Red Sorghum

  The sorghum was set in motion by the exhausted troops, whose heads and necks were soaked by the settling dew. Wang Wenyi was still coughing, even though he’d been the target of Commander Yu’s continuing angry outbursts. Father sensed that the highway was just up ahead, its pale-yellow outline swaying in front of him. Imperceptibly tiny openings began to appear in the thick curtain of mist, and one dew-soaked ear of sorghum after another stared sadly at Father, who returned their devout gaze. It dawned on him that they were living spirits: their roots buried in the dark earth, they soaked up the energy of the sun and the essence of the moon; moistened by the rain and dew, they understood the ways of the heavens and the logic of the earth. The colour of the sorghum suggested that the sun had already turned the obscured horizon a pathetic red.

  Then something unexpected occurred. Father heard a shrill whistle, followed by a loud burst from up ahead.

  ‘Who fired his weapon?’ Commander Yu bellowed. ‘Who’s the prick who did it?’

  Father heard the bullet pierce the thick mist and pass through sorghum leaves and stalks, lopping off one of the heads. Everyone held his breath as the bullet screamed through the air and thudded to the ground. The sweet smell of gunpowder dissipated in the mist. Wang Wenyi screamed pitifully, ‘Commander – my head’s gone – Commander – my head’s gone –’

  Commander Yu froze momentarily, then kicked Wang Wenyi. ‘You dumb fuck!’ he growled. ‘How could you talk without a head?’

  Commander Yu left my father standing there and went up to the head of the column. Wang Wenyi was still howling. Father pressed forward to catch a glimpse of the strange look on Wang’s face. A dark-blue substance was flowing on his cheek. Father reached out to touch it; hot and sticky, it smelled a lot like the mud of the Black Water River, but fresher. It overwhelmed the smell of peppermint and the pungent sweetness of sorghum and awakened in Father’s mind a memory that drew ever nearer: like beads, it strung together the mud of the Black Water River, the black earth beneath the sorghum, the eternally living past, and the unstoppable present. There are times when everything on earth spits out the stench of human blood.

  ‘Uncle,’ Father said, ‘you’re wounded.’

  ‘Douguan, is that you? Tell your old uncle if his head’s still on his neck.’

  ‘It’s there, Uncle, right where it’s supposed to be. Except your ear’s bleeding.’

  Wang Wenyi reached up to touch his ear and pulled back a bloody hand, yelping in alarm. Then he froze as if paralysed. ‘Commander, I’m wounded! I’m wounded!’

  Commander Yu came back to Wang, knelt down, and put his hands around Wang’s neck. ‘Stop screaming or I’ll throttle you!’

  Wang Wenyi didn’t dare make a sound.

  ‘Where were you hit?’ Commander Yu asked him.

  ‘My ear . . .’ Wang was weeping.

  Commander Yu took a piece of white cloth from his waistband and tore it in two, then handed it to him. ‘Hold this over it, and no more noise. Stay in rank. You can bandage it when we reach the highway.’

  Commander Yu turned to Father. ‘Douguan,’ he barked. Father answered, and Commander Yu walked off holding him by the hand, followed by the whimpering Wang Wenyi.

  The offending discharge had been the result of carelessness by the big fellow they called Mute, who was up front carrying a rake on his shoulder. The rifle slung over his back had gone off when he stumbled. Mute was one of Commander Yu’s old bandit friends, a greenwood hero who had eaten fistcakes in the sorghum fields. One of his legs was shorter than the other – a prenatal injury – and he limped when he walked, but that didn’t slow him down. Father was a little afraid of him.

  At about dawn, the massive curtain of mist finally lifted, just as Commander Yu and his troops emerged onto the Jiao-Ping highway. In my hometown, August is the misty season, possibly because there’s so much swampy lowland. Once he stepped onto the highway, Father felt suddenly light and nimble; with extra spring in his step, he let go of Commander Yu’s coat. Wang Wenyi, on the other hand, wore a crestfallen look as he held the cloth to his injured ear. Commander Yu crudely wrapped it for him, covering up half his head. Wang gnashed his teeth in pain.

