The Natural Laws of Good Luck (33 page)

“Yes.”

“Good idea.”

Zhong-hua's first drawings of our dream house looked like a cube of irreducible space in which only magicians could live. But this was just the small house of his beginning mind. By the end of the Year of the Dog, the house of his mind had grown big.

The Thirteen Followers of Life

“D
O YOU HAVE TIME, NOT?
” he asked me after I returned from work. We drove over to our casserole of pink insulation, fragments of wallboard, and ice-encrusted silk pantaloons. We wrestled free a few cement blocks from the snow. Then a few more. With carpenter's hammers, we tap-tapped the tenacious mortar from the edges and piled the intact blocks by the shed. “Very useful,” Zhong-hua said, and turned to denailing half-burned boards, stamping with his boots to flatten out the crumpled sheet metal roofing, and coiling electrical wire around his forearm. We worked in the dark below the severed power lines.

The red chimney bricks were harder to find, buried under asphalt shingles and crisscrossed layers of rafters, broken honeysuckle branches, and soil mixed with kitchen artifacts that were now more aligned with the realm of wood and metal than the realm of human habit. I did my best and was satisfied that I had rescued the bricks that volunteered themselves, ending with a knee-high stack. The next day when I returned from work, I saw that my husband had tripled my pile with his superior archaeological efforts. It wasn't enough for another sky-high chimney; it was only enough for a dwarf chimney or a flueless fireplace, but the point was, it was enough for something. These were building blocks, and I felt better.

The night before the demolition, we crept up the stairs, which were littered with chunks of ceiling, and removed all the windows by flashlight. These, too, went behind the shed. I pointed out that the seals were broken from the heat and the glass clouded. “Doesn't matter,” he said. The Dumpsters carted off on flatbed trucks had not been full. I discovered the missing cargo gargantuan in a corner of the barn: smoky pillows and blue-black futons, a melted toaster oven, four dozen ashy teapots, and even a coffee can of charcoaled amaryllis bulbs. When I sputtered my dismay, Zhong-hua said, “Sometime, some part, maybe useful.” Among these darkened everyday things, the troll dolls I had lovingly made lay tumbled together in a box with their hair singed and their boot toes burned.

I did not want to see what seemed like evidence of defeat. Could it not just all disappear and make way for the clean and new? But my husband didn't want these things gone. Dumpsters that swallowed the past and rolled it away with all its useful metal and fiber were as inane to him as they were a sweet relief to me. To him these goods were just slightly bruised but still useful, like shoes off a dead man. Maybe he felt no need to divest himself of failure; maybe he didn't even think of this word at all. Having grown up under Chairman Mao, he did not take loss personally. He had spoken of the time when the party officials came to get the furniture and the wooden door of the house to fuel the village steel-smelting furnaces. Then they demanded everyone's cooking wok and iron pots and melted them. Steel made this way was all unusable. Misfortune was universally experienced, and losses were collective and exponential. People who didn't die scavenged the landscape for insects and leaves and aimed their slingshots at the sky.

The hubris of taking unforeseen tragedy as personal failure did not escape me, and I made a determined effort to adopt my husband's practical stance even as I watched the old unworkable life stack up again in a new grotesque formation beside the six broken lawn mowers, of which my husband also said, “Some part sometime very
useful. Not whole thing broken, only some part broken, some way broken. Not cannot fix. Can fix.” The acrid smell of ash permeated everything, but my husband waved his hand to indicate, this, too, would pass: “Time.” Yes, time, I thought, stepping forward, and then, stepping back, I felt I could not bear the rank oppression of entangling junk.

My husband took great pains to save what I thought was trash and clearly intended to keep it for a long time, as long as it took for things to reveal their usefulness. Marriage had increased my capacity for bafflement. I dwelled in the land of the not understood and the not understanding. This was different, I had learned, from the land of the misunderstood and misunderstanding. I like to think it was a state of suspended illumination, and sometimes only the ability to dwell there with some semblance of grace affirmed our relationship. I fell from grace when I called my husband crazy, secretly to myself, or voiced this sentiment to close friends. But if someone else called him crazy, I took offense on his behalf. Under the pressure of defending my husband's sanity, mostly to myself, I got in the habit of comparing dissimilar circumstances successfully. For example, being an artist, I, too, saved things that could be called junk: old cloth, wire, metal scraps, buttons, shattered windshield glass, frayed rope, reeds, roots, horns, bones, and worn-out boots. The stuff of chaos was the stuff of creation.

