Free Homesick by Jean Fritz Page A

coffin winding down that steep mountain, bumping along under two poles that the coolies carried on their shoulders. Every bump was another never. Never, never, never, never.
    When the coffin was out of sight, my father put his arm around me. “You know, Jean,” he said, “you have been very, very good through this.”
    Suddenly something inside me exploded. I wheeled around at my father. “Good!” I shouted. “That’s all anyone can think about. Good! I haven’t even thought about being good. I haven’t tried to be good. I don’t care about being good. I have just been me. Doesn’t anyone ever look at me?”
    My father had sat down in a rocking chair and had pulled me onto his lap. I was crying now. All those tears that had been stored up inside were pouring out. My whole body was shaking with them. My father held me close and rocked back and forth.
    â€œYou don’t understand,” I cried. “You and Mother will never understand. I was waiting for Miriam to grow. I knew she’d understand. She was the only one. I was counting on her. I needed her.”
    I looked up at my father. His head was back on the headrest, his eyes were closed. Tears were streaming down his cheeks. “I do understand, Jean,” he said. And we went on rocking and rocking together.

4
    AFTER MY FATHER LEFT THIS TIME FOR HANKOW, he didn’t come back at all. Communist soldiers had begun to attack Wuchang (the city across the river from Hankow) and he was helping to set up hospitals for the sick and wounded. He wrote that we should come home as soon as Mother was able in case the riv erboats stopped running, so in the middle of September, even though Mother could walk only a little, we went back down the mountain. Kurry was shut up tight in a basket on my lap, and the Jordans, who were traveling all the way to Hankow with us, led our procession.
    I wasn’t sorry to leave Kuling. The bluebells and the tiger lilies had dried up and dropped off their stems. And I was glad to get away from the wind. Every night it came howling down from the mountaintop as if it were looking for something lost. It shook the trees inside out, rattled at doors, banged at shutters. Then it would stop for breath. Not there, it seemed to say. Not there. Then it would begin again. Whooo, whooo, going back to all the same places it had been, looking and looking. Some nights it never gave up. Even in a war, I thought, I would be safer in Hankow than in these mountains and with a wind that might, for all I knew, be looking for me. Maybe in Hankow my mother would get well quickly so I wouldn’t have to worry about upsetting her. Maybe sometime I could talk out loud about once having had a real baby sister with fingernails that had to be cut.
    Not yet, of course. My mother was carried down the mountain on a stretcher, and although she got up for meals on the boat, she spent most of the time lying down in our cabin. When we approached Hankow, she went on deck and stretched out on a long chair.
    â€œIt looks just the same, doesn’t it?” she said.
    And it did. Even from the middle of the river I could see the plane trees marching up the Bund in their white socks. (Their socks were painted on to keep bugs away, my father said.) As we came closer, I saw that there were more coolies on the dock than usual, more jostling, more noise, but I thought nothing of it. Just coolies. There was nothing that looked like war.
    Then the gangplank was lowered and my father bounded on the deck in his white panama hat and his white duck suit. He hugged us both, but Mother got the first hug and the longer one because of course she was the one to worry about. He shook hands with the Jordans. “This may be the last boat to get through,” he announced triumphantly. My father loved to set records: to be the last, the first, the fastest, to get through what he called Narrow Squeaks.
    He explained that he’d