continued to fall. Before long, ice the size of buckshot pierced our earlobes and stung our faces. The vast countryside set up a loud cacophony. We headed back much the same way as we’d come: Mother pushing the cart from behind, while First Sister pulled from the front. First Sister’s shoes split open in the back, exposing her chapped, frozen heels, and forced her to walk as if she were performing a rice-sprout dance. Every time Mother tipped the cart over, First Sister went down with it. The rope was pulled so taut that she fell head over heels more than once, until she cried out with every step she took. Zaohua and I were crying too, but not Mother. Her eyes had a blue cast as she bit down on her lip for strength. She moved cautiously, but with courage and steely determination. Her tiny feet were like two little spades that dug solidly into the ground. Eighth Sister followed silently behind, holding on to Mother’s clothes with a hand that looked like a rotten, water-soaked eggplant.
We were in a hurry to get home, and by noontime we’d reached the broad, poplar-lined gravel road. Although the sun hadn’t broken through the clouds, the sky was bright and the road seemed paved with glazed tiles. Snowflakes gradually replaced the hailstones, turning the road, the trees, and the surrounding fields white. We saw many corpses along the way, human and animal, and an occasional sparrow or magpie or wild hen. But no dead crows. Their black feathers were nearly blue against the white backdrop, and glossy. They feasted on the dead, making quite a racket.
Then our luck improved. First, next to a dead horse we found half a sack of chopped straw mixed with broad beans and bran. That filled my goat’s belly, and what was left was used to cover the feet of Big and Little Mute to protect them against the wind and snow. Once the goat had eaten its fill, it licked snow for the moisture. I knew what it meant when it nodded in my direction. After we were back on the road, Zaohua said she smelled roasted wheat in the air. Mother told her to follow the smell to its source. In a little hut overlooking a cemetery, we discovered the body of a dead soldier; lying beside him were two sacks filled with roasted wheat. We’d grown used to seeing dead people, and were no longer afraid. We spent the night in that hut.
First, Mother and First Sister dragged the dead young soldier outside. He’d killed himself by holding his rifle against his chest and putting the muzzle into his mouth, and then, after removing his worn sock, pulling the trigger with his toe. The bullet had blown off the top of his head; rats had eaten his ears and nose and had gnawed his fingers down to the bone, until they looked like willow twigs. Hordes of rats glared red-eyed as Mother and First Sister dragged him outside. Even though she was exhausted, Mother wanted to give thanks for the food, so she knelt on the frozen ground and, using the soldier’s bayonet, dug a shallow hole to bury his head. A little dugout like that meant next to nothing to a bunch of rats who survived by digging holes, but it brought comfort to Mother.
The hut was barely big enough to accommodate our little family and its goat. We blocked the door with our cart, with Mother sitting closest to the door, armed with the soldier’s brain-spattered rifle. As night fell, clusters of people tried to squeeze into our little hut; there were plenty of thieves and no-accounts among them, but Mother frightened them all away with her rifle. One man with a big mouth and malevolent eyes challenged her: “You know how to shoot that?” he said as he tried to force his way in. Mother poked at him with the rifle. She didn’t know how to shoot it. So Laidi took it away from her, pulled back the bolt, ejecting a spent cartridge, then pushed the bolt forward, sending a bullet into the chamber. Then she aimed the rifle above the man’s head and pulled the trigger. A column of smoke rose to the ceiling. Watching the way Laidi handled the weapon made me think of her glorious history as she followed Sha Yueliang from battlefield to battlefield. The big-mouthed man crawled away like a whipped dog. Mother looked at Laidi with gratitude in her eyes, before getting up and moving inside so the new guard could take her place.
That night I slept like a baby, not waking up until red sunbeams had lit up the snowy white world. I wanted to get down on my knees and beg Mother to let us stay in this ghostly little hut, stay here next to this towering cemetery, stay in this snow-covered pine grove. “Let’s not leave this happy spot, this lucky spot.” But she picked up the handles of her cart and led us back on the road. The rifle lay alongside Shengli, under our tattered quilt.
