White Lotus

by John Hersey

  A Spreading of Lard

  We had a common saying that a white man who would not steal had jade toenails.

  One day Dolphin went into the woods on Sun’s place with Quart, and they waded into the walled swamp where Old Sun kept a herd of half-wild swine, and they stole a fat shoat, killed it, and hid it in the woods under some dead leaves. At night they went out and found it and carried it behind the wall of the slave village on the great estate, and they dressed it there, burying the offal. They put the salted meat in earthenware jars, and they buried them, too, and marked the place.

  This much Dolphin told me—whispering in my ear as Moth, Second, he, I, and several other Sun slaves were seated cross-legged on Dolphin’s own k’ang one evening. Moth and I had slipped away over the fields without a chit, and I was too nervous to enjoy myself. Dolphin and Second wanted us to stay the night with them, but we were too afraid.

  A few mornings later, on the second day of the second month, when, each year, the water dragon, who controlled insects, was supposed to rouse himself from his winter sleep, Jasmine, Moth, and I were instructed by Hua to propitiate the dragon, so he would not infest us with crawling insects, while the men went to break out and back-furrow the remaining balks in the cotton fields, and to begin planting kaoliang.

  To pacify the dragon we dusted cinnabar under the folded quilts on all the k’angs, and we carried cooking ashes and placed them in rings around all the wells, both that for drinking and those for irrigation scattered about the farm.

  It happened that one of these irrigation wells, with a long canted bamboo lever for a lifting arm, was in a field adjacent to one of Sun’s, and a squad of Sun hogs was planting there. Second was among them. He saw us and hailed Moth. To control his slave force, Old Sun had a kind of private militia of armed yellow supervisors, and we saw Second run across the field to the one who was in charge of the planting squad. The slave and the militiaman talked a few moments. Then Second broke away and came at a loping run toward us.

  He was out of breath when he reached us. Gasping, he said, “I have only a moment—White Lotus—come over here.” He drew me aside.

  Jasmine was alarmed and suspicious. I heard her ask Moth, “Who is this pig?”

  “Ai!” Moth said. “He’s an old turtle. Don’t bother yourself. I know him.” And Moth made that middle-finger gesture of hers, of a man’s readiness. Mischievous girl, she was trying to make Jasmine think that Second was after my mouse.

  Second, his chest heaving, leaned down to me. “Dolphin—he has been asking for you—he’s in the sick-house.”

  “The sick-house! What’s the matter?”

  Second was still gulping air. “Bambooed—bad.”

  “When? What happened?”

  “Later—the bastards’ll give it to me—have to go.”

  “Tell me!”

  “The son of a turtle said he’d skin me—said run over, run back.”

  “But you could be telling me—”

  “Old Night-Soil Basket”—so the slaves called Old Sun—“he took charge himself. Pepper—you know that bastard pig?—he told on Dolphin—about the shoat—Dolphin beat Pepper up boxing once. Old Night-Soil Basket sat in his sedan chair—they had Dolphin’s hands tied up to a tree—Old Night-Soil Basket threatened branding—sat there talking while the turtles gave it to Dolphin. They took him down—laid him in a cart. Old Night-Soil Basket said, ‘You’re one of my best hogs, what’s-your-name, or I’d have given you a number-one bambooing—but you are such a good small pig—I like you—I thought I would just dust you off this time. You be a good hog now. Behave yourself. If I ever catch you again, I shall be obliged to give you a proper pounding with the heavy bamboo—not just an easy one like this. You understand, what’s-your-name?’ Old Night-Soil Basket never knows our names.”

  “What about Dolphin?”

  “They took him in the cart—sick-house. I have to go. It’ll be me next if I don’t go.”

  Second ran off.

  I was agitated all day.

