A Moment in the Sun (93 page)

One day while she was pulling more weeds and Baba was sitting on the little stone wall smoking tobacco, Feng, who hired men for the
sheng-yuan
’s fields and supervised his harvest, stopped to talk to him.

“This soil is weary of millet,” he said looking out at the crop, which was then no more than two feet high. “It will yield very little.”

“I would grow pearls,” said Baba, who according to Ma had been a clever man when he was young, happy even without drink, “if only I could afford the seed.”

“There is something better than pearls,” said Feng. “Everybody in Dang-shan is planting it.”

Baba tried not to look the foreman in the eye, instead staring out past Mei to his little ten
mu
.

“Is the
sheng-yuan
going to grow it in his fields?”

Feng shook his head. “He is not so hard-hearted. He would not deprive his neighbors of their sorghum wine.”

“Growing poppy flowers in forbidden,” said Baba, looking into the sky.

“What is forbidden here,” smiled the foreman, “is determined by the
sheng-yuan
. If you decide to change your crop, as many here are doing, I can give you the seeds without charge. But when you gather the gum you must sell it to me.”

“How much is it selling for?”

Feng put his finger to his lips. “We must not speak of such things. I only wish to leave you something to consider.”

Baba left the field in millet and it was the best crop in years. But the men who had grown poppy flowers were boasting and wearing real metal coins strung around their necks after their harvest and every night there was noise from the crowd at Yip’s hut.

“Pay no mind to those people,” Ma told Baba. She was saying her
sutras
more than ever and calling on the Eternal Mother even though she could no longer kneel like a Christian. “What is won too easily does not last.”

“They do not work as hard as I do,” said Baba, who only helped Mei during the harvest when he was afraid the grain might shatter if left too long on the stalk. “But they have twice as much in their palms at the end of it.”

There was enough to eat that winter. Ma made noodles once, and once Baba brought home a chicken he had won gambling.

“Too bad you don’t eat meat,” he said to Ma. “It will be torture for you to cook this.”

Most years he only got to tease her about being a White Lotus at New Year, when they spent their savings to buy pork buns and Ma would only eat the outside.

The next year Feng came to talk to Baba even before planting, but he had Mei put in the millet seed again. That was the year Quan Chuntao, who was Mei’s age, was taken as a bride by a young man in a village outside of Weifang and Eldest Brother was taken by the soldiers to fight against the Dwarf Bandits. Once again there was not too much or too little rain and only the usual insects and the crop was nearly up to Mei’s chin when Second Brother came home to say he had been let go from working in the
sheng-yuan
’s fields.

That night they were already asleep on the
k’ang
when there was a banging on the door and Baba went to it holding the rusted ax. It was poor Mr. Chan, who had taken to begging and sleeping outside since his wife died, shouting that there was a fire in Baba’s field.

There was a big moon and if Mei had not weeded and planted and weeded till her hands bled she would have thought the fire beautiful. As the night breeze swept it across the field, grasshoppers, some of them on fire, buzzed into the air just ahead of the flames. The breeze pushed the fire to the stone wall by the road and soon there was nothing left.

“We are cursed,” said Baba, his face black from the blowing soot, flecks of ash in his hair. “She has cursed us.”

The next day Mei was with Baba in the charred field, looking for burned animals they could eat, when Zhou stopped on the road. He had a sedan chair now, with silk curtains and four porters wearing a kind of uniform who carried it, and he wore a long silk vest and a hat that had a jeweled button on it to signify that he was a
sheng-yuan
. Mei stood by the wall while Baba climbed over to squat by Zhou’s chair and be spoken to.

“You are an unlucky man,” said the
sheng-yuan
. “We will have to discover who has done this to you and see that they are punished.”

“I have nothing,” said Baba, looking at the ground.

“Nobody starves in my village,” said Zhou. “I will have Feng bring you some seed, and you will plant again. They say a fire is good for the soil.”

“You are very kind.”

The
sheng-yuan
looked at Mei then with his wolf’s eyes and gestured for her to come forward. When she put her leg over the stone wall he began to laugh.

