Dragon Seed: The Story of China at War (26 page)

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.

With this letter wrapped up in a handkerchief and put safely away Ling Tan and his wife waited a few days until they were able to catch one coming and going, and to do this he went every day to the tea house and especially at night, for such men travelled by night and slept by day. On the fourth day he caught a young man who by his look signified what he did, and Ling Tan said to him in a low voice:

“If you are going to the border will you carry a letter to my son?”

The man nodded, and Ling Tan told him where he lived, and after nightfall he came to the house and Ling Tan brought him in and Ling Sao had a meal ready for him, and they ate together. While they ate the young man told of many things they had not known, how over the border in the free land a great army was gathering that would stand against the enemy like that wall which once emperors had built to the North, but this was a wall of living flesh to be two thousand miles long, and miles deep, sometimes ten but always one or two. And he told how in that free land there were schools and mines and mills and factories and though millions of people had fled there from land the enemy had taken, still they were determined to flee no further and they had taken their stand.

All this encouraged Ling Tan and though neither he nor Ling Sao felt a wish to go, for their own land was here and not there, he said, “I feel my heart take breath when you say these things, and when the day comes that the army drives forward I will be here and my son with me if he comes, and this piece of land will still be ours for we have never let it go.”

Then he gave the letter to the young man and he tried to tell him how he would know Lao Er when he saw him, but Ling Sao stopped him.

“You do not know him as I do,” she said, “for I carried him in my womb and he has a mole under his right eye, but very small so you must look for it and his eyes are bigger and blacker than another man’s and his face is square like his father’s, but his mouth is big like mine. His height is not above medium, but his shoulders are set square and the calves of his legs are round. On one great toe, that of the right foot, he has a deep cut, because when he was a child of twelve he stepped on a plowshare and I thought his toe was off, but I bound it on with a piece of my apron I tore off, a new apron it was, but I tore it, for was he not my son? And he had a boil once on his crown and it left a small bare place, but he keeps it covered with hair and you must look for it.”

Ling Tan burst out laughing at this and said, “Do you think he will search our son like that, old woman? Give no heed to her, young man—she is like all women. Her sons are like no other men on earth. I say he is a strong young man good enough to look at but not too good, and he is not our third son who is as pretty as a girl and I am glad he is not.”

Ling Sao’s face fell at that, and in the silence the young man rose and said he must be on his way.

“How long will it be before the letter is in my son’s hand?” Ling Tan asked him.

“I cannot say,” the young man replied. “If I am lucky it may be less than a month. But I am not always lucky.”

So they told him farewell, and Ling Tan gave him some money and Ling Sao gave him a package of bread with meat steamed inside, and they both told him to come here and sleep whenever he came and went, and he thanked them and was gone without ever having told them his name. Nor had they asked, because in these times it was better not to know a man by his name, so that on being asked by the enemy one could say, “I do not even know his name.”

With this letter gone, Ling Tan and his wife could only wait, and that year she alone helped Ling Tan on the land. The rice had been planted somehow in the early summer, and it was doing well, but they could not keep it so weedless as Ling Tan and his sons had in the other years, and the water buffalo had to go without its long days at grass for there was no one to take it to the low foothills for pasture, and yet as best they could these two, husband and wife, kept the land, and she let the house go and only cooked a meal quickly when they came in at night.

But they talked together much of how it would be when Jade and the little child were there and one day Ling Sao said they should have a hiding place into which they could put her, for never did she wish again to hide in the city with the white woman. They must have a place of their own to use if it were needful.

“But where?” Ling Tan asked. “Your thought is as good as an egg but go on and hatch the fowl.”

“I will sit on it awhile,” she said laughing.

So she thought and after a few days she said, “We could dig through the earthen floor of the kitchen behind the stove and then under the earthen wall of the house under the court yard. We have no time now for weaving and no place to sell the cloth if we did weave, and we could take the door frames and posts and beams from the weaving room and build a room under part of the court. Then we could cover the hole with a board and on that put straw.”

He was so full of praise for this thought that she grew shy, while he praised her.

“It took no great thought,” she said modestly.

“Yes, it did,” he said, “and many a woman would have let her mind lie idle while she worked in the fields, but I have ever seen this difference between you and other women, that your mind cannot be idle, and I say I never know what is coming out of you. And so I never tire of you, old woman.”

She covered her mouth with her hand while she smiled, for though usually she forgot the lack of two side front teeth which she had not had for many years, yet when her husband praised her she always remembered her gaps and covered her mouth until he forgot her again and she could know he did not see her when he looked at her.