On the morning of the third day, my maternal great-granddad led a donkey up to the house to take Grandma home; it was a Northeast Gaomi Township custom for a bride to return to her parents’ home three days after her wedding. Great-Granddad spent the morning drinking with Shan Tingxiu, then set out for home shortly after noon.
Grandma sat sidesaddle on the donkey, swaying from side to side as the animal left the village. Even though it hadn’t rained for three days, the road was still wet, and steam rose from the sorghum in the fields, the green stalks shrouded in swirling whiteness, as though in the presence of immortals. Great-Granddad’s silver coins clinked and jingled in the saddlebags. He was so drunk he could barely walk, and his eyes were glassy. The donkey proceeded slowly, its long neck bobbing up and down, its tiny hooves leaving muddy imprints. Grandma had only ridden a short distance when she began to get lightheaded; her eyes were red and puffy, her hair mussed, and the sorghum in the fields, a full joint taller than it had been three days earlier, mocked her as she passed.
‘Dad,’ Grandma called out, ‘I don’t want to go back there any more. I’ll kill myself before I go back there again. . . .’
‘Daughter,’ Great-Granddad replied, ‘you have no idea how lucky you are. Your father-in-law said he’s going to give me a big black mule. I’m going to sell this runty little thing. . . .’
The donkey nibbled some mud-splattered grass that lined the road.
‘Dad,’ Grandma sobbed, ‘he’s got leprosy. . . .’
‘Your father-in-law is going to give me a mule. . . .’
Great-Granddad, drunk as a lord, kept vomiting into the weeds by the side of the road. The filth and bile set Grandma’s stomach churning, and she felt nothing but loathing for him.
As the donkey walked into Toad Hollow, they were met by an overpowering stench that caused its ears to droop. Grandma spotted the highwayman’s bloated corpse, which was covered by a layer of emerald-coloured flies. The donkey skirted the corpse, sending the flies swarming angrily into the air to form a green cloud. Great-Granddad followed the donkey, his body seemingly wider than the road itself: one moment he was stumbling into the sorghum to the left of the road, the next moment he was trampling on weeds to the right. And when he reached the corpse, he gasped ‘Oh!’ several times, and said through quaking lips, ‘Poor beggar . . . you poor beggar . . . you sleeping there? . . .’ Grandma never forgot the highwayman’s pumpkin face. In that instant when the flies swarmed into the air she was struck by the remarkable contrast between the graceful elegance of his dead face and the mean, cowardly expression he’d worn in life.
The distance between them lengthened, one li at a time, with the sun’s rays slanting down, the sky high and clear; the donkey quickly outpaced Great-Granddad. Since it knew the way home, it carried Grandma at a carefree saunter. Up ahead was a bend in the road, and as the donkey negotiated the turn, Grandma tipped backward, leaving the security of the animal’s back. A muscular arm swept her off and carried her into the sorghum field.
Grandma fought halfheartedly. She really didn’t feel like struggling. The three days she had just got through were nightmarish. Certain individuals become great leaders in an instant; Grandma unlocked the mysteries of life in three days. She even wrapped her arms around his neck to make it easier for him to carry her. Sorghum leaves rustled. Great-Granddad’s hoarse voice drifted over on the wind: ‘Daughter, where the hell are you?’
The long, sorrowful blast of a bugle near the bridge is immediately followed by the staccato rhythm of machine-gun fire. Grandma’s blood continues to flow in concert with her breathing. ‘Mom,’ Father pleads, ‘don’t let your blood run out. You’ll die when it’s all gone.’ He scoops up a handful of black dirt and smears it over her wound; blood quickly seeps out from under it. He scoops up another handful. Grandma smiles in gratitude, her eyes fixed on the azure sky, deep beyond imagining, and fixed on the warm, forgiving, motherly, nurturing sorghum around her. A glossy green path, bordered by tiny white flowers, appears in her mind.
Grandma rode the donkey down this path, leisurely and carefree, while from deep amid the sorghum the stalwart young man raised his voice in a serenade that skimmed the top of the field. She was drawn to the serenade, her feet barely touching the tips of the sorghum plants, as though riding a green cloud. . . .
The man placed Grandma on the ground, where she lay as limp as a ribbon of dough, her eyes narrowed like those of a lamb. He ripped away the black mask, revealing his face to her. It’s him! A silent prayer to heaven. A powerful feeling of pure joy rocked her, filling her eyes with hot tears.
