Pearl Buck: Sons

WANG LUNG LAY DYING. He lay dying in his small, dark, old earthen house in the midst of his fields, in the room where he had slept as a young man, upon the very bed where he had lain on his marriage night. The room was less even than one of the kitchens in that great town house, which was his also, where his sons and their sons now lived. But he was content to die here in the midst of his lands, in this old house of his fathers, in this room with its rude, unpainted table and benches, under his blue cotton bed curtains, since die he must.

For Wang Lung knew that his time had come to die, and he looked at his two sons who were beside him and he knew they waited for him to die, and his hour was come. They had hired good physicians to come from the town, and these came with their needles and their herbs and they felt his pulse long and looked at his tongue, but in the end they gathered their medicines together to depart and they said, “His age is on him and none can avert his destined death.” Then Wang Lung heard those two sons of his whisper together, who had come to stay with him in this earthen house until he died, and they thought him sunken in sleep, but he heard them, and they said staring at each other solemnly, “We must send south for his other son, our brother.” And the second son answered, “Yes, and we must send at once, for who knows where he is wandering under that general he serves?” And hearing this, Wang Lung knew they prepared for his funeral.

Beside his bed stood his coffin which his sons had bought for him and placed there for his comfort. It was a huge thing, hewn of a great tree of ironwood, and it crowded the small room, so that who came and went must circle and press about it. The price of this coffin was nearly six hundred pieces of silver, but even Wang the Second had not begrudged the spending, although usually money passed through his fingers so slowly it seldom came out so much as it went in. No, his sons did not begrudge the silver, for Wang Lung took a vast comfort in this fine coffin of his, and every now and then, when he felt able, he stretched out his feeble yellow hand to feel the black, polished wood. Inside there was an inner coffin also, planed to smoothness like yellow satin, and the two fitted into each other like a man’s soul into his body. It was a coffin to comfort any man.

But for all this Wang Lung did not slip off into death so easily as his old father had done. It was true his soul was ready to start on its way half a score of times, but every time his strong old body rebelled that it must be left behind, its day ended, and when the struggle began between these two, Wang Lung was frightened at the warring he felt in himself. He had ever been more body than soul and he had been a stout and lusty man in his time, and he could not lightly let his body go, and when he felt his soul stealing away he was afraid, and he cried out in a hoarse gasping voice, wordlessly as a child cries.

Whenever he cried out thus, his young concubine, Pear Blossom, who sat by him day and night, reached out and soothed his old hand with her young hand, and his two sons hastened forward to comfort him with the tales of the funeral they would give him, and they told him over and over all they planned to do. The eldest son stooped his great, satin-clad body to the small, shriveled old, dying man, and he shouted into his ear, “We will have a procession more than a mile long, and we shall all be there to mourn you, your wives weeping and mourning as they should, and your sons and your sons’ sons, in white hempen garments of woe, and all the villagers and the tenants from your land! And your soul’s sedan shall go first and in it the picture we have had an artist draw of you, and after it is to come your great, splendid coffin, wherein you will lie like an emperor in the new robes we have waiting for you, and we have rented embroidered cloths of scarlet and of gold to be spread over your coffin as it is carried through the streets of the town for all to see!”

Thus he shouted until his face was red and he was breathless, for he was a very fat man, and when he stood erect again to pant more easily, Wang Lung’s second son took up the tale. He was a small, yellow, crafty man, and his voice came out of him through his nose and piping and small, and he said,

“There will come the priests also, who shall chant your soul into paradise, and there will come all the hired mourners and the bearers in red and yellow robes who shall carry the things we have prepared for you to use when you are a shade. We have two paper and reed houses standing ready in the great hall, and one house is like this and one like the town house, and they are filled with furniture and with servants and slaves and a sedan chair and a horse, and all you need. They are so well made and so made of paper of every hue that when we have burnt them at your grave and sent them after you, I swear I believe there will be no other shade so fine as yours, and all these things are to be carried in the procession for everyone to see, and we pray for a fair day for the funeral!”

Then the old man was vastly cheered and he gasped out,

“I suppose — the whole town — will be there!”

“The whole town, indeed!” cried his eldest son loudly, and he flung out his big, soft, pale hand in a large gesture. “The streets will be lined on either side with all the people who come to see, for there has not been such a funeral, no, not since the great House of Hwang was at its height!”

“Ah—” said Wang Lung, and he was so comforted that once more he forgot to die, and he dropped into one of his sudden, light slumbers.

But even this comfort could not go on forever, and there came an hour in the early dawn of the sixth day of the old man’s dying when it ended. The two sons were wearied with their waiting for the hour, for they were not accustomed to the hardships of a cramped house like this where they had not lived since they were young, and, exhausted with their father’s long dying, they had gone to bed in the small inner court he had built long ago in the days when he took his first concubine, Lotus, in the days when he was in his prime. They told Pear Blossom when they went at the beginning of the night that she was to call them if their father began his dying again suddenly, and they went to their rest. There upon the bed which Wang Lung had once thought so fine and where he had loved so passionately, his eldest son now lay down and he complained because the bed was hard and rickety with age, and he complained because the room was dark and close now that the season was spring. But once down he slept heavily and loudly, and his short breath caught in his thick throat. As for Wang the Second, he lay upon a small bamboo couch that stood against the wall and he slept lightly and softly as a cat sleeps.

But Pear Blossom did not sleep at all. She sat the night through in the still way she had, motionless upon a little bamboo stool so low that as she sat beside the bed her face was near the old man’s, and she held his dried old palm between her own soft palms. She was young enough in years to be Wang Lung’s daughter; yet she did not look young, either, for she had the strangest look of patience on her face, and all she did was done with the most perfect, tutored patience, which is not like youth. Thus she sat beside the old man who had been very kind to her and more like her father than any she had ever known, and she did not weep. She looked at his dying face steadfastly hour after hour, as he slept a sleep as still and nearly as deep as death.

Suddenly at that small hour when it is blackest night and just before dawn breaks, Wang Lung opened his eyes, and he felt so weak that it seemed to him his soul was out of his body already. He rolled his eyes a little and he saw his Pear Blossom sitting there. He was so weak he began to be afraid, and he said whispering, his breath caught in his throat and fluttering through his teeth, “Child — is this— death ?”