Henry was quiet for a moment. “Maybe he was saying good-bye.”
“Maybe,” Ling said. But the dream hadn’t been peaceful in any way. George’s death had hit Ling hard. Somehow, all along, she had believed he would beat it. He was young and strong. But she understood that illness was capricious and unfair. After all, Ling had been young and strong, too. And it hadn’t made a bit of difference to her legs.
The train whooshed into the station. Without a word, Henry offered his arm, and Ling did not refuse it.
“What’s the matter, Little Warrior?” Wai-Mae said the moment Ling got off the train in the forest.
“She lost her friend George to the sleeping sickness today,” Henry said, and the three of them stood listening to the soft chirrup of birds, not knowing what to say or do next.
“We should give his spirit rest,” Wai-Mae said at last.
“What do you mean?” Henry asked.
“It is very important to honor the dead. To make certain they can be happy in the afterlife, especially if it has been a very hard death,” Wai-Mae said. “Otherwise, the spirit can’t rest.”
Henry thought of his mother sitting in the cemetery working her rosary beads, all those painted saints giving her comfort. He thought, too, of burying Gaspard with a soup bone. Rituals were important. “I’ll get Louis,” he said, patting Ling’s shoulder. “We’ll do this right, Chinatown–New Orleans style.”
Henry, Louis, Wai-Mae, and Ling gathered on the hill above the golden village. Louis played a slow tune on his fiddle and Henry sang a hymn he’d learned as a boy. Wai-Mae plucked a twig from a nearby tree and transformed it into incense, which she lit with a candle made from a stalk of grass. Its sweet, smoky fragrance joined the pine and gardenia.
“How did you do that?” Henry asked, astonished.
But already Wai-Mae had gathered a handful of pebbles and was squeezing them in her fist, a look of fierce concentration on her face. When she opened her hand, it held a cup of tea.
“For your friend,” she said, and Ling left the offering on a bed of wildflowers.
“I don’t have a picture of George,” Ling said to Wai-Mae. “We should have one.”
Wai-Mae handed her a stick. “Draw.”
Ling did as she was told, dragging the stick through the dirt to make a simple representation of a face—a circle, two slashes for eyes, a line for a nose, and another for a mouth. Ling looked to Wai-Mae.
“You know what to do,” Wai-Mae said, guiding Ling’s hands to the image in the dirt.
Ling shook her head. “I don’t think I can do it.”
“Yes, you can,” Wai-Mae assured her.
Ling pictured George’s face in her mind, but all she could see was the ghostly George from her dream. She took a deep breath, and then she saw him as she had known him in life—skinny, hare-quick, mouth in a half smile, brows raised as if he were constantly surprised. That stupid snort. His hopeful eyes darting toward the Tea House door each time it opened, as if someone might walk through with his beautiful future cradled in her hands.
The buzzing sparked across the tips of her fingers. It coursed along her skin everywhere and shot straight up her neck, making her head balloon-light. And then the vibrations resonated deep inside, as if some part of her had joined this dream world, all her molecules shifting toward something yet to be written. Cracks formed in the earth.
Ling opened her eyes, feeling a bit woozy. Where the crude dirt drawing had been, a sapling, yellow-green with new life, now reached toward the sun. Tiny red buds struggled out of white casings. As she watched the light sparking along its fresh tendrils, it struck Ling as both funny and yet so perfect. This was the essence of George: something always on the verge of being born. Something not ready to die. She turned her head away so that the others couldn’t see her tears.
“I did it,” she whispered. And Ling didn’t know if the tears sliding down her cheeks were for her dead friend or the guilty joy she felt at discovering this new power.
Brief lightning fluttered through the dreamscape. The tops of the trees lost all shape and color, as if they’d been erased by an angry child. The whining insect chorus pierced the quiet for just a moment. Wai-Mae said a prayer over George’s symbolic grave. Ling scooped up a handful of dogwood blossoms and placed them near the sapling.
“For George. May all his dreams be happy now.”
Henry nodded at Louis, and the two of them took up with a good-times song, as if they were joining a funeral procession on Bourbon Street, sadness giving way to celebration of the life lived. Far above, the dream sky settled into its rich golden hue.
