The Mother: A Novel

by Pearl S. Buck

  She went secretly to the only man who knew how to read in the hamlet, and he wrote such few letters as any needed to have written and read such as came for any, and so added a little to his livelihood. This man the widow asked secretly, “Did any letter come for Li The First, who was son to Li The Third in the last generation?”

  And when the man said no, the gossip cried out, “But there was a letter, or so his wife says, and but a few days ago.”

  Then the man grew jealous lest they had taken the letter to some other village writer and he denied again and again, and he said, “Very well I know there was no letter, nor any answering letter, nor has anyone come to me to read or write or to buy a stamp to put on any letter and I am the only one who has such stamps. And there has not come so much as a letter carrier this way for twenty days or more.”

  Then the widow smelled some strange thing and she told everywhere, whispering that the wife of Li The First lied and there had been no letter and doubtless the husband had run away and left his wife. Had there not been a great quarrel over the new robe, so that the whole hamlet heard them cursing each other, and the man had pushed her down and struck her even? Or so the children said.

  But when the talk leaked through to the mother she answered stoutly that what she said was true and that she had made the new blue robe on purpose for the man to go to the far town, and that the quarrel was for another thing. As for the letter, there was no letter but the news had come by word of mouth from a traveling pedlar who had come in from the coast.

  Thus did the mother lie steadfastly and well, and the old woman believed the tale heartily and cried out often of her son and how rich he would be, and the mother kept her face calm and smooth and she did not weep as women do when their men run away and shame them. At last the tale seemed true to all, and even the gossip was silenced somewhat and could only mutter darkly over her silken flowers, “We will see—as time comes, we will see if there is money sent or any letter written, or if he comes home ever and again.”

  So the little stir in the hamlet died down and the minds of people turned to other things and they forgot the mother and her tale.

  Then did the mother set herself steadfastly to her life. The seven days were long past and the man did not come and the rice ripened through the days and hung heavy and yellow and ready for the harvest and he did not come. The woman reaped it alone then except for two days when the cousin came and helped her when his own rice was cut and bound in sheaves. She was glad of his help and yet she feared him too, for he was a man of few words, honest and few, and his questions were simple and hard not to answer truthfully. But he worked silently and asked her nothing and he said nothing except the few necessary words he must until he went away, and then he said, “If he is not come when the time is here to divide the grain with the landlord, I will help you then, for the new agent is a wily, clever man, and of a sort ill for a woman to do with alone.”

  She thanked him quietly, glad of his help, for she knew the agent but a little, since he was new in the last years to those parts, and a townsman who had a false heartiness in all he did and said.

  So day had passed into month, and day after day the woman had risen before the dawn and she left the children and the old woman sleeping, and she set their food ready for them to eat when they woke, and taking the babe with her in one arm and in her other hand the short curved sickle she must use in reaping she set out to the fields. The babe was large now and he could sit alone and she set him down upon the earth and let him play as he would, and he filled his hands with earth and put it to his mouth and ate of it and spat it out hating it and yet he forgot and ate of it again until he was covered with the muddy spew. But whatever he did the mother could not heed him. She must work for two and work she did, and if the child cried he must cry until she was weary and could sit down to rest and then she could put her breast to his earthy mouth and let him drink and she was too weary to care for the stains he left upon her.

  Handful by handful she reaped the stiff yellow grain, bending to every handful, and she heaped it into sheaves. When gleaners came to her field to glean what she might drop, as beggars and gleaners do at harvest time, she turned on them, her face dark with sweat and earth, and drawn with the bitterness of labor, and she screamed curses at them, and she cried, “Will you glean from a lone woman who has no man to help her? I am poorer than you, you beggars, and you cursed thieves!” And she cursed them so heartily and she so cursed the mothers that bore them and the sons they had themselves that at last they let her fields be, because they were afraid of such powerful cursing.

  Then sheaf by sheaf she carried the rice to the threshing-floor and there she threshed it, yoking the buffalo to the rude stone roller they had, and she drove the beast all through the hot still days of autumn, and she drove herself, too. When the grain was threshed, she gathered the empty straw and heaped it and tossed the grain up and winnowed it in the winds that came sometimes.

  Now she pressed the boy into labor too and if he lagged or longed to play she cuffed him out of her sheer weariness and the despair of her driven body. But she could not make the ricks. She could not heap the sheaves into the ricks, for this the man had always done, since it was a labor he hated less than some, and he did it always neatly and well and plastered the tops smooth with mud. So she asked the cousin to teach her this one year and she could do it thenceforth with the boy if the man stayed longer than a year, and the cousin came and showed her how and she bent her body to the task and stretched and threw the grass to him as he sat on top of the rick and spread it, and so the rice was harvested.

  She was bone-thin now with her labor and with being too often weary, and every ounce of flesh was gone from her, and her skin was burnt a dark brown except the red of cheeks and lips. Only the milk stayed in her breasts rich and full. Some women there are whose food goes all to their own fat and none to child or food for child, but this woman was made for children, and her motherhood would rob her own body ruthlessly if there was any need for child.

