Naturally, with all that bed business, Snow Flower got pregnant again, though I hoped that between the cold, the hardship, and our lack of nourishment that her monthly bleeding had simply paused as had mine. She did not want to hear that kind of talk.
“I’ve been pregnant before,” she said. “I know the signs.”
“Then I wish for you another son.”
“This time”—her eyes gleamed with a combination of happiness and certainty—”I will have one.”
“Indeed, sons are always a blessing. You should be proud of your eldest son.”
“Yes,” she responded mildly, then added, “I have watched you two together. You like him. Do you like him enough for him to become your son-in-law?”
I liked the boy, but this proposal was out of the question.
“There can be no man-woman match between our families,” I said. I owed Snow Flower a great deal for what I had become. I wanted to do the same for Spring Moon, but I would never allow my daughter to stoop so low. “A true-heart match between our daughters is far more important, don’t you agree?”
“Of course you are right,” Snow Flower responded, unaware, I think, of my true feelings. “When we get home we will meet with Auntie Wang as planned. As soon as the girls’ feet have settled into their new shapes, they will go to the Temple of Gupo to sign their contract, buy a fan to write of their lives together, and eat at the taro stand.”
“You and I should meet in Shexia too. If we are discreet, we can watch them.”
“Do you mean spy on them?” Snow Flower asked, incredulous. When I smiled, she laughed. “I always thought I was the wicked one, but look who’s scheming now!”
Despite the privations of those weeks and months, our plan for our daughters gave us hope and we tried to remember life’s goodness with each passing day. We celebrated Snow Flower’s younger son’s fifth birthday. He was such a funny little boy and we were entertained watching him with his father. They acted like two pigs together—nosing about, foraging, jostling their strong bodies against each other, both of them streaked with dirt and grime, both of them delighting in each other’s company. The older son was content to sit with the women. Because of my interest in the boy, Snow Flower began paying attention to him too. Under her eyes, he smiled readily. In his expression, I saw his mother’s face at that age—sweet, guileless, intelligent. Snow Flower looked back at him—not with mother love exactly, but as though she liked what she saw more than she had previously thought.
One day as I was teaching him a song, she said, “He shouldn’t learn our women’s songs. We learned some poetry as girls—”
“Through your mother—”
“And I’m sure you’ve learned more in your husband’s home.”
“I have.”
We were both excited, rattling off titles of poems we knew.
Snow Flower took her boy’s hand. “Let’s teach him what we can to be an educated man.”
I knew this would not be so very much since we were both illiterate, but that boy was like a dried mushroom dropped into boiling water. He soaked up everything we gave him. Soon he could recite the Tang dynasty poem that Snow Flower and I had loved so well as girls and whole passages from the classical book for boys that I had memorized to help my son in his lessons. For the first time, I saw true pride in Snow Flower’s face. The rest of the family did not feel the same, but for once Snow Flower did not cower or cede to their demands that we stop. She had remembered the little girl who used to pull back the curtain on the palanquin so we could peek out.
Those days—cold and uncomfortable and as filled with fear and hardship as they were—were wonderful in the sense that Snow Flower was happy in a way I had not seen her for many years. Pregnant, without much food, she seemed to glow from inside as though she were lit by an oil lamp. She enjoyed the company of the three sworn sisters from Jintian and relished not being locked up solely with her mother-in-law. Sitting with those women, Snow Flower sang songs I hadn’t heard for a long time. Out here in the open, away from the confines of her dark and dreary little house, her horse spirit was free.
Then, on a freezing night after we had been up there for ten weeks, Snow Flower’s second son went to sleep curled by the fire and never again woke up. I don’t know what killed him—sickness, hunger, or the cold—but in the early morning light we saw that frost covered his body and his face had gone icy blue. Snow Flower’s keening echoed through the hills, but the butcher took it hardest. He held the boy in his arms, tears running down his cheeks, their wetness sending trails through the many weeks of dirt that were ground into his face. He would not be comforted. He would not release the boy. He had no ears for his wife or even his mother. He hid his face in his son’s body, trying to block out their entreaties. Even when the farmers in our group sat around him, shielding him from our view and comforting him in low whispers, he did not yield. Every once in a while he lifted his face and cried to the sky, “How could I have lost my precious son?” The butcher’s brokenhearted question was one that appeared in many nu shu stories and songs. I glanced at the faces of the other women around the fire and saw their unspoken question: Could a man—this butcher—feel the same despair and sadness that we women feel when we lose a child?
He sat that way for two days, while the rest of us sang mourning songs. On the third day, he rose, hugged the child to his chest, and dashed away from our fire, through the clusters of other families, and into the woods that he and his son had ventured into so many times before. He returned two days later, empty-handed. When Snow Flower asked where her son was buried, the butcher turned and hit her with such ferocity that she flew back a couple of meters and landed with a thud onto the hard-packed snow.
He proceeded to beat her so badly that she miscarried in a violent gush of black blood that stained the icy slopes throughout our campsite. She was not very far along, so we never found a fetus, but the butcher was convinced that he’d rid the world of another girl. “There is nothing so evil as a woman’s heart,” he recited again and again, as though none of us had heard that saying before. We just kept to our ministrations of Snow Flower—stripping off her pants, melting water to wash them, cleaning her thighs of bloodstains, and taking the stuffing from one of her wedding quilts to stanch the putrid ghastliness that continued to flow from between her legs—and never raised our eyes or voices to him.
When I look back, I think it was a miracle that Snow Flower survived those last two weeks in the mountains as she passively accepted beating after beating. Her body weakened from the loss of blood from the miscarriage. Her body bruised and tore from the daily punishment her husband rained down on her. Why didn’t I stop him? I was Lady Lu. I had made him do what I wanted before. Why not this time? Because I was Lady Lu, I could not do more. He was a physically strong man, who did not shy away from using that strength. I was a woman, who, despite my social standing, was alone. I was powerless. He was well aware of that fact, as was I.
At the time of my laotong‘s lowest moment, I realized how much I needed my husband. To me, so much of my life with him had been about duty and the roles we were required to play. I regretted all the occasions when I had not been the wife he deserved. I vowed that if I made it down from that mountain I would become the kind of woman who might actually earn the title of Lady Lu and not be just an actor in a pageant. I wished for this and willed it to come true, but not before I would reveal myself to be far more brutal and cruel than Snow Flower’s husband.