“Uncle Tao!” she cried. “Do you remember?”
“The one Pa would never let Ma tell us about,” he answered.
“Now we’ll see for ourselves!”
“Unless he’s dead—” Jim suggested.
“He won’t be dead,” she declared. “Ma said he’d live a hundred years.”
She struck her mule smartly with the braided rawhide whip and he quickened his pace for a few steps and then plodded again.
“Oh, go on!” she said impatiently to the mule. “I’ve wanted all my life to see Uncle Tao!”
Uncle Tao at this moment was sitting on the inner side of the spirit wall, impatient for his supper. The house was in a turmoil, for his third daughter-in-law who was in charge of the kitchen had mistaken his pronunciation of chicken noodles for lichen noodles. She was somewhat stupid at best and terrified of Uncle Tao, and while lichen is easily prepared, a chicken has first to be caught and then killed and plucked and properly stewed. The sun was over the wall before the mistake was discovered and then Uncle Tao declared that he would wait until midnight before eating lichen noodles. He sat down firmly in the large speckled bamboo chair which some ancestor had once brought from Hangchow, and there he waited, smoking his yard-long pipe with ferocity. Meanwhile the lichen noodles were hastily fed to the children and the three daughters-in-law devoted themselves to the chicken, which was hiding in the cabbages.
They were further frightened to discover when the fowl was dead that by some mischance they had killed their best laying hen. The one due to be eaten was a yellow hen who laid eggs only occasionally, storing up her energy in fat. But this good hen laid at least three eggs a week and had for several years hatched and cared for flocks of chicks, whereas the yellow hen could never be kept on the nest long enough to hatch anything.
“At least let us not tell Uncle Tao,” the first daughter-in-law said.
“He will find out,” the second daughter-in-law replied dolefully. “As soon as he sets his five teeth into this fowl’s flesh he will know what we have done.”
They united in turning upon the third daughter-in-law, who, with her face quite pale, was busily getting the cauldrons hot. “How you could be so stupid!” said the eldest.
“Why did you not look at the fowl before you wrung its neck?” said the second.
Thus they cried at the poor soul, who could only tremble. “I caught her under the cabbages,” she faltered, “and I wrung her neck before she could escape again.”
Uncle Tao’s loud voice bellowed from behind the spirit wall. “I want to eat!”
“Hurry,” the eldest daughter-in-law commanded. “We can lay the blame afterward.”
As one woman they proceeded to chop the favorite into small bits, that the flesh might be cooked the quicker. In one cauldron the bits were browned in oil with onion, ginger, soy sauce and a little water added, and all covered tightly under the heavy wooden lid. In the other cauldron the water simmered waiting for the noodles.
“I want to eat!” Uncle Tao bellowed again.
“Coming, Uncle Tao!” the eldest daughter-in-law cried.
Everybody called him Uncle Tao, although properly speaking his own family should not have done so, and in no other village was such a thing to be found. It had begun when he had returned to the village to live, the first of the family to do so in this generation. Dr. Liang’s father had left the ancestral home to study in Peking and he never went back except to pay a visit of duty to his parents and to bury them when they died. He had been given a good post in the Imperial Court in the days before the revolution, and was thought even to have had some influence upon the young Emperor, who lived so pitifully immured by the old Empress, his mother. When the young Emperor died, the Empress exiled Dr. Liang’s father because he was one of those who had urged the Emperor to reform the nation. He had been exiled to Mongolia, but he had gone only as far as his ancestral village. There, by an extravagant use of gifts to the chief eunuch, he was allowed to live and even to visit Peking occasionally and no one told the old Empress that he was not in Mongolia. Before the exile Dr. Liang himself had visited the ancestral village only at the time of his grandparents’ funeral when he had been a boy of fourteen or fifteen. It was during the exile that his father had betrothed him, and there the wedding had taken place some three years later after she had learned to read and write.
