The Consummation
An Excerpt from Anton Piatigorsky's The Iron Bridge

The clap of firecrackers precedes her. Hired laborer Wu has been given the important task of igniting these mini-explosions, and his gap-toothed smile as he steps away from the black smoke indicates his pleasure with the assignment. A giggle whistles through his nose as unnamed woman Luo, riding inside the Mao’s frayed sedan chair, arrives in their open courtyard. It’s been a long and bumpy ride on the shoulders of four dangerously thin peasants. The perspiring men groan as they lower her sedan onto the gravel.

She’s here, says Jen-sheng. His tiny eyes regard the arriving party through the front window. Madam Mao stands outside beside the sedan, waiting for the next phase of the ritual. She spies Jen-sheng through the window and offers him an unimpressed nod. Madam Mao is a distant relation – as are most people in Shaoshan – a dower old lady who smells of rancid congee and sweat. Nuptial families throughout Hsiangtan county gossip in teahouses about this odorous go-between, how she devours their egg noodles and taints their otherwise fragrant ceremonies. Jen-sheng notes the red lacquered box tucked underneath her arm. Empty. Luo has accepted the contract and gifts. The deal isdone. Come here, he commands his son.

No, replies the unusually tall boy nestled in the corner.

Jen-sheng turns his eyes on his eldest child. Tse-tung! Your bride!

Tse-tung cups one of his thin hands around the fingers of the other. His legs are trembling.

Now!

She’s not my bride.

Jen-sheng’s small eyes further constrict and darken. His tight-lipped frown is exaggerated by the descending tails of his mustache, two misty waterfalls, plunging off either cheek. Tse-tung! I am your father! Come and do your duty!

The boy lowers his chubby cheeks, burying his defiance behind his hanging hair. No, he repeats.

Jen-sheng’s frame seizes. Come here now, unfilial beast!

Who are you to say unfilial? rasps the boy.

His father’s mouth hangs. The gross impertinence of this child, this insect, this eldest son! Were Jen-Sheng not so eager to complete the solemn rite of marriage, he’d reach for his switch and let the boy have it.

You let grandfather rot in his chair without ever once k’ou-t’ouing, or asking his opinion, or serving him tea, or deferring! A thousand times you mocked him with Li by the pond! Called him lazy and worthless! I heard you! And stupid for pawning his land! Tse-min heard you! And you call me unfilial?

I always do my duty!

That’s another one of your futile farts.

Jen-sheng lunges a step, then balks. He blinks and sucks in his cheeks. Too many people around. Too formal an occasion. He stomps his foot on the brushed earthen floor, but the tantrum hardly relieves his mounting anger. Wen Ch’i-mei, who has been kneeling by the ancestral tablets, her pear-shaped face lowered and expressionless, stands and shuffles into the kitchen. Tse-tung watches her go.

Are you sick? Jen-sheng asks the boy.

Tse-tung smirks, but tries to hide it with his hand. Another foolish, rhetorical attack!

I don’t think so! No, you’re perfectly well! So why don’t you remember your duties? Remember the Master’s saying: ‘Give your father and mother no cause for anxiety other than illness.’ Your bride’s locked in the sedan! Waiting is not the rite!

The boy’s grin doesn’t yield. Relying on classic texts is a game his father just can’t win. It’s true, Tse-tung retorts. Waiting is not the rite. But then the Master also said: ‘If one is guided by profit in one’s actions, one will incur much ill will.’

Your wedding’s decreed by heaven! The contract accepted! Eight characters matched!
You don’t believe in that old superstition.

It’s Heaven’s will! The old man in the moon has knotted the threads!

Tse-tung tilts his head and laughs, high-pitched and girlish. Oh yes! he cries. The old man’s threads! This, from you: a father who hasn’t made an offering to his ancestors once in his life! Now it’s ‘the old man’s threads’ and ‘a marriage decreed by Heaven’ like some peasant girl! That’s really too much! You’re really full of gall! A marriage for your son precisely when it’s too much for you to manage all the new land by yourself! How thoughtful of Heaven! How fortunate the eight characters have matched so seamlessly at such a good time for your profit! With the laundry and sewing, and the pigs bursting from their sty, and the rice milling more labor than Wu can handle by himself! Are you sure Heaven hasn’t decreed a wife who can also work the abacus? That would’ve been thoughtful, too! You miser! You can’t bear to part with even one extra tael to pay for more help! And you quote the Master at me? Believe me, I know what Confucius says! ‘The gentleman understands what’s moral. The small man understands what is profitable!’

The farmhouse’s yellow mudbrick walls, sturdy by village standards, are nowhere near thick enough to mute this family dispute. Outside, in the courtyard, with the heat still oppressive although the sun’s nearly down, neither the malodorous go-between, nor the thirsty peasants, nor the grinning laborer Wu show any signs of overhearing this eldest son’s scandalous rebellion, but no doubt they’re already dreaming of returning home (or to their local teahouses) where they will gossip in earnest about Jen-sheng’s unfilial boy in Shaoshan. Woman Luo, the most hidden of the group, sitting in her locked and oven-like sedan, must also be attuned to every word of the fight, since the moods of this father and son control her fate. Each harsh phrase stabs her like a knife. The mocking grunts, the taunting laughs, the blunt refusals of a future husband: jabs to her inner organs.

