The mother

by Pearl S. Buck

“He sat a while at the inn drinking tea this morning,” the boy replied, wondering. “And I saw his robe, new and blue, and it was pretty and our cousin when he knew how much it cost said it had cost my father very dear.”

“Aye, it cost him dear, I swear!” said the mother, suddenly, her voice hard.

And the girl piped up, echoing her brother, “Yes, his robe was blue—even I could see that it was blue.”

But the mother said no more. The babe began to weep where he lay sleeping in a winnowing basket and she went and picked him up and opened her coat and held him to her breast, and she suckled him as she went to cook the meal. But first she called to the old woman, “Turn yourself where you sit, old mother, and watch and tell me if you see the new blue of his robe, and I will put the meal on the table.”

“I will, then, daughter,” called the old dame cheerfully.

Yet when the rice was cooked and flaked, white and dry as the man loved it, still he did not come. When the cabbage was tender and the woman had even made a bit of sweet and sour sauce to pour upon its heart, as he loved it, he did not come.

They waited a while and the old woman grew hungry and faint with the smell of the food in her nostrils and she cried out, in a sudden small anger, being so hungry, “Wait no more for that son of mine! The water is leaking out of my mouth and my belly is as empty as a drum and still he is not here!”

So the mother gave the old woman her bowl then and she fed the children too and even let them eat of the cabbage, only she saved the heart of it for him. She ate also after this, but sparingly for she seemed less zestful in her hunger today, somehow, so there was still much rice left and a good bowlful of the cabbage and this she put carefully away where the wind would catch it and keep it fresh. It would be as good at night as it was now if she heated it again. Then she gave suck to the babe, and he drank his fill and slept, a round, fat, sturdy child, sleeping in the strong sun and brown and red with its heat, and the two children stretched in the shade of the willow tree and slept and the old woman nodded on her bench, and over the whole small hamlet the peace of sleep and the silence of the heat of noonday fell, so that even the beasts stood with drooping, drowsy heads.

Only the mother did not sleep. She took up her spindle and she sat herself in the shade of the willow tree that cast its shadow on the western part of the threshing-floor and she twisted the thread and wound it. But after a while she could not work. Through the morning she had worked steadily and smoothly, twisting and turning and spinning, but now she could not be still. It was as though some strange anxiety gathered like a power in her body. She had never known the man not to come home for his food. She murmured to herself, “It must be he has gone into the town to game or for something or other.”

This she had not thought of, but the more she thought upon it the more it seemed true that so he had done. And after a while her cousin-neighbor came out to go to his fields and after a while his wife awoke from where she had sat sleeping by a tree, and she called, “Has your man gone for the day somewhere?”