The pit by then was more than shoulder-deep, and all we could see were the occasional top of someone’s head and soaring clumps of wet, white mud; the air was suffused with the cool, fresh smell of raw earth.
One of the men climbed out of the pit and walked up alongside Sima Ting. “Town Head,” he said, “we’ve struck water.” Sima looked at him with glazed eyes and slowly raised his arm. “Come take a look,” the man said. “It’s deep enough.” Sima crooked a finger at the man, who was puzzled by the sign. “Idiot!” Sima growled. “Help me up.” The man bent down and helped Sima to his feet. Moaning, Sima thumped his waist with his fists and, with the other man’s help, hobbled over to the ridge of the pit. “Goddamn it,” Sima Ting cursed. “Get up here, you bastards, you’ll dig all the way down to Hell before you know it.”
The men climbed out of the pit and were pelted by the corrupt stench of the dead. Sima kicked the carter. “On your feet,” he demanded, “and get your cart over there.” The carter didn’t budge. “Gou San, Yao Si,” Sima bellowed, “toss this son of a bitch in first!”
Gou San, who was standing with the other men, grunted a reply.
“Where’s Yao Si?” Sima asked. “The itchy-footed prick slipped away already,” Gou San said angrily. “Smash that bastard’s rice bowl when we get back,” Sima said as he gave the carter another kick. “Let’s see if this one’s dead.”
The carter climbed to his feet, a hangdog look on his face, and cast a fearful glance at his cart standing at the edge of the graveyard. The crows were clustered on the bed, hopping up and down with loud, piercing cries. The horses were lying on the ground, their noses buried in the grass, crows perched on their backs. The rest of the crows were on the grassy ground, feasting. Two of them were fighting over a large morsel, one backing up, the other reluctantly surging forward and forcing the other to keep retreating. From time to time, neither would budge, as they dug in their talons, flapped their wings frantically, thrust out their heads, neck feathers standing straight up to reveal the purple skin beneath, both necks seemingly about to detach themselves from the torsos behind. A dog came out of nowhere and snapped up the entrails, dragging the two birds tumbling through the grass.
“Spare me, Town Head,” the carter implored as he fell to his knees in front of Sima Ting, who picked up a dirt clod and hurled it at the crows. They barely noticed. He then walked up to the families of the deceased and muttered, “That’s it, that will do it. You folks go home.”
Mother was the first of the stunned crowd to get down on her knees, followed by the others, who raised a piteous howl. “Elder Sima, lay them to rest,” Mother begged. The rest of the crowd pleaded with him, “Please, please, lay them to rest. Father, Mother, our children…”
Sweat poured down Sima’s neck from his bowed head. With an exasperated gesture, he walked back to where his men were standing, and said softly, “Brothers, I have tolerated your bullying tactics, your thievery, your fights, your taking advantage of widows, your grave-robbing, and all the other sins against heaven and earth. One trains soldiers for a thousand days, all for a single battle. And now, today, we have a job to do, even if the crows gouge out our eyes and peck out our brains. I, the town head, will take the lead, and I will fuck eighteen generations of women in the families of any one of you who tries to slack off! After we’ve finished, I’ll take you back and get you all drunk. Now on your feet,” he said to the carter, pulling him up by his ear, “and get that cart over here! Men, pick up your weapons, the battle is on!”
At that moment, three dark-skinned youngsters swam up through the waves of wheat. It was Aunty Sun’s mute grandsons. They were all wearing the same colored shorts, and nothing else. The tallest of the three was brandishing a sword that whipped in the air, making a whistling sound. The second was carrying a wood-handled dagger; and the shortest brought up the rear dragging a long-handled sword. With wide, staring eyes, they grunted and made a series of gestures describing their anguish. As a light flickered in Sima Ting’s eyes, he patted each of them on the head. “Youngsters,” he said, “your grandma and your brothers are there on the cart. We are going to bury them. Those damned crows have gone too far. They are the Japs, so let’s take the fight to them! Do you understand what I’m saying?” Yao Si, who had reappeared from somewhere, made some signs to the boys. Tears and flames of outrage spewed from the eyes of the mutes, who charged the crows, their knives and swords flashing in the air.
