A Moment in the Sun

by John Sayles

  “So where you come from, Mei?”

  “Born in Guangxi.”

  “What’s that like?”

  Mei looks up at him, wipes the wet from her face with the back of her sleeve. “Work in a field. Leave there when I’m a little girl, go to Hongkong.”

  Hod decides not to ask her what she did in Hongkong. She is skinny like Addie Lee but not from the consumption or they wouldn’t let her work in a hospital.

  “We stopped by there for coal,” says Hod. “But they wouldn’t even let us off the ship.”

  “You pretty sorry bugger, then, huh?”

  He has to laugh. “Yeah, that would be me.” Disgrace to his uniform or no, Hod thinks, before I go back to the company I am going to try to kiss this woman.

  One of the doc’s adjutants steps in then and asks what he is doing there.

  “I found a syringe on the floor,” Hod tells him. “I just brung it in.”

  The officer looks at the black mark on Hod’s sleeve and makes a disgusted face. “Get back to your ward.”

  “Yes sir.”

  He pauses in the kitchen to listen and is relieved when the adjutant has nothing to say to Mei. A sad-eyed private who looks sicker than most of Hod’s bunkies is stirring a huge cauldron full of bubbling oatmeal with a wooden paddle.

  “Got any bacon loose?” Hod asks.

  “Venereals don’t get bacon,” says the mess private. “Scramble, pal.”

  Baba always blamed it on her clown feet. Baba was his father’s only son and started with twenty mu to plant but liked to drink and liked to gamble and by the time Mei was born he had lost half of it. Her mother was very beautiful and had the lotus feet and gave him two sons, but the winter Mei was old enough to have hers bound Ma was under the influence of the yang gweizi and only got as far as cutting her toenails. She had a bowl of pig’s blood and the bandages ready but when Mei came in from numbing her feet in the snow Ma said “No, this is why the yang gweizi say we are stupid people and I will not do it to her.” It was the first time she saw Baba hit her mother, chasing her out in the yard with a stick of firewood and Mei crying, crying because he was beating her mother and because now she would never have lotus feet. Baba came back in alone, saying “What do these yang gweizi have to do with us?” but he had no idea how to bind feet and when Ma came back later, her face bruised, she threw out the pig’s blood and gave the bandages to Mrs. Hong for when her daughter turned four. When Mei’s brothers came inside they sensed that something was very wrong and did not speak. Nobody spoke for days.

  Baba never liked Mei after that. Before, he would let her walk behind the donkey to the market to sell their sweet potatoes and then let her ride in the side basket on the way home. After, he would only look at her and say that she was born in the year of the Great Famine and was a curse on the family, and if she was going to have clown feet she would have to work in the fields with the boys.

  Ma had followed the White Lotus way until the governor started putting those people in prison and many of them went to join the yang gweizi, who were yellow-haired beings from a land in the north where there was always snow. At that time if you bothered their followers they would complain to the other yang gweizi in Pekin, who would tell the Empress who would send soldiers to whip you. Even though Ma was a Christian she still bowed to the sun once every morning, noon, and evening and when she went to her knees to pray it was the old sutras she repeated over and over.

  “What good is it for you to be a Christian,” Baba said, “unless they give us food in the winter?”

  “They have taken a vow of poverty,” Ma would explain. “And besides, the kalpa is about to end and we cannot know what will follow.”

  When she was eight, Baba gave Mei a basket to collect dung. She spent most of her day by the road that passed the sheng-yuan’s fields because he had more land than anybody, more than one hundred mu that he planted with giaoliang, and more animals to work in it. She hid in the ditch by the edge of the field, watching the mules or the oxen being driven, and when one unburdened itself she would wait till the man driving the beast had moved it past a ways and then run to gather the dung, scooping it into the basket with her hands and running back to the ditch before he could turn the animal around. The best were the days when a caravan would pass by on the way to Qingdao and she could follow the camels. It only took a few camels to fill the basket. Ling-Ling, who was the sheng-yuan’s puppy, would find her in the ditch some days and they would play. Sometimes he would try to follow her home and Mei would have to throw a ball of dung as far as she could for the puppy to chase and then run away with the basket. Eldest Brother said she was the fastest girl he had ever seen, but of course that was because even the other Christians in the village let their daughters have lotus feet.

