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.
That night those two began to dig their hole. It was a hot midsummer’s night and the ground behind the stove was beaten into a rocky hardness by the many women who had crouched there, generation after generation, to feed their households. With all their sweating and work until they could work no more Ling Tan and his wife only dug down six or seven inches.
“The young ones will have to help us finish it,” he said, panting and weary.
“But we can get it deep enough to hide in at least by the time they come,” she said.
Thereafter day after day, they did not count their day’s work complete until they had added a few inches to the hole. This hole became the great comfort of their lives while they waited for the coming of their son and grandson, and it gave them the hope of hiding not only themselves if it became a need, but the rice now growing in their fields.
For one day to Ling Tan’s terror when he was working in his fields, he saw like an evil shadow upon the land a band of the enemy coming toward him from the city. He stood as they drew near, sure that his life was at an end, for among them were soldiers with guns, but no, when one began to speak he listened and perceived that they had not come to kill him. That enemy had a little book and a pen and he asked questions of Ling Tan, what his name was and how long he had lived here and how much land he had and how much rice he would have from the grain here standing. In his fear Ling Tan told more of the truth than he wished, but he made his harvest smaller by far than he knew he would have, because he was used to tax gatherers, and the enemy who questioned him knew no better and he put down what Ling Tan told him. Then he said in a loud voice:
“Farmer! This country now belongs to us who have conquered it and you must produce on your land as we say and the harvest is to come to us at the price we tell you it shall be. There is to be no more buying and selling as you wish, for we will establish law and order and all is to be done according to law.”
Now Ling Tan was a good farmer and a shrewd man and he knew that prices must vary with each year, depending upon the weather and the harvest and the number of people buying and selling and how much is sent out to other parts and brought in from other parts, and never can it be said early what the price of rice or meat is to be. So he said, making his voice quiet and courteous:
“Sirs, how can it be decided thus early what the price of grain is to be? In our country Heaven decides such things.”
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p; Then that little enemy man puffed himself up and scowled and drew down his mouth and shouted at Ling Tan.
“We decide all now, farmer, and those who disobey us need their land no longer.”
Ling Tan said no more, but he bent his head and fixed his eyes upon the rich dark earth on which he stood and he answered their questions and told them that he had one water buffalo and two pigs and eight chickens, a pond with fish and some ducks, and that in his household there were only himself and his old wife.
“Had you no children?” the man asked.
Then Ling Tan lifted his head and told his first full lie. “We are childless,” he said.
This the little enemy man put down too, and then he pursed his mouth and said one more thing.
“Beginning with the first of the month there is to be control of all fish, and only we shall eat fish. You, farmer, if you catch a fish in your waters you must not eat it but bring it to us.”
“But the pond is mine,” Ling Tan said without thinking, for all the years of his life since he was a child he had drawn fish from this pond and fish was their chief meat.
“Nothing is yours!” the man bellowed. “Will you village men never learn that you are conquered?”
Ling Tan lifted his head again. He shut his lips over his teeth to save his life, but he looked that little man in the eyes. “No,” his eyes said, “we will never learn that we are conquered,” and “No” his lifted head said, and “No” the look of his whole being said before those men. But his voice did not speak, because he knew that living he could hold all his land, while dead he could hold only so much as he was buried in.
The little enemy man looked away and said in a loud voice, “Now you are registered, farmer, and you and your wife and your pigs and fowls and fish and buffalo and your land, all that is yours. Do as we tell you and you shall live in peace.” Still Ling Tan did not speak, and he stood there with his head lifted up and his whole body still, while those men went away and he saw them stopping at every house and at every field where a man worked. Few were working this year compared to last for the young men were gone and some were dead, and the ones who worked were like him, those who believed that they must hold the land at whatever cost.
He would not go into the house as long as those enemy men were in sight. He took up his hoe again and went on with his work as though all else were nothing to him, but the heart with which he worked was sad. When they were gone from the valley to another place he looked around him and he saw that everywhere men were going toward the village and so he put his hoe on his shoulders and went too. There in the half-ruined tea house they gathered, between thirty and forty men, and each talked of what the enemy meant. Their rice was to be sold at a low price to the enemy, and they could eat no fish, even if one leaped into their hands from their own ponds.
“Such tyranny we have never known,” they said, and there was little talk that day, for none knew what was ahead and there was no use in talk and anger until they knew.
“If we can bear it we must bear it,” Ling Tan said at last, summing up their minds, “and if we cannot bear it we must find means not to bear it. But the land comes first.”
To this they all agreed and they parted. They were of one mind and there was not a traitor among them.
Going toward his house for his noon meal Ling Tan thought to himself that he was glad his second son was coming, for how could he endure through these times alone? The men in the village looked to him as their leader yet how would he know to lead them if what lay ahead could not be borne? They needed a leader young and strong and able to think what to do in these times which were so different from any he had known.
At the table in the quiet empty court yard he and his wife ate together, now that there were only the two of them, and he told her what had befallen them. And when she had heard she rolled up her sleeves and bade him go to a village bigger than theirs and see if he could buy as much salt as he could.
“But why, old woman?” he asked amazed.
“Those pigs must die,” she said, “and half of the fowls will die, and you shall have salt fish to eat if you cannot eat fresh.”
