disappointment, Mother found an unbroken earthenware jar in which Shangguan Lu had hidden her precious arsenic. She poured the red powder into the turnip soup. Once the powder dissolved, a colored oil spread across the surface of the soup and a foul smell filled the air. Mother stirred the mixture with a wooden ladle until it was smooth, then picked it up and slowly poured it into the wok. The corner of her mouth twitched oddly. After ladling some of the turnip soup into a chipped bowl, Mother said, “Lingdi, give this soup to your grandmother.” “Mother,” Lingdi said, “you put poison in it, didn’t you?” Mother nodded. “Are you going to poison Grandma?” “We’ll all die together,” Mother said, to which my sisters responded by weeping, including my blind eighth sister, whose thin cries were little more than the buzzing of a hornet. Her large, black, but sightless eyes filled with tears. Eighth Sister was the most wretched of the wretched, the saddest of the sad. “But we don’t want to die, Mother,” my sisters pleaded tearfully. Even I took up the chant: “Mother… Mother “My poor, dear little children…” Mother said; by then she too was crying. She cried for the longest time, all the while accompanied by her sobbing children. Finally, she blew her nose loudly, took back the chipped bowl, and flung it and its contents into the yard. “We’re not going to die! If death doesn’t frighten a person, then nothing can!” With that comment, she stood up and led us out into the street to find food. We were the first villagers to venture out onto the street. When they spotted the heads of the Sima family, my sisters were afraid. But in a matter of days, it was just another village sight. Mother held the little Sima bastard in her arm, so he was directly opposite me. She pointed to the heads and said to him softly, “I don’t want you to ever forget that, you poor child.”
Mother and my sisters walked out of the village and into a reawakened field, where they began digging up white grass roots, which they would boil after rinsing and mashing them. Third Sister, the smart one, found a nest of voles. What made that such a great find was not just the addition of meat to our diet, but that the food they’d stored away was now ours as well. After that, my sisters made a fishnet out of some hemp twine, which they used to snag some dark, thin fish and shrimp that had survived the winter in the local pond. One day, Mother put a spoonful of fish broth into my mouth; I spit it right back out and started bawling at the top of my lungs. Then she put a spoonful into the mouth of the Sima brat; the moron swallowed it right down. So Mother fed him another spoonful. He swallowed that too. “Good,” Mother exclaimed excitedly. “For all the bad karma, at least this kid knows how to eat.” She turned her gaze to me. “Now, what about you? It’s time you got weaned too.” Panic- stricken, I grabbed hold of her breast.
The village began to come back to life, once we had taken the lead. It was a calamitous time for local voles; after them came wild jackrabbits, fish, turtles, shrimp, crabs, snakes, and frogs. All across the vast land, the only creatures that survived were poisonous toads and birds on the wing. And still, if not for the timely growth of edible wild herbs, most of the villagers would have starved to death anyway. After Qingming passed, the peach blossoms began to fall, and steam rose from fallow fields that cried out for a new planting. But we had no farm animals and no seeds. By the time fat little tadpoles were swimming in the marshes, and in the oval waters of the local pond, and in the shallows of the river, the villagers had taken to the road. By the fourth month, most had left; by the fifth month, most had returned to their homes. Third Master Fan said, “Here at least there are wild grasses and edible herbs to keep us from starving. That’s more than you can say about other places.” By the sixth month, outsiders had begun showing up in our village. They slept in the church, and on the ground in the Sima compound, and in abandoned mills. Like dogs driven mad by hunger, they stole food out from under us. Finally, Third Master Fan organized the village men to drive the outsiders away. He was our leader; the outsiders countered with a leader of their own – a young man with bushy eyebrows and big eyes. He was a master at catching birds, always seen with a pair of slingshots hanging from his belt and, over his shoulder, a burlap bag that was filled with pellets of dried mud. Third Sister saw him in action one day. A pair of partridges was in the midst of a mating ritual up in the air. He took out one of his slingshots and fired a mud pellet into the sky, seemingly without even aiming. One of the partridges fell to the ground like a stone, landing right at Third Sister’s feet. The bird’s head was smashed. Its mate cried out as it circled overhead. The man took out another pellet, fired it into the air, and the second bird fell to the ground. He bent down, picked up the bird, and walked up to my sister. He looked right at her; she returned his gaze with a hateful stare of her own. By that time, Third Master Fan had been to our house to inform us of the movement to drive away the outsiders, which fired up our hatred of them. But rather than pick up the bird at Third Sister’s feet, he tossed her the one in his hands, then turned and walked off without a word.
