heavy with the smell of garlic as the moon rose behind tall trees, its pale rays falling onto the road. Filled with hope, he caught up with the cart in front. “Is that you, Fourth Uncle?” he repeated.
Fourth Uncle grunted in reply.
“Keep singing, Fourth Uncle.”
Fourth Uncle sighed. “Sing? At this point I can’t even cry.”
“I started out so early this morning, I never figured to be behind you, Fourth Uncle.”
“There are others ahead of us. Haven’t you seen all the animal droppings?”
“Didn’t you sell your crop yesterday, Fourth Uncle?”
“Did you?”
“Didn’t go. My wife just had a baby, and it was such a difficult delivery I was too busy to leave the house.”
“What did she have?” Fourth Uncle asked.
“A boy.” Gao Yang could not conceal his excitement. His wife had given him a son, and there had been a bumper crop of garlic. Gao Yang, your fortunes have changed. He thought about his mother’s grave. It was an auspicious site. What he had suffered over not divulging the location to the authorities all those years before had been worth it.
Fourth Uncle, who was sitting on the cart railing, lit his pipe, the match flame briefly illuminating his face. The bowl glowed as the acrid smell of burning tobacco was carried off on the chilled night air.
Gao Yang guessed why Fourth Uncle was so melancholy. “People’s lives are controlled by fate, Fourth Uncle. Marriage and wealth are determined before we’re born, so it’s useless to worry about them.” Trying to comfort Fourth Uncle, he discovered, lifted his own spirits, and he took no pleasure in Fourth Uncle’s problems. There was enough joy in his heart for him to hope that Fourth Uncle’s sons would also find wives soon. “Peasants like us can’t hold a candle to the well-to-do. Some folks’ lives aren’t worth living, and some stuff isn’t worth having. It could be worse for us-we could all be out begging. We know where our next meal is coming from, and tattered clothes are better than walking around bare-assed naked. Sure, life’s tough, but we’ve got our health, and a game leg or withered arm is better than leprosy. Don’t you agree, Fourth Uncle?”
Another grunted response as Fourth Uncle sucked on his pipe. Silvery moonlight bathed the shafts of his cart, the horns of the cow pulling it, the ears of Gao Yang’s donkey, and the thin plastic tarpaulin covering the garlic.
“My mother’s death helped to convince me that we should be content with our lot and no harder on ourselves than we have to. If everyone was on top, who would hold them up at the bottom? If everybody went to town for a good time, who would stay home to plant the crops? When the old man up there made people, he used different raw materials. The good stuff went for officials, the so-so stuff for workers, and whatever was left for us peasants. You and me, we’re made of scraps, and we’re lucky just to be alive. Isn’t that right, Fourth Uncle? Like that cow of yours, for example. She pulls your garlic, and has to give you a ride in the bargain. If she slows down, she gets a taste of your whip. The same rules govern all living creatures. That’s why you have to endure, Fourth Uncle. If you make it, you’re a man, and if you don’t, you’re a ghost. Some years ago, Wang Tai and his bunch made me drink my own piss- that was before Wang Tai’s heyday-so I gritted my teeth and did it. It was just a little piss, that’s all. The things we worry about are all in our heads. We fool ourselves into believing we’re clean. Those doctors in their white smocks, are they clean? Then why do they eat afterbirth? Just think, it comes out of a woman’s you-know- what, all bloody and everything, and without even washing it, they cover it with chopped garlic, salt, soy sauce, and other stuff, then fry it medium rare and gobble it up. Dr. Wu took my wife’s afterbirth with him, and when I asked him how it tasted, he said it was just like jellyfish. Imagine that-jellyfish! Have you ever heard anything so disgusting? So when they told me to drink my own piss, I slurped it down, a big bottle of it. And what about afterwards? I was still the same old me, everything still in place. Secretary Huang didn’t drink his own piss back then, but when he got cancer later, he ate raw vipers, centipedes, toads, scorpions, and wasps-fighting fire with fire, they said-but he only managed to keep up the fight for six months before breathing his last!”
