Thousand Pieces of Gold

by Ruthanne Lum McCunn

  “We’d be the laughingstock of the whole village.”

  “We already are.”

  Immediately regretting her words, Lalu burrowed her head into her father’s chest. Water squeezed from his rain-soaked clothes, spreading coldly over her, but she felt only the fierce pounding of his heart beneath her cheek.

  “Baba, I beg you. Let me help you. I don’t want to be . . .” She stopped, unable to say the word sold. “To go away,” she finally whispered.

  The muscles above her father’s tightly clenched jaws quivered, and for a long moment there was only the sound of wind and rain.

  “What about your golden lotus?” he asked.

  Lalu released her father and stared down at her feet. Every day for two years, her mother had wound long white bandages around each foot in ever tightening bands, twisting her toes under her feet and forcing them back until her feet had become two dainty arcs. They were not as small or as beautiful as those of a girl from a wealthy family who would not need to use them at all. But they were useless for heavy labor.

  Her mother rose and came to stand beside Lalu. “I’ll unbind them.”

  “Is that possible?” her father stammered.

  “We will make it possible,” her mother said.

  Later, in the quiet darkness of her own bed, Lalu dove under the quilt and felt her feet, no larger than a pair of newborn chicks. Dimly she remembered a time when her stride had been more than a few ladylike inches and she could run across the meadow, teasing a kite into the wind. Could her feet really become large and sturdy once again? Her hands curled around them, just as they had around the little featherless sparrow she had found last spring.

  Her father had told her death was certain, and she should drown it so it would not suffer. Obediently she had plunged the tiny creature into a basin of water. Its beak opened and closed soundlessly as it struggled for air and its featherless wings pushed desperately against her clenched fists. She released the bird. But it was too late. Unable to rise above the surface of the water, its wild convulsions became shudders, and one by one, the ripples diminished until the water became as still as frozen ice.

  Was it too late for her?

  THREE

  “Lalu,” her father called.

  Lalu straightened up from the row of millet she was thinning. She pulled her clinging, sweat-soaked jacket away from her body and wiped the perspiration from her face with her sleeve. Shading her eyes from the glare of the late afternoon sun, she looked over at her father.

  “Take that bundle of firewood A Cai gathered to your mother,” he said.

  “I’ll take it, Baba,” A Cai said.

  “No, this field must be finished today.”

  Each day her father searched for a new excuse to send her home early so she would not have to mix with the other farmers leaving the fields, and Lalu knew it was useless to offer to stay in her brother’s place. Nevertheless, she tried. “A Cai is tired and I am not.”

  “Your mother needs you,” he said tersely.

  “Yes, Baba.”

  Pinching her brother’s cheek sympathetically, Lalu balanced her hoe and the bundle of firewood on top of the wheelbarrow and started down the terraced hillside to the village.

  A colorful patchwork of green, brown, and yellow fields full of farmers with their sons and hired laborers stretched before her. Women washed clothes in the dikes by the willow-lined river bank, and old folks leaned against the levee walls, soaking up sunshine, talking story, and watching their grandchildren play around them. She could hear the laughter of small children, the cries of the peddlers shouting their wares; and when the breeze blew her way, she could smell the smoke that curled above the cluster of houses.

  But it was what she could not see that showed the village as it really was. The oxen, mules, and donkeys kept well hidden for fear of bandit raids. The furrowed brows of wives gauging each meal’s meager allotment so the carefully hoarded food might last until harvest. The knots of tension in the sun-blackened backs of farmers who knew that all their toil could be swept away in a moment, made futile by flood or drought or bandits or locusts.

