Red Sorghum

1

WHAT TURNS THE sorghum of Northeast Gaomi Township into a sweet, aromatic wine that leaves the taste of honey in your mouth and produces no hangover? Mother told me once, making sure I understood that I was not to give away this family secret, for, if I did, not only would our family’s reputation suffer, but if our descendants ever decided to set up another distillery they’d have lost their unique advantage. Without exception, the craftsmen from our neck of the woods live by a simple rule: they would rather pass on their skills to their sons’ wives than to their daughters. This established practice carries the same weight as the law in certain countries.

Mother said that the distillery was already a going concern under the operation of the Shan family. The wine they made wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t nearly as aromatic and rich as the wine that would come later, and it lacked the honeyed after-taste. The incident that resulted in the unique flavour of our wine occurred after Granddad murdered the Shans, and Grandma, following a brief period of discomposure, pulled herself together to display her natural entrepreneurial skills.

Like so many important discoveries that spring from chance origins or a prankster’s whim, the unique qualities of our wine were created when Granddad pissed in one of the wine casks. How could a man’s piss turn a common cask of wine into a wine of unique distinction? you ask. Well, this takes us into the realm of science, and you won’t hear any nonsense on the subject from me. Let those interested in the chemistry of brewing toss the matter around.

Later on, in order to improve upon the process, Grandma and Uncle Arhat hit upon the idea of substituting the alkali from old chamber pots for fresh piss — it was simpler, more efficient, and more controlled. This secret was shared only by Grandma, Granddad, and Uncle Arhat. I understand that the blending was done late at night, when everyone else was asleep. Grandma would light a candle in the yard, burn a wad of three hundred bank notes, then pour the liquid into the wine casks from a thin-necked gourd. She did it grandly, with an air of sublime mystery, in case there were prying eyes, for the astonished peeping Toms would assume that she was communing with spirits to seek divine assistance for the business. From then on, our wine prevailed over all our competitors’, nearly cornering the market.

2

AFTER THE WEDDING, Grandma returned to her parents’ home to spend three days before heading back to her in-laws’. She had no appetite during those three days, her mind distracted. Great-Grandma cooked all her favourite foods and tried to coax her into eating, but she refused everything and moped around the house like the walking dead. Even then her appearance didn’t suffer: her skin remained milky, her cheeks rosy; her bright eyes, set in dark sockets, looked like small moons glowing through the mist. ‘You little urchin,’ Great-Grandma grumbled, ‘do you think you’re an immortal or a Buddha who doesn’t need to eat or drink? You’ll be the death of your own mother!’ She looked at Grandma, who sat as composed as the Guanyin bodhisattva, two tiny white tears slipping out of the corners of her eyes.

Great-Granddad awoke from his drunken stupor on the second day of Grandma’s return, and immediately recalled Shan Tingxiu’s promise to give him a big black mule. His ears rang with the rhythmic clippety-clop of the mule’s hooves as it flew down the road. Such a mule: fetching black eyes like tiny lanterns, hooves like little goblets. ‘You old ass,’ Great-Grandma said anxiously, ‘your daughter won’t eat. What are we going to do?’

Great-Granddad glanced out of the corner of his drunken eyes and said. ‘She’s spoiled, spoiled rotten! Who does she think she is?’

He walked up to Grandma and said angrily, ‘What are you up to, you little tramp? People destined to marry are connected by a thread, no matter how far apart. Man and wife, for better or for worse. Marry a chicken and share the coop, marry a dog and share the kennel. Your dad’s no high-ranking noble, and you’re no gold branch or jade leaf. It was your good fortune to find a rich man like this, and your dad’s good fortune, too. The first thing your father-in-law did was promise me a nice black mule. That’s breeding….’

Grandma sat motionless, her eyes closed. Her damp eyelashes might have been covered with a layer of honey, each thick, full lash sticking to the others and curling like a swallowtail. Great-Granddad glared at her, his anger rising. ‘Don’t you act deaf and dumb with me. You can waste away if you want to, but you’ll be the Shan family’s ghost, because there’s no place in the Dai family graveyard for you!’

Grandma just laughed.

Great-Granddad slapped her.

With a pop, the rosiness in Grandma’s cheeks vanished, leaving a pallor behind. But the colour gradually returned, and her face became the red morning sun. Her eyes shining, she clenched her teeth and sneered. Glaring hatefully at her dad, she said: ‘I’m just afraid… if you… then you can forget about seeing a single hair of that mule!’

Lowering her head, she picked up her chopsticks and gobbled down the still-steaming food in front of her, like a whirlwind scooping up snow. When she was finished, she threw the bowl high into the air, where it tumbled and spun, sailed over the beam, and picked up two cobwebs before falling to the floor; it bounced around in a half-circle before settling upside down. She picked up another bowl and heaved it; this one hit the wall and fell to the floor in two pieces. Great-Granddad was so shocked his mouth fell open, his sideburns quivered, and he was speechless. ‘Daughter,’ Great-Grandma exclaimed, ‘you finally ate something!’

After throwing the bowls, Grandma broke down and cried. It was an agreeable, emotional, moist sound, which the room couldn’t hold, so it spilled outside and spread to the fields, to merge with the rustling of the pollinated late-summer sorghum. A million thoughts ran through her mind; over and over she relived what had happened from the time she had been placed in the bridal sedan chair until she had returned on the donkey’s back to her parents’ home. Every scene from those three days, every sound, every smell entered her mind… the horns and woodwinds… little tunes, big sounds… all that music turned the green sorghum red. It pounded a curtain of rain out of the clear sky: two cracks of thunder, a flash of lightning, rain falling like dense flax… turning her confused heart to flax, dense rain pouring in at an angle, then straight up, then straight down….

Grandma thought back to the highwayman at Toad Hollow, and to the valiant actions of the young sedan bearer. He was their leader, the main dog of the pack. He couldn’t be more than twenty-four — not a wrinkle on his rugged face. She recalled how close his face had been for a while, and how his lips, hard as mussel shells, had covered hers. Her blood had frozen for an instant, before gushing forth to dilate every blood vessel in her body. Her feet had cramped, her abdominal muscles had jerked madly. Their call to revolt had been aided by the vibrant sorghum — the powder on the stalks, so fine it was barely visible, spreading in the air above her and the sedan bearer….

Grandma hoped that by concentrating on the youthful passion of that moment she could hold on to it, but it kept slipping away, here one moment, then gone. And yet the leper’s face, like a long-buried rotten grape, kept reappearing, along with the ten hooked claws that were his fingers. Then there was the old man, with his tiny queue and the ring of brass keys at his belt. Grandma sat quietly, but even though she was dozens of li away from the spot, the rich taste of sorghum wine and the sour taste of sorghum mash seemed to roll around on her tongue. She recalled how the two male ‘serving girls’ reeked like drunken geese fished out of a wine vat, the smell of alcohol seeping from every pore in their bodies…. He had cut a swath through the sorghum, leaving the blade of his razor-sharp sword wet with little horseshoes of inky green, sticky residue from the decapitated plants, their lifeblood. She remembered what he had said: ‘Come back in three days, no matter what!’ Daggers of light had shot from his long, slitted eyes.

Grandma had a premonition that her life was about to change in extraordinary ways.

In some significant aspects, heroes are born, not made. Heroic qualities flow through a person’s veins like an undercurrent, ready to be translated into action. During her first sixteen years, Grandma’s days had been devoted to embroidery, needlework, paper cutouts, foot binding, the endless glossing of her hair, and all other manner of domestic things in the company of neighbour girls. What, then, was the source of her ability and courage to deal with the events she encountered in her adult years? How was she able to temper herself to the point where even in the face of danger she could conquer her fears and force herself to act heroically? I’m not sure I know.

Grandma wept for a long time without feeling much true grief; as she cried, she relived the joys and pleasures of her past, even the suffering and sorrow. The sounds of crying seemed to be a distant musical accompaniment to the beautiful and hideous images appearing and reappearing in her mind. Finally, she mused that human existence is as brief as the life of autumn grass, so what was there to fear from taking chances with your life?

‘Time to leave, Little Nine,’ Great-Granddad said, calling her by her childhood name.

Leave! Leave! Leave!

Grandma asked for a basin of water to wash her face. Then she applied some powder and rouge. As she looked in the mirror, she loosened her hairnet, releasing long, flowing hair that quickly covered her back with its satiny sheen, all the way down to the curve of her legs. When she pulled it across her shoulder with her left hand, it spilled over her breast, where she combed it out with a pear-wood comb. Grandma had uncommonly thick, shiny, black hair that lightened a bit at the tips. Once it was combed out smooth, she twisted it into large ebony blossoms, which she secured with four silver combs. Then she trimmed her fringe so that it fell just short of her eyebrows. After rewrapping her feet, she put on a pair of white cotton stockings, tied her trouser cuffs tightly, and slipped on a pair of embroidered slippers that accentuated her bound feet.

It was Grandma’s tiny feet that had caught the attention of Shan Tingxiu, and it was her tiny feet that had aroused the passions of the sedan bearer Yu Zhan’ao. She was very proud of them. Even a pock-faced witch is assured of marriage if she has tiny bound feet, but no one wants a girl with large unbound feet, even if she has the face of an immortal. Grandma, with her bound feet and lovely face, was one of the true beauties of her time. Throughout our long history, the delicate, pointed tips of women’s feet have been viewed as genital organs, in a way, from which men have derived a sort of aesthetic pleasure that sets their sexual juices flowing.

Now that she was ready, Grandma left the house, clicking her feet. A blanket had been thrown over the back of the family’s little donkey, in whose glistening eyes Grandma noticed a spark of human understanding. She swung her leg over the donkey’s back and straddled it, unlike most women. Great-Grandma had tried to get her to ride sidesaddle, but Grandma dug in her heels and the donkey started off down the road, its rider sitting proudly on its back, head up and eyes straight ahead.

Once she was on her way, Grandma didn’t look back, and although Great-Granddad was holding the reins at first, when they were out of the village she took them from him and guided the donkey herself, leaving him to trot along behind her.

Another thunderstorm had struck during the three days. Grandma noticed a section of sorghum the size of a millstone where the leaves were singed and shrivelled, a spot of emaciated whiteness amid the surrounding green. Assuming that lightning was the culprit, she was reminded of the previous year, when lightning had struck and killed her friend Beauty, a girl of seventeen, literally frying her hair and burning her clothes to cinders. A design had been scorched into her back, which some people said was the script of heavenly tadpoles.

Rumours spread that greed had killed Beauty, who had caused the death of an abandoned baby. The details were lurid. On her way to market one day, she heard a bawling baby by the roadside. When she unwrapped the swaddling clothes she found a pink, newborn baby boy and a note that said: ‘Father was eighteen, mother seventeen, the moon was directly overhead, the three stars were in the western sky, when our son, Road Joy, was born. Father had already married Second Sister Zhang, a girl with unbound feet from West Village. Mother will marry Scar Eye from East Village. It breaks our hearts to abandon our newborn son. Snot runs down his father’s chin, tears stream down his mother’s cheeks, but we stifle our sobs so no one will hear us. Road Joy, Road Joy, our joy on the road, whoever finds you will be your parents. We have wrapped you in a yard of silk, and have left twenty silver dollars. We beg a kindhearted passerby to store up karma by saving our son’s precious life.’

People said that Beauty took the silk and the silver dollars, but abandoned the infant in the sorghum field, for which heaven punished her by sending down a bolt of lightning. Grandma refused to believe the rumours about her best friend, but as she pondered the tragic mysteries of life her heart was gripped by desolation and melancholy.

The rain-soaked road was still wet and pitted by pelting raindrops; soft mud, with a light oily sheen, filled the holes. Once again the donkey left its hoofprints in the mud. Katydids hid in the grass and on the sorghum leaves, vibrating their long silken beards and sawing their transparent wings to produce a cheerless sound. The long summer was about to end, and the sombre smell of autumn was in the air. Swarms of locusts, sensing the change of season, dragged their seed-filled bellies out of the sorghum fields onto the road, where they bored their hindquarters into the hard surface to lay their eggs.

Great-Granddad snapped off a sorghum stalk and smacked the rump of the weary donkey, which tucked its tail between its legs and shot forward a few paces before resuming its unhurried pace. Great-Granddad must have been feeling very pleased with himself as he walked behind the donkey, for he began singing snatches of popular local opera, making up the words as he went along. ‘Wu Dalang drank poison, how bad he felt…. His seven lengths of intestines and the eight lobes of his lungs lurched and trembled…. The ugly man took a beautiful wife, bringing calamity to his door…. Ah — ye — ye… Big Wu’s belly is killing him… waiting for Second Brother to complete his mission… to return home and avenge his murder….’

Grandma’s heart thumped wildly as she listened to Great-Granddad’s crazy song. The image of that scowling young man, sword in hand, appeared in a flash. Who was he? What was he up to? It dawned on her that, even though they didn’t know each other, their lives were already as close as fish and water. Their sole encounter had been lightning quick and was over in a flash, like a dream, yet not like a dream. She had been shaken to the depths of her soul, overcome by spirits. Resign yourself to your fate, she thought as she heaved a long sigh.

Grandma let the donkey proceed freely as she listened to her dad’s fractured rendition of the Wu Dalang song. A breath of wind and a puff of fire, and there they were, in Toad Hollow. The donkey kept its nostrils closed tight as it pawed the ground, refusing to go any farther, even when Great-Granddad smacked it on the rump with his sorghum switch. ‘Get moving, you bastard! Get going, you rotten donkey bastard!’ The switch sang out against the donkey’s rump, but instead of moving forward, it backed up.

An awful stench assailed Grandma’s nostrils. Quickly dismounting and covering her nose with her sleeve, she tugged on the reins to get the donkey moving. It looked up at her, its mouth open, tears filling its eyes. ‘Donkey,’ she said, ‘grit your teeth and walk past it. There’s no mountain that can’t be scaled and no river that can’t be forded.’ Moved by her words, it raised its head and brayed, then galloped forward, dragging her along so fast her feet barely touched the ground and her clothes fluttered in the wind like red clouds tumbling in the sky. She glanced at the sham highwayman’s corpse as they passed. A scene of filth and corruption greeted her eyes: a million fat maggots had gorged themselves until only a few pieces of rotting flesh covered his bones.

Grandma climbed back onto the donkey after they’d managed to drag one another past Toad Hollow. Gradually she became aware of the smell of sorghum wine floating on the northeast wind. She whipped up her courage, but as she drew nearer to the climactic scene of the drama her sense of fear and foreboding was as strong as ever. Steam rose from the ground under the blazing sun, but shivers ran down her spine. The village where the Shans lived was far away, and Grandma, surrounded by the thick aroma of sorghum wine, felt as if the marrow in her spine had frozen solid. A man in the field to her right began to sing in a loud, full voice:

Little sister, boldly you move on

Your jaw set like a steel trap

Bones as hard as cast bronze

From high atop the embroidery tower

You toss down the embroidered ball

Striking me on the head

Now join me in a toast with dark-red sorghum wine.

‘Hey there, opera singer, come out! That’s terrible singing! Just awful!’ Great-Granddad shouted towards the sorghum field.

3

FATHER FINISHED HIS fistcake as he stood on the withered grass, turned blood-red by the setting sun. Then he walked gingerly up to the edge of the water. There on the stone bridge across the Black Water River the lead truck, its tyres flattened by the barrier of linked rakes, crouched in front of the other three. Its railings and fenders were stained by splotches of gore. The upper half of a Japanese soldier was draped over one of the railings, his steel helmet hanging upturned by a strap from his neck. Dark blood dripped into it from the tip of his nose. The water sobbed as it flowed down the riverbed. The heavy, dull rays of sunlight were pulverised by tiny ripples on its surface. Autumn insects hidden in the damp mud beneath the water plants set up a mournful chirping. Sorghum in the fields sizzled as it matured. The fires were nearly out in the third and fourth trucks; their blackened hulks crackled and split, adding to the discordant symphony.

Father’s attention was riveted by the sight and sound of blood dripping from the Japanese soldier’s nose into the steel helmet, each drop splashing crisply and sending out rings of concentric circles in the deepening pool. Father had barely passed his fifteenth birthday. The sun had nearly set on this ninth day of the eighth lunar month of the year 1939, and the dying embers of its rays cast a red pall over the world below. Father’s face, turned unusually gaunt by the fierce daylong battle, was covered by a layer of purplish mud. He squatted down upriver from the corpse of Wang Wenyi’s wife and scooped up some water in his hands; the sticky water oozed through the cracks between his fingers and dropped noiselessly to the ground. Sharp pains racked his cracked, swollen lips, and the brackish taste of blood seeped between his teeth and slid down his throat, moistening the parched membranes. He experienced a satisfying pain, and even though the taste of blood made his stomach churn, he scooped up handful after handful of water, drinking it down until it soaked up the dry, cracked fistcake in his stomach. He stood up straight and took a deep breath of relief.

Night was definitely about to fall; the ridge of the sky’s dome was tinged with the final sliver of red. The scorched smell from the burned-out hulks of the trucks had faded. A loud bang made Father jump. He looked up, just in time to see exploded bits of truck tyres settling slowly into the river like black butterflies, and countless kernels of Japanese rice — some black, some white — soaring upward, then raining down on the still surface of the river. As he spun around, his eyes settled on the tiny figure of Wang Wenyi’s wife lying at the edge of the river, the blood from her wounds staining the water around her. He scrambled to the top of the dike and yelled: ‘Dad!’

Granddad was standing on the dike, the flesh on his face wasted away by the day’s battle, the bones jutting out beneath his dark, weathered skin. In the dying sunlight Father noticed that Granddad’s short-cropped hair was turning white. With fear in his aching heart, Father nudged him timidly.

‘Dad,’ he said, ‘Dad! What’s wrong with you?’

Tears were running down Granddad’s face. He was sobbing. The Japanese machine gun that Detachment Leader Leng had so magnanimously left behind sat at his feet like a crouching wolf, its muzzle gaping.

‘Say something, Dad. Eat that fistcake, then drink some water. You’ll die if you don’t eat or drink.’

Granddad’s head drooped until it rested on his chest. He seemed to lack the strength to support its weight. He knelt at the top of the dike, holding his head in his hands and sobbing. After a moment, or two, he looked up and cried out: ‘Douguan, my son! Is it all over for us?’

Father stared wide-eyed and fearfully at Granddad. The glare in his diamondlike pupils embodied the heroic, unrestrained spirit of Grandma, a flicker of hope that shone and lit up Granddad’s heart.

‘Dad,’ Father said, ‘don’t give up. I’ll work hard on my shooting, like when you shot fish at the inlet to perfect your seven-plum-blossom skill. Then we’ll go settle accounts with that rotten son of a bitch Pocky Leng!’

Granddad sprang to his feet and bellowed three times — half wail, half crazed laughter. A line of dark-purple blood trickled out of the corner of his mouth.

‘That’s it, son, that’s the way to talk!’

