Mute stood up, grabbed Father by the scruff of his neck, and flicked him away. He flew through the air and crashed into a thicket of sorghum stalks. A quick somersault and he was on his feet, railing and swearing as he charged Mute, who merely grunted a couple of times. The steely look in his eyes froze Father in his tracks. Mute picked up the pistol and pulled back the bolt; a bullet fell into his hand. Holding it in his fingers, he looked at the notch in the casing from the firing pin, and made some unintelligible hand signs to Father. Then he stuck the pistol into Father’s belt and patted him on the shoulder.
‘What were you doing over there?’ Commander Yu asked.
Father was embarrassed. ‘They… they said they wanted to sleep with Mom.’
‘What did you say?’ Commander Yu asked sternly.
Father wiped his eyes with his arm. ‘I shot him!’
‘You shot somebody?’
‘The gun misfired.’ Father handed Commander Yu the shiny dud.
Commander Yu took it from him, examined it, and gave it a casual flick. It described a beautiful arc before plopping into the river.
‘Good boy!’ Commander Yu said. ‘But use your gun on the Japanese first. After you’ve finished them off, anybody who says he wants to sleep with your mom, you shoot him in the gut. Not in the head, and not in the chest. Remember, in the gut.’
Father lay on his belly alongside Commander Yu; the Fang brothers were on his other side. The cannon had been set up on the dike, aimed at the stone bridge, its barrel stuffed with cotton rags, a fuse sticking out behind. Fang Seven had placed a bundle of sorghum tinder next to him, some of which was already smouldering. A gourd filled with gunpowder and a tin of iron pellets lay beside Fang Six.
Wang Wenyi was to Commander Yu’s left, curled up, holding his long-barrelled fowling piece in his hands. His wounded ear was stuck to the white bandage covering it.
The sun was stake-high, its white core girded by a pink halo. The flowing water glittered. A flock of wild ducks flew over from the sorghum field, circled three times, then dived down to a grassy sandbar. A few landed on the surface of the river and began floating downstream, their bodies settling heavily in the water, their heads turning and darting constantly. Father was feeling warm and tingly. His clothes, dampened by the dew, were now dry. He pressed himself to the ground, but felt a pain in his chest, as from a sharp stone. When he rose up to see what it was, his head and upper torso were exposed above the dike. ‘Get down,’ Commander Yu ordered. Reluctantly, he did as he was told. Fang Six began to snore. Commander Yu picked up a clod of earth and tossed it in his face. Fang Six woke up bleary-eyed and yawned so heroically that two fine tears appeared in the corners of his eyes.
‘Are the Japs here?’ he asked loudly.
‘Fuck you!’ Commander Yu snarled. ‘No sleeping.’
The riverbanks were absolutely still; the broad highway lay lifeless in its bed of sorghum. The stone bridge spanning the river was strikingly beautiful. A boundless expanse of sorghum greeted the reddening sun, which rose ever higher, grew ever brighter. Wild ducks floated in the shallow water by the banks, noisily searching for food with their flat bills. Father studied their beautiful feathers and alert, intelligent eyes. Aiming his heavy Browning pistol at one of their smooth backs, he was about to pull the trigger when Commander Yu forced his hand down. ‘What the hell do you think you’re doing, you little turtle egg?’
Father was getting fidgety. The highway lay there like death itself. The sorghum had turned deep scarlet.
‘That bastard Leng wants to play games with me!’ Commander Yu spat out hatefully. The southern bank lay in silence; not a trace of the Leng detachment. Father knew it was Leng who had learned that the convoy would be passing his spot, and that he’d brought Commander Yu into the ambush only because he doubted his own ability to go it alone.
Father was tense for a while, but gradually he relaxed, and his attention wandered back to the wild ducks. He thought about duck-hunting with Uncle Arhat, who had a fowling piece with a deep-red stock and a leather strap; it was now in the hands of Wang Wenyi. Tears welled up in his eyes, but not enough to spill out. Just like that day the year before. Under the warm rays of the sun, he felt a chill spread through his body.