  Ma was always pleased if it was camels, especially in the winter when fuel for the fire was scarce. Mei hated winter because there was no hired work for Baba and he drank more and because it was always smoky inside their hut and freezing when she had to go out and squat to make her own dung on the pile next to the door. She didn’t like it in the summer either when the flies tickled your bottom but the cold was worse.

  One day in the winter when she had a basketful from the camels and it was almost dark and she was hurrying home there was a wolf eating something in front of the Chans’. The Chans were very poor, only straw on top of their mud hut instead of reeds like at Mei’s, and at first she was afraid because Mrs. Chan had just lost a baby and the poorest people would throw the little bodies outside for the animals. But when the wolf stepped away to look at her Mei saw that it had killed a pig, black bristles stained with red. The wolf’s eyes were like ice watching her. Mei circled around in the stubble on the far side of the road, but when she came back to the path the wolf began to walk after her. Mei walked backward. She used to practice walking backward sometimes because Second Brother said it was a good way to confuse evil spirits. The wolf began to catch up and she tossed a handful of the camel dung, which was still warm, onto the road and kept backing up. The wolf stopped to sniff the dung for a moment and she walked faster but still didn’t turn her back to it. As terrifying as the wolf was to look at she knew it would be worse if it was behind her and she couldn’t tell how close. It began to trot toward her, making up distance, and this time when she threw dung at it the wolf only shied away and kept coming. They were only halfway to her home, which was at the edge of the village, and it was winter so there were no men in the fields. Even the fastest of girls cannot outrun a long-legged wolf.

  That was when she heard Ling-Ling barking. The dog was in the last of the sheng-yuan’s fields, ears back and shaking all over, taking three steps forward and three back as she barked, her little paws nearly lifting off the ground with each high-pitched yip. The wolf looked at Mei, then took a few steps toward Ling-Ling and Mei began to run backward, dropping the basket to the road. The wolf turned and started after her again, loping, and Mei turned toward home and ran faster than she had ever run to gather dung.

  Mei could hear her own breath and hear the feet of the wolf on the dirt of the path behind her and Ling-Ling running parallel to them, barking, and then she could hear the wolf getting very close and Ling-Ling too, barking hysterically, and then a low snarl and Ling-Ling yelping and Mei ran, hollering now, hollering for her mother and there was Ma coming out into the yard tottering with her lotus gait, arms spread wide for balance and screaming, picking up the rusty ax with the split handle that Baba used to cut wood if there was ever wood and Mei hearing the wolf after her again, Mei running, running straight past her hobbling mother into the hut to leap on top of the k’ang and shake, breathless and crying, and Ma scolding the wolf as she backed into the hut with the ax in her hands, the wolf stalking her on one side and then the other with its head so low it almost touched the ground until Ma backed inside and slammed the door shut.

  Mei was still shaking when Ma put a new pile of sticks and grass into the fire under the k’ang, still shaking, eve
n with Ma holding her, when both her brothers came home, surprised by the story, and said there was no sign of a wolf outside. And shaking still when Baba came in, drunk from the baijiu.

  “A wolf is a very bad omen,” he said, reeling around the smoky room. “A very bad omen. She has cursed us again.”

  “If I listened to you about her feet,” said Ma, “we would have no daughter.”

  Mei waited for him to say that was right, that they were all very lucky, but he only snorted. Her brothers went to sit in the far corner and scowl then, because they knew there would be no dinner tonight. Ma sat on the k’ang holding Mei, rocking her, not even looking at Baba while he paced the few steps from wall to wall and complained that the foreign devils had cursed them all.

  “They dance naked to stop the rain,” he said. “They poisoned our donkey and called the locusts onto the field. They steal the part that comes out after a baby is born and keep it in a jar to make potions, and they dig up the dead to steal their eyes.”

  Ma only looked away and rocked Mei, waiting to see if he would tire and lie down first or if she would be beaten, but then there was shouting outside and someone banging on their door.

