Waxing Moon Read online

  Now, Mistress Yee moaned theatrically. “I must have broken my finger. Oh, gods, help me.”

  “Let me see it, Mistress,” Mirae said, squatting down very close to examine her lady’s finger.

  “Don’t touch me with your filthy hand!” Mistress Yee frowned.

  Mirae knew that her mistress would menstruate any day now, but still she was taken by surprise. She had thought that they had become friends, even if in secret. She had devoted herself to her mistress even when it had meant risking her own life. For the first time, her blood boiled with hostility. She despised Mistress Yee for fussing so much over a minor scratch.

  “Fetch me some potato meat to apply to my finger. It’s swelling. Can’t you see?” Mistress Yee cried, lifting her middle finger in the air.

  Mirae sprang up and went to the kitchen where a huge cast iron pot was on the stove in which mugwort was being steeped to bathe the corpse. The aroma filled the kitchen. She took a deep breath and began to peel a potato. Then she raised a stone pestle and aimed at the potato in the stone mortar. At that moment, Nani entered the kitchen, out of breath and pink in the face. She had just returned from a trip with Mrs. Wang to drop off the newborn at Jaya’s house.

  Ignoring Mirae, Nani sat in the middle of the kitchen and sighed. In a minute she began to sob, thinking of Mistress Kim, her kind-hearted mistress. She felt exhausted. The situation had overwhelmed the young maid. Wiping her eyes, she got up and filled a gourd with water.

  Mirae, almost done with crushing the raw potato, said, “My mistress broke her finger. She is in mourning.”

  “That’s an interesting way of mourning,” Nani commented and drank the water, dripping from both sides of her mouth onto her flat chest.

  “Well, she was crying so hard. Wildly lamenting the death of your mistress. She was delirious and fell on her finger,” Mirae said, wondering why in the world she was making up the story for the sake of her mistress. What is the matter with me?

  “Heaven knows your mistress hated mine. As good as my dear lady was—she didn’t speak harshly of anyone, including your mistress, in spite of all her ill intentions and deeds—I know that my mistress will not rest in peace. She will watch over her little one,” Nani said and walked out of the kitchen. Beyond the threshold, she turned around and pointed out, “By the way, potato meat isn’t for broken bones. It’s for bee stings.”

  Mirae looked down at the crushed potato and wondered what remedy was for broken bones, but then she realized her mistress didn’t have a broken bone. She snickered to herself. Her mistress just had a swollen finger, not even really swollen, so it didn’t matter what she was crushing in the mortar.

  She took a gob of potato paste and put it on a piece of gauze and carried it carefully to her mistress. On the way, she saw a group of people entering the gate. One of them was a professional wailer, another was carrying a bundle of bamboo sticks for the mourners, and another held an armful of white hemp clothing. Outside the gate, there was a banner made of cloth to indicate that the house was in mourning. But, oddly, the rice offering for the soul-escorting devils was missing.

  “My lady, here is the potato paste for your finger,” Mirae said, sitting down in a spot not too close to her mistress.

  Furrowing between her eyebrows, Mistress Yee inspected the potato paste, which was already turning slightly brown. Then she said, “Put it on my wrist.”

  “Didn’t you want this on your finger?”

  “I changed my mind,” she replied, and put her right hand out to be attended to.

  Confused, Mirae put it on her wrist.

  “That feels awful.” Mistress Yee scowled.

  “Soon it will get better,” Mirae comforted her mistress.

  “Now, go out and tell whomever you run into that I have a broken wrist, and that I have lost my voice from crying since this morning at the news of Mistress Kim’s tragic death. You can cry, too, if you want. Go. What are you looking at? Do I have something on my face?”

  “No, my lady, I am going,” Mirae said and left.

  What was on her mistress’s mind? Mirae was still confused. In the yard, she saw Mr. O watching his cousin climb up the ladder to the tile roof with Mistress Kim’s silk coat. When it was properly hung from the eaves, Mr. O shouted his first wife’s name three times. Then his cousin carefully brought the coat back down and gave it to Mr. O, so that he could deliver it to dress Mistress Kim.

  Mr. O looked a few years older than he had the day before. No residue of tears but he certainly looked shaken up.

  In Mistress Kim’s quarters, two maids were helping the hired undertaker bathe the corpse in steeped mugwort water. Her clipped nails and her hair from her comb were collected and put into five silk pouches. While the undertaker bound the feet and hands of the corpse tightly, the maids tidied up the room and waited for a male servant to bring the coat of Mistress Kim. Instead, Mr. O entered. The maids jumped up and stood by the sides of the corpse. He dropped Mistress Kim’s coat on the floor and cleared his throat. He looked at his wife for a brief moment and left at once without a word.

  The undertaker stuffed the mouth of the corpse with three spoonfuls of rice and put a coin in her sleeve to ease her journey to the next world. The hired mourner began to wail a sorrowful tune. Finally, both maids covered the corpse with her coat, dabbing at their eyes with a cotton cloth.

  Walking around the yard, Mirae realized that no one was available to hear the tale of her mistress. Everyone was preoccupied with Mistress Kim. She went back to Mistress Yee and lied to her for the first time. She said that everyone knew how much she was suffering.