When after the Empress died the family returned to Peking, old Mr. Liang as the eldest son and the guardian of the family estates had left Uncle Tao in charge. Uncle Tao was the younger brother, younger only by one half hour, for the two were twins, and all that remained alive of the once large Liang family of the previous generation. There were numerous cousins and remote relatives, who when they were without jobs and were hungry returned to the village to live, but of the Liang family direct there were only these two. They were very different. Dr. Liang’s father was dignified and a scholar. Uncle Tao had no dignity at all. As a boy he had driven his parents to despair with his mischief and his waywardness, and one day when his kind mother swallowed opium because she feared that her younger son would die under a headsman’s ax, her husband had firmly sent the boy away to a distant city, where a third cousin kept a medicine shop. The mother did not die, and the boy came home ten years later to his parents’ funeral. By then he was a handsome red-cheeked man with a loud laugh.
Mr. Liang rather liked his younger twin brother then. He himself had been the dutiful elder, the soul of rectitude and good behavior, and the tenants on the land cheated him continually. It was too easy to cheat Mr. Liang, who believed any who told him that the rains and the excessive sunshine, the heat and the surprising cold of the season had ruined the crops.
Uncle Tao soon saw what was going on. One day after the parents were safely under the earth he said to Mr. Liang, “Elder brother, I can see that if you continue to care for our family estates we shall all be out in the fields one day with the oxen and the tenants will be sitting here in our places. You had better put me in charge. I understand all about cheating.” Mr. Liang was only too happy to agree to this. He began the series of bribes which could make it safe for him to return permanently to Peking, and fourteen months after his son’s wedding, some years after the funeral of the Empress, and after the revolution, the family went to Peking, leaving Uncle Tao in charge. During these fourteen months Mrs. Liang had got to know Uncle Tao so well that she laughed every time she thought of him, while Dr. Liang grew more and more ashamed of him.
Behind the spirit wall Uncle Tao now rolled his head round and round and shut his eyes tight, preparing to shout yet another time that he wanted to eat. Before he could get up his wind, however, a tenant sauntered in from the street. He had been at the wineshop when two strangers and a servant stopped to ask the way to the Liang house. He had purposely misdirected them in order to leave himself time to come and warn Uncle Tao that he was to have visitors.
Uncle Tao opened his eyes. “Who are they?” he asked in his rumbling husky voice.
“They look like foreigners,” the tenant replied. “A man and a woman. The woman has her hair cut short. Perhaps they are only students of some sort. They have no red hair, purple eyes or chalk skin, but they look like city people.”
Uncle Tao hated city people. “Tell them I am dead,” he said, shutting his eyes. In a family of country gentry known for its courtesy and breeding Uncle Tao showed these qualities only when he was in good mood.
It was too late to obey him. At this very moment Young Wang appeared around the spirit wall. Uncle Tao opened his eyes and stared at the dapper young fellow in a strange uniform. Young Wang smiled and for a moment only stood, looking pleasant. Then he coughed to show that he was ready to introduce himself.
“What man are you?” Uncle Tao demanded.
“I am my master’s head servant,” Young Wang began glibly. “He sends me to say that he and his sister wish to pay their respects. They are son and daughter of the Liang family, children of the Honorable One’s elder broth
er’s son.”
Uncle Tao heard this with stupefaction. So long had it been since he had even thought of these relatives whom he had long considered as dead in some foreign land, that now his fat underjaw hung down. “Where are they?” he demanded.
“At the gate, Honored One,” Young Wang said. He could scarcely keep back laughter. This old gentleman, for it could be seen that Uncle Tao was still a gentleman, was of a sort he knew very well. Every village had someone more or less like him. True, he had never seen any country gentry so huge, so fat, so dirty as Uncle Tao, so like the Buddha in a forgotten temple, except that now he frowned instead of smiled. His great belly creased his soiled gray silk robe and his bare feet were thrust into old black velvet shoes. Upon the vast yellow face were a few sparse white whiskers, and the head, while almost entirely bald, had a handful of hairs at the back which were actually braided into a tiny queue secured with a dingy black cord. This queue should have been cut off more than thirty years ago when the revolution came, and that Uncle Tao had kept it was a sign of obstinacy, for he hated all governments alike. Indeed long after the revolution had come and the Empress was dust he still persisted in declaring that she was alive and in ignoring the new rulers.