Yu Zhan’ao removed his rain cape and tramped out a clearing in the sorghum, then spread his cape over the sorghum corpses. He lifted Grandma onto the cape. Her soul fluttered as she gazed at his bare torso. A light mist rose from the tips of the sorghum, and all around she could hear the sounds of growth. No wind, no waving motion, just the white-hot rays of moist sunlight crisscrossing through the open cracks between plants. The passion in Grandma’s heart, built up over sixteen years, suddenly erupted. She squirmed and twisted on the cape. Yu Zhan’ao, getting smaller and smaller, fell loudly to his knees at her side. She was trembling from head to toe; a redolent yellow ball of fire crackled and sizzled before her eyes. Yu Zhan’ao roughly tore open her jacket, exposing the small white mounds of chilled, tense flesh to the sunlight. Answering his force, she cried out in a muted, hoarse voice, ‘My God . . . ,’ and swooned.
Grandma and Granddad exchanged their love surrounded by the vitality of the sorghum field: two unbridled souls, refusing to knuckle under to worldly conventions, were fused together more closely than their ecstatic bodies. They ploughed the clouds and scattered rain in the field, adding a patina of lustrous red to the rich and varied history of Northeast Gaomi Township. My father was conceived with the essence of heaven and earth, the crystallisation of suffering and wild joy.
The braying donkey threaded its way into the sorghum field, and Grandma returned from the hazy kingdom of heaven to the cruel world of man. She sat up in a state of utter stupefaction, her face bathed in tears. ‘He really does have leprosy,’ she said. As Granddad knelt down, a sword appeared in his hand, as if by magic. He slipped it out of its scabbard; the two-foot blade was curved, like a leaf of chive. With a single swish, it sliced through two stalks of sorghum, the top halves thudding to the ground, leaving bubbles of dark-green liquid on the neat, slanted wounds.
‘Come back in three days, no matter what!’ Granddad said.
Grandma looked at him uncomprehendingly. He dressed while she tidied herself up, then put his sword away – where, she didn’t know. Granddad took her back to the roadside and vanished.
Three days later, the little donkey carried Grandma back, and when she entered the village she learned that the Shans, father and son, had been murdered and tossed into the inlet at the western edge of the village.
Grandma lies there soaking up the crisp warmth of the sorghum field. She is as light as a house swallow gracefully skimming the tips of the plants. The fleeting images begin slowing down: Shan Bianlang, Shan Tingxiu, Great-Granddad, Great-Grandma, Uncle Arhat . . . so many hostile, grateful, savage, sincere faces appear and disappear. She is writing the final page of her thirty-year history. Everything in her past is like a procession of sweet, fragrant fruit falling rapidly to the ground. As for her future, she can only dimly see a few holes of light, which are quickly extinguished. She is holding on to the fleeting present with all her might.
Grandma feels Father’s little paws stroking her. He calls out ‘Mom!’ timidly. All her hate and her love evaporate. She longs to raise her arm and stroke Father’s face, but it won’t do her bidding. Rising into the air, she sees a multicoloured ray of light streaming from above, and hears heaven’s solemn music, played by horns and woodwinds, large and small.
Grandma is exhausted: the handle of the present, the handle of the world of men, is slipping from her grasp. Is this death? Will I never again see this sky,
this earth, this sorghum, this son, the lover who has led his troops into battle? The gunfire is so far away, beyond a thick curtain of mist. Douguan! Douguan! Come help your mom. Pull your mom back. Your mom doesn’t want to die. My heaven . . . you gave me a lover, you gave me a son, you gave me riches, you gave me thirty years of life as robust as red sorghum. Heaven, since you gave me all that, don’t take it back now. Forgive me, let me go! Have I sinned? Would it have been right to share my pillow with a leper and produce a misshapen, putrid monster to contaminate this beautiful world? What is chastity then? What is the correct path? What is goodness? What is evil? You never told me, so I had to decide on my own. I loved happiness, I loved strength, I loved beauty; it was my body, and I used it as I thought fitting. Sin doesn’t frighten me, nor does punishment. I’m not afraid of your eighteen levels of hell. I did what I had to do, I managed as I thought proper. I fear nothing. But I don’t want to die, I want to live. I want to see more of this world. . . .
