Chapter 5
Xingdi slowly raised her head, eyes unfocused. “What?”
Mother gripped her shoulders. Her voice dropped lower, but every word coiled with vine-like hatred.
“We will kill him, and kill that lover of his. No—not merely kill them. We will ruin their names. We will make them stink for ten thousand years!”
Xingdi shuddered.
Strangely enough, she was usually far fiercer than Mother. She could fight and curse with the best of them. Yet now she trembled even harder.
“No. We can’t! A woman who kills her husband cannot be reborn human. She can only become a pig or a dog!”
I nodded. Everyone in the streets said so.
Mother shook her hard. “And now? How is your life any better than a pig’s or a dog’s?”
Xingdi fell silent. Her tears dropped onto my sister’s cold body.
For the second and final time, she sang the baby that lullaby.
“Moon so bright and wind so light,
Leaves cast shadows on the pane.
Crickets chirp, zheng-zheng, ringing
Like the music of a string.
“Soft the strings and sweet the tune,
Gently rocks the cradle now.
Mother’s baby dreams in slumber,
Sleep, my child, sleep safely now…”
“Give my little girl a name.” Choking back tears, Xingdi looked at Mother. “Elder Sister, you can read and write. Give her a beautiful name.”
Listening nearby, I made an innocent suggestion. “Can we call her Zhengzheng? Listen—the crickets are calling her outside to play.”
Xingdi stroked my head and crushed me against her. Tears ran down my neck.
“Yes.”
Then she lifted my sister, kissed her little face, and laid her in Ruyan’s arms. Smiling through her tears, she said to Ruyan, “I leave the child to you. On the road ahead, please—please look after her well…”
My sister was buried in Ruyan’s embrace.
Only after much pleading from Mother did Father agree to buy them a decent coffin and a proper gravesite.
Mother also told Father that all these years, she had withheld herself from him in anger, and that was why they had shared a bed so seldom and had so few children. My sister’s death had made her see reason. From now on, she wanted to bear him many sons.
Father was delighted. The two dead—one grown, one small—did nothing to dampen his appetite.
He soon discovered that a wife willing to bend herself to his pleasure was a hundred times better than any woman outside.
During those days, I almost always slept beside Xingdi. One arm around me, she fanned us with the other and softly hummed her lullaby. When a noisy cricket found its way into the room, I tried to chase it out, but she always stopped me.
“The cricket has come looking for your sister.”
Then I would dream of catching crickets with Zhengzheng.
One year passed, then two. In my dreams, my sister grew along with me.
Outside those dreams, Mother became gentler and more virtuous by the day, and her marriage to Father sweeter and sweeter.
By the time I was seven, they appeared as close as honey stirred into oil.
One day, Xingdi and I returned from sweeping the graves on the hill and found Mother shyly telling Father that she was pregnant.
Over the previous two years, Mother had taken the initiative to find Father two more concubines. Neither conceived. Father had grown frantic, so the news sent him into raptures.
He was so happy—and so easily coaxed by a few soft words from Mother—that he handed her the leather chest containing all his silver, along with its key.
“Keep this safe. It is the wealth of our household.”
Then he cheerfully went drinking with his friends.
The three of us watched him leave. Back inside, we opened the chest.
It contained a neat layer of silver ingots, five or six hundred taels in all, and two little purses that had belonged to women. By then, I could read. I recognized the two embroidered characters on the purses: Ruyan.
Mother saw them too. She picked one up and rubbed it between her fingers. With a cold smile, she turned to Xingdi.
“Send for the tinsmith you met at the temple the other day. Oh, and there is a woman named Xianglan… I hear she married a tea merchant?”