The Sinews of Love

by Alexander Cordell

Genres: Historical Fiction; Sagas; Multicultural & Interracial Romance

Synopsis

Orphaned by a tidal wave which claims her parents and her home, Ming Pei Sha is at the mercy of a world of human squalor and degradation. Destitute, she sells her body in a loveless match with an old businessman desperate for a son. Pei Sha witnesses first-hand the savage contrasts of the teeming city of Hong Kong, where the affluence and extravagance of the financiers' palaces cannot hide the appalling poverty of the slums. A city where and ancient and proud civilisation struggles against the corruption and greed of the modern age.

Release date: July 24, 2014

Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton

Print pages: 272

Sample

HONG KONG HELD its breath at the end of the Great Heat.

For in the month of September, in the year I was fifteen, there came a big wind from the sea, a sea-bitch that built a wave twenty feet high in the estuary of Shatin, and the wave came roaring in from Tolo and swept people away to die. Many of these were Tan-gar, the fisher-folk of my clan. Yet I remember this September not because of the great typhoon, not even for my birthday. I remember it because Orla, my sister, whom we called Gold Sister because of her beauty, was sold by my father to a dealer in women for a marriage of the bed.

This, the old ones say, is the sinews of love.

The baked earth flung up strange smells after a month of summer flame, and the curved tile roofs of Fo Tan, my village, flared red under a typhoon sky of bronze. The distant peaks of Tai Mo Shan were shrouded with swansdown clouds, the sea waving green and crested, spuming with joy at the thought of the coming slaughter.

‘Pei Sha,’ said Orla, my sister, ‘a big wind is coming,’ and she took pins from her mouth and put them in her hair, turning her head this way and that in the big Ming family mirror which once belonged to my grandfather in Kwangtung. Next she said, spitting on her fingers and tying her hair into a top-knot, ‘The storm signal is up in the Navy Yard on Hong Kong island. This morning your Big Nose Ginger missionary man do say a typhoon is coming.’

This rudeness angered me. Turning over in bed, I replied, ‘Do not worry. Suelen will see to it when she wakes.’

‘This wind will see to Suelen,’ she said. ‘Hei Ho Fat Woman do say that come night it will be standing on the tails of ten thousand cats.’

With eyes narrowed in pretended sleep, I watched her, and Orla was beautiful. At sixteen she was a woman with all the curves belonging to a woman. Preening, grimacing, she lifted her cheongsam skirt in the mirror, looking over her shoulder.

‘How’s that for a leg, Little Sister?’

‘I have seen better on Butcher Lai’s meat stall.’

‘That is because you are only a sister,’ and she pulled her skirt to the thigh. ‘A leg like that can send the boys raving.’

‘You hush, lest Suelen do hear you,’ I said, fearful. In a dream Orla replied:

‘You know, Pei Sha, if I slit this old skirt up to the waist they wouldn’t know sixteen from twenty.’

“Whisht! You will waken Suelen!”

Orla groaned. ‘Ai-yah! It is always hush for old Suelen. Soon she will not bother me for I will be in Tai Po – and if she had legs like mine I expect she’d be showing them.’ Then she went to the wash corner, slopped water into a basin, peeled off her dress and drawers and there was nothing on her. Bare as an egg she bent over the cot of our baby brother Tuk Un, sweeting and kissing the air above him in love, then she was head first into the bowl, splashing and bubbling.

I watched her. With my hands on my tiny breasts, I watched, for I would have had them as large and beautiful as Orla’s. Often I had seen the city girls washing behind the windows of slum Kowloon, the lamp-light gleaming on their sun-black bodies, all as slim as boys, being Cantonese. But Orla’s body was as white as an English girl’s – unusual for a Tan-gar – with the same curves and roundness. This is the body of a concubine, my father used to say, and it should be treasured with oil and perfumes. And it will bring us trouble – we who have had no child born out of wedlock for generations; better she gives joy in a rich man’s bed than roam the alleys like a bitch-dog and bring me home a litter of pups.

Then Suelen, my big sister, would look over her chopsticks with lights in her eyes and stare at my father with disdain. This, my wonderful Suelen!

Now, trying to forget Orla, I sat up in bed and got out a book for studying, but I heard a shout from the fields and above the stumps I saw Hui, my young brother, running in the window and he shouted wildly, his voice a reed above the summer music.