  ‘The heavens have smiled on you,’ Commander Yu said.

  ‘My blood’s all gone,’ Wang whimpered, ‘I can’t go on!’

  ‘Bullshit!’ Commander Yu exclaimed. ‘It’s no worse than a mosquito bite. You haven’t forgotten your three sons, have you?’

  Wang hung his head and mumbled, ‘No, I haven’t forgotten.’

  The butt of the long-barrelled fowling piece over his shoulder was the colour of blood. A flat metal gunpowder pouch rested against his hip.

  Remnants of the dissipating mist were scattered throughout the sorghum field. There were neither animal nor human footprints in the gravel, and the dense walls of sorghum on the deserted highway made the men feel that something ominous was in the air. Father knew all along that Commander Yu’s troops numbered no more than forty – deaf, mute, and crippled included. But when they were quartered in the village, they had stirred things up so much, with chickens squawking and dogs yelping, that you’d have thought it was a garrison command.

  Out on the highway, the soldiers huddled so closely together they looked like an inert snake. Their motley assortment of weapons included shotguns, fowling pieces, ageing Hanyang rifles, plus a cannon that fired scale weights and was carried by two brothers, Fang Six and Fang Seven. Mute was toting a rake with twenty-six metal tines, as were three other soldiers. Father still didn’t know what an ambush was, and even if he had, he wouldn’t have known why anyone would take four rakes to the event.

  2

  I RETURNED TO Northeast Gaomi Township to compile a family chronicle, focusing on the famous battle of the banks of the Black Water River that involved my father and ended with the death of a Jap general. An old woman of ninety-two sang to me, to the accompaniment of bamboo clappers: ‘Northeast Gaomi Township, so many men; at Black Water River the battle began; Commander Yu raised his hand, cannon fire to heaven; Jap souls scattered across the plain, ne’er to rise again; the beautiful champion of women, Dai Fenglian, ordered rakes for a barrier, the Jap attack broken . . .’ The wizened old woman was as bald as a clay pot; the protruding tendons on her chapped hands were like strips of melon rind. She had survived the Mid-Autumn Festival massacre in ’39 only because her ulcerated legs had made walking impossible, and her husband had hidden her in a yam cellar. The heavens had smiled on her. The Dai Fenglian in her clapper-song was my grandma. I listened with barely concealed excitement, for her tale proved that the strategy of stopping the Jap convoy with rakes had sprung from the mind of my own kin, a member of the weaker sex. No wonder my grandma is fêted as a trailblazer of the anti-Japanese resistance and a national hero.

  At the mention of my grandma, the old woman grew expansive. Her narration was choppy and confused, like a shower of leaves at the mercy of the wind. She said that my grandma had the smallest feet of any woman in the village, and that no other distillery had the staying power of ours. The thread of her narrative evened out as she talked of the Jiao-Ping highway: ‘When the highway was extended this far . . . sorghum only waist-high. . . . Japs conscripted all able-bodied workers. . . . Working for the Japs, slacked off, sabotage . . . took your family’s two big black mules . . . built a stone bridge over the Black Water River. . . . Arhat, your family’s foreman . . . something fishy between him and your grandma, so everyone said . . . Aiyaya, when your grandma was young she sowed plenty of wild oats. . . . Your dad was a capable boy, killed his first man at fifteen, eight or nine out of every ten bastard kids turn out bad. . . . Arhat hamstrung the mule. . . . Japs caught him and skinned him alive. . . . Japs butchered people, shit in their pots, and pissed in their basins. I went for water once that year, guess what I found in my bucket, a human head with the pigtail still attached. . . .’

  Arhat Liu played a significant role in my family’s history, but there is no hard evidence that he ha
d an affair with my grandma, and, to tell the truth, I don’t believe it. I understood the logic of what the old clay-pot was saying, but it still embarrassed me. Since Uncle Arhat treated my father like a grandson, that would make me sort of his great-grandson; and if my great-granddad had an affair with my grandma, that’s incest, isn’t it? But that’s hogwash, since my grandma was Uncle Arhat’s boss, not his daughter-in-law, and their relationship was sealed by wages, not by blood. He was a faithful old hand who embellished the history of our family and brought it greater glory than it would have had otherwise. Whether my grandma ever loved him or whether he ever lay down beside her on the kang has nothing to do with morality. What if she did love him? I believe she could have done anything she desired, for she was a hero of the resistance, a trailblazer for sexual liberation, a model of women’s independence.

