Sandalwood Death (21 page)

“Do you see what I see, madam?” he said. “Tell everyone exactly what you see. What we say does not count, but what you say does. Go ahead, tell them who has won and who has lost.”

Sun Meiniang faltered. She looked into her dieh’s red face and bloodshot eyes, and in them she saw the ardent hope he placed in her. But then she turned and saw the expressive eyes of the Magistrate, and she felt as if her mouth were sealed by a sticky substance. In the end, thanks to the prodding of the Judicial Secretary and Licentiate Shan, she broke down and sobbed:

“His Eminence has won and my dieh has lost . . .”

Two heads shot up from their respective vats, bringing with them beards dripping with water. They shook them, sending drops spraying in all directions. Their eyes met. Sun Bing, breathing hard, was dumbfounded; His Eminence was smiling, calm and composed.

“Is there anything else you care to say, Sun Bing?” the Magistrate asked with a smile.

Sun’s lips were twitching. He said nothing.

“In accordance with our agreement, Sun Bing, you are obligated to pluck out your beard!

Sun Bing, I say, Sun Bing, you haven’t forgotten, have you? Does your word mean nothing?”

Sun grabbed his beard with both hands, looked up at the sky, and sighed. “All right, I shall pluck out these annoying threads!” With a violent tug, he jerked out a skein of whiskers and flung them to the ground; drops of blood fell from his chin. He grabbed another skein and was about to pull them out as well, when Sun Meiniang fell to her knees before the Magistrate. Her face, lovely as a peach blossom, could soften any heart. With tears in her eyes, she looked up and pleaded in a delicate voice:

“Your Eminence, I beg you to pardon my dieh.”

The Magistrate squinted, a look of amazement on his face, tinged with gladness and, even more obviously, emotion. His lips fluttered. It hardly seemed as if he spoke at all:

“It’s you . . .”

“Stand up, daughter.” Tears spurted from Sun Bing’s eyes. “I do not want you begging from anyone,” he said softly.

Magistrate Qian, momentarily taken aback by this exchange, burst out laughing, and when he had finished, he said:

“Do you think I really wanted Sun Bing to pluck out that beard of his? Even though he came in second best in today’s competition, a beard like his is rarely seen anywhere in the world. I would feel a sense of loss if he were to pluck it out. The goal of this competition was, first, to stamp out his arrogance, and, second, to supply this august assemblage with a bit of entertainment. Sun Bing, I forgive you your transgressions and spare you your beard. Now, go home and sing your operas!”

Sun Bing fell to his knees and kowtowed.

The commoners in attendance sighed with deep emotion.

The local gentry drenched the Magistrate in flattering words.

Sun Meiniang remained kneeling, looking into the face of the venerable Magistrate Qian with rapt concentration.

“Daughter of the Sun family, you have proven your impartiality, and though you are a woman, you have the pluck of a man, a rarity in this world.” Magistrate Qian turned to his revenue clerk and said, “Reward her with an ounce of silver!”

C
HAPTER
S
IX

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1

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A clear and very bright moon hung high in the sky, looking like a naked beauty. The third-watch gong had just sounded, and the county town lay in stillness. Smells of nature—plants and trees and insects and fish—were carried on the summer-night breeze to cover heaven and earth like fine gauze decorated with pearl ornaments. The naked moon shone down on Sun Meiniang as she strolled alone in her courtyard. She too was naked; she and the moon enhanced each other’s beauty. Moonbeams flowed like water in which she swam like a large silvery fish. This was a fully bloomed flower, a piece of ripe fruit, a youthful, vigorous, and graceful body. From head to toe, with the exception of her feet—which were large and unbound—she was flawless. Her skin was glossy, the only blemish a scar on her head that was hidden by her lush hair.