‘Orla, get dressed,’ I cried, ‘Hui is coming!’

‘And welcome. There is nothing on me he has not seen before.’

‘But boys are with him!’

‘That makes them lucky. There is nothing like education,’ which was one for me.

And as she said it the door went back on its hinges. ‘Aha, got her!’ cried Hui. ‘Fat old Orla bare again, look boys!’

He was ten years old, a man before his time – chasing the village girls already, stalking the English boys for fighting, and I loved him enough to eat him. Hands on hips he stood in the doorway, grinning, muddy from the Shatin fishing, and his horrible friends were peeping round his legs.

‘Hui!’ I gasped, shocked.

‘In boys, in,’ he cried. ‘Ten cents a time. Fat old Orla, in!’

‘Bitch-dogs, running dogs!’ cried Orla, snatching at a towel and swiping.

And then Hui stared past me at Suelen’s straw bed, his expression changing, and ducked and ran, followed by his friends. For Suelen was rising on her elbows. Pushing her black hair from her face, she stared, her great eyes moving darkly under her heavy brows. Orla froze too, gripping her hands.

‘How dare you,’ whispered Suelen, ‘cover yourself decent.’

Suelen was not my true sister, but a Hakka – one of the guest-people brought into service centuries back by rich Cantonese. My parents had adopted her after finding her wandering homeless in a Kwangtung famine when she was six years old, and they had taken her in for free labour with the idea of selling her later, but there was no beauty in her. Now aged twenty-four, Suelen was as big and broad as a northern man. She rose from the bed, shaking out her glorious, black hair, her eyes shining with disgust and anger.

‘There is no shame in you, Orla – naked before a pack of boys.’

Orla did not reply, but her eyes were flashing threats at Hui, and him sitting on the step now, whittling at a new fishing prong, all grins and wickedness.

‘Nor shame in you either,’ cried Suelen, lifting him with her foot. ‘Away outside while your sister dresses, or I flay you!’

Hui floundered and ran and she watched him go with smiling eyes, for Hui was the make-believe son of her womb she had fashioned without the help of a man, since none desired her. Faintly came Hui’s cries to his friends on the heated air, and the wind came down from the mountains and whimpered over the sea, breathing typhoon. Suelen said to me:

‘You better, child?’

‘Ah.’

‘Did the American missionary man come today?’

Orla said, with one leg in her drawers, ‘He came, but Pei was sleeping. He left the cholera medicine for her, and more books.’

‘Books?’ Suelen swung to me. ‘You did not tell me this. Show me.’

I protested, ‘Suelen, they are only come this morning!’

Her face was wonderful to see, for she loved learning. ‘Show me now, Pei Sha!’

She was always pestering me about the studying. Because my brain was sharp, she and the missionary kept me at it night and day – even now, on the eighteenth day of my cholera, she was at me about the books. While the other girls were out in the night markets with their boys, I was studying. But although I was top of my form in Fo Tan village school, my father turned his face from me, for I was a girl, not a son. Now, drearily, I brought the books from under the blanket, saying, ‘The missionary brought two books. That one is silly old English. This one is a part of the lovely Dream of the Red Chamber, and is in Chinese.’

‘You have finished it?’

‘Tin Hau! It is a hundred pages and I have only just got it, woman.’

‘Do not blaspheme, do you hear me?’ She clasped my hands. ‘Read every word, little precious – every word – hear me?’

‘And where will reading get her?’ asked Orla. ‘Papa is right for once. Reading is for men, and education is lies.’

Suelen said softly, ‘Read, read, Pei Sha. To read is life – do not the great scholars say this – even Ku Yen-wu, of whom you speak?’

Orla said at the mirror, ‘Well, this one cannot read a damned word, but she has better things to speak for her. And I will be back from Tai Po in silk long before Pei Sha’s study buys a cloth jacket.’

‘O, aye?’ Suelen turned. ‘What is good enough for you is bad for Pei Sha, for she is brilliant in the head. And one day when she travels on the Star Ferry to work in the Bank of China she will thank God for me.’

‘And when will all this happen?’ asked Orla wearily.

Suelen rose. ‘She will not labour in the fields or in a rich man’s bed like you, for I can buy an earth coolie for a few dollars a day and a rich man’s joy almost as cheaply.’