He picked up one of Grandma’s fistcakes from the dark earth, bit off a chunk, and swallowed it. Cake crumbs and flecks of bubbly blood stuck to his stained teeth. Father heard Granddad’s painful cries as the dry cake stuck in his throat and saw the rough edges make their way down his neck.

‘Dad,’ Father said, ‘go drink some water to soak up the cake in your belly.’

Granddad stumbled along the dike to the river’s edge, where he knelt among the water plants and lapped up the water like a draught animal. When he’d had his fill, he drew his hands back and buried his head in the river, holding it under the water for about half the time it takes to smoke a pipeful of tobacco. Father started getting nervous as he gazed at his dad, frozen like a bronze frog at the river’s edge. Finally, Granddad jerked his dripping head out of the water and gasped for breath. Then he walked back up the dike to stand in front of Father, whose eyes were glued to the cascading drops of water. Granddad shook his head, sending forty-nine drops, large and small, flying like so many pearls.

‘Douguan,’ he said, ‘come with Dad. Let’s go see the men.’

Granddad staggered down the road, weaving in and out of the sorghum field on the western edge, Father right on his heels. They stepped on broken, twisted stalks of sorghum and spent cartridges that gave off a faint yellow glint. Frequently they bent down to look at the bodies of their fallen comrades, who lay amid the sorghum, deathly grimaces frozen on their faces. Granddad and Father shook them in hope of finding one who was alive; but they were dead, all of them. Father’s and Granddad’s hands were covered with sticky blood. Father looked down at two soldiers on the westernmost edge of the field: one lay with the muzzle of his shotgun in his mouth, the back of his neck a gory mess, like a rotten wasps’ nest; the other lay across a bayonet buried in his chest. When Granddad turned them over, Father saw that their legs had been broken and their bellies slit open. Granddad sighed as he withdrew the shotgun from the one soldier’s mouth and pulled the bayonet from the other’s chest.

Father followed Granddad across the road, into the sorghum field to the east, which had also been swept by machine-gun fire. They turned over the bodies of more soldiers lying strewn across the ground. Bugler Liu was on his knees, bugle in hand, as though he were blowing it: ‘Bugler Liu!’ Granddad called out excitedly. No response. Father ran up and nudged him. ‘Uncle Liu!’ he shouted, as the bugle dropped to the ground. When Father looked more closely, he discovered that the bugler’s face was already as hard as a rock.

In the lightly scarred section of field some few dozen paces from the dike, Granddad and Father came upon Fang Seven, whose guts had spilled out of his belly, and another soldier, named Consumptive Four, who, after taking a bullet in the leg, had fainted from blood loss. Holding his bloodstained hand above the man’s mouth, Granddad detected a faint sign of dry, hot breath from his nostrils. Fang Seven had stuffed his own intestines back into his abdomen and covered the gaping wound with sorghum leaves. He was still conscious. When he spotted Granddad and Father, his lips twitched and he said haltingly, ‘Commander… done for… When you see my old lady… give some money…. Don’t let her remarry…. My brother… no sons… If she leaves… Fang family line ended….’ Father knew that Fang Seven had a year-old son, and that there was so much milk in his mother’s gourdlike breasts that he was growing up fair and plump.

‘I’ll carry you back, little brother,’ Granddad said.

He bent over and pulled Fang Seven onto his back. As Fang screeched in pain, Father saw the leaves fall away and his white, speckled intestines slither out of his belly, releasing a breath of foul hot air. Granddad laid him back down on the ground. ‘Elder brother,’ Fang pleaded, ‘put me out of my misery…. Don’t torture me…. Shoot me, please….’

Granddad squatted down and held Fang Seven’s hand. ‘Little brother, I can carry you over to see Zhang Xinyi, Dr Zhang. He’ll patch you up.’

‘Elder brother… do it now…. Don’t make me suffer…. Past saving…’

Granddad squinted into the murky, late-afternoon August sky, in which a dozen or so stars shone brightly, and let out a long howl before turning to Father. ‘Are there bullets in your gun, Douguan?’

‘Yes.’

Father handed his pistol to Granddad, who released the safety catch, took another look into the darkening sky, and spun the cylinder. ‘Rest easy, brother. As long as Yu Zhan’ao has food to eat, your wife and child will never go hungry.’

Fang Seven nodded and closed his eyes.

Granddad raised the revolver as though he were lifting a huge boulder. The pressure of the moment made him quake.

Fang Seven’s eyes snapped open. ‘Elder brother…’

Granddad spun his face away, and a burst of flame leaped out of the muzzle, lighting up Fang Seven’s greenish scalp. The kneeling man shot forward and fell on top of his own exposed guts. Father found it hard to believe that a man’s belly could hold such a pile of intestines.

‘Consumptive Four, you’d better be on your way, too. Then you can get an early start on your next life and come back to seek revenge on those Jap bastards!’ He pumped the last cartridge into the heart of the dying Consumptive Four.

Though killing had become a way of life for Granddad, he dropped his arm to his side and let it hang there like a dead snake; the pistol fell to the ground.

Father bent over and picked it up, stuck it into his belt, and tugged on Granddad, who stood as though drunk or paralysed. ‘Let’s go home, Dad, let’s go home….’

‘Home? Go home? Yes, go home! Go home…’

Father pulled him up onto the dike and began walking awkwardly towards the west. The cold rays of the half-moon on that August 9 evening filled the sky, falling lightly on the backs of Granddad and Father and illuminating the heavy Black Water River, which was like the great but clumsy Chinese race. White eels, thrown into a frenzy by the bloody water, writhed and sparkled on the surface. The blue chill of the water merged with the red warmth of the sorghum bordering the dikes to form an airy, transparent mist that reminded Father of the heavy, spongy fog that had accompanied them as they set out for battle that morning. Only one day, but it seemed like ten years. Yet it also seemed like the blink of an eye.

Father thought back to how his mother had walked him to the edge of the fog-enshrouded village. The scene seemed so far away, though it was right there in front of his eyes. He recalled how difficult the march through the sorghum field had been, how Wang Wenyi had been wounded in the ear by a stray bullet, how the fifty or so soldiers had approached the bridge looking like the droppings of a goat. Then there was Mute’s razor-sharp sabre knife, the sinister eyes, the Jap head sailing through the air, the shrivelled ass of the old Jap officer. . Mother soaring to the top of the dike as though on the wings of a phoenix… the fistcakes… fistcakes rolling on the ground… stalks of sorghum falling all around… red sorghum crumpling like fallen heroes….

Granddad hoisted Father, who was asleep on his feet, onto his back and wrapped his arms — one healthy, the other injured — around Father’s legs. The pistol in Father’s belt banged against Granddad’s back, sending sharp pains straight to his heart. It had belonged to the dark, skinny, handsome, and well-educated Adjutant Ren. Granddad was thinking about how this pistol had ended the lives of Adjutant Ren, Fang Seven, and Consumptive Four. He wanted nothing more than to heave the execrable thing into the Black Water River. But it was only a thought. Bending over, he shifted his sleeping son higher up on his back, partly to relieve the excruciating pain in his heart.

All that kept Granddad moving was a powerful drive to push on and continue the bitter struggle against wave after murky wave of obdurate air. In his dazed state he heard a loud clamour rushing towards him like a tidal wave. When he raised his head he spotted a long fiery dragon wriggling its way along the top of the dike. His eyes froze, as the image slipped in and out of focus.

When it was blurred he could see the dragon’s fangs and claws as it rode the clouds and sailed through the mist, the vigorous motions making its golden scales jangle; wind howled, clouds hissed, lightning flashed, thunder rumbled, the sounds merging to form a masculine wind that swept across a huddled feminine world.

When it was clear he could see it was ninety-nine torches hoisted above the heads of hundreds of people hastening towards him. The dancing flames lit up the sorghum on both banks of the river. Granddad lifted Father down off his back and shook him hard.

‘Douguan,’ he shouted in his ear, ‘Douguan! Wake up! Wake up! The villagers are coming for us, they’re coming….’

Father heard the hoarseness in Granddad’s voice and saw two remarkable tears leap out of his eyes.

4

GRANDDAD WAS ONLY twenty-four when he murdered Shan Tingxiu and his son. Even though by then he and Grandma had already done the phoenix dance in the sorghum field, and even though, in the solemn course of suffering and joy, she had conceived my father, whose life was a mixture of achievements and sin (in the final analysis, he gained distinction among his generation of citizens of Northeast Gaomi Township), she had nonetheless been legally married into the Shan family. So she and Granddad were adulterers, their relationship marked by measures of spontaneity, chance, and uncertainty. And since Father wasn’t born while they were together, accuracy demands that I refer to Granddad as Yu Zhan’ao in writing about this period.

When, in agony and desperation, Grandma told Yu Zhan’ao that her legal husband, Shan Bianlang, was a leper, he decapitated two sorghum plants with his short sword. Urging her not to worry, he told her to return three days hence. She was too overwhelmed by the tide of passionate love to concern herself with the implications of his comment. But murderous thoughts had already entered his mind. He watched her thread her way out of the sorghum field and, through the spaces between stalks, saw her summon her shrewd little donkey and nudge Great-Granddad with her foot, waking the mud-caked heap from his drunken stupor. He heard Great-Granddad, whose tongue had grown thick in his mouth, say: ‘Daughter… you… what took you so long to take a piss?… Your father-in-law… going to give me a big black mule…

Ignoring his mumbling, she swung her leg over the donkey’s back and turned her face, brushed by the winds of spring, towards the sorghum field south of the road. She knew that the young sedan bearer was watching her. Struggling to wrench free of this unknown passion, she had a dim vision of a new and unfamiliar broad road stretching out ahead of her, covered with sorghum seeds as red as rubies, the ditches on either side filled with crystal-clear sorghum wine. As she moved down the road, her imagination coloured the genuine article until she could not distinguish between reality and illusion.

Yu Zhan’ao followed her with his eyes until she rounded a bend. Feeling suddenly weary, he pushed his way through the sorghum and returned to the sacred altar, where he collapsed like a toppled wall and fell into a sound sleep. Later, as the red sun was disappearing in the west, his eyes snapped open, and the first things he saw were sorghum leaves, stems, and ears of grain that formed a thick blanket of purplish red above him. He draped his rain cape over his shoulders and walked out of the field as a rapid breeze on the road caused the sorghum to rustle noisily. He wrapped the cape tightly around him to ward off the chill, and as his hand brushed against his belly he realised how hungry he was. He dimly recalled the three shacks at the head of the village where he had carried the woman in the sedan chair three days ago, and the tattered tavern flag snapping and fluttering in the raging winds of the rainstorm. So hungry he could neither sit still nor stand straight, he strode towards the tavern. Since he had been hiring out for the Northeast Gaomi Township Wedding and Funeral Service Company for less than two years, the people around here wouldn’t recognise him. He’d get something to eat and drink, find a way to do what he’d come to do, then slip into the sorghum fields, like a fish in the ocean, and swim far away.

At this point in his ruminations, he headed west, where bilious red clouds turned the setting sun into a blooming peony with a luminous, fearfully bright golden border. After walking west for a while, he turned north, heading straight for the village where Grandma’s nominal husband lived. The fields were still and deserted. During those years, any farmer who had food at home left his field before nightfall, turning the sorghum fields into a haven for bandits.

Village chimneys were smoking by the time he arrived, and a handsome young man was walking down the street with two crocks of fresh well water over his shoulder, the shifting water splashing over the sides. Yu Zhan’ao darted into the doorway beneath the tattered tavern flag. No inner walls separated the shacks, and a bar made of adobe bricks divided the room in two, the inner half of which was furnished with a brick kang, a stove, and a large vat. Two rickety tables with scarred tops and a few scattered narrow benches constituted the furnishings in the outer half of the room. A glazed wine crock rested on the bar, its ladle hanging from the rim. A fat old man was sprawled on the kang. Yu Zhan’ao recognised him as the Korean dog butcher they called Gook. He had seen Gook once at the market in Ma Hamlet. The man could slaughter a dog in less than a minute, and the hundreds of dogs that lived in Ma Hamlet growled viciously when they saw him, their fur standing straight up, though they kept their distance.

‘Barkeep, a bowl of wine!’ Yu Zhan’ao called out as he sat on one of the benches.

The fat old man didn’t stir, his rolling eyes the only movement on the kang.

‘Barkeep!’ Yu Zhan’ao shouted.

The fat old man pulled back the white dog pelt covering him and climbed down off the kang. Yu Zhan’ao noticed three more pelts hanging on the wall: one green, one blue, and one spotted.

The fat old man took a dark-red bowl out of an opening in the bar and ladled wine into it.

‘What do you have to go with the wine?’ Yu Zhan’ao asked.

‘Dog head!’ the fat old man snarled.

‘I want dog meat!’

‘Dog head’s all I’ve got!’

‘Okay, then.’

The old man removed the lid from the pot, in which a whole dog was cooking.

‘Forget the head,’ Yu Zhan’ao demanded. ‘I want some of that meat.’

Ignoring him, the old man picked up his cleaver and hacked at the dog’s neck, spattering the scalding soup about. Once he’d severed the head, he stuck a metal skewer into it and held it out over the bar. ‘I said I want dog meat!’ Yu Zhan’ao snapped, his ire rising.

The old man threw the dog head down on the bar and said angrily, ‘That’s what I’ve got. Take it or leave it!’

‘Who do you think you’re talking to?’

‘Just sit there like a good little boy!’ the old man warned. ‘What makes you think you can eat dog meat? I’m saving that for Spotted Neck.’

Spotted Neck was a famous bandit chief in Northeast Gaomi Township. Just hearing the name was enough to intimidate Yu Zhan’ao, for Spotted Neck was reputed to be a crack shot. His trademark of firing three shots in a circular motion had earned him the nickname Three-Nod Phoenix. People who knew guns could tell just by listening that Spotted Neck was nearby. Reluctantly Yu Zhan’ao held his tongue and, with the bowl of wine in one hand, reached out and picked up the dog head, then took a spiteful bite out of the animal’s snout. It was delicious, and he was ravenously hungry, so he dug in, eating quickly until the head and the wine were gone. With a final gaze at the bony skull, he stood up and belched.

‘One silver dollar,’ the fat old man said.

‘I’ve only got seven coppers,’ Yu Zhan’ao said, tossing the coins down on the table.

‘I said one silver dollar!’

‘And I said I’ve only got seven coppers!’

‘Do you really expect to eat without paying, boy?’

‘I’ve got seven copper coins and that’s it.’ Yu Zhan’ao stood up to leave, but the fat old man ran around the bar and grabbed him. As they were struggling, a tall, beefy man walked into the bar.

‘Hey, Gook, how come you haven’t lit your lantern?’

‘This guy thinks he can eat without paying!’

‘Cut out his tongue!’ the man said darkly. ‘And light the lantern!’

The fat old man let go of Yu Zhan’ao and walked behind the bar, where he stoked the fire and lit a bean-oil lamp. The glimmering light illuminated the stranger’s dark face. Yu Zhan’ao noticed that he was dressed in black satin from head to toe: a jacket with a row of cloth buttons down the front, a pair of wide-legged trousers tied at the ankles with black cotton straps, and black, double-buckled cloth shoes. His long, thick neck had a white spot on it the size of a fist. This, Yu Zhan’ao thought to himself, must be Spotted Neck.

Spotted Neck sized up Yu Zhan’ao, then stuck out his left hand and rested three fingers on his forehead. Yu Zhan’ao looked at him curiously.

Spotted Neck shook his head disapprovingly. ‘Not a bandit?’

‘I’m a sedan bearer for the service company.’

‘So you make your living with a pole,’ Spotted Neck said derisively. ‘Interested in eating fistcakes with me?’

‘No,’ Yu Zhan’ao replied.

‘Then get the hell out of here. You’re still young, so I’ll let you keep your tongue for kissing women! Go on, and watch what you say.’

Yu Zhan’ao backed out of the tavern, not sure whether he was angry or scared. He had grudging respect for the way Spotted Neck carried himself, but not to the exclusion of loathing.

Born into poverty, Yu Zhan’ao had lost his father when he was just a boy. So he and his mother had eked out a living by tending three mou — less than half an acre — of miserable land. His uncle, Big Tooth Yu, who dealt in mules and horses, had occasionally helped mother and son financially, but not all that often.

Then, when he was thirteen, his mother began an affair with the abbot at Tianqi Monastery. The well-to-do monk often brought rice and noodles over, and every time he came, Yu Zhan’ao’s mother sent the boy outside. Flames of anger raged inside him as sounds of revelry emerged from behind the closed door, and he could barely keep from torching the house. By the time he was sixteen, his mother was seeing the monk so frequently that the village was buzzing. A friend of his, Little Cheng the blacksmith, made him a short sword, with which he murdered the monk one drizzly spring night beside Pear Blossom Creek, named for the trees that lined it. They were in bloom on that wet night, blanketing the area with their delicate fragrance.

Granddad fled the village after the incident, taking odd jobs and finally getting hooked on gambling. Over time his skills improved, until the copper coins that passed through his hands stained his fingers green. Then, when Nine Dreams Cao, whose favourite pastime was nabbing gamblers, became magistrate of Gaomi County, he was arrested for gambling in a graveyard, given two hundred lashes with a shoe sole, forced to wear a pair of pants with one red leg and one black one, and sentenced to sweeping the streets of the county town for two months. When he’d completed his sentence he wandered into Northeast Gaomi Township, where he hired out to the service company. Upon learning that, after the death of the monk, his mother had hanged herself from the door frame, he went back one night to take a last look around. Some time later, the incident with my grandma occurred.

After walking outside, Yu Zhan’ao went into the sorghum field. He could see the dim lantern light in the tavern as he waited, following the progress of the new moon across the sky lit up with bright stars. Cool dew dripped from the sorghum stalks; cold air rose from the ground beneath him. Late that night he heard the tavern door creak open, flooding the night with lantern light. A fat figure hopped into the halo of light, looked around, then went back inside. Yu Zhan’ao could tell it was the dog butcher. After the man had gone back inside, the bandit Spotted Neck darted out of the door and was quickly swallowed up by shadows. The fat old man closed the door and blew out the lantern, leaving the tattered flag above his tavern to flutter in the starlight as though calling to lost spirits.

As the bandit walked down the road, Yu Zhan’ao held his breath and didn’t move a muscle. Spotted Neck chose a place right in front of him to take a piss; the foul odour hit Yu Zhan’ao full in the face. With his hand on his sword, he was thinking it would be so easy to put an end to this famous bandit chief. His muscles tensed. But then he had second thoughts. He had no grudge against Spotted Neck, who was a thorn in the side of County Magistrate Nine Dreams Cao, the man who had given Yu Zhan’ao two hundred lashes with a shoe sole. That was reason enough to spare Spotted Neck. But he was pleased to think I could have killed the famous bandit chief Spotted Neck if I’d wanted to.

Spotted Neck never learned of this brush with death, nor did he imagine that within two years he would die stark-naked in the Black Water River at the hands of this same young fellow. After relieving himself, he hitched up his pants and walked off.