Uncle Arhat and the two mules had been taken away by the Japs, and Grandma had washed her bloody face in the wine vat until it reeked of alcohol and was beet-red. Her eyes were puffy; the front of her pale-blue cotton jacket was soaked in wine and blood. She stood stock-still beside the vat, staring down at her reflection. Father recalled how she had fallen to her knees and kowtowed three times to the vat, then stood up, scooped some wine with both hands, and drank it. The rosiness of her face was concentrated in her cheeks; all the colour had drained from her forehead and chin.
‘Kneel down!’ she ordered Father. ‘Kowtow.’
He fell to his knees and kowtowed.
‘Take a drink!’
He scooped up a handful of wine and drank it.
Trickles of blood, like threads, sank to the bottom of the vat, on the surface of which a tiny white cloud floated alongside the sombre faces of Grandma and Father. Piercing rays emanated from Grandma’s eyes; Father looked away, his heart pounding wildly. He reached out to scoop up some more wine, and as it dripped through his fingers it shattered one large face and one small one amid the blue sky and white cloud. He drank a mouthful, which left the sticky taste of blood on his tongue. The blood sank to the base of the vat, where it congealed into a turbid clot the size of a fist. Father and Grandma stared at it long and hard; then she pulled the lid over it and rolled the millstone back, straining to place it on top of the lid.
‘Don’t touch it!’ she said.
Looking at the accumulation of mud and grey-green sow-bugs squirming in the indentation of the millstone, he nodded, clearly disturbed by the sight.
That night he lay on his kang listening to Grandma pace the yard. The patter of her footsteps and the rustling sorghum in the fields formed Father’s confused dreams, in which he heard the brays of our two handsome black mules.
Father awoke once, at dawn, and ran naked into the yard to pee; there he saw Grandma staring transfixed into the sky. He called out, ‘Mom,’ but his shout fell on deaf ears. When he’d finished peeing, he took her by the hand and led her inside. She followed meekly. They’d barely stepped inside when they heard waves of commotion from the southeast, followed by the crack of rifle fire, like the pop of a tautly stretched piece of silk pierced by a sharp knife.
Shortly after he and Grandma heard the gunfire, they were herded over to the dike, along with a number of villagers – elderly, young, sick, and disabled – by Japanese soldiers. The polished white flagstones, boulders, and coarse yellow gravel on the dike looked like a line of grave mounds. Last year’s early-summer sorghum stood spellbound beyond the dike, sombre and melancholy. The outline of the highway shining through the trampled sorghum stretched due north. The stone bridge hadn’t been erected then, and the little wooden span stood utterly exhausted and horribly scarred by the passage of tens of thousands of tramping feet and the iron shoes of horses and mules. The smell of green shoots released by the crushed and broken sorghum, steeped in the night mist, rose pungent in the morning air. Sorghum everywhere was crying bitterly.
Father, Grandma, and the other villagers – assembled on the western edge of the highway, south of the river, atop the shattered remnants of sorghum plants – faced a mammoth enclosure that looked like an animal pen. A crowd of shabby labourers huddled beyond it. Two puppet soldiers herded the labourers over near Father and the others to form a second cluster. The two groups faced a square where animals were tethered, a spot that would later make people pale with fright. They stood impassively for some time before a thin-faced, white-gloved Japanese officer with red insignia on his shoulders and a long sword at his hip emerged from the tent, leading a guard dog, whose red tongue lolled from the side of its mouth. Behind the dog, two puppet soldiers carried the rigid corpse of a Japanese soldier. Two Japanese soldiers brought up the rear, escorting two puppet soldiers who were dragging a beaten and bloody Uncle Arhat. Father huddled close to Grandma; she wrapped her arms around him.
Fifty or so white birds, wings flapping noisily, sliced through the blue sky above the Black Water River, then turned and headed east, towards the golden sun. Father could see the draught animals, with scraggly hair and filthy faces, and our two black mules, which lay on the ground. One was dead, the hoe still stuck in its head. The blood- soaked tail of the other mule swept the ground; the skin over its belly twitched noisily; its nostrils whistled as they opened and closed. How Father loved those two black mules.
