Snow Flower and the Secret Fan (28 page)

“
Waaa!
You tell these stories and ruin an already ruined boy’s life?” The old woman spat into the fire one more time and glared at me. “You give him hope when there is none? Why do you do that?”

I knew the answer, but I would never tell it to that old rat woman. We were not under normal circumstances, I know, but away from my own family I needed someone to care for. In my mind, I saw my husband as this boy’s benefactor. Why not? If Snow Flower could help me when we were girls, couldn’t my family change this boy’s future?

SOON ANIMALS IN
the hills around us became scarce, driven from their homes by the presence of so many people or dead—as so many of us died—from the cruelty of that winter. Men—farmers all—weakened. They had brought only what they could carry; when that ran out, they and their families starved. Many husbands asked their wives to go back down the mountain for supplies. In our county, as you know, women are not to be hurt in wartime, which is why we are often sent to find food, water, or other supplies during upheavals. Harming a woman during hostilities always leads to an escalation of fighting, but neither the Taipings nor the soldiers in the Great Hunan Army were from around here. They did not know the ways of the Yao people. Besides, how were we women, weak from hunger and frail on our bound feet, to go down the mountain in winter and carry back provisions?

So a small band of men set out, treading carefully down the mountain, hoping to find food and other necessities in the villages we had evacuated. Only a few made it back, and they told of seeing their friends decapitated and the heads mounted on stakes. The new widows, unable to bear the news, committed suicide: throwing their bodies over the cliff they had worked so hard to climb, swallowing burning embers from the evening fire, cutting their own throats, or slowly starving themselves. Those who didn’t take this path dishonored themselves even more by seeking new lives with other men around other fires. It seemed that in the mountains some women forgot the rules about widowhood. Even if we are poor, even if we are young, even if we have children, it is better to die, remain true to our husbands, and keep our virtue than to bring shame on their memories.

Separated from my children, I observed Snow Flower’s closely, seeing how they had been influenced by her, learning more about her through them, and—because I missed my own so terribly—comparing mine to hers. In my home, our eldest son had already taken his rightful place and a bright future stretched before him. In this family, Snow Flower’s eldest son had a position even lower than hers. No one loved him. He seemed adrift. Yet to me he was the most like my
laotong.
He was gentle and delicate. Perhaps this was why she had turned away from him with such a hard heart.

My second son was a good and smart boy, but he did not have the inquisitiveness of my first son. I imagined him living with us for his entire life, marrying in a bride, siring children, and working for his older brother. Snow Flower’s second son, on the other hand, was the bright light of this family. He had his father’s build, short and stocky, with strong arms and legs. The child never showed fear, never shivered from cold, never whined with hunger. He followed his father like a shadow spirit, even going on hunting expeditions. He must have been a help in some way or else the butcher would not have allowed such a thing. When they returned with an animal carcass, the boy sat on his haunches next to his baba, learning how to prepare the meat for cooking. This similarity to his father told me a lot about Snow Flower. Her husband may have been crude, stinky, and beneath my old same in every way, but the love she showed the boy told me that she also cared very much for her husband.

Spring Moon’s face and manner were everything that my daughter’s were not. Jade carried my so-so family’s coarseness in her features, which was why I was so hard on her. Since the moneys made from the salt business would provide her with a generous dowry, she would marry well. I believed Jade would make a good wife, but Spring Moon would become an extraordinary wife, if she were given the chances I’d been given.

All of them made me miss my family.

I was lonely and scared, but this was softened by the nights with Snow Flower. But how do I tell you this? Even here, even under these circumstances, with so many people about, the butcher wanted to do bed business with my
laotong.
In the cold and open space right next to the fire, they did it under their quilt. The rest of us averted our eyes, but we could not close our ears. Thankfully he was quiet, with only the occasional grunt, but a few times I heard sighs of enjoyment—not from the butcher but from my
laotong.
I did not understand this thing. After that business was over, Snow Flower would come to me and wrap her arms around me as we had done as girls. I could smell the sex on her, but with the freezing temperatures I was grateful for her warmth. Without her body next to mine I would have been just another woman who died in the night.

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.

The women under our tree continued to watch over Snow Flower. We tended to her cuts, using boiled snow to douse away potential infections, wrapping them in cloth torn from our own bodies. The women wanted to make her soup from the marrow of the animals the butcher brought to feed us. When I reminded them that Snow Flower was a vegetarian, we took turns walking in groups of two to forage in the forest for bark, weeds, and roots. We made a bitter broth and spoon-fed it to her. We sang songs of comfort.

But our words and deeds did nothing to ease her mind. She would not sleep. She sat by the fire, her knees drawn up, her arms wrapped around them. Her whole body rocked with gut-wrenching despair. None of us had clean clothes, but we had tried to remain neat in appearance. Snow Flower no longer cared. She neglected to wash her face with clumps of snow or rub her teeth with the hem of her tunic. Her hair hung loose, reminding me of the night my mother-in-law sank into illness. She became more and more like Third Sister-in-law on that same evening—barely present with us at all, her mind floating, floating, floating away.