  Then came the day set for measuring out the landlord’s share of all the harvest. Now this landlord of the hamlet and the fields about it never came himself to fetch his share. He lived an idle rich man in some far city or other, since the land was his from his fathers, and he sent in his place his agent, and this year it was a new agent, for his old agent had left him the last year, being rich enough after twenty years to cease his labors. This new agent came now and he came to every farmer in that hamlet, and the mother waited at her own door, the grain heaped on the threshing-floor and waiting, and the agent came.

  He was a townsman, head to foot, a tall, smooth man, his gown gray silk and leathern shoes on his feet, and he had a large smooth hand he put often to his shaven lip, and when he moved a scent of some sort came from him. The mother hung back when he came and when he called, “Where is the farmer?” the woman waited and let the old mother pipe forth, “My son he works in the city now, and there be only we upon the land.”

  And the woman sent the lad for the cousin and she waited silently, coming forward to hand the man his tea but saying nothing but common greeting, yet feeling his eyes somehow hot upon her bare feet and on her face. And she stood by while the cousin measured off the grain for her, and measured the share the agent took for his own, and the woman was glad she needed to say nothing nor even come near to see the weight, so honest was her cousin. But she saw the grain divided and hard it was too, as it was hard for every farmer, to give to this smooth townsman his own share in what they had labored on. But they gave grimly, and so did she, knowing that if they did not they would suffer, and besides the landlord’s share they gave the agent a fat fowl or two or a measure of rice or some eggs or even silver for his private fee.

  More than this, when all the grain was measured out the village must set a feast before the agent and every house must give a dish. Even in this lonely year the mother caught a fowl and killed it and cooked it for the feast, steaming it gently and long until it was
done and while the shape was whole and the skin unbroken, yet was the flesh so tender that when the first chopsticks touched it it would fall apart. The savor of that fowl and its smell when it had cooked so many hours were more than the children could endure and they hung about the kitchen and the boy cried, “I wish it were for us—I wish we ever could eat a fowl ourselves!”

  But the mother was bitter with her weariness and she answered, “Who can eat such meat except a rich man?”

  Nevertheless when the feast was over she went to the littered table where the men had sat and she picked up a bone left from her fowl and a little skin was hanging to it and a shred of meat and she took it and gave it to the lad to suck and she said, “Hasten and grow big, my son, and you can eat at table with them too.”

  Then the boy asked innocently, “Do you think my father will let me?”

  The mother answered bitterly, “If he is not here you shall eat in his place, that I swear.”

  Thus the year wore on to late autumn. Almost the children had forgotten that there had ever been another in the bed except themselves and their mother, and even the old woman seldom thought to ask of her son, because the chill winds set her old bones aching, and she had enough to do to search for this warm spot and that out of wind and in the sun, and she complained incessantly because the winds shifted so, and because every year the sun seemed cooler than the year before.

  The boy worked daily now in small ways and took it as his duty. Every day when there was no other task he led the buffalo to the hill lands and let it feed on the short grass, lying upon its back the whole day through, or coming down to leap upon some grave and sit there catching crickets in the grass and weaving little cages for them out of stems of grass. When he came home at night he hung the cages by the door, and the crickets chirped and the sound pleased the babe and his sister.

  But soon the wild grass on the hills browned with coming winter and the summer flowers among the grass bore seed and the byways were gay with purple asters and with small yellow wild chrysanthemums, which are the flowers of autumn, and it was time to cut the grass for winter’s fuel. Then the boy went with his mother and all day she cut the dried grass with her short-handled sickle and the boy twisted rope of grass and bound what she cut into sheaves. Everywhere over all the mountain sides there were spots of blue and these were people like themselves cutting and binding the brown grass into sheaves. In the evening when the sun set and the night air came down chill from the hill tops the people all went winding homeward through the narrow hilly paths, each loaded with two great sheaves upon a pole across the shoulder, and so did the mother also, and the boy with two little sheaves.

  When they came home the first thing the mother did was to seize the babe and ease her breasts of their load of milk and the child drank hungrily, having had but rice gruel in the day. The old woman these cold early nights crept into bed to warm herself as soon as the sun was set and the little girl came feeling her way out into the last light of day, wincing a little even in that pale light, and she sat smiling on the threshold, rejoicing in her brother’s coming, for she missed him now he had to work.

  So did the autumn pass, and here was the ground to be ploughed for wheat and the wheat sown and the mother taught the lad how to scatter it so that a passing wind would help him and how to watch the wind, too, and not let the grain fall too thickly here and too scanty there. Then the winter came when the wheat was sprouted but a little, and the fields shrank and hardened in the oncoming cold. Now the mother drew the winter garments out from under her bed where she kept them and she sunned them and made them ready to wear. But the rough work of the summer and the autumn had so torn her hands that even the coarse cotton cloth caught at the cracks upon them and her fingers were stiff and hard, although shapely still in the bone.