  In country records I discovered that in 1938, the twenty-seventh year of the Republic, four hundred thousand mandays were spent by local workers from Gaomi, Pingdu, and Jiao counties in the service of the Japanese army to build the Jiao-Ping highway. The agricultural loss was incalculable, and the villages bordering the highway were stripped clean of draught animals. It was then that Arhat Liu, a conscript himself, took a hoe to the legs of our captured mule. He was caught, and the next day the Japanese soldiers tied him to a tethering post, skinned him alive, and mutilated him in front of his compatriots. There was no fear in his eyes, and a stream of abuse poured from his mouth up until the moment he died.

  3

  SHE TOLD IT exactly like it was. When construction of the Jiao-Ping highway reached our place, the sorghum in the fields was only waist-high. Except for a handful of tiny villages, two crossing rivers, and a few dozen winding dirt paths, the marshy plain, which measured sixty by seventy-odd li – or about twenty by twenty-five miles – was covered with sorghum that waved like an ocean of green. From our village we had a clear view of White Horse Mountain, an enormous rock formation on the northern edge of the plain. Peasants tending the sorghum looked up to see White Horse and down to see black soil that soaked up their sweat and filled their hearts with contentment. When they heard that the Japanese were building a highway across the plain, they grew restive, awaiting the calamity they knew was coming.

  The Japanese said they would come, and they were as good as their word.

  My father was sleeping when the Japs and their puppet soldiers came to our village to conscript peasant labourers and confiscate their mules and horses. He was awakened by a disturbance near the distillery. Grandma dragged him over to the compound as fast as her bamboo-shoot feet would carry her. Back then there were a dozen or so huge vats in the compound, each brimming with top-quality white liquor, the aroma of which hung over the entire village. Two khaki-clad Japanese soldiers with fixed bayonets stood there as a couple of black-clad Chinese, rifles slung over their backs, untied our two big black mules from a catalpa tree. Uncle Arhat kept trying to get to the shorter puppet soldier, who was untying the tethers, but the taller comrade forced him back with the muzzle of his rifle. Since Uncle Arhat was wearing only a thin shirt in the early-summer heat, his exposed chest already showed a welter of circular bruises.

  ‘Brothers,’ he pleaded, ‘we can talk this over, we can talk it over.’

  ‘Get the hell out of here, you old bastard,’ the taller soldier barked.

  ‘Those animals belong to the owner,’ Uncle Arhat said. ‘You can’t take them.’

  The puppet soldier growled menacingly, ‘If I hear another word out of you, I’ll shoot your little prick off!’

  The Japanese soldiers stood like clay statues, holding their rifles in front of them.

  As Grandma and my father entered the compound, Uncle Arhat wailed, ‘They’re taking our mules!’

  ‘Sir,’ Grandma said, ‘we’re good people.’

  The Japanese squinted and grinned at her.

  The shorter puppet soldier freed the mules and tried to lead them away; but they raised their heads stubbornly and refused to budge. His buddy walked up and prodded one of them in the rump with his rifle; the angered animal pawed the ground with its rear hooves, its metal shoes glinting in the mud that sprayed the soldier in the face.

  The tall soldier pointed his rifle at Uncle Arhat and bellowed, ‘Come over here and take these mules to the construction site, you old bastard!’

  Uncle Arhat squatted on the ground without making a sound, so one of the Japanese soldiers walked up and waved his rifle in front of Uncle Arhat’s face. ‘Minliwala, yalalimin!’ he grunted. With the shiny bayonet glinting in front of his eyes, Uncle Arhat sat down. The soldier thrust his bayonet forward, opening a tiny hole in Uncle Arhat’s shiny scalp.