“What clown feet!” he said. “Your daughter is very beautiful—above the knees. You are truly an unlucky man.”

When the sedan chair and its passenger had passed Baba slapped Mei in the face.

Mr. Chan was arrested then and charged with setting the fire, worse, accused of lighting it with a match he had been given for that purpose by the
yang gweizi
. The village was told to gather by the gate in front of the
sheng-yuan
’s house, gathering obediently to watch Mr. Chan beaten one hundred strokes with the bamboo cane before he was taken away with a yoke around his neck. The
sheng-yuan
came out to warn all of them to be wary of the foreign devils, who were all spies for the Dwarf Bandits who were making war on the Empire. He offered free
baijiu
for the men then, and when Baba finally danced home he was with a half-dozen others, all of them ready to go to war. Ma was having her bleeding and he held her down and yanked away the rag and went out to the others saying they were going to Weifang to wipe the dirty blood on the house of the yellow-hair
yang gweizi
and break their spells.

It took Mei a week to rake the ash in the field till it was even. Then after a little rain Feng came with the seed and watched her plant the first handfuls.

“Not so deep as the millet,” he said. “Put it in rows with space to walk in between. This is gold you are planting.”

Ma’s left foot had begun to smell, and soon she could only walk on one leg using a crutch that Second Brother made for her.

“I was as pretty as you,” she said to Mei one night before either of the men had come. “Would you believe that? And then I was married. Mei, your feet have saved you again.”

“If I don’t marry,” Mei asked, “what will I be?”

Ma thought a long time about it. She was in less pain than usual but weaker, her eyes growing cloudy, and she smelled too sweet, like fruit fallen to rot.

“When this
kalpa
ends,” she said finally, “and it will be very soon, there will be a way for you. It will be a difficult way, terrifying, but you must stay on the path and never despair.”

“Like when I ran from the wolf.”

Ma squeezed Mei’s arm then. As Mei’s arms had grown stronger Ma’s had turned to sticks.

“Running may not be possible.”

Baba was very worried about the new crop, never having grown flowers before. Every day he scolded Mei, telling her not to crush the new plants under her big feet as she searched for weeds to pull. In only two weeks the sprouts came out, and after a month and a half it looked like they were growing tiny cabbages. And then the plants began to rise. Baba would brag to Second Brother, who had been taken on again in the
sheng-yuan
’s fields as an act of charity, that he was going to have the finest poppy-flower crop in the village, and Ma would cover her ears so she wouldn’t hear. Most years she put a smear of honey on the lips of their kitchen-god statue so in the New Year it would say sweet things about them when it flew to report to the Jade Emperor. Now she covered his whole head with clay so he could not see or hear what had become of her family.

“The four walls that we must escape in this life,” said Ma, who was more of a White Lotus than ever now that she could barely walk, “are liquor, lust, anger, and wealth.”

Baba and Second Brother laughed.

“We have escaped from wealth thus far,” said Baba. “Maybe this year we will let it catch us.”

Three months after the sowing, Mei’s plants began to blossom. The petals were crimson red, the color of happiness, and more beautiful than anything she had ever seen. But in only a few days they began to fall off the plants, carpeting the ground in red and leaving a little green ball on top of the stem.

The balls were growing fatter each day by the time Eldest Brother returned from fighting the Japanese. Everybody in the village knew that the Imperial Army had failed, had somehow been defeated by the Dwarf Bandits and their
yang gweizi
weapons, and so the family could not have a public celebration. Baba and Ma were excited though, even if Eldest Brother looked like a different person and was not at home in his body anymore, as if the Imperial officers or the Dwarf Bandits had stolen his spirit. He was going to be an escort, he said, a guard for the caravans passing from the mountains to the sea, but most days he only sat around drinking and gambling with the
pu hao
at Yip’s and people in the market said he was a salt smuggler. Then he joined a group called the Obedient Swords and on market days would appear with them to demonstrate how they could whip their swords at each other but always duck or leap over the blade and never be cut. Eldest Brother was the one who had to pass through the crowd with a rice bowl, asking for the audience to contribute money for their further training. He never came home to visit.

