For Want of a Story

Chapter One

There weren't always dragons in the Valley. At least she didn’t think so, though she was still not as familiar with the Driftless area of northwestern Wisconsin as she had been with the deep valleys of California. Yet, yesterday, with her pet iguana, Xia o Long, on her arm as usual, Long Mo (now called simply “Mo”) had looked more closely at the granite ridges surrounding their small town. Yes, there could be dragons there, perhaps in that highest one with the curved hump and jagged edge. Her mother, Daiyu, born in China, had told her that certain dragons sometimes slept for centuries in rolling hills like these—their backs and folded wings outlined in hilly crests—until someone had deep need of their hidden treasure.

This morning, she turned around from the window over the old, porcelain sink to greet her grandson and her daughter, Ting, who was getting ready to clean rooms at a local motel, bringing home just enough—with the help of food stamps—to feed the three of them. However, it was recently Jonny, who hadn’t yet reached his full height, who needed most of the food. He was always hungry. And he was always angry. Half Chinese, he had always been small for his age though he looked white—all except for the epicanthic fold over his nearly black eyes.

“I made breakfast sandwiches for both of you,” Mo hollered, pointing to the kitchen counter as Ting came down first, looking trim in her carefully pressed uniform.

“Thanks, mom, but I’m late. I’ll grab something at the motel,” she said as she grabbed a jacket from the banister. Though it was April, it was still cold in the north woods.

A minute later, Jonny, dark hair flopping into his face, came clattering down the stairs in boots, jeans, and hoodie. He grabbed two of the sandwiches, stuffing one in his mouth as he mumbled what she thought might be “thanks” as he slammed the door behind him.

Washing the breakfast pan and skillet, Mo waved through the window as Ting ran to catch the bus and Jonny threw his leg across his bicycle, supposedly to ride the three miles to the county high school. She suspected that he didn’t always go there, however. Sometimes he left his books behind and came back before school was officially over for the day. She didn’t think he was doing drugs, though she had heard that they were everywhere. The school counselors seemed to ignore the frequent absences of their students, especially those who, like Jonny, were only juniors and not interested in college. Most students at that school considered even technical school useless and elite.

Long Mo worried more and more about him. Because of his small size and different eyes, he had been bullied by other boys throughout both middle and high school along with the handful of Ojibwa and Dakota students who, for one reason or another, weren’t attending reservation schools. For the majority kids at the high school, there was no such thing as ‘half-white’—it was all or nothing. In middle school, white kids had stolen Jonny’s lunch or stuffed him in his locker or dumped his head in one of the boys’ room toilets, an older boy keeping lookout. They had called him “mugly” and his eyes “cray-cray.” In those days, he had come home crying, but the school administration had done little about it when Ting had called. In more recent years, in high school, Jonny had often come home with a black eye or bruises. Mo wondered if that meant that he was starting to fight back, but then she realized how useless that would be against so many.

Slowly Jonny had turned from the intensely sad and confused young boy, whose father had left him and his mother when he was ten, to this angry and intense young man. Getting good grades in computer science and art but barely passing every other subject—according to his last report card—he now spent most of his time in his room on his computer, ignoring his mother and grandmother’s attempts to draw him out. He no longer told them what was going on at school. Nor did the school have any information when Ting called the principal about the black eyes and bruises. “Just boys being boys,” she was told.

Lost in thought at the window, Mo realized that she had been fingering the brooch her mother had given her when she was 18: a sterling silver dragon, Fuzanglong, holding a real pearl. Daiyu had never told her what the pearl represented or why it was deemed so precious by the dragon. She said only that Long Mo needed to discover that herself.

And so she had. It had been difficult: such dragons did not give up their treasures easily. She herself had both inner and outer scars from those mid-century days in San Francisco where her first boyfriend had belonged to a gang of American-born Chinese who fought the foreign-born Chinese. She had had to make some hard decisions, but she had found unforeseen help from Fuzanglong. She had learned many things, among them the surprising truth that dragons could appear in many different and unexpected forms.

