“Keep your cursed secrets,” he said, laughing. “Do I care what you do?”
He turned homeward, very content, and a moment later saw his second son slip into the gate of the courtyard before him. Whatever it was that made him hasten from work at least it was in these walls, Ling Tan thought. It did not occur to him that it was his son’s own wife that made him so quick.
… Lao Er went into the room that was his with Jade. She was not there.
“Jade!” he called. There was no answer. “Jade” he called again. He made his voice low. Perhaps she was hiding. Sometimes she hid and came out only when he was distracted, to laugh at him. But though he called yet again, she did not come out. The room was empty.
He felt the fear he always did when he could not find her at once. Had she run away from him? He went into the court to find his mother. She was not there and he went into the kitchen. The wooden lid of the cauldron was steaming with the evening’s rice and so he looked behind the great earthen stove. There his mother was crouched, feeding the dried grass into the firebox. He could not for shame ask his mother where his wife was, and so in pretense he made his voice angry.
“My mother, why do you feed the fire? My worthless one ought to do it for you.”
“Worthless indeed,” his mother replied. “I have not seen her since the sun was in the middle of the sky. These young women! The matchmaker cheated us. It comes of having their feet free. When I was a girl our feet were bound and we stayed at home. Now they run around like goats.”
“I will find her and bring her home and beat her,” he said and felt so angry that if he had had Jade before his eyes at this moment he would have beaten her.
“Do it,” his mother replied. Then her small shrewd eyes lit with laughter. “Only make sure first, my son, that you are able! Women are not so easily beaten, now-a-days!”
She laughed a dry silent laugh and spread the grass sparsely over the flame. Ling Tan was not a poor farmer, and her own father had had rich soil to till, but she had been well taught that, rich or poor, in any house there should be no waste of food and fuel and cloth. When she wove a piece of cloth and cut a garment from it, the scraps of the cloth could lie in the palm of her hand. This the matchmaker had guaranteed and it was true. But it was hard to find such young women now. Orchid, her elder son’s wife, had feet bound in childhood, but the revolution had come before the work had been finished and her father had commanded her feet to be unbound, even as Ling Tan had refused to allow his own two daughters to have their feet bound.
She sat feeding the grass into the stove, leaf by leaf and blade by blade, a twig or two, a stalk, while she meditated upon her sons’ wives. Good or bad, sons’ wives could make the home happy or miserable and upon them depended the old. Sons could not be trusted, because in a house women were stronger than men. Thus, she thought, who could believe that her second son would beat Jade when he found her?
“He will not beat her,” she muttered into the flame. Her husband had beaten her twice in her youth, once in anger and once in jealousy, but he was stronger than his sons. Nor had she suffered the beatings calmly. She had pounded him with her fists and clawed his cheeks and bitten the lobe of his right ear so deeply that the marks of it were there still.
“Who bit you there?” people asked him even now.
“A hill tiger,” he always said and always laughed. She had come from a village in the hills.
But Jade — could any man beat Jade? She sighed and let the fire die and rose. Her knees were aching but she paid no heed to it. She lifted the lid of the cauldron and sniffed the rice. It was fragrant and nearly done. She fitted the lid firmly. There was no need for more fire — the steam would finish the cooking. She yawned and reached for the rice bowls that stood on a shelf in the earthen chimney. Part of a fish left from the noon meal would make meat, and the cabbage left she would stir into the rice. Fish cost nothing, for they had fish in their own pond and it was only needful to drop the net into the water.
She set the bowls on the table in the court, put down the chopsticks, and then went into the room where she and her husband slept. He was there, washing himself in a bowl full of cold water. They did not speak, but over the face of each of them came a look of peace. She sat down and taking the silver toothpick from her hair she picked her teeth slowly, gazing at him as he washed. She thought calmly that his body was as good now as it had been the first time she looked at it, hard and thin and brown. He moved quickly and with full strength, washing himself, wringing the cotton towel, which she wove as she had woven nearly all the cloth they used, and wiping himself dry. He was a clean man. There was never a smell nor a stink about him. When he opened his mouth to laugh in her face sometimes his teeth were sound and his breath came sweet. There was his third cousin whose breath was like a camel’s.
“How do you sleep at his side?” she had asked the cousin’s wife only the other day.
“Do not all men stink?” the woman had replied.
“Not mine,” she had said proudly.
“Now I will have my supper,” Ling Tan said suddenly. He drew on his loose blue cotton trousers and knotted a clean girdle about his waist. Then he remembered the pork. “I sent the eldest for pork,” he said. She opened her eyes wide. “We had half a fish left from noon.”
“I will have the pork,” he said loudly.
“Have it, then,” she replied and rose to go out to prepare it. When she entered the kitchen she saw the pork already there on the table, lying upon a dried lotus leaf. She seized it and examined it, always ready to be cheated by their eighth cousin, the butcher, though she never had been. The man was afraid of her and respected Ling Tan, and though he had his poor meats, as any butcher has, he knew where to sell them. This pound of pork was as good as could be had anywhere, the red and white in layers under the soft thick white skin, and she could find no fault with it. She chopped it quickly with garlic and salt and rolled it into small round balls and dropped them into boiling water. She had a deft hand at cooking and Ling Tan had not smoked more than two pipes before she was ready,
From the kitchen door she shouted to her eldest son, “Your father is ready to eat!”
Lao Ta came out of his family room, washed and clean, his child in his arms.
“We are here,” he said.
Ling Tan coming out of his door shouted for his second son.
“He will not hear,” his wife bawled from the kitchen. She was stirring the cold cabbage into the boiling rice. “He is looking for his woman.”
From the court came laughter, the laughter of two men whose wives never ran away. The mother dipped the rice into bowls and brought them out and laughed with them, and at the door the eldest son’s wife came and stood buttoning her jacket.
“Let me, mother,” she begged for courtesy, since she did not move. Then she laughed because they were all laughing, though she had not heard why. But this household was always laughing at something and being an easy kindly creature Orchid laughed without stopping to find the cause for their laughter.
And as they sat down the third son came quietly into the gate, leading the water buffalo by a rope through its nostrils. He was a tall silent boy not yet quite sixteen years of age, and nobody spoke to him when he came nor did he expect it. But he caught the quick careful look of his mother’s eyes and his father’s glance. Both looked at him to see if all was well, and Lao San knew what they did not, that he was the son they loved best though most uneasily, because of his temper. In many small ways he took a child’s advantage of his two older brothers, but they allowed him, doing no more than cuff him over his shorn head if he teased them. But toward his parents he was often wilful and ready to be sulky, and as little as possible did they command him to do anything, and Ling Tan purposely let him take the buffalo to the hills that he might have the rebellious boy away from him. Thus he was spared the need of dealing with his waywardness.