Life and Death are Wearing Me Out

“Treat him to something good.”
    “I’m not going to eat anything you give me,” he said as he swung the bag in his hand. “I brought my own food.”
    “Kaifang . . .” More tears. “Can’t you give your father a little face?”
    “Okay, that’s enough,” he said with obvious repulsion. “Don’t think I hate you two, because I don’t, not a bit. It was my mother’s idea to come looking for you, not mine.”
    “She . . . how is she?” I said hesitantly.
    “She has cancer.” His voice was low. There was silence for a moment before he continued. “She doesn’t have long to live, and would like to see you both. She says she has many things she wants to say to you.”
    “How could she have cancer?” said Chunmiao, now crying openly.
    My son looked at Chunmiao and just shook his head noncom-mittally.
    “Well, I’ve delivered the message,” he said. “Whether you go back or not is up to you.”
    He turned and walked off.
    “Kaifang ...” I grabbed his arm. “We can go together. We’ll leave tomorrow.”
    He wrested his arm from my grip.
    “I’m not traveling with you. I have a return ticket for tonight.”
    “Then we’ll go with you.”
    “I said I’m not traveling with you.”
    “Then we’ll walk you to the station,” Chunmiao said.
    “No,” my son said with steely determination. “There’s no need.”
    After your wife learned she had cancer, she insisted on going back to Ximen Village. Your son, who hadn’t graduated from high school, was bent on quitting school and becoming a policeman. His application was accepted by your old friend Du Luwen, once the Lüdian Township Party secretary, and now county police commissioner, either as a result of your relationship or of your son’s excellent qualifications. He was assigned to the criminal division.
    Following the death of your mother, your father moved back into the southern end of the little room in the western addition, where he resumed the solitary, eccentric lifestyle of his independent farming days. No one ever saw him out in the compound during the day, nor did they often see smoke from his chimney, though he prepared his own meals. He wouldn’t eat the food Huzhu or Baofeng brought to him, preferring to let it go bad on the counter by the stove or on his table. Late at night he’d get down off his sleeping platform, the kang, and come back to life. He’d boil a pot of water on the stove and make some soupy rice, which he’d eat before it was fully cooked. Either that or he’d simply eat raw, crunchy grain and wash it down with cold water. Then he’d be right back on the kang.
    When your wife returned to the village, she moved into the northern end of the western addition, previously occupied by your mother. Her twin sister, Huzhu, took care of her. Sick as she was, I never heard a single moan from her. She just lay quietly in bed, eyes closed as she tried to get some sleep, or open as she stared at the ceiling. Huzhu and Baofeng tried all sorts of home remedies, such as cooking a toad in soupy rice or preparing pig’s lung with a special grass or snakeskin with stir-fried eggs or gecko in liquor. She refused to try any of these remedies. Her room was separated by your father’s only by a thin wall of sorghum stalks and mud, so they could hear each other’s coughs and sighs; but they never exchanged a word.
    In your father’s room there were a vat of raw wheat, another of mung beans, and two strings of corn ears hanging from the rafters. After Dog Two died, I found myself with nothing to do and no mood to try anything new, so I either slept the day away in my kennel or wandered through the compound. After the death of Jinlong, Ximen Huan hung out with a bad crowd in town, returning infrequently, and only to get money from his mother. After Pang Kangmei was arrested, Jinlong’s company was taken over by county officials, as was the Ximen Village Party secretary position. By then his company existed on paper only, and all the millions in bank loans were gone. He left nothing for Huzhu or Ximen Huan. So after her son used up all of Huzhu’s personal savings, he stopped showing up altogether.
    Huzhu was living in the main house; every time I entered the house she was seated at her square table, cutting paper figures. Everything she made — plants and flowers, insects and fish, birds and beasts — was remarkably lifelike. She mounted the figures between sheets of white paper and, when she’d finished a hundred