“At least we can enjoy the beauty,” I said. So we stood on the top of the mountain behind our house and surveyed the glittering landscape.
Such events, such scenes, distract me and I record them. I do not complain. For six weeks of hard work, we have now a hundred gallons of amber-clear maple syrup, to be boiled later into sugar. I am particular about the color of the syrup. The first run is sweetest and best, and when the buds begin to swell the season is over. The late sap is thick and strong and will not make good sugar.
When the buds began to swell in April, I told Matt that he must tend the spring ploughing alone, or else hire John Stark from down the valley to help him, for Rennie and I were going to Kansas. We would be back, I told him, before the seeds we planted could sprout.
“I may bring my husband’s father,” I said, to prepare him.
Matt does not speak unless he must. He looked at me, his face carefully blank.
“You don’t know him,” I went on, “but he’s alone and if he needs us, he’ll live with us.”
A strange look crept over Matt’s dun-colored face. He no longer believed in the existence of Gerald.
“You’ve seen Gerald,” I reminded him. Matt has worked here as long as I can remember.
“I’ve sort of forgot his looks,” he said.
I opened the table drawer and took out the silver-framed picture of my husband. In the evenings I take it out, when Rennie and I sit here at our work, he at his books, I at my sewing, and then there are three of us. I cannot bear to look at it in the daytime, for I am reminded constantly that Gerald is thousands of miles away, across the widest ocean on the globe. But in the evening he comes close. I see him sitting in our house in Peking, thinking of us. I hope and pray he thinks of us.
“This is he,” I said to Matt.
He took the framed photograph in his two hands and stared at Gerald’s handsome face.
“Still looks like a nice feller,” he said cautiously and handed the picture to me again and went away.
At least he knows now that Gerald lives, and he will tell the other valley people and perhaps the reserve which they show me will yield to a warmer atmosphere. My grandfather did not belong to the valley and my parents were summer people first, and I cannot expect in one generation to be considered a valley woman. Perhaps they suspect Rennie of being a misdemeanor.
In April, the leaves of the maples being in bud, Rennie and I set forth on our journey. We had discussed going in the car and then had rejected the idea. Better to go by train, better and quicker, and easier, too, for an old man who might be returning with us. So far as I was concerned, he was coming. Only his own will against it could prevent his return to the family.
I tried to create his image for Rennie as the days passed by, plains and mountains flying across the windows of the train, but it was dim even in my own mind. I saw everyone through the bright mists of my love for Gerald. I am one of the fortunate women who marries her first love. I have no memory of any other. The first run of maple syrup, John Burroughs says, is like first love, “always the best, always the fullest, always the sweetest, while there is a purity and delicacy of flavor about the sugar that far surpasses any subsequent yield.”
“Your grandfather,” I told Rennie, “is tall and very thin and aristocratic in his appearance. Remember that he comes from Virginia. It is a wonder that he ever married a Chinese lady.”
Rennie withdrew by the slightest movement. He does not wish nowadays to talk about his Chinese grandmother. I suspect the prejudices of his schoolfellows may be creeping into his soul. If so, then Gerald’s father will help me.
“Your grandfather has dark hair and dark eyes, like your father,” I went on. “His hair is probably silver-white by now. Can you remember him at all?”
“I don’t remember,” Rennie said stubbornly. Whenever we speak of the life we lived in Peking he does not remember. He wants to be American.
“Ah well, when you see your grandfather, it will all come back to you,” I said. But I do not know if this is true.
The landscape passes too quickly by the window. Some day I shall travel slowly over the miles we whirl over now. I would like to stop at every village and town and walk on the country roads that wind away from us in an instant. I want to feel my roots go deep again. Last night in my berth I pulled the curtain aside and gazed out into the moonlight. I did not know where we were, what state, what county. I knew only my nation, and this so vast that within its endless borders even I can be a stranger. I ought not to blame Gerald that he does not come here, lest he be exiled.
I wept on his bosom that last night we had together in the Shanghai hotel. “Why won’t you come with me?” I sobbed. “What is it here that you love better than your wife?”
“No one and nothing,” he said. “Consider, my Eve, that if I leave China now it would be forever. And I’d be a stranger in America.”
“I’d be there,” I cried.
“Though you were there,” he said gravely.
I remember everything he ever said to me, not in a continual stream of memory, but interposed into my present life. Thus at midnight, in the vastness of the land over which we sped, I felt myself a stranger, and I remembered what he said.
We have found Gerald’s father. He is living alone in a shack, a hut, at the edge of a cluster of one-story houses in western Kansas. Little Springs is a small town, less than a town. It is on the high plains, halfway to the mountains. It was easy to find him, for when we asked at the station everybody knew him in a strange respectful doubtful sort of way.
“MacLeod? That’s the old gentleman.” This was the shirt-sleeved man at the ticket window, talking around the cud of tobacco in his mouth.
He directed us to the far end of the one street and a mile beyond it in a one-room unpainted house we found Gerald’s father. The door was open, although the air is chill here, even in April, and he was sitting inside at a rough table, wearing, of all things, his old padded Chinese robe and reading a Chinese book. When he saw us he got to his feet in his formal fashion and stood there smiling. He has let his beard grow and his hair is too long. Both are silver-white. He is terribly thin and his eyes are huge. I never knew before how much he looks like Gerald. I flew to him and put my arms around him.
“Baba — why on earth are you here?”
Baba was what I had always called him. It is easier to say than Father. And hearing the name now, he lifted his bent head, he saw me and recognized me, strangely without surprise, as though he did not know where he was. He did not embrace me but he did not push my arms away. He said in a mild distant voice, “I was taken ill on the train and they put me off here, and here perforce I stopped. There is no reason for me to live one place rather than another.”
How selfishly Gerald and I lived on in the house in Peking in those perilous prewar days! We knew we were selfish, and yet we clutched, every doomed hour of happiness. Yet it is also true that we believed anyone who reached America had reached heaven. We thought of Baba as safe merely because he had left the troubled provinces of China. We had a few letters from him, placid letters, saying that he was comfortable and we were not to worry about him, that he had found friends. And beset with our own worries, in wars and dangers, we simply forgot him.