The Third Son

by Julie Wu

  “That’s too far,” Yoshiko’s brother exclaimed. “You may not get home by sunset.”

  “Here, in front of me. Your parents will worry—” As Yoshiko shifted, she dropped her writing board.

  I picked up the board and handed it to her. “They don’t worry about me,” I said.

  I looked down and waited for her to take the writing board. I closed my eyes, fighting down the ache of being left behind, of being alone and forgotten and uncared for.

  I felt a hand on my head. I looked up into Yoshiko’s face, feeling my close-cropped hair brushing the softness of her palm.

  “You helped me,” she said. “You’re a good boy.” She smiled, and I saw, even in her brother’s shadow, that the brown of her eyes was flecked with gold.

  As her brother started pedaling away, she cried out, “See you at school, or maybe the movies!”

  I watched them ride back over the bridge. I stood watching them until the bicycle receded and disappeared through a bend in the fields beyond.

  She had given me the first tender moment of my life.

  2

  I WALKED HOME, MY feet crunching on the gravel in rhythm with the cicadas screeching in the banyan trees. I wasn’t alarmed to be alone in the countryside. I was used to it.

  It had not always been this way. I had once roamed the fields with my little brother Aki, one year younger than me. I had played with Aki every day and prevented the others from taking his meager share of food at the table. I had taken care of him as well as a little boy could. But when Aki was four, he woke one morning with his eyes glassy, his skin burning under my hand. Pneumonia, I heard the surgeon tell my parents. You’ll need to take him to the hospital.

  How did he get it, Doctor?

  The cold weather, the rain. He’s very thin.

  Ai! You see, Saburo. I told you not to keep him outside so late!

  A couple of weeks later, Aki died. I was hiding behind a rice barrel in the kitchen when I heard.

  The colors of the countryside deepened in the yellowing light as I reached the railroad tracks. The last train to Taipei hurtled by, blue passenger cars roaring, curving away north, side rods pumping up and down, windows glinting orange in the setting sun.

  Brainchild of the Japanese, the train was always on time, and it meant that I was late. For a moment I stood still, thinking of the gray walls of my house and what awaited me there: the front door, so massive it would dam the Tamsui River, my mother behind the door, my father in his armchair, his political cronies by his side.

  The train receded, leaving in its wake the smell of coal and the calls of frogs hidden in the light-tipped grass. An egret glided over rice paddies lit like so many molten pools, its wings on fire.

  I walked again, my muscles now tense with fear, and crossed the tracks to take the long road toward my house. My stomach clenched at the rich smells of buffalo dung and the marsh grass that swished quietly in the wind, the long blades bending now and again to reveal the far-off semicircle of granite that was the tomb of my first Taiwanese ancestor.

  I took out my tin-pipe plane and dragged it behind me, its hinged wings folding and unfolding as I walked. One of the wires broke, and I twisted grass around it instead, thinking that Yoshiko would have thought me clever. I pulled the plane past the tomb of my second Taiwanese ancestor, a rice farmer, and then my third, a doctor. But now I was so close to the house that not even the plane could bring me pleasure. I tucked it back into my pocket and I turned the corner, stomach contracting, mouth dry at the sight of our heavy front door with its old-fashioned wooden lock.

  When I opened the door, my mother stood behind it in her worn cheongsam, her face long and tired—square-jawed like mine, one eye double lidded and the other not—with her arm raised, holding a bamboo switch to beat me.

  The pain of the first blow knocked me to my knees—the blunt force of the main branch against my side, the sharpness of the little twigs cutting into the skin between my shirt and the waistband of my shorts. And then as she drew her arm back again I scrambled to get facedown on the floor in my habitual pose, arms over my head, nose to the musty floorboards, and braced for the next blow.

  “Always late! Do you know what time it is?”

  My flesh was tender, my skin thin and easily bruised. A child’s body is not designed to withstand the kind of blows that an adult can wield with the better part of a tree. Or rather, the child can withstand in the sense of survival, but the nerve endings will never be completely restored. They will remain raw and painful for the rest of the child’s life.