  Yet she worked on, sitting now in the doorway to be in the southern sun and out of the sharp wind and first she tended to the old woman’s garments, since she felt the chill so much. And she bade the old woman stay in bed a day or two and take off the red shroud she wore, and in between the stuff and its lining she put back the cotton wadding she had taken out when summer came, and the old woman lay snug and chattered happily and cried, “Shall I outlast this shroud, do you think, daughter-in-law? In summer time I feel I shall, but when the winter comes I am not sure, because my food does not heat me as once it did.”

  And the mother answered absently, “Oh, you will last, I dare swear, old mother, and I never saw such an old crone for lasting on when others have gone the common way.”

  Then the old woman cackled full of pleasure and she cackled, laughing and coughing, “Aye, a very lasting sort I be, I know!” and lay content and waited for her shroud to be made warm for her again.

  And the mother mended the children’s clothing, but the girl’s garments she must give to the babe, and the boy’s to the girl, so had they all three grown in the year. Then came the question of what the lad would wear to keep him warm. There was the man’s padded coat and there the trousers that he had worn those three winters gone and he had torn them and she had mended them at wrist and neck, and in the front was a long tear where the buffalo’s horn had caught one day when he was angry at the beast and had jerked the rope passed through its nostrils, so that it tossed its head in agony.

  But she could not bear to cut them small to the lad’s shape. She turned the garments over pondering and aching and at last she muttered, “What if he should come—I will not do it yet.”

  But there the boy was not clad for winter and he waited shivering in the chill of morning and evening, and at last she set her lips and made the garments small for him and she comforted herself and said in her heart, “If he comes we can sell some of the rice and buy new ones. If he should come at the new year he will take pleasure in the new garments.”

  So the winter wore on and it seemed to the woman that the man must surely come at the new year, a time when all men go to their homes if they still live and are not beggars. So when any asked her she began to say, “He will come home for the new year festival,” and the old mother said a score of times a day, “When my son comes at new year …” and the children hoped too for the day. Now and again the gossip would smile and say in her malice, and she was making herself a fine new pair of shoes against the day of festival, “It is strange no letter comes from that man of yours, and I know none comes, for the letter writer tells me so.”

  Then the mother would answer with outward calm, “But I have heard several times by mouth of one who passed, and my man and I have never held with much writing and the good money that must go out for it, and no knowing, either, what hired writers forget to say and it is all written and it is public for the whole street to know when once it does come to me. I am glad he sends no letters.”

  So did she silence the gossip, and so much she said he would come at the new year that truly it seemed to her he would. The time drew near and everyone in the hamlet was busy for the feast, and she must needs be busy, too, not only for the children, to make them new shoes and wash their garments clean and make a new cap for the babe, but she must be busy for the man, also. She filled two great baskets with the rice, all she dared to spare, and carried them to the town, and sold them at but a little less in price than the man did, and this was well enough, seeing she was a woman bargaining alone with men. With the money she bought two red candles and incense to burn before the god and red letters of luck to paste upon the tools and on the plough and farm things that she used, and she bought a little lard and sugar to make sweet cakes for the day. Then with what was left she went into a cloth shop and bought twenty feet or so of good blue cotton cloth and to another shop and bought five pounds of carded cotton wool for padding.

  Yes, she was so sure by now he would come that she even set her scissors in that cloth and she cut it slowly and with pains and care and she made a coat and trousers of the good stuff and padded them evenly and quilted them, and so she finished the garments to the last button she made of bits o
f cloth twisted hard and sewed fast. Then she put the garments away against his coming, and to all of them it seemed the garments brought the man more nearly home again.

  But the day dawned and he did not come. No, all day long they sat in their clean clothes, the children clean and frightened lest they soil themselves, and the old woman careful not to spill her food upon her lap, and the mother made herself to smile steadfastly all through the day, and she told them all, “It is still day yet, and he may yet come in the day.” There came those to the door who had been good fellows with her man and they came to wish him well if he were come, and she pressed tea on them and the little cakes and when they asked she said, “Truly he may come today, but it may be his master cannot spare him days enough to come so far, and I hear his master loves him well and leans on him.”

  And when the next day the women came she said this also and she smiled and seemed at ease and said, “Since he is not come, there will come word soon, I swear, and tell me why,” and then she spoke of other things.

  So the days passed and she talked easily and the children and the old woman believed what she said, trusting her in everything.

  But in the nights, in the dark nights, she wept silently and most bitterly. Partly she wept because he was gone, but sometimes she wept, too, because she was so put to shame, and sometimes she wept because she was a lone woman and life seemed too hard for her with these four leaning on her.

  One day when she sat thinking of her weeping it came to her that at least she could spare herself the shame. Yes, when she thought of the money she had spent for his new garments and he did not come, and of the cakes she had made and of the incense burned to pray for him, and he did not come, and when she thought of the gossip’s sly looks and all her whispered hints and the wondering doubtful looks of even her good cousin, when time passed and still the man did not come, then it seemed to her she must spare herself the shame.