‘This is a pity,’ said Orla, preening in the mirror. ‘The rates should be higher.’

In the afternoon the sky grew dark and the wind rose to a higher note of anger. Tuk Un, my Second Brother, awoke and reached for Suelen, as always, and she was having him on her knee for cooing when my mama came in with the breast milk which sent him crowing delighted, for he was ten months old and a nipple hunter. Mama came in laughing, as always, wiping away rain. Little and fat was my mother on the stool, all sunlight and chatters, her savings bright gold in her smiles as Tuk Un hammered her and sucked. ‘Wheeah,’ she said, ‘that is a wind indeed! You are safest nursing the old cholera, Pei, for they are tying things down all over town. Even the kidneys are flying kites on Butcher Lai’s meat stall and Hei Ho Fat Woman’s is flat on its face already, with pots and pans bowling, and serve her right.’ She kissed Tuk Un, smelled him deep, gasped with joy, and shifted him on to the other one. ‘No sign of Papa?’

‘Time he was back from Shatin or I will not be going to Tai Po tonight,’ said Orla.

Mama nodded, her eyes sad. ‘I know that road. If Shatin floods neither Papa nor the merchant man will arrive tonight.’

‘Best place for the pair of them,’ said Suelen, ‘stuck in Shatin.’

Mama frowned. ‘Soon the ferries will stop.’

‘All the aeroplanes are flat on the ground at Kai Tak airport,’ whispered Hui, now in bed with me. ‘Force Seven—what does it mean?’

Suelen said at nothing, ‘If Shatin floods and Papa does not come tonight this will show Tin Hau’s displeasure at the sale of a daughter – do you realise?’ And my mama’s eyes went wide at this, for she and Papa were Tan-gar, and Tin Hau, the Queen of Heaven, was their god above all gods. Mama said softly, ‘Suelen, Orla will obey her father. Let that be the end of it. Finish now.’

Suelen straightened. ‘I am not started. I will start when Papa and the dealer in women arrive,’ and she made a fist of her hand and went round the room like a caged tiger, thumping her palm. My mother said:

‘Suelen, you are adopted, not a natural daughter. Keep your place!’

My sister lowered her face. Softly now, ‘Yes, Mama.’

‘Then remember. Orla is of this family. You are Hakka. You are not even of our blood – though we love you, you are not of the clan. Leave this to Papa.’

I pitied Suelen. She worked on the building sites seven days a week, like all earth coolies, for just over a dollar an hour. Often I had seen her under the poles, her buttocks twisting expertly to the loads – a trick of the earth coolies, for a load is time, not weight. Now Orla said joyfully, ‘Do not look so evil, Suelen. Soon I will be home with big money. No longer will you labour equal with men or Hui shine shoes along the Praya, and Papa can buy his big junk and sail to Shanghai and Amoy!’

‘With the money he gets for selling his child,’ said Suelen bitterly.

‘Listen!’ commanded Hui, his finger up, and the silence screamed. In a lull of the sighing wind we heard it again; footsteps.

‘They come,’ said Hui. ‘Papa and the dealer in women.’

I sat up in the bed. Suelen grew tense. Mama gave Tuk Un to Hui and fought to get them away, and Orla rose to her feet by the mirror, her head back, smiling, drawing her hands down her fine, curved body.

My father came first, bowing the dealer in, subservient as always. The merchant came, severe in his black mandarin gown, and I saw a face arrogant with wealth; pouched eyes as lazy-lidded as a rice crow’s. How strange is life that I should later know this man Wing Sui so well. Stranger, as if I had called to him he fixed his eyes on me.

‘Three daughters, eh, Ming? Lucky man.’

‘Better – I have also two sons,’ said Papa, ‘but only one daughter is for sale. You will not want the biggest, and the youngest is just out of the cholera. Orla, come!’

Orla swaggered to him, copying the actresses, but she was like beef at market, hips wiggling. Nodding approval, the dealer walked slowly round her, and said, ‘She is a bag of hay. She stands like a slattern and walks like a hoyden, but we will mend her. Yes, Ming, four thousand dollars.’

‘And two hundred,’ said my father, screwing at his hands.

Shocked, Wing Sui swung to him. ‘You twist the bargain we made in Shatin. Four thousand, not a cent more.’

‘And two hundred. Four thousand two hundred dollars I need to buy a share in a junk and take my family back to the sea.’