Grandma’s sincerity moves the heavens. Fresh drops of a crystalline moisture ooze from her dry eyes, which emit a strange light. Once again she sees Father’s golden face and two eyes that are so like Granddad’s. Her lips quiver, she calls Douguan’s name. ‘Mom,’ Father shouts excitedly, ‘you’re going to be okay! You’re not going to die. I’ve stopped the bleeding, it’s stopped! I’ll go get Dad, I’ll tell him to come. Mom, you can’t die, you have to wait for Dad!’
Father runs off, his retreating steps turning into a gentle monologue, then into the music from heaven that Grandma had heard a moment earlier. It is the music of the universe, and it emanates from the red sorghum. She gazes at the sorghum, and through the dimness of her vision the stalks turn crafty and surpassingly beautiful, grotesque, and bizarre. They begin to moan, to writhe, to shout, to entwine her; they are demonic one minute, intimate the next, and in her eyes they coil like snakes. But then they suddenly stretch out like spikes, and it is beyond her power to describe their brilliance. They are red and green, they are black and white, they are blue and green; they are laughing heartily, they are crying pitifully. Their tears are raindrops beating against the desolate sandbar of her heart.
The blue sky shines through the spaces between the sorghum stalks. It is so high, yet so low. Grandma feels as though heaven and earth, man, and the sorghum are intertwined, huddled beneath a gigantic canopy. White clouds dragging earthly shadows behind them brush leisurely against her face. A flock of white doves swoops down and perches on the stalks’ tips, where their cooing wakes Grandma, who quickly distinguishes their shapes. The doves’ red eyes, the size of sorghum seeds, are fixed on her. She smiles with genuine affection, and they return her smile. My darlings! she cries silently. I don’t want to leave you! The doves peck at the sorghum grains, their chests slowly expanding, their feathers fanning out like petals in the wind and rain.
A large flock of doves had once nested in the eaves of our home. In the fall, Grandma placed a large basin of clear water in the yard, and when the doves returned from the fields they perched neatly on the rim of the basin to spit the sorghum seeds from their crops into water in which their reflections shimmered. Then they swaggered around the yard. Doves! Driven from their nests by the storms of war, they grieve over Grandma’s imminent death.
Grandma’s eyes glaze over once again, as the doves take flight, soaring through the vast blue sky, filling it with the rhythmic flapping of their wings. She floats upward to join them, spreading her newly sprouted wings to glide weightlessly in the air above the black soil and sorghum stalks. She gazes longingly at the ruins of her village, at the meandering river, at the crisscrossing roads and paths, at the bullet holes in the sky, and at the doomed creatures beneath her. For the last time she smells the aroma of sorghum wine and the pungent odour of hot blood. A scene she never witnessed suddenly takes shape in her mind: caught in a hail of gunfire, hundreds of her fellow villagers, their clothes in rags, lie in the sorghum field, arms and legs writhing in a macabre dance. . . .
The final thread linking her to mankind is about to part; all her melancholy and suffering, her anxieties and dejection settle onto the field below, striking the sorghum like hailstones and continuing down to the black soil to take root and give birth to bitter fruit for generations to come.
Grandma has completed her liberation. She flies off with the doves. Her shrinking thoughts, which might fit into a human fist, embrace only joy, contentment, warmth, comfort, and harmony. She is at peace. With genuine devotion she exclaims:
‘Heaven! My heaven . . .’
9
WHILE THE MACHINE guns continued to strafe the area, the trucks’ wheels began to creep up onto the stone bridge. Flying bullets kept Granddad and his troops pinned down. A few men stuck their heads above the dike, only to pay for their recklessness with their lives. Granddad’s chest swelled with rage. All the trucks were now on the bridge, raising the machine-gun-fire trajectory. ‘Men,’ he shouted, ‘attack!’ He pulled off three quick shots, downing two Japanese soldiers, whose bodies fell across the cab, their dark blood staining the hood. With the echo of his shots still in the air, a cacophonous burst of fire erupted from behind the dikes lining the road. Seven or eight more Japanese soldiers were cut down; two of them fell off the truck, arms and legs churning desperately as they burrowed into the black water on either side of the bridge. The Fang brothers’ cannon roared, spewing a torrent of flame from its muzzle. Steel pellets and balls tore into the second truck in line, with its load of sacks, sending plumes of smoke skyward. White rice streamed from countless holes.
