Vessel

by Chongda Cai

  In those days, my mother also stopped by the old house, although I don’t know if she was, like me, consciously looking for something, or if she was unwittingly drawn there.

  Knowing my mother, I thought that she must have rented it to the family because she knew they would take it over. Only a family that big squeezed into the tiny house could fill the place with happiness and heartbreak.

  The life of others painted in a thin coat over her own old life in the house was exactly what she needed. It provided just enough distance.

  The newer four-story building where my mother lives now never felt like home to me.

  That house was built when I was in my third year of high school, two years after my father had his first stroke. One day my mother called me into her room, opened the middle drawer of the table, and took out a roll of bills. She said we had one hundred thousand yuan. Some of it she had earned herself, some my sister earned as a bookkeeper, and some I had contributed from editing and tutoring. She told me that since I was the head of the household, I could decide what to do with it. Without really thinking, I told her we should keep saving.

  During the two years my father had been unwell, my mother used to leave the house every night around eight or nine o’clock, carrying a cloth bag. Each time she came back from her nightly trip, I heard her toss something in the yard behind the house, and then she would come back in the house and pretend it was perfectly normal for her to be coming and going at that hour. My sister and I pretended not to know what was going on, but we already knew. She was secretly going each night to pick up the cabbage leaves, radish tops, and other discarded items from the floor of the market. She threw them in the yard and then in the morning washed them and cut off the rotten parts. She put them on the table without letting on where they had come from. Combined with four meatballs, the market scraps provided a meal. We didn’t tell her we knew. We knew the truth, but we didn’t want to face the consequences of revealing the lie.

  That night, after I told her that I wanted to keep saving, she told me she wanted to build a house.

  “Before your father got sick,” she said, “he was talking about building a house. So that’s what I want to do.” That was her reasoning.

  “But he still has medical bills,” I said.

  “I want to build a house,” she said.

  She was like a little girl in a toy store who refuses to budge from the aisle until her parents buy her the doll she wants.

  I nodded. It would mean a few more years of eating vegetables of unknown origin. But I understood how she felt. I thought about the relatives who went out of their way to avoid us when we were in town or pretended we were invisible when we happened to make offerings at the ancestral temple at the same time.

  I knew the house would be my mother’s way of sending a message to the world. Once the house was built, she could hold her head high.

  When the money was added up, there was enough to tear down half of the old house and put up a small two-story house. My mother picked an auspicious day to start construction and, despite not having completed elementary school, sketched a design for the new house. This was two weeks before I wrote my college entrance exam. Before the old house was torn down, the household was gripped by preparations, which saw family members shuffled around: my father and mother lived in the west wing of the old house, and my sister, who was old enough that our parents were waiting for the day she would get married and move out, had settled into the east wing. I had no place to live, so I moved into the school dormitory.

  A week before the old house was to come down and work on the new house would begin, my mother insisted on buying a string of firecrackers. Whenever there was enough sun, she put the coil up on the roof to bake. She said that was the best way to make sure they went off with a clear, loud bang. That summer there were a few afternoons of inexplicably heavy rain. She would rush out as soon as the first drops of rain fell to take the firecrackers down, then bring them inside to dry off in front of an electric fan. She cared for her firecrackers like a mother does a newborn.

  When demolition day came, one of the workers took a hammer and gave the wall a ceremonial tap. It was time. With all the neighbors watching, my mother went to the middle of the street, gently unrolled the string of firecrackers, and lit the fuse.

  The sound was just as impressive as she had hoped. Blue-green smoke from the firecrackers floated up, mixing with dust from the road. As the smoke and noise filled the alley, I heard my mother exhale a long, deep sigh.

  Building a house is a nerve-racking process, especially when you’re going into debt to do it. My mother split her time between the gas station and the construction site. She was barely over a hundred pounds, but she put every last ounce of strength into her work. She went from moving around oil drums at the gas station to shouldering loads of bricks for the house. She trembled under the weight of the load, weaving between towers of bricks that stood as tall as her. And when that was done, she would rush over to the old house to look after my father.

  With a mother like that, there was no way I could relax. When school let out, I rushed home to find her dripping with sweat—but she never stopped smiling. When she was tired, she would sit down right where she was and rest until she caught her breath. Even when she was completely exhausted, panting in the dirt, she never stopped smiling.

  Whenever anyone walked by, no matter how exhausted she was, she would spring up to say, “That son of mine said he wants a new place for when he gets married. I kept telling him not to bother, but he insisted. What can I do? If he’s going to be ambitious, I’d better support him.”

  My worst fear came true one afternoon a week before I took my exam. My mother was at work on the new house when she suddenly clutched her stomach and fainted. It didn’t take long for the doctor to make a diagnosis: acute appendicitis.

  By the time I made it to the hospital, the surgery was complete. I found her sitting up on a bed in the inpatient department on the second floor. She smiled when she saw me: “Is the foundation done yet?” She was worried I was going to yell at her.