Their carts rounded a bend where the road crossed the wasteland behind Sand Roost Village. The area was dotted with sandy hillocks on which red willows, indigo bushes, wax reeds, and maples grew. Branches and leaves twinkled in the moonlight. A dung beetle flew through the air, buzzing loudly until it crash-landed on the road. Fourth Uncle smacked the cow’s rump with a willow switch and relit his pipe.
At an incline the donkey lowered its head and strained in silence as it pulled its load. A sympathetic Gao Yang slung the rope over his shoulder and helped pull. It was a long, gradual climb, and when they made the top, he looked back to see where they’d been; he was surprised to see flickering lanterns in what seemed to be a deep pit. On the way down he tried sitting, but when he saw how the donkey arched its back and how its hooves were bouncing all over the place, he jumped down and walked alongside the cart to forestall disaster.
“We’ll be halfway there at the bottom of this slope, won’t we?” Gao Yang asked.
“Just about,” Fourth Uncle replied dispiritedly.
Insects in the trees and bushes along the way heralded their passage with dull, dreary chirps. Fourth Uncle’s cow tripped and nearly lost its footing. A light mist rose from the road. Rumblings were audible in the distance, due south, and the ground shook slightly.
“There goes a train,” Fourth Uncle commented.
“Have you ever ridden one, Fourth Uncle?”
“Trains arent meant for people like us, to use your words,” Fourth Uncle said. “Maybe the next time around I’ll be born into an official’s family. Then I’ll ride one. Meanwhile I have to be content with watching them from a distance.”
“I’ve never been on one, either,” Gao Yang said. “If the old man up there smiles down on me with five good harvests, I’ll splurge a hundred or so to ride a train. Trying something new might make up for having to drag myself through life like a beast in human garb.”
“You re young yet,” Fourth Uncle said. “There’s still hope.”
“Hope for what? At thirty you’re middle-aged, at fifty they plant you in the ground. I’m forty-one, a year older than your first son. The dirt’s already up to my armpits.”
“People survive a generation; plants make it till autumn. Climbing trees to snare sparrows, and wading in water to catch fish, it seems like only yesterday. But before you know it, it’s time to die.”
“How old are you this year, Fourth Uncle?”
“Sixty-four,” he replied. “Seventy-three and sixtyrfour, the critical years. If the King of the Underworld doesn’t come get you, you go on your own. There’s little chance I’ll be around to eat any of this year’s millet crop.”
“Come, now, you’re strong and healthy enough to live another eight or ten years at least,” Gao Yang said to perk him up.
“You don’t need to try to raise my spirits. I’m not afraid of dying. It can’t be worse than living. And just think of the food I’ll save the nation,” Fourth Uncle added wryly.
“You wouldn’t save the nation any food by dying, since you only eat what you grow. You’re not one of those elite parasites.”
The moon burrowed into a gray cloud, blurring the outlines of roadside trees and increasing the resonance of the insects inhabiting them.
“Fourth Uncle, Gao Ma’s not bad. You were right to give him permission to marry Jinju.” It just slipped out, and he regretted it at once, especially when he heard Fourth Uncle suck in his breath. Moving quickly to change the subject, he said, “Did you hear what happened to the third son of the Xiong family in Sheep’s Pen Village, the one who went off to study in America? He wasn’t there a year before he went and married a blond, blue-eyed American girl. He sent a picture home, and now Old Man Xiong shows her off to everybody he sees.”
“His ancestral graves are located on auspicious land.”
That reminded Gao Yang of his mother’s grave: it was on high land, with a river to the north and a canal to the east; off to the south you could see Little Mount Zhou, and to the west a seemingly endless broad plain. Then he thought of his two-day-old son, his big-headed son. All my life I’ve been a brick right from the kiln, and I can’t change now. But Mother’s final resting place might work to the advantage of her grandson and give him a decent life when he grows up.
A tractor chugged past, headlight blazings, a mountain of garlic stacked on its bed. Realizing that their small- talk was slowing them down, they prodded the animals to pick up the pace.
