“I asked you a question!” she shouted angrily. “What do you gain by showing me those yellow teeth? I can’t get a fart out of you, even with a stone roller!”
With a long face, Shangguan Fulu said, “Why ask me? If you say leave, we leave, if you say stay, we stay.”
Shangguan Lü sighed. “If the signs are good, we’ll be all right. If not, there’s nothing we can do about it. So get to work and push down on her belly!”
Opening and closing his mouth to build up his courage, Shangguan Shouxi asked loudly, but without much confidence, “Has the baby come?”
“Any man worth his salt focuses on what he’s doing,” Shangguan Lü said. “You take care of the donkey, and leave women’s business to me.”
“She’s my wife,” Shangguan Shouxi muttered. “No one says she isn’t.”
“My guess is this time it’s a boy,” Shangguan Shouxi said as he pressed down on the donkey’s belly. “I’ve never seen her that big before.”
“You’re worthless …” Shangguan Lü was losing spirit. “Protect us, Bodhisattva.”
Shangguan Shouxi wanted to say more, but his mother’s sad face sealed his lips.
“You two keep at it here,” Shangguan Fulu said, “while I go see what’s going on out there.”
“Where do you think you’re going?” Shangguan Lü demanded as she grabbed her husband’s shoulders and dragged him back to where the donkey lay. “What’s going on out there is none of your business! Just keep massaging the donkey’s belly. The sooner she foals, the better. Dear Bodhisattva, Lord in Heaven. The Shangguan ancestors were men of iron and steel, so how did I wind up with two such worthless specimens?”
Shangguan Fulu bent over, reached out with hands that were as dainty as his son’s, and pressed down on the donkey’s twitching belly. The donkey lay between him and his son; pressing down one after the other, they seemed to be on opposite ends of a teeter-totter. Up and down they went, massaging the animal’s hide. Weak father, weak son, accomplishing little with their soft hands — limp wicks, fluffy cotton, always careless and given to cutting corners. Standing behind them, Shangguan Lü could only shake her head in frustration, before reaching out, grabbing her husband by the neck, and jerking him to his feet. “Go on,” she demanded, “out of my way!” She sent her husband, a blacksmith hardly worthy of the name, reeling into the corner, where he sprawled atop a sack of hay. “And you, get up!” she ordered her son. “You’re just underfoot. You never eat less than your share, and you’re never around when there’s work to be done. Lord in Heaven, what did I do to deserve this?”
Shangguan Shouxi jumped to his feet as if his life had been spared and ran over to join his father in the corner. Their dark little eyes rolled in their sockets, their expressions were a mixture of cunning and stupidity. The silence in the barn was broken once again by the shouts of Sima Ting, setting father and son squirming, as if their bowels or bladders were about to betray them.
Shangguan Lü knelt on the ground in front of the donkey’s belly, oblivious of the filth, a look of solemn concentration on her face. Rolling up her sleeves, she rubbed her hands together, creating a grating noise like scraping the soles of two shoes together. Laying her cheek against the animal’s belly, she listened attentively with her eyes narrowed. Then she stroked the donkey’s face. “Donkey,” she said, “go on, get it over with. It’s the curse of all females.” Then she straddled the donkey’s neck, bent over, and laid her hands on its belly. As if planing a board, she pushed down and out. A pitiful bray tore from the donkey’s mouth and its legs shot out stiffly, four hooves quaking violently, as if beating a violent tattoo on four drums, the jagged rhythm bouncing off the walls. It raised its head, left it suspended in the air for a moment, then brought it crashing back to earth with a moist, sticky thud. “Donkey, endure it a while longer,” she murmured. “Who made us female in the first place? Clench your teeth, push … push harder …” Holding her hands up to her chest to draw strength into them, she took a deep breath, held it, and pushed down slowly, firmly.
The donkey struggled, yellow liquid shot out of its nostrils as its head jerked around and banged on the ground. Down at the other end, amniotic fluid and wet, sticky feces sprayed the area. In their horror, father and son covered their eyes.
“Fellow villagers, the Jap horse soldiers have already set out from the county seat. I’ve heard eyewitness accounts, this is not a false alarm, run for your lives before it’s too late …” Sima Ting’s shouts entered their ears with remarkable clarity.
