At first he fumbled with the bellows and was sweating heavily; the heat from the flames pricked his skin painfully. The old blacksmith’s face was expressionless, hard as a broken tile. He didn’t so much as look at Hei-hai, who bit his lip and wiped the sweat from his face with a sunburned arm before it ran into his eyes. His gaunt chest rose and fell like the bellows; puffs of air burst from his mouth and his nostrils.
The mason carried in blunt-nosed chisels to be repaired. ‘Can you hold out?’ he asked Hei-hai. ‘If not, tell me, and you can go back to the rock pile.’
Hei-hai didn’t so much as look up.
‘Pig-headed kid!’ the mason said as he dumped the chisels on the ground and walked off. But he was back shortly, now in company with Juzi. She had tied her bandana around her neck; it framed her face perfectly.
Under the bridge, a light shone in the young blacksmith’s eyes; he swallowed hard, licking his dry, chapped lips with a thickened tongue. His eyes were as big as Hei-hai’s, but the right one was covered by an eggshell-coloured film. Over time he’d come to rely on his left eye, leading to a habit of cocking his head to the right. With his head pillowed on his right shoulder, he sent a burning gaze from his left eye to the woman’s rosy face. An eighteen-pound sledge stood between his legs, head on the ground; he rested his hand on the handle as if it were a cane.
The fire in the forge blazed, sending black smoke and sparks up to the bridge, where it swirled and returned angrily to enshroud the boy’s face. He coughed, his chest wheezed. The old blacksmith gave him a frosty look, took a pipe from a leather pouch that had been rubbed shiny, slowly filled and lit it from the forge, and blew two streams of white smoke into the black cloud, making his nose hairs twitch. He cast an indifferent gaze through the smoke at the mason and Juzi. ‘Not so much coal,’ he said to Hei-hai. ‘Nice, even layers.’
The boy frantically pumped the bellows, his skeletal figure rocking back and forth. Flames shone on his sweaty chest, throwing his ribs into clear relief. His heart beat pathetically, like a tiny mouse tucked between a pair of ribs. ‘Make long, steady motions,’ the old blacksmith said.
Juzi’s eyes filled with tears when she noticed the blood on Hei-hai’s lower lip. ‘Hei-hai,’ she shouted, ‘don’t work for them. Come back with me to break rocks.’ She walked up to the bellows and grabbed his kindling-stick arms. He fought to break her grip, and made throaty noises that sounded like the growl of a dog about to bite. He was so light she had no trouble dragging him out of the opening. His calloused feet scraped noisily across the rocky soil.
‘Hei-hai,’ she said as she set him down, ‘let’s not work for them. The smoke’s too much for you. You’re so skinny there isn’t a drop of sweat left in you – you’re baked dry. Come break rocks with your big sister, that’s much easier.’ She pulled him back toward the rock pile. She had strong arms and large, soft hands that enveloped his wrist as if it were a twig. Hei-hai’s heels ploughed furrows in the rocky soil. ‘Stop that, you foolish little boy,’ she stopped to say. ‘Walk with me.’ She tightened her grip on his wrist. ‘You’re so skinny, I could shatter your bone with a squeeze, so how could you take on that kind of hard work?’ Hei-hai gave her a nasty look, then dropped his head and sank his teeth into her fleshy wrist. ‘Ow!’ she cried out, and let go of his wrist. Hei-hai spun around and ran back to the bridge.
His teeth left deep imprints on her wrist. His canines, practically fangs, had drilled two bloody holes in her skin. The troubled mason ran up and took out a wrinkled handkerchief to wrap around her bleeding wrist. She shoved him away, wouldn’t even look at him, as she bent down, scooped up a handful of dirt, and smeared it over the bite marks.
‘That’s got germs!’ he shouted, startled.
She turned and walked over to the rock pile, sat in her place and stared at the endless ripples on the river. She didn’t break a single rock.
The women commenced whispering.
‘Look, another one’s turned dumb.’
‘I’ll bet Hei-hai knows black magic.’
‘Get your ass over here, Hei-hai, you little prick,’ the mason called out as he walked toward the bridge. ‘How could you bite a friendly hand?’