“At the gate!” Uncle Tao exclaimed. “How inconvenient!”
“May they come in, Honored One?” Young Wang asked.
“I have not yet eaten,” Uncle Tao replied.
Young Wang began to grow angry and turning his back abruptly he went back to the gate.
“Old One,” the tenant said apologetically, “it is none of my business and I ought to die, but after all they are the children of your elder brother’s son who after all is the first in the next generation after you.”
Uncle Tao lifted himself up by his hands on the arms of the bamboo chair and made as if he were about to heave himself at the tenant who fled at once around the spirit wall and out of the gate. There the miserable man saw the guests who stared at him in surprise. He smiled in a sickly fashion, and jerked his thumb over his shoulder. “The old man is getting his anger up,” he said, hurrying away.
“I thought that old relative looked as though he had temper,” Young Wang said.
A hearty red flew into Mary’s sunburned cheeks. “Why should anybody be angry with us?” she demanded of James. “I’m going straight in. We belong here, too.”
“Wait,” James said. “Perhaps we had better go to the inn.”
“I won’t,” Mary replied. “The inn is sure to be dirty.” So saying she walked briskly up the two cracked marble steps of the gate, went under the portal and around the spirit wall where she came full upon Uncle Tao. She knew at once that it was he. No one else could have looked at the same time so absurd and so formidable. Their eyes met. Uncle Tao frowned and drew down his full lips.
“Uncle Tao!” Mary said.
Uncle Tao did not reply. He continued to stare at her.
“My elder brother and I have returned to our ancestral home,” Mary said. “We are Liangs, and our father is Liang Wen Hua.”
“Little Bookfool, I always called him,” Uncle Tao said suddenly.
Mary laughed, and small wrinkles crossed the severe expanse of Uncle Tao’s flat face. “Go away,” he said. “I never talk to women.”
As he so spoke James appeared at Mary’s side. He bowed slightly. “Uncle Tao, you must forgive us,” he said in his best Mandarin. “We have rudely come here. Yet we think of ourselves as your children also, and of this as our home. If it is not convenient for us to stay here for a few days, please tell us.”
Uncle Tao wagged his head. “Where have you come from?” he asked.
“From Peking today, but some months ago we came from outside the seas, from America.”
“I heard some twenty years ago that the Bookfool had gone there,” Uncle Tao said with some show of interest. His thick lids lifted slightly and he began to breathe through his mouth. “How does he earn his rice?”
“He teaches school,” Mary said.
“Do they pay him well?” Uncle Tao demanded.
“Well enough,” she replied.
At this moment Uncle Tao remembered again that he was hungry. “I have not eaten,” he announced.
“Neither have we,” Mary said.
“We can eat at the inn,” James said quickly. He was a little ashamed that Mary talked so much. Old-fashioned gentlemen did not like to hear women speak.
Before Uncle Tao could answer, his eldest daughter-in-law came briskly to the door. “The fowl is ready, Old Father,” she called. Then she stared.
Uncle Tao heaved himself out of his chair. When he stood up it could be seen that he was a very tall man, in spite of his weight. He pointed a long and dirty thumbnail at the two guests. “These are my brother’s grandchildren,” he told his daughter-in-law. “It is very inconvenient that they have arrived without telling me. Now we have only the thin yellow hen to eat.”
The daughter-in-law felt that this was the moment to confess the grievous mistake that had been made. Uncle Tao would perhaps restrain himself before strangers. She began smoothly, “Old Father, the gods have guided us. Doubtless they saw these two coming hither. We chased the thin yellow hen under the cabbages and the youngest one among us reached her hands under and caught and twisted her neck off before she could escape us. When she brought out the fowl, it was not the thin yellow hen but the fat red one. We longed to die when we saw this, but now I see the meaning of it. The gods know better than we humans can know. There is enough chicken flesh with the noodles and some eggs we found in the hen to make a meal for these two also.”
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 p
eople,” 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.”