  With the help of Moth, who was adept at plausible excuses, I concocted a story, which I whispered to Hua’s wife, about having irregular periods, about being afraid that the water influences of the Number Six Field to the east of the slave hut had affected the fire element in my lower body; I wanted to consult the old yellow monk, a mendicant physician, who treated the inmates of Sun’s sick-house.

  Hua’s wife whispered to Hua, and within a few minutes I had a chit to go to the sick-house.

  During the hushed conference between our master and mistress, Moth stole a scoopful of pork lard from one of the jars in the “cool corner” of the work space, and she wrapped it in some dried kaoliang leaves, and as I set out for Sun’s she slipped the package into my tunic and whispered, “For his cuts—the best help.” I remembered, from the sight of her naked back, that day in the cotton field, that Moth was not a stranger to bamboo rods.

  With one exception the buildings at Old Sun’s were sound, clean, and made of bricks. The exception was the slaves’ sick-house, which was in fact a pesthole. Set off at a far corner of the slaves’ vast compound, out of sight and mind of the master’s family, it was one large room, its walls of mud and kaoliang stalks; its floor of dirt; its roof leaky; the oiled paper pasted on the grille of its one window tattered and flapping. There were two huge communal k’angs, in whose ovens inadequate fires were lit once a day, only to flicker out before the damp clay of the beds was dried out, to say nothing of warmed, and on these k’angs lay the slave inmates. As I entered the open doorway I felt the beginning of an anger that was to grow during the next few minutes to an almost uncontainable pressure. An old man, nearly eighty, covered with a tattered quilt, lay staring with glittering eyes at the roof beams as he waited for the end; a multitude of flies crawled about his mouth, which sagged open, for he was snoring, though awake. A handful of women (complications of childbirth, fevers, rheumatism) sat with crossed legs near the window stoically passing the time with talk. And in the dark far corner, with a cloth over his head, and the back of his tunic stained with dried blood, lying prone, was a form that must have been Dolphin’s.

  I crawled across the k’ang toward him on my hands and knees. My anger now was a hard knot in my throat.

  I knelt beside him. Perhaps he was sleeping. Should I touch him on an arm?

  After a time I leaned forward until my mouth was near the cloth over his head, and I murmured in a voice so quiet that it would not rouse him if he was asleep, “I brought some lard for your back.”

  With a suddenness that startled me, one of Dolphin’s hands snatched the cloth away from his head, and he lifted his mat-printed cheek and turned his eyes enough to look up at me.

  This was the first time he had seen me with my sooty hair and bean earrings.

  “Ai!” he said, his mouth curling in a bitter smile. “Who let in the magpie?”

  “I brought some lard for your back,” I said in a voice shaking now with two angers.

  “I don’t have a back,” Dolphin roughly said. “Old Shit Basket has my old back.”

  “Would you like me to spread the lard?”

  “Listen, little Fall-Down. I wouldn’t give a turtle’s dropping to have a potful of hair dye spread on my cuts. Why don’t you go home to Dirty Hua?” He pulled the cloth over his head.

  My anger was dissolving into a nameless and bottomless heat that was far worse. “It was not easy for me to get here,” I said.

  “I’ll tell you the easy way,” the voice under the cloth said, blowing out part of the cloth in small puffs. “Steal a shoat.”

  Something now took hold of me, and with firm hands I lifted Dolphin’s near shoulder, reached under his chest, and undid, one by one, the cloth-knot fasteners of his tunic. He did not resist. In fact he rolled a bit to his side to make my task easier. But as I did the horrible work of pulling the tunic away from the long
scabs, he threw a stream of abuse at me for trying to make myself look like a yellow woman. By now my pulsing anger—not at him, but at them—had surged back again, and I did not care what he said. I took the cloth from his head and spread the lard on it with my hand, and applied the whole compress to the broad place at which I could not bear to look, and Dolphin stopped railing.

  The old man with the flies swarming around his open mouth suddenly started to groan. The sick women paid me no attention.

  I leaned forward to Dolphin’s ear again and in a low furious voice said, “I am your sow, you terrible hog.”