Inside the house, Tse-tan, a rotund two year old, marches into the central room and baldly stares at his brother, his face full of the open curiosity which only a child can express. I think the little one’s also ready for a wife, says Tse-tung, gesturing at the boy. Are you sure Heaven hasn’t decreed that, as well?

Wen! shouts Jen-sheng. The boy’s plump mother scampers into the central room and awaits further instruction. Get him out of here!

She scoops the child over her shoulder and takes him into the kitchen. Tse-min regards his father’s on the way out.

Your problem, says Tse-tung, is that you’ve only eyes for money. Is eighty-four tan not enough for you? Still hungry for more rice? You want to be really fat? You think I can’t see your intentions? You tell Luo you’re pious – that this will be a pious home for his daughter, but your sons know better! Don’t we, Tse-min?

He has turned to his twelve-year-old brother for reinforcement. Tse-min, who has been hunched and motionless at the table, sits up shocked – Tse-tung almost never speaks to him, let alone asks for his support! He stutters some inaudible phrase, shifts and looks back and forth between sibling and father. It’s been quite a show so far, but the last thing Tse-min wants to do is to participate in the drama.

Tse-tung rolls his eyes, refusing to wait for an answer from his cowardly brother. You can’t order me around, he says. I’ll throw myself into the pond before I’ll ever follow you. And you know it!

Jen-sheng winces. It’s a painful reminder of last year’s fight. That humiliating afternoon when Li and Yang and the three elder Wens from his wife’s village over Tiger Resting Path came to his house for tea. He recalls Tse-tung’s shuffling into their home with Three Kingdoms tucked under his arm, his girlish hands clean, not a second worked in the fields that entire morning. Shameful. Of course the boy got a public berating from his embarrassed father. But then Tse-tung threw his book in the dirt, cursed his family in blasphemous terms and stormed away. He threatened to throw himself into the pond. Imagine: the eldest Mao child drowning himself, out of spite! Jen-sheng and Wen Ch’i-mei followed him to the shore, Jen-sheng demanding a k’ou-t’ou in apology. Tse-tung adamantly refused and the father had to back down in front of all his friends.

The sharp taste in Jen-sheng’s mouth as he stood by that lotus pond. That same metallic taste now spreads across his tongue: an acid of embarrassment. His throat constricts with a thirst for public affirmation, for confirmation of an indisputable fact: I am the father, the elder, head of the Mao clan – and the quenching of that thirst must come through the complete transformation of his stone-like son into liquid form. A melting. The boy kneeling before him, his watery head touching then soaking into the earthen floor. A spineless, limp and very real submission. But Jen-sheng already knows that this demand will be as futile now as it was last year. Still, he can’t help himself; he deserves an act of obeisance. This Confucian father: imprisoned and compelled.

He points sternly to the ground. K’ou-t’ou before your elder!

Tse-tung purses his small mouth and straightens his long back. When he stands at full height he’s a good head taller than his father, though still only fourteen years old. With his high and broad forehead and his mother’s sweet and taunting eyes – two rainbow arched lids with flat walls underneath – Tse-tung looks as sturdy as the brick behind him. It’s intimidating. How awful, to be terrified of one’s own son! Four tutors the boy’s been through since the end of his public schooling, but not one could temper him. Not that he hasn’t learned his texts. No, thinks Jen-sheng, this child’s command of the classics is better than mine. Every time I corner him, he turns the Master back against me! I want to keep fighting, but what can I do? My son can’t be out reasoned, can’t be physically beaten, can’t be married, or made to work the fields, or the abacus, or anything of use! Still, it’s intolerable, his insubordinate behavior, here, in front of Tse-min and Wen Ch’i-mei and the child, and with Madam Mao and her loose tongue out in the courtyard, and with Wu and those damn sedan transporters pricking open their ears! Heaven knows what they’ll say about Mao Jen-Sheng in their teahouses! I’ll be mocked! And that woman Luo stuck in my sedan, affronted by my son, an impudent groom – as if I could even dream of sending that bride back to her father! Jen-sheng: an old fool, an ignorant old fool, incapable of controlling his own child!

K’ou-t’ou! This instant!

Jen-sheng’s voice cracks. He smoothes the ends of his mustache and tries to appear magisterial. Tse-tung smiles and makes no move towards his father. To stay any longer is torture. With his cheeks darkening, Jen-sheng hurries into the kitchen, then the bedroom. Tse-tung cups his hands and enjoys his success.

Anton Piatigorsky is a recipient of the Siminovitch Protégé Award and the author of many award-winning plays, including Mysterium Tremendum, The Offering, and Easy Lenny lazmon and the Great Western Ascension. His adaptation of S. Anski’s The Dybbuk will be produced by Soulpepper in 2010.

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