Father crawled on his belly from the sorghum field back to the dike, anxious to talk to Granddad, who was urgently reloading his pistol. The lead Jap truck revved its engine to get across the bridge, but the front wheels ran over the rake barrier; loud hissing sighs escaped from the punctured tyres. The truck rumbled grotesquely as it dragged the linked rakes along, and to Father it looked like an enormous twisting snake that had swallowed a hedgehog it was trying to dislodge. The Japs on the lead truck jumped to the ground. ‘Old Liu,’ Granddad shouted, ‘sound the bugle!’ The sound of Bugler Liu’s horn chilled the air. ‘Charge!’ Granddad commanded, leading the charge and firing without aiming, cutting down one Japanese soldier after another.
The troops on the west side of the road joined the attack, engaging the Japs in hand-to-hand combat. Granddad watched as Mute leaped up onto the bed of the lead truck. The two remaining Japs on the truck lunged with their bayonets. He warded off one with his knife, then neatly separated the soldier from his helmeted head, which sailed through the air, trailing a long howl before landing heavily on the ground, the thud driving the remnants of the scream out of its mouth. Father, amazed by the sharpness of the knife, stared at the stunned expression on the Jap’s face. The cheeks were still quivering, the nostrils still twitching, as though it were about to sneeze.
Mute dispatched the other Jap, and when the man’s headless torso fell against the truck’s railing, the skin on his neck shrank inward around pulsating gushes of blood. The Japs in the rear truck lowered the barrel of their machine gun and fired a hail of bullets, mowing down Granddad’s soldiers like so many saplings, which toppled onto the Jap corpses. Mute sat down hard on the cab, blood seeping from a cluster of chest holes.
Father and Granddad threw themselves to the ground and crawled back to the sorghum field. When they cautiously peeked over the top of the dike, they saw the rear truck chugging in reverse. ‘Fang Six,’ Granddad shouted, ‘the cannon! Nail that son of a bitch!’ The Fang brothers turned their loaded cannon in the direction of the dike, but as Fang Six bent over to light the fuse he was hit in the belly. Green intestines slithered out of the hole. ‘Shit!’ he blurted as he grabbed his belly with both hands and rolled into the sorghum field. The trucks would soon be off the bridge. ‘Fire that cannon!’ Granddad screamed. Fang Seven picked up the smouldering tinder and touched it to the fuse with a shaky hand. It wouldn’t light, it simply wouldn’t light! Granddad rush
ed up, grabbed the tinder out of his hand, and blew on it. It flared up. He touched it to the fuse. It sizzled, smoked momentarily, then went out with a puff of white smoke. The cannon sat silently, as though dozing. Father just knew it wouldn’t fire.
The Jap truck had already reached the bridgehead, and the second and third trucks had started moving backward to join it. In the river below, several Jap corpses floated eastward, seeping blood that attracted frenzied schools of white eels. After a moment of silence, the cannon belched thunderously, and its iron body leaped high above the dike as a wide swath of fire immolated one of the rice trucks.
The Japs aboard the first truck jumped down onto the dike and set up their machine gun. They opened fire. A bullet slammed into Fang Seven’s face, shattering his nose and splattering Father with blood.
Two Japs in the cab of the blazing truck opened their doors and jumped out, straight into the river. The middle truck, unable to move either way, growled strangely, its wheels spinning. The rice rain continued to fall.
The Jap machine gun abruptly stopped firing, leaving only carbines to pop off an occasional shot. A dozen or so Japs ran at a crouch past the burning truck, heading north with their weapons. Granddad ordered his men to fire, but few responded. The dike was dotted top and bottom with the bodies of soldiers; wounded men were moaning and wailing in the sorghum field. Granddad fired, sending Japs flying off the bridge. Rifle fire from the western side of the road cut down more of them. Their comrades turned tail and ran. A bullet whizzing over from the southern bank of the river struck Granddad below the right shoulder; as his arm jerked, the pistol fell from his hand to hang by its strap from his neck. He backed into the sorghum field. ‘Douguan,’ he cried out, ‘help me.’ Ripping the sleeve of his shirt, he told Father to take a strip of white cloth from his waistband to bind the wound. That was when Father said, ‘Dad, Mom’s asking for you.’