Zhong-hua tried to tell the demolition man to “go carefully,” so as not to break what was salvageable: the radiators, the water tank, and the old floor beams. According to demolition protocol, this man broke every radiator in two. Zhong-hua pronounced him a terrible worker and a boy. The excavation of the new and bigger cellar hole progressed as a battering of shale, gneiss, and bluestone, locally known as “graywacky.” The dozer had been working all day. At six o'clock Zhong-hua shook his head. “No good.”

“What?”

“No good. This need change.”

“Change? For God's sake, why?”

“Can't explain. House not straight not OK. This house need exactly north, exactly south.”

“But, Zhong-hua, then we will be looking straight down the county road instead of into the woods.”

“Look down road is OK. This house need exactly straight, exactly face north, exactly back to south. Also, house with old shed need exactly parallel. Cannot have space become very narrow at one end, become very wide at other end. End of one building need even with end of other building, not one building start halfway in middle of other building.”

“It's OK if the shed is not exactly lined up with the house because we will be taking the shed down, won't we?”

“Not. Anyway, you need understand—just one day not parallel not OK. Just one day with this kind of fighting energy can make whole family's life no good. This generation and next, next, next generation all have trouble. Buddhist temple area never have fighting corners.”

I studied the shed adorned with hornets' nests, boarded-up windows, and dangling shingles. “Oh, great, this way we will look out the front door right into the wall of a rotting shed. I'm trying to say it's very ugly and will block the kitchen window.”

“Yes. Block window is OK. Look into rotting shed also OK. You cannot imagine how beautiful this shed will be.”

He was right about that. I was experiencing a failure of imagination—a woeful failure for an artist. I gave in, confident that there would be abundant opportunity to consider the shed's potential, as it really was situated right outside the front door of the new house.

“OK, well, if you have other things, can you please tell me soon, before the building inspector signs off on the plans?”

Zhong-hua's beloved broken-down cars blocked the path of the big trucks bringing gravel and dirt for the septic field. We spent a few hours coaxing the engines to start and shifting the ones that refused to start into neutral. Zhong-hua insisted that they all would work again someday, even though one had no brakes and
a door missing, one no transmission, and the last a seized engine. I said we had to have the junk guy come and get the cars. He said he definitely didn't want that. Then he said, “You know, if east wind not pushing west wind, then west wind will pushing east wind.”

“Huh?”

“If I don't tell you what to do, then you will tell me what to do. If you don't tell me, then I will definitely tell you. One house have two bosses no good. Traditional way is man is boss.”

“But we are both very bossy, so we are equals.”

“Ugh. This maybe work.”

He was emphatic about wanting to keep the cars, so I gave him a hand and left the subject alone. Knowing my husband, he would find a way to transfer the good transmission to the car with the good engine, even if it were five years in the future.

We walked around the voracious sharp-toothed rock pit. Fronds of chamomile sprouted in from the hard clay and gravel. I wanted to smooth over our differences in opinion and share some joy in this project. “Look, here is our bedroom in the northwest corner. We will see the sun set.”

“No good.”

“What?”

“Bedroom need on east side. This is must-be thing.”

“Zhong-hua, you sat there and looked at the plans yesterday. You never said anything.”

“This is must-be thing for children.”

“The children don't live here. They are grown up.”

“Even one night sleeping in wrong corner is bad thing. A daughter who sleeps in wrong room of father's house can never do well for whole life. Father sleeping where kitchen should be is terrible. Northeast corner is fire corner—cannot sleeping in fire corner. This kind of breaking thousand-year things can throw away thousand-year good fortune. People say they don't believe this old stuff, and I say, ‘You don't believe, but you can watch, see, look: these people cannot do very well.'”