That scar was the result of a bite from a donkey before she had taken her first step as an infant. Unaware that her mother lay dead on the kang from swallowing opium, she had crawled up on her mother’s neatly dressed body, like climbing a resplendent mountain range. She was hungry, searching for the nipple, but in vain. She cried, and in the process she fell to the floor, where she cried even louder. No one came. So she crawled out the door, attracted by the smell of milk. No sooner had she reached the yard than she saw a young donkey drinking its mother’s milk. The ill-tempered adult had been tied to a tree by her owner, and when the little girl crawled up to feed alongside, or in place of, her baby, the donkey bit down on the girl’s head, gave her a shake, and flung her away, where she was immediately stained by her own blood. This time her terrified wails reached a neighbor woman, who picked her up and covered the wound with powdered lime to stop the bleeding. The injury was so severe that most people believed she would not survive. Even her normally buoyant father was sure she would die, but she hung on tenaciously. For the first fourteen years of her life, she was a scrawny, frail girl with a conspicuous scar on the back of her skull. She tagged along behind her dieh as he made the opera circuit, taking the stage in a variety of parts: little girls, little demons, even kittens. But in her fifteenth year, like a desiccated wheat sprout nourished by a spring rain, she grew like a weed, and at the age of sixteen, her hair grew lush and black, the way dense new shoots burst forth from a willow tree whose canopy has been lopped off. The scar disappeared beneath all that hair. At seventeen, she fleshed out, and people discovered that she was a girl. Prior to this, because of her unbound feet and sparse hair, most of the performers in the troupe had assumed that she was a nearly bald little boy. At eighteen, she had become the prettiest maiden in Northeast Gaomi Township.

“If not for her big feet,” people lamented, “the girl could become the Imperial Consort!”

It was this damning flaw—big, unbound feet—that caused her to be considered unmarriageable at the age of twenty, and was why, with no other prospects, Sun Meiniang, still lovely as a flower, was forced by harsh circumstances to marry Zhao Xiaojia, a butcher who lived and worked on the east side of town. When Meiniang moved in, Xiaojia’s bound-footed mother was still alive. She hated the sight of her daughter-in-law’s big feet, and tried to get her son to trim them down to size with his boning knife. When he refused, she decided to do it herself. Having lived up till then among a performing troupe, Meiniang knew all the acrobatic moves for the opera stage, and she had never been schooled in the traditional feminine imperatives of “three obediences”—first to father, then to husband, and finally to son—and the “four virtues” of fidelity, physical charm, propriety, and fine needlework. She was, not surprisingly, an untamed young woman who, now that she was married, found it suffocating to keep her temper in check and hold back her sobs. So when her mother-in-law came at her on her tiny feet, knife in hand, Meiniang’s pent-up anger burst to the surface. She leaped up and let loose a flying kick, a perfect demonstration of the “virtues” of unbound feet and testimony to her training and hard work in the troupe. Not particularly steady to begin with, her bound-footed mother-in-law was knocked to the floor. Meiniang rushed up, straddled her like Wu Song on the back of a tiger, and beat her with her fists until the poor woman could only scream piteously and soil herself, front and back. In the wake of this beating, the distraught old woman’s abdomen became dangerously distended, which soon led to her death. It was, for Sun Meiniang, a liberation, for she stepped up as head of the household. She converted a room with a southern exposure, facing the street, into a little public house that featured warm millet spirits and stewed dog meat for the general public. Burdened with a dullard of a husband, she relied upon her beauty to ensure a thriving business. All the local dandies entertained thoughts of finding their way into her favor, but none succeeded. Sun Meiniang was known by three nicknames: Big-Footed Fairy, Half-Way Beauty, and Dog-Meat Xishi, a play on the name of a legendary beauty.

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2

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Even ten days after the battle of the beards, the people’s excitement over Magistrate Qian’s striking appearance and broad-minded approach to governing had not abated, and they now looked forward with eager anticipation to the festive day on which they would meet his wife. Custom dictated that on the eighteenth day of the fourth month, the doors of the three halls, access to which was severely restricted, even to leading yamen officials, the rest of the year, were thrown open for women and children for the day. The wife of the County Magistrate would rise early in the morning and, in her finest attire, sit beneath the eaves of the Third Hall in the company of her husband, smiling broadly as she received members of the local populace. A gesture of goodwill toward the people, it also served as a grand display of the adage “A revered husband deserves an honored wife.”