  From the time Lalu had learned to walk, she had worked: first, following her father’s plow and dropping soy beans into the furrows; later, when her father planted the sweet potato vines, filling the holes with water, covering all but one leaf with soil; then, during the harvests, cleaning sweet potatoes for her mother to slice and dry, and picking peanuts off the vines. Even during the two years of footbinding, when she could not walk, she had not been idle, learning to sew and spin and weave. And after her feet became little four-inch lotus, when she was no longer allowed to work in the fields, she had helped her mother at home. Except for the harvests. Then she and her mother joined the other women and girls, threshing wheat and millet, picking peanuts, and preparing sweet potatoes, turnips, cabbages, and other vegetables for storage. She had thought working as her father’s laborer would be no harder. She had found she was wrong.

  Her mother had tried to make unbinding Lalu’s feet as easy as possible, loosening the bindings gradually, soaking, massaging, stuffing cotton between the toes so they could gradually expand outwards, but the toes had not flattened in time for spring planting. Chewing her lips to keep from crying, Lalu had carried heavy buckets of fertilizer into the fields, making her feet swell. Then, because her father had no stone roller to press the soil down so the young shoots would have solid earth for support, she had trampled the ground with her swollen feet. At night, when she took off the loosened bindings, the smell of decaying flesh had made her too ill to eat. But the ground for the peanut crop needed to be leveled and hardened; ridges had to be built up for planting the sweet potatoes; and the vegetable garden had to be laid out. Then the new seedlings had to be thinned and weeded; and always there was water to be carried up from the river. And when her mother, swollen with child again, neared her term, there were household chores as well, chores her parents said were not fitting for A Cai, a son.

  Lalu now knew that her toes would never lie completely flat again, but callouses had formed; and though her walk was somewhat strange and rolling, she felt only pleasure in this her second year in the fields. She paid close attention when her father explained the proper way to fertilize a field or plant a sweet potato vine, feeling enormous pride as he entrusted her more and more with work that needed skillful, knowledgeable hands. There were even guilty moments when she was almost glad the wheat had failed, for she loved everything to do with farming: the preparation of the soil, the planting, the careful nurturing . . .

  “Psssst.”

  Lalu jumped. A Cai leaped out from behind a grave mound and climbed onto the wheelbarrow, curling up behind the bundle of firewood.

  “What?” Lalu began.

  “I sneaked off and cut across the fields when Baba wasn’t looking. Take me around behind the temple where he won’t see me.”

  “You’d better hurry back before he misses you.”

  A Cai pouted. “I never get a chance to play with my friends.”

  Lalu tried to look stern, but his sweaty, dirt-streaked face and babyish pout made the corners of her mouth twitch. “Baba will be furious.”

  “You can make it all right with him, you always do.”

  She laughed, knowing her little brother had gotten the better of her again. “Okay, hang on tight!” she cried. And she raced down the hill in her strange, rolling lope, the wheelbarrow hurtling noisily over the bumps, her long, thick braid flying straight out behind.

  Lalu, exhilarated from her run, burst through the door, panting. Her mother, face moist and red from the steaming kettles, broke off the folk song she was humming to A Da, the baby strapped on her back.

  “Did I see A Cai behind the temple?” she asked.

  “He’s tired,” Lalu defended.

  Her mother fed the fire with gaoliang stalks. “But not too tired to play with his friends. You spoil him.”

  A Fa toddled in from the courtyard. He tugged at L
alu’s pants. “Mama has a surprise for you.”

  Lalu swung her little brother up and hugged him. She pinched his legs which protruded from split pants. “Hmmm, you’re getting fat, fat enough to eat,” she said, taking a playful bite.

  “Come see!” he demanded, kicking.

  She set him down. “See what?”

  “Over here, look.”

  He pulled her out into the courtyard and pointed to the wooden table set for two. “You’re going to eat with Baba from now on. Mama said so.”

  Like all the other men, Lalu’s father was fed first, before his wife and children, and with the better food. As a child, Lalu had asked why, and her mother had explained, “Men are the pillars of the family. We depend on them for our lives, so they must be fed well.” Now she, Lalu, was to eat first too!

  Her eyes brimmed with tears. It didn’t matter that the farmers said her father was turning Heaven and earth upside down by allowing his daughter to work by his side. Or that their wives told her mother, “Your daughter’s face is passable, but those big feet are laughable.” Or that A Cai’s friends called her a carp on herring feet, and her own friends avoided her. Her parents understood!