  Dolphin said, “Go away.”

  An ancient yellow monk, in filthy yellow robes, with a shaved head and a black spot on his forehead, was sunning himself against the sick-house wall when I emerged. I went to him, kowtowed in the dust, and said, “Old Worshipful, sell me a paper saying that you must treat me here a few minutes every day for a month.” I held up for him to see the coppers that Hua’s wife had given me for medicine.

  “What is your trouble, small sow?” the old man said.

  “My trouble is the man who was beaten.”

  “Ayah,” the monk said. “You are a very sick pig.” He fumbled in a greasy bag, then took out inkstone, water jar, brush cylinder, and a scrap of thin paper. He wrote what I wanted. I gave him the coppers.

  The Money Belt

  My “sickly” month was the best time I had ever had under yellow dominion. I visited the old monk at Sun’s sick-house —or, in other words, Dolphin—every afternoon. I continued my secret lessons with the old uncle. I feigned a weakness which completely fooled Dirty Hua and which earned me light work part of the time. I kept wheedling coppers from Hua’s wife for powders and pills the old monk never administered to me, and I gave the money to Dolphin.

  Spring was now well advanced. I entered the sick-house carrying a branch of pear blossoms. Dolphin was able to sit up; his industry was a surprise to me. He was weaving a mat. Day after day he wove baskets of bamboo splits and mats of kaoliang splits, made brooms, sewed canvas mule collars stuffed with kaoliang leaves—and all these products he sold to Old Sun’s militia supervisors. He kept the money from these efforts and the coppers I gave him in a money belt that he wore at all times. His hands were flying.

  “Are you going to buy me a beautiful sedan chair?” I asked him.

  “I am going to buy you a beautiful nothing to wrap your most valuable nothings in,” Dolphin said.

  I knew well enough why he wanted money—to help get himself to the mountain; but this knowledge I pushed to the back of my head.

  We were planting cotton. Some days I worked between Lank on the fore plow (who often asked me openly and crudely to lend him my mouse; I was sorry for him, and he knew it) and Grin on the after plow. Lank, up ahead, behind a mismatched team, a donkey and a bullock yoked together, lightly opened the crests of the back-furrowed beds, and I, walking behind him, drilled the cotton seeds, and Grin came along behind me with a concave board on a plow stock to cover the drills.

  The air was soft; redbud, black haw, and jasmine were in bloom along the edges of the fields.

  “How long are you going to keep up this sick-house game?” Grin asked from his plow behind me.

  “Until I am well,” I called over my shoulder.

  “Ai! Do you mean well the way Moth is well?” She was so far along in her pregnancy as to be excused from field work; she had only about a month to go.

  I held my tongue. My silence spoke of my happiness, which teasing could not ruffle. But as we came to the end of a furrow I had a chill; I had imagined for a moment in my rhapsodical eye, against the blue horizon, a frightening faraway mountain, its brow blood red in a sunset.

  My Certainty

  It was a season of watching and waiting—the seedlings appeared in spite of a chilling rain in the first week, and I felt sure, with anticipation blind to consequences, that Dolphin would soon ask me to help him make good use of the warming up of the spring nights. He was healed and back at work.

  A tiny toad hopped out from under a seedling once when we were chopping weeds. “Watch out with your hoe there!” Jasmine sharply said. It was bad luck to kill a toad; it meant you would stub your toe. She clucked her tongue and shook her head over my absent-mindedness.

  “What is the matter with you?” the old uncle peevishly asked me one day during a lesson. He was seated on the stool of the spinning wheel; I was cross-legged on a kaoliang mat on the floor. “Have you lost interest in our work?” I burst into tears; I could not tell the broken old man how full I was of delight and hope.