Yu Zhan’ao jumped to his feet and walked into the sleeping village, stepping lightly so as not to awaken the dogs. When he reached the Shans’ gate, he held his breath as he familiarised himself with his surroundings. The Shan family lived in a row of twenty buildings, divided into two compounds by an interior wall and surrounded by an outer wall with two gates. The distillery was in the eastern compound, while the family lived in the western compound, in which there were three side rooms on the far edge. There were also three side rooms on the edge of the eastern compound, which served as bunkhouses for the distillery workers. In addition, a tent in the eastern compound accommodated a large millstone and the two big black mules that turned it. Finally, there were three connecting rooms at the southern edge of the eastern compound with a single door facing south. That was where the wine was sold.

Yu Zhan’ao couldn’t see over the wall, so he quickly scaled it, making scraping noises that woke the dogs on the other side, who began to bark loudly. After retreating about half the distance an arrow flies, he hunkered down in the square where the Shans dried their sorghum. He needed a plan. The pleasant aroma from a pile of sorghum husks and another of leaves caught his attention. Kneeling down beside the dry husks, he took out his stone and flint, and lit them. But no sooner had they ignited than he had another idea, and he smothered the flames with his hands. He walked over to the pile of leaves, some twenty paces distant, and set fire to it. Less compact than the husks, they would burn more quickly and be easier to extinguish. On that windless night, the Milky Way stretched across the sky, surrounded by thousands of twinkling stars; flames quickly leaped into the air, lighting up the village as though it were daytime.

‘Fire!’ he yelled at the top of his lungs. ‘Fire —’ Then he hid among the shadows of the western wall around the family compound. Tongues of flame licked the heavens, crackling loudly and setting the village dogs to barking. The distillery workers in the eastern compound, startled out of their sleep, began to shout. The gate banged open, and a dozen or so half-naked men came rushing out. The western gate also opened, and the wizened old man with the pitiful little queue stumbled out, screaming and wailing. Two big yellow dogs flew past him towards the raging fire and raised a howl.

‘Fire… put it out….’ The old man was nearly in tears. The distillery hands rushed back into the compound, snatched up buckets on poles, and ran to the well. The old man also ran back inside, picked up a black tile crock, and ran towards the well.

After shedding his straw rain cape, Yu Zhan’ao crept along the base of the wall and entered the western compound, flattening up against the Shans’ screen wall to watch the men scurry back and forth. One of them dumped a bucketful of water on the fire, the stream of liquid looking like a piece of white silk in the glare of the flames, in whose heat it curled and twisted. They poured bucketful after bucketful of water onto the fire, high arching waterfalls one minute and puffs of cotton the next, forming a scene of exquisite beauty.

A prudent voice of reason called out, ‘Let it burn, Master. It’ll soon burn itself out.’

‘Put it out…. Put it out….’ He was in tears now. ‘Hurry up and put it out…. That’s enough mule fodder for a whole winter….’

With no time to waste on the scene outside, Yu Zhan’ao slipped into the house, where he was met by an overwhelming dampness. His hair stood on end. A mildewy voice emerged from inside the room to the west.

‘Dad… what’s burning?’

Having entered the house after staring at the flames, Yu Zhan’ao was forced to wait until his eyes had adjusted to the darkness. When the voice repeated the question, he headed towards it. The room was lit up by the glare through the paper window, making it easy for him to see the long, flat face on the pillow. He reached out and held down the head, which cried out in alarm, ‘Who… who are you?’ Two claws dug into the back of Yu Zhan’ao’s hand as he drew his sword and buried it in the pale skin of the long, thin neck. A breath of cool air escaped onto his wrist, followed by hot, sticky blood that gloved his hand. He felt like throwing up. Fearfully, he took his hand away. The wrinkled, flat head was convulsing on the pillow, golden blood spurting from the neck. He tried wiping his hand on the bedding, but the harder he wiped, the stickier it got, and the stronger his feelings of nausea grew. Grasping the slimy sword in his hand, he turned and ran into the outer room; there he scooped a handful of straw out of the stove to clean off his hand and his sword, which glinted in the light and seemed to come alive.

Every single day, he had engaged in secret swordplay with the weapon given to him by Little Cheng the blacksmith, and each time he heard the pillow talk emerging from his mother’s room he sheathed and unsheathed it over and over. Villagers began taunting him by calling him Junior Monk, to which he reacted with a blood-curdling glare. The sword now lay beneath his pillow, keeping him awake at night with high-pitched shrieks. He knew the time had come.

The full moon was hidden behind dense leaden clouds that night, and as the villagers were falling asleep, a light rain began to fall, the scattered drops slowly soaking the ground and filling the hollows with silvery water. The monk opened the door and walked in under a yellow oilcloth umbrella. From the vantage point of his room, he watched the monk fold his umbrella and saw his shiny bald pate as he unhurriedly scraped the mud from the soles of his shoes on the threshold.

He heard his mother ask, ‘What are you doing here at this time of night?’

‘I had to say a seventh-day funeral mass for the mother of “Man-Biter” in West Village.’

‘I mean why so late? I didn’t think you’d come.’

‘Why not?’

‘It’s raining.’

‘If it had been raining daggers, I’d have come with a pot over my head.’

‘Get in here, and be quick about it.’

‘Does your belly still hurt?’ the monk asked softly as he entered her room.

‘Not so bad, ahhh…’

‘What’s wrong?’

‘The boy’s dad has been dead nearly ten years, and look what I’ve become. I don’t know if I’m up or I’m down.’

‘Be up. I’ll chant a sutra for you.’

He didn’t close his eyes that night, as he listened to the shrieks of the sword beneath his pillow, to the patter of the rain outside, to the even breathing of the sleeping monk, and to his mother as she talked in her sleep. He sat up in alarm when he heard the strange laugh of an owl in a nearby tree. After dressing, he picked up the sword and stood with his ear cocked in the doorway of the room where his mother and the monk slept. His heart was a white wasteland, desolate and empty. Gently he opened the door and walked out into the yard, where he looked up into the sky: the leaden clouds were lighter than before and a glimmer of early-dawn light was visible. A gentle rain was still falling, slow and unhurried, silently moistening the earth and splattering weakly as it landed in puddles. He followed the winding road to Tianqi Monastery, which ran about three li and crossed a tiny brook on black stepping-stones.

During daylight hours the brook was so clear you could count the tiny fish and shrimp on the sandy bottom. But now it was grey and hazy under a thin mist, and the sound of splashing rainwater made him sorrowful and anxious. The stones were wet and slippery; the glimmering water was rising. He was mesmerised by the sight of ripples as the water struck the stones beneath his feet. The smooth sandy edge of the brook was lined by flower-laden pear trees. After fording the brook, he turned into the pear grove, where the sandy ground was firm yet slightly springy. The white pear blossoms poking through the mist were dazzling, but their redolence was snuffed out by the chilled air.

He located his father’s grave in the depths of the pear grove, covered with weeds that hid a dozen or more treacherous holes burrowed into the ground by mice. Although he tried hard to recall his father’s face, all he could conjure up was the faint image of a tall, skinny man with sallow skin and a light, wispy moustache.

After returning to the edge of the brook, he hid behind one of the trees and stared blankly at white ripples where the water struck the black stepping-stones. The sky, beginning to suffuse with light, had grown paler, the clouds parted to reveal the outline of the little road.

The monk walked quickly up the road under the yellow oilcloth umbrella that obscured his head. There were tiny water stains on his green cassock. Raising the hem with one hand and holding his umbrella high with the other, he crossed the brook, his rotund figure twisting as he stepped from stone to stone. Now that his pale, puffy face was visible, Yu Zhan’ao gripped the sword and listened to its high-pitched shriek. His wrist ached and began to turn numb; his fingers started to twitch. After fording the brook, the monk let go of the hem of his cassock and stomped his feet, splashing his sleeve with mud, which he flicked off with his fingernail.

This fair-skinned monk, who prided himself on always looking tidy and fresh, exuded a pleasant soapy odour, which Yu Zhan’ao could smell as he watched him fold his umbrella and shake off the water before slipping it under his arm. The twelve round burns on his pale scalp sparkled. Yu Zhan’ao recalled seeing his mother caress that scalp with both hands, as though she were stroking a Buddhist treasure, while he laid his head in her lap like a contented infant. By now the monk was so close he could hear his laboured breathing. He was barely able to grip the sword handle, which was as slippery as a loach. He was drenched with sweat, his eyes were blurring, and he was getting light-headed. He was afraid he might faint.

As the monk passed by, he spat a gob of sticky phlegm, which landed on a twig and hung there sickeningly, giving rise to all sorts of nauseating thoughts in Yu Zhan’ao’s mind. He inched closer, his head throbbing painfully. His temples felt like mallets pounding on a taut drum inside his head. The sword seemed to enter the monk’s rib cage on its own. The monk stumbled a few steps before grabbing the trunk of a pear tree to steady himself, and turned to look at his assailant. There was pain in the monk’s pitiful eyes, and a keen sense of regret in his heart. He said nothing as he slid slowly down the tree trunk to the ground.

When Yu Zhan’ao pulled the sword out of the monk’s rib cage, a flow of lovely warm blood was released, soft and slippery, like the wing feathers of a bird…. The buildup of water on the pear tree finally gave way and splashed down on the sandy ground, bringing dozens of petals with it. A small whirlwind rose up deep in the pear grove, and he later recalled smelling the delicate fragrance of pear blossoms….

He felt no remorse, though, over murdering Shan Bianlang, only disgust. The flames gradually died down, but the sky was still brightly lit. A ghostly shadow rustled at the base of the wall; the village was engulfed by a swelling tide of barking. Metal rims of water buckets clattered loudly; water sizzled and sputtered as it hit the roaring flames.

Six days earlier: The downpour had soaked the sedan bearers until they looked like drenched chickens, and the only dry spot on the young bride was her back. He stood with the other bearers and musicians in mud puddles, watching two slovenly old men lead the bride into the house. Not a single person in the large village came out to watch the excitement, and the bridegroom was nowhere in sight. A rusty odour seeped through the open door, and the sedan bearers knew without being told that the bridegroom, who wouldn’t show his face, was indeed a leper. Seeing that there were no witnesses to the excitement, the musicians settled for a bland little tune.

A wizened old man came outside with a little basket of copper coins and croaked, ‘Here’s your reward! Come and get it!’ as he scattered a handful of coins on the ground. The bearers and musicians watched the coins splash in the puddles, but none made a move to pick them up. The old man bent over and picked up the coins, one at a time. That was when the idea of burying a knife in the old man’s scrawny neck formed in Granddad’s mind.

Now flames were lighting up that same compound and the couplets pasted up alongside the gate. Since he wasn’t completely illiterate, he read them, and when he had finished, flames of indignation drove every trace of coolness out of his heart. He used some folk wisdom to absolve himself: charity for the sake of karma doesn’t mean you’ll die in bed; murder and arson are a sure path to the good life. Besides, he’d given the young woman his word, and had already murdered the man’s son; by sparing the father, he’d only be subjecting him to the grief of seeing his son’s corpse. There was no turning back. Now that he’d knocked over the gourd and spilled all the oil, he’d create a new life for the young woman. ‘Old Man Shan,’ he mumbled under his breath, ‘this day next year will be your first anniversary!’

The fire was dying out, returning the compound to darkness and the stars to the sky, although a few cinders remained in the pile of leaves. When water was dumped on the hot spots, white steam and glowing cinders rose dozens of feet into the air. The men stood, buckets in hand, casting large shadows on the ground.

‘Don’t be sad, Master. Financial losses, lucky bosses,’ said the voice of reason.

‘Heaven has no eyes…. Heaven has no eyes…’ Shan Tingxiu mumbled.

‘Let the men go inside and get some rest, Master. They have to be up for work early in the morning.’

‘Heaven has no eyes… Heaven has no eyes….’

The men staggered into the eastern compound. Yu Zhan’ao hid behind the screen wall as the clatter of buckets on carrying poles moved past him, followed by silence. Shan Tingxiu stood in the gateway mumbling, but finally began to lose interest and carried his tile crock back into the compound, the two family dogs leading the way. Clearly exhausted, when they spotted Yu Zhan’ao they merely barked once or twice and headed for their pen, where they plopped down and didn’t make another sound.

Yu Zhan’ao could hear the big mule in the eastern compound grind its teeth and paw the ground. The three stars had moved to the western sky, so it was after midnight. He braced himself, gripped his sword, and waited until Shan Tingxiu was a mere three or four paces from the door, then rushed him with such force that he buried the sword in his chest, past the hilt. The old man flew backward, his arms spread out, as if he were taking off into the air, before falling on his back. His tile crock crashed to the ground and blossomed like a flower. The dogs barked listlessly a few more times and took no more notice. Yu Zhan’ao withdrew his sword, rubbed both sides of the blade on the old man’s clothes, and turned to leave. But he stopped himself.

After dragging Shan Bianlang’s body out into the yard, he removed some rope from a carrying pole at the base of the wall, tied the two frail corpses together at the waist, then hoisted them up and carried them out to the street. They hung limply over his shoulder, their dragging feet making pale designs in the dirt, the blood seeping from their wounds leaving red patterns on the ground. Yu Zhan’ao carried the bodies over to the western inlet, whose glassy surface reflected half the stars in the sky. A few sleepy white water lilies floated gracefully like sprites in a fairy tale. Thirteen years later, when Mute shot Yu Zhan’ao’s uncle, Big Tooth Yu, there was hardly any water at this spot in the river, but these lilies were still there. Yu Zhan’ao dumped the bodies into the water with a loud splash. They sank quickly to the bottom, and when the ripples died, the sky once again owned the surface.

Yu Zhan’ao rinsed his hands, his face, and his sword in the river, but no matter how long he washed, he couldn’t remove the smells of blood and mildew. He then headed down the road, forgetting all about retrieving his rain cape from the Shan compound. When he’d travelled about half a li, he turned into the stand of sorghum, and immediately stumbled and fell. Suddenly realising how tired he was, he rolled over on his back, oblivious to the dampness, and gazed at the stars until he fell asleep.

5

FIVE MONKEYS SHAN, knowing there was something fishy about the fire that night, seriously considered getting up and helping to fight it, thus carrying out his responsibilities as village chief. But Little White Lamb, the voluptuous opium peddlar, wrapped her arms around him and wouldn’t let go. Two bandit gangs had once fought over this girl, with her fair skin and moist, captivating, suggestive eyes — what is called ‘fighting over the nest’ in bandit parlance. She was a living sign that the war being waged by Gaomi County Magistrate Nine Dreams Cao was far from won.

In 1923, Nine Dreams Cao had been serving the Northern Warlord Government as magistrate for nearly three years, and his ‘three torches’ were blazing. For him the earthly scourges were banditry, opium, and gambling, and the only way to put the world in order was to annihilate bandits, stamp out opium, and outlaw gambling. His favourite punishment was a beating with the sole of a shoe; hence his nickname, Shoe Sole Cao the Second. A complex individual for whom the words ‘good’ and ‘bad’ are woefully inadequate, he was involved in many important ways with my family, so it is appropriate to include him in this narrative as a link to what follows.

In two years of draconian decrees, Nine Dreams Cao had achieved considerable results in his rampage against the three scourges. But Northeast Gaomi Township was a long way from the county seat, and behind the scenes gambling, opium, and bandits flourished as never before.

Five Monkeys Shan slept till dawn with Little White Lamb in his arms. She awoke first. After lighting the bean-oil lamp, she stuck a silver pin into an opium pellet and thrust it into the flames. Once it caught fire, she stuffed it into a silver pipe and handed it to Five Monkeys Shan, who curled up in bed and inhaled for a minute or so. A tiny white dot glowed on the pellet. After holding his breath for two minutes, he exhaled streams of thin blue smoke through his mouth and nostrils, just as one of the Shan family’s hired hands banged frantically on the door and reported: ‘Village Chief! Terrible news! Murder!’

Five Monkeys Shan accompanied the hired hand into the Shan compound, with several other men on his heels. Then he followed the trail of blood to the inlet at the western edge of the village. The crowd behind him swelled.

‘The bodies must be at the bottom of the river,’ he said.

No one made a sound.

‘Who’ll go down and drag them up?’

The men exchanged glances, but said nothing.

The emerald-green water was smooth as glass. Water lilies floated placidly on the surface, with scattered dewdrops sticking to the leaves nearest the water, as moist and round as pearls.

‘One silver dollar. Now who’ll go?’

Still no sound.

An acrid stench rose from the inlet, and an unimaginably foul red glare emerged from a puddle of purplish blood in the reeds at the water’s edge. The sun rose above the field, white at the top and green at the bottom, sizzling like a chunk of partially fired steel. A line of black clouds above the horizon of sorghum tips stretched far off into the distance, so level you’d think your eyes were playing tricks on you. The inlet sparkled like a river of gold, broken only by the water lilies, which seemed otherworldly.

‘Who’ll go down for a silver dollar?’ Five Monkeys Shan asked in a booming voice.

The ninety-two-year-old woman from our village told me, ‘No man would have dared go into an inlet filled with the blood of a leper, not even for his own mother! If he did, he’d come out infected. If two went in, they’d both come out infected. Not for any amount of money… All that evil was caused by your grandma and your granddad!’ I wasn’t happy with the old hag for placing the blame on Granddad and Grandma, but as I looked at her clay-pot head I just smiled weakly.

‘Nobody’s willing to go down? Not a fucking one of you? Then we’ll just let father and son cool off in the water! Old Liu, Arhat Liu, since you’re the foreman, go into town and report this to Shoe Sole Cao the Second.’

In preparation for the trip, Uncle Arhat Liu wolfed down some food, followed it with half a gourdful of wine, then led out one of the black mules, tied a burlap bag over its back, and mounted it. He headed west, towards the county town.

Uncle Arhat wore a sombre expression that morning, from either anger or resentment. He was the first to suspect that something terrible had befallen his master and the master’s son following the suspicious fire. Up at the first light of dawn, he was surprised to note that the western compound gate was wide open. He spotted blood on the ground as soon as he walked into the yard, and more of it inside the house. Even in his confused state he knew that the fire and blood-letting were linked.

Since he and all the other hands knew that the young master had leprosy, they did not enter the western compound unless it was absolutely necessary, and then only after spraying mouthfuls of wine over their bodies. Uncle Arhat believed that sorghum wine was an effective disinfectant for all kinds of dangerous germs. When Shan Bianlang’s bride entered the compound three days earlier, no villagers were willing to assist, so naturally he and an old distillery hand were left to help her out of the sedan chair. As he held her arm and walked her into the house, he glanced at her out of the corner of his eye, seeing her delicate bound feet and her plump wrist, as big around as a lotus root, and he couldn’t stifle a sigh. In the midst of his shock over the murder of Old Man Shan and his son days later, the image of Grandma’s tiny feet and full wrist appeared and reappeared in his mind. He didn’t know if the sight of all that blood made him sad or happy.

