couldn’t drive away. Droplets of water began to ooze from the corners of her eyes, and her lips trembled slightly as she uttered a weak cry: ‘Elder brother…’
‘Passion…’ Granddad groaned.
Uncle Arhat backed silently out of the room.
Granddad leaned over the kang and dressed Second Grandma, who cried out when his hand brushed against her skin; she began to rant, just as she had years earlier when possessed by the weasel. He pinned her arms down to keep her from struggling, then slid her pants up over her dead, soiled legs.
Uncle Arhat walked in. ‘Manager Yu, I’ll borrow a wagon from next door… take mother and daughter back to get better…’
He searched Granddad’s face for a reaction. Granddad nodded.
Uncle Arhat picked up two comforters and ran outside, where he spread them out on the bed of the big- wheeled wagon. Granddad cradled Second Grandma, one arm under the nape of her neck, the other under the crook of her legs, as if she were a priceless treasure. He walked past the smashed gate out into the street, where Uncle Arhat waited with the wagon. He had hitched one of the mules to the wagon shafts; the poor mule whose rump Granddad had beaten bloody was tied to the rear crossbar. Granddad laid the now-screaming Second Grandma onto the bed of the wagon. He knew how badly she wanted to be strong, but he also knew she didn’t have the will.
Now that he’d taken care of Second Grandma, he turned to see Uncle Arhat, his weathered face streaked with an old man’s tears, walking up with the corpse of Little Auntie Xiangguan. Granddad’s throat felt as if it were in the grip of a pair of metal tongs. He coughed violently, racked by dry heaves. Gripping the axle to support himself, he looked skyward and saw in the southeast the enormous emerald fireball of the sun bearing down on him like a wildly spinning wagon wheel.
Taking the body of Little Auntie in his arms, he looked down into a face twisted by torment; two stinging tears fell to the ground.
After laying Little Auntie’s corpse next to Second Grandma, he lifted a corner of the comforter and covered the girl’s terror-streaked face.
‘Get up on the wagon, Manager Yu,’ Uncle Arhat said.
Granddad sat impassively on the railing, his legs dangling over the side.
Uncle Arhat flicked the reins and started out slowly, the axles of the wagon turning with difficulty. Long- drawn-out groans emerged from the dry, oil-starved sandalwood, followed by loud creaks that sounded like death rattles as the wagon bumped and rolled out of the village and onto the road heading towards our village, from which the scent of sorghum wine rose into the air. Although Second Grandma looked as if she had been rocked to sleep by the bumpy ride, her misty grey eyes remained open. Granddad put his finger under her nose to see if she was breathing. Weak, but he could feel it; that put him at ease.
A vast open field all around, a wagon of suffering passing through, the sky above as boundless as a dark ocean, black soil flat as far as the eye could see, sparse villages like islands adrift. As he sat on the wagon, Granddad felt that everything in the world was a shade of green.
The shafts of the wagon were much too narrow for our big mule, the spoked wheels much too light. Its belly was squeezed so uncomfortably between the shafts that it wanted to start running; but Uncle Arhat controlled the metal bit in its mouth, so it could only nurse a silent grievance and raise its forelegs as high as possible, as though it were prancing. Mumbled, sobbing curses tumbled from Uncle Arhat’s mouth: ‘Fucking swine… fucking inhuman swine… slaughtered the whole family next door, ripped open the daughter-in-law’s belly… Depraved… Unborn baby looked like a skinned rat… Potful of soupy yellow shit… Fucking swine…’
The black mule tied to the back of the wagon plodded along behind, its head bowed, although it was impossible to tell whether the look on its long face was one of indignation, anger, shame, or capitulation.
