White Lotus by John Hersey

Author:John Hersey
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2019-09-03T16:00:00+00:00

Dragon’s Head

Hua felt complacent about his crop, stacked in the safe godown of Old Sun, and he honored the traditional period, from the new moon of the New Year to the full moon that followed, of a thorough suspension of work. But for the daily chores to keep the animals and fowl alive, and to get the cooking and washing of the household done, we were relieved of all labor. Grin hunted; he shot his long-watched weasel. Jasmine mended her family’s clothing. Daddy Chick sat all day in the door of the slave hut playing his fiddle and dozing. Lank, armed with written chits authorizing visits to nearby farms, spent whole days in the traditional pastime of the New Year layoff: gambling, mainly with dominoes made of bamboo; he grew thinner and more morose than ever. Hua’s wife’s mei-mei, her younger sister, visited us, and our mistress wanted to show how aristocratically one could live with ten souls in the slave quarters. “Mei-mei wants a foot-warmer.” And I would have to heat a brick and wrap it in cotton cloths and carry it to the mei-mei and kowtow after I tucked it under her tiny blood-starved feet. But several days Moth and I, wearing cedar twigs wrapped in our hair in the belief that they would protect our bodies from lice, got chits from Hua to visit Old Sun’s. Moth was tired of Quart and had taken up with a humorous hog named Second; her pregnancy was by now thoroughly noticeable, but nobody seemed to be put off by it, and men still sought and enjoyed her company. And I? I spent the whole layoff softening Dolphin’s heart by devious means.

For instance: Moth told me that a pinch of dust from a woman’s footprint sprinkled in a man’s food would make the man’s private parts itch unbearably in desire for that woman alone.

It took me three visits to Old Sun’s and a great deal of fatuous byplay to get a few grains of dust from one of my own footprints into a bowl of cabbage that Dolphin was about to eat.

From a peddler in the crowd of itinerant salesmen that was forever milling about the side gate of the Sun compound, where Sun’s housekeepers did their buying, I bought, with two cash I had stolen from Hua’s wife’s bag of kitchen coppers, a piece of root from the plant called never-shame-weed, and I kept a small piece of it in my mouth and chewed it whenever I was near Dolphin, for this was said to provide an irresistible magnetism.

I played, as well as I could, Moth’s game of offer-and-snatch-away.

I had no inkling how my efforts were succeeding until the holidays came to an end, on the evening of the full moon, with the Lantern Festival. We had learned that the Sun slaves had organized a procession that would go from farm to farm that night to entertain yellow masters of the countryside; we supped early and cleaned up and waited.

In

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