Uncle Arhat whipped the big black mule, wishing it could sprout wings and fly him to town. He knew there would be more excitement to come, since the flowery, jadelike little bride would be returning from her parents’ home tomorrow morning on her donkey. Who would be the beneficiary of the Shan family’s vast holdings? Things like that were best left to Nine Dreams Cao to decide. After having overseen Gaomi County for three years, Cao had earned the sobriquet ‘Upright Magistrate’. People talked about how he dispatched cases with the wisdom of the gods, the vigour of thunder, and the speed of wind; about how he was just and honourable, never favouring his own kin over others; and about how he meted out death sentences without batting an eye. Uncle Arhat smacked the mule’s rump harder.

The mule flew west towards the county town, pounding the ground with its rear hooves when its front legs were curled up, then stretching out its front legs and curling its rear legs. The movement produced a rhythm of hoofbeats that belied the seemingly chaotic motion. Dust flew like blossoming flowers in the glinting light of the horseshoes. The sun was still in the southeastern corner of the sky when Uncle Arhat reached the Jiao-Ping — Jinan rail line. The mule balked at crossing the tracks so Uncle Arhat jumped down and tried to pull it across. But since he was no match for the animal’s strength, he sat down on the ground, gasping for breath and trying to figure out what to do next. The sunlight hurt his eyes. He stood up, wrapped his jacket around the mule’s eyes, and led it in a circle a few times before crossing the tracks.

Two black-uniformed policemen guarded the town’s northern gate, each armed with a Hanyang rifle. Since it was market day in Gaomi County, a stream of pushcarts, peddlars with carrying poles, and people on mules and on foot passed through the town gate. Ignoring the traffic, the policemen busied themselves leering at pretty girls passing in front of them.

Uncle Arhat led his mule onto the main street of town, paved with green cobblestones that clattered loudly under the mule’s shod hooves. To the south, the huge market square was jammed with people from every trade and occupation, haggling over prices, shouting and carrying on, buying and selling everything under the sun.

In no mood to get caught up in the excitement, Uncle Arhat led the mule up to the gate of the government compound, which looked like a dilapidated monastery, its tile roofs covered with yellow weeds and green grass. The red paint on the gate was peeling badly. An armed sentry stood to the left, while to the right a bare-chested man supported himself with both hands on a staff resting in a smelly honeypot.

Uncle Arhat bowed to the sentry. ‘Sir,’ he said, ‘I need to report to County Magistrate Cao.’

‘Magistrate Cao took Master Yan to market,’ the sentry replied.

‘When will he be back?’

‘How should I know? Go look for him at the market square if you’re in such a hurry.’

Uncle Arhat bowed again. ‘Thank you, sir.’

Seeing that Uncle Arhat was about to walk away, the bare-chested man sprang into action, churning his staff up and down in the honeypot and shouting, ‘Come look, come look, everybody, come look. My name is Wang Haoshan. I cheated people with a phony contract, and the county magistrate sentenced me to stir up a honeypot….’

Uncle Arhat and the mule entered the crowded market square, where people were selling baked buns, flatcakes, and sandals. There were scribes, fortune-tellers, beggers using every imaginable ploy, peddlars of aphrodisiacs, trained monkeys, gong-banging hawkers of malt sugar, knickknack vendors, storytellers with tales of romance and intrigue, dealers in leeks, cucumbers, and garlic, sellers of barber razors and pipe bowls, noodle sellers, rat-poison merchants, honeyed-peach sellers, child vendors — yes, even a ‘child market’, where children with straw markers on their collars could be bought or sold. The black mule kept rearing its head, making the steel bit in its mouth sing out. The sun was directly overhead, blazing down on Uncle Arhat, drenching his purple jacket with his own sweat.

Uncle Arhat spotted the official he was looking for at the chicken market.

Magistrate Cao had a ruddy face, bulging eyes, a square mouth, and a thin moustache. He was decked out in a dark-green tunic and a brown wool formal hat. He carried a walking stick.

Caught up in resolving a dispute, he had drawn quite a crowd. Instead of forcing his way to the front, Uncle Arhat led the mule out of the crowd, which blocked his view of what was going on, then mounted up, giving himself the best seat in the house.

A little runt of a man was standing beside the tall Magistrate Cao, and Uncle Arhat assumed it must be the Master Yan to whom the sentry had referred. Two men and a woman stood cowering before Magistrate Cao, their faces bathed in sweat. The woman’s cheeks were made even wetter by her tears. A fat hen lay on the ground at her feet.

‘Worthy magistrate, your honour,’ she sobbed, ‘my mother-in-law can’t stop menstruating, and we have no money for medicine. That’s why we’re selling this laying hen…. He says the hen is his….’

‘The hen is mine. If the magistrate doesn’t believe me, ask my neighbour here.’

Magistrate Cao pointed to a man in a skullcap. ‘Can you verify that?’

‘Worthy magistrate, I am Wu the Third’s neighbour, and this hen of his wanders into my yard every day to steal my chickens’ food. My wife’s always complaining about it.’

The woman screwed up her face, without saying a word, and burst out crying.

Magistrate Cao removed his hat, spun it around on his middle finger, then put it back on.

‘What did you feed your chicken this morning?’ he asked Wu the Third, who rolled his eyes and replied, ‘Cereal mash mixed with bran husks.’

‘He’s telling the truth, he is,’ the man in the skullcap confirmed. ‘I saw his wife mixing it when I went over to borrow his axe this morning.’

Magistrate Cao turned to the crying woman. ‘Don’t cry, countrywoman. Tell me what you fed your chicken this morning.’

‘Sorghum,’ she said between sobs.

‘Little Yan,’ Magistrate Cao said, ‘kill the chicken!’

With lightning speed, Yan slit the hen’s crop and squeezed out a gooey mess of sorghum seeds.

With a menacing laugh Magistrate Cao said, ‘You’re a real scoundrel, Wu the Third. Now, since you caused the death of this hen, you can pay for it. Three silver dollars!’

Wu the Third, shaking like a leaf, reached into his pocket and pulled out two silver dollars and twenty copper coins. ‘Magistrate, your honour,’ he said fearfully, ‘this is all I have.’

‘You’re getting off light!’ Magistrate Cao said, handing the money to the woman.

‘Magistrate, your honour,’ the woman said, ‘a hen isn’t worth all that much. I only want what’s coming to me.’

Magistrate Cao raised his hands to his forehead, uttered an exclamation, and said, ‘You’re truly a decent, upright woman. Nine Dreams Cao salutes you!’ Bringing his legs together, he removed his hat and bowed low.

The poor woman was so flustered she could only gaze at Nine Dreams Cao through tear-filled eyes. Once she’d regained her senses, she fell to her knees and said over and over, ‘His honour, the upright magistrate! His Honour, the upright magistrate!’

Magistrate Cao placed his walking stick under her arm. ‘Up, get up.’

The countrywoman got to her feet.

‘I can tell you are a filial daughter by the way you came to market in shabby clothes and poor health to sell a hen for the sake of your mother-in-law. Nothing impresses the magistrate like filial piety. Take the money and look after your mother-in-law. Take the chicken as well. Clean it and make a nice soup for her.’

Money in one hand, chicken in the other, the woman walked away, murmuring her gratitude.

Meanwhile, the deceitful Wu the Third and the neighbour who had served as his witness stood under the blazing sun trembling with fright.

‘Wu the Third, you scoundrel,’ Nine Dreams Cao commanded, ‘drop your pants.’

Wu was too bashful to do as he was told.

‘You tried to cheat that good woman in broad daylight,’ Magistrate Cao rebuked him. ‘It’s pretty late for modesty, isn’t it? Do you know what shame is selling for these days? Drop ’em!’

Wu the Third dropped his pants.

Nine Dreams Cao took off one of his shoes and handed it to Little Yan. ‘Two hundred lashes. All cheeks. Ass and face!’

Holding Magistrate Cao’s thick-soled shoe in his hand, Little Yan kicked Wu the Third to the ground, took aim at his exposed backside, and started in, fifty on each side, until Wu was screaming for his parents and begging for mercy, his buttocks swelling up in plain sight of everyone. Then it was his face’s turn, again fifty on each side; that stopped his screams.

Magistrate Cao placed the tip of his walking stick on Wu the Third’s forehead and said, ‘Will you try something like that again, you old scoundrel?’

Wu the Third, whose cheeks were so puffy he could barely open his mouth, responded by pounding his head on the ground as though he were crushing garlic.

‘As for you,’ Nine Dreams Cao said, pointing to the man who’d served as witness, ‘an ass-kisser who’d make up a story like that is the scum of the earth. I’m not going to give you a taste of the bottom of my shoe, because your ass would only soil it. Since you prefer something sweet, I’ll let you lick the ass of your rich buddy. Little Yan, go buy a pot of honey.’

Little Yan moved towards the crowd, which parted to let him pass. The false witness fell to his knees and banged his head so hard on the ground that his skullcap fell off.

‘Get up! Get up! Get up!’ Nine Dreams Cao commanded. ‘I’m not going to have you beaten or punished. I’m going to treat you to some honey, so what are you pleading for?’

When Little Yan returned with the honey, Nine Dreams Cao pointed to Wu the Third. ‘Spread it on his ass!’

Little Yan rolled Wu over on his belly, picked up a stick, and spread the potful of honey over his swollen buttocks.

‘Start licking,’ Nine Dreams Cao ordered the false witness. ‘You like kissing ass, don’t you? Okay, start licking!’

The false witness kept kowtowing loudly. ‘Magistrate, your honour,’ he pleaded, ‘Magistrate, your honour, I promise I’ll never again…’

‘Get the shoe ready, Little Yan,’ Nine Dreams Cao said. ‘And really put some arm into it this time.’

‘Don’t hit me,’ the false witness screamed, ‘don’t hit me! I’ll lick it.’

He crawled up to Wu the Third, stuck out his tongue, and began lapping up the sticky, transparent threads of honey.

The looks on the hot, sweaty faces of observers can hardly be described.

Sometimes fast, sometimes slowly, the false witness licked on, stopping only to throw up, which turned Wu the Third’s buttocks into a mottled mess. Seeing that he’d accomplished’ his purpose, Nine Dreams Cao roared, ‘That’s enough, you scum!’

The man stopped licking, pulled his jacket up over his head, and lay on the ground, refusing to get up.

As Nine Dreams Cao and Little Yan turned to leave, Uncle Arhat jumped off his mule and shouted, ‘Upright Magistrate! I come to file a grievance —’

6

JUST AS GRANDMA was about to climb off her donkey, the village chief, Five Monkeys Shan, stopped her: ‘Young mistress, don’t get down. The county magistrate wants to see you.’

Grandma was taken to the inlet at the western edge of the village in the custody of two armed soldiers. Great-Granddad had such severe leg cramps he couldn’t walk, and it took the nudge of a rifle in his back to get him moving; he fell in behind the donkey, his knees knocking.

Grandma noticed a black colt tied to the willow tree at the inlet. It was beautifully liveried, its forehead decorated with a red silk tassel. A few yards away, a man sat behind a table with a tea service. At the time, Grandma didn’t know that he was the illustrious Magistrate Cao. Another man stood next to the table, the magistrate’s capable enforcer, Master Yan, or Yan Luogu. Rounded-up villagers stood in front of the table, crowded together as though huddling to keep warm. A squad of twenty soldiers fanned out behind them.

Uncle Arhat stood behind another table, soaked to the skin.

The bodies of Shan Tingxiu and his son were laid out beneath the willow, not far from the tethered colt. Already beginning to stink, they oozed a foul yellow liquid. Above the bodies, a flock of crows hopped around on the branches, making the canopy of foliage come alive.

This was Uncle Arhat’s chance to get, finally, a clear look at Grandma’s full, round face. Her almond-shaped eyes were large, her long neck was like alabaster, her lush hair was rolled up into a bun at the back of her head. Her donkey stopped in front of the table, Grandma sitting tall and straight on its back, the picture of grace. As he watched Magistrate Cao’s dark, solemn eyes sweep across my grandma’s face and breast, a thought flashed into Uncle Arhat’s mind. The old master and his son came to grief because of this woman. She must have taken a lover, who had set the fire to ‘lure the tiger out of the mountain’, then had killed father and son to clear the way for himself. When the radishes have been picked, the field is bare. Now she could carry on however she pleased.

But when he looked at Grandma, Uncle Arhat was immediately besieged with doubts. No matter how a murderer tries to mask it, the look of evil always shows through. This woman sitting on her donkey… like a beautiful statue carved from wax, gently swinging her dainty, pointed feet, her expression a mixture of solemnity, tranquillity, and grief — unlike a bodhisattva, yet surpassing a bodhisattva. Great-Granddad stood alongside the donkey in stark contrast: his age against her youth, his decrepitude against her freshness, all serving to accentuate her radiance.

‘Have that woman come forward to answer some questions,’ Magistrate Cao ordered.

Grandma didn’t stir. Village Chief Five Monkeys Shan shuffled up and shouted angrily, ‘Climb down from there! His honour the county magistrate has ordered you to dismount!’

Magistrate Cao raised his hand to call off Five Monkeys Shan, then rose and said genially, ‘You there, woman, dismount. I want to ask you some questions.’

Great-Granddad lifted Grandma down off the mule.

‘What is your name?’ Magistrate Cao asked her.

Grandma stood stiffly, her eyelids slightly lowered, and said nothing.

Great-Granddad answered for her in a quaking voice, ‘Your honour, the unworthy girl’s name is Dai Fenglian. We call her Little Nine. She was born on the ninth day of the sixth month —’

‘Shut up!’ Magistrate Cao barked.

‘Who said you could talk?’ Five Monkeys Shan castigated Great-Granddad.

‘Damned fools!’ Magistrate Cao banged his fist on the table, causing Five Monkeys Shan and Great-Granddad to shrink in terror. As a benevolent expression reappeared on the magistrate’s face, he pointed to the bodies beneath the willow tree and asked, ‘You there, woman, do you know those two men?’

Grandma glanced out of the corner of her eye, and her face paled. She shook her head in silence.

‘They are your husband and your father-in-law. They have been murdered!’ Magistrate Cao shouted.

Grandma reeled before collapsing to the ground. The crowd surged forward to help her up, and in the confusion her silver combs were knocked loose, releasing clouds of black hair like a liquid cataract. Grandma, her face the colour of gold, sobbed for a moment, then laughed hysterically, a trickle of blood seeping from her lower lip.

Magistrate Cao banged the table again. ‘Listen, everyone, to my verdict. When the woman Dai, a gentle willow bent by the wind, magnanimous and upright, neither humble nor haughty, heard that her husband had been murdered, she was stricken with overpowering grief, spitting a mouthful of blood. How could a good woman like that be an adulteress who plotted the death of her own husband? Village Chief Five Monkeys Shan, I can see by your sickly pallor that you are an opium smoker and a gambler. How can you, as village chief, defy the laws of the county? That is unforgivable, not to mention your tactics to defile someone’s good name, which adds to your list of crimes. I am not fooled in my judgements. No disciples of evil and disorder can evade the eyes of the law. It must have been you who murdered Shan Tingxiu and his son, so you could get your hands on the Shan family fortune and the lovely woman Dai. You schemed to manipulate the local government and deceive me, like someone wielding an axe at the door of master carpenter Lu Ban, or waving his sword at the door of the swordsman Lord Guan, or reciting the Three Character Classic at the door of the wise Confucius, or whispering the ‘Rhapsody on the Nature of Medicine’ in the ear of the physician Li Shizhen. Arrest him!’

Soldiers rushed up and tied Five Monkeys Shan’s hands behind his back. ‘I’m not guilty, I’m innocent. Your honour, Magistrate…’ he shrieked.

‘Seal his mouth with the sole of your shoe!’

Little Yan drew out of his waistband a large shoe made just for this purpose and smacked Five Monkeys Shan across the mouth three times.

‘It was you who murdered them, wasn’t it?’

‘I’m innocent I’m innocent I’m innocent…’

‘If you didn’t do it, who did?’

‘It was… oh my, I don’t know, I don’t know….’

‘A few minutes ago you had it all figured out, and now you say you don’t know. Use the shoe sole again!’

Little Yan smacked Five Monkeys Shan across the mouth a dozen times, splitting his lips, from which frothy blood began to ooze. ‘I’ll tell,’ he muttered tearfully, ‘I’ll tell….’

‘Who’s the murderer?’

‘It… it… was a bandit, it was Spotted Neck!’

‘He did it on your orders, didn’t he?’

‘No! It was it was it was… Oh, Master, please don’t hit me…’

‘Listen to me, everybody,’ Nine Dreams Cao said. ‘Since assuming office as head of the county, I have worked hard to stamp out opium, outlaw gambling, and annihilate bandits, and I have had notable success with the first two. Only bandits remain a serious problem, running rampant in Northeast Gaomi Township. The county government has called upon all law-abiding citizens to report incidents and expose offenders in order to bring peace to the land.

‘Since the woman Dai was legally wed into the Shan family, she may assume its possessions and wealth. Anyone attempting to take advantage of this poor widow, or scheming to deprive her of what is legally hers, will be charged with banditry and disposed of accordingly!’

Grandma took three paces forward and knelt before Magistrate Cao, raising her lovely face and calling out:

‘Father! My true father!’

‘I am not your father,’ Magistrate Cao corrected her. ‘Your father is there, holding the donkey.’

She crawled forward and wrapped her arms around Magistrate Cao’s legs. ‘Father, my true father, now that you’re the county magistrate, don’t you know your own daughter? Ten years ago you fled the famine with your little girl and sold her. You may not know me, but I know you….’

‘My goodness! What kind of talk is that? It’s a bunch of nonsense!’

‘Father, how’s my mother? Little Brother must be about thirteen now. Is he in school? Father, you sold me for two pecks of red sorghum, but I held your hand and wouldn’t let go. You said, ‘Little Nine, when Father has turned things around he’ll come back for you.’ But now that you’re the county magistrate you say you don’t know me….’

‘The woman is mad, she has mistaken me for someone else!’

‘I’m not mistaken! I’m not! Father! My true father!’ She held tightly to Magistrate Cao’s legs and rocked back and forth, glistening tears streaming down her face, the sun glinting off her jadelike teeth.

Magistrate Cao lifted Grandma up and said, ‘I can be your foster-father!’

She tried to fall to her knees again, but was supported under the arms by Magistrate Cao. She squeezed his hand and said with childish innocence, ‘Father, when will you take me to see Mother?’

‘Soon, very soon! Now, let go, let go of me….’

Grandma let go of his hand.

Magistrate Cao took out a handkerchief to wipe his sweaty brow.

Everyone stared at the two of them.

Nine Dreams Cao removed his hat and twirled it on his finger as he stammered to the onlookers, ‘Fellow villagers — I have always advocated — stamp out opium — outlaw gambling — annihilate bandits —’

He had barely finished when — pow! pow! pow! — three shots rang out, and three bullets flew over from the sorghum field by the inlet, releasing three puffs of smoke when they hit the brown hat perched atop his middle finger. It sailed into the air, as though in the grip of a demon, and landed in the dirt, still twirling.