  It was the lantern-bearer for Zhou, the sheng-yuan. Zhou himself was behind, sitting in the wheelbarrow that Mr. Chan’s eldest son wheeled him around in. Baba could not speak at first, the sheng-yuan never having stopped at their hut before, certainly not on a winter night, and could only kowtow with his mouth hanging open.

  “The sheng-yuan is looking for Ling-Ling,” said the lantern-bearer.

  Baba only stared, not understanding, as smoke from the fire poured past him out into the dark night.

  “Ling-Ling is his dog,” Ma hissed softly from the k’ang.

  The sheng-yuan pointed through the doorway at Mei.

  “I am told this girl plays with it. And steals dung from my fields.”

  Mei still trembling, chilled to her bones with fear, could only shake her head. The sheng-yuan, who could barely read and had bought his position, had eyes like the wolf.

  “She has not seen it,” said Ma softly, not looking at anybody.

  “She says she has not seen it,” said Baba, his voice shaking. “I am sorry.”

  The sheng-yuan made a grunt then, and immediately the lantern-bearer was trotting away in front as Mr. Chan’s eldest son hustled Zhou away in the wheelbarrow.

  Baba shut the door and sat heavily on the floor and began to weep.

  “Now we are ruined,” he said between sobs. “He thinks she has killed his dog.”

  After that there was no more Ling-Ling to play with in the ditch and at night when they rolled their mattresses out on top of the k’ang Baba was always on the far side and then Eldest Brother and then Second Brother and then Mei and then Ma. Ma’s legs started to hurt her more than ever, though she never complained about it. Sometimes before Baba came home she would sit on the k’ang and stretch them out one at a time for Mei to rub.

  “I used to feel bad,” she said to her daughter, “and sometimes I wondered if it was not too late to turn your toes under. But now I know. If we have lotus feet the wolves will catch us.”

  For two years there was no rain and the next year there was too much rain and there was only boiled millet to eat with no salt or soy and sweet potatoes that were rotten by the end of the winter and even the sheng-yuan, who grew his sorghum to brew into baijiu, began to look hungry. He was the only one in the village who lived in a house behind walls like the yang gweizi in Weifang did, the only one who wore clothes of cloth that was not spun at home. There were mulberry orchards in the next village, and oak for pongee, and years ago Ma’s family had all been silk weavers, but now nobody had the money to buy silk unless it was for a wedding. For a wedding people bought it to make a dress and hired a boy as a crier to warn you there was a bride coming by and Mei would stand out front of the hut with her mother, her mother’s hand on Mei’s shoulder for balance, and watch the bride be carried past in her chair. Mei would always look first to the red veil, trying to see through to the girl’s face and know if she was crying or smiling, and then her eyes would go to the tiny feet, delicate triangles in beautiful beaded slippers. The men carrying the brides were professional porters, paid by the number of li they had to travel, and kept the chair as steady as if it was floating down a peaceful river.

  “Don’t worry,” Ma would always say, reading Mei’s thoughts when the procession passed out of sight. “When this kalpa ends things will be different. Men will want girls with feet like yours.”

  At the rumor of the next spring Baba kicked her awake and told her she was coming with him and her brothers to work in the field. The field was full of weeds and every one of them had to be pulled and burned before the ground could be broken to receive the seed. Baba stood over Mei, scolding whenever she missed a weed or broke the stem without pulling up the roots.

  “If you are going to look like a man,” he said, “you will learn to work like one.”

  Mei didn’t mind the work, which was different than what Ma did in and around the hut. You breathed less smoke. She only felt bad when people would stop on the road to stare at her.

  “You have a mule there,” said Yip who did not own land but lived in a hut where men went to drink baijiu and gamble and meet with wicked women. “Neither a horse nor a donkey.”