At that moment, a bucketful of hot, dirty water flew into the mason’s face. He was standing in the right spot, the aim was perfect, and not a drop of the water was wasted. His soft brown hair, his jacket and the upturned collar of his red athletic shirt were coated with iron filings and coal dust. The filthy water ran from his head in rivulets.
‘Are you fucking blind?’ he stormed into the opening. ‘Who did that? Speak up. Who was it?’
No response. The black smoke had dissipated; the fire in the forge was blazing. The old blacksmith, his skin crimson, was taking a white-hot chisel out of the forge with a set of tongs. Sparks of molten steel popped off the tip. He laid it on the anvil and tapped the edges with his hammer. The anvil answered crisply. With the tongs in his left hand, he turned and moved the chisel, hitting it with his ball-peen hammer. The one-eyed blacksmith’s sledge came down hard on each spot the older man’s hammer hit, moving like a chicken pecking at rice; the younger man’s sledge gave no ground.
Hot air swirled. Amid the frightful sound of steel being tempered, sparks sprayed from the chisel and landed on the oilskin aprons and foot protectors, where they sizzled and gave off white smoke. They also landed on Hei-hai’s bare skin. He grimaced, baring two rows of white wolf cub teeth. Blisters rose on his belly, but he gave no sign of feeling pain, and hypnotic flames danced in his eyes. His thin shoulders hunched, his neck tucked down between them, and with his arms folded in front, he cupped his hand over his mouth and chin so tightly his nose was a mass of wrinkles.
A point was pounded onto a blunt chisel as its colour cooled from dusky red to silver grey. The ground was covered with white slag, hot enough to ignite straw, which disgorged lazy threads of white smoke.
‘Who splashed me, damn it!’ the mason roared in the face of the young blacksmith.
‘It was me, so what!’ The blacksmith said, cocking his head elegantly; his body seemed to glow as he stood with his hands on his sledge handle.
‘Are you blind?’
‘Only the one eye. I flung the water, and you walked into it. Just your luck.’
‘That’s a ridiculous argument!’
‘These days the bigger fists win the argument.’ He clenched his fists, making his muscles bulge.
‘Come on, then, one-eyed ogre. I’ll put the light out of the other one,’ the mason said, drawing up threateningly. The old blacksmith approached innocently, and bumped into the mason, who sensed something radiating from the old man’s sunken eyes, a kind of sign, and his muscles went slack. The old man looked up and casually sang a line from either an opera or a popular song.
For love of your sword, your learning, your youthful virility
I followed you across the earth, wracked by storm and hunger, enduring countless hardships . . .
He sang only that much, then stopped, and it was clear that he had swallowed the melody’s last mournful strains. He glanced at the mason again, then lowered his head to quench the newly sharpened chisel in the bucket; but just before he did that, he rolled up his sleeve and thrust a hand into the water to test the temperature. A deep purple scar on his forearm, round with a raised centre, did not really resemble an eye, but it looked like one to the mason, who felt that the strange eye was watching him. Twisting his lip, he felt as if a spell had been cast. He emerged from under the bridge as if walking on air, and disappeared for the rest of the day.
The boy’s eyes ached, his sun-baked scalp burned. He stood up from her seat and strolled back to the forge. It was dark under the bridge, so he felt his way over to the old blacksmith’s folding stool. As he sat on it, his mind a blank, his hands abruptly began to burn, so he pressed them against the cold stone wall and directed his thoughts to the past.
Three days earlier, the old blacksmith had taken time off to return home and fetch pad
ded clothes and bedding, saying that the older you got, the more you valued your legs, and that he didn’t feel like walking home after work each day. He would spread his bedding near the forge to stay warm at night. (Hei-hai eyed the blacksmith’s bedding. The northern edge of the bridge opening had been sealed by a flashboard, though sunlight shone through the gaps and fell on a greasy padded jacket and mangy dog-skin bed mat.) When his master left for home, the younger one became the ruler of the forge. He entered that morning, chest thrown out, belly protruding, and announced amiably, ‘Light off the forge, Hei-hai. The old guy’s gone home, so it’s just you and me.’
Hei-hai just stared.
‘What are you gawking at, you little prick? You think I’m not good enough? I’ve been with the old guy three years, I know all his tricks.’