Many of the county’s ordinary residents had been witness to His Eminence’s elegant bearing, and details of his wife’s background and education had early on filled local women’s ears. Anticipation leading to this special day had reached a fever pitch. What they yearned to know was, what sort of woman was a worthy spouse to a virtually celestial County Magistrate? Comments and opinions swirled above streets and byways like willow catkins: some said that the Magistrate’s wife was a woman of unrivaled beauty, capable of toppling a city with a smile; others said that the face of the Magistrate’s wife was scarred by pockmarks, that she was a demon in disguise. These two diametrically opposed views ignited avid curiosity among local women. Younger women were natural proponents of the view that the County Magistrate’s wife must be favored with the beauty of fresh flowers and fine jade. Slightly older, more experienced women doubted that this romantic view was sustainable in the world in which they lived, and were more inclined to accept the folk adage that says “A desirable man is burdened with an undesirable wife, while an ugly man marries a lovely maiden.” They cited as proof of this view the so-called “flower and moon” beauty of the former Magistrate’s wife, he of the wretched features. But younger women, especially the unmarried maidens, were firm in their desire to believe that the wife of the new Magistrate must be the sort of beauty who had fallen to earth from heaven.

Sun Meiniang looked forward to this day more fervently than any other woman in the county. She had already seen the County Magistrate on two occasions, the first on a drizzly night in early spring. While she was trying to hit a cat that had run off with a fish, the missile struck the Magistrate’s palanquin by mistake. Inviting him into her establishment, she noted his elegant appearance and demeanor in the candlelight, and was taken by his poise and easy manner, almost as if he had stepped out of a New Year’s painting. His conversational skills were extraordinary, his attitude one of pure affability, and even when he discussed serious matters, a unique sense of intimacy and gentility was ever-present. Any comparison of that man with her hog-butchering husband . . . well, there
was
no comparison. If truth be known, at that moment there was no room anywhere in her heart or mind to accommodate the image of Xiaojia. She walked as if floating on air, her heart raced, and her cheeks burned. She masked her confusion with excessively polite conversation and frenetic industry in order to keep busy, but in the process she knocked over a wineglass with her sleeve and overturned a bench with her knee. All that time, with everyone’s eyes on him, the Magistrate maintained the airs of his office, but she could tell, either from his coughs, which did not seem natural, or from the limpid expression in his eyes, that tender feelings lay beneath His Eminence’s tough exterior. The second time she saw him was at the battle of the beards. On that occasion, as the person chosen to validate the outcome, she was close enough not only to drink in His Eminence’s features with her eyes, but to smell the exquisite fragrance emanating from his body. Her lips were so close to his thick, glossy queue and his powerful neck, so very close . . . she seemed to recall that her tears fell on his neck: Ah, Your Eminence, how I hope that my tears really did fall on your neck
. . .
To acknowledge her impartiality, His Eminence rewarded her with an ounce of silver. But when she went to claim her reward, the goateed revenue clerk looked at her askance, with a strange gleam in his eye, resting on her feet for a very long time, which abruptly brought her back to earth. She guessed, from the look in his eyes, what he was about to say, and her heart cried out in silent agony: Oh, heaven, oh, earth, oh, Dieh, oh, Niang, my feet have spelled my doom! If only I had let my mother-in-law pare my feet with that boning knife when I had the chance, no matter how great the pain. If having small feet cost ten years of my life for each, I would gladly die twenty years before my time. Those thoughts produced a loathing for her dieh. Dieh, you not only caused the death of my niang, but might as well have caused mine as well; you cared only for your own romantic escapades and had no thoughts for your daughter; you raised your daughter like a son and refused to bind her feet . . . even if your beard had been superior to that of His Eminence, I would still have declared him the winner. Though, in fact, yours is inferior to his.

Sun Meiniang returned home with the County Magistrate’s gift of silver, her passion rising whenever she recalled the look of tenderness in his eyes; but icicles formed on her heart when she conjured up the censorious look in the eyes of the revenue clerk. As the day to see the Magistrate’s wife drew near, women flocked to the shops to buy cosmetics and fussed over new clothes, like maidens preparing for their wedding. But Sun Meiniang still had not made up her mind to go. Although she had seen His Eminence on but two occasions, at which he had not bestowed upon her any sweet words or honeyed phrases, she stubbornly clung to the belief that they had feelings for one another and that one day they would be together like a pair of mandarin ducks with their necks entwined. When women on the street engaged in debate over what the Magistrate’s wife, whom they would soon see in person, looked like, her cheeks burned as if they were talking about a member of her family. Truth be told, she could not say whether she wished His Eminence’s wife to be angelically lovely or demonically hideous. If she had the face of an angel, would that not be the end of her dream? But if she had the features of a demon, would His Eminence not be an object of pity? So she looked forward to the arrival of the special day, yet was simultaneously apprehensive of it. The day would surely come anyway, however, whether its inevitability filled her with hope or with apprehension.