A Map for the Missing(93)

“Don’t worry about it.” Of course none of the villagers would have gone against his mother’s wishes. He hadn’t realized until now that his mother would have had to ask everyone in the village to be complicit in keeping a secret of his father’s illness. Sometimes, her desires seemed so simple that he forgot about her ability to play the fool. She’d been the one who’d shepherded their family through the years of famine and the Cultural Revolution, flattening paper money in crannies that wouldn’t be suspected, singing the Chairman’s praises loudly in public so that there would be no doubt cast over the family’s allegiances.

“Weren’t you worried, though?” he asked abruptly. “The first day I came back, when you visited. If you’d told me then, I could have spent the rest of the days looking for him. If any of you had just told me earlier that he was in Hefei, maybe I could have found him.”

Second Uncle looked at Yitian, bewildered. “It was your father!” He shook his head to cast off the idea. “None of us were really worried about him. He was so strong, so capable. Nobody thought anything really bad had happened. We thought he’d come back at any moment.”

“But that’s not how it works. The disease worsens over time.”

“I didn’t really understand how bad things could get.” Second Uncle sighed. “But how could we? I couldn’t have ever imagined anything happening to your father that he couldn’t get out of himself. When that thing happened with his leg, he started moving more slowly. Even that was a big shock to me. I just always thought he was invincible, I suppose. Even when we were kids, he was our leader.”

“He’d gotten older, though. He wasn’t the same anymore.”

“You wouldn’t understand, because you didn’t know your father when he was younger.”

“Maybe.”

“And I’m sure your father never told you about his past.”

He continued on, oblivious to Yitian’s impatience. “There was a little gang of five of us. Big Mosquito and Tang Yuan—they both died before you were born, so you wouldn’t have known them. One in a truck accident and the other drowned. And then Fourth Brother Tang, he was always a little smarter than the rest of us, so he moved to the township. But yes, even though he wasn’t the largest, your father was our leader.” He chuckled. “He was a bit of a bully, to be honest. He’d decide what to do and the rest of us would just follow his plans. It was so funny to see him threatening Big Mosquito. But he always won. If he wanted to go steal watermelons, we did that. If he wanted to go throw sticks at some of the girls, we’d go do that. Everyone was a little scared of us.”

“Then why did you all stay with him, if he was such a bully?” The child Second Uncle described sounded just like the father Yitian knew as an adult.

“Well, everything he did was something that we other kids wanted to do, but we would have been too afraid to try if it wasn’t for him. So it wasn’t hard to be convinced. Anyway, your father wasn’t all bad. You know that. He took care of your family and did all the things that mattered. You have to be grateful for that.”

“I am.”

“Good. Because your father didn’t have it easy, you know. What with your grandfather not helping at all. Your father led that family from a young age, and we all admired him for that. Perhaps that’s why it was easy to listen to him.”

“What do you mean?”

“I already told you. He was our leader—”

“Not about that. I mean, what you said about my father not having it easy.”

“Oh, he must have told you about that before. After your grandfather was denounced, it was your father who had to do everything for the family.”

“No, that can’t be true.”

Second Uncle laughed loudly, then quieted. “What do you mean? Of course it’s true! You think I’m lying to you?”

“But my grandfather—”

“You must have noticed that your grandfather couldn’t really do work, all these years.”

“That can’t be right.”

“When did you see your grandfather doing farmwork?”

Yitian had scattered memories of his grandfather’s back bent with a hoe, but that was all. And if he was truthful to himself, there was a rigidity to the movement he saw in his mind, unlike the way his father or Yishou held their tools.

“We thought he would have learned, but he just couldn’t pick it up. Always would end up hurting himself if he so much as tried to pick up one of the tools. Of course, we weren’t able to help him, you understand. We could have gotten in trouble, because he’d been labeled a counterrevolutionary early on . . . and your grandfather—I know you were close with him, Yitian, but he was different when he got older, so forgive me—he always seemed as if he wasn’t really trying to learn, either. As if he thought he was above it all.”

All throughout Yitian’s childhood, the villagers who came to speak to his grandfather lavished praise upon him. At times the words of awe sounded exaggerated—his grandfather doing such an ordinary thing as holding a book in his hand enough for them to say he belonged in the imperial court—but Yitian had always assumed that their behavior was out of respect for him as an elder and the holder of a kind of book learning uncommon in the village. Now, he saw a different interpretation—perhaps what he’d always seen as reverence for his grandfather was the remnant of people who were ashamed for how they’d once refused to help him.