Today, there was no one left with whom she could discuss these things. Ting had never been interested in her Chinese heritage, having left California as soon as she could, marrying the first white man who had asked her, and moving as far away as possible. Though Ting had done her best to fit in with the other families in Aspen Junction, she had always been an outsider. Long Mo was surprised and relieved when Ting had asked her to move in with them after Mo’s husband died in California at about the same time that Ting’s husband had left her and Jonny. Ting needed someone to help take care of Jonny while she worked. At the time, Mo had just turned 70 and was happy to join her daughter and grandson, anywhere, even in this small town in the middle of nowhere.

They lived, literally, on the outside edge of town near the woods and a small creek. Their home was a small, two-story, run-down frame house that needed paint, a new roof, and many other updates which they couldn’t afford. The one good thing was that, with the little money her husband had left behind, Ting had been able to buy the house at a foreclosure sale. It was theirs, for better or worse.

It seemed to Mo that the people of Aspen Junction were sadder and angrier than even seven years ago when she had arrived. There were fewer and fewer ways to make a good living because, from their view, the government seemed to care more about endangered species, protecting the environment, and the rights of the ‘Indians’ than it did the needs of the white people whose great-grandparents had settled, logged, trapped, and fished these rivers, providing homes and furs for those downstream as well as a good life for themselves. To them, ‘Indians’ seemed rich enough up in their reservation casinos, pulling in handfuls of money spent by the tourists who flocked there.

Women with no resources of their own, like Ting, held whatever low-paying jobs were available: maids in motels, waitresses, or cashiers in grocery and convenience stores. Most all adults in Aspen Junction mistrusted the governments in Madison and Washington, which seemed to have forgotten about them and what their people had done for the state and the country in the last century. Today, they were fearful of being undervalued and powerless, overtaken by the wealthy, the so-called ‘educated,’ and by brown, red, and yellow people.

Ting brought home stories she had overheard at the motel of civilian defense forces which had recruited many of these dissatisfied local men. Such groups offered a kind of kinship and the hope of taking back their ‘inheritance,’ their ‘legacy,’ even their land, proposing ways to defend themselves against those who they believed wanted to take away their rights and everything they valued. These groups offered training in the use of advanced military arms, not just the everyday rifles and shotguns that most families already had. Even Ting’s household had one of each. Jonny’s father had taught him when he was just a kid how to kill small animals for food and how to protect his mom against predators.

Mo wondered about how Jonny saw himself in these times. Yes, he looked white, except for his eyes, but he was not considered by others to be white. She knew that, for years, he had been cornered, humiliated, and hurt by those boys who saw him as a threat (their girlfriends probably liked Johnny’s dark, mysterious eyes). Or maybe they just thought he was an easy target. She suspected that many of these same boys, like their fathers, were being recruited by paramilitary ‘defense’ forces, who told them that college was not for them. She wondered if Jonny was being recruited too.

As his senior year came closer, Mo became more and more concerned about Jonny. She saw images on his computer that confused and frightened her. She knew that, like herself at that age, Jonny needed a story, somewhere to begin.

So that morning, after the dishes were done, when she was sure she was alone, she went outside to the barely tinkling wind chimes she had hung under the big beech tree. She spread a yellow cloth on the ground and lit one of her precious sticks of incense made from the resin of the Dracaena palm tree. When she saw the slim plume of smoke begin to rise, she kneeled in front of it (her joints cooperating today) facing the direction of the high ridge that had caught her attention yesterday.

She knew from experience that Fuzanglong did not like to be disturbed: that he could be cranky, even unintentionally dangerous. But in general, all Chinese dragons were extraordinarily high forms of The Creative and could be trusted. There were many other Chinese dragons as well: the Dragon Kings, who helped with new journeys; the Azure dragons, who offered protection; and the Feiling, the most ancient of all, who flew the heavens, carrying with them the priceless wisdom of the Tao.

She had been helped by many of these in her time, but, today, she knew what was needed. Bowing her head to the ground in front of the powerful incense, she whispered, “Honorable Fuzanglong, once more I call upon your favorable assistance! This time it is Jonny who needs you—desperately! Please, most esteemed Fuzanglong, please—come!”

Xio o Long gripped her upper arm tighter as they both felt a low rumble beneath them.

© Kathleen A Dale