An oblique shadow was approaching. It was Widow Liang.

“Hush, don’t disturb your wife. I’m just bringing a woolen vest for her. Here, take it. How is she doing?”

“Very well, and she’ll do even better with you people thinking about her.”

“I don’t know why I just want to think about her. She’s my spiritual backbone. I have to go now. Take care.”

Looking at Widow Liang’s silhouette floating along the path, Mr. Yi recalled the changes occurring in the village, especially in the younger generation. “Things are becoming the way you’d like them to be,” he said to himself.

Like his wife, Mr. Yi enjoyed reading medical books, and in his spare time from farming he thought about herbs. Actually he had learned quite a lot about herbs. But he knew that his understanding of herbal medicine was different from his wife’s. As he saw it, one needed to be “possessed” to penetrate deep into this field of research, but he wasn’t possessed. He had just told his wife about this. He felt relieved.

4
Something Unpleasant

Gray hadn’t shown up to work in Mrs. Yi’s herb garden since the rainy day. Could he be ill? Not at all. He was healthy now. He could eat three big bowls of rice at one meal. Perhaps he was seeing a woman? This was possible: he’d been seen with a girl from another village. Mrs. Yi chatted with her husband about this.

“I am so glad for him. A young man like Gray will be good for Yun Village,” Mrs. Yi said.

“I certainly hope so,” her husband said in a tone that was a little uncertain.

And so Mrs. Yi had to go to the mountains alone, as she had before. Her husband couldn’t go with her because this was the busy farming season. All he could do was pray for her safety. Sometimes Mrs. Yi had to go into the mountains because a critically ill patient needed a certain kind of herbal medicine that was better sourced in the wild than in her garden. It was only on Niulan Mountain that one could find almost any herb. Of course, they were not always easy to find. Often when she was about to despair, she told herself, “Hold on, hold on one more moment and you’ll have a harvest.” And it worked out every time. She sometimes felt lonely in the mountains without Gray. But she had been alone there before Gray showed up; she could get used to it again. Mrs. Yi stopped worrying and turned her attention back to the task at hand.

The herb she was looking for in the mountains was called patch-the-bones. In the shadow of the trees, her eyes became as sharp as an eagle’s. She murmured something. It wasn’t long before she found the herb on a tree trunk.

The drizzle thickened as she came down the hill. The path was wet and slippery. She sprained her ankle and could not move. She had to take out some of the bone patch herb that she had just picked, pound it, and apply it to her ankle. She could not bear to use more of the herb, because she needed it to treat Grandma Mao’s legs.