“You slippery devil, where the hell have you been?” Sima demanded of Yao Si, grabbing him by the shoulders and shaking him violently.
“I went to get those three.”
The mutes jumped up onto the back of the cart, quickly bloodying their flashing knives and swords, sending dismembered crows thudding to the ground. “Charge!” Sima Ting shouted. The men swarmed up to the cart to fight the crows. Curses, the sounds of battle, the screeches of crows, and the flapping of wings created a sheet of noise that joined a convergence of fetid smells – death, sweat, blood, mud, wheat, and wildflowers.
The torn and broken bodies were laid out pell-mell in the pit. Pastor Malory stood atop the new earth beside the pit and intoned, “Dear Lord, deliver the souls of these unfortunate victims…” Tears streamed from his blue eyes down through the purplish scars from the whip; from there they dripped onto his ripped black robe and the heavy bronze crucifix on his chest.
Sima Ting pulled him down off the ridge of the pit. “Malory,” he said, “go over there and take it easy. Don’t forget that you barely escaped the jaws of death yourself.”
As the men shoveled dirt into the pit, Pastor Malory cast a long shadow under the setting sun. Mother stood there watching him and feeling her heart race beneath her heavy left breast. By the time the sun’s rays had turned red, a massive grave mound had risen in the middle of the cemetery. Sima Ting led the survivors in kowtowing before the mound and discharging several obligatory but feeble wails. Mother urged the family members of the victims to kowtow to Sima Ting and his funeral detail to show their gratitude. “There’s no need for that,” Sima said.
The members of the funeral detail walked toward the sunset on their way home. Mother and my sisters were well behind the ragged column of people, which stretched for at least a quarter of a mile, with Pastor Malory bringing up the rear on unsteady legs. Thick human shadows lay across the fields of wheat. Under the sun’s blood- red rays, the seemingly endless expanse of quiet was broken by the tramping of feet, the whistling of the wind past the stalks of wheat, the hoarse sounds of my crying, and the first drawn-out mournful hoot of a fat owl as it woke from a day’s sleep in the canopy of a mulberry tree in the cemetery. It had a heart-stopping effect on everyone who heard it. Mother stopped to look back at the cemetery, where purple mist rose from the ground. Pastor Malory bent down to pick up my seventh sister, Qiudi. “You poor things,” he said.
His words hung in the air when a chorus of millions of chirping insects rose all around him.
2
It was on the morning of the Mid-Autumn Festival, a hundred days after my sister and I were born, when Mother took us to see Pastor Malory. The church gate facing the street was tightly shut and marred by blasphemous, antireligious graffiti. We took the path to the rear of the church, where our raps on the door echoed in the wilderness. The emaciated goat was tied to a stake beside the door. She had such a long face that she looked more like a donkey or a camel or an old woman than a goat. She raised her head to look gloomily at Mother, who clipped her on the chin with the toe of her shoe. After a lingering complaint, she lowered her head to continue grazing. A rumbling noise was accompanied by the sound of Pastor Malory’s coughs. Mother rang the bell. “Who is it?” Pastor Malory asked. “Me,” Mother replied softly. The squeaky door opened a crack, and Mother slipped inside with us in her arms. Pastor Malory shut the door behind her, then turned, reached out and embraced us with his long arms. “My adorable little ones, the fruit of my loins…”
Sha Yueliang and his newly formed band of men, the Black Donkey Musket Band, walked spiritedly up the road we’d just taken on the funeral procession, heading straight for our village. On one side of the road, sorghum grew tall amid the wheat; reeds stretched to the edge of the Black Water River on the other side. A sun-drenched summer, with plenty of sweet rain, had made it a wildly fruitful growing season. The leaves were fat and the stalks thick, even before there were silks atop the head-high sorghum; river reeds were lush and black, the stems and leaves covered by white fuzz. Even though it was already mid-autumn, there wasn’t a hint of autumn in the air. And yet, the sky was the rich blue of autumn, the sun autumnally beautiful.
Sha Yueliang had a band of twenty-eight men, all riding identical black donkeys from the hilly south country of Wulian County. With their thick, muscular bodies and stumpy legs, the donkeys were easily outrun by horses; but
