The Binding Chair by Kathryn Harrison Read Free Book Online Page A

clothes in which to meet the rulers of the next world; everything had yet to be prepared. The household shivered with activity.
    On the third day after his death—when his spirit would have reached the bridge between worlds—a phalanx of priests arrived to read scripture through the night. During these rites, May yawned, she swooned; in the morning she awoke on the floor, sleeping at the feet of her dead father.
    On the seventh day after his death, and on the fourteenth and the twenty-first—each week for seven weeks—May and her mother and grandmother chanted May’s father on his way through the next world; they urged him toward reincarnation. He was a famous man, her father. A spirit like his was one for whose return China waited. After all, had he not defended their town from foreign devils? With his brothers he had burned the homes of missionaries, he had rid the countryside of their corrupt texts, their pale-eyed wives and daughters, and their disgraceful, impoverished, and downtrodden god. Of course May’s father might, it must be acknowledged, not be reincarnated at all. He might become a god himself, with a local shrine, a day of observance.
    For weeks, his body lay in state, receiving homage. Around him tables overflowed with his favorite foods and servants squatted to burn incense and spirit money. An artist, fingers black, tunic and trousers immaculate, labored over a last portrait. Every so often, he climbed onto a chair to look from above at the body’s blind, silent face. As it was expected that she wail, May did. And at the encoffining ceremony, she kneeled with her mother and grandmother. With them she bowed so obsequiously low that she bumped and bruised her head on the floor.
    To initiate the funeral procession, in unison the three women—mother, wife, and daughter—unbound their hair and swept it over the lacquered wood of the casket, relieving May’s father’s corpse of the corruption of death. Then the shining black box was carried from the courtyard while firecrackers burst, driving off jealous spirits. Ghosts without homes, without family to love and care for them.
    Wearing white, May followed her father’s new and flattering portrait through the winding streets and into the ancestral graveyard. Next to May, as was the duty of a new widow, Chu’en wept and tore the hair from her head. In the graveyard, family and mourners were shocked to discover May’s father’s tomb already filled by the remains of some bold scoundrel eager to share in the blessings heaped upon so illustrious a resting place. The interloper was exhumed and dragged outside the cemetery wall as May, Chu’en, and Yu-ying looked on.
    …   
    T HOUGH NO ONE else in the family had died, the necromancer returned when May was fourteen. It was time for her betrothal, and in order to make an auspicious match, Yu-ying said the concerns of May’s departed father must be addressed. At a table reserved for only the most honored guests, the necromancer dipped his fingers in a bowl and wiped them dry. Offered wine, he drank, and he ate all the morsels of meat and fish and every cake set before him. When May’s grandmother had paid for his expensive advice, she contracted with a matchmaker, confident that May’s feet were as beguiling as her face. Yu-ying was almost sorry that propriety dictated that they remain bound and unseen. Left and right, each had a big toe that curled up, four that folded down, and a plantar crease so deep that several coins could be hidden inside it. Under her grandmother’s tutelage, May had learned how to care for her feet in privacy, how to wash them and to cut the corns and calluses with a sharp knife, how to stop infections with borax and odors with alum. She’d learned never to move her skirt while sitting, never to move her legs while lying down, and never to wash her feet in the same basin as her face—otherwise she would be reborn as a pig.
    Following Yu-ying’s instructions, May had sewn a