The gunshots were met by gasps and whistles from the crowd. ‘It’s Spotted Neck!’ someone shouted.

‘Three-Nod Phoenix!’

‘Quiet down! Quiet down!’ Magistrate Cao shouted from his refuge under the table.

The people, crying for their parents, scattered like wild animals.

Little Yan quickly untied the black colt from the willow tree, dragged Magistrate Cao out from under the table, helped him onto the horse, and swatted it on the rump. The colt, its mane standing straight up, its tail bristling, ran like the wind with the county magistrate in the saddle, while the soldiers fired a few random shots towards the sorghum field before making themselves scarce.

The banks of the inlet grew strangely quiet.

Grandma rested her hand sombrely on the donkey’s head and stared towards the sorghum field. Great-Granddad had thrown himself under the donkey and covered his ears with his hands. Steam rose from the clothes of Uncle Arhat, who hadn’t moved.

The water in the inlet was smooth as ever; the floating white lilies had spread open, their petals like ivory. The village chief, Five Monkeys Shan, whose face was bruised and swollen by the shoe sole, shrieked ‘Spare me, Spotted Neck! Spare me!’

His shrieks were answered by three more rapid gunshots, and Grandma saw the bullets strike his head. Three tufts of hair stood straight up as he fell over, kissing the ground with his open mouth, a mottled liquid oozing from the upturned back of his head.

Grandma’s expression didn’t change; she gazed at the sorghum field as though awaiting something. A breeze swept across the inlet, raising ripples on the surface, setting the lilies in motion, and bending the rays of light on the water. Half of the gathered crows had flown down to the bodies of Shan Tingxiu and his son; the other half remained perched on the willow branches, raising a clamour. Their tail feathers fanned out in the breeze, revealing glimpses of the dark-green skin around their rectums.

A tall, husky man emerged from the sorghum field and walked along the bank of the inlet. He wore a rain cape that came down to his knees and a conical hat woven out of sorghum stalks. The strap was made of emerald glass beads. A black silk bandana was tied around his neck. He walked to the body of Five Monkeys Shan and looked down at it. Then he walked over to Magistrate Cao’s hat, picked it up, and twirled it on the barrel of his pistol before heaving it in the air. It sailed into the inlet.

The man looked straight at my grandma, who returned his gaze.

‘Were you bedded by Shan Bianlang?’ he asked.

‘Yes,’ Grandma said.

‘Shit!’ He turned and walked back into the sorghum field.

Uncle Arhat was utterly confused by what he’d seen, and couldn’t have told you which way was up.

The bodies of the old master and his son were now completely covered by crows, some of which were pecking at the eyes with their hard black beaks.

Uncle Arhat was trying to make sense of everything that had happened since he’d lodged his complaint at the Gaomi market the day before.

Magistrate Cao had led him into the county-government building, where he lit candles and listened to his account as they gnawed on green radishes. Early the next morning, Uncle Arhat guided the magistrate to Northeast Gaomi Township, followed by Little Yan and a couple of dozen soldiers. They reached the village at about ten o’clock. After a quick surveillance, the county magistrate summoned Village Chief Five Monkeys Shan, and ordered him to round up the villagers and drag the corpses from the water.

The surface of the inlet shone like chrome, and the depth of the water seemed unfathomable. The county magistrate ordered Five Monkeys Shan to dive for the bodies, but he shrank back, complaining that he didn’t know how to swim. Uncle Arhat summoned up his courage. ‘County Magistrate, they were my masters, so bringing them out should be my job.’ He told one of the other hands to fetch a bottle of wine, which he rubbed over his body before diving in. The water was as deep as a staff, so he took a long breath and sank to the bottom, his feet touching the spongy warm mud. He searched around blindly with his hands, but found nothing. So he rose to the surface, took another deep breath, and dived again. It was cooler down there. When he opened his eyes, all he could see was a layer of yellow. His ears were buzzing. A large blurry object swam up to him, and when he reached out to it a sharp pain shot through his finger, like a wasp sting. He screamed, and swallowed a mouthful of brackish water. Flailing his arms and legs for all they were worth, he swam to the surface; on the bank, he gasped for breath.

‘Find something?’ the magistrate asked.

‘Nnn-no…’ His face was ashen. ‘In the river… something strange…’

As he gazed down into the inlet, Magistrate Cao took off his hat, twirled it on his finger, then turned and ordered two soldiers, ‘Hand grenades!’

Little Yan herded the villagers a good twenty paces away.

Magistrate Cao walked over to the table and sat down.

The soldiers flattened out on the riverbank, and each took a muskmelon hand grenade out of his belt. They pulled the pins, banged the grenades against their rifles, and flung them into the inlet, where they hit the water with a splash, raising concentric circles on the surface. The soldiers pressed their faces against the ground. Silence — not even a bird chirped. A long time passed, but nothing happened in the river. By then the concentric circles had reached the shore; the water was as smooth as a bronze mirror, and just as mysterious.

Magistrate Cao gnashed his teeth and ordered, ‘One more time!’

The soldiers heaved two more grenades, which sputtered as they sailed through the air, leaving a trail of white smoke; when they hit the water, two muffled explosions rose from the bottom, sending plumes of water a dozen feet into the air.

Magistrate Cao rushed up to the bank, followed by the villagers. The water continued roiling for a long time. Then a trail of bubbles rose to the surface and popped, revealing at least a dozen big-mouthed, green-backed carp that bellied-up to the surface. As the ripples smoothed out, a foul stench settled over the water, which was bathed in sunlight. The light illuminated the villagers, and Magistrate Cao’s face began to glow.

Suddenly two trails of pink bubbles gurgled up in the middle of the inlet and burst, as the people on the bank held their breath. A layer of golden husks covered the surface of the river under the blazing sun, nearly blinding the onlookers. Two black objects rose slowly beneath the trail of bubbles, and then the surface was broken by two pairs of buttocks; the bodies rolled over, exposing the distended bellies of Shan Tingxiu and his son. Their faces remained just below the surface, as though held back by shyness.

The magistrate ordered a distillery worker to run back and fetch a long hooked pole, with which Uncle Arhat snagged the legs of Shan Tingxiu and his son — producing a sickening sound that made everyone’s gums crawl, as though they had all bitten into sour apricots — then slowly dragged the bodies towards the bank.

The little donkey raised its head towards the heavens and brayed.

‘Now what, young mistress?’ Uncle Arhat asked.

Grandma thought for a moment. ‘Have someone buy a couple of cheap coffins in town so we can bury them as soon as possible. And pick out a gravesite. When you’re finished, come to the western compound. I want to talk to you.’

‘Yes, ma’am,’ he replied respectfully.

Uncle Arhat, together with the dozen or so hired hands, laid the elder and younger masters in their coffins and buried them in the sorghum field. They worked feverishly, in silence. By the time they’d buried the dead, the sun was in the western sky, and crows were circling above the gravesite, their wings painted purple by rays of sunlight. Uncle Arhat said to the men, ‘Go back and wait for me. Don’t say anything. Watch my eyes for a signal.’

He went to the western compound to receive instructions from Grandma, who was sitting cross-legged on the blanket she’d taken from the donkey’s back. Great-Granddad was feeding straw to the animal.

‘Everything has been taken care of, young mistress,’ Uncle Arhat said. ‘These are Elder Master’s keys.’

‘Keep them for now,’ she said. ‘Tell me, is there someplace in the village where you can buy stuffed buns?’

‘Yes.’

‘Buy two basketfuls, and give them to the men. Tell them to come here when they’re done. And bring me twenty buns.’

Uncle Arhat brought the twenty buns wrapped in fresh lotus leaves. Grandma took them and said, ‘Now go back to the eastern compound and have the men eat as quickly as possible.’

Uncle Arhat murmured his acknowledgement as he backed away.

Grandma then placed the twenty buns in front of Great-Granddad and said, ‘You can eat these on the road.’

‘Little Nine,’ he protested, ‘you’re my very own daughter!’

‘Go on,’ she demanded, ‘I’ve heard enough!’

‘But I’m your dad!’ he rebuked her angrily.

‘You’re no father of mine, and I forbid you ever to enter my door again!’

‘I am your father!’

‘Magistrate Cao is my father. Weren’t you listening?’

‘Not so fast. You can’t just throw one father away because you found yourself a new one. Don’t think having you was easy on your mother and me!’

Grandma flung the buns in his face. They hit like exploding grenades.

Great-Granddad cursed and ranted as he led the donkey out the gate: ‘You misbegotten ingrate! What makes you think you can turn your back on your own family? I’m going to report you to the county authorities for being disloyal and unfilial! I’ll tell them you’re in league with bandits. I’ll tell them you schemed to have your husband killed….’

As Great-Granddad’s shouts and curses grew more distant and fainter, Uncle Arhat led the hired hands into the compound.

Grandma touched up her hair and smoothed out her clothes, then announced in a stately manner: ‘Men, you have worked hard! I’m young, and have no experience in managing affairs, so I’ll need to rely on everyone’s help to get by. Uncle Arhat, you have served the family loyally for over a decade, and from now on you’ll be in charge of all distillery affairs. Now that the elder and younger master have left us, we need to clean the table and start a new banquet. We will have the backing of my foster-dad at the county level, and will do nothing to offend our greenwood friends. If we treat the villagers and our customers fairly and courteously, there’s no reason why we can’t stay in business. I want you to burn everything the elder and younger masters used. Anything that can’t be burned will be buried. Tonight you’ll need to get plenty of rest. Well, what do you think, Uncle Arhat?’

‘We will carry out the young mistress’s orders,’ he responded.

‘If any of you wants to leave, I won’t stand in your way. Anyone who finds it difficult to work for a woman should look for employment elsewhere.’

The men exchanged glances. ‘We’ll do our best for the young mistress,’ they said.

‘Then that’s all for now.’

The men retired to the bunkhouse in the eastern compound, buzzing about all that had happened. ‘Turn in,’ Uncle Arhat said to them. ‘Get some sleep. We have to be up early tomorrow.’

In the middle of the night, when Uncle Arhat got up to feed the mules, he heard Grandma sobbing in the western compound.

Bright and early the next morning, he went out to look around. The gate to the western compound was closed, and there was no sound from inside. He stood on a stool and looked over the gate. Grandma was seated on the ground next to the wall, with only the comforter beneath her; she was fast asleep.

Over the next three days, the Shan family compound was turned upside down. Uncle Arhat and the hired hands, their bodies sprayed with wine, removed the elder and younger masters’ possessions — bedding, clothing, straw mats, eating utensils, sewing items, anything and everything — piled it in the middle of the yard, doused it with wine, and set it on fire. Then they dug a deep hole, into which they threw anything that didn’t burn.

When the house had been cleared out, Uncle Arhat carried a bowl of wine to Grandma. A string of bronze keys lay at the bottom. ‘Young mistress,’ he said, ‘the keys have been disinfected in wine three times.’

‘Uncle,’ Grandma replied, ‘you should be in charge of the keys. My possessions are your possessions.’

Her comment so terrified him he couldn’t speak.

‘This is no time to decline my offer. Go buy some fabric and whatever else I’ll need to furnish the house. Have someone make bedding and mosquito nets. Don’t worry about the cost. And have the men disinfect the house, including the walls, with wine.

‘How much wine should they use?’

‘As much as they need.’

So the men sprayed wine until heaven and earth were soaked. Grandma stood in the intoxicating air with a smile on her lips.

The disinfecting process used up nine whole vats of wine. Once the spraying was completed, Grandma told the men to soak new cloth in the wine and scrub everything three or four times. That done, they whitewashed the walls, painted the doors and windows, and spread fresh straw and new mats over the kangs, until they had created a new world, top to bottom.

When their work was finished, she gave them each three silver dollars.

Ten days later, the odour of wine had faded and the whitewash made the place smell fresh. Feeling lighthearted, Grandma went to the village store, where she bought a pair of scissors, some red paper, needles and thread, and other domestic utensils. After returning home, she climbed onto the kang beside the window with its brand-new white paper covering and began making paper cutouts for window decorations. She had always produced paper cutouts and embroidery that were so much nicer than anything the neighbour girls could manage — delicate and fine, simple and vigorous, in a style that was all her own.

As she picked up the scissors and cut a perfect square out of the red paper, a sense of unease struck her like a bolt of lightning. Although she was seated on the kang, her heart had flown out the window and was soaring above the red sorghum like a dove on the wing…. Since childhood she had lived a cloistered life, cut off from the outside world. As she neared maturity, she had obeyed the orders of her parents, and been rushed to the home of her husband. In the two weeks that followed, everything had been turned topsy-turvy: water plants swirling in the wind, duckweeds bathing in the rain, lotus leaves scattered on the pond, a pair of frolicking red mandarin ducks. During those two weeks, her heart had been dipped in honey, immersed in ice, scalded in boiling water, steeped in sorghum wine.

Grandma was hoping for something, without knowing what it was. She picked up the scissors again, but what to cut? Her fantasies and dreams were shattered by one chaotic image after another, and as her thoughts grew more confused, the mournful yet lovely song of the katydids drifted up from the early-autumn wildwoods and sorghum fields. A bold and novel idea leaped into her mind: a katydid has freed itself from its gilded cage, where it perches to rub its wings and sing.

After cutting out the uncaged katydid, Grandma fashioned a plum-blossomed deer. The deer, its head high and chest thrown out, has a plum tree growing from its back as it wanders in search of a happy life, free of care and worries, devoid of constraints.

Only Grandma would have had the audacity to place a plum tree on the back of a deer. Whenever I see one of Grandma’s cutouts, my admiration for her surges anew. If she could have become a writer, she would have put many of her literary peers to shame. She was endowed with the golden lips and jade teeth of genius. She said a katydid perched on top of its cage, and that’s what it did; she said a plum tree grew from the back of a deer, and that’s where it grew.

Grandma, compared with you, I am like a shrivelled insect that has gone hungry for three long years.

As she was cutting the paper, the main gate suddenly creaked open, and a strangely familiar voice called out in the yard: ‘Mistress, are you hiring?’

The scissors dropped from Grandma’s hand onto the kang.

7

THE FIRST THING Father saw after Granddad shook him awake was a long, coiling dragon coming straight for them as though on wings. Bold howls rose from beneath upraised torches. Father wondered how this wriggling line of torches could have so deeply moved a man like Granddad, who could kill without batting an eye. He was weeping openly. ‘Douguan,’ he mumbled between sobs, ‘my son… our fellow villagers are coming….’

Several hundred villagers — men and women, boys and girls — crowded round. Those not holding torches were armed with hoes, rakes, and clubs. Father’s best friends squeezed up to the front, holding torches made of sorghum stalks that were tipped with cotton wadding dipped in bean oil.

‘Commander Yu, you won the battle!’

‘Commander Yu, we have slaughtered cattle, pigs, and sheep for a feast for you and your men.’

Granddad fell to his knees in front of the solemn, sacred torches, which lit up the meandering river and the vast, mighty sorghum. ‘Fellow villagers,’ he said in a trembling voice, ‘I, Yu Zhan’ao, should be condemned for all time for being duped by Pocky Leng’s treachery. My men… all lost in the fight!’

The torches closed in around him, smoke rose in the air, flames flickered uneasily, and drops of burning oil sizzled as they fell to the ground like red thread. Red cinders in a floral pattern covered the dike. A fox in the sorghum field howled. Fish, attracted by the light, schooled just below the surface. The people were speechless. Amid the crackling of flames, a thunderous sound came rolling towards them from some distant spot in the field.

An old man, his face dark, his beard white, one eye much larger than the other, handed his torch to the man beside him, bent down, and slipped his arms under my granddad’s. ‘Get up, Commander Yu, get up, get up.’

‘Get up, Commander Yu,’ the villagers echoed, ‘get up, get up.’

Granddad rose slowly to his feet, as the heat from the old man’s hands warmed the muscles of his arms. ‘Fellow villagers,’ he said, ‘let’s take a look around.’

The torchbearers fell in behind Granddad and Father, the flames lighting up the blurry riverbed and the sorghum fields all the way up to the battleground near the bridge. The burned-out trucks cast eerie shadows. Corpses strewn across the battlefield gave off an overpowering stench of blood, which merged with the smell of scorched metal, of the sorghum that served as a vast backdrop, and of the river, so far from its source.

Women began to wail as drops of burning oil fell from the torches onto the people’s hands and feet. The men’s faces looked like steel fresh from the furnace. The white stone bridge had turned scarlet.

The old man with the dark face and white beard shouted, ‘What are you crying for? This was a great victory! There are four hundred million of us Chinese. If we take on the Japs, one on one, how do you think their little country will fare? If one hundred million of us fought them to the death, they’d be wiped out, but there’d still be three hundred million of us. That makes us the victors, doesn’t it? Commander Yu, this was a crushing victory!’

‘Old uncle, you’re just saying that to make me feel good.’

‘No, Commander Yu, it really was a great victory. Give the order; tell us what to do. China may have nothing else, but it’s got plenty of people.’

Granddad straightened up. ‘You people, gather up the bodies of our fallen comrades!’

The villagers spread out and gathered up the bodies from the sorghum fields on both sides of the highway, then laid them out on the dike on the western edge of the bridge, heads facing south, feet north. Pulling Father along behind him, Granddad walked down the column of bodies, counting them. Wang Wenyi, Wang’s wife, Fang Six, Fang Seven, Bugler Liu, Consumptive Four… one face after another. Tears ran down Granddad’s deeply lined face like rivers of molten steel in the light of the torches.

‘What about Mute?’ Granddad asked. ‘Douguan, did you see Uncle Mute?’

The image of Mute’s razor-sharp sabre knife slicing off the Jap’s head, and of the head sailing, screaming, through the air, flashed into Father’s mind. ‘On the truck,’ he said.

The torches encircled one of the trucks. Three men climbed onto it as Granddad ran up. They lifted Mute’s body over the railing and onto Granddad’s back. One man held Mute’s head, another his legs, and they staggered up the dike with their load, to lay it on the easternmost edge of the grisly column. Mute, bent at the waist, was still gripping his blood-spattered sabre knife. His lifeless eyes were staring, his mouth open, as though frozen on a scream.

Granddad knelt and pressed down on Mute’s knees and chest; Father heard the dead man’s spine groan and crack as his body straightened out. Granddad tried to wrench the sword free, but the death grip thwarted his attempts. He brought the arm down so that the sword lay alongside Mute’s leg. One of the women knelt and rubbed Mute’s eyes. ‘Brother,’ she said, ‘close your eyes, close them now. Commander Yu will avenge your death….’

‘Dad, Mom’s still in the field….’ Father began to weep.

With a wave of his hand, Granddad said, ‘You go…. Take some people with you and carry her back….’

Father darted into the sorghum field, followed by several villagers with torches, whose burning oil brushed the dense stalks. The aggrieved dry leaves crackled and burned when they were splattered, and as the fires spread, the stalks bowed their heavy heads and wept hoarsely.