‘I shall not break the bargain! Four thousand – two thousand now, two thousand when she completes her apprenticeship.’ The dealer folded his arms. Suelen said, ‘Papa, you bargain for the body of your child as if she were a common whore.’

‘Four thousand two hundred now or I raise the price higher,’ cried my father, and the dealer shrugged and turned towards the door, saying:

‘Keep her. I can buy European women near that figure.’

‘Then buy them, whoremonger,’ said Suelen, but my father ran and slammed the door and flung out his hands in supplication. The dealer sighed, smiling, and said:

‘That is better. Four thousand, and half paid now.’ His smile faded and he turned to Suelen. ‘And keep a knife near that woman’s tongue for she doesn’t know the length of it.’

My father snatched the money from his hand, and counted it. Sickened, I turned away. In moments Orla was bending over me.

‘Goodbye, Pei Sha,’ she said.

I heard brief chatter, the merchant’s barked goodbyes. When I looked again all were gone save Mama, who was putting Tuk Un to bed, and Suelen standing against the wall by the Ming mirror. She was weeping. This was strange since I had never seen Suelen weep before.

IN THE MORNING I watched my father dress and this he did with great care lest he be uncovered. Buttoning his jacket he came to my bed and stood there with the money for Orla in his hands, and said:

‘Pei Sha, do you see this money? Had you earned your keep instead of mooning your life away with school and books, your sister might not have been sold.’

‘Yes, Papa.’

He added, ‘I prefer brilliance in sons, and I thank God for Hui and Tuk Un for I have had my fill of women.’

‘And we our fill of men,’ said Suelen, coming in from the yard. Dull anger was stirring on her mouth. There was a fine grace in her as she stood there defiant to my father, this coming from the head loads of her childhood. Her cheeks were broad and flat, her nostrils wide and her teeth large and shining, and with her great, slanted eyes she watched my father with a smouldering calm as he spread the bank notes on the floor before the altar of Tin Hau our goddess, the Queen of Heaven: lighting two joss sticks, he kowtowed, and said over his shoulder, ‘Today we travel to Sai Kung, back to the sea-life. Only those who walk will get there since I will not wait for laggards.’

Hui came in fighting the door, for the wind was rising to a fury in the fields. Hearing this, he said, ‘Never mind, Papa. If old Pei cannot walk I will carry her – on my back I will carry her like a donkey.’

‘She walks like the rest of us,’ said Papa.

‘She rides,’ said Suelen, staring down at him. My father scrambled to his feet, defiant, then turned away. Hui said joyfully, ‘She rides! What Suelen says do go for me, eh, Papa?’

A word about First Brother while on the subject.

He was thick in the shoulders and dark handsome, for he had fed while the rest of us starved. His teeth were white in his wide Tan-gar smile and there was a great joy in him, for life itself was a wand of magic to be bent to his will. For his living he shoe-shined along the Kowloon pavements and the Hong Kong Praya, and sometimes I went with him, for I loved the waterfront. It is strange and wonderful sitting there with Hui watching the people pass. Here, with the harbour tide slamming along the old stone quays go the big American sailors like great, white Peking ducks, some with shrill Chinese street-women hanging on their arms.

‘Two more dead by dawn,’ Hui would say and the boys would giggle and roll on the pavements, which I thought disgusting.

But oh, I do love the Hong Kong Praya! Here is a honk honk of geese and the quack quack of ducks and the roar of the traffic thunders and crashes when the ferries barge in from Yaumati and drop their jaws to the surge of cars. There the uniformed policemen with their graceful dances and accusing fingers stand, unheeding of the hatreds; now pass the cheongsam ladies, upswept at the bosom, undone at the knees, their radiant faces bright in sunlight; now cat-women, those with purrs, says Hui, their whiskers deep in the cream of life, a sigh a dollar: all this and more you see along the Praya which will be alive when the world is dead, says Suelen.

‘Phstt!’ I put my fingers to my lips now and Hui sauntered across to me. We waited until my father gathered up the bank notes and went out with a glare at Suelen. And the moment he was gone Suelen got Hui’s ear and held him.

‘Listen, you – Pei Sha needs to go to see her American missionary man, and you will take her.’

‘Down to Shatin? Two miles?’ he protested. ‘I am not an elephant!’