Third Sister came home with the partridges; the meat was for Mother, the broth for my sisters and the little Sima bastard, and the bones for my grandmother, who crunched them up loudly. Third Sister didn’t tell anyone that the outsider had given her the partridges, which were quickly transformed into tasty juices that wound up in my stomach. On a number of occasions, Mother waited until I was asleep to stick one of her nipples into the mouth of the little Sima baby; but he refused it. He preferred to grow up on grasses and bark. Blessed with an astonishing appetite, he swallowed anything that was put into his mouth. “He’s like a donkey,” Mother commented. “He was born to eat grass.” Even the turds that came out of him were like equine droppings. Not only that, Mother believed that he had a pair of ruminating stomachs. We often saw clumps of grass rise up from his stomach into his mouth, then watched as he closed his eyes and chewed contentedly, white foamy bubbles gathering at the corners of his mouth. After he’d chewed for a while, he’d stretch out his neck and swallow it down with a gurgling sound.
Battles between the villagers and outsiders broke out following an attempt by Third Master Fan to ask them politely to leave. The outsiders’ representative – the young man who had given Third Sister the partridges – was called Birdman Han, the bird-catching specialist. With his hands on the slingshots at his waist, he argued vigorously, without giving an inch. He said that Northeast Gaomi had at one time been an unpopulated wasteland, and everyone was an outsider then. So if you can live here, why can’t we? But those were fighting words, and an argument ensued; that soon led to pushing and shoving. One young villager, an impetuous fellow everyone called Consumptive Six, came bursting out from behind Third Master Fan, picked up a steel club, and swung it at the head of Birdman Han’s aging mother. Her skull cracked and, leaking a gray liquid, the old woman died on the spot. Birdman let out a wail that sounded more like that of an injured wolf. Taking his slingshots from his belt, he let two pellets fly, blinding Comsumptive Six where he stood. All hell broke loose then, with the outsiders gradually getting the worst of it. With the body of his mother over his shoulder, Birdman Han retreated, fighting every step of the way,- all the way back to the sandy ridge west of the village. There he laid his mother out on the ground, loaded his slingshot, and took aim at Third Master Fan. “You had better not try to kill us all, headman. Even a rabbit bites when it’s cornered!” Before he’d finished, one of his pellets cut the air with a whoosh and struck Third Master Fan in his left ear. “Since we are all Chinese,” Birdman Han said, “I’ll spare you this time.” Cupping his hand over his split ear, Third Master Fan backed off without a word.
The outsiders threw up dozens of tents on the sandy ridge, making it their own. Birdman Han buried his mother on the sandy ridge, then picked up his slingshots and walked up and down the street twice, cursing in his unfamiliar accent. What he was telling the villagers was this: I am a single man, so if I kill one of you, we’re even, and if I kill two of you, I’ll be one ahead. It is my hope that everyone can live in peace. With Consumptive Six’s blinded eyes and Third
Master Fan’s shattered ear as examples, none of the villagers was willing to take them on. “Just think,” Third Sister said, “he’s lost his own mother, so what else can he fear?”
From that time on, the outsiders and the villagers coexisted peacefully despite the grudges each carried. My third sister and Birdman Han met nearly every day at the spot where he had laid the partridges at her feet. At first, the meetings appeared unplanned, but before long they had turned into outdoor trysts, one waiting for the other, no matter how long it took. Third Sister’s feet trampled the grass in that spot until it stopped growing altogether. As for Birdman Han, he would simply show up, toss birds at her feet, and leave without a word. Sometimes it would be a pair of turtledoves, sometimes a game hen, and once he brought a huge bird that must have weighed thirty pounds. Third Sister was barely able to carry it home on her back; even Third Master Fan, the wisest man around, had no idea what kind of bird it was. All I can say is, I’d never tasted anything quite so delicious in my life. Naturally, the taste came to me indirectly, through my mother’s milk.
Taking advantage of his close relationship with our family, Third Master Fan cautioned Mother to pay heed to what was going on between my third sister and Birdman Han. His words had a demeaning, foul quality. “Young niece, your third daughter and that bird-catcher… ah, it’s a corruption of public morals, and it’s more than the villagers can stand!” Mother said, “She’s just a girl.” To which Third Master Fan replied, “Your daughters are different from other girls their ages.” Mother sent Third Master Fan off with, “You go back and tell those gossips they can to go to hell!”
Reproaching Third Master Fan was one thing, dealing with Third Sister was another: when she came home with a half-dead red-crowned crane, Mother took her aside for a serious talk. “Lingdi,” she said, “we can’t keep eating
