Life and Death are Wearing Me Out

back by the men around him.

“Let it go,” they said. “Just let it go. The last thing you want is to piss off this madman. He’s the only independent farmer in the whole county. They know all about him up at the county chief’s office.”

The crowd broke up, leaving just the two of us. A crescent moon hung in the sky; the sight and the situation made me sad beyond words. After venting against the county chief and that bunch of farmers, my master took off his jacket and tore it into strips to bind my injured leg. Hee-haw, hee-haw – That really hurt. He wrapped his arms around my head, his tears falling onto my ears. “Blackie, old Blackie, what can I say to make this better? How could you believe anything the officials said? At the first sign of trouble, all they care about is saving their precious official. They don’t give a damn about you. If they’d sent for a stonemason to break up the rocks that pinned your hoof, it might have been saved.” The words were no sooner out of his mouth than he let go of my head and ran over to the rocky spot in the road, where he reached down and tried to retrieve my separated hoof. He cried, he swore, he panted from sheer exhaustion, and he eventually managed to retrieve it. Standing there holding it in his hand, he wailed, and when I saw the iron shoe, worn shiny after all that time, I broke down and cried too.

With the encouragement of my master, I managed to stand up again; the thick bindings made it possible – barely – for me to rest my injured leg on the ground, but my balance, sadly, was lost. Fleet-footed Ximen Donkey was no more, replaced by a cripple who lowered his head and listed to the side with every step. I entertained the thought of flinging myself off the mountain and putting an end to this tragic life; my master’s love was all that kept me from doing just that.

The distance from the iron mine at Reclining Ox Mountain to Ximen Village in Northeast Gaomi Township was about twenty miles. If all four of my legs were in good shape, that little distance would not have been worth mentioning. But now one of them was useless, making the going unbelievably hard; I left traces of flesh and blood along the way, marked by wrenching painful cries from my throat. The pain made my skin twitch like ripples on a pond.

My stump was beginning to stink by the time we reached Northeast Gaomi Township, drawing hordes of flies whose buzzing filled our ears. My master broke some branches from a tree and twisted them together to make a switch to keep the flies away. My tail hung limply, too weak to swish; thanks to an attack of diarrhea, the rear half of my body was covered with filth. Each swing of my master’s switch killed many flies, but even greater numbers swarmed up to take their place. So he took off his pants and tore them into strips to replace the first bindings. Now he was wearing only shorts and a pair of heavy, thick-soled leather boots. He was a strange and comical apparition.

Along the way we dined on the wind and slept in the dew. I ate some dry grass, he subsisted on some half- rotten yams from a nearby field. Shunning roads, we walked down narrow paths to avoid encountering people, like wounded soldiers deserting the scene of battle. We entered Huangpu Village on a day when the village dining hall was open, the delightful smells wafting our way. I heard my master’s stomach rumble. He looked at me with tears in his reddened eyes, which he dried with his dirty hands.

“Goddamn it, Blackie,” he blurted out, “what are we doing? Why are we hiding from everyone? We’ve done nothing to be ashamed of. You were injured while working for the people, so the people owe you, and by taking care of you like this, I’m doing the people’s work too! Come on, we’re going in.”

Like a man leading an army of flies, he walked with me into the open-air dining hall. Steamers heaping with lamb dumplings were brought out of the kitchen and placed on a table. They were gone almost immediately. Lucky diners skewed the hot dumplings with thin tree branches and gnawed at them from the side; others tossed them from hand to hand, slurping hungrily.

Everyone saw us come in, cutting a sorry figure, ugly and filthy, and smelling as bad as we looked. Tired and hungry, we gave them a terrific fright, and probably disgusted them in the bargain, costing them their appetite. My master swatted my rump with his switch, sending a cloud of flies into the air, where they regrouped and landed on all those steaming dumplings and on the dining hall kitchen utensils. The diners hooted unappreciatively.

A fat woman in white work clothes, by all appearances the person in charge, waddled up to us, held her nose, and, in a low, muffled voice, said:

“What do you think you’re doing? Go on, get out of here!”

Someone in the crowd recognized my master.

“Aren’t you Lan Lian, from Ximen Village? Is it really you? What happened to you?”

My master just looked at the man without replying, then led me out into the yard, where everyone stayed as far away from us as possible.

“That’s Gaomi County’s one and only independent farmer,” the man shouted after us. “They know about him all the way to Changwei Prefecture! That donkey of his is almost supernatural. It killed a pair of wolves and has bitten a dozen or more people. What happened to its leg?”

The fat woman ran up.

“We don’t serve independent farmers, so get out of here!”

My master stopped walking and, in a voice filled both with dejection and passion, replied:

“You fat sow, I am an independent farmer, and I’d rather die than be served by the likes of you. But this donkey of mine is the county chief’s personal mount. He was carrying the chief down the mountain when his hoof got caught in some rocks and broke off. That’s a work-related injury, and you have an obligation to serve him.”

I’d never heard my master berate anyone so passionately before. His birthmark was nearly black. By then he was so skeletal he looked like a plucked rooster, and a very smelly one, as he advanced on the fat woman, who kept backing up until, covering her face with her hands, she burst into tears and bolted.

A man in a well-worn uniform, hair parted in the middle, looking very much like a local official, walked up to us, picking his teeth.

“What do you want?”

“I want you to feed my donkey, I want you to heat a tub of water and give him a bath, and I want you to get a doctor over here to bandage his injured leg.”

The official shouted in the direction of the kitchen, drawing a dozen people out into the yard.

“Do as he says, and make it quick.”

So they washed me from head to tail with hot water, and they summoned a doctor, who treated my injured leg with iodine, put a medicinal salve on the stump, and wrapped it with heavy gauze. Finally, they brought me some barley and alfalfa.

While I was eating, someone carried out a bowl of steaming dumplings and placed it in front of my master. A man who looked like a mess cook said softly:

“Eat up, elder brother, don’t be stubborn. Eat what you have here and don’t give a thought to your next meal. Get through today without worrying about tomorrow. In these fucked-up times you suffer for a few days, then you die, the lamp goes out. What’s that, you don’t want these?”

My master was sitting on a couple of chipped bricks tied together, bent over like a hunchback and staring at my useless stump; I don’t think he heard a word the mess cook said. His stomach was rumbling again, and I could guess how tempting those plump, white dumplings must have been. Several times he stuck out a black, grimy hand to pick one of them up, only to quickly pull it back.

11

With a War Hero’s Help, an Artificial Hoof

Starving Citizens Dismember and Eat a Donkey

My stump healed and I was out of danger, but I’d lost the ability to work and was just a crippled donkey. The slaughterhouse team came by several times with an offer to buy me and improve the lives of Party cadres with my meat. My master sent them away with loud curses.

In a story called “The Black Donkey,” Mo Yan wrote:

The mistress of the house Yingchun found a beat-up leather shoe somewhere, brought it home, and cleaned it; she filled the inside with cotton, sewed a strap onto the top, and tied it to the crippled donkey’s injured leg, which