By Pearl S. Buck
Liu, the farmer, sat at the door of his one-room house.
It was a warm evening in late February, and in his thin body
he felt the coming of spring.
How he knew that the time had now come when sap should stir
in trees and life begin to move in the soil he could not
have told himself.
In other years it would have been easy enough.
He could have pointed to the willow trees about the
house, and shown the swelling buds.
But there was no more trees now.
He had cut them off during the bitter winter when they were
starving for food and he had sold them one by one.
Or he might have pointed to the pink-tipped buds of his three peach trees
and his six apricot trees that his father had planted in his day
so that now, being at the height of their time, they bore a load
of fruit every year.
But these trees were also gone.
Most of all, in any other year than this he might have pointed to his
wheat fields, where he planted wheat in the winter when the land was
not needed for rice, and where, when spring was moving into summer,
he planted the good rice, for rice was his chief crop.
But the land told nothing, this year.
There was no wheat on it, for the flood had covered it long after
wheat should have been planted, and it lay there cracked and like
clay but newly dried.
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Well, on such a day as this, if he had his buffalo and his plow as
he had always had in other years, he would have gone out and
plowed up that cracked soil.
He ached to plow it up and make it look like a field again, yes,
even though he had not so much as one seed to put in it.
But he had no buffalo.
If anyone had told him that he would eat his own water buffalo that
plowed the good land for him, and year after year pulled the stone
roller over the grain and threshed it at harvest he would have called
that man idiot.
Yet it was what he had done.
He had eaten his own water buffalo, he and his wife and his parents
and his four children, they had all eaten the buffalo together.
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But what else could they do on that dark winter's day when the last
of their store of grain was gone, when the trees were cut and sold,
when he had sold everything, even the little they had saved from
the flood, and there was nothing left except the rafters of the
house they had and the garments they wore?
Was there sense in stripping the coat off one's back to feed
one's belly?
Besides, the beast was starving also, since the water had covered
even the grass lands, and they had had to go far afield to gather
even enough to cook its bones and flesh.
On that day when he had seen the faces of his old parents set
as though dead, on that day when he had heard the crying of his
children and seen his little daughter dying, such a despair
had seized him as made him like a man without his reason,
so that he had gathered together his feeble strength and he
had done what he said he never would; he had taken the kitchen
knife and gone out and killed his own beast.
When he did it, even in his despair, hee groaned, for it was
as though he killed his own brother.
To him it was the last sacrifice.
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Yet it was not enough.
No, they grew hungry again and there was nothing left to kill.
Many of the villagers went south to other places, or they
went down the river to beg in the great cities.
But he, Liu the farmer, had never begged.
Moreover, it seemed to him then that they must all die and
the only comfort left was to die on their own land.
His neighbor had come and begged him to set forth with them;
yes, he had even said he would carry one of the old parents
on his back so that Liu might carry the other, seeing that
his own old father was already dead.
But Liu had refused, and it was well, for in the next two
days the old mother was dead, and if she had died on the
way he could only have cast her by the roadside lest the
others be delayed and more of them die.
As it was he could put her safely into their own ground,
although he had been so weak that it had taken him three days
to dig a hole deep enough for her little old withered body.
And then before he could get her buried he and his wife had
quarreled over the poor few clothes on the old body.
His wife was a hard woman and she would have buried the old
mother naked, if he had let her, so as to have the clothes
for the children.
But he made her leave on the inner coat and trousers; although
they were only rags after all, and when he saw the cold earth
against his old mother's flesh-well, that was sorrow for a man,
but it could not be helped.
Three more he had buried somehow, his old father and his baby
daughter and the little boy who had never been strong.
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That was what the winter's famine had taken from them.
It would have taken them all except that in the great pools
lying everywhere, which were left from the flood, there were
shrimps, and these they had eaten raw and were still eating,
although they were all sick with a dysentery that would
not get well.
In the last day or so his wife had crawled out and dug a
few sprouting dandelions.
But there was not fuel and so they also were eaten raw.
But the bitterness was good after the tasteless flesh of
the raw shrimps.
Yes, spring was coming.
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He sat on heavily, looking out over his land.
If he had his buffalo back, if he had his plow that they
had burned for fuel, he could plow the land.
But when he thought of this as he did many times every day,
he felt helpless as a leaf tossed upon the flood.
The buffalo was gone; gone also his plow and every implement
of wood and bamboo, and what other had he?
Sometimes in the winter he had felt grateful that at least
the flood had not taken all the house as it had so many
other houses.
But now suddenly it came to him that he could be grateful for
nothing, no, not even that he had his life left him and the
life of his wife and the two older children.
He felt tears come into his eyes slowly as they had not even
come when he buried by the rags which had comforted him
that day.
But now he was comforted by nothing.
He muttered to himself.
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"I have no seed to plant in the land. There the land lies! I
could go and claw it up with my hands if I had the seed and
the land would bear. I know my good land. But I have no seed
and the land is empty. Yes, even though spring comes, we must
still starve!"
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And he looked, hopeless, into the barren spring.