Hei-hai lazily started a fire as the blacksmith smugly hummed a tune. He thrust several pieces of steel from the day before into the mouth of the forge. Hei-hai made the fire inside roar, adding red to the black of his face. The young blacksmith burst out laughing. ‘Hei-hai,’ he shouted, ‘anyone would think you were a Red Army soldier, with all those scars.’
The boy pumped the bellows even harder.
‘How come that foxy foster mother of yours hasn’t come to see you lately? She’s probably mad that you bit her. What does her arm taste like? Is it sour? Sweet? You sure know how to enjoy good food, you little fuck! Give me a chance to hold that tender arm of hers and I’d gnaw it like a cucumber.’
Hei-hai picked up the tongs, pulled a piece of white-hot steel out of the forge, and banged it down on the anvil.
‘That was fast, boy!’ The blacksmith picked up a medium-sized hammer, smaller than his sledge but bigger than the ball-peen, gripped the steel with his tongs, and pounded with all his might. Hei-hai stood watching. The blacksmith was strong, and his hammer seemed to have a life of its own. The pointed end of the chisel was perfectly tapered, like a newly sharpened pencil. Hei-hai looked sadly at the old blacksmith’s ball-peen hammer. The younger man carried the chisel over to the bucket and quenched it in the water, his actions a mirror image of those made by the older man. Hei-hai turned away and fixed his eyes once more on the hammer lying alongside the anvil. Its wooden handle was as shiny as the horns of an old bull.
The young blacksmith worked with quick precision, and in short order had tempered a dozen or more chisels. He sat proudly on the master’s stool and rolled a cigarette. After putting it between his lips, he told Hei-hai to bring him a live coal to light it. ‘You see, son? We did just fine without the old guy.’
At the height of his self-satisfaction, masons who had taken the new chisels to the worksite reappeared.
‘What kind of shitty work are you giving us, black-smith? The tips either break off or bend. We’re working with stone out there, not bean curd. Wait till your master returns, and don’t use our chisels for practice.’
They dumped the chisels on the ground and left. The blacksmith’s face darkened. He shouted for Hei-hai to get the fire going again and reheat the chisels. Soon after, when he’d hammered and quenched them a second time, he personally carried them to the worksite. But he’d no sooner returned to the bridge than the masons followed, dumping more ruined chisels on the ground and raining curses on his head. ‘You pathetic fuck, quit messing with us. Look at your work! Every fucking tip has broken off!’
Hei-hai looked at the blacksmith, wrinkles appearing at the corners of his mouth, though it was impossible to tell if he was happy or sad. The blacksmith flung his tools away, crouched down and sulked. As he smoked a cigarette, his good eye rolled in its socket, resulting in a puzzled, angry stare, his eyebrows wriggling like tadpoles. He flicked his cigarette butt away and stood up.
‘Shit!’ he said. ‘Light a fire, Hei-hai, and let’s get back at it.’
Hei-hai pumped the bellows lethargically. The blacksmith exhorted and cursed him, but he didn’t look up. The steel was hot. The blacksmith struck it a couple of times and then carried it over to the water bucket. But this time, instead of quenching the steel gradually, like the old master did, he dunked it all the way in; the water sizzled and released a twisting cloud of steam. He lifted the chisel out of the water, held it up and cocked his head to examine the pattern and colour. He then laid it on the anvil and rapped it lightly with his hammer, splitting the steel in half. Dejected, he threw his hammer to the ground and flung one half of the steel as far as he could outside the bridge opening, where it landed on a rock. It looked ugly.
‘Go pick that up,’ he barked at Hei-hai. The boy’s ears twitched, but his legs stayed put. For this he received a kick in the pants, a bang on the shoulder with a pair of tongs and a deafening shout in the ear: ‘Go bring that thing back to me!’
Head down, Hei-hai walked over to the chisel, bent over slowly and picked it up. It sizzled in his hand. There was a smell of fried pork. The chisel thudded to the ground.
The blacksmith could hardly believe his eyes. He burst out laughing. ‘I forgot it was still hot, you little prick. Your trotter is cooked. Let’s eat!’