  I was about to lose my temper, but I was pulled up short by the sound of shuffling, panting, and a cane tapping. It was my father. He had set off for the hospital as soon as he got the news. After hobbling out to the main road, he had managed to get a taxi, but the trip had still taken him three or four hours.

  He shuffled into the room, leaning heavily on his cane, and then carefully lifted himself onto the other bed in the room. His long journey over, he breathed a sigh of relief. Still panting, he asked my mother, “You’re okay?”

  My mother nodded.

  My father’s mouth curled up as he tried to catch his breath and force the muscles in his face to cooperate. He asked again, “You’re okay?” I could see that his eyes were red. “You’re really okay?” His lips trembled like a small child on the verge of crying.

  I stood there, silent.

  By the time the house was done, I was away at university. It had taken six months to complete, and my mother had been forced to borrow money from my aunt and uncle. That was about all I knew, though, since she never told me how much they had lent her. I also knew that she owed the carpenter for his work on the gate. Every week, she counted up the money taken in at the gas station, took out the profits, and went to pay down her debts.

  When it came time to move into the new house, my mother wanted to stay true to local traditions, which meant hosting a banquet for the relatives, even though it would cost her at least ten thousand yuan.

  The night of the banquet, she couldn’t stop smiling. When the guests had left, she got me and my sister to collect all the food that could be salvaged. I knew we would be eating leftovers for at least a week.

  My sister was the first to protest. “Why are you spending money like crazy?” she asked.

  My mother kept quiet and continued tidying up. But my sister had broken the silence, and I couldn’t hold back anymore: “I don’t even know how I’m going to
pay next year’s tuition.”

  “Why do you care so much what other people think?” my sister said. “What is he going to do if he can’t pay for school? What about all the medical bills?” My sister began to weep.

  My mother was silent for a long time. The only sound was my sister crying.

  “You know what I live for?” my mother asked. “I live for this—that sigh of pride when it’s all over, when we can hold our heads high. Nothing else matters but that.”

  It was the first time my mother had gotten angry at us since my father’s stroke.

  At the time, I was busy with school or working at the newspaper, and then tutoring during winter and summer breaks, so for me the new house remained temporary lodging.

  My father, though, was quite satisfied with the new house. Since the left side of his body was paralyzed, he struggled to get around, but he went out each day to sit beside the gate and greet everyone as they passed. “Pretty amazing,” he would say, “what that old wife of mine built, eh?”

  His satisfaction was short-lived. I don’t know who gave him the idea, but it was only about a week before he was heard saying to one of those passersby, “My wife isn’t giving me money for my medical bills. She spent all the money building a house for our son, skimped on my treatment, and left me like this—I can’t even walk.”

  Every time my mother went in or out, she was subjected to my father’s vicious accusations. At first she pretended not to hear him, but gossip spread quickly in our small town. The fact that it was a disabled man leveling the accusations gave them even more weight.

  One night, while I was away at university, Third Aunt called and told me to come home. My mother had called her that afternoon and said out of nowhere, “I want you to tell Blackie that I paid off most of the debts, but we still owe a bit. I don’t want him to forget about the three thousand that’s owed to Mr. Cai, the carpenter. These people helped us when we needed them, so I want him to look after them. Tell him that his father has to take his heart medicine every night around seven o’clock. He needs to make sure that he has at least a month of each prescription, and tell him, no matter what else is going on, he has to make sure his father takes his medicine. Let him know that I’ve saved up some money for his sister’s dowry, then there’s my jewelry, and the rest I hope she can come up with herself.”

  I got home as quick as I could. I saw that she had prepared a bowl of lean pork and ginseng soup. It was her favorite. She made it for herself whenever she was feeling sick. Whether it had any real medicinal qualities or was simply an effective placebo, she always felt better by the next day.

  She heard me enter but said nothing.

  I spoke first. “What are you doing?”

  “I’m drinking soup,” she said.

  I looked at the soup in her bowl. It seemed thicker than normal. I guessed what was going on. I walked over, picked up the bowl, and took it away from her.

  At that moment, even though neither of us said anything, we both knew what was happening.

  She burst into tears as she watched me pour the soup down the drain. She said, “I don’t want to give up. Do you think it was easy for me to get to this step? If I give up right now, it’s humiliating.”

  That night revealed what had been lurking in both our hearts. Through the hard times, the idea of ending it all had floated like a malevolent spirit. Neither of us had dared talk about it, though.

  I thought she was too fragile to hear those words, and she had thought the same of me.

  But that night the ghost was made flesh.

  My mother quietly led me upstairs to the room she shared with my father. He had gone to bed after dinner and was already fast asleep, his childlike snore echoing through the bedroom. My mother pulled open a drawer and took out a box. Inside the box was a paper bag wrapped in a scarf.

  It was rat poison.

  “I bought it after your father got sick,” she said quietly. “There were so many times when I felt like I just couldn’t take it anymore. I’d take out the poison. . . . I wanted to put it in the soup, but I couldn’t do it, so I always put it back.”