‘There was big talk just now!’

Suelen said, ‘You will take her in Papa’s old rickshaw.’

‘You are as addled as ten-year eggs, the pair of you.’

‘Hui,’ I said, ‘if you take me to the American missionary man I will give you a Bank of Hell note for a hundred and fifty thousand dollars.’

‘That is money,’ said Suelen drily.

‘For the Festival of Ghosts?’ He grimaced as boys do. ‘But that is just finished!’

‘Next year will come,’ I answered. ‘The money can be pledged in the meantime.’

‘I will take you. Money now!’

‘Money afterwards,’ said Suelen, ‘you are worse than your father.’

‘Quick then – on my back and away before Papa comes back!’

Out of the bed with me and on to Hui’s back and he ran down the alley slum to the hole where the rickshaw stood, and into the back I went and into the shafts went Hui, and down to Shatin he raced to the mission of the American doctor, to the one who had taught me and nursed me through this illness. I could not leave Fo Tan village without this goodbye, for this one, like the men and women of the World Lutheran Service, and scores of other societies, were giving back to Hong Kong what the money-bags were taking out of it.

After this sad goodbye to a saint, Hui and I came back to Fo Tan to be one with our own people, for that afternoon we were leaving our village.

What is there in an unnumbered shanty hut on a hillside that clutches at the heart? Shielding my eyes from the fierce sun, I looked at my village. Below me the tin roofs criss-crossed the bright green of the valley; beyond was a maze of alleys where children played noisily, the big, yellow house of Head Man Leung, the stall shops, the place of the compradore. And farther still lay the quicksilver sheen of Tolo Harbour and bright islands swarming to a glaring horizon. The threatened wind has dropped and some say this is the eye of the typhoon, its lull, but we do not believe it; we are still travelling to Sai Kung. Look! Below are the green swamps of the paddy fields, the terraced hills of the market gardeners whose red-roofed hovels splash the green with blood, a torn battlefield of flowing rice where the black-hatted Hakka work. What is there in this bit of ancient China that grips the heart?

Every inch of this black earth floor I know, for I have watched it through illness after illness, hunger after hunger: every stain on the faded walls is a demon king or dragon. From every corner comes the smell of incense, of sweet and sour pork when times were good and the bitter bite of black bread when times were bad – and oh! – the crunched sugar-cane and sweet mooncakes on the mid-autumn festivals! Ai-yah! And when the New Year came blazing in on his firecrackers and feasting, the rat-holes of that hut danced with joy. There, behind the curtain, came the hot, sweet smell of blood and a gasping and faint cries when Mama brought forth Tuk Un, though she made no sound, for Suelen was off shift and sleeping, she said.

‘Wheeah!’ cried Hui, ‘Mama, Suelen – look, Pei Sha is crying!’

‘I am not,’ I said, indignant.

For we were outside the hut now and the villagers were crowding about us, and then there were prayers and a clattering of shoulder-poles and who had got the Ming mirror for God’s sake and who the devil suggested travelling to Sai Kung on market day never mind typhoon, for the crowds will be packed like herrings in ice-cubes.

The village was shouting, throwing out its arms to us, Head Man Leung was bowing deep, for we were leaving with a fair name and all debts paid.

‘Kiss your village,’ said Suelen, ‘in your heart, Ming Pei Sha.’

‘Goodbye, Fo Tan,’ I said.

The family, led by my father, got moving. Papa first, bowed under his bamboo shoulder-pole, him with pots and cans and bedding, then came me in the rickshaw – what you could see of me, for you know what it is like when you move – with Hui in the shafts again, then Suelen, her big rush baskets bouncing on her pole, next Mama with Tuk Un on her back blowing bubbles and shouting with excitement, and away we went at speed to impress the neighbours. Now, at the junction with the Shatin road we stopped and looked back and saw a forest of hands and heard the cheering, and were proud. And we were filled with a new and tremendous joy, for we were going back to the craft of the sea, which had been the birthright of the Mings for centuries. After four stagnant years of being anchored to the land by the typhoon that had smashed our big junk, we were running for the oceans again, for the shimmering snapper fish and garoupa, the big crab-snares, the lobster-cages for the floating restaurants of Shatin and Aberdeen, and there was an excitement gripping me at the very thought of it, a joy of adventure that does not lie in books.

‘Faster!’ cried Papa.