  A week later Baba hired her brothers out to work in the sheng-yuan’s fields. Most days after that he would just sit and smoke tobacco and watch Mei work, shouting if he disapproved of something she did or did not do. Mei missed being with her mother and wished she had a puppy like Ling-Ling to walk along with her and chase butterflies while she was pulling weeds or driving the young ox rented from Mr. Hong around the wet field with a switch or poking holes with a stick and planting seed or spreading the dung from the pile next to the door or pulling up the next growth of weeds. But when there was not too little rain nor too much and the locusts decided not to come, the millet began to grow, and Mei was proud. She had made that happen. She began to watch the sky and smell the air like the other farmers did, began to search the stalks for insects whenever she walked in the field, began to dream about things that might hurt her crop. Sometimes, if she watched very carefully, she could see it growing taller.

  One day while she was pulling more weeds and Baba was sitting on the little stone wall smoking tobacco, Feng, who hired men for the sheng-yuan’s fields and supervised his harvest, stopped to talk to him.

  “This soil is weary of millet,” he said looking out at the crop, which was then no more than two feet high. “It will yield very little.”

  “I would grow pearls,” said Baba, who according to Ma had been a clever man when he was young, happy even without drink, “if only I could afford the seed.”

  “There is something better than pearls,” said Feng. “Everybody in Dang-shan is planting it.”

  Baba tried not to look the foreman in the eye, instead staring out past Mei to his little ten mu.

  “Is the sheng-yuan going to grow it in his fields?”

  Feng shook his head. “He is not so hard-hearted. He would not deprive his neighbors of their sorghum wine.”

  “Growing poppy flowers in forbidden,” said Baba, looking into the sky.

  “What is forbidden here,” smiled the foreman, “is determined by the sheng-yuan. If you decide to change your crop, as many here are doing, I can give you the seeds without charge. But when you gather the gum you must sell it to me.”

  “How much is it selling for?”

  Feng put his finger to his lips. “We must not speak of such things. I only wish to leave you something to consider.”

  Baba left the field in millet and it was the best crop in years. But the men who had grown poppy flowers were boasting and wearing real metal coins strung around their necks after their harvest and every night there was noise from the crowd at Yip’s hut.

  “Pay no mind to those people,” Ma told Baba. She was saying her sutras more than ever an
d calling on the Eternal Mother even though she could no longer kneel like a Christian. “What is won too easily does not last.”

  “They do not work as hard as I do,” said Baba, who only helped Mei during the harvest when he was afraid the grain might shatter if left too long on the stalk. “But they have twice as much in their palms at the end of it.”

  There was enough to eat that winter. Ma made noodles once, and once Baba brought home a chicken he had won gambling.

  “Too bad you don’t eat meat,” he said to Ma. “It will be torture for you to cook this.”

  Most years he only got to tease her about being a White Lotus at New Year, when they spent their savings to buy pork buns and Ma would only eat the outside.

  The next year Feng came to talk to Baba even before planting, but he had Mei put in the millet seed again. That was the year Quan Chuntao, who was Mei’s age, was taken as a bride by a young man in a village outside of Weifang and Eldest Brother was taken by the soldiers to fight against the Dwarf Bandits. Once again there was not too much or too little rain and only the usual insects and the crop was nearly up to Mei’s chin when Second Brother came home to say he had been let go from working in the sheng-yuan’s fields.

  That night they were already asleep on the k’ang when there was a banging on the door and Baba went to it holding the rusted ax. It was poor Mr. Chan, who had taken to begging and sleeping outside since his wife died, shouting that there was a fire in Baba’s field.

  There was a big moon and if Mei had not weeded and planted and weeded till her hands bled she would have thought the fire beautiful. As the night breeze swept it across the field, grasshoppers, some of them on fire, buzzed into the air just ahead of the flames. The breeze pushed the fire to the stone wall by the road and soon there was nothing left.

  “We are cursed,” said Baba, his face black from the blowing soot, flecks of ash in his hair. “She has cursed us.”

  The next day Mei was with Baba in the charred field, looking for burned animals they could eat, when Zhou stopped on the road. He had a sedan chair now, with silk curtains and four porters wearing a kind of uniform who carried it, and he wore a long silk vest and a hat that had a jeweled button on it to signify that he was a sheng-yuan. Mei stood by the wall while Baba climbed over to squat by Zhou’s chair and be spoken to.