I agreed that we needed to do everything we could to invoke good fortune and health. Our one-story, two-bedroom house would have a kitchen in the northwest, a bedroom in the northeast for children and grandchildren, our bedroom in the southwest, and a huge middle room—perfectly square—according to Zhong-hua's specifications.

In the first days, the construction crew, not comprehending my husband's speech, narrowed their eyes, as if that would widen the portals for the sound waves. In just a few days, their inner ears had reconfigured to let in the odd-shaped English words. After that, everyone did fine, except the plumber, who was nearly deaf and generally unnerved by my husband. Communication was an ordeal for both of them. The plumber leaned forward squinting and nodded unhappily. Zhong-hua ended it with “OK, OK, OK,” and they parted ways having no clue what had been agreed to and each having his own definite idea of how the pipes should go in. On the side the plumber told me, “Your husband is a nice guy, but only one of us can be up on the ladder at one time, you know what I mean?”

While the men were framing the house, a construction crew five miles away had just removed the steel façade from the Big Lots storefront. They were getting ready to cart it away on a flatbed trailer when Zhong-hua persuaded them to divert one of the beams into the bushes for a small fee. The beam was twenty-four feet long and weighed four hundred pounds. Our discount beam remained in the bushes for a month, and we visited it from time to time until the carpenter cajoled a friend to fetch the beam and deposit it at our new house. The carpenter was not enthusiastic about Zhong-hua's insistence on incorporating a Big Lots beam into the house design, and his noncommittal nod was the worthy equivalent of Zhong-hua's own phrase: “Let me think about.”

Zhong-hua showed up at the construction site every day to help in any way he could and clean up in the evening. He reported back that American workers eat too many doughnuts. One day he prepared northern Chinese dishes for them: hot peppers with tofu,
pork with scallions and ginger. They sputtered and coughed and sucked air. The next day the boss bought a ham and cheese sub for Zhong-hua. On the day the floor joists were laid on the sills, the crew leader called me at work to say that Zhong-hua was busy hanging up rice-paper banners painted with large red Chinese characters all along the center beam. “He says the words will protect us. Yep. We've never been protected before. It's kind of nice.”

Zhong-hua was everywhere on that construction site. He walked beams, climbed ladders, shoveled gravel, and generated opinions about every detail of the project with the single-mindedness of a freight train. The list of “must-be” things grew, and the men started getting edgy. Progress was slow because Zhong-hua questioned everything they did. Sensing that he was making them “not happy,” Zhong-hua started his own huge project thirty feet from the house.

He said it was a retaining wall, but I could not discern what it would retain. He had stretched a simple string from the telephone pole by the road to a stake midfield and placed rocks from the cellar hole along the string. He fixed the broken arm of Kathy's wheelbarrow and borrowed it to mix the mortar. He added more and more rocks to make a straight wall quite unlike the lichen-covered walls undulating like giants' necklaces along the forest floor.

I admired those earlier, much better builders of walls, whose arms hefted and stomach muscles tightened in counterbalance just like ours. Even more I admired the generous patience of the first people to walk this land, who took time to learn the language of the birds and offered human words to fire and earth. They knew how to talk to stones. They lifted them red-hot from the fire, placed them in the center of the sweat lodge, and sprinkled them with water. The stones answered the prayers and accepted the human beings as relatives. I hoped they would accept us. I hoped our neighbor would not hate this wall. Zhong-hua was evidently thinking the same thing.

“Maybe this wall make Dave not happy.”

“Maybe.”

“I need stop now, you think?”

“Maybe you should stop.”

“I think continue bit by bit.”

“Yes, bit by bit.”

“Not one time all finish.”

“No.”

By dark he was scraping the metal bottom of the empty barrow with his trowel. Traditional New England walls used no mortar, but this one did. Zhong-hua figured one hundred bags of cement and three hundred bags of sand would do it. Finding the rationale behind someone else's words and deeds is hard. I gave myself more time. Swallows, the expert angels of dusk, feasted on insect throngs. The skies rumbled and spat electricity. I threw down my trowel and ran for cover, but Zhong-hua worked on, heaving boulders on the rain-pelted muscles of his will.