Country Driving [83]
“It’s a lot of trouble for you to come out here,” Cao Chunmei said.
“It’s no problem,” I said. I pressed the boy’s brow—he was on fire. His eyes looked frightened but still he didn’t speak.
“Will you eat some lunch?” Cao Chunmei asked politely.
“I already ate,” I said. “I think we should go now.”
They decided that Cao Chunmei would stay behind until Wei Jia was settled in the hospital. She had prepared a change of clothes and a roll of toilet paper in the Mickey Mouse backpack. Wei Ziqi carried his son down the hill and into the backseat of the car. The boy lay with his head in his father’s lap.
The road from the village is steeply switchbacked, and I drove slowly, so the car wouldn’t bounce. After ten minutes Wei Jia said that he felt sick, and I pulled over. He made gagging noises and twin trails of blood trickled down from his nostrils. Wei Ziqi dabbed at them with the toilet paper; in the sunlight the boy looked even paler. After a minute we set off again.
Autumn is the best season in northern China, and it was a beautiful day, the sky clear and bright. The peasants had come to the final crop of the year, the soybeans, and rows of men with short-handled scythes stood bent in the fields, heads bowed like penitent monks. People threshed the haylike stalks all along the road. We had nearly an hour of rough mountain driving before the Badaling Expressway, and I tried to keep calm by focusing on the details of the countryside. We climbed out of the Huaisha River valley, across the tunneled pass, and then we descended to Nine-Crossings River. The waterway colors caught my eye—the orange-painted rails of the bridge, the dark pools of stagnant water, the white-barked poplars along the banks. At Black Mountain Stockade we had to stop again; this time the boy vomited. His nose was bleeding steadily. His father tore off fresh pieces of paper and shoved them inside to stop the flow.
The road climbed again, winding steeply through walnut orchards, and then we reached the last pass of the day. From there it’s all downhill to the valley where the Ming emperors are buried. Their tombs are scattered across the plain, each laid out to face the south, and the gold-tiled roofs shined bright in the October sunshine. We drove by the grave of Xuande, the fifth Ming ruler. According to legend he killed three Mongols with his own bow. Next we passed the tomb of his grandfather, Yongle, the great ruler who established the capital in Beijing in 1421. Just beyond that grave, Wei Ziqi asked me to stop again.
Wei Jia murmured that he had to go to the bathroom. His father took down the boy’s pants and he produced a sickly stream of diarrhea. He was completely white now and there was no expression in his eyes. We were less than ten minutes from the highway.
“I think we should keep moving,” I said.
“Give him a minute,” Wei Ziqi said.
I had pulled over in a ditch beside an apple orchard that had been recently harvested. On the road, a steady line of tour buses roared past on their way to the Ming tombs. I wondered if any tourists caught a glimpse of the scene: the parked car with its flashing lights; the father in the ditch, cradling his son. The harvested orchard, fruit picked clean, branches bare in the stark autumn light.
MIMI HAD ARRANGED A spot for Wei Jia in the children’s ward of the Peking University Health Center Number Three, where the blood specialists were supposed to be good. We registered the boy, and after he was in bed he seemed to recover some of his color. But now he was so frightened that he struggled against anybody in a white coat; when they tried to take a blood test, he bit one nurse and took a swing at another. His father and I pinned him to the bed while they performed the test. Afterward he calmed down, and a nurse said that he would be kept under close observation to see if his platelet count improved. She asked who would stay with the boy tonight.
“I will,” Wei Ziqi said.
“You can’t!” the woman said sharply. “Only female comrades are allowed to spend the night in the hospital.”
“His mother will