Gods Men (32 page)

“It is dead, hon,” Clem replied. “In its way all that old life is dead, but the ones who live it don't know it—not even your father, I guess. What say we find the Fongs?”

Mr. Fong had prospered during the years of civil war. Ignoring the political maneuvers of military men and passing by in silence the rantings of students upon the streets, he had begun to stock his book shop with other things people wanted to buy, needles and threads, brightly colored woolen yarns, clocks and dishes, machine-knitted vests and socks, leather shoes and winter gloves, pocketbooks and fountain pens and tennis shoes, pencils and rubber hot-water bottles. Most of his goods came from Japan and he was uneasy about this, for young students who were also zealous patriots often ransacked shops, heaped the goods in bonfires, and pasted labels on the shop windows announcing that so and so was a traitor and a Japan lover. Mr. Fong made two cautious trips a year to Japan to buy goods, and he had consulted with the Japanese businessmen with whom he did such profitable trade, and thereafter his goods were marked “Made in USA.” A small shipping town in Japan was named Usa for this convenience. Mr. Fong had then continued to prosper without sense of sin, for he considered all warfare nonsense and beneath the notice of sensible businessmen. He had peace of mind in other ways, for his family shared his health and prosperity and his eldest son had continued to improve the English which Clem had long ago begun to teach him. Yusan was now a tall youth, already married to a young woman his parents had chosen for him, and she had immediately become pregnant.

On a certain clear cool day in early spring Mr. Fong felt that life would be entirely good if politicians and soldiers and students were cast into the sea. His content was increased by the pleasant smell of hot sugar and lard that Mrs. Fong was mixing together in preparation for some cakes, helped by his eldest daughter, who was already betrothed to a young man whose father was a grain dealer. Mr. Fong's two younger sons, Yuming and Yuwen, were playing with jackstones in the court, for the holiday of the Crack of Spring had begun.

Upon this pleasant household Clem and Henrietta arrived. The door was opened by Yuwen, who had been born after Clem went away. Nevertheless the American was a legend in the Fong family and Yuwen recognized him with alacrity and smiles. He left the door ajar and ran back to tell his father that Mr. Mei had come back. Mr. Fong dropped his pipe and shouted for Yusan, who was in his own part of the house and made haste to the gate.

With hands outstretched he greeted Clem. “You have come back—you have come back!” he spluttered. “Is this your lady? Come in—come in—so you have come back!”

“I have come back,” Clem said.

Thus Clem with Henrietta at his side entered again this fragment of the old world of his childhood and smelled again the familiar smells of a Chinese household, a mingling of sweetmeats and incense and candles of cowfat. There was even the old faint undertone of urine, which told him that Mr. Fong had not become more modern during the years and that he still stepped just outside his door when it was necessary. Smell of whitewash from the walls, smell of old wood from the rafters, and the damp smell of wet flagstones in the court were all the same. The pomegranate tree was bigger, and the goldfish in the square pool, roused by the sun, were huge and round.

Clem gazed down into the shallow pool. “Same fish?”

“The same,” Mr. Fong said. “Here everything is the same.”

A scream made them turn. Mrs. Fong rushed out of the open doors of the central living room.

“You are come—you are come!”

She took Clem's hand in both of hers. “He is like my son,” she told Henrietta. Her round face was a net of smiling wrinkles.

“You must take her for your daughter-in-law.” Clem said. “Her father is Lane Teacher.”

“A good man, a good man!” Mr. Fong cried.

Yusan came out next and he and Clem shook hands in the foreign fashion, and then Yusan put his hand over Clem's. “We have often asked the gods to bring you back to us.” To Henrietta he said with great courtesy, “My inner one asks you to go to her. She is very big just now with our first child, and does not like to come out before men she has not seen before.”

“Come with me,” Mrs. Fong said, and Henrietta stepped over the high wooden threshold.

“We will sit in the sun,” Mr. Fong said to Clem. “I do not need to be polite with you. Yuming, Yuwen—do not stand there staring. Go and fetch tea and food.”

The three men sat down upon porcelain stools set in the court and Mr. Fong surveyed with love this one returned. “You are too thin,” he told Clem. “You must eat more.”

