The mother

by Pearl S. Buck

And the slow elder son felt this warm love his mother had for his brother, and he brooded on it. Every day of labor he had done, and all the labor that he spared her he remembered now and it seemed to him his mother was the crudest soul that ever lived and she never recked it anything that he had striven from childhood for her sake. So the bitterness gathered slow and deep within his heart, and he hated his brother.

XIV

NOW all this hatred gathered in the elder son and even the mother did not know how deep it was until a certain day when out it came, bursting forth like a river dammed behind a dyke and swollen with waters from small secret sources that men do not know, so that when it breaks they are astonished because none knew how it had been with that river all the days when it had seemed the same.

It was at the time of the rice harvest at the end of a summer when all must labor hard and heavily upon the land from dawn to dark, and so everyone must labor who is not rich enough to hire it done for him. Now the young lad had labored that day, too, although he usually thought of some distant thing he had to do elsewhere. But this time the mother had coaxed him to it and she had said to him secretly, smoothing his bony lad’s hand while she talked, “Work well for these few days, my son, while the harvest lasts, and show your brother how well you can do, and if you will work well and please him then I will buy you something pretty when the work is done, something that you want most.”

So the lad promised he would, pouting his red lips and feeling himself hard used, and he worked well enough, although not too well, yet well enough to save his skin when his brother’s eye fell on him.

But that day when a rain threatened before the sheaves were in, they all worked beyond the usual hour and the mother worked until she was spent, for she had never been so tireless as she was before she ate the bitter herbs to save her honor that dark night. Then she sighed and straightened her aching back and said, “My son, I will go home and see the food is heated for you when you come, for I am spent and sore.”

“Go home, then,” said the elder son a little roughly, yet not meaning to be so, for he never urged his mother to do more than she would. So she went then, and left the brothers alone, for the hour grew too late even for the gleaners who had followed them by day.

Scarcely had she set the food to boiling when the maid cried out from where she sat upon the threshold that she heard her little brother weeping, and when the mother ran out of the kitchen it was so and she ran to the harvest field and there upon the reaped grain the elder son was beating the younger one most mercilessly with the handle of his scythe, and the younger one was howling and striking back with his two fists and struggling to loose himself from his brother’s hard grasp about his neck. But the elder brother held him fast and beat him with the dull end of the handle. Then the mother ran with all her strength and clung to the angry elder son and begged of him, “Oh, my son, a little lad he is yet—Oh, son. Oh, son!”

And as she clung like this the younger slipped out from the elder’s hand and ran swift as a young hare across the field and disappeared into the dusk. There were these two left, the mother and her bitter elder son. Then she faltered, “He is such a child yet, son, only fourteen and with his mind still on play.”