Free The Mother: A Novel by Pearl S. Buck Page A

we upon the land.”
    And the woman sent the lad for the cousin and she waited silently, coming forward to hand the man his tea but saying nothing but common greeting, yet feeling his eyes somehow hot upon her bare feet and on her face. And she stood by while the cousin measured off the grain for her, and measured the share the agent took for his own, and the woman was glad she needed to say nothing nor even come near to see the weight, so honest was her cousin. But she saw the grain divided and hard it was too, as it was hard for every farmer, to give to this smooth townsman his own share in what they had labored on. But they gave grimly, and so did she, knowing that if they did not they would suffer, and besides the landlord’s share they gave the agent a fat fowl or two or a measure of rice or some eggs or even silver for his private fee.
    More than this, when all the grain was measured out the village must set a feast before the agent and every house must give a dish. Even in this lonely year the mother caught a fowl and killed it and cooked it for the feast, steaming it gently and long until it was done and while the shape was whole and the skin unbroken, yet was the flesh so tender that when the first chopsticks touched it it would fall apart. The savor of that fowl and its smell when it had cooked so many hours were more than the children could endure and they hung about the kitchen and the boy cried, “I wish it were for us—I wish we ever could eat a fowl ourselves!”
    But the mother was bitter with her weariness and she answered, “Who can eat such meat except a rich man?”
    Nevertheless when the feast was over she went to the littered table where the men had sat and she picked up a bone left from her fowl and a little skin was hanging to it and a shred of meat and she took it and gave it to the lad to suck and she said, “Hasten and grow big, my son, and you can eat at table with them too.”
    Then the boy asked innocently, “Do you think my father will let me?”
    The mother answered bitterly, “If he is not here you shall eat in his place, that I swear.”
    Thus the year wore on to late autumn. Almost the children had forgotten that there had ever been another in the bed except themselves and their mother, and even the old woman seldom thought to ask of her son, because the chill winds set her old bones aching, and she had enough to do to search for this warm spot and that out of wind and in the sun, and she complained incessantly because the winds shifted so, and because every year the sun seemed cooler than the year before.
    The boy worked daily now in small ways and took it as his duty. Every day when there was no other task he led the buffalo to the hill lands and let it feed on the short grass, lying upon its back the whole day through, or coming down to leap upon some grave and sit there catching crickets in the grass and weaving little cages for them out of stems of grass. When he came home at night he hung the cages by the door, and the crickets chirped and the sound pleased the babe and his sister.
    But soon the wild grass on the hills browned with coming winter and the summer flowers among the grass bore seed and the byways were gay with purple asters and with small yellow wild chrysanthemums, which are the flowers of autumn, and it was time to cut the grass for winter’s fuel. Then the boy went with his mother and all day she cut the dried grass with her short-handled sickle and the boy twisted rope of grass and bound what she cut into sheaves. Everywhere over all the mountain sides there were spots of blue and these were people like themselves cutting and binding the brown grass into sheaves. In the evening when the sun set and the night air came down chill from the hill tops the people all went winding homeward through the narrow hilly paths, each loaded with two great sheaves upon a pole across the shoulder, and so did the mother also, and the boy with two little sheaves.
    When they came