Father parted the sorghum to reveal the body of Grandma, lying on her back and facing the remote, inimitable sky above Northeast Gaomi Township, filled with the spirits of countless stars. Even in death her face was as lovely as jade, her parted lips revealing a line of clean teeth inlaid with pearls of sorghum seeds, placed there by the emerald beaks of white doves.

‘Carry her back,’ Granddad said.

A group of young women lifted her up. With torches casting a wide net of light along the route, the sorghum field turned into a fairyland, and each member of the procession was surrounded by an eerie halo of light.

One woman carried Grandma’s body onto the dike and laid it at the westernmost end of the corpses.

The old man with the white beard asked, ‘Commander Yu, where will we find enough coffins for them all?’

Granddad thought for a moment. ‘We won’t carry them back,’ he said finally, ‘and we don’t need coffins. For now, we’ll bury them in the sorghum field. Once I’ve rallied our forces, I’ll come back and give them a proper send-off.’

The old man sent a group back to weave additional torches, since they would be burying the dead through the night. ‘While you’re at it,’ Granddad added, ‘bring some draught animals so we can tow that truck back with us, and chop down enough sorghum stalks to cover the bodies and line the bottoms of the graves before filling them in with dirt.’

Grandma was the last to be interred. Once again her body was enshrouded in sorghum. As Father watched the final stalk hide her face, his heart cried out in pain, never to be whole again throughout his long life. Granddad tossed in the first spadeful of dirt. The loose clods of black earth thudded against the layer of sorghum like an exploding grenade shattering the surrounding stillness with its lethal shrapnel. Father’s heart wept blood.

Grandma’s grave mound was the fifty-first in the field. ‘Fellow villagers,’ the old man said, ‘on your knees!’

The village elders fell to their knees before the line of graves, the fields around them vibrating with the sound of weeping. The torches were beginning to die out. Just then a star fell from the southern sky, its brilliance not fading from view until it had passed below the tips of sorghum.

It was nearly dawn when the old torches were replaced by new ones. A milky gleam gradually penetrated the fog over the river. The dozen or so draught animals grazed noisily on the sorghum stalks and chewed the fallen ears of grain.

Granddad ordered the people to remove the linked rakes from the road and push the first truck across the highway and into the ditch on the eastern shoulder. When it was done, he picked up a shotgun, aimed at the gas tank, and fired, filling it with holes through which the gasoline spurted out. Then, taking a torch, he stepped back, aimed carefully, and flung it. A towering white flame shot into the air, igniting the frame and quickly turning the truck into a pile of twisted metal.

The villagers put their shoulders to the undamaged truck loaded with rice, pushing it across the bridge and onto the highway, then tipped the burned-out hulk of the third truck into the river. The gas tank of the fourth truck, which had retreated to the road south of the bridge, was also blasted by the shotgun and set afire, sending more flames shooting up into the heavens. All that remained on the bridge were piles of cinders. Flames rose into the sky to the north and south of the river, punctuated by the occasional crack of an exploding shell. The Jap corpses, burned to an oily crisp, added the stench of roasted flesh to the acrid smell in the air. The people’s throats itched, their stomachs churned.

‘What’ll we do with their bodies, Commander Yu?’ the old man asked.

‘If we bury them, they’ll stink up our soil! If we burn them, they’ll foul our air! Dump them into the river and let them float back home.’

Thirty or more corpses were dragged up onto the bridge, including the old Jap, who had been stripped of his general’s uniform by the Leng Detachment soldiers.

‘You women look away,’ Granddad announced.

He took out his short sword, split open the crotches of the Jap soldiers’ pants, and sliced off their genitalia. Then he ordered a couple of the coarser men to stuff the things into the mouths of their owners. Finally, working in pairs, the men picked up the Japanese soldiers — basically decent men, perhaps, maybe handsome at one time, virtually all in the prime of their youth — and, one two three, heaved them over the side. ‘Jap dogs,’ they shouted, ‘go back home!’ The Japanese soldiers flew through the air, carrying the family jewels in their mouths, and landed in the river with a splash, a whole school of them caught up in the eastward flow.

The faint rays of dawn found the villagers too exhausted to move. The fires along the banks were dying out beneath the still-dark sky. Granddad told the villagers to hitch the animals up to the front bumper of the undamaged rice truck.

The animals strained, the ropes were yanked taut, and the axles groaned as the truck crawled forward like a clumsy beetle. The front wheels kept veering from side to side, so Granddad halted the animals, opened the door, and slid into the cab to try his hand at steering. The ropes snapped taut as the animals strained forward again, and Granddad wrestled with the steering wheel until he began to get the hang of it. Now the truck was heading straight, the terrified villagers fell in behind it. Keeping one hand on the steering wheel, Granddad felt around the dashboard with the other. He snapped on a switch, sending two rays of light shooting out the front.

‘It opened its eyes!’ someone shouted from behind him.

The headlights lit up the road ahead as well as the hairs on the animals’ backs. Feeling very good about things, Granddad pushed and turned and twisted and pulled every button and switch and lever and knob he could find. A shrill noise rang out, and the horn began to blare. So you haven’t lost your voice! Granddad was thinking. Deciding to have a little fun, he turned the ignition switch; a rumbling emerged from its belly as the truck shot forward crazily, knocking down mules and oxen, and bumping horses and donkeys out of the way, scaring Granddad so badly he was drenched with sweat, front and back. Having climbed onto the tiger’s back, he didn’t know how to get down.

The dumbstruck villagers watched the truck knock the animals down and drag them along. It travelled a few dozen yards before careening into a ditch west of the road and coming to a shuddering halt, the raised wheels on one side spinning like windmills. Granddad smashed the glass and climbed out, his hands and face smeared with blood.

He stood looking at the demonic creature, a grim smile on his face.

After the villagers had unloaded the rice from the back of the remaining truck, Granddad blasted holes in the gas tank and once again ignited the gasoline with a torch. The flames licked the heavens.

8

FOURTEEN YEARS EARLIER, Yu Zhan’ao, a bedroll over his back, and dressed in clean, freshly starched white pants and jacket, stood in the yard of our home and shouted: ‘Mistress, are you hiring?’

With a hundred thoughts running through her mind, Grandma’s natural instincts deserted her. Her scissors dropped to the kang, and she fell backward onto the brand-new purple comforter.

His nostrils filled with the odour of fresh whitewash and a delicate feminine fragrance, Yu Zhan’ao’s courage mounted. He barged into the room.

‘Mistress, are you hiring?’

Grandma lay face up and blurry-eyed on the comforter.

Yu Zhan’ao threw down his bedroll and slowly approached the kang. At that moment his heart was like a warm pond in which toads frolicked while swifts skimmed the surface. When his dark chin was only about the thickness of a piece of paper from Grandma’s face, she slapped him on his dark, shiny scalp, then sat up quickly, picked up her scissors, and screamed, ‘Who are you? What do you think you’re doing? How dare you barge into a strange woman’s room!’

Startled, he backed up and said, ‘You… you really don’t know me?’

‘How dare you talk like that! I lived a cloistered life at home until my wedding day, less than two weeks ago. How would I know you?’

‘Okay, if that’s the way you want it,’ he said with a smile. ‘I hear you’re shorthanded at the distillery, and I need work to put food in my belly!’

‘All right, as long as you don’t mind hard work. What’s your name? How old are you?’

‘My name’s Yu Zhan’ao. I’m twenty-four.’

‘Take your bedroll outside,’ she said.

Yu Zhan’ao obediently walked outside and waited under a blazing sun. Traces of burned leaves remained in the yard, and he relived the memory of what had happened there recently. He waited for about half an hour, growing more restless by the minute, and was barely able to keep from rushing inside and settling accounts with the woman.

After murdering Shan Tingxiu and his son, he had not run away, but had hidden in the field near the inlet to watch the excitement. Even now he sighed in wonder over Grandma’s amazing performance. She might be young, but she had teeth in her belly and could scheme with the best of them. A woman to be reckoned with, certainly no economy lantern. Maybe she was treating him like this today just in case there were prying eyes and ears. He waited a bit longer, but still she didn’t come out. The yard was silent except for a calling magpie perched on the ridge of the roof. In the grip of anger, he was rushing towards the house, prepared to make a scene, when he heard Grandma’s voice through the window. ‘Report to the eastern compound.’

Realising his mistake in not following the proper etiquette, Yu Zhan’ao let go of his anger and walked over to the eastern compound, where he saw rows of wine vats, piles of sorghum, and a crew of hired hands working inside the steamy distillery. He strode into the tent and asked a worker standing on a high stool feeding sorghum into a bucket above the millstone, ‘Hey, who’s in charge here?’

The man looked at him out of the corner of his eye. When he had fed all the sorghum into the bucket, he jumped down off the stool and backed away from the millstone, holding a sieve in one hand and the stool in the other. Then he gave a shout, and the mule, wearing a black blindfold, began turning the millstone. Its hooves had worn a groove in the ground around the stone. A dull grinding sound emerged as crushed grain poured like raindrops from the space between the stones into a wooden pan below. ‘The foreman’s in the shop,’ the man said, pursing his lips and pointing with his chin to the buildings west of the main gate.

With his bedroll in his hand, Yu Zhan’ao entered through the back door and spotted the familiar figure of an old man sitting behind the counter working his abacus, occasionally taking a sip from a small, dark-green decanter beside it.

‘Foreman,’ Yu Zhan’ao announced, ‘are you hiring?’

Uncle Arhat looked up at Yu Zhan’ao and reflected for a moment. ‘Are you looking for permanent or temporary work?’

‘Whatever you need. I’m interested in working for as long as I can.’

‘If you want to work for a week or so, I can do the hiring. But if you’re interested in a permanent job, the mistress has to approve.’

‘Then you’d better go ask her.’

Yu Zhan’ao walked up and sat on one of the stools as Uncle Arhat lowered the counter bar and walked out the rear door. But he turned and came back in, picked up a crudely made bowl, half-filled it with wine, and set it on the counter. ‘Your mouth must be dry. Have some wine.’

Yu Zhan’ao’s thoughts were on the woman’s remarkable schemes as he drank. ‘The mistress wants to see you,’ Uncle Arhat said when he returned. They went over to the western compound. ‘Wait here,’ Uncle Arhat said.

Grandma walked outside with poise and grace. After grilling Yu Zhan’ao for a while, she waved her hand and said, ‘Take him over there. We’ll try him for a month. His wages start tomorrow.’

So Yu Zhan’ao became a hired hand in the family distillery. With his strength and clever hands, he was an ideal worker, and Uncle Arhat sang his praises to Grandma. At the end of the first month, he summoned him and said, ‘The mistress likes the way you work, so we’ll keep you on.’ He handed him a cloth bundle. ‘She wants you to have these.’

He undid the bundle. Inside was a pair of new cloth shoes. ‘Foreman,’ he said, ‘please tell the mistress that Yu Zhan’ao thanks her for the gift.’

‘You can go,’ said Uncle Arhat. ‘I expect you to work hard.’

‘I will,’ Yu Zhan’ao promised.

Another two weeks passed, and Yu Zhan’ao was finding it harder and harder to control himself. The mistress came to the eastern compound every day to look around, but directed her questions only to Uncle Arhat, paying hardly any attention to the sweaty hired hands. That did not sit well with Yu Zhan’ao.

Back when the distillery was run by Shan Tingxiu and his son, the workers’ meals were prepared and sent over by café owners in the village. But after Grandma took charge, she hired a middle-aged woman whom everyone called ‘the woman Liu’, and a teenaged girl named Passion. They lived in the western compound, where they were responsible for all the cooking. Then Grandma increased the number of dogs in the compound from two to five. Now that the western compound was home to three women and five dogs, it became a lively little world of its own. At night the slightest disturbance set off the dogs, and any intruder not bitten to death would surely have the wits frightened out of him.

By the time Yu Zhan’ao had been working the distillery cooker for eight weeks, it was the ninth lunar month, and the sorghum in the fields was good and ripe. Grandma told Uncle Arhat to hire some temporary labourers to clean the yard and open-air bins in preparation for the harvest. They were clear, sunny days with a deep sky. Grandma, dressed in white silk and wearing red satin slippers, carried a willow switch around the yard, with her dogs running on her heels, drawing strange looks from the villagers, although none dared so much as fart in her presence. Yu Zhan’ao approached her several times, but she stayed aloof and wouldn’t bestow a word on him.

One night Yu Zhan’ao drank a little more than usual, and wound up getting slightly drunk. He tossed and turned on the communal kang, but couldn’t fall asleep, as moonlight streamed in through the window in the eastern wall. Two hired hands sat beneath a bean-oil lantern mending their clothes.

Then Old Du took out his stringed instrument and began playing sad tunes, striking resonant chords in the hearts of the listeners. Something was bound to happen. One of the men mending his clothes was so moved by Old Du’s melancholy tunes that his throat began to itch. ‘It’s no fun being alone,’ he sang hoarsely, ‘no fun at all. Tattered clothes never get sewn….’

‘Why not get the mistress to sew them for you?’

‘The mistress? I wonder who will feast on that tender swan.’

‘The old master and his son thought it would be them, and they wound up dead.’

‘I hear she had an affair with Spotted Neck while she was still living at home.’

‘Are you saying Spotted Neck murdered them?’

‘Not so loud. “Words spoken on the road are heard by snakes in the grass!”’

Yu Zhan’ao lay on the kang sneering.

‘What’re you smirking for, Little Yu?’ one of them asked.

Emboldened by the wine, he blurted out, ‘I murdered them!’

‘You’re drunk!’

‘Drunk? I tell you, I murdered them!’ He sat up, reached into the bag hanging on the wall, and pulled out his short sword. When he slid it out of the scabbard, it caught the moon’s rays and shone like a silverfish. ‘I’ll tell you guys,’ he said with a thick tongue, ‘our mistress… I slept with her…. Sorghum fields… Came at night and set a fire… stabbed one… stabbed the other….’

One of his listeners quietly blew out the lantern, throwing the room into a murky darkness in which the moonlit sword shone even more brightly.

‘Go to sleep go to sleep go to sleep! We have to be up early tomorrow to make wine!’

Yu Zhan’ao was still mumbling. ‘You… damn you… pretend you don’t know me after you hitch up your pants… work me like an ox or a horse…. Don’t think you can get away with it…. Tonight I’m going to… butcher you….’ He climbed off the kang, sword in hand, and staggered outside. The other men lay in the dark, staring wide-eyed at the moon glinting off the weapon in his hand, not daring to utter a sound.

Yu Zhan’ao walked into the moonlit yard and looked at the glazed wine vats glistening in the light like jewels. A southern breeze swept over from the fields, carrying the bittersweet aroma of ripe sorghum and making him shiver. The sound of a woman’s giggle drifted over from the western compound. As he slipped into the tent to move the bench outside, he was met by the pawing sounds of the black mule tethered behind the feed trough. Ignoring the animal, he carried the bench over to the wall. When he stepped on it and straightened up, the top of the wall reached his chest. A light behind the window illuminated the paper cutout. The mistress was playing games with the girl Passion on the kang. ‘Aren’t you a couple of naughty little monkeys?’ he heard the woman Liu say. ‘It’s bedtime; now, go to sleep!’ Then she added, ‘Passion, look in the pot and see if the dough has begun to rise.’

Holding the sword in his mouth, Yu Zhan’ao climbed up onto the wall. The five dogs rushed over, looked up, and began to bark, frightening him so badly he lost his balance and tumbled into the western compound. If Grandma hadn’t rushed out to see what was going on, the dogs probably would have torn him to pieces, even if there had been two of him.

After calling off the dogs, Grandma shouted for Passion to bring out the lantern.

The woman Liu, rolling-pin in hand, came running out on big feet that had once been bound and screamed, ‘A thief! Grab him!’

Passion followed, lantern in hand, the light falling on the battered face of Yu Zhan’ao. ‘So it’s you!’ Grandma said coldly.

She picked up the sword and tucked it into her sleeve. ‘Passion, go fetch Uncle Arhat.’

No sooner had Passion opened the gate than Uncle Arhat entered the compound. ‘What’s going on, Mistress?’

‘This hired hand of yours is drunk,’ she said.

‘Yes, he is,’ Uncle Arhat confirmed.

‘Passion,’ Grandma said, ‘bring me my willow switch.’

Passion fetched Grandma’s white willow switch. ‘This’ll sober you up,’ Grandma said as she twirled the switch in the air and brought it down hard on Yu Zhan’ao’s buttocks.

Stung by the pain, he experienced a sense of numbing ecstasy, and when it reached his throat it set his teeth moving and emerged as a stream of gibberish: ‘Mistress Mistress Mistress…’

Grandma whipped him until her arm was about to fall off, then lowered the switch and stood there panting from exhaustion.

‘Take him away,’ she said.

Uncle Arhat stepped up to pull Yu Zhan’ao to his feet, but he refused to get up. ‘Mistress,’ he shouted, ‘a few more lashes… just give me a few more…’

Grandma whipped him twice on the neck with all her might, and he rolled around on the ground like a little boy, kicking the air with his legs. Uncle Arhat called for a couple of hired hands to carry him back to the bunkhouse, where they flung him down on the kang; he rolled around like a squirming dragonfly, a stream of filth and abuse gushing from his mouth. Uncle Arhat picked up a decanter, told the men to pin his arms and legs, and poured wine down his throat. As soon as the men let go, his head lolled to the side and he grew silent. ‘You drowned him!’ one of them exclaimed fearfully, bringing the lantern up. Yu Zhan’ao’s face was contorted out of shape, and he sneezed violently, extinguishing the lantern.

He didn’t wake up until the sun was high in the sky. He walked into the distillery as though stepping on cotton; the men watched him curiously. Recalling the beating he’d received the night before, he rubbed his neck and his buttocks, but felt no pain. Thirsty, he picked up a ladle, scooped some wine from the flow, tipped back his head, and drank it down.

Old Du the fiddler said, ‘Little Yu, your mistress gave you quite a beating last night. I’ll bet you won’t be climbing that wall again.’

Up till then the gloomy young man had instilled a measure of fear in the others, but that had evaporated when they heard his pitiful screams, and now they outdid one another teasing him mercilessly. Without a word in reply, he grabbed one of them, raised his fist, and buried it in the man’s face. A quick exchange of glances, and the others rushed up, threw him to the ground, and began raining blows on him with fists and feet. When they’d had their fill, they took off his belt, stuck his head into the crotch of his pants, tied his hands behind his back, and threw him to the ground.

Like a stranded tiger or a beached dragon, Yu Zhan’ao struggled to get free, rolling around on the ground like a ball for as long as it takes to smoke a couple of pipefuls. Finally, having seen enough, old Du went up, untied Granddad’s hands, and freed his head from his pants. Yu Zhan’ao’s face was pallid as a sheet of gold paper as he lay on the pile of firewood like a dying snake. It took him a long time to catch his breath. Meanwhile, the others held on to their tools, just in case he took it into his head to get even. But he just staggered over to one of the vats, ladled out some wine, and began gulping it down. When he was finished, he climbed back up onto the pile of firewood and fell fast asleep.