  “I can’t do it,” I said. “I’m not willing. I don’t believe things can’t get better.”

  That night, I tried to convince her. I knew that since I was the head of the family, I could order her not to do it. Even for something like suicide, she needed my approval. She gave me her promise. She looked like a child. She sat beside me and began to cry.

  I took the paper bag from her. I finally felt like the head of the family.

  Even though I was the head of the household, I was still far from ready for the role. The week after I took the rat poison from my mother, my father lost his temper, and I took the bag out and screamed that it might be better if we all just died. Everyone stared at me. My mother forced the bag out of my hand, glared at me, and put it in her pocket.

  In the days after the secret was revealed, the rat poison became one of my mother’s tactics to defuse disputes in the house. Without speaking, my mother would climb the stairs to her bedroom, and whatever argument was taking place would be forgotten as we all sat silently, listening. At that moment all of the anger in our hearts slowly melted away, replaced by the thought of our mutual destruction. There was no way for us to be angry with that thought hanging over our heads.

  The rat poison never served its true purpose of killing vermin, but it managed to snuff out all the anger and resentment that poverty and disability had visited on our family.

  During my first year of university, when I was home for summer vacation, my mother called me into her room again. She took out a roll of bills.

  “How about we put two more floors on it?” she said.

  I couldn’t decide whether to laugh or cry. It had taken three years of hard work to pay off our debts, and there were still times when I struggled to come up with money to pay my tuition—and my mother was about to go down the same road all over again.

  My mother twisted the money nervously in her hands. Her face turned red. She looked like a general giving the order to dig in ahead of the final battle. “Nobody else around here has a four-story house,” she said. “If we build one, we can finally hold our heads high.”

  I realized that my mother was even more stubborn than I had first imagined. She didn’t want merely to hold her head high—she wanted to be able to lord it over the neighbors.

  I knew I couldn’t refuse her.

  Just as she had planned, the extra two stories on the house caused a stir. When the firecrackers went off to signal completion, my mother took my father on a walk to the market.

  “You just wait a few more years,” she said to everyone they passed. “My son and I are going to take down the old house in front, too. We’ll have a little courtyard with a wall around it, and we’ll put some effort into fixing the place up just right—we’ll invite you over to have a look when we’re done!”

  “Come over and have a look when we’re done,” my father slurred, fighting his half-paralyzed tongue.

  A year after that walk to the market my father suddenly passed away.

  Two years later my mother went to the municipal government and saw the line cutting through her house.

  On the way back from the municipal government office, she turned to me and asked, “Can we finish building it?”

  “Sure,” I said.

  She tried to explain it to me: “Do you think I’m just being stubborn? I keep thinking, if it’s going to be torn down, we should build more, spend more. . . . I don’t know why I want to keep building.”

  She couldn’t stop herself from crying. “I know,” she said, “that if we hadn’t built it, I’d be unhappy my whole life. It doesn’t matter what house I ended up living in. It wouldn’t matter where I ended up.”

  When we got home, we ate dinner and watched TV for a while, then my mother went to bed early. It was not her body that was tired but her heart. I couldn’t sleep, though, so I crawled out of bed and turned on all the l
ights in the house. For the first time in years, I inspected every single part of the house. It was like seeing a face that was both familiar and strange; I ran my hand over the wrinkles, the age spots, and the scars. Not much care had gone into the top two stories of the house. They also lacked the special banisters my mother had installed for my father on the lower floors. There wasn’t much furniture, either. The upper floors had stayed unoccupied until my father had passed away. Shortly afterward, my mother had abruptly moved upstairs; my room had been moved to the fourth floor then, too. For a while, my mother refused to set foot on the second floor.

  The first room on the second floor had been my parents’ bedroom. My room was right beside their room, and my sister’s was across the hall. The second floor wasn’t very big, less than a thousand square feet without the staircase to the balcony, and that tiny space was carved into three rooms. When my father was paralyzed and struggling to get around, he used to curse my mother for designing the place with no rhyme or reason. “I didn’t even finish elementary school,” my mother would say. “You think I had any qualifications as an architect?”

  The marks of my father’s cane on the walls of the second floor were still there. I opened the first room and found that it still held a faint scent of my father. The table that had once held my mother’s money and the rat poison was still there, too, its top pockmarked from the times my father had angrily brought his cane down on it. I found the middle drawer locked. I had no idea what might be in there.

  I left the lights off and went to sit in a chair beside the bed where my father once slept. I remembered how he lay there in the years after his stroke. I suddenly remembered something else, too: how I used to lie on his stomach when I was a boy.

  The memory pulled me toward the bed, and once again I was enveloped by his scent. Pale moonlight lit the room. I felt something on his pillow and saw that it was a sticker portrait I had taken of myself at a photo booth many years before. My face looked startlingly pale. I took a closer look and realized that the picture had simply faded, rubbed smooth by my father’s fingers stroking it.