“They will kill us if they find out,” he cried. But she twisted her face at him. “Can we help it if a sickness carries off our beasts?” she asked. “I will go through the village and tell the women that all beasts are to be sick, and do you tell it as you go to buy salt, and the word will fly from mouth to mouth, among those who have not already thought of it, and be sure every quick-witted soul will think of it anyway.”
He grinned and said no more, and he did go and buy salt, but it was too scarce to buy all in one place and he had to go to several. Then stealthily and by night, they killed and dried and salted their fowls and their pigs. But they left the sow until she littered and Ling Tan let her into the room where the loom used to be so that the piglets would not be seen.
“They at least are not registered,” he thought.
For days thereafter they worked and whenever Ling Sao saw anyone like an enemy coming she hid the meats in the hole behind the stove that was daily getting deeper. And never had Ling Tan eaten so much meat as he did that summer, for there were the small parts that could not be easily salted and the blood to make puddings. And so it was done throughout that whole region, and the village dogs grew fat on entrails and offal. The only trouble was the scarceness of salt. Then suddenly salt came in from sources they did not know, but it was brought somehow by unknown hands into the villages and left at shops and people took it and were glad and did not ask whence it came. They knew it came from the hills.
The summer was long that year while Ling Tan and his wife waited for their son and grandson, and yet there was the hole to dig. Every day they looked down the roads and at night they woke and listened and thus the days followed on each other. Most of all was Ling Tan harassed with little enemy men coming to the village, sometimes with soldiers and sometimes without, to tell him what he must do and what he must not do, and to smell out his crops and sometimes only to stare and see. Now that he could draw his breath in their presence he was able to see that though all were evil not all were equal in their evil, and he learned to hear them and to hold himself in silence.
“I will wait until my son comes,” he always thought. “I will do nothing but keep silence until my son comes.”
Sometimes the enemy came even to the house, but Ling Sao had learned to be wary, and she had hiding places for meat and rice, and if the hole was not big enough she thrust what was left up into the thatch of the darker rooms where if dust fell it would not be seen. She sat there seeming a dull and silent old woman who stared at the strangers and did not stop her spindle while she twisted her white cotton thread, and if they spoke and she saw their lips move she pretended she was deaf and pointed to her ears and shook her head, and so they let her alone. She took care not to brush her hair smooth or wash her face clean these days and the sun made her brown skin nearly black and she let it.
“The uglier I am the safer I am,” she thought, and she took heart that the hole was now big enough to hide Jade and the child at least.
Thus passed the summer and then the heat broke, and then they thought that any day surely their son would come, and Ling Tan only hoped he would come in time for harvest.
“Yet we must hide him too from the enemy,” he said, “for the enemy compels the young men to labor for them, and our son must not be lost to us,” and so they devised ways of constant watchfulness and how they would tell their son he must learn to work by night and sleep by day, and they would watch.
At last one night the hour came for which they had waited. Nearly at midnight they were waked from their sleep and they ran into the court. There was a low knocking at the gate, and Ling Tan leaped toward it and was about to throw the gate open, certain of who was there, but his wife who held the lamp, called, “Wait. I must first put out the light, so that if it is not they we will have time to escape, and if it is they none will see them coming.”
He was struck again with her quick wits, and so he waited while she put out the little lamp, and then he threw open the gate. In the dim starlight they saw two figures.
“Father!”
It was their second son’s voice, and Ling Tan and his wife heard it, and then how they pulled those two in! They led them to the kitchen through the darkness for in the kitchen there was no window and then they closed the door and Ling Sao lit the lamp again and so they saw each other. There they were, Lao Er and Jade, but they looked like two men, for Jade had her hair cut off short and she wore men’s garments and her feet were bare and thrust into men’s straw sandals, and her face was so thin and brown that even one who had known her could have passed her on the road and thought her a farmer. But Ling Sao was famished and starving for the child.
“Where is my grandson?” she cried. “Where is my little meat dumpling?”
Then Jade smiling took the load from her back, and there cleverly hidden under a basket was that little boy for whom Ling Sao had been waiting. She thought of no one and of nothing else as she took him in her arms, her face all trembling and broken with weeping, and she unwrapped him and looked at him all over.
“He is exactly as I thought he would be,” she whispered, and she lifted him and held him against her shoulder and rocked him back and forth. “Oh, how it eases me,” she whispered. “Oh, how I am comforted to hold him like this!”
And the others stood about her, saying nothing, but tears were in their eyes because of the agony of her joy, for such joy is made up partly of sorrow and none can know that deep joy who has not had sorrow first. As for Jade, when she saw it she was for the first time willing for all the danger through which she had carried the child. She had not wanted to come back, but to go forward further to the West, and she and Lao Er had argued bitterly as to whether they ought to obey the letter which had come to their hands through many another. For that young man who had first taken it from Ling Tan was shot by an enemy gun and he had died. But all that he carried he gave to another before he breathed his end, not only Ling Tan’s letter but other letters and first of all the secret messages that were his real duty, the messages between those who ruled the free lands and those who were in the hills, and thus by one way and another Ling Tan’s letter had reached his son.
Dragon Seed: The Story of China at War Page 21
