Her husband twisted in the bed when he heard such words, for he knew that at bottom there was no reason in them and yet he was a man of peace and he did not want to bring her wrath down upon him, so he only sighed out that his head ached and he wished she would let him sleep, and with that she kicked him in the small of his back, and he was goaded beyond his own courage at this and he kicked her too, but a lesser kick, and he asked:
“Was I not his father and do I not sorrow? I sorrow more than you do because he was the only child you ever bore me, but I could have had a hundred sons in these years with all my wasted seed.”
At this his wife was so full of fury that she rained her kicks on him with both feet, for what he said was true enough. She was barren from a fever that fell upon her after her only son was born, and with her evil temper she would not have allowed a concubine to her husband even had he had the money for one, which he never had. And though now he kicked back once or twice she was too much for him and so he rose at last and went and laid himself down on a bench in their one other room and wondered to himself why women were as they were and he envied monks and hermits and all those men who need not a woman, and dreamed an old dream of his that one day he would walk away and be a monk himself.
Yet even this little dream of his was now spoiled, for many temples were emptied of their priests these days and soldiers filled them and he feared soldiers as he feared his wife, and so he lay on that narrow bench and felt how evil his life was, and he a quiet man who asked only a little peace around him. But there was no peace now anywhere, and none for him either, in his small life.
… In her own house Ling Sao felt the emptiness too great. She had been used to every room full of her children and grandchildren and at night sleepers in every room and at meals the table crowded, and she herself busy and managing, and now here were only the men and the two little children. And even these little children were silent and full of fear of what they did not know, but they would not stir outside the house and there they would sit hand in hand, the elder like a little old man, and they were thin and yellow and shrank if any noise fell upon their ears.
As to their father, he who used to be so easy and cheerful now seldom spoke a word to anyone, for the truth was this eldest son of Ling Tan’s was a man ill suited for these times. He was one who would have thrived in the good life they used to have and he would have grown into a quiet gentle older man, respected in the village for his wisdom, and the father of many children who would have loved him for his kindness, but in these times when nothing went well, he did not know what to do, and he fell into stillness so deep that it seemed almost witlessness sometimes. There was no hope of finding one to take Orchid’s place yet, and if sometimes he wished there were such a one there were other times when he was glad there was not, for fear of more children and more trouble, and so he went on as dully in his ways as the water buffalo did, doing what he was told and plodding back and forth upon the land.
Ling Tan looked at him often and he thought, “There is one whose life is spoiled by war as surely as any other’s has been,” and then Ling Tan would fall into one of his deep rages that he had now-a-days against all men on the earth who make war. As he plowed back and forth across his fields he raged within, looking at the half-ruined houses of his village and his own house that he dared not mend lest it tempt the roaming soldiers of the enemy, and all about him in the valley the villages were so. And on the other side of the city, where he had not seen it but only heard, the land was itself ruined, scorched and barren, that good fertile land which centuries of peace had made rich for food. Never had their own little wars despoiled the land except through taxes made too high and the land urged to greater bearing. And yet even so for this fruitage there must be more ordure put in and more enrichment, and so the land still held its good.
Back and forth all through that spring while Ling Sao fretted in the house Ling Tan raged in his heart against the men who made wars, wherever they were, and he knew from hearsay that such men were in other countries too, and he thought of the foreigners on the other side of his land and wondered if they suffered as he was suffering, and he thought:
“We men of peace and sense, whether here on top of the earth or hanging downward from it on the other side, we ought to band together and forbid life to all who would make war. Yes, when we see a child like that we ought to keep him locked, if he will not be taught.”
And the more he thought the more sure he was that only a certain kind of man made war, and if these men were somehow done away with, then there could be peace. Such were his thoughts these days, but what could he do, one man upon his land? And yet he said to himself, “Are there not others like me?”
This was a joyless spring, and one festival passed another and Ling Sao made no feasts, and none were made anywhere for how can a people rejoice when an enemy rules over them? The house was so silent that she grew full of fretfulness so that her very skin itched with it, and she would sit scratching herself in the evening because of her fretfulness. At last Ling Tan himself noticed it and he asked her one night in the third month of that luckless year:
“Why do you sit scratching yourself and rubbing your nose and jerking your arms like that?”
And she burst out with words as though a lid had been taken from a jar:
“Our house is like a grave and now I know we ought never to have let our second son and Jade go away from it. Our eldest son is helpless and what will these two poor children do if anything happens to you and me and we already old?”
He listened to this and marveled that for all their years together he could never know what would come out of this woman.
“Would you ask our second son and Jade to come back here?” he asked her gravely, “and shall we tell them to bring our grandchild back from free land to this land that is the enemy’s?”
“It is not the enemy’s so long as we live upon it,” she told him. “That is where you are wrong, old man. It is not ours only if we give up and go away and leave it. But that we will not do, and our sons should not either, because if we should die, how would the land be held?”