  THIS HAPPENED MOST days—that I was late for dinner, and that I was beaten. Each day I left school with every intention of going straight home to avoid punishment. But fear alone was not enough to keep me hurrying toward the dreariness of our great room, filled at all times with my father’s many important guests, the hallways piled with newspapers and broken knickknacks my mother could not decide what to do with. Even our courtyard was to be tread carefully, with its woven trays of drying daikon and pei tsai on their way to being pickled for the winter. We had few toys except for the tools left overnight by workers fixing our roof, and after I was caught planing the corner of our dining table, we no longer had even those.

  I found every day that the riches of my life were outside, in the fields and roads. I could not believe that being under the beautiful sky had killed Aki. He had fallen ill at home. It was much more plausible to me that the joylessness of our home life had done him in, and so I could not stop myself from pausing to play a game of marbles or to fashion scrap metal into some kind of vehicle. I became so absorbed outside that I forgot my fear, and so my mother’s punishment was the daily price I paid for an afternoon of freedom. I did not ever regret my adventures outside, and I did not regret having walked with Yoshiko at all.

  THOUGH MY MOTHER beat me every day, I never once saw her beat any of my sisters and brothers, even if they came home late. I came to understand that this was my punishment for Aki and for the rebellious core within me that refused to take the blame for my brother’s death.

  I spoke, my lips brushing against the fraying edges of my sleeve: “No.”

  The bamboo wavered over my head. “What’s that, stupid?”

  My shirt had ridden up, and the floorboards were cool against my belly, which churned inside, seething and resentful. I spoke again, my voice dead between my arm and the floor. “I don’t know what time it is.”

  The bamboo landed on my head, my chest, making me gasp with pain. Her voice rose with frustration. “Imbecile! Talking back to your mother! What do you want? A gold watch? How come all the others come home on time? How many times must I punish you for you to come home on time?”

  I was quiet then, drawing into myself, hardly more than nerve endings on fire. I thought of Yoshiko’s brother cradling her in his arms. And inside me grew the seeds of my self-righteousness. Because I knew that my mother was wrong.

  3

  I DREAMED THAT I was at Yoshiko’s house. I was in a bright, small kitchen with banana trees outside the window. Yoshiko’s brother fried fish on the stove while Yoshiko watched, perched on a stool. She beckoned, smiling, and I woke up to the delectable smell of hot lard. For a moment I thought perhaps the dream had been real, but when I sat up I felt my bruises from the bamboo switch, and then I smelled the egg.

  Stomach growling painfully, I jumped out of bed and dressed quickly in the same handed-down shorts and shirt I had worn the day before. I ran into the kitchen.

  I arrived just in time to see Kazuo get up from the table, licking the oil off his girlish lips. My mother was taking his bowl and the frying pan to the sink. She studiously looked away, her asymmetrical eyes weary and cast down. Her jaw was set.

  “What’s for breakfast?” I asked.

  “Steamed bread, as always,” she replied. “Why do you ask?”

  I understood that this was a question I should not answer. In our home, ancestors were worshipped, elders respected and never questioned.
But still dazzled by the happy picture of Yoshiko and her brother, I was feeling particularly resentful of my mother’s coldness.

  “I smelled the egg,” I said.

  “Stupid,” she said. “It’s wartime.”

  “I saw the rations come yesterday morning,” I said. “We got eight eggs.” We got more provisions than other Taiwanese families; our Japanese names ensured that we received the same rations as the Japanese, and my parents bought even more food on the black market.

  “We have five now and guests coming for lunch.” She worked with her back toward me, scrubbing traces of the precious egg off her pan, her shoulder muscles tensing and relaxing against the shapeless fabric of her dress.

  She glanced over her shoulder, not quite at me. “Always talking back and disrespectful.” She gestured at the kitchen with her chin. “Look at all I have to do.”

