Free The Mother: A Novel by Pearl S. Buck

babe with her in one arm and in her other hand the short curved sickle she must use in reaping she set out to the fields. The babe was large now and he could sit alone and she set him down upon the earth and let him play as he would, and he filled his hands with earth and put it to his mouth and ate of it and spat it out hating it and yet he forgot and ate of it again until he was covered with the muddy spew. But whatever he did the mother could not heed him. She must work for two and work she did, and if the child cried he must cry until she was weary and could sit down to rest and then she could put her breast to his earthy mouth and let him drink and she was too weary to care for the stains he left upon her.
    Handful by handful she reaped the stiff yellow grain, bending to every handful, and she heaped it into sheaves. When gleaners came to her field to glean what she might drop, as beggars and gleaners do at harvest time, she turned on them, her face dark with sweat and earth, and drawn with the bitterness of labor, and she screamed curses at them, and she cried, “Will you glean from a lone woman who has no man to help her? I am poorer than you, you beggars, and you cursed thieves!” And she cursed them so heartily and she so cursed the mothers that bore them and the sons they had themselves that at last they let her fields be, because they were afraid of such powerful cursing.
    Then sheaf by sheaf she carried the rice to the threshing-floor and there she threshed it, yoking the buffalo to the rude stone roller they had, and she drove the beast all through the hot still days of autumn, and she drove herself, too. When the grain was threshed, she gathered the empty straw and heaped it and tossed the grain up and winnowed it in the winds that came sometimes.
    Now she pressed the boy into labor too and if he lagged or longed to play she cuffed him out of her sheer weariness and the despair of her driven body. But she could not make the ricks. She could not heap the sheaves into the ricks, for this the man had always done, since it was a labor he hated less than some, and he did it always neatly and well and plastered the tops smooth with mud. So she asked the cousin to teach her this one year and she could do it thenceforth with the boy if the man stayed longer than a year, and the cousin came and showed her how and she bent her body to the task and stretched and threw the grass to him as he sat on top of the rick and spread it, and so the rice was harvested.
    She was bone-thin now with her labor and with being too often weary, and every ounce of flesh was gone from her, and her skin was burnt a dark brown except the red of cheeks and lips. Only the milk stayed in her breasts rich and full. Some women there are whose food goes all to their own fat and none to child or food for child, but this woman was made for children, and her motherhood would rob her own body ruthlessly if there was any need for child.
    Then came the day set for measuring out the landlord’s share of all the harvest. Now this landlord of the hamlet and the fields about it never came himself to fetch his share. He lived an idle rich man in some far city or other, since the land was his from his fathers, and he sent in his place his agent, and this year it was a new agent, for his old agent had left him the last year, being rich enough after twenty years to cease his labors. This new agent came now and he came to every farmer in that hamlet, and the mother waited at her own door, the grain heaped on the threshing-floor and waiting, and the agent came.
    He was a townsman, head to foot, a tall, smooth man, his gown gray silk and leathern shoes on his feet, and he had a large smooth hand he put often to his shaven lip, and when he moved a scent of some sort came from him. The mother hung back when he came and when he called, “Where is the farmer?” the woman waited and let the old mother pipe forth, “My son he works in the city now, and there be only