  “What’s wrong? Aren’t you happy?” A Fa demanded.

  “Leave your sister alone,” their mother said. She turned to Lalu. “Come inside, I have something to show you before your father gets home.”

  A Fa waddled ahead importantly. Their mother pulled a stool out from under the table and set A Fa on it.

  “You stay here and keep the flies off the pickles and salt fish,” she told him.

  Lalu, dazed with pride and joy, followed her mother inside. Her mother reached into the clothing box and took out a small, fitted under jacket, the kind women wore to flatten their breasts.

  “I made this for you.”

  Lalu blushed. “I don’t need it yet.”

  “You’re fourteen, a woman. Look how your sweaty outer jacket clings to you. Do you want to be called a wanton?”

  Lalu held the under jacket up against her. “It’s too small.”

  “Try it on,” her mother said.

  “Now?”

  “Now.”

  Lalu turned to face the wall. Her whole body afire with embarrassment, she unbuttoned her loose-fitting cotton jacket, slipped it off, and struggled into the tight-fitting bodice her mother had made.

  “I can’t breathe.”

  “Nonsense, it’s perfect,” her mother said, tugging it in place.

  “How will I swing my hoe?”

  Her mother sighed. “The villagers are right. We should have sold you.”

  “No, Mama. You don’t mean that.”

  As though Lalu were a child again, her mother pulled Lalu’s outer jacket over the bodice. “Don’t you know I say that for your sake, not mine?” she scolded gently. “If we had sold you, we would have found you a good mistress, one not too far away, and you would be doing decent woman’s work in a good household, not bitter labor.”

  “But I love working in the fields,” Lalu protested.

  “And when you became of age, your mistress would have found you a good husband, and you would have been free again. Now you’re neither snake nor dragon. You are a woman, yet you work like a man, a laborer. Who will marry you?”

  “I don’t care. I’m happy, really I am.”

  “You’re a woman. You should be growing sons, not vegetables.”

  “I will, just as soon as A Cai is old enough to really help.”

  “If it were only that easy,” her mother said. “Have you forgotten the saying – A large footed woman tarries, for no one wants to marry her?”

  “But you said you would rebind my feet,” Lalu stammered.

  “I will, but they’re ruined. They’ll never have the same perfect shape or be as small. Besides, it’s not just your feet. You’re doing what no woman in this village, this district, has done, and your name is on every gossip’s tongue. What decent, modest woman will take you for a daughter-in-law now?”

  FOUR

  Five years’ labor in the fields had given Lalu the experienced eyes of a skilled farmer and she knew as soon as she began spreading the sweet potatoes on the kitchen floor that Old Man Yang had cheated them. Three baskets of undersized and half-rotted sweet potatoes in exchange for a healthy, hardworking donkey! But, in the beginning of the third year of drought, with the mortgage still unpaid, and everything else of value either sold or stolen by bandits, there had been no other way to get the seed potatoes they needed for spring planting. Grimly, she began sorting them into two piles. The better ones for seed. The others to help eke out their diet of dry roots and watery gruel.

  Outside, deep-toned drums throbbed like thunder, and Lalu knew without looking that the village leaders were, once again, carrying the Dragon King into the fields to show him the earth, parched and cracked from the angry sun. For two springs and summers they had watched helplessly as the river shriveled into a shallow stream and then a trickle, forcing them to dig deeper and deeper for water. Last year, when the wood buckets dipped into the riverbed began to fill with mud, the village leaders had carried the Dragon King into the fields to show him the stunted crops with deformed, twisted leaves. Men and boys with wreaths of coarse grass on their heads had followed, beating drums and bearing banners inscribed with prayers for rain. The Dragon King had sent no rain then. What made anyone think he would send rain now?

