Pearl Buck - Sons

“No, no, we will open the other gate so that he need not come near you at all.”

Then Lotus cried again in her old, querulous way,

“I forget what son he was of that old man of mine! Was he the one who used to stare at that pale slave I once had and he ran away when that silly old man of mine took her for himself?”

Then both brothers looked at each other aghast and they were astonished at this tale and had never heard it, and Wang the Merchant said hastily, for Lotus was now very free and obscene in her old age and talked of her early life so that neither brother allowed his children to come near her for she did not know decency from indecency and all her old life would come bubbling to the surface of her lips sometimes, and he said,

“We know nothing of this. Our brother is now a famous lord of war and he will ill brook such talk as this against his honor.”

But Lotus when she heard this laughed and she spat upon the tile floor and she cried out,

“Oh, and you men are so full of your honor but we women know what poor stuff your honor is made of!” And she listened for Cuckoo to laugh also, and she cried out, “Eh, Cuckoo?” and Cuckoo, who was never far away, gave her thin shrill cackle of laughter, for she was pleased to see these two middle-aged men, each grave and important in his own way, put to such confusion. As for the two brothers, they hurried away to direct the serving men in all that must be done.

When all was ready Wang the Tiger came with his house, and he took up his abode in these days in the court where his father had lived. It was empty for him, now, and swept at last of every presence except his own and his son’s and he could forget that anyone had ever lived there except himself and his son.

Then the festival came to this whole house, the festival of spring, and everyone laid aside his private grudge for the once; even the wives of the two elder brothers, when they came together in the family, were formal and courteous with each other. Everything was done in its proper order and in the way it should be done, and there were certain duties at this time which the sons of Wang Lung had toward their father.

It happened that two days before the festival day was Wang Lung’s birthday. Wherever he was, on this day he was ninety years old, and since his sons were together they determined to perform their whole filial duty and Wang the Tiger was very ready because since he had his own son his anger against his father had gone of its own accord and he was left ready and eager to take his place in the line of father and son and father and son.

On this birthday of Wang Lung’s, therefore, his sons invited many guests and a great feast was prepared, such a feast as they would have made if their father had been with them, and there was rejoicing and congratulation and there was every dish such as is proper at a birthday feast. And they had Wang Lung’s tablet there and made obeisance to it and they did him honor on his birthday.

On the same day Wang the Landlord hired priests and he spared no money and each son gave his share, and the priests chanted all their chants for Wang Lung’s spirit to give it rest and joy in the happy courts where it now was, and they decked the hall with their sacred emblems and signs, and for half a day the courts were filled with the rise and the fall of their chanting voices and the dull thick sound of the wooden sticks upon their drums of wood.

All this did Wang Lung’s sons do in his memory. Beyond this they and their wives and their sons went out to the place where the graves of their fathers were, and Wang Lung’s sons saw to it that every grave was made straight and smooth and heaped high with fresh earth. Each grave was shaped to a point and upon the point a clod of earth was put, and white paper cut cunningly into long strips was fastened beneath the clod and streamed in the sweet spring wind of that day. And Wang Lung’s sons bowed to the earth before his grave and they set incense to burn, and they brought their sons to bow, and proudest of them all was Wang the Tiger, for he took his own fair son and he bowed the child’s little head, too, and he was knit to his fathers and to his brothers through this child, his son.

And as they went home again they saw that over the whole countryside, wherever there were fathers’ graves and grandfathers’ graves, there were sons who did what they had done for Wang Lung this day, for it was a day of remembrance. Then Wang the Landlord was more moved than he usually was, and he said,

“Let us do this more regularly than we have in past years, for we have but ten more years and our father will be a hundred years old, and then he will have been born again into another body in this world, and we cannot feast his birthday, for it will be a new birth and he will be unknown to us.”

And Wang the Tiger, grave in his fatherhood, said, “Yes, we ought so to do for him as we hope our sons will do for us when we are where he is now.”

And they went homewards in silence and gravity, each feeling his kinship to the others more than was wont with any of them.

After these duties were over, they all set themselves to the merriment of the festival, and when the day of the festival came to evening the air was unexpectedly warm and sweet and a little slender perfect moon hung in the sky, clear and pale as amber. On this night they all gathered in the court where Lotus lived, for she had that day turned plaintive all of a sudden and she said,

“I am a lonely old woman and they never come near me nor hold me as one of this house at all!”

And she moaned and wept tears out of her blind old eyes so that Cuckoo went and told the brothers, and they yielded to her because this day their hearts were unexpectedly tender toward their father and what had been his. Instead, therefore, of feasting in the courts of Wang the Landlord, where his lady would have had the family gather, they went to the court where Lotus lived. It was a large and beautiful court, too, with pomegranate trees brought from the south in one corner, and in the center was a small octagonal pool where the new little moon shone reflected. There they all ate cakes and drank wine, and the children rejoiced in the moon’s light and they ran everywhere hiding in and out of the shadows and running out again to seize a cake or sup a little wine. They all ate their fill of the steamed delicacies and cakes suitable to this festival, some stuffed with pork chopped fine, and some with brown sugar and very dainty. There was so much that even the slaves ate freely and the servants filched and ate behind doors or when they went on a pretense to fetch more wine. Nor was it missed what they took, or if the mistresses’ sharp eyes noted it, at least for once nothing was said, so that no reproof might mar the night.

And as they ate and drank, Wang the Landlord’s eldest son, who was a very pretty musician, played upon a flute, and his next brother, a lad with nimble, delicate fingers, played upon a harp whose strings he struck lightly with two slender bamboo sticks, and they played ancient songs to the spring, and sang a plaint or two of some dead maiden’s to the moon. When they played so well together, their mother was very proud, and she commended them often and cried loudly as soon as one song was finished,

“Play something else, my sons, for it is pretty to play like this under the new moon!” And she was proud of their slender, lovely looks.

But the wife of Wang the Merchant, whose sons were plainly taught and who knew no toying with music, yawned and talked aloud to this one and to that one, but most of all to the wife she had chosen for Wang the Tiger. She made very much of this one and she was pointed in her ignoring of the learned wife; she scarcely glanced at Wang the Tiger’s daughter, but she could never be done with smelling and nuzzling the boy child, and one might have thought it all due to her that the child was a boy.