The Binding Chair by Kathryn Harrison Read Free Book Online

City. China. Here she is. In all her …” Alice waited for the word glory , but May had stopped speaking.
    The two of them watched an officer lead and then push a native girl, her hands tied behind her back, up a flight of wood stairs to the platform. As the crowd heckled, she fell to her knees, keening.
    “What is she saying! What’s happening to her?” Alice shook May’s arm up and down, as if trying to pump a reply out of her.
    “Look,” May said finally. “Watch.”
    A second officer, dressed identically to the one who had forcibly escorted the girl, dragged a bale of wire up the steps of the platform. He began unwinding it as the first read aloud from a paper. Alice watched the shining loops fall from the bale as the officer made one end of the wire fast around the weeping girl’s waist with a slipknot that he tested and tightened. Then he climbed a stepladder in order to thread the other end through a pulley, creating a primitive tackle attached to the top of the pole. When he let go, the wire dropped; its tip fell like a bright needle and swayed, glinting in the sunshine. The officer stepped carefully down from the ladder. He stood still, saying nothing, surveying all the faces turned toward him. A few words to the crowd, and a basket was passed forward over the heads of the onlookers. Woven from stout sticks, it was the kind of basket used for carting firewood, and the officer in charge of the wire lashed its dangling end to the basket’s thick handles, so that it hung just at the height of his shoulders.
    While he worked, the crowd remained quiet, as if engrossed by the performance of an especially adept magician. At last even the rickshaw man stood up on his shafts, pulling cold dumplings from his pocket and chewing them with a circular, ungulate motion of his sinewy jaws. Every third bite or so, he used one finger to extract a bit of gristle from his mouth, examined it minutely before flicking it into the crowd.
    The officer who had read aloud from the paper made a further announcement, and the onlookers began mounting the steps in single file, more orderly than any group of Chinese Alice had yet seen. It remained quiet enough for her to hear the girl’s cries.
    “What’s she saying! What are they doing to her!” Alice kept asking her aunt, but May said nothing. She appeared as transfixed as the rest of the crowd.
    Alice saw that each person who climbed up to the platform carried a stone and reached up to drop it in the basket. As the basket grew heavier and was pulled progressively downward by the weight of the stones, the girl stopped screaming. For as long as she could, she stood on her toes. Then she tried to climb the pole, perhaps hoping to lower the basket all the way to the platform and thus relieve the wire’s constriction; but if this had been her plan, she’d waited too long, she no longer had the freedom of movement or the strength it required. Her forehead against the pole, she coughed, and blood came out of her mouth.
    “Why,” Alice said. “They’ll … They will … It’s going to cut her in half!”
    May nodded, expressionless. She looked at the tears running from Alice’s eyes.
    “But why!”
    “Adultery. She ran away and was caught. She brought disgrace to a powerful family. She didn’t understand, perhaps, what marriage … What it demanded of her.”
    “But can’t anyone—”
    “No,” May said. “They can’t.”

T WICE T HWARTED
    W HEN M AY WAS TWELVE, HER FATHER DIED . According to the European calendar, this happened in 1889, in October, as May would calculate years later, consumed with the task of translating such dates—and anything else of importance—from Chinese to English. The district necromancer was consulted for the most propitious day on which to bury him, and as that day was two months after his death, the rigors of mourning seemed to May interminable. Her father, only forty-six, had died unexpectedly and had no coffin waiting, no suit of