  On the stove, a pot of baby bottles boiled for my youngest brother, who sat on the floor sucking his thumb and pulling his hair. A wet stain showed through his diaper. On the kitchen table were piles of tofu for preserving, a bowl of beans soaking in water, and half-chopped bamboo shoots. I heard my sisters arguing from the great room and the maid scolding them. There were seven of us children, all under the age of ten. I knew that was a lot of work, even with a maid. Most families had grandmothers to help, but my mother’s family lived in the North and my father’s parents were dead.

  I sat down at the table and tore at my white lump of bread, thinking of the girl, Yoshiko, and her moachi. I finished the bread in seconds and my stomach still ached, but my mother started slicing the tofu with her sharpest knife and I was not stupid enough to continue asking for more food.

  “They canceled school because of the air raids,” she said.

  “Then I’ll go out to play.”

  “Hou,” she said.

  I walked east, across the railroad tracks, through the deserted town, passing the low office building where my cousin, Toru, had recently started practice as a physician, and then the hardware store where Yoshiko and I had taken shelter. The buildings ended, and I headed toward the river and Turtle Head Mountain, where Yoshiko and her brother lived. I wished now that I had gotten on that bicycle with them. At least then they would have known where to find me. Now I had to find them, and I had no idea where to go once I got to the bridge.

  I walked past several rice paddies that looked abandoned. The house amid them was boarded up and I saw no signs of people or water buffalo. But the herons stalked the paddies, and as I drew closer I saw telltale ripples on the surface of the water and knew that there were fish within.

  Why not bring them another fish? Perhaps they would fry it right up. My stomach gurgled at the thought, and in a second I had slipped off my shoes and stepped into the cool water.

  I waded through the paddy and then crouched, dipping my fingertips through the reflection of the rippled clouds and of my eyes, alert and unblinking, their slight asymmetry evoking my mother’s face. A mosquito bit the back of my neck. The water was dark with buffalo dung, with fish droppings and algae. I could sense it resting in the warm water by the bank—the fish, mistaking my light almost-touch for the swaying grass.

  Let Kazuo have his egg. I could do better on my own.

  My fingers closed ever so slowly over the fish. Its smooth body rocked back and forth in the water between my hands.

  But hunger had made me careless, and I realized the body was too smooth to be a fish. I had my hands around a snake! My heart pounded, sending a surge of warm blood through my chest and arms. My second cousin had been bitten three years ago by a water krait and had died within two hours.

  If I backed away, the snake would realize I was there. If I continued to close slowly on it, the snake would bite me. I took a breath and hurled the snake into the air. It writhed, zigzagging, black and white against the pale blue sky. And then I saw to my horror that I had accidentally thrown it almost straight up, and it fell back into the paddy at my feet.

  I jumped back and fell into the water on my bottom. As I scrambled to my feet, I felt a quick bite on my calf.

  I got out of the water and looked at my muddy leg. Try as I could, I couldn’t find the bite. I had felt it, though, I was sure. How stupid I was! And so far from home . . . It would take me at least an hour to get back.

  Another child might have run home for his mother, no matter what the distance. But I had no illusions that getting to my mother would be worth the time.

  Cousin Toru! Maybe he was at his clinic in town.

  I ran. I panted, and by the time I reached the nearest buildings I felt a cramping in my belly, different from my usual hunger pangs. I stopped, out of breath, my forehead dripping with sweat.

  The air-raid siren went off.

  My heart stopped. I saw the image of the American plane bearing down on me, the pilot aiming his gun, Yoshiko screaming. I found my legs running of their own accord through the empty streets, past the shuttered windows and the padlocked doors of corrugated steel.

  Toru, Toru. Please be there.

  His door was locked, and I stood in front of it in a panic as the sirens wailed. I pounded on the door, yelling.

  “Toru!”

  The window to the side of the door was locked, too, and I hit it with a rock. But I was not strong enough and the window only cracked slightly.

  I picked up the rock to smash at the window again. But then suddenly the door opened and Toru’s head poked out. He stared at me for a moment. He was a young man, but his eyes were gray and serious like his father’s—my father’s oldest brother.