From then on, Yu Zhan’ao got roaring drunk every day, then climbed up onto the pile of firewood and lay there, his moist blue eyes half closed, a mixed smile on his lips: the left side foolish, the right side crafty, or vice versa. For the first few days, the men watched him with interest; after a while, they began to grumble. Uncle Arhat tried to get him to do some work, but Yu Zhan’ao just looked at him out of the corner of his eye and said, ‘Who the hell do you think you are? I’m the master here. That kid in her belly is mine.’

By then my father had grown in Grandma’s belly to about the size of a little ball, and in the mornings the sound of her retching in the yard drifted over to the western compound. The experienced old-timers talked about nothing else. When the woman Liu brought over their food, they asked her, ‘Old Woman Liu, is the mistress with child?’

She glared at them. ‘Watch out, or someone might cut out your tongue!’

‘Looks like Shan Bianlang knew what he was doing after all!’

‘Maybe it’s the old master’s.’

‘No wild guessing! Do you really think a spirited girl like that would let one of the Shan men touch her? I’ll bet it was Spotted Neck.’

Yu Zhan’ao jumped up from the pile of firewood and gestured gleefully. ‘It was me!’ he shouted. ‘Ha ha, it was me!’

They had a good laugh over that, and cursed him roundly.

On more than one occasion, Uncle Arhat urged Grandma to dismiss Yu Zhan’ao, but she invariably replied, ‘Let him rant and rave if he wants to. I’ll fix his wagon sooner or later.’

One day she walked into the compound, her thickening waist obvious to all, to speak with Uncle Arhat.

Avoiding her eyes, he said softly, ‘Mistress, it’s time to break out the scales and buy the sorghum.’

‘Is everything ready? The compound and the grain bins?’

‘Everything’s ready.’

‘When did you do it in the past?’

‘Just about now.’

‘Let’s wait a while longer this year.’

‘We might lose out. There are at least ten other distilleries.’

‘The harvest has been so good this year there’s more than they can handle. Put up a notice that we’re not ready yet. We’ll buy when the others have had their fill. By then we can name our own price, and the grain will have more time to dry out.’

‘You’re probably right.’

‘Anything else we need to talk about?’

‘Not really, except for that hired hand. He gets so drunk every day he can hardly move. Let’s pay him off and get rid of him.’

Grandma thought for a moment. ‘Take me to the distillery so I can see for myself.’

Uncle Arhat led the way to the distillery, where the workers were just then pouring fermented mash into the distiller. The firewood beneath the cooker crackled and the water roiled, sending clouds of steam into the distiller, a three-foot-high wooden vessel with tightly woven bamboo strips at the base, which fitted over the cooker. Four men with wooden spades ladled the sorghum mash, a green-spotted, sweet-smelling fermented mixture, from the vat into the steaming distiller. Since the steam had nowhere else to go, it filtered up through the cracks in the base, and the alert men dumped the mash wherever the steam was coming through, to keep the heat from dissipating.

When they saw Grandma approaching, they threw themselves into their work. From his firewood perch, Yu Zhan’ao, who looked like a dirty-faced, ragged beggar, stared at Grandma with a cold glint in his eyes.

‘I came to see how sorghum is converted into wine,’ Grandma said.

Uncle Arhat moved a stool over for her.

The men, favoured by her presence, worked as never before. The stoker kept the fires blazing under the cookpots. The water bubbled, sending sizzling steam snaking its way up through the distiller to merge with the panting sounds of the workers. When they had filled the distiller with mash, they covered it with a tight-fitting honeycombed lid to let the mixture cook until wisps of steam began to ooze from the tiny openings in the lid. They quickly brought over a double-plate pewter object with a concave centre. Uncle Arhat told Grandma it was the distiller. She walked over to get a closer look, then returned to the stool without a word.

The men placed the pewter distiller over the wooden one to block out the steam. The only sounds came from the roaring fires beneath the cookpot. The wooden distiller was white one minute and orange the next, as a delicate, sweet aroma, sort of like wine but not quite, seeped through the wooden vessel.

‘Add cool water,’ Uncle Arhat said.

The men climbed up onto a bench and began pouring cool water into the concave centre of the pewter distiller. One of them stirred the water rapidly with what looked like an oar, and after about half the time it takes a joss stick to burn down, Grandma’s nostrils were filled with the smell of wine.

‘Get ready to catch the wine,’ Uncle Arhat ordered.

Two men ran up with wine crocks woven of wax reeds and covered with ten layers of paper, then sealed with many coats of varnish. They placed the crocks under distiller spouts that looked like duck beaks.

Grandma stood up and stared at the spouts as the stoker shoved pieces of pine-oil-soaked firewood into the stoves, which crackled loudly and spat out clouds of white smoke that lit up the men’s greasy, sweaty chests.

‘Change the water!’ Uncle Arhat shouted.

Two men rushed into the yard and came running back with four buckets of cool well water. The man on the stool pulled a lever, releasing the heated water from the top of the distiller. Then he poured in the fresh water and continued stirring.

Grandma was stirred by the solemn, sacred labour. Just then she felt my father move inside her belly, and looked over at Yu Zhan’ao, who was lying on the pile of firewood staring at her with a sinister glint in his eyes, the only cold spots in the steamy distilling tent. The stirring in her heart cooled off. She averted her eyes and calmly watched the two men with the crocks, who were waiting for the wine to flow.

The aroma grew heavier as wisps of steam escaped through the seams of the wooden distiller. Grandma watched the spouts brighten, the glow freezing for a moment, then slowly beginning to stir as clear, bright drops of liquid rolled down into the wine crocks like tears.

‘Change the water!’ Uncle Arhat yelled. ‘Stoke the fire!’

Hot water poured from the open taps as more cool water was dumped in, maintaining a steady temperature on the lid, causing the steam between the layers to cool and form a liquid, which gushed out through the spouts.

The first wine out was warm, transparent, and steamy. Uncle Arhat picked up a clean ladle, half-filled it, and handed it to Grandma. ‘Here, Mistress, taste it.’

The rich aroma made her tongue itch. Father stirred in her belly again. He was thirsty for the wine. First she sniffed it and touched it to her tongue, then took a sip to savour its bouquet. It was amazingly aromatic and slightly pungent. She took a mouthful and swished it around with her tongue. Her cheeks softened as though they were being rubbed gently with silky cotton. Her throat went slack, and the mouthful of warm wine slid down. Her pores snapped open, then closed, as a feeling of incredible joy suffused her body. She swigged three mouthfuls in rapid succession, her belly feeling as though it were being massaged by a greedy hand. Finally, she tipped back her head and drained the ladle. By then her face was flushed and her eyes sparkled; she had never looked so beautiful, so irresistible. The men gaped with astonishment, neglecting their work.

‘Mistress, you sure know how to drink!’ they complimented her.

‘It’s the first drink I’ve ever had,’ she replied modestly.

‘If that’s how you handle the first one, with a little practice you could finish off a whole crock.’

By now the wine was gushing from the spouts — one crock, then another, each of which was stacked alongside the pile of firewood. Suddenly Yu Zhan’ao climbed down off the pile, undid his pants, and pissed into one of the brimming crocks. The shocked men numbly watched the steam of clear liquid splash into the wine crock and send sprays over the sides. When he’d finished, he smirked and staggered up to Grandma, whose cheeks were flushed. She didn’t move as he wrapped his arms around her and planted a kiss on her face. She paled, stumbled, and sat down hard on the stool.

‘That child in your belly,’ he demanded angrily. ‘Is it mine or isn’t it?’

Grandma was crying. ‘If you say so…’

Yu Zhan’ao’s eyes blazed and his muscles grew taut, as if he were a workhorse standing up after rolling in the dirt. He stripped down to his shorts. ‘Now watch me clean the distiller!’

Cleaning the distiller is the hardest job of all. Once the wine has stopped flowing through the spouts, the pewter distiller is removed; then the honeycombed wooden lid is lifted from the wooden distiller, which is filled with sorghum mash, dark yellow and scalding hot. Yu Zhan’ao climbed onto a bench, wielding a short-handled wooden spade, and scooped the mash out into the frame. His movements were so slight he seemed to be using only his forearms. The heat turned his skin scarlet, and sweat ran down his back like a river, smelling strongly of wine.

My granddad Yu Zhan’ao worked with such consummate skill that Uncle Arhat and the other men looked on in awe. Talents hidden for months were now on display. When he’d finished, he drank some wine, then said to Uncle Arhat, ‘Foreman, that’s not all I can do. Now look. When the wine comes down the spouts, the steam dissipates. If you put another, smaller distiller over the spouts, you’d have nothing but the best wine.’

Uncle Arhat shook his head. ‘I doubt that,’ he said.

‘If not,’ Granddad said, ‘you can chop off my head!’

Uncle Arhat glanced at Grandma, who sniffed once or twice. ‘That’s not my business. I don’t care. Let him do what he wants.’

She returned to the western compound, sobbing.

From that day on, Granddad and Grandma shared their love like mandarin ducks or Chinese phoenixes. Uncle Arhat and the hired hands were so tormented by their naked, demonic exhibition of desire that their intelligence failed them, and even though they had a bellyful of misgivings, in time, one after another, they became my granddad’s loyal followers.

Granddad’s skills revolutionised the operation, giving Northeast Gaomi Township its first top-line distilled wine. As for the crock into which he had pissed, since the men dared not dispose of it on their own, they just moved it over to a corner and left it there. Late one overcast afternoon, as a strong southeast wind carried the aroma of sorghum wine across the compound, the men were suddenly aware of an unusually rich and mellow fragrance. Uncle Arhat, whose sense of smell was keenest, sought out the source, and was astonished to discover that it came from the piss-enhanced crock in the corner. Without a word to anyone, he lit the bean-oil lantern, turned up the wick, and settled down to study the phenomenon.

First he scooped out a dipperful of the wine, then let it drip slowly back into the crock and watched it form a soft green liquid curtain that was transformed into a multipetaled flower, like a chrysanthemum, when it hit the surface. The unique fragrance was more volatile than ever. He scooped up a tiny bit of the wine, tasting it first with the tip of his tongue, then taking a decisive swig. After rinsing his mouth with cool water, he drank some ordinary sorghum wine from one of the other crocks. He flung down the dipper, rushed out, burst through the western compound gate, and ran across the yard, shouting, ‘Mistress, joyful news!’

9

AFTER BEING SENT away by Grandma with a bundle of hot buns, Great-Granddad led his donkey home, cursing all the way. As soon as he arrived, he blurted out to Great-Grandma how my grandma had acknowledged Magistrate Cao as her foster-dad and had disowned her real father. Enraged by the news, Great-Grandma added her fulminations to his, and the two of them looked like old toads fighting over a cicada. After a while, she said, ‘Forget your anger, old man. As they say, “Strong winds eventually cease, unhappy families return to peace.” Go see her in a couple of days. She’s inherited so much wealth that we could live on what slips through her fingers.’

‘All right,’ he agreed. ‘I’ll go see the misbegotten ingrate in a couple of weeks.’

Two weeks later, he rode up on his donkey, only to find the main gate shut tight. Grandma ignored his shouts. After he’d yelled himself hoarse, he turned and rode away.

Granddad was already working in the distillery by the time Great-Granddad next returned, and Grandma’s five dogs constituted an impregnable line of defence. His pounding at the gate was met by a chorus of barks, and when, at last, the woman Liu opened the gate, he was immediately surrounded by dogs, content to bark for the moment. Poor Great-Granddad quaked in fright.

‘Who are you looking for?’ the woman Liu asked him.

‘And who are you?’ Great-Granddad fired back indignantly. ‘I’ve come to see my daughter!’

‘Just who is your daughter?’

‘The woman who runs this place.’

‘Wait here. I’ll go tell her.’

‘Tell her her real father’s here!’

The woman Liu returned with a silver dollar in her hand. ‘You there, old man, the mistress says she has no father, but she’s willing to give you a silver dollar to buy some buns for your trip.’

‘Misbegotten ingrate!’ Great-Granddad railed. ‘Get your ass out here! Who the hell do you think you are, disowning your own father as soon as you’re rolling in money!’

The woman Liu flung the silver dollar to the ground. ‘Go on, you pigheaded old man,’ she said. ‘If you make the mistress mad, you’ll get more than you bargained for.’

‘I’m her father!’ he insisted. ‘She murdered her father-in-law. Is her own father going to be next?’

‘Go on,’ the woman Liu urged him, ‘get going. If you don’t, I’ll have to set the dogs on you!’

She gave a signal to the dogs, and they crowded up closer. The green dog nipped the leg of the donkey, which brayed, jerked the reins free, and galloped away. Great-Granddad bent over, picked up the silver dollar, and stumbled after the donkey, with the barking dogs on his heels all the way to the edge of the village.

The third time Great-Granddad came to see Grandma, he demanded one of the big black mules, insisted that her father-in-law had promised him one before he was murdered, and that his death did not invalidate the promise. He threatened to take his complaint to the county government if Grandma reneged on the promise.

‘You’re nothing to me,’ she said. ‘I don’t know you. And if you keep harassing me, I’ll report you to the authorities.’

Great-Granddad found someone to write out a complaint for him, then rode his donkey into town to see Magistrate Cao and bring formal charges against Grandma.

Following the shock of having his hat shot full of holes by Spotted Neck, Magistrate Cao had returned home and promptly fallen ill. So, when he read the complaint, which was linked to the homicides at Northeast Gaomi Township, sweat dripped from his armpits.

‘Old man,’ he said, ‘you’ve charged your daughter with having an illicit affair with a bandit. Where’s your proof?’

‘Your honour, County Magistrate,’ Great-Granddad replied, ‘the bandit in question is sharing my daughter’s kang at this very minute. He’s none other than Spotted Neck, the man who shot your hat full of holes.’

‘Old man, you know, don’t you, that if what you’re saying is true your daughter’s life is in danger.’

‘Magistrate, honour compels me to forsake family loyalty… but for… my daughter’s property…’

‘Why, you money-grubbing old son of a bitch!’ the magistrate bellowed. ‘You’d sacrifice your own daughter to get your hands on that little property she has! No wonder she disowned you. You’re no ‘father’ in my book. Give him fifty lashes with a shoe sole and send him on his way!’

Poor Great-Granddad — not only was his complaint rejected, but the fifty lashes left his buttocks in such sad shape he couldn’t even sit on his donkey, and had to lead it behind him as he staggered home. Shortly after leaving town, he heard hoofbeats behind him, and when he turned to look, he recognised the county magistrate’s black colt. Fearing for his life, he fell to his knees.

The rider was Magistrate Cao’s right-hand man, Master Yan. ‘Old man,’ he hailed him, ‘get up, get up. The magistrate said that, since he’s your daughter’s foster-dad, there’s a certain kinship between the two of you. The whipping was intended as a lesson for you. He wants you to take these ten silver dollars home to open a small business and forget about ill-gotten wealth.’

Great-Granddad accepted the silver dollars and kowtowed gratefully, not rising to his feet until the black colt had crossed the railway tracks.

Magistrate Cao had been sitting alone in the main hall of the government office thinking for half an hour when Little Yan returned from delivering the money. The magistrate led him into a small room and closed the door. ‘I’m convinced that the man sharing the woman Dai’s kang is Spotted Neck,’ he said, ‘the most notorious bandit in Northeast Gaomi Township. Nabbing him will be like cutting down the tree and watching the Northeast Gaomi Township monkeys scatter. The reason I had you beat the old man today was to keep the news from leaking out.’

‘You have great foresight,’ Little Yan said.

‘I was duped by the woman Dai that day.’

‘Even the wisest man occasionally falls prey.’

‘Take twenty soldiers on fast horses to Northeast Gaomi Township and capture the bandit leader.’

‘The woman, too?’

‘No,’ the magistrate cautioned him, ‘no, no, under no circumstances. If you took her into custody, it would be a great loss of face for you-know-who Cao, wouldn’t it? Besides, my judgement that day was intended to help her. What a tragedy for such a lovely young thing to be married to a leper. No wonder she took a lover. No, just nab Spotted Neck, and let her off the hook, so she can have a chance to live a good life.’

‘A high wall surrounds the Shan compound,’ Little Yan said, ‘and a pack of mean dogs guards the inside. We won’t catch Spotted Neck flatfooted. If we try to break down the gate or scale the wall in the middle of the night, he’ll pick us off like clay pigeons, won’t he?’

‘You’re too simple-minded,’ Magistrate Cao said. ‘I’ve got a wonderful plan.’

Late that night, Little Yan and twenty soldiers rode out of the city, according to the magistrate’s plan, heading for Northeast Gaomi Township. Since it was late autumn — the tenth lunar month — the sorghum in the fields had already been harvested and lay in large piles. The riders reached the western edge of the village just before daybreak, when crystalline dew covered the dark weeds and the chilly autumn air cut like a knife. They dismounted and waited for orders from Little Yan, who told them to tether their horses behind a pile of sorghum and leave two soldiers to watch them. Then they changed clothes and prepared for action.

The sun rose red in the sky, the black earth was covered by a blanket of white, and a fine layer of dew settled on the men’s eyelashes and brows and the downy hairs on the muzzles of the horses. Little Yan looked at his pocket watch. ‘Let’s go!’ he said.

With eighteen soldiers behind him, he cautiously entered the village. They were armed with carbines, loaded and ready. Two took up positions at the village entrance, two more at the head of the lane. Another lane, two more soldiers in hiding, and so on. By the time they reached the compound gate, their number was reduced to Little Yan and six soldiers disguised as peasants, one carrying a pole with two empty wine crocks over his shoulder.

When the woman Liu opened the gate, Little Yan signalled the soldier with the wine crocks who squeezed past her into the compound. ‘What do you think you’re doing?’ she said angrily.

‘I came to see the owner,’ the soldier said. ‘I bought two crocks of wine a couple of days ago, and ten people died from drinking it. What kind of poison did you put in it?’

While he was stating his case, Little Yan and the other soldiers slipped into the compound and hid quietly by a corner of the wall. The watchdogs surrounded the man with the wine crocks and barked frantically.

Grandma walked out, sleepy-eyed, buttoning up her clothes. ‘Go to the shop if you have business here,’ she said testily.

‘There’s poison in your wine,’ the soldier said. ‘Ten people died from drinking it. I demand to see the owner.’

‘What kind of nonsense is that?’ Grandma shot back. ‘We sell wine all over this area, and we’ve never had any problems. How could members of your family alone die from drinking it?’

As the dispute raged between Grandma and the tall soldier, surrounded by the five dogs, Little Yan signalled his troops, who streaked into the house on his heels. The soldier outside threw down his wine crocks, pulled a pistol from his belt, and aimed it at Grandma.

Granddad was getting dressed when he was pushed down onto the kang by Little Yan and his men, who tied his hands behind his back and dragged him out into the yard.

The dogs rushed up to save him, and the soldiers opened fire. Fur flew, blood was everywhere.