  To escape the sweltering afternoon heat, Mrs. Wang sat under a weeping willow by Sunset Lake on the way to a party at the home of the peasant family who had been taking care of Mistress Kim’s infant girl.

  She devoured a cucumber to quench her thirst and sang a song, the only song she knew by heart from her childhood.

  A ri rang, A ri rang, A ra ri yo-o-o-o.

  Her mother had sung this song to her as a lullaby, even though the lyrics were about unrequited love, until she was quite old—eight or nine. When she was ten, her mother married again, a traveling actor this time, and vanished from her life. So she was left with her grandmother, who was a midwife, not by training but by her experiences over the years. Her grandmother taught her how to read and write. She also taught her how to ease the pain of shrieking women and how to deliver babies. She told her to make an entry in a journal after each delivery. “You learn tremendously from reviewing and writing about your experiences,” her grandmother emphasized.

  When Mrs. Wang was sixteen, there was a flood in her village. She and her grandmother had to relocate themselves temporarily to a relative’s house. On the way there, Mrs. Wang had to lift her long skirt so as not to get it wet. A young man witnessed the beautiful shape of her bare ankles from the corner of his house, and he fell instantly in love with her.

  He wrote a poem about her anklebones resembling baby peaches and so on. He had his servant deliver it to Mrs. Wang, who read it and was unmoved. She tossed the poem into a chest where she kept some of her mother’s things and never looked at it again. But the young man fell gravely ill, longing for her reply. He lost his appetite and developed a fever and talked to himself constantly. His parents thought he was possessed by some evil spirit, so they threw a bowlful of rock salt at him every morning and put a knife under his pillow every night. But he only grew worse. He looked out the window for hours every day and would not respond to simple questions.

  His parents learned from a male servant what ailed their son. When they learned about Mrs. Wang’s family background, they urged their son to forget about her. Of course, he couldn’t. So his father locked him in the grain storage room and starved him from one full moon to the next. He came out unswayed and looking better than when he had entered,
so the father said, “Maybe this is his fate.”

  The mother of the young man visited Mrs. Wang’s grandmother, who eagerly agreed to the marriage proposal. Mrs. Wang, however, had no intention of marrying anyone, especially the young man who wrote the miserable poem that didn’t rhyme. But her grandmother said that she wasn’t going to live forever. So Mrs. Wang was forced into the marriage. But she was determined not to have a baby, for she knew what it was like to give birth. Whenever her young husband came near her, she beat him notoriously. Once, she dragged him to a young dogwood tree in the yard and tied him to it. He wrestled with the tree to free himself and finally uprooted it. Still tied to the dogwood, he walked around to find someone to untie the rope that bound his torso to the tree. The sight of this young husband made a scene, and the story had traveled all over the village by sunrise. His parents decided to lock their daughter-in-law in the grain storage room, but Mrs. Wang fled with her belongings in a sack.

  She settled down in this village, where no one knew of her past. She had to pawn her mother’s gold chrysanthemum hairpin to get a room. She worked hard and earned the reputation she now had. She was generous with the poor and proper with the rich. She was also a counselor for those in trouble. Fifteen years before, just once, she had made her way back to her hometown to see her grandmother. The old woman had gone mad and lost her teeth. She didn’t remember her own granddaughter. Mrs. Wang asked her for forgiveness, and her grandmother said something, but without her teeth, what came out of her mouth sounded like “Go to hell.” Mrs. Wang replied, “I am not afraid of hell, Granny. But I am afraid to see Mama in hell. She might very well be there for abandoning her only daughter, and I for abandoning my own grandmother.” She placed her mother’s gold hairpin, which she had retrieved from the pawnshop when she had earned enough money, in her grandmother’s palm, and dragged her heavy feet away. That was the last time she had seen her grandmother.

  Mrs. Wang felt the heat rise from the earth as the sun settled high in the sky as she remembered her grandmother. She thought she’d better get going before it got too hot. There was a good-sized carp swimming under the water. Taking a nearby stone, she threw it at the moving fish, but only water splashed on her. She laughed at her own ludicrousness. But the water cooled her down and made her feel much better.

  The corn stalks on the way to the peasants’ house were taller than Mrs. Wang. She could already smell food, probably fried scallion patties, as she neared the thatched-roof mud house.

  “Here I am,” Mrs. Wang thundered at the entrance.

  “Please come in, Mrs. Wang. Thank you for coming to our humble home,” said Dubak, a copper-faced farm worker with a simple smile as he bowed down.

  “Ah, Mrs. Wang. You are here already and I am not half done with cooking. Please have a seat.” Jaya came out into the yard from the kitchen with Mr. O’s baby in her right arm and a spatula in her left hand.

  “She is doing quite well, Mrs. Wang.” Jaya smiled broadly, showing the baby to her. “I really thought she wouldn’t make it. She was so small and weak in the beginning. But with my milk, look at her. She is thriving. Drinking more than my son. She sometimes leaves none for him. . . .” She went on and on.

  “How are you doing?” Mrs. Wang asked to divert her attention.

