season, without his padded jacket, so smeared with dog grease it looked like armor. Any dog, no matter how vicious, gave him a wide berth, then turned and barked at him from a safe distance. Mother went to see him one day when she was on the northern bank of the Flood Dragon River, where she had gone to look for wild herbs. He was, at the time, stewing a pot of dog meat. “Here to buy some dog meat?” he asked when she barged in the door. “It’s not ready yet.” “No, Dabiao, I’ve brought some meat for you this time. Remember that time at the open-air opera when you touched me when no one was looking?” Gao Dabiao blushed. “Well, today you don’t have to worry if anyone’s looking or not.”
Once she was sure she was pregnant, Mother went to the Matron’s shrine at the Tan family tent, where she burned incense, kowtowed, made her vows, and handed over the little bit of money she’d brought with her when she was married. But that changed nothing – she had another girl, whom she named Pandi.
Not until much later was Mother able to determine whether the father of her sixth daughter, Niandi, was Gao Dabiao or the skinny little monk at the Tianqi Temple. When Niandi was seven or eight years old, Mother could tell by the shape of her face, her long nose, and long eyebrows.
In the spring of that year, Shangguan Lu contracted a strange illness, with itchy silvery scales erupting all over her body from her neck down; in order to keep her from scratching her skin raw, her husband and son were forced to tie her hands behind her back. The illness had this iron woman howling day and night; out in the yard, the wall and the stiff bark of the plum tree were blood-specked where she had rubbed her back to relieve the terrible itch. “I can’t stand it, this itching is killing me… I’ve offended the heavens, help me, please help me…”
The two Shangguan men were so incompetent that a stone roller couldn’t get them to fart and an awl couldn’t draw blood, so the responsibility of finding help for her mother-in-law naturally fell to Mother. All in all, after riding the family mule from one end of Northeast Gaomi to the other, she engaged a dozen or more physicians, employing both Chinese and Western methods; some left after writing a prescription, others just left. So Mother brought in a shaman and then a sorcerer, but their magic potions and spirit waters also ended in failure. Shangguan Lu’s condition actually worsened daily.
One day, her mother-in-law called Mother to her bedside. “Shouxi’s wife,” she said, “as the saying goes, fathers and sons are bound by kindness, mothers and daughters-in-law are linked by enmity. After I die, this family’s existence will depend upon you, because those two are a pair of asses who’ll never grow up.”
“Don’t talk like that, Mother,” my mother said. “I heard from Third Master Fan that there is a wise monk at the Tianqi Temple in Madian Township who possesses remarkable medical powers. I’ll bring him to see you.”
“It’s a waste of money,” her mother-in-law said. “I know the source of my illness. Back when I was first married, I killed a damned cat by pouring scalding water on it. That hateful animal kept stealing our chickens, and I only wanted to teach it a lesson. I never thought it would die, and now it’s wreaking its vengeance.”
But Mother made the thirty-li trip on their mule.
The pasty-faced, effetely handsome, fragrant-smelling monk counted the beads on his rosary as he listened to Mother. “Madam patron,” he said at last, “this unworthy monk sees patients here in the temple. I never make house calls. So you go back and bring your mother-in-law to see me.”
And that is precisely what Mother did. She harnessed the mule to a cart and took her mother-in-law to Tianqi Temple, where the wise monk wrote out two prescriptions, one liquid to be ingested and another for washing the skin. “If these do not work,” he told them, “there is no need to see me again. If they do, then return and I will give you a new prescription.”
Mother went immediately to a pharmacy, bought the medication, and returned home to prepare and administer them. After her mother-in-law ingested one of the potions three times and was bathed twice with the other, almost miraculously, the itching stopped.
Deliriously happy, the patient withdrew some money from the family chest and sent Mother back to thank the monk and fetch the new prescription.
While she waited for the new prescription, Mother asked the wise monk if there were some way he could help her bear sons rather than daughters. As their conversation grew more intimate – a passionate monk and a woman eager to produce a son – they became lovers.
As for Gao Dabiao, the dog butcher at Sandy Mouth Village, his brief affair with Mother had whetted his appetite. So on the evening that Mother rode her mule home from Tianqi Temple, passing by the Black Water River as the moon was replacing the sun in the sky, Gao Dabiao leaped out from among the sorghum stalks and blocked her way.
“Lu Xuan’er, you are a fickle woman!”
“Dabiao,” Mother said, “I felt sorry for you, and that is why I closed my eyes and let you have your way a time or two. That is as far as it goes.”
“You can’t toss me aside just because you got a piece of that little monk!”
“That’s nonsense!”
“You can’t fool me. Do as I say, or I’ll spread the word all over Northeast Gaomi Township that you had an affair with the little monk on the pretense of seeking a cure for your mother-in-law.”
Mother let Gao Dabiao carry her into the sorghum.
Her mother-in-law’s illness was completely cured, but word of Mother’s illicit relationship with the monk reached the older woman’s ears anyway.
So when Niandi was born, and her mother-in-law saw it was another girl, she picked the baby up by her legs and was about to drown her in the chamber pot.
Mother jumped out of bed, wrapped her arms around her mother-in-law’s legs, and pleaded, “Mother, be merciful, please. For my sake, after taking care of you all these months, spare the little one…”
“That makes sense,” her mother-in-law said, lowering her voice. “But this business with the monk, is it true?”
Mother said nothing.
“Tell me! Is this a bastard I’m holding?”
Mother shook her head resolutely.
Her mother-in-law tossed the baby onto the bed.
9
In the fall of 1935, while Mother was on the bank of the Flood Dragon River cutting grass, she was gang-raped by four armed soldiers fleeing from a rout.
When it was over, she looked out at the river and decided to drown herself. But just as she was about to walk to her death, she saw the reflection of Northeast Gaomi’s beautiful blue sky in the clear water. Cool breezes swallowed up the feelings of humiliation in her breast, so she scooped up handfuls of water to wash her sweaty, tear-streaked face, straightened her clothes, and walked home.
In the early summer of the next year, eight years after the birth of her previous child, Mother gave birth to her seventh, Qiudi. The birth of yet another daughter threw her mother-in-law into despair. Stumbling as she walked, she retrieved a bottle from a trunk in her room and gulped down great mouthfuls of the strong liquor before dissolving into loud wails. Mother, too, was dejected, and as she looked with disgust into the wrinkled face of her newborn child, her only thought was: God in Heaven, why are you so stingy? All you had to do was add a smidgeon of clay to this child to make it a son.
Her husband then stormed into the room, pulled back the blanket, and staggered backward. The first thing he did after recovering from the shock was reach behind the door, pick up the club for pounding wet clothes, and bring it down on his wife’s head. Blood splattered on the wall as the crazed little man turned and ran outside, fuming. Snatching a pair of red-hot tongs out of the blacksmith furnace, he ran back to his wife’s room and branded her on the inside of her thigh.
Wisps of yellow smoke and the stench of burning flesh quickly filled the room. With a shriek of pain, Mother fell out of bed and curled into a ball on the floor, her body twitching.
When Big Paw Yu heard that Lu Xuan’er had been branded, he rushed over to the Shangguan home with a hunting rifle, and without saying a word, aimed it at the chest of Shangguan Lu and pulled the trigger. The rifle misfired. By the time he’d readied the weapon for a second try, Shangguan Lu had run into the house and slammed
