Gold Mountain Blues - Ling Zhang [120]
Six Fingers showed him out. The eyes of everyone in the room were on her. She knew they expected her to cry, but her eyes were dry. Try as she might, she could not muster a single tear. They waited expectantly, then began to look at her askance.
Six Fingers cleared her throat. “Don’t cry. Mum needs peace and quiet.” They sniffed back their tears. “She has had such a hard life, how can we not cry?” said Ah-Fat’s aunt. She was a woman who never had an opinion of her own, in fact hardly ever spoke or did anything. Now that she did speak up, her words, though few, seemed to fall like lead weights and gouge craters in the ground. Six Fingers walked unsteadily among the craters, scarcely able to keep her balance. She forced herself to stand still. “Wait outside,” she commanded Kam Ho. Then she addressed the others: “Go back to your rooms and rest. I have things I want to say to Mum.” Ah-Fat’s aunt led them out, sobbing inconsolably: “It’s too late for talking now!” Six Fingers ignored them and simply shut the door.
She went to Mrs. Mak’s bedside, seeing how frail she looked; she seemed to have shrunk to the size of a child. Her sightless eyes, sunken into their dark cavities, were like deep wells of sadness. Her mother-in-law’s life hung by a thread. She knelt and grasped the gaunt, claw-like hands.
“I know you’re waiting for Ah-Fat, Mum. I know you don’t like me because Ah-Fat loves me too much. But believe me, he hasn’t wasted his love for me—I can be here for both Ah-Fat and me. I can show you how much we love and honour you. Don’t go, Mum, stay with me.”
She quivered as something sharp—Mrs. Mak’s talon-like fingernails— jabbed the palm of her hand.
Six Fingers freed herself from the old woman’s grip, pulled up the front of her jacket and got out the knife that she carried in her waistband. It was a small knife, about six inches long, in an ornamented silver sheath. Mak Dau had bought it several years before from one of the yamen guards, for a considerable amount of money.
Nowadays Six Fingers carried it with her all the time, supposedly for self-defence. She had no idea how to use it but it gave her a sort of Dutch courage. In reality, she had never so much as killed a chicken. As a child she used to stop her ears and hide in the farthest corner of the room when the neighbours’ pigs and cattle were slaughtered. She could not even bear to hear live fish thrashing in the hot oil of the frying pan, let alone the squeals and bellows of dying beasts. She had only once in her life used a knife on a living creature—herself. When she was seventeen, she had used Auntie Cheung Tai’s fodder knife to cut off her sixth finger.
It had never, ever occurred to her that she might have to use a knife on herself a second time.
Six Fingers took the knife out of its sheath. Its blade shone with a cold gleam. Even though she never used it, Mak Dau took it back every couple of weeks and sharpened it for her. She held it close to her eyes and blew some hairs across the blade—the blade sliced them noiselessly in two. It was a trick Mak Dau had taught her for testing how keen the blade was.
She rolled up her trouser leg. She had put on wide trousers today for their trip out to the new house, and once she had folded them loosely couple of times, she could see her thigh. Her flesh gleamed too, soft and white. She grasped the handle of the knife and began to tremble. She suddenly felt her age. She was thirty-five now, not a fearless seventeen-year-old any more.
Back then she had had no one else to worry about. She had determined on one course of action and nothing was going to get in her way. Things were different now; her heart belonged to many people … her husband had a piece, so did her sons, and her mother-in-law. Only the smallest piece of her heart could be claimed as her own and that single-minded courage was gone.
She raised the knife, then let it fall, raised it again, lowered it again. She put her left hand over