Gold Mountain Blues - Ling Zhang [135]
Ah-Fat carried the lamp outside to where his son still knelt on the ground. The back of his jacket was shredded by the whip lashes; he could not see if he had drawn blood. Kam Shan stiffened when he heard Ah-Fat’s footsteps and did not look round. In the oppressive silence, Ah-Fat felt himself shrinking. The atmosphere was as prickly as a ball of thistles and thorns capable of stabbing you painfully wherever you touched it. He knew that he and his son were within a hair’s breadth of straining each other’s forbearance to the breaking point.
Ah-Fat turned and went into the kitchen. He got two bowls and two pairs of chopsticks and laid them on the table, then brought out the iron pot filled with the sausage-flavoured rice. He could not make up his mind whether to fill two bowls or one. His hand quivered in indecision. He served only himself and sat down.
He was ravenous and the smell of the sausage made his belly shriek with hunger. But he could not eat. The grains of rice seemed to turn to sand in his throat. He felt his son’s eyes boring into his back, needling him just enough to make it impossible for him to settle in his chair.
He slammed the bowl down on the table.
“Do you want me to spoon-feed you?” he snarled.
There was a rustling behind him as Kam Shan got up. It sounded as if the boy tottered for a moment before finding his feet. Then he came over, filled a bowl for himself and sat down silently to eat. Ah-Fat looked up and suddenly saw a thread of congealing blood in his son’s nostrils. The blood was inky-dark in colour. Ah-Fat almost retched, and felt the rice grains which had stuck in his throat wriggle upwards like maggots. He made as if to give his handkerchief to his son; his hand was already in his pocket, his thumb and forefinger had hold of the fabric. But his hand suddenly flagged. The handkerchief felt like a lead weight and he could not move it.
Oh, Ah-Yin, he groaned silently, feeling close to tears. He and Kam Shan were like two ancient, flint-hard rocks pressed together under the weight of a mountain. Six Fingers could have kept them apart, he thought, prying open a tiny crack. That little space would be life-giving; without it, he and his son would be condemned forever to a stalemate.
He suddenly missed Six Fingers terribly.
From that day on, Ah-Fat sent Loong Am with Kam Shan when he went to market and impressed on him that he was to stick with Kam Shan every step of the way. Kam Shan got up early and came home early, and the money he brought back more or less added up. Ah-Fat secretly felt that he could do with a few thrashings, it made him a man. He gradually relaxed.
He was soon to discover how wrong he was.
The patch of land he had bought two years before, through the crops it grew and the beasts it pastured, had brought him several surprisingly fat bank drafts. And when, in spring, his Italian neighbours decided to sell their property and to live with their son in the Prairie region, he was able to buy them out at the kind of knock-down price he had only dreamed of. His new purchase gave him a property several times bigger than before. He could stand at the field edge and not see the far boundary. Today he stood looking across the land; it had just rained and the leaves of the crops drooped low, covering the ground in an unbroken carpet of green. This was not last year’s green, it was the fresh green of the new year. Ah-Fat sighed comfortably. What a vast place Gold Mountain was. A piece of land this