Hei-hai walked back to the bridge opening, ignoring the blacksmith as he thrust his scalded hand into the bucket of water. Then he walked slowly out from under the bridge and bent over to examine the broken chisel. It was silvery with a rough, pitted surface. The muddy ground on which it lay was steaming: a thin, almost invisible whiteness. He bent lower until his rear end was sticking up in the air; his shorts hiked up to expose thighs that were much lighter in colour than his calves. One of his hands rested on his back, the other hung straight down and swung closer to the chisel, water dripping onto it from his fingertips. Each drop hissed and bounced noisily as it shrank to form a pattern, smaller and smaller until it disappeared. He felt the heat on the tips of his fingers, heat that made its way through his chest and into his heart.
‘What the hell are you doing there, bent double with your ass in the air like a pilloried capitalist roader?’ the blacksmith yelled at him.
Hei-hai’s hand shook as he picked up the chisel; then, grabbing his behind with his left hand, he sauntered back. When the blacksmith saw yellow smoke rising from Hei-hai’s hand, his eye seemed riveted. ‘Let go of it!’ the blacksmith shouted. ‘Drop it!’ His voice now sounded like the screech of a cat. ‘Drop it, you little prick!’
Hei-hai crouched down in front of the blacksmith, opened his hand and shook it a couple of times. The chisel rolled twice and stopped at the blacksmith’s feet. He stayed on his haunches as he looked up into the blacksmith’s face.
‘Stop looking at me, you son of a bitch, stop it!’ The blacksmith was trembling. He looked away. Hei-hai stood up and walked out from under the bridge.
He recalled looking into the cloudless western sky after he emerged. A white half-moon hung in the sky like a tiny cloud.
He was worn out from thinking. There was a buzzing in his ears. He got up from the old blacksmith’s stool, and went over and lay down on the man’s bedding. He pillowed his head on the jacket, and his eyes drifted closed. He felt someone caressing his face and his hands. It hurt, but he bore it. Two drops of water fell heavily, one onto his lips, which he swallowed, the other onto his nose, which stung.
‘Wake up, Hei-hai, have something to eat.’
His nose ached terribly. He clambered to his feet and saw her. Tears threatened to spill from his eyes, but he forced them back down.
‘Here,’ she said as she untied her crimson bandana. It held two corn buns, one with a piece of pickled cucumber folded into it, the other a leek. A long strand of her bleach-tipped black hair lay across the buns. She picked it up with two fingers and flicked it away, where it landed with a sound that reverberated in Hei-hai’s ears.
‘Eat up, you little mutt,’ she said as she rubbed his neck.
The boy kept his eyes on her as he bit into the buns and chewed.
‘How did you burn your hand? Did that one-eyed dragon do that to you? Are you going to bite me again? You’ve got sharp fangs.’ r />
The boy’s ears flapped like fans. He raised a bun in his left hand and the leek and the cucumber in his right, and covered his face.
Chapter Three
A thundershower struck that night. When the workers showed up the next morning, they saw that the rocks had been washed clean and the sandy ground levelled. Water in the trough was twice as high as the day before; the few remaining clouds were reflected in the brilliant blue water. There was a sudden chill in the air; the autumn wind bored through the bridge openings and, together with the rustling of the sea of jute plants, chilled people from the inside out. The old blacksmith’s padded jacket, shiny as armour, was missing its buttons, and he could only close it by drawing together the lapels and securing them with a red plastic-wrapped electric cord. Hei-hai, still wearing only a pair of shorts, was bare-chested and barefoot, but he didn’t seem to suffer from the cold. A red plastic-wrapped electric cord also held up his shorts, in place of the cloth sash he’d either lost or put away. His hair had grown wild and was now two inches long, every strand standing up like the spines of a hedgehog. The workers looked at him with pity and admiration as he walked over the rocky ground, with its pooled rainwater, in bare feet.
‘Aren’t you cold?’ the old blacksmith asked.
Hei-hai gave a confused look, as if he hadn’t understood the question.
‘I asked you if you’re cold,’ the blacksmith repeated, raising his voice a bit. The look of confusion disappeared as Hei-hai lowered his head and began lighting the forge. He lightly pumped the bellows with his left hand, holding the coal shovel in his right, and stared at the burning stalks of wheat. The old blacksmith took his greasy jacket off the bed and draped it over Hei-hai’s back. The boy squirmed with obvious discomfort. As soon as the blacksmith walked off, Hei-hai took off the jacket and laid it back on the bed. With a shake of his head, the old man crouched down to smoke.