirt. Yongjun had died shocked and afraid, but he had within him the same anger that lived in my skin, even if his was buried deep.

Paul shrieked as the fabric closed tighter against him, a dozen red pinpoints of blood soaking through his shirt. A moment later, they spread, and I imagined all the times my needle had sunk in and out of that gorgeous striped fabric because my little brother deserved something fine.

I shouted when two strong hands grabbed me by the ankles, dragging me back so fast that my cheek hit the ground. The splintery floor snagged my skin, tore it with a flash of pain so bright that the great blow to my back was secondary for all it knocked the breath out of me in a great rush of air. I clawed at the floor, trying to command my body to do something, anything beyond lying there for the next blow, but it didn’t come.

Instead the senior Greene struck Sally a hard blow to the face, shouting that she had almost hit him with the chair, and her thin cry of pain gave me enough time to get to my knees, turning so I could use great handfuls of Greene’s trousers to haul myself up. The trousers were his, nothing but praise songs and an indifferent animal knowledge of what he was, but I wasn’t after the trousers. Instead, I was after the coat, and I cried out with grief like a stab wound when I touched it.

Listen.

It was tropical-weight wool without a single slub, deep black with the most handsome sheen of blue. The long seams were machine-sewn in our little apartment in New York, but I did all of the finishing by hand, from the collar that I shaped to lie just so against my brother’s neck to the sleeves that had been measured for his long arms to the vent in the back fitted perfectly for his hips. It was his, made for him and for no one else, and under my hands, the fabric remembered.

Greene grunted as the fabric went tight around him, but he was smarter than his son, who had gone quiet under the table. He reached for the hem of the jacket, ready to tear it off his body. He was strong enough that the wool gave way with a purring rip, and I turned to the table to grab for the double-pronged serving fork. I had a delirious image of it pressed into Greene’s eye, but when I spun around brandishing it, I stopped in shock.

For a moment, I thought he had stripped off his face to reveal the demon that must surely live underneath. That was the only way for me to understand his eyes bugging almost out of his head, the black tongue that rolled down his chin.

Then I looked again and saw that it was the strip of fabric he had torn from the coat, crammed between his teeth and writhing like a snake as it pushed deeper. He clawed at his own face, went to seize the end before it disappeared, but his arms went stiff, the black lucite buttons at the cuff glinting like eyes. Greene went to his knees, his sides heaving as the black fabric disappeared between his lips, stretching his jaws, distending his throat.

I turned to Sally, cowering against the wall, her hands up over her face.

“I didn’t want to,” she repeated over and over again. “I’m sorry.”

Yongjun had worn no dresses, but I reached out to seize a fold of her skirt. I got a scrap of praise songs, a splatter of blood, and then my head split with lightning as she clubbed me with the handle of the carving knife. I dropped to the ground, and she gave me a kick for good measure. My vision swam, and everything felt watery in my ears, her words, the repetitive moaning of Greene behind me. It came to me we were of a similar size. She could wear my brown sprigged dress after I was dead, and I would whisper my fury to her for years to come.

The only thing that saved me was reaching blindly for the black shapes that moved in front of me, her patent leather shoes.

The shock of anger traveled up my arm, I was young, I was beautiful, I was loved, and oh how I danced!

Sally drew her foot back to land another kick, but then she yelped as her foot jerked back and to one side. She would have gone down on her face if the other foot hadn’t followed smartly after and then came down with a brisk clack on the floor. One and two, and one and two, and I levered myself up on one elbow to watch Sally dance. Her arms flew up to keep her balance, her body jerked like a marionette on strings, but her shoes flew like birds, one and two, straight to the open door. She tried to fall forward, anything to get off the shoes that had remembered how to dance, but they only moved faster, keeping her balance for her, juggling her weight over them and keeping her upright as they carried her out into the fields.

I recovered Yongjun’s jacket and shirt, barring the strip that was lodged so firmly in Greene’s throat, and I found Sally’s washboard and tub tucked away in the kitchen. While Yongjun’s clothes soaked, I searched the house, and from the loft, I pulled down a good dozen suitcases, some as humble as mine, some leather with proper tags affixed that would give some closure to people who wondered if their loved one might return home.

These I left in the dining room where Greene and his son lay, and I went to the kitchen to clean Yongjun’s clothing. I had found his suitcase, including an extra shirt and trousers as well as my letters to him. He’d kept every one, and for a moment, the grief I refused to entertain battered at my eyes and my ears, threatening to overwhelm me. Then I laid it aside and went to work, scrubbing out Yongjun’s clothes with a bar of soap and rubbing them over the washboard with soothing rhythm: you’re with me, you’re with me, you’re all right now. He wasn’t and would never be, and I concentrated on the wool and the cotton, the buttons and the seams instead.

There was a drying rack hung up on the pantry door, and I laid his clothes over the rails before I went to light the woodstove. As his clothes dried in front of the fire, I searched the kitchen. In an old tin labeled “lard” I found a small roll of cash, probably Sally’s rainy day money, which I pocketed, and behind the meager tins of sugar and salt, I discovered a wooden box with jewelry in it. Some of it could have been Sally’s, but there were also a men’s ring with a single tiny diamond set asymmetrically in its face and another for an infant. I wouldn’t have touched them if someone paid me, and I set the box gingerly with the suitcases in the front room.

By then, Yongjun’s clothes were dry, and they murmured with his voice when I shook them out: hello, jie, I have missed you, I have missed you, have you come out at last to see how kind the world is?

I carried his clothes tenderly to the back porch, where the moon had risen high and bathed the world in its uncertain silver shine. I’d left my suitcase on the porch, and now I opened it, laying aside my own clothes to reach the precious cargo I had carried all the way from New York. One by one, I drew the garments out, my mother’s satin tunic with the closures made from Chinese coins, my younger sister’s blue cheongsam with the embroidered red poppies, my father’s severe brown suit. The people who had worn them were gone, so instead I filled them with moonlight, watched with aching love as the sleeves and trousers and bodices and shirts opened into the shapes most dear to me in the world.

At last, I snapped out Yongjun’s clothes as well, and now I did cry to see how handsome they were, how they held his lanky form and smoothed his gangly frame to grace. A sleeve raised up as if it would wipe my cheeks, fell back down when it realized it couldn’t, and I smiled through the tears.

“It’s all right. I’m all right,” I told him. “I’m here.”

Yongjun’s shirt tucked properly into his jacket, and he went to join our sister’s cheongsam. I could not stand to have her burned in it, for all that it was her favorite, and right behind her was my mother’s tunic, carried by her mother from across the sea. Sometimes, I could still hear my maternal grandmother’s whispers as well, her voice so much like my mother’s which is so much like mine. My father’s suit, older than I am, hung back with dignity until Yongjun’s clothes came to meet him, but then the sleeves rose up to pull them in, and I covered my mouth with my hand, shaking hard. He had been so proud of Yongjun. All of us were.

In a while, I would do a last sweep of the house to see if there was anything else to take with me. I would bathe in the creek, and I would put on my spare dress that usually lay so comfortable and safe between my parents’ clothes. I would walk back to the main road, and perhaps the woman with the truck would pick me up. Perhaps I would decide where I would go next, and what I might do.

For the moment, however, I stepped out from the porch, and the shapes of my family circled around me, love stitched tight in wool, in silk, and in cotton.