  “Toru!” I dropped the rock. My fingers were tingling.

  His eyes flicked to the sky at the sound of distant planes. “Get in,” he said.

  I went in, and he hurried me down a set of very steep stairs into a tiny area in the basement that had been outfitted as an air-raid shelter, with water, dried foods, and piles of books. At the bottom of the stairs I crumpled as the cramping in my belly intensified.

  He bent toward me, his eyes intent.

  “I’m sorry about the window—” I began.

  “Never mind. Why did you come?”

  “I’ve been bitten by a krait.”

  “You’re sure it was a krait?”

  I nodded. “Black-and-white rings. I saw it.”

  He took a rag and wiped the mud off my leg. The faintest traces of a bite appeared on the full of my calf. He looked me in the eyes again. “Seeing okay?”

  “Yes.”

  “Breathing okay?”

  I nodded.

  “Well, we’ll have to treat you in the clinic upstairs. Lai.”

  He helped me up the stairs again and into his examining room, which was cluttered with large boxes. He pulled down the shades, set me on his examining table, and started rummaging through a box, his movements quick and fluid. There was the distant sound of machine-gun fire.

  “You’re lucky.” He unwrapped a long metal needle. “I was just getting ready to evacuate.” He glanced at me. “Now, lie down.”

  “I can’t. My stomach hurts . . .”

  “Slowly. Breathe.”

  I lay back shakily, puffing my cheeks, squinting at the lamp overhead. “You’re not supposed to have your light on during an air raid.”

  “Well, we need it, and it’s daylight. It won’t matter.”

  I felt a jab of pain in my belly and winced. “I want to stay alive,” I said.

  Toru straightened up. He had an armful of equipment and a small brown vial in his hand. As he spoke, he dumped the armful of equipment onto a chair and placed the vial carefully on the counter. “Well, hopefully you will. You were smart to come find me right away.” He dragged a metal pole to my side and hung a glass bottle of clear fluid on it. “I have a little antivenom. It’s new, but I think we should try it.”

  “You haven’t tried it before?”

  “No,” he said. “But it’s your only chance. Abdominal cramping is the first manifestation of envenoming. After that it a
ttacks your nervous system . . . Well, no time to waste talking.”

  He unrolled what I thought had been a label on the little brown vial and unfolded it into a sheet of paper. He read it, then attached tubing to the bottle of fluid. He worked methodically, without any appearance of haste, extracting a small amount of fluid from the vial and injecting it into the bottle.

  He began tying my arm tightly onto a wooden splint. I winced.

  “Shouldn’t you hurry?” I said.

  “I have to make this secure. It’s to keep the needle in place. If it moves, you’ll be in big trouble.” He tied my arm, splint and all, to the bed and inserted the needle into my arm.

  He put his hand on my shoulder. “Now we just wait for it to infuse.” He bent toward me and looked into my eyes again. “Your eyelids were always asymmetrical?”

  “Yes.” I hesitated, then said, “Toru?”

  “What is it?”

  “The nervous system. That’s my brain, right? And the nerves going down my back? It makes your hands move.”

  He straightened up. “How do you know that?”

  “Kazuo was talking about it. He wants to be a doctor.”

  “That’s right. The nervous system controls all your body’s functions, including breathing. That’s why krait bites are so lethal. Though you should be fine.” He fell silent and began to examine me, telling me to look this way and that, open my mouth. He lifted up my shirt. “What are all these scratches and bruises from?” he said.

  I pulled my shirt back down and said nothing. They were from my mother.

  He sat down on a box beside me so his face was level with mine. He watched me closely. “What were you doing outside, so far away from home? It’s not safe outside these days.”

  As if to prove his point, the sound of a shell thundered in the distance.

  “I was hungry, and I was looking for some friends.”

  “Hungry? But your family gets plenty of rations.”

  “Kazuo gets all the eggs,” I said. “And my little sister gets the meatballs. I have to chop them for her on Saturdays and I never get to eat any.”