The Good Earth (House of Earth, #1)

by Pearl S. Buck

Now father and son could rest. There was a woman coming to the house. Never again would Wang Lung have to rise summer and winter at dawn to light the fire. He could lie in his bed and wait, and he also would have a bowl of water brought to him,

Some time, in some age, bodies of men and women had been buried there, houses had stood there, had fallen, and gone back into the earth. So would also their house, some time, return into the earth, their bodies also. Each had his turn at this earth.

His impulse was to say, “For this day you have had enough. Go and lie upon your bed.” But the aching of his own exhausted body made him cruel, and he said to himself that he had suffered as much with his labor that day as she with her childbirth, and so he only asked between the strokes of his scythe, “Is it male or female?” She answered calmly, “It is another male.”

“Now, I would not sell a child!” he said loudly. “I was sold,” she answered very slowly. “I was sold to a great house so that my parents could return to their home.” “And would you sell the child, therefore?” “If it were only I, she would be killed before she was sold … the slave of slaves was I! But a dead girl brings nothing. I would sell this girl for you—to take you back to the land.” “Never would I,” said Wang Lung stoutly, “not though I spent my life in this wilderness.”

“No, and not forever. When the rich are too rich there are ways, and when the poor are too poor there are ways. Last winter we sold two girls and endured, and this winter, if this one my woman bears is a girl, we will sell again. One slave I have kept—the first. The others it is better to sell than to kill, although there are those who prefer to kill them before they draw breath. This is one of the ways when the poor are too poor. When the rich are too rich there is a way, and if I am not mistaken, that way will come soon.”