There was half a foot of snow on the road; it crunched beneath our feet and the wheels of our cart. No longer falling as often, we were able to make pretty good time. The glare of the sun was blinding, making us look especially dark by contrast, no matter what we were wearing. Mother wras bolder than usual that day, maybe because of the presence of the rifle in the basket and Laidi’s ability to use it. She turned into a bit of a tyrant at around noon, when a retreating soldier, a straggler from the south, the sling around his arm giving the illusion that he was wounded, decided he’d search our cart. Mother slapped him so hard his gray cap flew off. He took off running without even stopping to retrieve his cap, which Mother picked up and clapped onto the head of my goat. The goat wore its new cap proudly; the cold, hungry refugees around us parted their lips and, with what energy they had left, managed an array of laughter that actually sounded worse than weeping and wailing.
Early the next day, after my morning meal of goat’s milk, my spirits soared; my thoughts were lively and my perceptions keen. As I looked around, I discovered the county government’s printing machine and the document- filled metal cases lying abandoned by the side of the road. Where were the porters? No way of knowing. And the mule company? Gone too.
There was plenty of activity on the road, as columns of stretcher bearers headed south with their moaning cargo of wounded soldiers. The bearers panted from exhaustion, their faces bathed in sweat; they kicked snow into the air with their ragged movements. A woman in white was staggering along behind the stretcher bearers when one of them stumbled and fell, dumping the shrieking soldier he was carrying onto the ground. The man’s head was swathed in bandages, leaving only the black holes of his nostrils and his pale lips visible. A soldier carrying a leather case on her back rushed up to curse the careless porter and console the wounded soldier. I recognized her at once: it was the woman named Tang, Pandi’s comrade-in-arms. She cursed the militiamen in the coarsest language and spoke gently to the wounded soldiers. I saw deep wrinkles on her forehead and crow’s feet at the corners of her eyes; a once vivacious young soldier had turned into a haggard, matronly woman. But she didn’t even look at us, and Mother didn’t seem to recognize her.
The line of stretchers seemed never-ending. We hugged the side of the road so as not to slow down their procession. Finally, the last stretcher passed, leaving the icy roadway a mess from all the tramping it had withstood. Melted snow was now nothing but dirty water and mud; unmelted snow was spotted with fresh blood, giving it the horrifying look of rotting skin. My heart clenched as my nostrils filled with the smell of melting snow and the stench of human blood. That and the repulsive smell of sweaty bodies. We got back on the road, with considerably more trepidation now; even the milk goat, which had been prancing along proudly with its army cap, trembled fearfully, like a new recruit on his first day in battle. The rest of the people paced up and down on the road, unable to decide whether to keep going or to head back. The road to the southwest led to a battlefield, that was a given, and would take us straight into a forest of weapons and a hailstorm of gunfire; everyone knew that bullets don’t have eyes, that artillery shells aren’t given to apologies, and that soldiers are tigers down off the mountain, none of them vegetarians. People cast questioning glances back and forth, but no answers were forthcoming. Without looking at anyone, Mother forged ahead with her cart. When I turned to look, I saw that some of the refugees had turned and were heading to the northeast, while others fell in behind us.
We spent the first night after the fighting in the same place we’d spent the first night of the evacuation: the same little courtyard and the same little side room, complete with the coffin in which the old woman had lain. The only difference was that nearly all the buildings in the tiny village had been leveled; even the three-room hut where Lu Liren and members of the county government had lived was now nothing but a pile of rubble. We entered the village just before nightfall, when the setting sun was a blood-red ball. The street was littered with broken bodies; twenty or more mangled corpses had been stacked neatly in an open square, as if connected by an invisible thread. The air was hot and dry; a number of trees with charred limbs appeared to have been struck by lightning.
Amid the ruins of the village, only that little two-room hut remained standing, as if it had continued to exist just for us. We pulled away the fallen beams and posts that blocked the door and went inside. The first thing we saw was the coffin, which brought home the realization that after nearly twenty days and nights, we were right back where we had spent that first night. “The will of Heaven!” Mother said tersely.