“Elder Brother, I have a weak stomach,” Clem replied.

“Then you are too agitated about something,” Mr. Fong said. “Tell me what it is. You must not agitate yourself.”

Thus invited Clem began talking, as he always did sooner or later, about his hope of selling cheap food even here in China.

Mr. Fong and Yusan listened. Yusan never spoke before his father did, and Mr. Fong said, “What you have undertaken is far beyond the power of one man. It is no wonder that you have a weak stomach and that you are too thin. A wise man measures his single ability and does not go beyond it. What you are doing is more than a king can do, and certainly more than the Old Empress ever did. As for these new men we have now, they do not think of such a thing as feeding the people.”

“Are they worse rulers than the Old One?” Clem asked.

Mr. Fong looked in all four directions and up at the empty sky. Then he drew his seat near to Clem's and breathed these words into his ear.

“In the old days we had only certain rulers. There was the Old Buddha and in each province the viceroy and then the local magistrate. These all took their share. But now little rulers run everywhere over the land. It is this little man and that little man, all saying they come from the new government and all wanting cash. We are worse off than before.”

The two younger boys came out with an old woman servant bringing some of the new cakes and tea.

“Eat,” Mr. Fong said. “Here your mind may be at peace and your stomach will say nothing.”

Not in years had Clem eaten a rich sweetmeat, but he was suddenly hungry for these cakes that he remembered from his childhood. He took one and ate it slowly, sipping hot tea between each bite.

“When one eats lard and sugar,” Mr. Fong said, “hot tea should surround the food. … Thus also one drinks wine with crabs.”

Clem said, “Strange that I do feel peace here as I have felt it nowhere else. In spite of the wars and the new rulers, I feel peace here in your house.” His Chinese lay ready on his tongue. He spoke it with all the old fluency and ease. His thoughts flowed into soft rich vowel sounds in the rising and falling tones.

“We are at peace here,” Mr. Fong agreed. “The outside disturbance has nothing to do with our peace within. Stay here with us, live here, and we will make you well.”

In a corner Yuming and Yuwen were eating cakes heartily in front of a fat Pekinese dog, who snuffled through his nose and blinked his marble-round eyes at the hot delicious fragrance. It did not occur to either boy to share his cake with the dog. To give a beast food made for human beings would have been a folly, and the Fongs did not commit follies. A hard, age-old wisdom informed them all. Clem sat watching, relaxed, though he was not less aware of all that weighed upon his conscience. Peace was sweet, and sweet it was to find nothing changed. Of all places in the world, here was no change.

In the small square central room of the three rooms which Mr. Fong had allotted for his son and his son's wife, Henrietta sat between Mrs. Fong and Jade Flower, who was Yusan's wife. Each held one of her hands and stroked it gently, gazing at her and asking small intimate questions.

“How is it you have no child?” Mrs. Fong asked.

“I have never conceived,” Henrietta replied. She had been afraid at first that she could no longer speak Chinese, but it was there, waiting the sight of a Chinese face. Something warmly delicate, the old natural human understanding she remembered so well and had missed so much was between her and these two.

Mrs. Fong exclaimed in pity. “Now what will you do for your him?” “Him” was husband. Mrs. Fong was too well bred to use the word.

“What can I do?” Henrietta asked.

Mrs. Fong drew nearer. “You must mend your strength. You are both so thin. Stay with us and I will feed you plenty of red sugar and blood pudding. That is very good for young women who do not conceive quickly. When you have been with us a month, I will guarantee that you will conceive. My son's wife was less than that.”

“Fourteen days,” Jade Flower said in a pretty little voice, and giggled.

Mrs. Fong frowned at her, then smiled and concerned herself again with Henrietta.

“Have you been married more than a year?”

“Much more,” Henrietta said.

Mrs. Fong looked alarmed. “You should not have waited so long. You should have come to us before. Do they not understand what to do in your country?”

“Perhaps they are not so anxious for children,” Henrietta replied. She could not explain to this woman, who was all mother, that Clem was somehow her child as well as her husband, and that she did not greatly care if there were no children, because she did not need to divide herself. Mrs. Fong would not have understood. Was it not for the man's sake that a wife bore children?