  The third day of the third month was Ch’ing Ming, the spring festival—a day when the yellows visited their ancestors’ graves, offered a feast to the spirits of those who were gone, and directed their slaves to repair the graves. Now Hua’s wife was distantly related to Old Sun, and on Ch’ing Ming all of us save gravid Moth went to the burying ground, our owners to worship at, and we to repair, the graves of Hua’s wife’s grandparents and parents.

  For me the trip into the Sun family graveyard was a thrilling curiosity, for Moth had long since told me that the Sun graveyard was a favorite trysting place for white lovers. It afforded perfect safety; the yellows were known never to set foot in the burying grounds at night.

  Where would Dolphin and I lie? Between the grave mounds on that gentle slope, under the great willow? Near the artistic wall, its designs of studded bricks and blue-plastered spaces now so brilliant in the sunshine?

  Squads of Sun hogs were working all around us. I felt that I was in the grip of brassbound certainties: Dolphin was among the uniformed men, I would encounter him, he would command me to meet him here in the graveyard—not on this night, because there would be too many other white pairs copulating among the mounds on a night when so many hogs were reminded of this safe place, but two or three nights from now. I did not even look for Dolphin; he would find me. He would ask me. And when the time came…

  These certainties in my mind caused a piercing pain of anticipation and longing in my chest.

  Yes, there was Dolphin. Yes, he was coming with sure strides toward me. I was calm. I knew what was to happen. I thought I would melt from that hot melancholy pain in my chest.

  According to the custom of girls on third third, I had my hair done up in spiral coils as a sign that I was available for marriage—at any rate, available. Would he notice?

  “Fall-Down!” he said, coming straight up to me. He looked around and saw that Hua and his wife were busy several paces away setting out the propitiating foods. “Listen to speech. I want to ask you something.”

  “Yes.” With every fiber of my being I was ready.

  “Look. You’ve got me in trouble.”

  “How trouble? What trouble?”

  “The old monk at the sick-house, he says you owe him money, he says you owe him a hundred cash, he says if you don’t pay him he’s going to tell Old Sun I had a Hua sow come and lie with me every afternoon while I was in the sick-house.”

  I had not yet even realized the inappropriateness of my facial expression. Dolphin seemed thoroughly annoyed. Yet I still stood receptive, face tilted to accept.

  “I’ll pay him,” I said, with asinine eagerness. “As soon as I can get a chit I’ll pay him…. But, Dolphin. I didn’t lie with you.”

  “He’ll make it so. The yellow people always believe a monk.”

  “But I didn’t, Dolphin.” With a rush I was telling myself, but not Dolphin, that I owed the monk nothing, that he was an extortionist, and worse—he used his holy calling to suck slaves. Yet I wanted to keep my mind on the invitation Dolphin was surely…

  “You’d better get the money to him. Before they skin me again.”

  At last I was beginning to mobilize myself. I saw a passage of uncertainty in Dolphin’s face. He appeared to want to turn on his heel and walk away, yet something held
him—a moment’s vacillation. In all my days of visiting him at the sick-house he had never spoken an endearing word to me. How had I become so certain then of his wanting me?—that he would ask for me, today? I had become so certain, I now imagined, because of my reading of just such moments of hesitation as this in a man to whom decisiveness was the only valid pose. There was that hint of tightness around his mouth.

  I moved close to him and said in an urgent voice, “I’ll come here day after tomorrow night, I’ll wait for you.”

  Dolphin said nothing and showed nothing, unless possibly a draining off into his eyes of some of the feeling, whatever it was, that had stiffened his mouth. He began to turn.

  I delayed him for a moment by saying, “Under the willow.”

  Now he turned away and I said to his back, “After the timekeeper’s gong for the first quarter of the night.”

  The selfish man was walking quickly away.

  Figures in the Dark

  Under a cuticle moon I could barely make out the nearest grave mounds. I stood beneath the willow, my hands on the trunk to keep, through its rough touch, some sense of reality. Willow! Symbol, in the yellows’ tales, of frailty and lust.