Shangguan Fulu and his son opened their eyes and saw Shangguan Lü sitting beside the donkey’s head, her own head lowered as she gasped for breath. Her white shirt was soaked with sweat, throwing her solid, hard shoulder blades into prominent relief. Fresh blood pooled between the donkey’s legs as the spindly leg of its foal poked out from the birth canal; it looked unreal, as if someone had stuck it up there as a prank.
Once again, Shangguan Lü laid her twitching cheek against the donkey’s belly and listened. To Shangguan Shouxi, his mother’s face looked like an overripe apricot, a serene golden color. Sima Ting’s persistent shouts floated in the air, like a fly in pursuit of rotting meat, sticking first to the wall, then buzzing over to the donkey’s hide. Pangs of fear struck Shangguan Shouxi’s heart and made his skin crawl; a sense of impending doom wracked him. He lacked the courage to run out of the barn, for a vague sense of foreboding told him that the minute he stepped out the door, he’d fall into the hands of Jap soldiers — those squat little men with short, stubby limbs, noses like cloves of garlic, and bulging eyes, who ate human hearts and livers and drank their victims’ blood. They’d kill and eat him, leaving nothing behind, not even bone scraps. And at this very moment, he knew, they were massing in nearby lanes to get their hands on local women and children, all the while bucking and kicking and snorting like wild horses. He turned to look at his father in hopes of gaining solace. What he saw was an ashen-faced Shangguan Fulu, a blacksmith who was a disgrace to the trade, sitting on a sack of hay, arms wrapped around his knees as he rocked back and forth, his back and head banging against the wall. Shangguan Shouxi’s nose began to ache, he wasn’t sure why, and tears flowed from his eyes.
With a cough, Shangguan Lü slowly raised her head. Stroking the donkey’s face, she sighed. “Donkey, oh donkey,” she said, “what have you done? How could you push its leg out like that? Don’t you know the head has to come out first?” Water spilled from the animal’s lackluster eyes. She dried them with her hand, blew her nose loudly, then turned to her son. “Go get Third Master Fan. I was hoping we wouldn’t have to buy two bottles of liquor and a pig’s head for him, but we’ll just have to spend the money. Go get him!”
Shangguan Shouxi shrank up against the wall in terror, his eyes glued to the door, which led to the lanes outside. “The l-lanes are f-filled with J-Japanese,” he stammered, “all those J-Japanese …”
Enraged, Shangguan Lü stood up, stormed over to the door, and jerked it open, letting in an early-summer southwest wind that carried the pungent smell of ripe wheat. The lane was still, absolutely quiet. A cluster of butterflies, looking somehow unreal, flitted past, etching a picture of colorful wings on Shangguan Shouxi’s heart; he was sure it was a bad omen.
4
The local veterinarian and master archer, Third Master Fan, lived at the eastern end of town, on the edge of a pasture that ran all the way to Black Water River. The Flood Dragon riverbank wound directly behind his house. At his mother’s insistence, Shangguan Shouxi walked out of the house, but on rubbery legs. He saw that the sun was a blazing ball of white above the treetops, and that the dozen or so stained glass windows in the church steeple shone brilliantly. The Felicity Manor steward, Sima Ting, was hopping around atop the watchtower, which was roughly the same height as the steeple. He was still shouting his warning that the Japanese were on their way, but his voice had grown hoarse and raspy. A few idlers were gaping up at him with their arms crossed. Shangguan Shoux
i stood in the middle of the lane, trying to decide on the best way to go to Third Master Fan’s place.
Two routes were available to him, one straight through town, the other along the riverbank. The drawback of the riverbank route was the likelihood of startling the Sun family’s big black dogs. The Suns lived in a ramshackle compound at the northern end of the lane, encircled by a low, crumbling wall that was a favorite perch for chickens. The head of the family, Aunty Sun, had a brood of five grandsons, all mutes. The parents seemed not to have ever existed. The five of them were forever playing on the wall, in which they’d created breaches, like saddles, so they could ride imaginary horses. Holding clubs or slingshots or rifles carved from sticks, they glared at passersby, human and animal, the whites of their eyes truly menacing. People got off relatively easy, but not the animals; it made no difference if it was a stray calf or a raccoon, a goose, a duck, a chicken, or a dog, the minute they spotted it, they took out after it, along with their big black dogs, converting the village into their private hunting ground.