Now there was sense in what she said, and Ling Tan was too just to deny sense even to a woman when he heard it from her, and so he said:
“Speak on, old woman, and let me hear more,” and he lit his pipe to keep him calm, though tobacco was precious these days and would be until he had his own small crop cut.
“What I say is that our son ought to come back here and live as he used to do,” she said, “for we ought not to yield to the enemy. We are yielding when we let our sons go out and the enemy will think we are afraid if all the young men go out and only the old are left.”
There was truth in this again and he smoked a while and then he said, “But the outlook is so ill. It is true that women are more safe these days than they were before the new year since courtesans are plentiful, they say, and the worst of the enemy soldiers have gone on, but there are other ills ahead.”
“What ills?” she asked. Not once had she ever said again that she feared no man and never would as long as she lived, but what ill was worse than men?
“There are rumors that we farmers are to have bitter laws put on us,” he said, “and how can we refuse to obey the enemy when we have no guns?”
“If there are such ills ahead our sons should be here to help us bear them,” she told him, “and when you write the letter back to our second son, you tell him I said so.”
“Hah,” he said, and nothing more than that, but he sat a long time that night with the thought that his wife had put into his head. It was but a seed she dropped in that wilful half-childish way that women have, a truth she chanced upon not for itself but out of some simple wish she had doubtless to see her grandson. But his man’s mind could take the seed and fertilize it with his thought and bring it up to fruit and so he did.
“If it be true that this enemy will spread over the land like an evil plague,” he thought, “is it well that we all flee
before it and let them have the land? Some flee because they dare not stay but there are those strong enough to stay and am I not one? She is wrong to say all my sons must be here, but she is right when she says this eldest son cannot live here alone, and he cannot. But my youngest son cannot be here for he will do better elsewhere, but is not my second son like me? If he is like me he ought to be here to hold the land with me. He and I and others like us, we must stay where we belong and hold as best we can what is ours and harry the enemy like fleas in a dog’s tail so that the beast can make no headway for stopping to gnaw his rear.”
He laughed silently at his own small joke and Ling Sao cried, “Why are you sitting there laughing to yourself like an old idiot in such days as these?”
“I am not ready to tell you yet,” he said and would not tell her, but the seed had sprouted in his mind and was putting out its leaves.
Yet so evil was that spring that his courage might have failed him to call back his second son had not the summer brought its own disaster to his house, and this disaster was worse than the new taxes the enemy put down upon the land and worse than the laws they made about the price of rice or what they said a man must plant and all such tyranny as Ling Tan had never thought could be upon the earth. And this was the disaster. In that year so many people had been killed that to bury all was not possible, and to rid the streets of bodies, such as could not be buried were thrown into the canals and into the river and when the river rose with spring and swelled into the canals, those bodies were thrown up again or brought down from other cities and left upon the banks, and sickness came upon the people from all this rotting flesh, and among the poor it came from eating crabs that fed on flesh, and so when the heat of summer came fluxes and fevers spread everywhere.
Where should it spread but to Ling Tan’s house? There it fell upon the youngest and the weakest most heavily. All were ill for ten days and more, but those two grave little children went down first, and though the three grown ones tended them with all their care, and their own flux and vomit poured from them like water, so that even as the children died, Ling Sao had to turn aside to vomit while she held the little one to ease his dying. They died, those two, and with them died such hopes as Ling Tan did not know he had, and Ling Sao wept as she had never wept. These grandparents had been so troubled and distraught that they had let the children do as best they could day in and out, because all had to suffer now, and yet when the little creatures ceased living, the old ones felt their own lives gone.
“What have we left now?” Ling Sao moaned. “What is a house where no children are?”
As for the eldest son, the children’s father, he did not weep or moan, but he crept about the house like his own shadow, and when the two little ones were buried and his parents better and his own flux stayed, one day he begged his parents to forgive him if he went away a while.
“But where will you go?” his mother cried.
“I do not know, except I must go,” he said in his dull voice.
Then Ling Tan cast about and thought of somewhere his eldest son could go, at least so that they might have hope of seeing him again, and so he put his wits to work quickly and said:
“If you must go I wish you would turn to the hills and see if you can find your younger brother and tell us how he does. I always fear he went to the robbers and not to the good hill men. Find him and if he is with those wicked men, lead him to the good.”
This, he said, would give the man a task and better a task he must do than to go out idle in despair, and at the same time to put to an end his secret doubt on his third son.
“Do you so command me?” the eldest son asked.
“I do,” Ling Tan replied.
“Then I must obey,” his son replied.
So within the next few days when Ling Sao had washed his clothes and had sewed into his coat some money Ling Tan had still, they watched him go, a bed quilt rolled upon his back and in his hand food for a day or two, and new sandals on his feet.
“How will you do all the work upon the land now?” Ling Sao asked her husband.