6
FATHER RECALLED THAT the mule-drawn wagon carrying Second Grandma and the corpse of Little Auntie Xiangguan arrived in our village at noon. A strong wind from the northwest raised clouds of dust on the roads and rustled leaves on the trees. Dead skin peeled from his lips in the parched air. When the wagon, one mule in front and another at the rear, appeared in the village, he ran like the wind to meet it. Uncle Arhat was hobbling along beside the bumping, creaking wagon. The mules, Granddad, and Uncle Arhat all had a gummy, dust-covered residue in the corners of their eyes. Granddad sat on the railing, holding his head in his hands like a clay idol or a wooden icon. The scene sucked the words right out of Father’s mouth. At a distance of about twenty yards from the wagon, his sensitive nose detected an inauspicious odour emanating from the wagon. Frightened, he turned and ran back home, blurting out to Grandma, who was anxiously pacing the floor, ‘Mom, Dad’s back, the mule’s pulling a long wagon, dead people in the back.’
Grandma’s face fell. After a momentary pause, she rushed outside with him.
The wagon wheels ground to a bumpy halt, creaking one last time as the wagon stopped just beyond the gate. Granddad climbed down slowly and stared at Grandma with bloodshot eyes. The sight frightened Father; Granddad’s eyes reminded him of the cat’s-eye stones on the banks of the Black Water River, whose colours were forever changing.
‘Well, you got your wish!’ Granddad snarled at Grandma.
Not daring to defend herself, she timidly approached the wagon, Father on her heels, and looked into the bed. The folds of the comforter were filled with black earth, revealing the lumpy outlines of whatever was underneath. She picked up a corner, but let it drop as though her fingers were scalded. Father glimpsed Second Grandma’s smashed, pulpy face and Little Auntie’s rigid, open mouth.
That open mouth called up all sorts of pleasant childhood memories for Father. He’d frequently gone to Saltwater Gap to spend a few days, against Grandma’s wishes. Granddad had told him to call Second Grandma ‘Second Mom,’ and since she treated him like her own son, he thought she was just wonderful. She occupied a special place deep in his heart and seeing her was like coming home. Little Auntie Xiangguan had a mouth as sweet as honey that was forever filling the air with gentle shouts of ‘Elder Brother’. This dark-skinned little sister was one of his favourites, and he was fascinated by the fine, nearly transparent fuzz on her face; most of all he loved her bright eyes, like shiny buttons. Yet, just when they were at the peak of enjoyment, Grandma would send someone over to drag him home, and he would look down at her from his perch in the arms of the messenger on the mule and feel terribly sad. He wondered why Grandma and Second Grandma hated each other so.
Father thought back to the time he’d gone to weigh the dead baby, a couple of years or so earlier. He’d accompanied Mother to the place called Dead Baby Hollow, some three li beyond the village. Since township tradition forbade the burial of babies under the age of five, the tiny corpses were abandoned out in the open. Traditional birthing customs were followed back then, and only the most rudimentary medical treatment was available, so the infant mortality rate was particularly high, and only the strongest survived.
I sometimes think that there is a link between the decline in humanity and the increase in prosperity and comfort. Prosperity and comfort are what people seek, but the costs to character are often terrifying.
When Father went to Dead Baby Hollow with Grandma, she was obsessed with the Flower Lottery, a small- scale form of gambling in which you neither fly too high nor fall too hard, which had captivated the villagers, the women in particular; since Granddad was enjoying a stable, prosperous life, the villagers chose him as the society head and banker. Placing the names of thirty-two flowers in a bamboo tube, he publicly drew out two a day, one in the morning and one at night. The herbaceous peony or the Chinese rose, maybe the common rose, maybe the prickly rose. The gambler whose flower was picked earned thirty times the amount she’d bet. Women caught up in the Flower Lottery devised all manner of methods to guess which name Granddad would draw. Some poured wine down their daughters’ throats in anticipation of babbled visions in their drunkenness. Others forced themselves to dream for the answer. Going to Dead Baby Hollow was Grandma’s unique and appalling method.
It was so dark that Father couldn’t see his hand in front of his face. Grandma had wakened him in the middle of the night, startling him out of a deep slumber and making him feel like screaming at her for frightening him like that. ‘Don’t make a sound,’ she had whispered. ‘Come with me to guess the flowers.’ With his natural curiosity and the promise of a good mystery, Father was immediately awake and eager to go. Quickly putting on their boots and caps, they tiptoed past Granddad and slipped out of the yard and the village. Because they proceeded with caution