The year before, they had chased down a Felicity Manor donkey that had broken free of its halter; after killing it, they’d skinned and butchered it out in the open. People stood by watching, waiting to see how the folks at Felicity Manor, a powerful and rich family in which the uncle was a regimental commander who kept a company of armed bodyguards, would deal with someone openly slaughtering one of its donkeys. When the steward stamped his foot, half the county quaked. Now here were all these wild kids, slaughtering a Felicity Manor donkey in broad daylight, which was hardly less than asking to be slaughtered themselves. Imagine the people’s surprise when the assistant steward, Sima Ku — a marksman with a large red birthmark on his face — handed a silver dollar to each of the mutes instead of drawing his pistol. From that day on, they were incorrigible tyrants, and any animal that encountered them could only curse its parents for not giving it wings.
While the boys were in their saddles, their five jet black dogs, which could have been scooped out of a pond of ink, sprawled lazily at the base of the wall, eyes closed to mere slits, seemingly dreaming peaceful dreams. The five mutes and their dogs had a particular dislike for Shangguan Shouxi, who lived in the same lane, although he could not recall where or when he had managed to offend these ten fearsome demons. But whenever he came across them, he was in for a bad time. He would flash them a smile, but that never kept the dogs from flying at him like five black arrows, and even though the attacks stopped short of physical contact, and he was never bitten, he’d be so rattled his heart would nearly stop. The mere thought of it made him shudder.
Or he could head south, across the town’s main street, and get to Third Master Fan’s that way. But that meant he would have to pass by the church, and at this hour, the tall, heavyset, redheaded, blue-eyed Pastor Malory would be squatting beneath the prickly ash tree, with its pungent aroma, milking his old goat, the one with the scraggly chin whiskers, squeezing her red, swollen teats with large, soft, hairy hands, and sending milk so white it seemed almost blue splashing into a rusty enamel bowl. Swarms of redheaded flies always buzzed around Pastor Malory and his goat. The pungency of the prickly ash, the muttony smell of the goat, and the man’s rank body odor blended into a foul miasma that swelled in the sunlit air and polluted half the block. Nothing bothered Shangguan Shouxi more than the prospect of Pastor Malory looking up from behind his goat, both of them stinking to high heaven, and casting one of those ambiguous glances his way, even though the hint of a compassionate smile showed that it was given in friendship. When he smiled, Pastor Malory displayed teeth as white as those of a horse. He was forever dragging his dirty finger back and forth across his chest — Amen! And every time that happened, Shangguan Shouxi’s stomach lurched amid a flood of mixed feelings, until he turned tail and ran like a whipped dog. He avoided the vicious dogs at the mutes’ house out of fear; he avoided Pastor Malory and his milk goat out of disgust. What irritated him most was that his wife, Shangguan Lu, had special feelings for this redheaded devil. She was his devout follower, he was her god.
After wrestling with his thoughts for a long moment, Shangguan Shouxi decided to take the north and east route, even though the watchtower, with Sima Ting standing on its perch, and the scene below had him in its thrall. Everything seemed normal down here, except, of course, for the steward, who was acting like a monkey. No longer petrified by the prospect of encountering Jap devils, he had to admire his mother’s ability to size up a situation. But just to be on the safe side, he bent down and picked up a couple of bricks. He heard the braying of a little donkey somewhere and a mother calling to her children.
As he walked past the Sun compound, he was relieved to see that the wall was deserted: no mutes saddled in the breaches, no chickens perched on top, and, most importantly, no dogs sprawled lazily at the base. A low wall to begin with, the breaches brought it even closer to the ground, and that gave him an unobstructed view of the yard, where a slaughtering was in progress. The victims were the family’s proud but lonely chickens; the butcher was Aunty Sun, a woman of ample martial talents. People said that when she was young, she was a renowned bandit who could leap over eaves and walk on walls. But when she fell afoul of the law, she had no choice but to marry a stove repairman named Sun.