“The foreign devils have put a spell on Ma,” he told Second Brother when he saw him at the market. “They are making her rot while she is still breathing and it is unlucky to look at her.”

The plants were as high as Mei’s breasts and the green balls the size of hens’ eggs when it was time to harvest. Feng came to show them how to do this, bringing Mei a special slicer, a wooden handle with three slivers of glass stuck in it.

“Choose only the pods that are standing at attention, like this one,” he said, demonstrating. “Then make a cut, up and down, on three sides. Wait until the sun is three hands from the ground before you do this, or the nectar will dry too quickly and not flow out. In the morning you take this other blade and scrape off the gum, but be careful not to hurt the pod, because it can be milked many times.”

There was so much work to be done that even Baba had to help every morning, scraping the pods that had been scored and then slicing the newly ripe ones in the late afternoon. Ma refused to help drying the gum they collected, so he had to tend to that as well, even boiling some down to a brown paste in the cooking pot and then drying it more. Ma only watched him with her cloudy eyes, sitting on the
k’ang
all day, unwilling to help him keep the fire going for his business and unable to cook because he always had opium boiling in the pot. Mei came in late from the field, sticky with poppy gum, and had to help Ma outside to relieve herself on the dungpile. Second Brother came to say he was moving to the barracks the
sheng-yuan
kept for his workers. At night it was only the three of them, Mei trying to rub the gum off her fingers and Ma sitting on the
k’ang
looking into the next world and Baba sitting on the floor under the window smoking opium in his pipe, his eyes as cloudy as Ma’s.

The pods were milked out in two weeks and then Mei had to cut them off and leave them in the sun to dry. The day she cut them open to take the seeds out was the day that Ma died.

The hut was ripe with the sweet smell of her. Mei came home just as the sun hid behind the earth and Baba was already on the floor with his cheeks wet with tears, smoking opium, Ma laying flat on the
k’ang
with a white cloth laid over her face.

Eldest Brother took charge then because Baba could barely breathe without weeping. He came home from the swordsmen and burned spirit money in front of the hut and poured a ring of sorghum wine around it. Feng sent word that the
sheng-yuan
would offer credit on the opium paste that was still drying, and a coffin was ordered and a new set of white clothing for Baba and Mei and her brothers and even for Ma. Mei was allowed to help prepare the body with Mrs. Hong, taking Ma’s old clothes off to burn and cleaning her and dressing her in the new white clothes and the beautiful beaded slippers from the day she was married
.
Mei had never seen her mother’s feet naked before, and they were not beautiful. Mrs. Hong held a cloth dipped in jasmine water over her nose because the smell was too powerful, and put the powder on Ma’s face and put her brass earrings on and covered her face with a yellow cloth and her little wasted body with a sky-blue one.

Eldest Brother lifted Ma into the coffin and put up an altar at the foot of it. Because Ma had a bad ending very few people came. Mei remembered only a paid monk chanting prayers and Ma’s older sister crawling into the hut on her knees. Eldest Brother broke Ma’s comb in two pieces, putting one half into the coffin and giving the other to Mei, and then Ma was gone from the earth.

Feng did not wait the forty-nine days of mourning, incense still burning at the altar, before he came to sit with Baba.

“A death in the family is a very hard thing,” he said, sitting cross-legged on the
k’ang
and drinking the tea Mei had served him. “Very expensive. The coffin, paying the monk, clothing—with all that the
sheng-yuan
has advanced to you, I can only pay twelve
tiao
for what you have harvested and what you have cooked.”

Baba only nodded. Twelve
tiao
was more than he had had in his palm for many years. The foreman sighed.

“But now you have no real woman to tend to this house,” he said, as if Mei was not squatting on the floor only a few feet away from him, “and no son to work in your field. It will be difficult. You will have to hire someone to do these things, and that costs money.”

“I have seed drying,” said Baba, picturing the twelve
tiao
disappearing into the hands of strangers. “And my Second Son will come back.”