Mute walked off, dragging his rifle behind him, followed by the two soldiers.
Father and a bunch of other kids crept timidly over to the inlet, where they could look down at Big Tooth Yu, whose body lay face up in the mud. All that was left of his face was the perfectly formed mouth. The fluids of his brain had oozed into his ears from the shattered scalp, and one of his eyeballs hung from the socket like a huge grape on his cheek. The white lotus blossom, its stem broken and trailing several white threads, lay next to his hand. Father could smell its perfume.
Now that it was over, Adjutant Ren brought up a cypress coffin with a thick layer of varnish and a yellow satin lining, into which he placed the neatly dressed body; following a proper funeral ceremony, Big Tooth Yu was buried beneath the little willow tree. Adjutant Ren wore his dapper black uniform to the funeral and had his hair slicked down neatly. A strip of red silk was wrapped around his left arm. Commander Yu, in hempen mourning clothes, wailed loudly, and as the procession left the village, he smashed a brand-new ceramic bowl against a brick.
Grandma made a set of white mourning clothes for Father – she wore sackcloth. Father, fresh willow switch in hand as he walked behind Commander Yu and Grandma, witnessed the smashing of the ceramic bowl against the brick, and was reminded of Big Tooth Yu’s splintered forehead. He had a vague inkling that the two events were somehow linked. The collision of one event with another always produces a third inevitability.
Father looked on dispassionately, without shedding a tear, as the procession formed a ring around the willow tree, and sixteen robust young men slowly lowered the coffin into the yawning grave with eight thick ropes. Commander Yu scooped up a handful of dirt and flung it down on the glossy coffin lid. The thud resounded in everyone’s heart. The men began shovelling dirt into the grave, drawing angry rumbles from the coffin as it slowly disappeared into the black soil, which rose higher and higher, until it filled the grave, then formed a mound like a steamed bun. Commander Yu fired three shots into the air above the willow tree, the bullets tearing through the crown of the tree, one after another, to shear off yellow leaves like fine eyebrows, which fluttered in the air. Three shiny casings leaped into the putrid water of the inlet, and were immediately retrieved by a boy who jumped down, his feet squishing in the soft green mud. Adjutant Ren took out his Browning and pulled off three shots, which shrieked like roosters as they sped above the sorghum. Commander Yu and Adjutant Ren faced each other, smoking guns in their hands. Adjutant Ren nodded. ‘He did himself proud!’ He stuck his pistol into his belt and strode into the village.
Father watched Commander Yu slowly raise his weapon and aim it at Adjutant Ren’s retreating back. The funeral party was stunned, but no one made a sound. Adjutant Ren, unaware of what was happening, strode confidently into the village, the bright yellow gear-wheel in the sky shining in his face. Father saw the pistol jerk once, but the explosion was so weak and so distant he wasn’t sure he heard it. He watched the bullet’s low trajectory as it parted Adjutant Ren’s shiny black hair before moving on. Without so much as turning his head or breaking stride, Adjutant Ren continued on into the village.
The sound of whistling drifted towards Father’s ears. It was the familiar sound of ‘The sorghum is red, the sorghum is red!’ Hot tears filled his eyes. The receding figure of Adjutant Ren grew larger and larger. Commander Yu fired another shot; this time it was so loud it rocked the earth and startled the heavens. Father saw the bullet’s flight and heard the explosion at the same time. The bullet struck a sorghum plant, severing its head, which was shattered by a second bullet as it settled slowly to the ground. Father was vaguely aware that Adjutant Ren bent over and plucked the yellow blossom from a bitter-weed at the roadside, then held it up to his nose and savoured its fragrance for a long time.
Father told me that Adjutant Ren was a rarity, a true hero; unfortunately, heroes are fated to die young. Three months after he had walked so proudly away from the heroic gathering, his Browning pistol went off while he was cleaning it and killed him. The bullet entered his right eye and exited through his right ear, leaving half of his face covered with a metallic blue powder. A mere three or four drops of blood seeped out of his right ear, and by the time the people who heard the shot had rushed over, he was lying dead on the ground.
