Gold Mountain Blues - Ling Zhang [209]
The first thing that gave her away was the underclothes she wore. The village women found out about the brassiere when Cat Eyes was breastfeeding Yin Ling. Even though she turned her back to feed the baby, they noticed that after she had undone her jacket, she opened up another layer of lacy white cotton underneath. Her panties, too, were a subject of village gossip. No one knew about them except Kam Shan until one day, one of the household servants saw them in the laundry bucket. She went out and told her friends that the woman from Gold Mountain was so stingy with cloth that she had cut down her panties until they hardly covered her buttocks.
Of course, the panties were only the beginning. Although Cat Eyes did not know it, gossip swirled around her. The villagers directed their comments to her mother-in-law, and these comments accumulated in Six Fingers’ ears like earwax. Six Fingers looked glummer by the day.
Cat Eyes did not actually need to wash her own clothes. There were plenty of women servants to do the cooking, the washing and the sewing. But Cat Eyes did not want anyone to see her underwear. Besides, she found it comforting to go to No-Name River, because it reminded her of the village where she grew up. Her home village had plenty of water, just like this one, and her family had depended on its water as much as on the land for their food. She had worked in the fields alongside her mother, and when her father went fishing, she rowed the boat for him. She had had no news of her family since the day she and her elder sister were kidnapped and taken to Gold Mountain, so when she arrived in Spur-On Village with Kam Shan last year, she got him to take her back to her home village. There was no one left of her family; on the untended graves of her parents the artemisia grew tall.
It had rained continuously for some days and the waters of No-Name River had risen so high they covered all but half of the topmost stone step on the bank. Cat Eyes put the basket down, sat down on the step, rolled up her trouser legs and, with her clogs still on, stretched her feet into the water. She leaned forward until she could see her reflection. The water rippled in the breeze, elongating her face like a cucumber and stretching it as broad as a tomato. As Cat Eyes laughed, she heard the water whisper something in her ear. Softly, softly the words beseeched her: “Why not come in … come in…?”
Cat Eyes snapped out of her reverie. She remembered her father’s warning to her and her sister when they were little. When it rains and the river’s in spate, he had said, the water spirits lure people in. But Cat Eyes feared neither the water nor the water spirits. She stirred up the mud with her foot and retorted: “In your dreams!” And the water was silenced. Cat Eyes could not know that a dozen or so years later, another Fong would hear the waters speak and, knowing nothing of water spirits, would be lured in.
Although the water had fallen silent, Cat Eyes was still on the alert. At times like this, it would have been better to have a man with her, but Kam Shan was not the sort of man to go around with a woman. When she ran away from the brothel all those years ago and hid in his cart, he had only agreed to take her in because she threatened to kill herself. That act of kindness had estranged him from his father