The woman Liu soiled her pants as she slumped to the ground.

‘Gentlemen,’ Grandma protested, ‘we’ve done nothing to harm you, and have no grudge against you. If it’s money or food you want, just say so. There’s no need to use your weapons.’

‘Shut up!’ Little Yan shouted. ‘Take him away!’

Then she recognised Yan. ‘Don’t you work for my fosterdad?’ she asked urgently.

‘This has nothing to do with you,’ he said. ‘Just get on with your life!’

Uncle Arhat ran out of the shop when he heard gunfire in the western compound. But the instant his head popped through the gate, a bullet whizzed past his ear, and he quickly pulled back. There wasn’t a soul on the quiet street, though all the dogs in the village were howling. Little Yan and his men dragged Granddad out of the compound and down the street. The two soldiers left behind had already brought the horses up, and when the men hiding at the village entrance and the heads of the lanes saw that everything had gone smoothly, they left their positions and mounted up. Granddad was tied face down across the back of a horse with a purple mane. On Little Yan’s command, they galloped out of the village on the road to the county town.

When they arrived at the government compound, the soldiers dragged Granddad off the horse. Magistrate Cao walked up to him, stroking his moustache and grinning from ear to ear. ‘So, Spotted Neck, you shot three holes in the magistrate’s hat. Well, the magistrate is going to repay you with three hundred lashes with the sole of a shoe.’

Bruised, shaken, and dazed by the jarring trip, Granddad could do nothing but vomit as they dragged him off the horse.

‘Commence the beating!’ Little Yan ordered.

The soldiers walked up and kicked Granddad to the ground, raised extra-large shoes nailed to long sticks, and began beating him for all they were worth. At first he gritted his teeth, but he was soon shouting for his parents.

‘Spotted Neck,’ Nine Dreams Cao said, ‘now you see what you’re up against with Shoe Sole Cao the Second!’

The beating had cleared Granddad’s head. ‘You’ve got the wrong man!’ he screamed. ‘I’m not Spotted Neck….’

‘So you think you can lie your way out of it! Three hundred more lashes!’ Magistrate Cao shouted angrily.

The soldiers kicked Granddad to the ground again and pelted him again with the shoe soles. By now his buttocks were numb. He looked up and screamed, ‘Nine Dreams Cao, everybody calls you Cao the Upright Magistrate, but you’re nothing but a muddled dogshit official! Spotted Neck has a big spot on his neck. Look at my neck; do you see anything there?’

The startled Nine Dreams Cao waved his hand, and the soldiers backed off. Two others lifted Granddad up so Magistrate Cao could examine his neck.

‘How do you know Spotted Neck has a big spot on his neck?’ Magistrate Cao asked him.

‘I’ve seen him.’

‘If you know Spotted Neck, then you must be a bandit, too. I haven’t got the wrong man!’

‘Thousands of people in Northeast Gaomi Township know Spotted Neck. Does that make them all bandits?’

‘You were sleeping on a widow’s kang in the middle of the night, so, even if you’re not a bandit, you’re still a scoundrel. I haven’t got the wrong man!’

‘Your foster-daughter was willing.’

‘She was willing?’

‘Yes.’

‘Who are you?’

‘One of her hired hands.’

‘Aiyaya! Little Yan, lock him up.’

Grandma and Uncle Arhat rode up to the government-compound gate on their two big black mules just then. Uncle Arhat stood outside the gate holding the reins while Grandma ran into the yard, wailing and screaming. A sentry barred her way with his rifle. She spat in his face. ‘This is the county magistrate’s foster-daughter,’ Uncle Arhat explained. No sentry would stop her now. She barged into the main hall….

That afternoon, the county magistrate sent Granddad back to the village in a curtained sedan chair.

He spent the next two months convalescing on Grandma’s kang.

Grandma rode into the county town to deliver a heavy bundle to her foster-mother as a gift.

10

THE TWENTY-THIRD day of the twelfth month in the year 1923; the Kitchen God is sent to heaven to make his report. A member of Spotted Neck’s gang had kidnapped my grandma that morning. The ransom demand was received in the afternoon: the distillery was to pay one thousand silver dollars for the hostage’s safe return. If they failed to do so, they could retrieve her body from the Temple of the Earth God at the eastern edge of Li Village.

By rummaging through chests and cupboards, Granddad scraped together two thousand silver dollars, which he stuffed into a flour sack and told Uncle Arhat to deliver on one of the mules.

‘Didn’t they only ask for one thousand?’

‘Just do as I say.’

Uncle Arhat left on the mule.

Uncle Arhat returned with my grandma before nightfall, escorted by two mounted bandits with rifles slung over their backs.

When they spotted Granddad they said, ‘Proprietor, our leader says you can sleep with the gate open from now on!’

Granddad told Uncle Arhat to fetch a crock of the piss-enhanced wine for the bandits to take back with them. ‘See what your leader thinks of this wine,’ he said. Then he escorted the bandits to the edge of the village.

When he returned home, he closed the gate, the front door, and the bedroom door behind him. He and Grandma lay on the kang in each other’s arms. ‘Spotted Neck didn’t take advantage of you, did he?’

Grandma shook her head, but tears rolled down her cheeks.

‘What’s wrong? Did he rape you?’

She buried her head in his chest. ‘He… he felt my breast….’

Granddad stood up angrily. ‘The baby, is he all right?’

Grandma nodded.

In the spring of 1924, Granddad rode his mule on a secret trip to Qingdao, where he bought two pistols and five thousand cartridges. One of the repeaters was German-made, called a ‘waist-drum’, the other a Spanish ‘goosehead’.

After returning with the pistols, he locked himself up in his room for three days, breaking the weapons down and putting them back together over and over and over. With the coming of spring, the ice in the river melted, and fish that had spent a suffocating winter at the bottom swam sleepily to the surface to bask in the sun. Granddad took the pistols and a basketful of cartridges down to the river, where he spent the entire spring picking off fish. When there were no more large ones, he went after little ones. If he had an audience, he shot wildly, hitting nothing; but if he was alone, each round smashed a fish’s head. Summer arrived, and the sorghum grew.

It poured rain on the seventh night of the seventh month, complete with thunder and lightning. Grandma handed Father, who was nearly four months old, to Passion and followed Granddad into the shop in the eastern compound, where they closed the doors and windows and had Uncle Arhat light the lamp. Grandma laid out seven copper coins on the counter in the shape of a plum blossom. Granddad swaggered back and forth beyond the counter, then spun around, drew his pistols, and began firing — pow pow, pow pow, pow pow pow — seven rapid shots. The coins flew up against the wall; three bullets fell to the floor, the other four were stuck in the wall.

Grandma and Granddad walked up to the counter, where they held up the lantern and saw there wasn’t a mark on the surface.

He had perfected his ‘seven-plum-blossom skill’.

Granddad rode the black mule up to the wine shop on the eastern edge of the village. Cobwebs dotted the frame of the door, which he pushed open and walked inside. A strong smell of putrefaction made his head reel. Covering his nose with his sleeve, he looked around. The fat old man was sitting beneath the beam, a noose around his neck. His eyes were open; his black tongue was sticking out through parted lips.

Granddad spat twice to clear out his mouth and led the mule to the edge of the village where he stood thoughtfully for a long time, while the mule pawed the ground and swished its hairless tail to drive away swarms of black flies as big as beans. Finally, he mounted the mule, which stretched out its neck and began heading home; but Granddad jerked back the icy metal bit in its mouth and smacked it on the rump, turning down the path by the sorghum field.

The little wooden bridge over the Black Water River was still intact at the time, and whitecaps from the swollen river splashed up onto the bridge planks. The roar of the river frightened the mule, which balked at the bridgehead and refused to cross, even when Granddad showed it his fists. So he rose up in the saddle and sat down hard, forcing the mule to trot out into the middle of the bridge, its back sagging. He reined it to a halt. A shallow layer of clear water washed across the planks, and a red-tailed carp as thick as a man’s arm leaped out of the water west of the bridge, describing a rainbow in the air before splashing into the water on the eastern side.

Granddad watched the westward flow of water as it washed the mule’s hooves clean. The mule lowered its lips to touch the spray above the churning water, which splashed its long, narrow face. It closed its nostrils and bared its white, even teeth.

Green-tipped sorghum on the southern bank waved in the wind as Granddad rode eastward along the riverbank. When the sun was directly overhead, he dismounted and led the animal into the sorghum field. The black, rain-soaked earth was like a gooey paste that swallowed up the mule’s hooves and covered Granddad’s feet. The mule struggled to keep its heavy body moving forward. White puffs of air and green, powdery froth shot from the animal’s nostrils. The pungent, vinegary smell of sweat and the putrid stench of black mud made Granddad feel like sneezing. He and his mule parted the dense, tender green sorghum to clear a lane through the field; but the stalks righted themselves slowly, leaving no sign that anyone had passed by. Water seeped from the ground where they had walked, quickly filling the indentations.

Granddad’s legs and the mule’s belly were splattered with mud. The sound of their movement was harsh and grating in the stifling air of the field, where the sorghum grew unchecked. Before long, Granddad was breathing hard; his throat was parched, his tongue sticky and foul-tasting. Having no more perspiration to sweat, his pores oozed a sticky liquid like pine oil, which stung his skin. The sharp sorghum leaves cut his bare neck.

The angered mule kept shaking his head, wanting desperately to leap into the air and gallop along the tips of the sorghum, or, like our other black mule, to be at the trough feeding wearily on a mixture of sorghum leaves and scorched grain.

Granddad walked confidently and steadfastly down a furrow, his plan well thought out. The mule, whose eyes were watering from brushing up against sorghum leaves, kept looking at its master, sometimes sadly, sometimes angrily, as it was led through the field. Fresh footprints appeared on the ground in front of them, and Granddad detected traces of the smell he had been anticipating. The mule shortened the distance between them, still snorting, still weaving its bulky body among the sorghum stalks. Granddad coughed, more loudly than necessary, and a wave of intoxicating fragrance wafted towards him from up ahead. He knew, his sixth sense told him, that he was a mere step or two from the spot that had obsessed him for so long.

Granddad followed the trail without having to look at the footprints. He sang out to break the stillness: ‘. . One horse far away from the state of Xiliang…’

He sensed footsteps behind him, but kept walking, as though blissfully ignorant. Suddenly a hard object poked him in the ribs. He raised his hands compliantly. Hands reached into his shirt and removed his pistols. A strip of black cloth was wrapped around his eyes.

‘I want to see your chief,’ he said.

A bandit wrapped his arms around Granddad, picked him up off the ground, and spun him around for a minute or two, then let him fall hard onto the spongy black ground. His forehead and hands covered with mud, he climbed to his feet by grabbing on to a stalk of sorghum; his ears were ringing and he saw a flash of green, then a flash of black. He could hear the heaving breathing of the man beside him. The bandit broke off a stalk of sorghum and thrust one end into Granddad’s hand. ‘Let’s go!’ he said.

Granddad heard the footsteps of the bandits behind him and a sucking sound as the mule pulled its hooves out of the gooey mud. When the bandit removed Granddad’s blindfold, he covered his eyes with his hands, squeezed out a dozen or so tears, then let his hands drop. In front of him was a camp trampled out of the sorghum. A dozen men with rain capes over their shoulders stood in front of the two tents, where a man sat on a wooden stump; there was a big spot on his neck.

‘Where’s your leader?’

‘Are you the proprietor of the distillery?’ Spotted Neck asked him.

‘Yes.’

‘What do you want here?’

‘To pay my respects to an expert and learn from him.’

Spotted Neck sneered. ‘Don’t you go down to the river to shoot fish for target practice every day?’

‘I can’t get the knack of it.’

Spotted Neck held up Granddad’s pistols and looked down the barrels, then cocked them. ‘Fine weapons. What are you practising with these for?’

‘To use on Nine Dreams Cao.’

‘Isn’t he your old lady’s foster-dad?’

‘He gave me three hundred and fifty lashes with the sole of his shoe! All because of you.’

Spotted Neck laughed. ‘You murdered two men and took possession of their woman. You deserve to have your head lopped off.’

‘He gave me three hundred and fifty lashes!’

Spotted Neck raised his right hand and pulled off three quick shots — pow pow pow — then did the same with his left. Granddad sat down hard on the ground, buried his head in his arms, and screeched. The bandits roared with laughter.

‘How could a scared rabbit like that murder anyone?’ Spotted Neck wondered aloud.

‘He saves his courage for sex,’ one of the bandits said.

‘Go home and take care of business,’ Spotted Neck said. ‘Now that the Gook is dead, your home will be the contact point.’

‘I want to learn how to shoot so I can kill Nine Dreams Cao!’ Granddad repeated.

‘I hold the life of Nine Dreams Cao in the palm of my hand, and I can take it from him any time I want,’ Spotted Neck said.

‘Does that mean I’ve wasted my time coming here?’ Granddad asked unhappily.

Spotted Neck tossed Granddad’s two pistols to him. He barely caught one; the other landed on the ground, its muzzle buried in the mud. He picked it up, shook off the mud, and wiped the barrel on his sleeve.

One of the bandits walked up to blindfold Granddad, but Spotted Neck waved him off. ‘No need for that,’ he said as he stood up. ‘Come on, let’s take a bath in the river. We’ll walk part of the way with the proprietor here.’

One of the bandits led the mule. Granddad fell in behind the animal, followed by Spotted Neck and his gang of bandits. When they reached the riverbank, Spotted Neck looked at Granddad with a cold glint in his eyes. Granddad wiped the mud and sweat from his face. ‘I guess I was wrong to come,’ he said, ‘wrong to come. This heat’s enough to kill a man.’

He took off his muddy clothes, casually tossed the two pistols onto the pile of clothing, then ran down to the river and dived in, splashing around like a fritter in hot oil. His head bobbed up and down; his arms flailed like those of a man trying to pull up a clump of water grass.

‘Doesn’t he know how to swim?’ one of the bandits asked.

Spotted Neck just snorted.

‘He’ll drown, chief!’

‘Go in and drag him out!’ Spotted Neck ordered.

Four bandits dived in and carried Granddad, who had swallowed a caskful of water, up to the bank, where he lay like a dead man.

‘Bring his mule over,’ Spotted Neck said.

One of the men led the mule over.

‘Lay him across the mule’s back,’ Spotted Neck said.

The bandits lifted him up onto the mule’s back, his bloated belly pressing down on the saddle.

‘Make it run!’ Spotted Neck said.

With one bandit leading the mule, another behind, and two more holding on to Granddad, the mule trotted down the riverbank; by the time it had travelled about the distance of two arrow shots, a murky column of water shot out of Granddad’s mouth.

The bandits lifted Granddad off the mule and laid him out naked on the dike. He looked up at the tall, hulking Spotted Neck with eyes as dull as those of a dead fish.

Spotted Neck removed his rain cape and said with a friendly smile, ‘You just got a new lease on life, young man.’

Granddad’s ashen cheeks twitched painfully.

Spotted Neck and his men stripped and dived into the river. Excellent swimmers, they had a frolicking water fight, sending sprays of the Black Water River flying in all directions.

Slowly Granddad got to his feet and draped Spotted Neck’s rain cape over his shoulders. After blowing his nose and clearing his throat, he flexed his arms and legs. His saddle was dripping wet, so he dried it off with Spotted Neck’s clothes. The mule touchingly stretched its satiny, glistening neck towards Granddad. He patted it. ‘Be patient, Blackie, be patient.’

Granddad picked up his pistols as the bandits swam towards the riverbank like a flock of ducks. He fired seven shots in perfect cadence. The brains and blood of seven bandits were spattered across the cruel, heartless waters of the Black Water River.

Granddad fired seven more shots.

By then Spotted Neck had crawled up onto the shore. The Black Water River had washed his skin as clean as a snowflake. Standing fearlessly in a clump of yellowing grass at the river’s edge, he commented with considerable admiration, ‘Nice shooting!’

The blazing, golden sun lit up the drops of water rolling down his naked body.

‘Spotty,’ Granddad asked him, ‘did you touch my woman?’

‘What a rotten shame!’

‘What got you into this business, anyway?’

‘You won’t die in bed,’ Spotted Neck replied.

‘Aren’t you going back in the water?’

Spotted Neck backed up until he was standing in the shallow water. ‘Shoot me here,’ he said, pointing to his heart. ‘The head is so messy!’

‘All right,’ Granddad agreed.

The seven bullets Granddad fired surely turned Spotted Neck’s heart into a honeycomb. He merely moaned once as he fell backward, his legs sticking out of the water like fins for a moment before he sank to the bottom like a fish.

The following morning, Granddad and Grandma rode their black mules over to the home of Great-Granddad, who was melting silver into longevity ingots. When they burst in on him, he knocked over the smelting kettle in alarm.

‘I hear Nine Dreams Cao rewarded you with ten silver dollars,’ Granddad said.

‘Spare me, worthy son-in-law….’ Great-Granddad fell to his knees.

Granddad took out ten silver dollars and stacked them on Great-Granddad’s shiny scalp.

‘Hold your head up straight, and don’t move!’ he demanded.

He moved back a few steps. Pow pow. Two silver dollars sailed into the air.

Two more shots sent two more silver dollars flying.

Before Granddad had fired ten shots, Great-Granddad lay in a blubbering heap on the floor.

Grandma took out a hundred silver dollars and tossed them on the floor, which shone like silver.

11

GRANDDAD AND FATHER returned to their razed home, where they retrieved fifty silver dollars from a hiding place in the wall. Then, dressed as beggars, they went to a small shop in town, near the railway station, where a red lantern hung. They bought five hundred bullets from a heavily made-up woman, then hid out for several days, until they found a way to sneak out through the town gate. They planned to settle accounts with Pocky Leng.

On the afternoon of the sixth day following the ambush and battle at the Black Water River bridge — the fifteenth day of the eighth lunar month in the year 1939 — Granddad and Father drove a billy goat, nearly dead from the dung building up inside it, to the sorghum field at the western edge of the village. More than four hundred Japs and six hundred of their puppet soldiers had encircled our village like a steel hoop on a barrel. Granddad and Father hurriedly cut open the billy goat’s stitched-shut rectum, and after relieving itself of pounds of dung, it dumped several hundred cartridges onto the ground. They quickly scooped them up, ignoring the stinking filth, and engaged the invaders in a solemn and stirring battle in the sorghum field.

Although they killed dozens of Japanese soldiers and dozens of puppet soldiers, they were still outnumbered. As night fell, the villagers tried to breach the encirclement at the southern edge of the village, where there was no gunfire, but were met by a withering hail of machine-gun fire. Hundreds of men and women were killed instantly in the sorghum field, and their mortally wounded comrades crushed countless stalks of red sorghum in their own death agonies.

The Japs torched the village before withdrawing. Flames shot up into the heavens, and kept burning, turning half the sky white. The moon that night was full and blood-red, but the war below turned it pale and weak, like a faded paper cutout hanging grimly in the sky.

‘Where to now, Dad?’

No response.