Wordlessly, Commander Yu picked up Adjutant Ren’s Browning pistol.
7
GRANDMA, CARRYING BASKETS of fistcakes on the pole over her shoulder, and Wang Wenyi’s wife, carrying two pails of mungbean soup, rushed towards the bridge across the Black Water River. Though they had planned at first to head southeast through the sorghum field, they found the going too hard. ‘Let’s take the road, Sister-in-Law,’ Grandma suggested. ‘The long way round is fastest.’
They were like high-flying birds making good headway through the open sky. Grandma had put on a scarlet jacket and oiled her hair until it glistened like ebony. Wang’s wife, a vigorous but diminutive woman, was nimble on her feet. Back when Commander Yu was recruiting troops, she had brought Wenyi over to the house and asked Grandma to speak to Commander Yu to sign him up as a guerrilla. Grandma had promised she would, and Commander Yu had taken him on for her sake.
‘Are you afraid of dying?’ Commander Yu had asked him.
‘Yes.’
‘When he says yes he means no, Commander,’ Wang’s wife had explained. ‘Japanese planes bombed our three sons into pulp.’
Wang Wenyi was not cut out to be a soldier. His reactions were slow, and he couldn’t tell his right from his left. During marching drills on the parade ground, he was hit by Adjutant Ren more times than you could count. His wife had an idea: he would carry a sorghum stem in his right hand, so when he heard a right-turn command he’d turn in that direction. Since he had no weapon, Grandma gave him our fowling piece.
When the women reached the bank of the twisting Black Water River they headed south, without stopping to enjoy the chrysanthemums on the bank or the dense thickets of blood-red sorghum beyond it. Wang Wenyi’s wife had lived a life of suffering, Grandma one of privilege. Grandma was drenched with sweat, Wang Wenyi’s wife was as dry as a bone.
Father had since returned to the bridgehead, where he reported to Commander Yu that the fistcakes would be there soon. Commander Yu patted him on the head for a job well done. Most of the soldiers lay around the sorghum field, soaking up the sun. Growing fidgety with impatience, Father strolled over to the field west of the road to see what Mute and his troops were up to. Mute was still honing his knife, so Father stopped in front of him, his hand resting on the Browning at his belt, a victor’s smile on his face. Mute looked up and grinned broadly.
Father presumed that the four linked rakes blocking the road, their teeth pointing skyward, must have reached the limits of their patience. The stone bridge spanning the river looked like an invalid just beginning his recovery. Father walked up to the dike and sat down, looking first east, then west, then to the river flowing beneath him, and finally to some wild ducks. The river was beautiful, owing to its profusion of living plants and tiny whitecaps, each filled with mystery. He spotted piles of white bones resting in thickets of reeds, and remembered our two big black mules.
In the spring, throngs of rabbits run wild in the fields. Grandma rides her mule, rifle in hand, as she hunts rabbits, with Father sitting behind her, his arms wrapped around her waist. Frightened by the mule, the rabbits fall easy prey to Grandma’s shots. She invariably returns home with a string of rabbits around the mule’s neck. A steel pellet once lodged between two of her back teeth when she was eating wild rabbit, and no amount of prying could dislodge it.
Father watched a column of dark red ants transport mud pebbles across the dike. When he laid a clod of earth in their way, they strained to climb over it instead of skirting it. He picked it up and heaved it into the river, where it broke the surface without a sound. Now that the sun was overhead, a fishy smell drifted over on the hot air. Bright glimmers of light flashed everywhere and made the area sizzle. It seemed to Father that the space between heaven and earth was filled with the red dust of sorghum and the fragrance of sorghum wine. He stretched out on the dike, face up, and in that moment his heart leaped into his throat; later on he realised that patience is always rewarded, and that the consequences of his waiting were perfectly common, ordinary, casual, and natural. For he had spotted four strange dark-green, beetlelike objects crawling noiselessly towards him on the highway that cut through the sorghum fields.
‘Trucks,’ he muttered ambiguously. He was ignored.
‘Jap trucks!’ He scrambled to his feet, panic-stricken, and stared at the trucks streaking towards him like