Shangguan Shouxi counted the corpses of seven chickens, glossy white, with splotches of blood here and there the only traces of their death struggles. An eighth chicken, its throat cut, flew out of Aunty Sun’s hand and thudded to the ground, where it tucked in its neck, flapped its wings, and ran around in circles. The five mutes, stripped to the waist, hunkered down beneath the house eaves, staring blankly at the struggling chicken one minute and at the razor-sharp knife in their grandmother’s hand the next. Their expressions and movements were alarmingly identical; even the shifting of their eyes seemed orchestrated. For all her renown in the village, Aunty Sun had been reduced to a skinny, wrinkled old woman, although her face and her expression, her figure and her bearing, carried evocative remnants of her former self. The five dogs sat in a huddle, heads raised, blank, mysterious looks in their eyes, bleak gazes that defied attempts to guess what they meant.
Shangguan Shouxi was so mesmerized by the scene in the Suns’ yard that he stopped to watch, his mind purged of anxieties and, more significantly, his mother’s orders. He was now a forty-two-year-old shrimp of a man leaning up against a wall, a rapt audience of one. Feeling the icy glare of Aunty Sun sweep past him like a knife, yielding as water and sharp as the wind, he felt scalped. The mutes and their dogs also turned to look at him. Evil, restless glares emerged from the eyes of the mutes; the dogs cocked their heads, bared their fangs, and growled as the hair on the back of their necks stood up. Five dogs, like arrows on a taut string, ready to fly. Time to get moving, he was thinking, when he heard Aunty Sun cough threateningly. The mutes abruptly lowered their heads, swollen from excitement, and all five dogs hit the ground obediently, legs splayed in front of them.
“Worthy nephew Shangguan, what’s your mother up to?” Aunty Sun asked calmly.
He was stuck for a good answer; there was so much he wanted to say, and not a word would come out. As his face reddened, he just stammered, like a thief caught in the act.
Aunty Sun smiled. Reaching down, she pinned a black-and-red rooster by the neck and stroked its silky feathers. The rooster cackled nervously, while she plucked the stubborn tail feathers and stuffed them into a woven rush sack. The rooster fought like a demon, madly clawing the muddy ground with its talons.
“Do your daughters know how to kick shuttlecocks? The best ones are made from the tail feathers of a live rooster. Ai, when I think back…”
She stopped in midsentence and glared at him as she sank into the oblivion of reverie. Her gaze seemed to bounce off the wall then bore through it. Shangguan Shouxi’s eyeballs didn’t flicker, and he held his breath, fearfully. Finally, Aunty Sun seemed to deflate in front of his eyes, like a punctured ball; her eyes went from blazing to mour
nfully gentle. She stepped down on the rooster’s legs, wrapped her left hand around the base of its wings, and pinched its neck. Unable to move, it gave up the struggle. Then, with her right hand, she began plucking the fine throat feathers until its reddish purple skin showed. Finally, after flicking the rooster’s throat with her index finger, she picked up the shiny knife, shaped like a willow leaf, made a single swipe, and the throat opened up, releasing a torrent of inky red blood, large drops pushing smaller ones ahead of them. Aunty Sun slowly got to her feet, still holding the bleeding rooster, and looked around wistfully. She squinted in the bright sunlight. Shangguan Shouxi felt lightheaded. The smell of poplars was heavy in the air. Scat! He heard Aunty Sun’s voice and watched as the black rooster tumbled through the air and thudded to the ground in the middle of the yard. With a sigh, he let his hands drop from the wall.
Suddenly, he remembered that he was supposed to be getting Third Master Fan to help with the donkey. But as he was turning to leave, the rooster, bloody but fighting to stay alive, struggled miraculously to its feet, propped up by its wings. Shorn of feathers, its tail stood up in all its strange, hideous nakedness, frightening Shangguan Shouxi. Blood still streamed from its open throat, but the head and comb, bled dry, were turning a deathly white. Yet it kept fighting to hold it up. Struggle! It held its head high, but then it sagged and hung limply. Again it rose in the air, then drooped, and rose one more time, this time, it seemed, to stay. It shook from side to side, as the rooster sat down, blood and foamy bubbles seeping from its beak and then from the opening in its neck. Its eyes glittered like gold nuggets. Distressed by the sight, Aunty Sun wiped her hands with straw and seemed to be chewing on something, even though her mouth was empty. She spat out a mouthful of saliva and yelled at the five dogs, “Go!”
Shangguan Shouxi fell flat on his backside.