“It may be better to take a second wife for him and let her bear the children for both of you,” Mrs. Fong said.

“This is not allowed in our country,” Henrietta said.

Mrs. Fong opened her eyes. “What other way is there for childless wives?”

“They remain childless,” Henrietta said.

Jade Flower gave a soft scream. “But what does he say?”

“He is good to me,” Henrietta said.

“He must be very good,” Mrs. Fong agreed. She stroked Henrietta's hand again. “Nevertheless, it is not wise to count on too much goodness from men. Little Sister, you shall drink red sugar in hot water and I will kill one of our geese and make a blood pudding.” She looked at Henrietta. “Can you, for the sake of a child, drink the blood fresh and hot?”

“I cannot,” Henrietta said quickly.

“That is what I did,” Jade Flower urged. “I drank it one day and soon I had happiness in me.”

Mrs. Fong frowned at her daughter-in-law and smiled at Henrietta. “We must not compel,” she advised. “Not all women are alike. Some women cannot drink blood, not even to have a child. If they drink it, they vomit it up. I will make it into a pudding. Two or three puddings, one every day. Then we will see—we will see—” and she stroked Henrietta's hand.

“You trouble yourself without avail,” Mr. Fong said to Clem. They had been several days in Peking, living in the home of the Fong family. Clem's digestion ran smoothly and he was more quiet in mind than he had been for years.

“How do I trouble myself?” he asked.

They sat in the big family room, a comfortable, shabby, not-too-clean place, where the dogs wandered in and out and the cats sprawled in the warmest spot of sunshine, and neighbor children came to stare at the Americans, while Mrs. Fong bustled everywhere. Henrietta was unraveling an old sweater to knit a new jacket and cap for the Fong grandchild to be born now at any hour.

Mr. Fong cleared his throat and spat into a piece of brown paper, which he then threw under the table. “You think that you, one man, can feed the whole world. This is a dangerous dream. It only gives you the stomach trouble of which you have told me. Nothing is more dangerous than for one man to think he can do the work of all men.”

Clem's skin prickled at this criticism. He was secretly proud of his dream, which he had done so much to fulfill. At heart a truly modest man, he had nevertheless the modest man's pride in his modesty in the face of achievement.

Mr. Fong, wrapped in an ancient black silk robe long since washed brown and ragged at the edges, perfectly understood what Clem was feeling. He looked at him over his brass spectacles and said, emphasizing his words with his forefinger, “It is presumptuous for man to consider himself as a god. The head raised too high even in good will be struck off too soon. Each should tend only his own. Beyond there is no responsibility.”

He picked up a cat that happened to be lying by his chair and held it uncomfortably about its belly. “This creature is blind. I do not feed any of the cats, not even this one. They are here to catch mice. But the other cats bring at least one mouse each day to this blind cat.”

The aged cat, outraged by his grasp, now scratched him with both hind and forelegs and yowled. Immediately three cats came into the room and looked pleadingly at Mr. Fong, who dropped the cat and wiped his bleeding hand on his gown.

“Please continue to teach my husband,” Henrietta said. “I want him to live a long life.”

Mr. Fong inclined his head. He was so much older than Clem that he knew he could say anything to him. Meanwhile nothing Clem said impressed him. Yusan listened with deference, since in this case he was the younger man, but he had no wish to take the part which Clem wanted to put upon him.

“I shall certainly see that my own family is fed, and such others as are dependent upon us. It would be foolish to go further.” This was Yusan's conclusion. He went about these days from shop to house in perpetual readiness to hear a small loud cry from the three rooms which were his home under this roof, and he was impervious, in his generation, to the cries of others.

Clem, walking with Henrietta one afternoon upon the city wall, a vantage which gave them a wide view over the roofs of houses and the green trees of the courtyards, paused to gaze down into the vast square of the city. The palace roofs were brilliant under the sun of autumn and the temple roofs were royal blue. “I guess Yusan doesn't get my ideas,” he said sadly enough to arrest Henrietta's wandering attention.