  Beginning to tremble, Grandma blurted out, ‘Do it, Uncle, take the mules for them.’

  The other Jap soldier edged up close to Grandma, and Father noticed how young and handsome he was, and how his dark eyes sparkled. But when he smiled, his lip curled to reveal yellow buck teeth. Grandma staggered over to Uncle Arhat, whose wound was oozing blood that spread across his scalp and down his face. The grinning Japanese soldiers drew closer. Grandma laid her hands on Uncle Arhat’s scalp, then rubbed them on her face. Pulling her hair, she leaped to her feet like a madwoman, her mouth agape. She looked three parts human and seven parts demon. The startled Japanese soldiers froze.

  ‘Sir,’ the tall puppet soldier said, ‘that woman’s crazy.’

  One of the Jap soldiers mumbled something as he fired a shot over Grandma’s head. She sat down hard and began to wail.

  The tall puppet soldier used his rifle to prod Uncle Arhat, who got to his feet and took the tethers from the smaller soldier. The mules looked up; their legs trembled as they followed him out of the compound. The street was chaotic with mules, horses, oxen, and goats.

  Grandma wasn’t crazy. The minute the Japs and the puppet soldiers left, she removed the wooden lid from one of the wine vats and looked at her frightful, bloody reflection in the mirrorlike surface. Father watched the tears on her cheeks turn red. She washed her face in the wine, turning it red.

  Like the mules he was leading, Uncle Arhat was forced to work on the road that was taking shape in the sorghum field. The highway on the southern bank of the Black Water River was nearly completed, and cars and trucks were driving up on the newly laid roadway with loads of stone and yellow gravel, which they dumped on the riverbank. Since there was only a single wooden span across the river, the Japanese had decided to build a large stone bridge. Vast areas of sorghum on both sides of the highway had been levelled, until the ground seemed covered by an enormous green blanket. In the field north of the river, where black soil had been laid on either side of the road, dozens of horses and mules were pulling stone rollers to level two enormous squares in the sea of sorghum. Men led the animals back and forth through the field, trampling the tender stalks, which had been bent double by the shod hooves, then flattening them with stone rollers turned dark green by the plant juices. The pungent aroma of green sorghum hung heavily over the construction site.

  Uncle Arhat, who was sent to the southern bank of the river to haul rocks to the other side, reluctantly handed the mules over to an old geezer with festering eyes. The little wooden bridge swayed so violently it seemed about to topple as he crossed to the southern bank, where a Chinese overseer tapped him on the head with a purplish rattan whip and said, ‘Start lugging rocks to the other side.’ Uncle Arhat rubbed his eyes – the blood from his scalp wound had soaked his eyebrows. He picked up an average-sized rock and carried it to the other side, where the old geezer stood with the mules. ‘Use them sparingly,’ he said. ‘They belong to the family I work for.’ The old geezer lowered his head numbly, then turned and led the mules over to where teams of animals were working on the connecting road. The shiny rumps of the black mules reflected specks of sunlight. His head still bleeding, Uncle Arhat hunkered down, scooped up some black dirt, and rubbed it on the wound. A dull, heavy pain travelled all the way down to his toes.

&
nbsp; Armed Jap and puppet soldiers stood on the fringes of the construction site; the overseer, whip in hand, roamed the site like a spectre. The eyes of the frightened labourers rolled as they watched Uncle Arhat, his head a mass of blood and mud, pick up a rock and take a couple of steps. Suddenly he heard a crack behind him, followed by a drawn-out, stinging pain on his back. He dropped the rock and looked at the grinning overseer. ‘Your honour, if you have something to say, say it. Why hit me?’

  Without a word, the grinning overseer flicked his whip in the air and wrapped it around Uncle Arhat’s waist, all but cutting him in half. Two streams of hot, stinging tears oozed out of the corners of Uncle Arhat’s eyes, and blood rushed to his head, which began to throb as though it might split open.

  ‘Your honour!’ Uncle Arhat protested.

  His honour whipped him again.

  ‘Your honour,’ Uncle Arhat said, ‘why are you hitting me?’