Chapter :
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Chapter 5

LESS THAN A WEEK AFTER SHE HAD WALKED up the path to greet her husband, Moon Scent
already felt completely settled down, as if she had never been away.
In the morning Gold Root worked in the courtyard, splitting bamboos into halves, then slicing them thin. After this he rested for a while, He dragged out two huge baskets from indoors, fetched a chair, and sat down facing the baskets, smoking his long pipe. They were hand-some to look at, made with split bamboos woven into a pattern of big white and pale green squares.
Then, squatting on the ground, he passed the long slices of bamboo through the basket to make a handle. He grew hot from working so he removed his padded jacket and piled it on the chair.
A younger cousin returning from the hills carried on his shoulder a bundle of quivering long bamboos eight or nine yards in length. Coming into the courtyard, he shed the bamboos on the ground with a tremendous crash. Gold Root did not even look up.
Moon Scent came out and sat under the eaves mend-ing the jacket Gold Root had taken off. They both sat facing the sun, Gold Root more out in front. The sun sailed slowly into the clouds and emerged as slowly. The earth brightened and dulled many times. But the hus-band and wife never once spoke to each other.
With the warmth of the sun upon her, Moon Scent felt itchy at the waist. She lifted her jacket, revealing a good deal of yellowish pale flesh. She scratched the skin into a dull red flush, then, inspired by a sudden sus-picion, seized Gold Root's jacket. She spread it out and looked it over carefully. Nothing there. Then, turning one sleeve inside out, she went on with her mending.
When Gold Root finished the handle of a basket, he would set one foot inside and try to lift it by the handle. The handle remained firm. Big Uncle hurried by with his hands inside his sleeves, but seeing the new basket he stopped to set one foot inside and try the strength of the handle, too. Finding it satisfactory, he walked away without a word. Other kinsmen crossed the courtyard. Every one of them paused to step on the basket and try the handle, only to pass on without comment.
Moon Scent brought out bowls and chopsticks and set them on the table in the open. In the middle of the table she placed a bowl of blackish cubes of salted vegetables, and on one side a tall wooden bucket holding the rice gruel. Beckon had appeared from nowhere to hang around the table.
"Hey, come have your lunch," Gold Root called out gaily to the child, quite unnecessarily, since his daughter had already fetched her own stool. The first time he picked up some vegetable with his chopsticks he de-posited it in her bowl.
Moon Scent scarcely touched the vegetable. It was unseemly for a woman to be too interested in tasty things. But when Gold Root turned to refill his bowl she quickly took some of it, twice.
A yellow dog looking for nonexistent scraps under the table burrowed under Gold Root's chair. The fluffy tail waved at Gold Root's rear exactly as if it were Gold Root's tail.
Big Aunt passed by. She craned her neck to have a good look at what they were eating. Then she walked on without saying anything. Recently there had been a cool-ness between them because Big Aunt suspected, probably justly, that Sister-in-Law Gold Have Got was always complaining about her to Moon Scent, about her injustice, her perpetual nagging.
Way up high on the white wall there were little pic-tures painted in black ink, a spray of orchids enclosed in a fan-shaped border, and a hexagon framing a sheathed rapier and a stringed instrument-things that were as far removed from their lives as the moon. And the topmost picture, faded by half a century of wind and rain, was faint as a morning moon.
Gold Root finished eating first. He turned his chair around and deliberately, it seemed, sat with his back toward Moon Scent as he hunched forward smoking his long pipe.