Uncle Tao heard this and he glowered for a moment but he did not speak. He lumbered toward the door, rolling his thick lips as he thought of food. There he paused and turned to his daughter-in-law. “I suppose you have filled those rooms of my brother’s with your children and that we have not an empty bed in the house.”
“There is no truth in what you say,” the daughter-in-law retorted. “I can brush the children away like flies.” She turned to Mary. “Come in, do! In a few minutes I shall have two rooms empty for you.”
“We have brought our own bedding,” Mary said gratefully. She liked this honest round-faced country kinswoman.
“Ours is clean,” this kinswoman replied, somewhat hurt. “We have no lice in this house.”
“That I know,” Mary said.
“Do not be offended,” James said. “We are only glad to be under the roof of our ancestors.”
“Then come and wash yourselves and eat,” the woman said and she led them into the house, and Young Wang, who had been standing waiting at the spirit wall, went and led in the mules from the other side of the wall where he had tethered them to a date tree, and tethered them instead in the court to a thick and old pomegranate tree laden with hard red fruit. There he unloaded the bedding and bags and he, too, came in.
In the night rain fell. Mary heard the quiet drip from the tiled eaves above her bed and she woke. The bed was harder than any she had ever slept upon, being only a bottom of boards set upon benches. Nevertheless she felt rested. A thick cotton mattress was under her body and a clean cotton quilt was folded over her. The kinswomen had refused to allow the other bedding to be opened. “We have plenty of everything,” they had insisted. “Is this not your home? Our ancestors would rise against us if we let you sleep under other bedding as though here were only an inn.”
The night was so cool that there were no mosquitoes and Mary had not let down the heavy flaxen bed curtains. She lay in the darkness listening to the rain, breathing in a faint mustiness in the room, the smell of old wood and plastered walls and generations of her family. The house was none too clean — that she had seen during the evening — and her kinswomen, alas, were not often bathed. They had gathered in her room to watch her prepare for bed, cheerful, curious, friendly, and she had not the heart to send them away. They had exclaimed at the whiteness of her undergarments and at the cleanness of her skin.
“We country people,” the eldest had proclaimed, “cannot have time to wash ourselves. In the summer it is true we pour water over our bodies every day. But now with storing the harvest and getting ready for winter we cannot wash every day. In winter of course it is too cold to bathe.”
Why had she not resented their curiosity? It was sweet and childlike. They had admired her much, remarking tenderly upon the natural narrowness of her feet which had never been bound, upon the smallness of her waist, the beauty of her breasts. There was nothing coarse in their eyes, and there was no envy in them.
“Are you betrothed?” they had asked and when she said she was not they felt it a pity and that her parents had neglected their duty. She had tried to explain that she did not want to be betrothed but here they could not understand her. “Ah, but you must be betrothed,” one had exclaimed and the others nodded. She had not argued with them. She could not, indeed. They belonged to another world.
And Uncle Tao! She laughed silently in the dark when she thought of him. He had ruled over the evening. What was that song she had learned in kindergarten long ago in New York? “Old King Cole was a merry old soul and a merry old soul was he!” That was Uncle Tao. Fretful until he was full of food, when he had cleaned the bones of the fat hen and had supped up the final fragments of noodles, had eaten the last of the side dishes and the sweets, he became genial. Around him the family relaxed into ease and the children who had stayed far from him came near and leaned on his enormous knees and laughed at the size of his belly, reposing like a pillow in his lap.
He rumbled with husky laughter and laughing made him cough until he was purple, and while the children ran for the spittoon, his sons rubbed his back. He recovered to emit loud belches and to wipe the tears from his eyes, and everybody relaxed again.
It was James who had persuaded him to talk of the past. “Tell us about our grandfather and the old times, Uncle Tao,” James said.
They had sat far into the night listening, and children went to sleep in their mothers’ arms while Uncle Tao talked. Mary had listened with strange warm feelings. The crude old room with its plastered walls and cobwebby rafters, the open-faced kind of country people, these were real and they were her own. She curled herself down into the huge bed. “I like it here,” she murmured. “I like it better than anywhere in the world.”
On the other side of the wooden partition James too was awake. It had not taken him long to see that his kinspeople were ridden with trachoma. The eyes even of the children were red. No wonder when they used the same gray towel, the same tin basin! If he were not mistaken, the middle son had tuberculosis. And these were the gentry!
Uncle Tao, James saw, would not like any change. Nevertheless change, James decided, was what he would bring to his ancestral village. He got up out of bed and lit the candles on the table. They stood in brass holders wrought in the shape of the character for long life. He would bring long life to them with health. His heart grew soft when he thought of them, even Uncle Tao. “They’re good,” he thought. “They’re really good people.”
The next morning began with a quarrel between James and Mary. When they came out of their rooms and met in the big central room of the house there was only the eldest daughter-in-law there.
“The outside persons,” she said, meaning the men, “have gone to see to the planting of the winter wheat. They asked me to excuse them to you, and to say they would be home before noon and they beg you to eat and be comfortable. Uncle Tao does not get up early. One of the children is by his door listening and when Uncle Tao begins to rumble the little one will come and tell us. It is like this every morning.”
“Please do not trouble yourselves about us, good aunt,” James said.
“It is no trouble,” she replied. “What will you eat? Our food is poor.”
“Anything,” Mary said, “I’m hungry.” Then she said impulsively, “Don’t treat us as guests. Let us come to the kitchen with you and fetch our own food.”
The kinswoman laughed and did not refuse and so they followed her through the courtyard to the kitchen. The morning was clear and bright, and alas, the sunshine showed all too plainly that the kinswomen were not careful housewives. Mary looked at James with meaning, and James said in a low voice and in English, “Never mind, most germs die with heat.”
There was plenty of heat. The kinswoman opened the wooden lid of the great cauldrons, and steam poured from fragrant millet. The iron ladle was so hot it could not be touched without a cloth, and Mary, when she saw the dark rag offered to her, used her handkerchief instead. Cold salted duck eggs still in the shell were clean enough and salted fish was safe, and so they heaped their bowls and went outdoors in the sun to eat. The house was quiet, for the other kinswomen and the older children had gone to the fields and to the ponds to wash clothes, and only the smallest children played about in the dust.
“Let us go to the fields, too,” Mary said to James.
When they had eaten and washed their bowls they found their kinswoman again, who now was weaving cloth in a back room. They heard the clack-clack of the loom and going there they saw her seated high in the loom, hands and feet both at work in the midst of a mighty dust.