Now, with afternoon closing upon us the sun shone with a sudden and terrifying splendour, and the estuary became jewelled and glittering with heat. A mile above the crag which the English call Amah Rock a cloud was gathering, great, black, like a bag of fury, its base fire-shot, its billows crowned with copper hue, its edges with a glaring whiteness. All that morning the wind had been blustering and crying and sweeping up the sea now the day was quiet. Suelen, now leading, stopped by the roadside and lowered her burdens.

‘The typhoon is coming,’ she said, pointing.

‘The typhoon is gone,’ said Papa.

‘But the big winds sometimes turn,’ protested Mama. My father buttoned his coat.

‘Forget the wind, come or go. Before its first gust we will be safe in Sai Kung.’ He got under his shoulder-pole and straightened. ‘We go.’

‘Pray to your gods,’ Suelen whispered, and I heard her and said nothing.

It was two o’clock when we reached Shatin.

Stand reverently aside to the passing funeral, everybody in white; wince to the clash of cymbals, the brazen blasts of trumpets, for somebody important has died. We did not guess, as we waited for a path, that death would visit many more in Shatin before the night was out. Now came the mourners supported by relatives, then the professional mourners, their six-inch nose-drips telling the grief of those left, their cries heart-rending in the heated air. Papa was impatient of life, never mind death. On he went, his load barging people aside.

‘Hey-ho, hey-hoaah! Watch your legs there, here is a live family on the move! Heyaah!’ and he plunged into the stall crowds of Shatin with my poor little Hui straining in the shafts and Mama and Suelen following, all sweating tigers. Now to the sea-front, to the jam-packed spars of Tan-gar and Hoklo, the boat-people, for here the sea-children mate with the land. And the stalls of the vendors were filled to overflowing – for those with the money to buy – sugar-coated lotus seeds, roasted cock-roaches, golden wheat and black beans, chicken giblets fried crisp and red and a hundred miles of fat pork sausages that brings the spit to the mouth. Pig slices and steam-rollered duck starts rumbles in empty bellies, soya beans spilled over great dried fish whose sightless eyes held the dull complaint that life should treat them so: beset with flies, whole hogs hung crucified on doors, their pinioned vitals sweating in the heat, the blistered fat of their entrails flinging off their reek of dying. Sadly for me, for I love the crowds and commotion, the stalls die away behind us. Again the wind threatens, says Suelen. Near Tai Wai, in the shade of a frangipani tree we rested, and there was peace away from the dust of the road and the sweating agony of the poles. Outstretched like vagrants, we slept, and while we slept the wind rose, and when we awoke the sea was going mad in the estuary and was building a great wall of water out beyond Tolo, the junk men said.

For the first time I was afraid.

We boiled rice over a wood fire, I remember, and Suelen said, ‘Papa, the tide in the estuary is higher, I can smell brine in the wind.’

For there is no nose in this world like the nose on a Hakka.

My father did not reply.

‘Ming Ho,’ said Mama, ‘listen to that wind. There is no sense in camping on low ground in Shatin. We should be travelling on the track to the hills.’

And even Hui, returning from a squatting, said, ‘I did speak to a village girl and she did tell me that the Big Nose Gingers have put up Force Nine in the Navy Yard, and that the typhoon has turned again and is coming for Hong Kong. I called to her, but she began to cry, and ran.’

My father said, ‘Would you believe the stupid Navy before the word of a Tan-gar fisherman? My grandfather sailed the Hankow bore and the secrets of typhoons he handed on to me.’

Suelen said at nothing, ‘Rest his bones in peace. He knows a typhoon best who died in one,’ and she settled herself back in the thick, lush grass with all the time in the world. Such was my father’s mood that nobody protested again, but I saw Mama watching the sky. With her rice-bowl in one hand and sticks in the other she supped the rice through her strong white teeth, gasping and swallowing. And miles above her in the copper sky there began a low sighing and rumbling. Mist began to swirl among the peaks of Ma On Shan, wreathing in billows across the canyons of the sky as if in haste to deluge the brittle land.

Rising, my father said, ‘Suelen, Pei Sha, Hui, follow me,’ and we did so until we came to a little glade where, on a mossy bank, stood two urns of burial. Papa said:

‘Look well on these urns for they contain the bones of my parents long since dead. With my ow. . .