  “I am doing fine, Mrs. Wang.” Jaya smiled again.

  “Are you carrying another?” Mrs. Wang asked bluntly, looking at her midriff.

  “Yes, I am.” Jaya’s cabbage face turned purple. Naturally large, people often thought that she was pregnant when she was not.

  Mrs. Wang cleared her throat. No children, no trouble had been the motto of her life, but there were people with a different outlook on life. So that was that. But right now, hunger pinched her stomach.

  “Smells good here. I smelled fried scallion patties from the corn field,” Mrs. Wang said. She was sitting on the raised floor at the entrance to the hut. Flies were buzzing around the food, which was covered with a hemp cloth.

  “That’s why I married her. She makes the best scallion patties in the village,” Dubak said, dropping a bundle of potatoes in the middle of their yard. “Mrs. Wang, I would like you to take this. These potatoes taste like chestnuts. So flavorful they melt in your mouth,” he said proudly.

  “I appreciate your gift, but my aging legs are not as agile as they once were. I can’t carry that sack back home. I will take a few,” Mrs. Wang said, examining the cooked potatoes peeking out from under the hemp cloth on a low table.

  “I will carry it for you.”

  “What did I do to deserve that?”

  “You brought my son out to this world. He is such a good sleeper. He is sleeping right now by the way. But I must say, and forgive me for saying this, but Mr. O’s daughter keeps my wife awake all night. Every night, she cries several times. My son and I sleep through thunder. But the baby girl’s a very delicate sort,” Dubak said, scratching his head vigorously.

  Mrs. Wang quickly understood that the invitation to their son’s one-hundredth-day birthday had a flip side. They were also wondering when another money pouch might find its way to them from Mr. O.

  “Tomorrow is her hundredth day. We wonder if it will be all right to celebrate hers the way we do, or do they have something else in mind? Commoners like us don’t know how to imitate the nobleman’s way of life. Besides, we don’t have the means to do it anyway,” Dubak said, pulling his hair. “My wife says we should take her home for the occasion, so that they can see how well she has been fed and taken care of. But I say no, we can’t go uninvited, even though we care for their offspring.”

  “I get your meaning. But I thought you were paid. I mean, your wife was paid for the entire period of nursing the baby up front. Is that not true?” Mrs. Wang asked, raising her caterpillar eyebrows.

  “Yes, of course,” Dubak answered. “But that’s not—that’s not what I am wondering. It’s not the-the money,” he stuttered.

  “Of course it’s the money,” his wife interrupted. “Mrs. Wang, we are commoners. And I can only speak as a commoner. I was paid for nursing their baby. It’s true they paid enough money for that. But is milk all that a baby needs? She needs clothes, she needs . . .” She couldn’t think of what else a baby needed. “Personally, I am a little concerned that no one has ever come to see how the baby is doing. What if they don’t take her back when she is done nursing? Are we stuck with her? I would like to know. What if another baby comes along? I can’t care for this baby long unless—” She stopped her speech there.

  “I will deliver your message. I just didn’t know I was here for that mission.” Mrs. Wang scowled.

  “No, Mrs. Wang. That’s not why we invited you. Please sit down,” begged Jaya.

  She brought more food to the table and then sat down across from Mrs. Wang, encouraging her to please take the chopsticks. When Mrs. Wang finally succumbed to tasting the food, Jaya pulled out her large breast to give to the whimpering baby girl.

  “Do you like my scallion patties?” Jaya asked, a grin spreading across her face.

  “Heavenly,” Mrs. Wang replied as she picked up her third one. Right now, a bowl of mud would be delicious, she thought to herself.

  After devouring half a dozen scallion patties, Mrs. Wang gulped down a large bowl of milky white rice wine. She was in an excellent mood. She burped and then she wanted to take a look at the babies. Jaya brought them close and Mrs. Wang examined them. Like his mother, the boy was double-chinned, twice the size of Mr. O’s daughter. She was alert and staring at Mrs. Wang as if she understood what was being said.

  “She sucks blood out of me all night long, and then when my baby boy wakes up, there is hardly any milk left for him.” Jaya laughed superficially.

  “When the mother of the poor thing finds her way to a good place, she will remember your effort. Even though I saw her only after she was dead,
I knew she had been a good soul,” Mrs. Wang said.

  “Oh, we knew of her excellent reputation. A few years ago my husband was hired to escort her to her grandfather’s funeral in her hometown. He said that Mistress Kim was more queenly than the queen of China,” Jaya said.

  Mrs. Wang got up, leaving a few coins on the table.

  “What is this, Mrs. Wang?”

  “Buy something for your son. What’s his name?”

  “Sungnam is his name. Star of the South,” Jaya said self-consciously.

  “A good name that is,” Mrs. Wang said.

  Dubak got up from the yard, where he had been mending his straw shoes. He put the sack of potatoes on his shoulder and a towel around his head.

  “Are you sure you want to walk back with me with that on your shoulder?” Mrs. Wang asked.

  “When you bite into one of my potatoes for dinner, you will be happy you let me carry this for you.” He smiled, showing his horsey, square front teeth. He was already sweating. The blazing sun was still fastened in the middle of the sky.