“Kiss me goodnight,” she said. “I’ll never go to Peking,” she added as I leaned to kiss her cheek.
“You might,” I said gaily. I was too happy to be anything but gay in those days, though she shook her head.
She was right. She never went to Peking. Within in a year after Gerald and I were married, she died of a sudden chill that developed quickly into pneumonia and I remembered what she had said every winter, drawing her grey shawl about her.
“These Vermont winters will be the death of me,” she always said, and, in the end, it was true. She was winter-killed, but part of it was the winter she carried in her own soul, wherever she was.
Yesterday before twilight, the sky darkened suddenly under a cloud, hurricane black, a flying cloud that sailed high over the mountains encircling the farm. A strange unease fell on man and beast and even on me, though I have seen hurricanes enough. So the heavy sandstorms used to fall upon Peking. But there was neither sand nor rain in yesterday’s cloud. A few drops fell from the swollen shape above and then the wind hurried it on.
Whatever the wind was, it blew the darkness away and today the valley lies under a scintillating sun and the warmth of it draws the mists again from the melting snow.
I dread the spring this year. I try not to look at the clock. It is useless now to watch and wait for the postman. I shall never get another letter from Gerald. I tell myself that every day. When Matt brought in the mail this morning, I did not turn my head. “Put it on the desk in the office,” I said. But I went to look, just the same, knowing there was no letter.
So I was busy, for we have the orchard to prune before the sap begins to run in the sugar bush. We raise good apples, old-fashioned and sound. The cellar is still stocked with them, although I have been giving them away all winter. My favorites are the pound apples, each weighing a pound, or very nearly, red-skinned and crisp and a nice balance between sour and sweet. When I bite into one I remember that Gerald does not like apples. Chinese apples are pithy and tasteless, but even our good American apples could not tempt him. He came sometimes to help us pick the apples but I never saw him eat one. Instead he talked of pears. Yet once when I brought him a plate of Bartletts he did not finish even a pear.
“They are soft,” he said. “The pears in Peking are as crisp as celery and full of clear juice.”
“Then they are not pears,” I said to tease him.
“Wait and see,” he said.
For by then we knew we would be married as soon as he had his doctor’s degree. And when I did eat Peking pears they were different indeed, indescribable and delicious, pears certainly, but not American in taste or texture. At first I thought they were plucked before they were ripe, as the Chinese harvest their peaches, preferring a slightly green taste to the mellow sweet of ripeness. But the pears were ripe and they held their freshness all through the winter.
…We have pruned all day, Matt and I. He is a silent fellow, a Vermonter, lank and lean, his teeth gone too early from a wretched diet which nevertheless he will not improve. He looks upon my brown breads and green salads with distaste and refusal and though I press him to share my luncheon, he sits apart and munches what he calls lunch meat between two huge slabs of the cheap bread, which I consider not bread but a solidified foam of white flour and water. Matt knows of my years in China and doubtless he wonders about Gerald but he never asks me a question that does not pertain to the farm. Save for this, his conversation consists of bits of bad news from the valley. Thus today I heard that the deep quarrel between young Tom Mosser and his wife has now reached the point of blows.
“He took a knife to her — not the blade, though,” Matt said.
“What then?” I inquired.
“The handle,” he said. “It was made of horn. He dug it in her.”
“Where?” I inquired.
“Buzzim,” he said briefly.
Bosom? Mollie Mosser has a big rich bosom and she wears her sweaters too tight. I did not continue the conversation.
“I want to finish the orchard before Rennie comes home from school,” I said. And we went back to work.
And so, while my thoughts wander far from my Vermont hillside, I prune my apple trees, remembering that fruit is borne on the small and twiggy branches, and never on the bold young growth. Saw and shears I can use well enough, and I take the large branches first, cutting upwards for an inch or two, lest the wood split. When the saw is sharp, my neighbors say, it is time to prune the fruit trees, a saying true enough, for during the winter, when the weather is not fit for outside work, I oil the tools and sharpen the saws and the scythe. I have an old-fashioned wheel of sandstone that does well for the larger tools, but the small ones I sharpen by hand against a strip of flint. And I have learned to prune severely. A close clean cut heals soon — that I have learned. But I know that too deep a cut will never heal. The branch will bear no fruit.
Nothing can hold back the spring. It comes against my dread, and I watch the signs. Rennie asks me every few days, “Mother, no letter?”
I shake my head. “I am afraid it is getting difficult for your father,” I say. “The anti-American feeling in China is growing under the skillful communist propaganda.”
Rennie muses, “What is communism, really?”
“Who knows?” I reply. “It is what people make it.” And I tell him of Karl Marx, the strange little man, long dead, who lived his narrow little life, and somehow managed by the power of his wayward brain, to lay hold upon millions of human lives.
“Even our lives, Rennie,” I said. “Because of him we are separated, you from father and I from husband.”
“And can my father not free himself?” he asked.
How could I answer this? “I suppose,” I said, “that if our country, here, went communist we’d stay, believing in our past and in our future, and hoping that somehow we’d escape.”
“And could we?” he persisted. “And can my father?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
“Nor I, Mother,” he said. “And I don’t know even if this is my country.”
“It is yours because it is mine,” I said. “And let that be the end of it.”
It is not the end, as I well know. Rennie will have to choose his own country.
And sooner or later I shall have to tell him that I have his father’s last letter upstairs, locked into the secret drawer of my mother’s old desk, for there will be no more letters now.
But I put off the day. Rennie went on talking this evening after our supper, which we ate by the kitchen fire. It is an old chimneypiece, used once for cooking, or so I suppose. A crane is built under it and a great pot hangs from the crane, in which I still heat water when electricity fails in a summer thunderstorm.
“I should think my father could get a letter to us somehow,” Rennie continued.
“We do not know what rigors are imposed upon him,” I replied. “It is dangerous for him that his father is American.”
“Where is my grandfather MacLeod?” Rennie asked.
Rennie likes apples. I keep a wooden bowl of them on the kitchen table for our evenings and while he talked he was biting deeply into the white flesh of a red Baldwin.
“He’s in Kansas. We shall have to go and find him one of these days,” I said. “And do you forget that you used to call him Baba?”
I should have been looking at seed catalogues, but I was doing nothing except stare into the fire. I had planned long ago to visit Gerald’s father. It was one of my beloved’s last requests to me that day when we stood on the dock in Shanghai.
“Go and see my father and take Rennie with you,” Gerald bade me. “It will comfort him to see his grandson.”
“Is that why you are sending us to America?” I demanded.
“One reason “among others,” he replied.