“I do not know,” he said, “but I had not the heart to hold him.”
“There is only one thing to do,” she said, “Heaven has shown its will. You must write our second son and call him home.”
Ling Tan turned to her then, a small smile on his face.
“Are you sure it is only Heaven’s will, old woman? I did not hear you try to keep our eldest son.”
But she replied, “Could it be my will to let the children die?” and there was no smile on her face.
The smile went from his face then and he said sadly, “Well I know that was not your will.”
They watched their son go down the road and toward the hills until he too was lost and then they were alone indeed. Into the quiet house they went, and never had they been alone in it, because before Ling Tan’s old parents died his own first sons were born, and so what was now had never been. In such quiet Ling Sao could not live and she kept begging him, “Will you not write that letter now? Why will you not write that letter today? It may take them a month and more to come.”
“Wait,” he told her, and on another day still, “wait.”
And she had to wait until the thought was fully ripe in his own mind so that he was sure of its wisdom, and that day came. For the more he pondered this wickedness of war the more sure he was that it could only be overcome by such men as he, determined to live out their lives in spite of it, and his second son was more like him than any of the others and there must be one like him after him to go on living. For this war he saw would be no short struggle. This enemy would not easily let go its gains, and the war might go on to son’s son and even after, and their strength must be that they could live, whatever came.
When Ling Tan had been seven days alone upon the land, such thoughts shaped in him to one strong end, and he told his wife the eighth morning when he rose:
“This day I send the letter to our second son.”
Then she was overjoyed and she bustled herself about food and she said, “You must have an egg fresh to give you strength,” and she took out of her basket her newest egg and broke it into a bowl and she made him drink it down now before he ate his morning meal and when he had eaten he went to his third cousin’s house.
Now Ling Tan as he sat in his cousin’s house telling him what to write to his second son well knew what a burden he took upon himself. Ling Sao saw only that now she was to have her son back and a little grandson she had never seen and the more precious because of the two who had died. If she were secretly uneasy she comforted herself by thinking that at least the worst of disorder was over, and the soldiers who had been most vile were checked or else sent on to new cities to conquer, and though the times were very bad if the people kept their heads low under the enemy perhaps they could live.
But Ling Tan saw further than she did and more clearly, and he knew his own temper and the temper of his second son, and that they were not men who could obey slavishly all that was commanded in these days. The outlook was not good for free men and he knew it, and so he made long pauses in the letter, thinking and rubbing his shorn head over what he ought to say to his son, and the cousin waited with the brush moist in his hand, and sometimes the brush dried before Ling Tan was ready, and then the cousin had to wet it again in his mouth until his mouth was full of ink he had rubbed from the inkstone onto the brush.
“Tell my son,” Ling Tan said at last, “that he must understand he does not come back for peace, for there can be no peace. What has been was bad enough but what lies ahead may be worse. Who can tell? He and I must tighten our hearts to endure what can scarcely be endured.”
This the cousin wrote down and waited and sucked his brush and after a while Ling Tan went on.
“Tell him that I and his mother are alone, that my other sons are gone to the hills, that my eldest son’s wife and his two children are dead and our youngest daughter gone with the white woman. But he is not to
come at risk only because we are alone. Tell him his mother wants him to come because the house is empty but I want him to come only if he feels as I feel, that, curse the enemy, I will hold this land as long as I live, and he with me, and when I die he is to hold it after me with his son until such time as the enemy leaves our country.”
The cousin paused on this to say, “If this letter falls into the hands of the enemy will they not come to this village and destroy us all?”
“I will send this letter by no usual way but by a messenger until he reaches the border,” Ling Tan said to give him courage to go on.
There were such men who came and went across the border from the free land into this enemy-taken country, and they made a business of coming and going, and they dressed themselves like beggars or farmers or old blind men who go about clanging their little bells and stopping to tell stories and sing songs among the people, and by such a one his son’s letter had come to Ling Tan.
So the cousin went on doubtfully to write, and when the letter was finished he read it again to Ling Tan to make sure all had been said that he meant, and Ling Tan, struggling to discern the meaning in the flowery learned things the cousin put in extra, heard enough to make him know that his son would see what he meant. He knew, too, that his son would know the letter was written by this cousin who could never put his brush to paper without letting the learned useless words flow out of him, ancient sayings from the classics and lines of poetry and all such foolishness which the tongues of sensible men left to themselves never speak.
“He will see what is cousin and what is me,” Ling Tan thought, “and I cannot offend the man because he loves to make his little show,” and so the letter was finished and Ling Tan stayed to see it sealed and then he took the letter himself, because if he left it the cousin might think of other things to say and add them and confuse the whole beyond what it already was, for besides the learned words the cousin had put in all his own news, how his son had died and how the village was half ruined, and Ling Tan could only trust to his second son’s shrewdness to pick out what was the real meaning of the letter.