  Lalu’s stomach gnawed hungrily. She kneaded it, but it only grew more demanding. She picked up another sweet potato and examined it. It already had toothmarks from a rat. Two. If she took a bite, a small one, surely no one would know. Trancelike, she lifted the potato to her open mouth, but before she could bite into it, a drop of saliva fell on it, darkening the skin like blood. She hurled it to the floor. How could she even think of satisfying her own hunger when everyone else in her family was starving?

  She rose and opened the door. Dry heat hit her with the force of a blow and she leaned weakly against the door post. The sun-faded strips of red and black New Year greetings crackled beneath her weight, crumbling into dust, and Lalu jerked straight, relieved her mother was not home to witness such a bad omen.

  Her eyes adjusted to the glare, and she saw her father, A Cai, and a few other farmers break off from the tail end of the procession returning to the temple. She knew she would not be permitted to join them, but perhaps she could get close enough to hear what they might say. Anything, rather than hold potatoes she could not eat. She banged the door shut and walked toward them.

  Heat enveloped her like a thick winter quilt, and her feet scuffed up clouds of dust, clogging her nostrils, making her eyes smart. By the time she neared the temple, her hair and clothes were sticky with sweat. She thought of her mother’s face when A Fa had suggested they water the fields by wringing their sweat-drenched clothes over the dying crops. At the time it had made Lalu giggle, but now, as she crouched down behind the temple wall, she did not even smile. The situation was too grave.

  “We must go to the main river for water,” she heard her father say.

  “But that’s over the mountain, half-a-day’s journey away,” Old Man Yang protested.

  “It’s the only way,” her father insisted.

  “Full of ideas aren’t you?” the old man said.

  “Yes, like winter wheat,” someone chortled.

  “And making a girl work like a man!”

  The farmers, eager for something to laugh at, exploded in a roar.

  “This time Nathoy is right. We cannot wait and hope any longer,” someone interrupted.

  “We could try going to the main river,” another voice grudgingly agreed.

  “What about bandits?”

  Lalu felt her sweat turn cold. Ever since she could remember, the village had been threatened by bandits, but since the drought, they had grown in numbers. The raids had been more frequent, and many of the bandits were former laborers who had lived and worked in the village. They knew what to look for an
d where to find it. And they were completely ruthless.

  “Why would they attack us?” her father asked. “We’ll be carrying nothing but our buckets.”

  “They might kidnap one of us for ransom,” Old Man Yang suggested.

  “Except for yourself, who has money?”

  “When they discovered the Pans were too poor to pay a ransom for their father, they made the old man dig his own grave and lie in it. Then they bashed in his skull with the shovel.”

  “And when Shi was slow paying the ransom for his son, the bandits sliced off the boy’s ear.”

  “It’s the women and children I’m worried about. If they’re left alone, who knows what we’ll find when we return.”

  “We could take turns going. That way, there would always be men in the village.”

  “Just having men here is not enough. We must fight them,” Lalu’s father urged.

  “Didn’t you see what happened to Fat Wu?”

  Everyone grew silent, for Fat Wu had leaped at a bandit’s throat only to have his head severed in a single blow. The head had rolled into the gutter and down the street, knocking against sudden curves, splattering blood against courtyard walls until another bandit swooped on it and pierced it with a pole which he stabbed into the ground. The mouth had hung open and the big white teeth had gleamed ghostlike in the predawn darkness while his queue, matted with blood, swayed fitfully back and forth, a warning to anyone else foolish enough to resist.

  Lalu’s father broke the silence. “Fat Wu tried to fight them alone. We must organize into teams and patrol the streets and lanes.”

  “Wasn’t it your idea to have soldiers come help us? They were worse than the bandits.”

  “The ones billeted with us ate everything we’d been able to save from the bandits.”

  “And I was afraid to leave my wife and daughters alone for even a minute the whole time they were here!”

  “It’s you and your mad schemes that have brought us all this bad luck!” Old Man Yang accused.

  “Don’t be so foolish,” Lalu’s father said.